The foundation for black participation in the Civil War began more than a hundred years
             before the outbreak of the war. Blacks in America had been in bondage since early
             colonial times. In 1776, when Jefferson proclaimed mankind's inalienable right to life,
             liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the institution of slavery had become firmly
             established in America. Blacks worked in the tobacco fields of Virginia, in the rice fields
             of South Carolina, and toiled in small farms and shops in the North. Foner and Mahoney
             report in A House Divided, America in the Age of Lincoln that, "In 1776, slaves
             composed forty percent of the population of the colonies from Maryland south to Georgia,
             but well below ten percent in the colonies to the North." The invention of the cotton gin
             by Eli Whitney in 1793 provided a demand for cotton thus increasing the demand for
             slaves. By the 1800's slavery was an institution throughout the South, an institution in
             which slaves had few rights, and could be sold or leased by their owners. They lacked any
             voice in the government and lived a life of hardship. Considering these circumstances, the
             slave population never abandoned the desire for freedom or the determination to resist
             control by the slave owners. The slave's reaction to this desire and determination
             resulted in outright rebellion and individual acts of defiance. However, historians place
             the strongest reaction in the enlisting of blacks in the war itself.
             Batty in The Divided Union: The Story of the Great American War, 1861-65,
             concur with Foner and Mahoney about the importance of outright rebellion in their
             analysis of the Nat Turner Rebellion, which took place in 1831. This revolt demonstrated
             that not all slaves were willing to accept this "institution of slavery" passively. Foner and
             Mahoney note that the significance of this uprising is found in its aftermat...