[Sailor Steve]

You say you like Gods & Generals. Have you seen Gettysburg? It takes place after, but was filmed years earlier, and is the better movie.

The writing of the US Constitution was not a cause of the American Civil War, but has ties to it. The biggest argument of the Constitutional Debates (May-September 1787) was the question of representation. The original Virginia Plan, written by James Madison and presented by the Virginia delegation to the Convention, proposed that one representative be elected to represent a certain amount of people. Other delegates objected. The States at that time considered themselves individual countries, only willing to submit themselves to a greater government where it was absolutely necessary, and felt that, like the Continental Congress created during the Revolution, each state should have one representative.

Madison argued that under the Virginia plan the people would be represented, and the government was to be for the people, not the States. The others argued that the bigger states, like Virginia and Pennsylvania, would rule everything and the smaller states, having fewer representatives, would get, as we say, "the short end of the stick." The Virginians argued that with the States being represented equally the people of the larger states would suffer, since a million people in a big state would have one representative, the same as fifty thousand people in a small state.

They finally settled on the system we have today - the Senate, with two members representing each State, and the House of Representatives, with one Representative for a certain number of people.

During all this the Southern States said that since they had so few people they would be cheated on any decision, and came up with the idea that the slaves should be counted as well as the free citizens of the States for the purpose of representation. The Northern States objected that this would be cheating, because the slaves themselves would not be represented, being considered only property, and because the Southern States would receive extra representation based on people who could not themselves vote.

The Southern States threatened to take no further part in the new country if their demands were not granted. The Northern delegates, believing that the country could not survive unless all thirteen States became members, gave in to the Southerners' demands. The compromise made at that time was that five slaves would be equal to three free men for the purpose of representation. This has led in recent times to Black apologists saying that the Founding Fathers only considered a black man to be worth three-fifths of a white man. This was not true, but it's easy to see why they would feel this way.

That decision did not directly affect events that followed, but it does show the basic underlying problem that beset the young United States.