When the United States was formed, it was just that—a group of nominally united states. The original concept was for these individual states to have extensive powers of self government over their own affairs, while a national government would concern itself with foreign policy, a common currency and a common postal system. As these individual states evolved, different social and economic systems emerged. The northern states enthusiastically embraced the Industrial Revolution, while the southern states remained largely agricultural. Slavery, which involved the importation of Africans, against their will, to work as farm laborers, had been outlawed in the seven northern states in 1804. However, it remained an integral part of life in the South, where massive cotton fields were the region's economic backbone.
By the 1840s, slavery had become the most divisive political issue in the United States. There was a powerful movement in the North that sought the abolition of slavery throughout the nation, which was strongly resisted in the South. For the abolitionists, it was a moral issue. They believed that slavery was simply wrong. For Southerners, most of whom did not actually own slaves, it was solely an issue of "states' rights"—the right of individual states to govern their own internal affairs as guaranteed in the Constitution. The slavery issue was further complicated by the question of whether new states admitted to the Union ought to be "slave states" or "free states." For example, the two largest states admitted up to that time were split. Texas had entered as a slave state in 1845 and California as a free state in 1850. By the late 1850s, the southern states had begun to openly discuss the possibility of seceding from the United States and forming a separate nation. The disagree- Abraham Lincoln saved the Union.
ment came to a head during the 1860 presidential campaign. The Republican party candidate, Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) of Illinois, strongly favored abolition, but his primary concern was to preserve the Union. After he was elected, the southern states quickly moved to secede from the Union even before his inauguration. On February 4, 1861, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas met in Montgomery, Alabama to form the Confederate States of America, adopting a constitution similar to the United States constitution except for the sanction of slavery. Arkansas, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia also joined the Confederacy, and later Richmond, Virginia (just a day's ride from Washington, DC) was designated the Confederate capital.
Lincoln vowed to go to war to restore the Union, but it was the Confederacy that initiated the first battle, when they attacked the US Army post at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. A war of national preservation had begun between two profoundly different views of how one nation—or two separate nations— should be preserved.