In new areas where the republic could engrave its own features—as in the
Old Northwest—most northerners (and, initially, antislavery southerners)
assumed that freedom would reign. But when,
in the case of Missouri in, northerners took this principle to mean that Congress could prevent anew state from choosing slavery for itself, southerners recognized that this claim implicitly challenged the very constitutional right upon which the
Southern states depended for their freedom from federal interference over slavery. The South’s representatives successfully defended this point in but had to accept in return that slavery could not expand into the Louisiana
Purchase north of 36°30´. Thereafter southerners were always conscious that,
during the Missouri crisis, a Northern majority had clearly demonstrated its fundamental dislike of the institution of slavery.
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This new watchfulness accounts for the rapid shift of most southerners to a states rights outlook in the s. Whereas the majority of Southern politicians had become increasingly nationalist since 1801 and shared
in the postwar consensus, they now adopted the standpoint of the Old Republican strict constructionists, essentially as a weapon of sectional defense. They turned against the American System as much because it enhanced the power of the federal government as because of its economic effects, which in any case benefited some parts of the South. As some Old Republicans warned,
the government that could dig a canal could also free a slave. Though the direct threat to slavery may seem minimal in the s, the widespread dislike of slavery in the North was obvious and, as
William Freehling has observed,
the more sensitive of southerners saw menace where none was intended.
Thereafter the South needed constant reassurance—and secured it after through the election of Jackson and the Democrats commitment to giving the South every possible satisfaction.
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Ironically, the very strength of the Union brought on a greater crisis in the s. The most committed antislavery men in the North began to argue that the existence of slavery anywhere in the nation stained the consciences of all truly Christian Americans, and therefore action must betaken immediately to end the sinful institution. Thus even Garrisonian abolitionists, who would later conspicuously place conscience before Union, conceived of North and South as being part of the same moral and political community.
Moreover, improvements in the means of daily contact between the sections allowed these modern abolitionists to bring their message home to the
South by the circulation of antislavery materials through the mails. This challenge united the whole South against external interference, but a series of minor sectional compromises between 1835 and one, for example,
tacitly allowed local postmasters to censor the mails—gave the South every reassurance that the federal government would not allow any Northern interference in the South’s peculiar institution. The federal compromise over slavery could be reaffirmed in this way because
many antislavery northernersThe State of the Union
•
25 were unwilling to embrace an extremist crusade that not only risked driving the South out of the Union, but also threatened to introduce racial equality and a horde of northward-moving freed blacks.
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As a result, even in the sand early s politicians and voters behaved as though they belonged to a national political community. The willingness of the North to reject the abolitionists made possible the internal division of the South and the operation of the nationally focused second party system. When Texas won its independence from Mexico in Presidents and Congress became primarily concerned to prevent its request for annexation from disrupting national (and party) unity. When President
Tyler in 1843 decided to pitch his campaign for reelection on an expansionist platform, he appealed to pent-up Southern frustration over Texas and anxiety about apparent abolitionist successes in the courts and churches.
Finding their Southern support attracted to Tyler’s
campaign, the
Democratic Party took up the cause of Manifest Destiny, but handled the
Texas issue as essentially a matter of national security, with Democrats allover the Union seeing expansion as an American rather than a purely
Southern cause.
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The subsequent war with Mexico and the acquisition of anew empire in the Southwest in 1848 raised once more the very issues that had been so threatening in the Missouri crisis. The Old South remained as concerned as ever to preserve its system of racial control and labor exploitation, and thought expansion of its peculiar institution essential.
On the other side,
even anti-abolitionist northerners opposed the extension of slavery into areas where slavery had been banned before American acquisition. Yet despite the diametric opposition of slave and free states on this question, compromise proved possible on the basis of leaving the issue to the people who actually settled each of the newly acquired territories. However, this formula required a sufficient number of northerners to concede the theoretical possibility of slavery expansion, which they did on the assumptions that the South wanted only the nominal right to expand slavery, not its actual expansion, and that slavery could not in fact expand into a climate hostile to staple production. These were assumptions that the events of the s would prove false. Moreover, though Unionist sentiment remained strong enough
into produce a compromise, the long, bitter argument over slavery expansion in the late shad driven the two sections apart and forced them to take up hostile positions in which each section began to define its own essence and virtue in contradistinction to the other.
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