Slavery and National Expansion in the United States Author(s): Adam Rothman Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol. 23, No. 2, Antebellum Slavery (Apr., 2009), pp. 23-29 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40505984
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This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Adam Rothman
Slavery and National Expansion in the United States
May 19, 1856, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Mas- phase, a contest between a resurgent proslavery expansionism and a sachusetts rose in the Senate to denounce a bill authorizing the potent northern "free soil" movement that drove a wedge through the people of the Kansas Territory to form a state government and trans-sectional collaborations of the Jacksonian party system. join the Union. "It is the rape of a virgin Territory," he proclaimed to a The Northwest Ordinance symbolized the antislavery prom- shocked gallery, "compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and ise of the United States in the decade following the Revolution. Its it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the landmark Article Six outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude hideous offspring of such a crime, in except as punishment for crime the hope of adding to the power of (an exception that would reappear Slavery in the National Government" in the Thirteenth Amendment) in (1). Sumner was not the only propa- the Northwest Territory, which be- gandist to represent the extension of came the states of Ohio, Indiana, slavery into Kansas as rape. A litho- Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. graph by John Magee printed in 1856 Although the ordinance included a illustrated the shocking allegation fugitive clause so that slaves from (see page 27). It depicted Liberty, "the other states could not legally find fair maid of Kansas," as a white wom- refuge there, the Ohio River came an draped in an American flag, beset to mark a symbolic border between by pillaging, leering "border ruffians" freedom and slavery in the early recognizable as the Democratic poli- United States - as Harriet Beecher ticians President James Buchanan, Stowe famously dramatized in Uncle Stephen Douglas, Lewis Cass, and Tom's Cabin. Adherence to Article William Marcy (2). What was the Six allowed antislavery forces to de- meaning of this politically explosive feat attempts to smuggle slavery into mix of western expansion, slavery, the jurisdictions carved out of the and sexual violence in the 1850s? Northwest Territory. One Ohio poli- Americans had struggled with tician called the article a "cloud by the problem of slavery in the western day and pillar of fire by night" that territories for seventy years, dating gave strength and courage to the back to the passage of the Northwest friends of liberty (3). Ordinance by the Continental Con- A different situation prevailed gress in 1787. There were three phas- south of the Ohio River. Congress es of this struggle. The first, running refused to apply Article Six to Ken- from the Northwest Ordinance to the tucky and the Southwest Territory Missouri Compromise, saw sharp (which became Tennessee) in the political debates over the status of 1780s and to the Mississippi Territo- slavery in the territories ceded by the ry (which became Alabama and Mis- original states to the Union and in sissippi) in the 1790s. Why? North the territories acquired in the Loui- Carolina and Georgia insisted on siana Purchase. The second phase allowances for slavery as the price of spanned the Jacksonian era from the giving up their claims to these west- early 1820s to the early 1840s, when ern lands. In the Natchez district on the problem of slavery in the western the Mississippi, slavery was already territories remained dormant. Slav- entrenched, and the national govern- ery grew dramatically in the Deep ment worried about alienating the South while an emergent abolitionist local elite. Moreover, it was widely movement in the northern states be- believed that social and economic de- "Eliza's flight, a scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin," 1852. This sheet music gan to develop a searing critique of cover shows Eliza, a fugitive slave, fleeing across a frozen Ohio River, velopmentthe on the southwestern fron- the "peculiar institution." The Mexi- symbolic border between freedom and slavery in antebellum America. tier required slavery because free can War opened the third and final (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, American Memory.) white people could not or would not
Ο AH Magazine of History · April 2009 23
This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Southern Slave Auction," Harper's Weekly, July 13, 1861. African American men, women, and children being auctioned off in front of a crowd of men. After the ban on the importation of slaves took effect in 1808, the slave auction, as part of the internal slave trade, became increasingly important to the preservation of slavery and devastating to the lives of enslaved people. (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-2582.) perform the hard work of clearing the wilderness in a hot and humid after northern states' gradual emancipation laws, Tallmadge proposed climate. And some Jeffersonians even began to argue that "diffusing" amending the Missouri statehood bill to prevent any further increase the slave population across the continent would lessen the danger of in slavery and to provide for emancipation at the age of twenty-five of slave revolt, improve the slaves' condition, and possibly ease the path all enslaved children born in Missouri after it became a state. Note toward emancipation (4). that slavery could have endured in Missouri until the late nineteenth The Louisiana Purchase raised the stakes in the debate over century under such provisions, although its slow decline might have slavery's expansion. Thomas Jefferson assured the nation that allowed the for an accelerated abolition at a later date. The Tallmadge vast new territory promised "a wide-spread field for the blessings Amendments of won broad support among the northern majority in the freedom and equal laws" (5). What, then, about slavery? Organizing House of Representatives but ran up against a proslavery phalanx in the Orleans Territory (which would become the state of Louisiana) the Senate, where they were defeated (8). in 1804, Congress permitted slavery but banned the importation Southern of slaveowners were appalled by the northern antislavery foreign slaves into the territory, while it left the status of slavery outcry in in 1819. They regarded the effort to block Missouri's admission "Upper Louisiana" to be regulated according to local law - and as to a beslave state as a violation of the principle of state equality and sov- reckoned with at a later date. The Orleans Territory's planter elite, ereignty, who an attack on their unique "species" of property, and an insult had recently made a profitable switch to growing cotton and tosugar, their honor. They also could see the handwriting on the wall. As strongly protested against the prohibition on foreign slave importa- population growth in the free states outpaced that of the slave states, tion. In a classic statement of the environmental dimension of proslav- national power tilted away from slaveowners. With Maine entering the ery logic, they argued that they needed enslaved Africans to maintain Union as a free state, they needed Missouri to enter as a slave state to the levee along the Mississippi River. Otherwise, "cultivation maintain must sectional parity in the Senate. Leading proslavery ideologues cease, the improvements of a century be destroyed, and the great also river detected a serious danger from northern abolitionists armed with resume its empire over our ruined fields and demolished habitations" a broad Hamiltonian view of the Constitution. South Carolina's steely- (6). Civilization, that is, required slavery. minded John Calhoun, for instance, scrambled from nationalism in The problem of slavery in the Louisiana cession reached a high-the i8ios to state rights in the 1820s with the specter of antislavery water mark in 1819 when the citizens of the Missouri Territory appliedlooming on the horizon. High tariffs, subsidies for internal improve- for membership in the Union under a state constitution that allowed ments, and support for the colonization of free blacks in Africa all slavery. In response, James Tallmadge, antislavery congressman seemed from be stalking horses for abolitionism. They were even loath to New York, took the unprecedented step of blocking Missouri's admis-accept the 36o 30' dividing line between free and slave territory in the sion as a slave state. "Now is the time," Tallmadge declared, "the remainderexten- of the Louisiana cession, but that line held as a cornerstone sion of the evil must now be prevented, or the occasion is irrecoverably of the Missouri compromise. lost, and the evil can never be contracted" (7). Modeling his approach
24 OAH Magazine of History · April 2009
This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This 1867 cartoon of King Cotton by Thomas Nast shows "a skinny old king" with hair and beard of cotton, an oversize crown on his head, a whip in his hand, sitting on his throne, while African American slaves bring him cool drinks and fan him. Britannia and Napoleon III prostrate themselves before him and deposit their crowns at his feet - a reminder that during the Civil War governments and manufacturing interests in some European states, dependent on Southern cotton, sympathized with the Confederacy. The base of the dais is inscribed "Slavery." In the elaborate ornamentation around the throne the repeated "C.S.A." is "Confederate States of Amer- ica." The throne-room is crowded with the militant leaders of the Confederacy, shown as knights in armor." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZC6-77.)
The first phase of the struggle over slavery in the West ended in Atlantic slave trade. This circumstance did not result from the delib- a stalemate. Slavery had been permitted in some places and prohib- erate "breeding" of slaves by owners or from humane treatment by ited in others. Where permitted, slavery expanded. By 1840, the new southern owners compared to those in places like Jamaica, Cuba, and slave states and territories added to the Union after 1783 contained Brazil. Rather, it stemmed from a unique mix of ecological conditions, more than a million enslaved people, or 44 percent of the total slave work regimes, and demography that allowed enslaved people in the population of the United States. Almost 250,000 lived in the states southern United States to subsist, survive, and sustain their commu- carved from the Louisiana Purchase - Louisiana, Missouri, and nities over time. It ought to be remembered, furthermore, that the Arkansas (9). Where had they all come from? Some were "créoles," concept of "natural reproduction" is misleading. No child was natu- born and raised in the places where they lived. Others were legally rally born a slave; throughout the Americas, it was law that turned a imported from West Africa and the Caribbean before the prohibition newborn baby into the property of the mother's owner - even when on slave importation took effect in 1808 or smuggled in afterwards. that person was the baby's father. By the 1830s, abolitionists came to Most came from other slave states, either accompanied by migrating regard this principle as the root of slavery's sexual disorder, arguing owners or sold through the domestic slave trade. An 1857 map of the that it encouraged rape and undermined the slave family (12). United States published in London illustrated not only the "area and The transatlantic take-off of the cotton textile industry also helped extent of the free & slave-holding states" but also distinguished be- to drive slavery's expansion in the southern United States. American tween the slave-exporting and slave-importing regions of the South planters and farmers grew little cotton for sale in the eighteenth cen- (10). The domestic slave trade was mutually profitable for the Upper tury, but they increasingly devoted land and slaves to cotton produc- South and Lower South, but it put tremendous pressure on the fami- tion from the 1790s onward. When cotton prices were high and land lies and communities of enslaved people, who referred to slave traders wrested from the southern Indians became available (as in the late as "soul drivers" (11). i8ios and early 1830s), white southerners' all-in exuberance seemed Two other factors were especially important to the great expan- irrational to some observers, who warned of "Alabama fever" and "cot- sion of slavery in the nineteenth century. First was the "natural re- ton mania." By 1840, southern planters and farmers were producing production" of the enslaved population. The U.S. South was one of more than six hundred million pounds of cotton per year - a major- the few places in the Americas where the slave population increased ity of the world's crop - and most of it was exported to Great Britain, without the continual replenishment of captive Africans through the the world's largest manufacturer of cotton textiles. Cotton alone ac-
OAH Magazine of History »April 2009 25
This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms counted for more than half the value of all U.S. exports in the de- was not contained. As northern society grew and modernized, the cades before the Civil War. Although cotton planters were prone to a task of containment became more urgent and more difficult (15). boom-and-bust economic cycle, vulnerable to weather and worms, and A hiatus in territorial expansion during the Jacksonian era helped often tangled in debt, many nevertheless believed that they enjoyed an to keep the lid on antislavery. No new territories were added to the unassailable position in the world economy. As South Carolina Sena- Union from the acquisition of Florida in 1821 to the annexation of tor James Henry Hammond famously blustered in a 1858 speech, "No, Texas in 1845, which meant that the explosive question of slavery's you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make expansion did not arise. During this period, the United States "filled war upon it. Cotton is king" (13). in" its already-acquired territory through policies that promoted fron- At the same time, though, a "free" tier social and economic development North emerged, too, due to gradual in places where the status of slavery abolition in the original states from was regulated either by the Northwest Pennsylvania to New England and Ordinance (as in the case of Michi- the prohibition on slavery in the gan) or the Missouri Compromise Northwest. Free black people forged (as in the case of Arkansas). The vast their own communities in northern extent of undeveloped land within the cities. They hated slavery with all United States and the expulsion of the their heart and soul, and they won southern Indians eased pressure for over a few of their white neighbors further expansion in the 1820s and to the cause of immediate abolition. 1830s, but national politicians' fear But they also confronted new forms of reprising the Missouri crisis and of racist discrimination dubbed "Jim inflaming sectionalism also helped to Crow" after a stock character in give manifest destiny a short breather the increasingly popular blackface (16). minstrel show. State constitutional The Missouri crisis was crucial reforms stripped free black men of to Jacksonian politics in another way. the right to vote. Black people were As New York's Martin Van Buren rec- subjected to segregation in public ognized, one way to avoid dangerous venues like schools and streetcars sectional conflict over slavery was to and relegated to the bottom of the build a national party around the com- economy. Alexander de Tocqueville mon ideas and interests uniting white observed that "the prejudice of race northern and southern men. Over the appears to be stronger in the States next two decades, both Van Buren's which have abolished slavery, than Democratic Party and its rival, the in those where it still exists; and no- Whigs, battled over a wide range of is- where is it so intolerant as in those sues, most notably the proper role of States where servitude has never the national government in promot- been known." Northern racism was ing capitalist economic development. powerful, but it did not prevent the Democrats favored a minimal role for rise of an organized antislavery the national government, while Whigs movement. Instead, racism shaped favored a more vigorous one. Both par- the northern antislavery movement; ties, however, had to keep antislavery it can be detected in support for the out of the spotlight in order to secure "colonization" (deportation, really) Campaign banner for Free Soil candidates Martin Van Buren and Charles southern support. The "gag rule" used of free blacks in Africa and in the Francis Adams in the 1848 presidential race. Perched atop the "Temple by the House of Representatives to whites-only impulse within the free of Liberty" is an eagle with the motto: "Free Soil - Free Labor - Free stifle debate over antislavery petitions soil argument (14). Speech" an abridged rendering of the party's slogan, "Free Soil, Free La- from 1836 to 1844 epitomized the an- The problem of slavery deeply bor, Free Speech, and Free Men." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, tiabolitionist quarantine of the Jack- LC-USZC2-2465.) divided the northern public. Some sonian era. Yet the fact that Congress northerners, including nascent cotton textile manufacturers and had to impose a gag rule reveals that beneath the surface of Jacksonian merchant capitalists who dealt in slave-grown commodities, had politics lurked a zealous and radical campaign against slavery (17). an immediate economic stake in southern slavery and saw nothing The revival of U.S. territorial expansion in the mid-i84os ushered wrong with it. But most white northerners had a different and more the problem of slavery back to the center of national politics. Tennessee complex attitude toward slavery. If the actual practice seemed remote politician, slaveowner, and dark horse candidate James K. Polk won the and could easily be ignored, they nevertheless reviled "slavery" in the Democratic nomination on an expansionist platform in 1844 and nar- abstract as the worst of all possible human conditions. Evangelicals rowly defeated the Whig candidate Henry Clay in the presidential elec- implored lost souls to wash away the "slavery" of sin. Labor reformers tion. President Polk orchestrated the annexation of Texas in 1845, a war decried "wage slavery." Feminists abhorred the "slavery of sex." Rhe- with Mexico in 1846 -1848, and the extension of the United States to torically, slavery became a ubiquitous sign of oppression. This dogma the Pacific Ocean. Today his presidency might be called a "catastrophic might not lead white northerners to sympathize with black slaves, but success" (18). After Texas annexation added a giant new slave state to neither did it endear them to white southern slaveholders. The Mis- the Union, many northerners were wary that Polk's Mexican war was souri crisis demonstrated what could happen if northern antislavery little more than a land grab for the "slave power." To defuse that idea, an obscure Democratic congressmen from Pennsylvania named Da-
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This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Published during the presidential campaign of 1856, the cartoon was a bitter indictment of the Democratic administration's responsibility for violence and bloodshed in Kansas. In the center stands Democratic incumbent Franklin Pierce, dressed in the buckskins of a "border ruffian," as the proslavery invaders of the Kansas terri- tory from Missouri were known. He has planted his foot on an American flag which is draped over Liberty, who kneels at his feet imploring, "O spare me gentlemen, spare me!!" With a scalp on his belt, Pierce is armed with a rifle, tomahawk, dagger, and pistol. At right, a similarly outfitted Lewis Cass stands licking his lips and scoffing, "Poor little Dear. We wouldnt hurt her for the world, would we Frank? ha! ha! ha!" At the far right, Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas kneels over a slain farmer and holds up the victim's scalp, exclaiming, "Hurrah for our side! Victory! Victory! "We will subdue them yet." On the far left, Democratic candidate James Buchanan and Secretary of State William Marcy kneel over another victim and empty his pockets. Buchanan lifts the man's watch, saying,"T'was your's once but its mine now, "Might makes right, dont it." Pierce responds, "You may bet your life on that, ole Puddinhead," and says to Liberty, "Come Sissy, you go along wid me, I'le take Good care of 'you' (hie) 'over the left.'" In the left background a cottage burns, and the mad widow of a murdered settler stands before the ruffians. Widow: "Come husband let us go to heaven, where our poor Children are." Ruffian, thumbing his nose: "Ho! ho! She thinks I'm her husband, we Scalped the Cus and she like a D--m fool went Crazy on it, and now she wants me to go to heaven with her." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-92023.)
linois. The Free Soil vote declined in 1852 and the Democrats won a vid Wilmot proposed to prohibit slavery in any territory acquired from resounding electoral victory in that year's presidential election. Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House in 1846 and 1847 with Then everything unraveled. Emboldened by his party's success, nearly unanimous northern support from both parties, but southern- ers and their conservative northern allies in the Senate killed it both Douglas introduced a bill in 1854 to organize a large region of the Louisiana cession - eventually Kansas and Nebraska - on the basis of times (19). popular sovereignty. Needing southern support for a transcontinen- Resolving the status of slavery in the Mexican cession turned into tal railroad from Chicago to California, Douglas's bill overturned the a second Missouri crisis. In 1848, a coalition of antislavery northerners time-honored Missouri compromise by enabling territories north of from the Democratic, Whig, and Liberty parties organized the Free Soil party to block slavery's further expansion. They nominated the the 36o 30' line in the Louisiana cession to legalize slavery. A coali- tion of southerners and pro-Douglas northern Democrats passed the former architect of the Democratic Party, Martin Van Buren, as their Kansas-Nebraska bill and threw the country's political system into dis- candidate and won 291,000 votes in the election - about fourteen per- array. Rival proslavery and antislavery groups flocked to Kansas and cent of the popular vote in the North. Defections to Free Soil may have plunged the territory into violence, capped by the notorious murder deprived the Democrats of victory. Instead, the Whig candidate Zacha- of five proslavery settlers by John Brown and his sons at Pottawato- ry Taylor, a hero of the Mexican war and a slaveowner, won the election. mie Creek. Unable to reconcile its northern and southern wings, the He surprised southerners by supporting the admission of California as Whigs practically collapsed; new parties including the Know-Noth- a free state, and then he surprised the country by dying. Ultimately the ings and Republicans rushed into the vacuum. This was the politi- so-called Compromise of 1850 settled the question by admitting Cali- cal context for Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech and Magee's fornia as a free state and allowing the other territories carved out of the equally lurid cartoon (20). Mexican cession to decide on the status of slavery for themselves - a Let us return now to the original question: what was the mean- principle known as "popular sovereignty" championed by the north- west Democrats Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen Douglas of Il- ing of the politically explosive mix of western expansion, slavery, and
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This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Argument of the Chivalry," 1856. Winslow Homer's dramatic portrayal recreates the severe beating of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner by Representative Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina on May 22, 1856. Brooks's actions were prompted by Sumner's public remarks about the "rape" of Kansas (which open this article), directed against his cousin, Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, and against Senator Stephen A. Douglas, delivered in the Senate two days earlier. An enraged Brooks (right), standing over the seated Sumner in the Senate chamber, is about to land a heavy blow of his cane. The unsuspecting Sumner sits writing at his desk. Brooks's fellow South Carolinian Representative Lawrence M. Keitt stands in the center, raising his own cane menacingly to prevent possible intervention by the other legislators present. Clearly no help for Sumner is forthcoming. Above the scene is a quote from Henry Ward Beecher's May 31, 1856 speech at a Sumner rally in New York, where he proclaimed, "The symbol of the North is the pen; the symbol of the South is the bludgeon." (Image courtesy of Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-38851.)
sexual violence in the 1850s articulated by Sumner and illustrated by Representative Preston Brooks stormed onto the floor of the Senate and Magee? The antislavery depiction of the Kansas territory as "virgin beat Sumner senseless. The chickens had come home to roost (22). □ Territory" symbolically erased the original indigenous inhabitants and the history of violence entangled with American expansion and Endnotes instead associated the American West with a pure and idealized free- 1. Congressional Globe, Senate, 34th Congress, ist Session, 530. Available at
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This content downloaded from 173.68.27.139 on Mon, 24 Aug 2020 22:03:03 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 9· These statistics are derived from the Historical Census Browser (2004). 16. D.W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Retrieved October 31, 2008, from the University of Virginia, Geospatial Years of History. Vol. 2: Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven: Yale and Statistical Data Center,
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