The rift between North and South still exists today in 2015................as it did in 1835, when Andrew Jackson was President, as it did in 1861, when the civil war started, as it did in the 1790s...............and before the USA became its own country..............in part it is due to the types of people............the Europeans............

THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY

The furor that had been aroused over the Missouri Compromise quieted down considerably in the 1820s, only to be brought back to life by a series of events at the end of the decade. Serious debates over abolition took place in the Virginia legislature in 1829 and 1831; in the North discussion began about the possibility of freeing the slaves and then resettling them back in Africa (a proposal that led to the founding of Liberia). Agitation increased with the publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829, Nat Turner's rebellion in 1831 and Andrew Jackson's handling of the nullification crisis that same year.

The Turner rebellion was only one of about 200 slave uprisings between 1776 and 1860, but it was one of the bloodiest, and thus struck fear in the hearts of many white southerners. Nat Turner and a handful of slaves spontaneously launched a rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. They moved from farm to farm, indiscriminately killing whites along the way and picking up additional slaves. By the time the militia put down the insurrection, more than eighty slaves had joined the rebellion, and sixty whites lay dead. While the uprising led some southerners to consider abolition, the reaction in all southern states was to tighten the laws governing slave behavior.

That same year, South Carolina's opposition to the federal tariff led the legislature to declare that the law was null and void in the state, and the state's leaders spoke of using the militia to prevent federal customs agents from collecting the tax. President Andrew Jackson swept aside the states' rights arguments and threatened to use the army to enforce federal laws. In the face of Jackson's determination, the state backed down, but the episode raised fears throughout the South that it was only a matter of time before Congress would begin to tamper with slavery.

Southern anxiety increased in 1833 with the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. Led by the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, the Society pledged to end slavery in the United States. The sentiments adopted at the founding meeting established the basic argument of the Society for the next three decades, namely, that slavery was illegal, if not under the Constitution (which Garrison had damned as "a covenant with hell"), then certainly under natural law.

Membership in the new organization mushroomed. By 1835 there were more than 400 chapters and by 1838 the number had grown to 1,350, with more than 250,000 members. The growth of the abolition movement was due in part to the similarity between it and other reform movements of the era. Abolitionists, like other reformers, were calling for a freeing of the human spirit and the elimination of artificial barriers to self-fulfillment. Abolition turned out to be the most important of all the reforms of the Jacksonian era, but its success would put the Union itself at risk.

For further reading: Russell B. Nye, William Lloyd Garrison and Humanitarian Reformers (1955); Louis Filler, The Crusade Against Slavery (1960); Martin Duberman, ed., The Anti-Slavery Vanguard (1965); and Aileen Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics (1967).