Existing comment:
Westward Expansion fueled the battle over slavery. During the 1840s, the country grew by two-thirds with the annexation of Texas, the seizure of much of what had been Mexican territory, including California, and the determination of the Oregon boundary. As Americans moved west to these new territories, would slavery be permitted or excluded?
Southern leaders demanded slavery's extension. Opening these territories to slavery, a Georgia newspaper editor determined, would "secure to the South the balance of power... for all coming time [and] give to her the control in the operations of the Government." Most white Northerners did not object to slavery where it existed in the South, but they agreed with Connecticut congressman Gideon Welles who opposed slavery's expansion. "The time has come," thundered Welles, "when the Northern democracy should make a stand... [We must] satisfy the northern people... that we are not to extend the institution of slavery..."
Agreement seemed improbably. Could compromise conquer contempt?
The Kansas Free State battery, Topeka, 1856:
Civil War erupted in Kansas five years before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. In an experiment entitled "popular sovereignty," adopted by Congress in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, settlers residing in a new territory could determine for themselves whether to adopt or exclude slavery in their state constitution. The experiment disintegrated into bloody butchery in Kansas as antislavery and proslavery forces attempted to influence the final outcome.
Southerners denounced this 1856 antislavery political propaganda. "There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery," opined Senator Robert MT Hunter of Virginia. Northerners championed these statistics of proof of free labor's superiority to slave labor. Slavery was the foe "to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community," claimed Massachusetts abolitionist clergymen Theodore Parker.
John Brown, 1856:
Fiery abolitionist John Brown, believing God had called upon him to destroy slavery, attacked the United States armory and arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia to obtain weapons for his war. Brown's raid failed, but in his subsequent trial and execution, he became an antislavery martyr. Southerners vilified Brown. "So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of Union! All such foes of the human race!" shouted Virginian JTL Preston at Brown's hanging.
I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.
-- Brown's final note, handed to his jailer, December 2, 1859
In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon, thank God.
-- William Lloyd Garrison
Abolitionists -- a small but vocal minority -- were the South's greatest enemy. They believed slave owners were sinners and that slavery was a violation of human rights. For 30 years, abolitionists had blasted slavery and the South through newspapers, prayer meetings, political rallies, and literature.
Most white Northerners did not oppose slavery where it existed in the South, but slowly opinion changed. When Harriet Beecher Stowe's gripping novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in 1852, it sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and became the most popular antislavery publication.
Although white Northerners began to oppose the institution of slavery on moral grounds, few embraced equal rights for blacks. |