I'm Angela O'Dell and you are listening to real cool history for kids, a podcast show featuring history stories told from a biblical worldview. Welcome to episode 23 of Real Cool History for kids.

In the next couple of episodes, we're going to visit the historical period surrounding the American Civil War. In our episodes about Samuel Mud,

we learned about the events surrounding the assassination

of President Abraham Lincoln.

President Lincoln.

President Lincoln was the President of the United States of America during the Civil War, the

war that almost destroyed our country.

In this episode, we're going to hear the story of how that war began and also the stories of the soldiers who fought in that war.

When Abraham Lincoln ran for president,

several southern states had threatened to leave the Union

and they held true to their promise.

You see when he was running for election, President Lincoln had said that he would not interfere

with the slavery where it had already existed, but he would prevent

it from spreading to the new states and the new territories.

Many southerners believed that Lincoln would still end slavery anyway.

For them, the end of slavery would deal a devastating blow to the southern economy

and its reliance on slave-grown crops.

It was a very complicated situation.

You see, not all southerners owned slaves, about one third of them did, and the rates of ownership varied widely from location to location. very slave ownership than the upper south and the border states, the states along the border

between the north and the south.

For example, nearly one half of all Mississippians owned slaves in 1860, while one quarter of Tennesseans and

one eighth of Missourians were slave owners. For other southerners they were opposed to the idea of

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