Alva Review-Courier -

Slavery existed in every U.S. state when the Constitution went into effect in 1789. Some of the Northern states, however, soon began outlawing the practice so that by 1827 the country was divided into a South that had slavery and a North that did not.

Meanwhile, by the 1830s the country’s two political parties – the Democrats and the Whigs – had lots of office holders in both the northern and southern sections of the country.

That began to change in 1854 when the Whigs became the Republicans and embraced a concept called “free soil.” That meant that as the country moved westward, the new states and territories that developed there would be free lands – with no slavery.

Southerners opposed the free soil movement because they knew that it would soon mean that slave states would be in the minority and would lose control of both Congress and the Electoral College.

Sure enough, southern fears were starkly displayed in the 1860 presidential election. Former Whig Congressman and Republican presidential nominee Abraham Lincoln won the election by carrying every “free” state while losing every slave state.

Southerners panicked. Before Lincoln could be sworn into office, southern states began seceding from the Union and created the Confederate States of America. Soon, the country was plunged into the Civil War.

The North came to represent a united nation without slavery while the South stood for maintaining slavery by dividing the nation in two.

When the North won, its leaders decided to punish white southerners by not only freeing the slaves and granting those who were adult men the right to vote but also by taking the right to vote away from white men who had supported the Confederacy.

Thus, the post-war years ushered in a period known as Reconstruction – supposedly making the South believe in the same things the North did.

One result of this was that most white southerners came to hate the Republican Party while supporting Democrats almost “solidly.” But the civil rights movement changed that – as we will see next week.