The US is gaining ground spreading out across North America.
The economy is booming.
In the South it's Cotton.
In the North, Industry
But the new nation is divided.
In the land where all men are created equal.
4 million black Americans live as slaves.
And it's tearing the nation apart.
It's 1825.
Across the world, the modern era is being born.
The Industrial Revolution has reached America.
In upstate New York,
A man-made river is cutting through the wilderness.
The Erie Canal
Is the biggest construction project
In the Western world in the last 4,000 years.
Nearly 500 km long an dug by hand,
Is not a single qualified engineer on the project or in the country.
But that's not holding the canal building back.
I think of the spirit of America being
Imagination combined with tenacity.
There's a strong work ethic,
A wonderful freedom of creation
Combined with the mental muscle and physical labor.
So to me, it represents
The best of the human spirit.
But the landscape doesn't always cooperate.
A wall of solid limestone nearly 20 meter high.
And another 50 more km of virgin territory stands between the diggers and Lake Erie.
The canal will linking the Atlantic Ocean to the whole middle of America.
It will change where people live, and why,
Turning the North into a global economic powerhouse.
The man behind the canal is New York's governor,
DeWitt Clinton.
Born to wealth, he won't take no for an answer.
He wants to be president of the United States.
Instead, he runs New York for 20 years.
(Man) America was blessed with many inspirational leaders,
And I think DeWitt Clinton had a real sense of how important
New York could be for America.
Clinton's vision is to make New York rich.
The Press thinks that the canal is a dangerous and expensive waste of time..
They call it "Clinton's big ditch."
Clinton thinks otherwise.
(DeWitt Clinton) It is a work more stupendous, more magnificent,
And more beneficial than has hitherto been achieved
By the human race.
Entrepreneurship is about doing things
When you don't know what it's gonna look like,
You don't know what it's gonna be made of,
You just have this instinct that you can do it and it'll work.
Those guys had visions and did it.
50,000 men dig out 11 million cubic yards of rock.
Many Irish immigrants find works in the Crews.
David Gilroy makes five times what he can earn back home,
But it's hazardous work.
There's only one way to cut through the rock face.
Gunpowder.
A highly combustible mix of nitrate, charcoal and sulfur.
The wrong proportions can be lethal.
There's only one job that's more dangerous
Than lighting the fuse...
Going back to relight it.
To cope, workers drink.
Whiskey calms the nerves-- And clouds the brain.
An English tourist can't believe they're mixing
Alcohol and explosives.
(Man) The Irish laborers grew so reckless of life,
That at the signal for blasting,
They would just hold their shovels over their heads.
I think when you're brought up in America,
You're brought up on the history of hard work.
There are so many immigrants
That have died to build this country.
That's in our bloodstream, that's in our DNA as Americans.
We don't want their lives to go in vain.
Because of that, we usually work harder than anybody else.
Eight years of digging.
Nearly a thousand lives lost.
The Erie Canal costs more than 100 million today.
The canal opens in 1825
$15 million of goods begin to flow along its land every year.
Villages along the canal become prosperous cities.
Goods plunge in price.
The frontier is flooded with new commodities,
Ships' goods back to new market
New York City becomes a boom town.
Wall Street takes off as a global financial center.
The city quadruples in size that becomes the nation’s number-one port.
The trade boom creates so much wealth that in 1840
The word "Millionaire" is invented.
Today 80% of the upstate population
Of the state of New York still lives within 40 km of the canal.
Hundreds of kilometers to the south,
A small plant is creating another economic boom.
Cotton.
But its rapid spread will plant the seeds of war.
Tropical cotton flourishes in America's southern states.
Its valuable soft fibers is easy to grow.
But processing cotton is labor-intensive.
By hand separating seeds from fiber in a couple of kilos grown cotton.
Could take a whole day.
A simple patent filed on 4th March 1794,
Changes that.
The cotton gin.
It automating the process it deeply divides the country.
(Man) The cotton gin transformed not only America, but the world.
The concept of mass production using a machine
Just exploded everywhere.
A single worker can now process 50 times more cotton per day.
Output multiplies across the South.
By 1830, America is producing half the world's cotton.
By 1850, it's nearly 3/4.
Called white gold,
Cotton supports a new lavish lifestyle in the South.
By 1850,
There are more millionaires per capita
In Natchez, Mississippi, than anywhere else on Earth.
The richest man in town owns 40,000 acres,
The South is thriving
But its wealth is built on the back of slavery.
The industrial North is implicated in the South's success.
It profits from cotton.
But turns a blind eye to slavery.
The Founding Fathers many of them slave owners assumed slavery would disappear.
It has been abolished in Britain for 20 years.
And is outlawed across Europe.
But with the cotton explosion,
Slavery becomes critical to the economy the South.
Slaves are now up to 5 times more more valuable
Than before the invention of the cotton gin
People don't really realize this,
But slavery was actually on the decline in the South
Prior to the invention of the cotton gin,
But then once the cotton gin made it so practical
To grow cotton,
All of a sudden, every farmer in the South
Wanted to plant as much cotton as possible.
But overproduction is destroying the land.
Cotton heads west in search of fertile soil,
Bringing slavery with it.
Anti-slavery forces in the North
Want to keep the frontier free.
The stage is set for the first battles
In the war over slavery.
(Narrator) In the 1850s the Cotton boom transforms America.
But it's a time bomb.
The rural South grows it, the industrial North turns into fabric.
And both profits of it.
The boom is fueled new machine, the power loom.
Raw cotton comes in, finished cloth goes out.
All under one roof.
The modern factory is born.
Lowell, Massachusetts, is called the city of spindles,
A textiles boom town.
Its population explodes from 200 in 1820
To nearly 20,000 In just 15 years.
More than a third of the town works in the mills.
85% are single women between 15 and 25.
Harriet Robinson is ten.
When her father dies, she goes to work at the mill.
(Harriet Robinson) I can see myself now, racing down the alley,
Between the spinning frames,
Carrying in front of me a bobbin box
Bigger than I was.
Its a new way for young women to make money.
Harriet's wages help support her family.
Industrialization is changing lives.
All the mill girls make good use of their money.
The mortgage is lifted from the homestead,
The farmhouse is painted.
Mill girls help maintain widowed mothers
And drunken or invalid fathers.
We were paid $2 a week.
Oh, how proud I was when it came to my turn
To stand upon the bobbin-box.
(Woman) When women really joined the workforce
In the cotton mills and the thread factories,
I think it gave women an opportunity to get out,
Be serious about being breadwinners.
And it changed the whole fabric of America.
The mills also revolutionize how Americans dress.
Previously, most families made their own clothes.
Now, people buy cheaper ready-to-wear.
Eastern fashions replace buckskin.
By 1850, men's clothing
Is the largest manufacturing industry in New York City.
For me, what makes me proudest to be an American
Is that American spirit of productivity, optimism,
This idea that the world doesn't have to be doom and gloom,
That we can use technology to make our lives better.
Fashion isn't the only innovation
To come out of the mills.
Technology used here will lead straight to Silicon Valley.
Looms pioneer punch cards to produce patterned fabric.
Each hole in the card tells the loom
To use a different-colored thread,
A yes-no decision.
It's binary code, the basis of all modern computers.
The birth of the computer and Internet
Begins in cotton mills.
You know, in every major development,
I think, in the history of America,
Technology has been at the center of it.
Despite 12-hour shifts,
The factories offer a new world of opportunity for women.
They are reading more, talking more,
Educating themselves.
(Harriet Robinson) Yeah, reading books on factory time was against the rules,
But we hid books in apron pockets and wastebaskets.
Sometimes we pasted poems on our looms to memorize.
And together they began to make their voices are heard.
In October 1836.
Women from the Lowell Mills gather after work and organize.
Their protest against wage cuts
Is one of the first strikes in US history.
And they will win.
The mill bosses back down.
A generation of young women go on to become teachers,
Writers and college graduates.
Harriet Robinson will become a leading suffragette
And petition Congress.
For the right of women to vote.
They're the first wave in a movement
Their secret meetings are illuminated by lamps
Fueled by an extraordinary creature.
(Man) Whale oil opened up the night,
And like so many really transformative
Technological innovations, it expanded human freedom.
It created a way for people to get more,
Do more and achieve more.
It will be 20 years before the discovery of crude oil.
Until then, America runs on oil from whales.
(Man) The whaling industry helped invent
Part of that kind of Industrial Revolution
And the classic American workaholic,
Work-round-the-clock kind of environment,
Where if you have more light to keep you going
In those dark winter days, you could get more done,
You could make more money,
And you could kind of drive the economy forward.
Whaling becomes another boom industry.
Up to 180 tons and more than 30 meters long.
A single whale can produce up to 11 cubic meters of oil.
Even today, whale oil is used by NASA.
The Hubble space telescope runs on it.
Whaling becomes one of the North's biggest industries,
Bringing in $11 million a year.
But the human cost is high.
Half of all whaling ships will be lost at sea.
Few men are willing to take the risk.
But it's an opportunity for African-Americans.
20,000 freemen and escaped slaves take to the seas.
John Thompson is a runaway slave.
(John Thompson) I have a family in Philadelphia.
But fearing to remain there any longer,
I thought I would go on a whaling voyage
Where I stood least chance of being arrested by slave hunters.
The equal opportunity offered in whaling
Is ahead of its time.
Here, a colored man is only known and looked upon as a man
And is promoted in rank
According to his ability and skill
To perform the same duties as a white man.
(Henry) The whaling industry offered an ex-slave like John Thompson
The possibility of social and economic fluidity,
Mobility and acceptance in a way.
Even in the North, that was not possible
For black people otherwise.
(John Thompson) The man on the lookout cried out, "There she blows!"
There were four whales in sight,
Not more than 3/4 of a mile distant.
The whalers use state-of-the-art harpoons
Invented by ex-slave Lewis Temple.
They kill and take out.
The whale can only be killed by lancing under the fin.
Which is a work of much skill and practice.
A monster, terrible in his fury,
Able to shiver the boat in atoms
By one stroke of his tail.
Yet even the dangers at sea are preferable
To the horror of life as a slave.
And die of punishment awaits any who risks escape to freedom.
(Narrator) 1841, New Orleans.
The heart of the slave trade.
It's auction day.
In the first half of the 19th century,
Over half a million slaves will be sold at auction.
It's a business worth $2 billion to the Southern economy.
Since the cotton boom,
The value of slaves has skyrocketed.
Now men cost over $1,000.
Women, $800.
Children, $500.
Solomon Northup, an educated freeman from the North,
Was kidnapped into slavery.
You boy you, come over here.
(Solomon Northup) He would make us hold up our heads,
Walk us briskly back and forth,
While customers would feel our hands and arms and bodies,
Make us open up our mouths and show our teeth,
Precisely as a jockey examines a horse,
Which he is about to barter for or purchase.
Scars upon a slave's back were considered evidence
Of a rebellious or unruly spirit, and hurt his sale.
Take your top off.
90% of all African-Americans are slaves,
4 million men, women and children.
(Woman) We had based this country
On everyone having inalienable rights to freedom and equality,
And yet we created a system
Of abject persecution.
Slaves are fattened for auction,
Dark-skinned men are bought for the fields,
Light-skinned women for the house.
Traders lie about their ages,
Even dyeing a slave's gray hairs.
(Man) For the plantation owners,
It was like just going to your local supermarket
To get sugar or flour.
They had become so desensitized to the humanity of the slave
That they did not see them as human beings.
Buyers demand the most fertile slaves for breeding.
The most expensive are light-skinned teenage virgins.
Rape is common.
Eliza being sold with her two children.
Emily and Randall.
In Louisiana, it's illegal for children under 11
To be taken from their parents.
Boy, come over here.
But it happens all the time.
Show me your teeth.
You know, 140 years is not a really long time
In the context of history.
So it's hard for me to believe that blacks
Didn't have any rights here,
They weren't treated as human beings,
They were treated like animals, essentially.
Sir, please!
Over half the sales at auction will tear a family apart.
If you've ever been eight, to think of being separated
From your mother and your father and sold
And you'll never see them again.
The horror of that, the poignancy of all of that,
And yet that's the kind of thing
That happened across the South up until the end of slavery.
Okay, my final offer,
I'll give you 1,000 For that man,
900 for that man.
That woman there, $700.
Please, buy my child!
Sir!
(Solomon Northup) I have seen mothers kissing for the last time
The faces of their dead offspring,
But never have I seen such an exhibition of intense grief
As when Eliza was parted from her child.
On board a train heading north.
A slave is on the run.
The risk of capture is high.
At most, 1,000 a year are successful.
Common punishments if caught include; branding,
Slashing of Achilles tendons and ears cut off.
Frederick Douglass has already failed twice,
But he has a better chance than most of passing as a freeman.
Unlike 80% of slaves, he can read and write.
Even in the 21st century,
We're only three or four generations away
From people that not only could not get paid for their labor,
It was against the law for them to read and write,
It was against the law for them to marry,
It was against the law for them to name their children
After themselves.
Ladies and gentlemen, please.
Long way to go.
Ticket.
Black Americans must carry documents proving they're free,
Or who they belong to.
Frederick Douglass carries papers borrowed from a friend.
(Man) Ticket.
But they won't hold up to careful examination.
(Frederick Douglass) My whole future depended on the decision of this conductor.
(Chicken clucking)
Someone get this chicken.
(Frederick Douglass) This moment of time was one of the most anxious
I ever experienced.
Had he looked closely at the paper,
He could not have failed to discover
That it called for a very different-looking person
From myself.
Frederick Douglass makes it to New York City-- and freedom,
Here becomes a leading figure in the antislavery movement.
Douglass ill become the most famous African-American of his time.
And even debate with President Lincoln in the White House.
Many escaped slaves use a network of secret roots,
Called the Underground Railway.
Harriet Tubman is its most famous operator.
An escaped slave herself,
She risks her life returning south again and again
To guide others to freedom.
Tubman will do anything to avoid capture.
Even keeping babies quiet with opium.
(Annette) Harriet Tubman is the Moses of our people.
She was a wanted woman, she was a hated woman,
Reviled by the white South.
Just imagine you've gotten out of slavery, you've escaped,
And yet you come back,
You have the courage and the care about other people
To come back into a hell.
(Dogs barking)
The South puts a reward on her head,
But nothing stops her.
Not even $40,000 bounty.
Come on, y'all!
Come on!
Move or die.
Tubman is one of America's first civil-rights activists.
Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman
Threaten everything the South stands for.
(Al) Tens of thousands of slave owners
Had to deal with, for the first time,
The fact that these people are going to rebel.
She was far more effective
As the symbol that they feared
Than the few hundred that she saved.
(Dogs barking)
Nearly 60,000 Slaves will escape,
Up to a $50 million loss to their owners,
And growing opposition to slavery
It means the South will have to fight
To preserve its way of life.
The battle for the soul of a nation
Has begun.
(Narrator) Midway through the 19th century,
America enters the modern world.
In 20 years, there'll be Levi's Jeans,
Chewing gum and hot dogs.
But the nation is split ideologically
Between North and South.
Slavery became not simply a political issue,
Not simply an economic issue, but a moral issue as well.
It became the issue
That defined North and South in the 1850s.
September 1850.
A new Fugitive Slave Law brings the brutality
Of Southern slavery to the North.
No African-American is safe, anywhere in the U.S.
Gentlemen, you've made a mistake.
This is a place of business.
I'm a tailor, these are my clients.
I'm a freeman. I'm not a slave, gentlemen.
(Henry) The Fugitive Slave Law meant that if you were a slave
And you managed to escape to the North,
Your master could come and get you,
And you had no recourse.
Not only that, if you were a free Negro,
They still could sell you down the river.
The search for runaway slaves escalates into a witch hunt.
Simple accusation can condemn African-American escapes slaves or free
Federal magistrates get $10 to rule them slaves,
Five to set them free.
The new law causes outrage.
Abolitionist newspapers and tracks spread across the North.
In 1852, the novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin"
By Harriet Beecher Stowe,
An unknown Connecticut housewife.
Becomes the best selling book of the century after the Bible.
Its passionate anti-slavery message appeals especially to women.
Many now politicized for the first time.
Slavery is the burning issue of the day.
The Northerners began to see that, wait a minute,
They're not gonna keep slavery just in the South,
They wanna take slavery west
And to turn the country into a slave country.
As new settlers flood into frontier territories
Each becomes a battle ground.
In Kansas a peaceful protest turns violent.
Towns are terrorized, stores robbed.
Homesteads burned.
Neither North nor South will back down.
One man will stop at nothing in his quest to abolish slavery.
John Brown.
Becomes a folk hero in the North...
And a terrorist to the South.
He believes himself to be God's chosen instrument.
He will stop at nothing for his cause.
(Man) John Brown is one of those controversial figures
About whom almost anything you can say is true.
He's a terrorist, in our modern terms.
He's a revolutionary.
The divide between North and South is an open wound.
Kansas bleeds for two years,
More than 200 are killed.
America is on the road to war.
America is built on a number of distinct fault lines,
One, of course, was slavery and freedom,
That was a fault line that had to be addressed.
In the South, slavery is a way of life,
Even for non-slave owners.
Antislavery forces in the North
Threaten what many regard as their birth right.
There is still, in some areas of America,
A great pride in being Southern and holding true
To the original Southern attitude.
I think our clinging to the idea that slavery is a right
And just a way of life,
You know, it is a dark spot in our history.
Anger in the South grows every day.
The North claims the moral high ground,
But its getting rich from cotton, too.
Pretty much everybody agreed that a crisis was developing.
Not everyone knew that the crisis would include,
In the end, the Civil War,
But everyone understood that a showdown
Between the slave South and the free North
Was about to occur.
The actions of radical abolitionist John Brown Escalates the crisis.
In October 1859.
He prepares to take the fight into the heart of the South.
He plans to capture the federal arsenal
At Harpers Ferry, Virginia,
Its the biggest collection of weapons in the South.
20,000 rifles, muskets and pistols,
Brown wants to arm the slaves and lead a slave rebellion.
Fighting alongside him are his five sons,
All willing to die for their cause.
The arsenal is poorly defended.
Breaking in is easy.
But Brown's plan depends on slaves joining fight.
He needs a small army to carry off so many weapons.
Without slave reinforcements, it's a suicide mission.
When word gets out, local townsfolk attack the arsenal.
Not a single slave joins Brown and his men.
Trapped they must fight for their lives.
(John Brown) I wanna free all Negroes in this state.
I have possession of the United States armory,
And if the citizens interfere with me,
I must only burn the town and have blood.
1859
(Narrator) Radical abolitionist John Brown
Attempts to inspire a slave revolt.
No of joined him, and now he's trapped.
At dawn, the US Marines arrive.
They storm the arsenal under the command of
Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Brown and his men decide to fight.
The soldiers overwhelm them.
But this is just the beginning of the fight against slavery.
John Brown survives in his captured.
But his sons are dead.
His trial captivates the country.
Charged as a criminal,
He puts the institution of slavery on trial.
Brown is convicted of treason and sentenced to death.
A terrorist in the South, a martyr in the North.
He's executed on December 2nd, 1859.
As the country prepares to elect a new president in 1860,
Many wonder if the nation can survive.
(John Brown) I, John Brown,
Is now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land
Will never be purged away but with blood.
In Chicago, May 18th, 1860.
An unlikely candidate wins the Republican Party’s nomination.
For President.
Abraham Lincoln's only claim to fame.
He's lost two elections to the Senate.
Lincoln hates slavery,
But he's desperate to hold the country together.
What I admire about Abraham Lincoln
Is that he had his beliefs and he stuck to his beliefs
At a time when it wasn't popular to do so,
Especially when it was black, white
And very cut-and-dry, he stuck to his beliefs.
When the country goes to the poll on November 6th, 1860.
The stakes are high.
Lincoln is elected president of a nation on the brink of civil war.
Convinced he'll abolish slavery, the South rebels.
Southern states threaten to leave the Union.
The North backs Lincoln.
But in Southern cities like Atlanta the papers talk of war.
(Man) "Let the consequences be what they may."
"Whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore"
"And Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms"
"With mangled bodies, the South will never"
"Submit to such humiliation and degradation"
"As the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."
(Henry) The South knew that Lincoln was gonna win,
And it was just a matter of time,
Tick, tick, tick, before secession occurred.
The South wants no part of a Union
With Lincoln in the White House.
But as he prepares to take office,
Lincoln is still determined to avoid a civil war.
Lincoln was not happy about slavery.
He did not see that as congruent to
"All men are created equal."
And he had given a speech, before he ever became president,
On why that was so important to him.
And I think that was coming to a head,
And when he got elected,
That was the final straw for the South.
On December 20th, 1860.
South Carolina secedes from the Union.
The ten other slave states soon follow.
As Lincoln celebrates victory, the shadow of war follows across America.
In February 1861, a few weeks before his inauguration,
The Confederate States of America are born.
(Colin) Lincoln's principal objective was to save the Union
And then we'll deal with slavery,
But before too long, he had to both save the Union
And deal with slavery.
Lincoln receives his first death threats
Before ever taking office.
He save every one,
In a file labeled:
"Assassination."
On the journey to Washington,
He wear a disguise, just to be safe.
To avoid war, he proposes a compromise.
It is Lincoln who explains the case for freedom
And says, "I'm not gonna attack slavery where it is,"
"But I'm not gonna let it expand."
At his inauguration,
Abraham Lincoln reluctantly pledges that states with slaves
Will be allowed to keep them,
But it's too little, too late.
A virtual state of war already exists.
The South mobilizes an army of 800,000 men
Against a Union army of 2.5 million.
Five weeks later the first shots ring out Between the States.
The civil war will be the deadliest in American history.
In the next four years, more lives will be lost
Than in all America's other wars put together.