By the year 1810 the slave trade to the United States came to an end and the population of the slaves begun to increase naturally. This made way to the transmission and the preservation of the religious practices that were African American. The slaves in the slave quarters organized their own invisible institution through signal, passwords and messages that were not understood by the white.

It proved very hard for the slave to preserve their religion in North America. Most of the slaves lived under harsh conditions and they were high death rates, which reduced their numbers. The salves were separated from their families and the tribal groups and this made it hard for them to practice. For those who tried to practice the concrete efforts of the white owners to eradicate the non-Christian customs that saw as heathens made the preservation of the religious tradition difficult. Traditional beliefs, rhythms, isolated songs and beliefs in the in the curative power of roots and the efficacy of the world spirit and the ancestors did not survive well in the nineteenth century.

They called the believers to hush harbor were they mixed freely and practiced their traditional religion. However, they did this in secret because the whites could not agree because they thought that giving the slaves the freedom to perform their religious ceremonies would give them a chance to plot a rebellion against their owners and they feared that. This made the white in America dictate the religion that then slaves were going to follow. They were determined to eradicate the non-Christian customs that the Africans professed.

Maintaining the slaves was important to the whites and if giving the slaves the freedom to practice their religious ceremonies was a threat then they were going to be denied that freedom. The civil war is the central event in the American history consciousness. The historical and the literary elements that were related to the civil war and to reconstruction were many but the main issue was slavery and the slave trade. The co existence of the slave owning south with the increasingly anti slavery north made a conflict likely.