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The third hour looks at the period from 1800 through the start of
the Civil War, during which slavery saw an enormous expansion and
entered its final decades.
The series' third hour looks at the period from 1800 through the
start of the Civil War, during which slavery saw an enormous
expansion and entered its final decades. As the nation expanded
west, the question of slavery became the overriding political issue
of the time. These years saw an increasingly militant abolitionist
movement and a widening rift between the North - which had
largely outlawed slavery but continued to reap the vast economic
benefits of the system - and the South, now home to millions
of enslaved black men, women and children. This is the period of
slavery most commonly depicted in history books and captured by
such dramas as the famed miniseries "Roots"; the segment recounts a
number of personal plights just as moving as those Alex Haley
chronicled. Exemplifying the kind of emotional trauma the slaves
endured are Harriet Jacobs and Louis Hughes. Jacobs, born in North
Carolina in 1813, grew up dodging a lecherous master and eventually
fled his home, then spent seven years hiding out in her
grandmother's dark, suffocating attic, watching her children from a
tiny hole in the wall. Hughes and his wife, Matilda, worked
together in the McGee household in Mississippi, where their newborn
twins died because their mother was granted no time to feed or care
for them. Decades before these stories unfolded, leading
southerners such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson had been
convinced slavery was nearing its end. But the Louisiana Purchase
and the Mexican War brought vast new territories into the United
States, and the battle between those for and against slavery
intensified. By 1860, every attempt at striking an agreement -
the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, a draconian
federal fugitive slave law - had failed, splitting the Union.