Themes of the American Civil War
The Challenge of Slavery, 1819–1850
Download 2.25 Mb. View original pdf
|
| The Challenge of Slavery, 1819–1850 One sign of the strength of this Union was the effectiveness with which the main threat to its survival was handled. The house divided against itself did stand a Union that was half slave, half free, did survive for seventy years. Between 1776 and 1804 northerners abolished slavery in their own midst because the institution was immoral, had harmful effects on white society, and contradicted the principles upon which the republic was based. Many leading southerners agreed, but recognized that the section’s economic dependence on slavery and widespread fears of the consequences of releasing hordes of Africans made emancipation impossible there. These severe differences over the future of slavery could be accommodated in 1787 by a federal structure that allowed states to determine the nature of their own internal institutions. As long as slavery could be regarded as a local, and not a national, problem the federal government could ignore the question of its existence and instead simply focus on the practical consequences of slavery. Such issues as federal apportionment, the importation of slaves, and the return of fugitives were settled in 1787 and the arrangements made then duly honored in the following decades. Behind this sectional agreement lay not just a desire to create a republic for white men, but also the fact that many northerners combined their antipathy for slavery with a conviction that “Negroes” were an inferior and dangerous people who must be restrained from polluting white society. 49 The one issue that could not be handled with comparative ease was the question of slavery expansion. If slavery was an inherited, necessary evil, then its continuation where it already had some existence could be accepted, as in the Old Southwest in 1790 and the new state of Louisiana in 1812. 24 • Donald Ratcliffe 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. 50 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. 51 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 northerners The 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. 52 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. 53 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. 54 Download 2.25 Mb. Share with your friends:
|