History of the United States - Section 7 19th Century - Origins of the Civil War (Part 7 - continued) Early Republic At the time of the American Revolution, the institution of slavery was firmly established in the American colonies. It was most important in the six southern states from Maryland to Georgia, but the total of a half million slaves were spread out through all of the colonies. In the South 40% of the population was made up of slaves, and as Americans moved into Kentucky and the rest of the southwest fully one-sixth of the settlers were slaves. By the end of the war, the New England states provided most of the American ships that were used in the foreign slave trade while most of their customers were in Georgia and the Carolinas. During this time many Americans found it difficult to reconcile slavery with their interpretation of Christianity and the lofty sentiments that flowed from the Declaration of Independence. A small antislavery movement, led by the Quakers, had some impact in the 1780s and by the late 1780s all of the states except for Georgia had placed some restrictions on their participation in slave trafficking. Still, no serious national political movement against slavery developed, largely due to the overriding concern over achieving national unity. When the Constitutional Convention met, slavery was the one issue that left the least possibility of compromise, the one that would most pit morality against pragmatism. In the end, while many would take comfort in the fact that the word slavery never occurs in the Constitution, critics note that the three-fifths clause provided slaveholders with extra representatives in Congress, the requirement of the federal government to suppress domestic violence would dedicate national resources to defending against slave revolts, a twenty-year delay in banning the import of slaves allowed the South to fortify its labor needs, and the amendment process made the national abolition of slavery very unlikely in the foreseeable future. With the outlawing of the African slave trade on January 1, 1808, many Americans felt that the slavery issue was resolved. Any national discussion that might have continued over slavery was drowned out by the years of trade embargoes, maritime competition with Great Britain and France, and, finally, the War of 1812. The one exception to this quiet regarding slavery was the New Englanders association of their frustration with the war with their resentment of the three-fifths clause that seemed to allow the South to dominate national politics. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the northern states (north of the Mason-Dixon Line separating Pennsylvania and Maryland) abolished slavery by 1804. In the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, Congress (still under the Articles of Confederation) barred slavery from the Mid-Western territory north of the Ohio River, but when the U.S. Congress organized the southern territories acquired through the Louisiana Purchase, the ban on slavery was omitted. Missouri Compromise In 1819 Congressman James Tallmadge, Jr. of New York initiated an uproar in the South when he proposed two amendments to a bill admitting Missouri to the Union as a free state. The first barred slaves from being moved to Missouri, and the second would free all Missouri slaves born after admission to the Union at age 25. With the admission of Alabama as a slave state in 1819, the U.S. was equally divided with 11 slave states and 11 free states. The admission of the new state of Missouri as a slave state would give the slave states a majority in the Senate; the Tallmadge Amendment would give the free states a majority. The Tallmadge amendments passed the House of Representatives but failed in the Senate when five Northern Senators voted with all the Southern senators. The question was now the admission of Missouri as a slave state, and many leaders shared Thomas Jeffersons fear of a crisis over slavery—a fear that Jefferson described as a fire bell in the night. The crisis was solved by the Compromise of 1820, which admitted Maine to the Union as a free state at the same time that Missouri was admitted as a slave state. The Compromise also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory north and west of the state of Missouri along the line of 36–30. The Missouri Compromise quieted the issue until its limitations on slavery were repealed by the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854. In the South, the Missouri crisis reawakened old fears that a strong federal government could be a fatal threat to slavery. The Jeffersonian coalition that united southern planters and northern farmers, mechanics and artisans in opposition to the threat presented by the Federalist Party had started to dissolve after the War of 1812. It was not until the Missouri crisis that Americans became aware of the political possibilities of a sectional attack on slavery, and it was not until the mass politics of the Jackson Administration that this type of organization around this issue became practical. Nullification Crisis The American System, advocated by Henry Clay in Congress and supported by many nationalist supporters of the War of 1812 such as John C. Calhoun, was a program for rapid economic modernization featuring protective tariffs, internal improvements at Federal expense, and a national bank. The purpose was to develop American industry and international commerce. Since iron, coal, and water power were mainly in the North, this tax plan was doomed to cause rancor in the South where economies were agriculture-based. Southerners claimed it demonstrated favoritism toward the North. The nation suffered an economic downturn throughout the 1820s, and South Carolina was particularly affected. The highly protective Tariff of 1828 (called the Tariff of Abominations by its detractors), designed to protect American industry by taxing imported manufactured goods, was enacted into law during the last year of the presidency of John Quincy Adams. Opposed in the South and parts of New England, the expectation of the tariff’s opponents was that with the election of Andrew Jackson the tariff would be significantly reduced. By 1828 South Carolina state politics increasingly organized around the tariff issue. When the Jackson administration failed to take any actions to address their concerns, the most radical faction in the state began to advocate that the state declare the tariff null and void within South Carolina. In Washington, an open split on the issue occurred between Jackson and his vice-president John C. Calhoun, the most effective proponent of the constitutional theory of state nullification through his 1828 South Carolina Exposition and Protest. Congress enacted a new tariff in 1832, but it offered the state little relief, resulting in the most dangerous sectional crisis since the Union was formed. Some militant South Carolinians even hinted at withdrawing from the Union in response. The newly elected South Carolina legislature then quickly called for the election of delegates to a state convention. Once assembled, the convention voted to declare null and void the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 within the state. President Andrew Jackson responded firmly, declaring nullification an act of treason. He then took steps to strengthen federal forts in the state. Violence seemed a real possibility early in 1833 as Jacksonians in Congress introduced a Force Bill authorizing the President to use the Federal army and navy in order to enforce acts of Congress. No other state had come forward to support South Carolina, and the state itself was divided on willingness to continue the showdown with the Federal government. The crisis ended when Clay and Calhoun worked to devise a compromise tariff. Both sides later claimed victory. Calhoun and his supporters in South Carolina claimed a victory for nullification, insisting that it had forced the revision of the tariff. Jacksons followers, however, saw the episode as a demonstration that no single state could assert its rights by independent action. Calhoun, in turn, devoted his efforts to building up a sense of Southern solidarity so that when another standoff should come, the whole section might be prepared to act as a bloc in resisting the federal government. As early as 1830, in the midst of the crisis, Calhoun identified the right to own slaves as the chief southern minority right being threatened: I consider the tariff act as the occasion, rather than the real cause of the present unhappy state of things. The truth can no longer be disguised, that the peculiar domestick [sic] institution of the Southern States and the consequent direction which that and her soil have given to her industry, has placed them in regard to taxation and appropriations in opposite relation to the majority of the Union, against the danger of which, if there be no protective power in the reserved rights of the states they must in the end be forced to rebel, or, submit to have their paramount interests sacrificed, their domestic institutions subordinated by Colonization and other schemes, and themselves and children reduced to wretchedness. On May 1, 1833, Jackson wrote of this idea, the tariff was only the pretext, and disunion and southern confederacy the real object. The next pretext will be the negro, or slavery question. The issue appeared again after 1842s Black Tariff. A period of relative free trade after 1846s Walker Tariff which had been largely written by Southerners. Northern industrialists (and some in western Virginia) complained it was too low to encourage the growth of industry. Gag Rule debates From 1831 to 1836 William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) initiated a campaign to petition Congress in favor of ending slavery in the District of Columbia and all federal territories. Hundreds of thousands of petitions were sent with the number reaching a peak in 1835. The House passed the Pinckney Resolutions on May 26, 1836. The first of these resolutions stated that Congress had no constitutional authority to interfere with slavery in the states and the second that it ought not do so in the District of Columbia. The third resolution, known from the beginning as the gag rule, provided that: All petitions, memorials, resolutions, propositions, or papers, relating in any way, or to any extent whatsoever, to the subject of slavery or the abolition of slavery, shall, without being either printed or referred, be laid on the table and that no further action whatever shall be had thereon. The first two resolutions passed by votes of 182 to 9 and 132 to 45. The gag rule, supported by Northern and Southern Democrats as well as some Southern Whigs, was passed with a vote of 117 to 68. Former President John Quincy Adams, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 1830, became an early and central figure in the opposition to the gag rules. He argued that they were a direct violation of the First Amendment right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. A majority of Northern Whigs joined the opposition. Rather than suppress anti-slavery petitions, however, the gag rules only served to offend Americans from Northern states, and dramatically increase the number of petitions. Since the original gag was a resolution, not a standing House Rule, it had to be renewed every session and the Adams faction often gained the floor before the gag could be imposed. However in January 1840, the House of Representatives passed the Twenty-first Rule, which prohibited even the reception of anti-slavery petitions and was a standing House rule. Now the pro-petition forces focused on trying to revoke a standing rule. The Rule raised serious doubts about its constitutionality and had less support than the original Pinckney gag, passing only by 114 to 108. Throughout the gag period, Adams superior talent in using and abusing parliamentary rules and skill in baiting his enemies into making mistakes, enabled him to evade the rule and debate the slavery issues. The gag rule was finally rescinded on December 3, 1844, by a strongly sectional vote of 108 to 80, all the Northern and four Southern Whigs voting for repeal, along with 55 of the 71 Northern Democrats. Antebellum South and the Union There had been a continuing contest between the states and the national government over the power of the latter—and over the loyalty of the citizenry—almost since the founding of the republic. The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798, for example, had defied the Alien and Sedition Acts, and at the Hartford Convention, New England voiced its opposition to President James Madison and the War of 1812, and discussed secession from the Union. Southern culture Although a minority of free Southerners owned slaves (and, in turn, a minority of similar proportion within these slaveholders who owned the vast majority of slaves), Southerners of all classes nevertheless defended the institution of slavery – threatened by the rise of free labor abolitionist movements in the Northern states– as the cornerstone of their social order. Based on a system of plantation slavery, the social structure of the South was far more stratified and patriarchal than that of the North. In 1850 there were around 350,000 slaveholders in a total free Southern population of about six million. Among slaveholders, the concentration of slave ownership was unevenly distributed. Perhaps around 7 percent of slaveholders owned roughly three-quarters of the slave population. The largest slaveholders, generally owners of large plantations, represented the top stratum of Southern society. They benefited from economies of scale and needed large numbers of slaves on big plantations to produce cotton, a highly profitable labor-intensive crop. In the 1850s as large plantation owners outcompeted smaller farmers, more slaves were owned by fewer planters. Yet, poor whites and small farmers generally accepted the political leadership of the planter elite. Several factors helped explain why slavery was not under serious threat of internal collapse from any moves for democratic change initiated from the South. First, given the opening of new territories in the West for white settlement, many non-slaveowners also perceived a possibility that they, too, might own slaves at some point in their life. Second, small free farmers in the South often embraced racism, making them unlikely agents for internal democratic reforms in the South. The principle of white supremacy, accepted by almost all white southerners of all classes, made slavery seem legitimate, natural, and essential for a civilized society. White racism in the South was sustained by official systems of repression such as the slave codes and elaborate codes of speech, behavior, and social practices illustrating the subordination of blacks to whites. For example, the slave patrols were among the institutions bringing together southern whites of all classes in support of the prevailing economic and racial order. Serving as slave patrollers and overseers offered white southerners positions of power and honor. These positions gave even poor white southerners the authority to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any slave traveling outside his or her plantation. Slave patrollers and overseers also won prestige in their communities. Policing and punishing blacks who transgressed the regimentation of slave society was a valued community service in the South, where the fear of free blacks threatening law and order figured heavily in the public discourse of the period. Third, many small farmers with a few slaves and yeomen were linked to elite planters through the market economy. In many areas, small farmers depended on local planter elites for vital goods and services including (but not limited to) access to cotton gins, access to markets, access to feed and livestock, and even for loans (since the banking system was not well developed in the antebellum South). Southern tradesmen often depended on the richest planters for steady work. Such dependency effectively deterred many white non-slaveholders from engaging in any political activity that was not in the interest of the large slaveholders. Furthermore, whites of varying social class, including poor whites and plain folk who worked outside or in the periphery of the market economy (and therefore lacked any real economic interest in the defense of slavery) might nonetheless be linked to elite planters through extensive kinship networks. Since inheritance in the South was often unequitable (and generally favored eldest sons), it was not uncommon for a poor white person to be perhaps the first cousin of the richest plantation owner of his county and to share the same militant support of slavery as his richer relatives. Finally, there was no secret ballot at the time anywhere in the United States – this innovation did not become widespread in the U.S. until the 1880s. For a typical white Southerner, this meant that so much as casting a ballot against the wishes of the establishment meant running the risk of social ostracization. Thus, by the 1850s, Southern slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike felt increasingly encircled psychologically and politically in the national political arena because of the rise of free soilism and abolitionism in the Northern states. Increasingly dependent on the North for manufactured goods, for commercial services, and for loans, and increasingly cut off from the flourishing agricultural regions of the Northwest, they faced the prospects of a growing free labor and abolitionist movement in the North. Militant defense of slavery With the outcry over developments in Kansas strong in the North, defenders of slavery— increasingly committed to a way of life that abolitionists and their sympathizers considered obsolete or immoral— articulated a militant pro-slavery ideology that would lay the groundwork for secession upon the election of a Republican president. Southerners waged a vitriolic response to political change in the North. Slaveholding interests sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse hostile and ruinous legislation. Behind this shift was the growth of the cotton textile industry in the North and in Europe, which left slavery more important than ever to the Southern economy. Literature Reactions to the popularity of Uncle Toms Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (whom Abraham Lincoln reputedly called the little woman that started this great war) and the growth of the abolitionist movement (pronounced after the founding of The Liberator in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison) inspired an elaborate intellectual defense of slavery. Increasingly vocal (and sometimes violent) abolitionist movements, culminating in John Browns raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859 were viewed as a serious threat, and—in the minds of many Southerners—abolitionists were attempting to foment violent slave revolts as seen in Haiti in the 1790s and as attempted by Nat Turner in 1831, some three decades earlier. After J. D. B. DeBow of New Orleans established De Bows Review in 1846, it grew to become the leading Southern magazine, warning the planter class about the dangers of depending on the North economically. De Bows Review also emerged as the leading voice for secession. The magazine emphasized the Souths economic inequality, relating it to the concentration of manufacturing, shipping, banking and international trade in the North. Searching for Biblical passages endorsing slavery and forming economic, sociological, historical and scientific arguments, slavery went from being a necessary evil to a positive good. Dr. John H. Van Evries book Negroes and Negro slavery: The First an Inferior Race: The Latter Its Normal Condition– setting out the arguments the title would suggest– was an attempt to apply scientific support to the Southern arguments in favor of race based slavery. Latent sectional divisions suddenly activated derogatory sectional imagery which emerged into sectional ideologies. As industrial capitalism gained momentum in the North, Southern writers emphasized whatever aristocratic traits they valued (but often did not practice) in their own society: courtesy, grace, chivalry, the slow pace of life, orderly life and leisure. This supported their argument that slavery provided a more humane society than industrial labor. In his Cannibals All!, George Fitzhugh argued that the antagonism between labor and capital in a free society would result in robber barons and pauper slavery, while in a slave society such antagonisms were avoided. He advocated enslaving Northern factory workers, for their own benefit. Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, denounced such Southern insinuations that Northern wage earners were fatally fixed in that condition for life. To Free Soilers, the stereotype of the South was one of a diametrically opposite, static society in which the slave system maintained an entrenched anti-democratic aristocracy. COMING UP - Southern fears of modernization Picture 1 - President Andrew Jackson viewed South Carolinas attempts to nullify the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 as being tantamount to treason. The issue of states rights would play a large role leading up to the Civil War near to 30 years later. Picture 2 - Violent repression of slaves was a common theme in abolitionist literature in the North. Above, this famous 1863 photo of a Gordon, deeply scarred from whipping by an overseer was distributed by abolitionists to illustrate what they saw as the barbarism of Southern society.
Posted on: Sat, 30 Aug 2014 13:33:59 +0000
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