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Home , David Wilmot

SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES: The Origins of the Disunion Crisis

Thesis: While abolitionists and rebellious slaves played crucial roles in bringing on the conflict between the free labor North and the slave labor South, the disunion crisis hinged on the issue of whether to allow the institution of slavery to expand into the trans-Mississippi territories.

1. The Free Soil Issue: the free soil movement in the North demanded the prohibition of slavery from the western territories, reserving the territories for free non- slaveholding farmers. The emerged in the election of 1848, but the Republican party, founded in 1854, represented the most important expression of the free soil issue.

The importance and limits of abolitionism: A) from difference to threat: It was one thing to say that slave labor and free labor made the South and the North different. But difference - even given the economic divisions over tariffs, internal improvements, banking, immigration, and the expansion of federal power these issues might entail - did not necessarily mean war or even antagonism. The abolitionists made sure there would be antagonism. As abolitionists developed their moral and religious indictment of slavery, the slaveholders answered with their own aggressive defense of slavery as a positive good. Anti-slavery and pro-slavery arguments eventually included economic and political and cultural dimensions. Even as anti-slavery forces emphasized the greater efficiency and dynamism of free labor and warned that slavery compromised civil liberties and threaten the Union, they also depicted the South as a backward society of ignorance and stagnation. Abolitionism thus helped set in motion an ideological contest over competing labor systems and the civilizations they supposedly gave rise to. B) Negrophobes and the cotton interests: But it is also crucial to understand the limits of abolitionism’s morally-based arguments. Those limits that also help explain why narrowly economic conflicts alone were unlikely to lead to war. Abolitionism, as a moral indictment of slavery, never won over the highly “negrophobic” populations of the southern tier of Northern states (the unskilled laborers and small farmers of southern Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois who did not at all like the idea of competing with freed slaves that they feared would flow out of the South after emancipation. Nor did abolitionism win over the most powerful and wealthy classes in the North, the bankers, merchants, textile manufacturers and other commercial groups (insurance, warehousing, the legal profession) who were making excellent money off of the cotton trade or whose key markets remained in the slave South. Some other issue was needed to bring such groups into an anti-slavery (as opposed to abolitionist) movement. The effort to prohibit slavery in the territories provided that issue. Free soilers insisted that they had no intention of abolishing slavery where it already existed (no intention, that is, of unleashing a flood of emancipated slaves into the North or of destroying markets in the

1 slave South). Free soilers simply wanted to preserve economic opportunities for white, free labor in the new territories. On this basis, a powerful anti-slavery movement, not necessarily committed to abolition, began to take shape in the North in defense of free soil, free labor, and free men.

The and slavery expansionism: For a variety of economic, political, and ideological reasons, slaveholders felt the need to expand. Economically, the slave economy appeared to need fresh expanses of virgin land as the regressive slave- labor agriculture (lacking the capital and incentives to use improved methods and tools) wore out the fertility of the older lands. Moreover, slaveholders in upper South depended on the sale of surplus slaves to the lower South to keep themselves financially above water. Politically, only new slave states - and hence new slave-state senators - could help the slaveholders maintain the balance of power in Congress (they had long since lost control of the House of Representatives which, being based on population, was in the hands of free labor Northerners). Ideologically, since the slaveholders insisted that slavery was not a necessary evil, but a positive good, they were in a difficult position to accept its containment. If it was a positive good, the basis of a superior civilization, they had to ask, then why should it not be allowed to expand? Beginning in the mid-1840s, slaveholders aggressively looked for ways to expand slavery, laying claim to Texas, demanding their rights in the western territories, and even launching military and diplomatic campaigns to annex certain areas of the Caribbean and Latin America. Northerners tended to see the effort to expand slavery’s reach as the workings of the Slave Power, by which they meant an aggressive conspiracy of slaveholders that would stop at nothing to preserve and expand the “peculiar” institution. The idea of the Slave Power had come out of the abolitionist controversies of the 1830s, when slaveholders damned restrictions on free speech and other civil liberties in an effort to silence the abolitionists, and gained influence with every new effort to extend slavery.

The (1846) and anti-slavery coalitions: In the midst of the Mexican War (see below), a Democratic congressman from , David Wilmot, tried to add a free-soil amendment to an appropriations bill to finance the war. Wilmot’s proviso stipulated that slavery would be forever excluded from any territories gained as a result of the war. Passed by the House of Representatives but defeated by the Senate, the proviso anticipated the platforms of both the Free Soil (1848) and Republican (1854) parties. The proviso impressed upon slaveholders the absolute necessity of maintaining control of the Senate, but it also struck fear into their hearts. For Wilmot himself was a negrophobe who had no sympathy whatsoever for African-Americans or for abolitionists. And yet he was clearly anti-slavery. Here was an issue, saving the western territories for free white farmers and rescuing them from “degrading” competition with slave

2 labor, that might dangerously enlarge the constituency for anti-slavery movements. The Wilmot proviso appealed to the self-interest (and even to the racism) of Northerners, rather than relying upon any sort of moral appeal. The free soil issue remained a crucial element of all future anti- slavery coalitions, including the one that elected Republican president in 1860.

2. Manifest Destiny and Competing Nationalisms: The free soil issue also appealed to a form of American nationalism associated with the concept of “manifest destiny.” Manifest Destiny implied that it was God’s providential plan that Americans spread their institutions and values across the North American continent and, potentially, beyond. But which institutions would be spread and would slavery be one of them? Republicans, who offered one version of American nationalism, insisted that for the American republic to enjoy its rightful influence in the world, slavery must be prevented from expanding across the continent.

Nationalism: the “great” idea of the 19th century: The idea of nationalism held that the “people,” or the “folk,” were united by shared language, values, and cultural forms (from cuisine and literature to music and ethnic traditions). I place “great” in quotation marks because the idea of nationalism, on the one hand, could take profoundly democratic forms, uniting the “ordinary people” of Europe against aristocracies which had more in common with aristocracies in other countries than with the people in their own country. But, on the other hand, nationalism could take the form of racial and ethnic aggressive and exclusion as it often still does today (consider, for example, our current debate over immigration). The idea was “great” in impact, but not necessary “good” in its influence. The mid-19th century unification of Germany and Italy suggested the tremendous power of nationalism. The Republican party of the 1850s can be understood, at least in part, as another expression of nationalism, one that unified the North even as it defined the slaveholding South as the great threat to the nation.

America’s Manifest (Anglo-Saxon?) Destiny: Initially, “manifest destiny” had a strongly ethnic component; American nationalism was defined to some extent in terms of freedom and liberty and the institutions that embodied that (the school, representative assemblies and the like) but also as a militant Anglo-Saxon conquering of inferior races (especially the Mexican). In the early 1850s, the “American” or “Know-Nothing” party defined American nationalism in terms of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestantism (WASP culture, in modern terminology) and called for the removal of immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants. After a brief flirtation with this nativist position, the Republican party defined American nationalism in terms of liberty, individualism, opportunity, democracy, and freedom rather than ethnic, racial or religious characteristics. But at the end of the 1840s and the beginning of the 1850s, it was not clear what direction American nationalism would take. And the issue of whether to allow slavery to expand into the territories

3 became bound up with that question.

The westward movement and the annexation of Texas: The controversial annexation of Texas and its entry into the Union as a slave state was one of the first fruits of manifest destiny. Texas had been a province of Mexico which had abolished slavery earlier in the century, but had also encouraged Americans to settle the sparsely populated areas of eastern Texas. Americans did so, and they brought their slaves. These American slaveholders eventually fought for independence from Mexico (beginning with the famous battle at the Alamo) and became an independent republic in 1836. Texan slaveholders wanted to join the Union, but President Andrew Jackson feared the backlash that might come from the North with the admission of a new slave state and so he blocked annexation. President John Tyler tried again in 1844, but failed. The presidential election of 1844 became something of a referendum on the annexation of Texas and when Democratic candidate James Polk won, he interpreted the election as a mandate for annexing Texas, which Congress ratified in 1845. Free state forces were not pleased. Neither was Mexico.

The Mexican War (1846-48) and its bitter fruits: Relations with Mexico deteriorated as the Mexican government had never accepted the loss of Texas. When Texas claimed the Rio Grande as its southern and western border (thereby incorporating much of present- day New Mexico), a border dispute emerged. President Polk, after having failed to purchase the disputed territory, sent American troops across the Nueces River (in the middle of the disputed area) to the Rio Grande (thus occupying all of the disputed area). When, after two months, Mexican troops finally attacked US troops encamped on land that Mexico claimed, Polk demanded war and Congress obliged. he Mexican war dragged on longer than expected, but it ended in complete victory for the U.S. and the acquisition of vast new territories. As South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun feared, however, these territories proved to be the “forbidden fruit” of the slaveholders. Angry disputes over whether slavery would be allowed in the new territories soon followed and eventually led to secession and war.

3. The

The election of 1848: popular sovereignty and “free soil, free labor, free men”: the issue of the status of slavery in these new territories dominated the presidential election of 1848, even as the two major parties attempted to avoid it. The Democrats nominated of Michigan who ran on the platform of “popular sovereignty” (i.e. the actual settlers in the territories would decide for themselves whether to allow slavery or not). The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor, hero of the Mexican War and an apolitical Louisiana slaveholder who had most likely never voted before in his life. Anti-slavery forces rejected both candidates and formed a third

4 party, the Free Soil party, and ran on a platform of “free soil, free labor, and free men.” In other words, the Free Soil party argued that the territories were crucial to preserving and extending the free labor society and maintaining a society of free men. The Free Soil challenge cut into the Democratic vote and effectively elected the Whig Taylor. But the issue the party raised, the free soil issue, dominated American politics for the next twelve years.

President Taylor and California Statehood: The first result of the Mexican War was California’s application for statehood with a free labor constitution. Slaveholders threatened to secede from the Union if California were brought in (the admission of a new free state was not why they had supported the Mexican War). Taylor stood firm and threatened to hang any southern who advocated secession, but Taylor unexpectedly died in July. Millard Fillmore, a weak politician from , succeeded him in the presidency and the initiative fell again to the slaveholders.

Clay’s Compromise and Douglas’: Aging Whig Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, mastermind and hero of previous compromises over slavery, tried to secure one more compromise. The compromise itself represented an elaborate series of provisions, but the key elements were admittance of California as a free state, application of the doctrine of popular sovereignty to the new territories, and a new, more rigid Fugitive Slave Law as a incentive for Southerners to accept the compromise. (Other provisions ended the slave trade but not slavery itself in Washington, D.C., adjusted the borders of New Mexico and Texas, and provided for federal payment of Texas’s debt from its war for independence.) With the help of the Taylor administration, Clay had appealed to a sense of patriotism in Congress to try to pass the compromise but, ominously, patriotic appeals had little impact. Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, a less lofty and more Machiavellian figure, took over the task of passing the Compromise, just as Taylor died. With the help of the Fillmore administration and the liberal distribution of Texas’s bonded debt (which would be paid in full as part of the compromise) to key congressional leaders, Douglas managed to pass not a single omnibus bill containing all the provisions of the compromise, but a series of separate bills each with its own carefully-crafted majority. The compromise, in other words, passed not in the spirit of national patriotism but in an atmosphere of somewhat corrupt wheeling and dealing and a frank appeal to self-interest. Not surprisingly, the Compromise settled nothing.

The Fugitive Slave Law (1850): abolitionists vs. slaveholders: Indeed, one provision of the Compromise immediately became the centerpiece of renewed sectional conflict. As slaveholders

5 insisted the Northern enforcement of the law would be a test of whether secession could be avoided, abolitionists - black and white - mobilized to evade the law. Moreover, the law itself seemed the greatest example of just what the Slave Power was up to. Denying suspects the right of trial by jury, and requiring Northern citizens to assist in the capture of suspected fugitives, the law made a mockery of civil rights and liberties in the Northern communities in which fugitives would be tracked down. Controversial resistance to the law began almost immediately.

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