In the early 1700s America began using slaves, which continued for over two and a half centuries. The slaves who were used for tobacco plants and then for cotton at the time mostly came from Africa. The growing demand for cotton led many slave owners in the South to begin growing cotton, causing slaves and cotton to become the basis of the Southern economy. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The abolitionist movement during the late 1800s began to divide the United States over the issue of slavery. Slavery was outlawed in all of the new Western states in the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The South thought this was a threat to slavery itself. A Supreme Court case in 1857 stated that blacks were not citizens there because slaves who escaped to the North were still the property of their owners and should be returned to them. This case was often known as the Dred Scott decision. Many Northerners breathed new life into the ailing abolition program because of this court case. In 1860 a member of the anti-slavery Republican Party became president, he was known as Abraham Lincoln. His election convinced many people in the South that slavery could not spread to the new territories acquired by the United States and could eventually be abolished. The Civil War was caused by the attempt of eleven Southern states to secede from the union. During the war, Abraham Lincoln issued the famous Emancipation Proclamation which freed all slaves in all areas of the country that were in rebellion at the time. This furthered European interference on the South Side and also freed military and naval officers from returning fugitive slaves to their owners, but only after winning the war. The next step in the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was the release of American slaves. The last mention of this issue in parliament was decades earlier, but in 1791 there was a vote on abolition and 163 members voted against it. For moral reasons, very few parliamentarians dared to defend trade even in the first debates. They argued over many financial and political reasons for taking it forward. A large vested interest was people who profited from trade; if trade were disrupted, the entire plantation system would also be at stake. One MP stated that “West Indian property is at stake, and while men may be generous with their own property, they should not be generous with the property of others.” (Historynet.com) France could gain an economic and naval advantage because of the abolition of the British trade. Englishmen such as John Locke Daniel Defoe John Wesley and Samuel Johnson had already argued against slavery and trafficking before the parliamentary debates. Dr. Johnson once toasted at a celebration in Oxford “To the next negro insurrection in the West Indies.” (Historynet.com) The first group organized to fight slavery arrived amid scattered protests. Both sides risked expulsion if they still owned slaves in 1776. British Quakers established the Anti-Slavery Committee in 1783 which played a major role in abolition. The team began by distributing pamphlets to Parliament and the public about slavery. A vital aspect of the abolitionist plan became the investigation, and Thomas Clarkson's investigations into slave ships and major trading towns gave ammunition to the leading parliamentary advocate of abolition, William Wilberforce. Others called Wilberforce and his friends the Saints, sometimes as a sign of..