Picture this. A letter home from a soldier serving in the Civil War. A few meager sheets of paper,

creased carefully in the middle, covered in looping handwriting that would look astonishing to us today,

but not so much then when excellent penmanship was still commonplace.

The letter sits in a mailbag with dozens of others, written in the camp the night before.

This one is a husband's reply to his wife's earlier letter, one pleading with him to come home

to be where he is needed most, with her and their new baby.

In these folded pages, the soldier tries to explain why he cannot,

why he is fighting this long, bloody war, and whether the letter was written by a Union

soldier or a Confederate one hardly matters. The message is likely the same. He is here, he writes, because of one thing

above all else, one towering issue that must be settled once and for all. The issue of slavery. Good day, American history hitters. Here in the laziest days of summer, perhaps we found you on a sandy beach or on a raft in a pool.

Wherever you are, I'm Don Wildman. Very glad you're listening.

The lead up to the American Civil War is a detective story following the clues of antebellum

politics and policy. Today is the first of a short series of episodes exploring the road

to the Civil War. Why any war begins will always be a complicated question,

but with the American Civil War, it comes down to slavery, although you'll certainly find

plenty who've argued otherwise and persist in doing so today. So that's where we start with

this series, the painfully fundamental issue of enslavement. Listen to the statistic.

By the time of the start of the Civil War, in the South, we had upwards of three and a half

million souls in bondage.

That's in a total population of just over nine million.

That's 40% of the population in the South were enslaved.

And a million more up north and elsewhere who had no direct experience of slavery were

...