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Slavery and National Expansion in the United States Author(S): Adam Rothman Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol

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Slavery and National Expansion in the United States Author(S): Adam Rothman Source: OAH Magazine of History , Apr., 2009, Vol 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 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40505984?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Oxford University Press and Organization of American Historians are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to OAH Magazine of History 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.
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