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 Free Soil party 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 Slave Power 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 Wilmot Proviso (1846) and anti-slavery coalitions: In the midst of the Mexican War (see below), a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, 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 Abraham Lincoln 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.