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Slave Power

The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power held by American slaveowners in the federal government of the United States during the Antebellum period.[1] Antislavery campaigners charged that this small group of wealthy slaveholders had seized political control of their states and were trying to take over the federal government illegitimately to expand and protect slavery. The claim was later used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery.

The term was popularized by antislavery writers including Frederick Douglass, John Gorham Palfrey, Josiah Quincy III, Horace Bushnell, James Shepherd Pike, and Horace Greeley. Politicians who emphasized the theme included John Quincy Adams, Henry Wilson and William Pitt Fessenden.

Southern power[edit]

Southern power was derived from a combination of factors. The "three-fifths clause" (counting 100 slaves as 60 people for seats in the House and thus for electoral votes) gave the South disproportionate representation at the national level.[4]


Parity in the Senate was critical, whereby a new slave state was admitted in tandem with a new free state. Regional unity across party lines was essential for key votes. In the Democratic party, a presidential candidate had to carry the national convention by a two-thirds vote to get nominated. It was also essential for some Northerners—"Doughfaces"[5]—to collaborate with the South, as in the debates surrounding the three-fifths clause itself in 1787, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the gag rule in the House (1836–1844), and the wider subject of the Wilmot Proviso and slavery expansion in the Southwest after the Mexican war of 1846–1848.[6] However, the North was adding population—and House seats—much faster than the South. With the Republicans gaining every year, the secession option became more and more attractive to the South. Secession was suicidal, as some leaders realized, and as John Quincy Adams had long prophesied. Secession, argued James Henry Hammond of South Carolina, reminded him of "the Japanese who when insulted rip open their own bowels." And yet when secession came in 1860 Hammond followed. Historian Leonard Richards concludes, "It was men like Hammond who finally destroyed the Slave Power. Thanks to their leading the South out of the Union, seventy-two years of slaveholder domination came to an end."[7]

Threat to republicanism[edit]

From the point of view of many Northerners, the supposedly definitive Compromise of 1850 was followed by a series of maneuvers (such as the Kansas–Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, etc.) in which the North gave up previously agreed gains without receiving anything in return, accompanied by ever-escalating and more extreme Southern demands. Many northerners who had no particular concern for blacks concluded that slavery was not worth preserving if its protection required destroying or seriously compromising democracy among whites. Such perceptions led to the Anti-Nebraska movement of 1854–1855, followed by the organized Republican Party.

Opponents[edit]

Historian Frederick J. Blue (2006) explores the motives and actions of those who played supportive but not central roles in antislavery politics—those who undertook the humdrum work of organizing local parties, holding conventions, editing newspapers, and generally animating and agitating the discussion of issues related to slavery. They were a small but critical number of voices who, beginning in the late 1830s, battled the institution of slavery through political activism. In the face of great odds and powerful opposition, activists insisted that emancipation and racial equality could only be achieved through the political process. Representative activists include: Alvan Stewart, a Liberty party organizer from New York; John Greenleaf Whittier, a Massachusetts poet, journalist, and Liberty activist; Charles Henry Langston, an Ohio African-American educator; Owen Lovejoy, a congressman from Illinois, whose brother Elijah was killed by a pro-slavery mob; Sherman Booth, a journalist and Liberty organizer in Wisconsin; Jane Grey Swisshelm, a journalist in Pennsylvania and Minnesota; George W. Julian, a congressman from Indiana; David Wilmot, a congressman from Pennsylvania, whose Wilmot proviso tried to stop the expansion of slavery in the Southwest; Benjamin Wade and Edward Wade, a senator and a congressman, respectively, from Ohio; and Jessie Benton Frémont of Missouri and California, wife of the Republican 1856 presidential nominee John C. Frémont.[8]

Impact of Democratic Free Soilers[edit]

The Democrats who rallied to Martin Van Buren's Free Soil Party in 1848 have been studied by Earle (2003). Their views on race occupied a wide spectrum, but they were able to fashion new and vital arguments against slavery and its expansion based on the Jacksonian Democracy's long-standing commitment to egalitarianism and hostility to centralized power. Linking their antislavery stance to a land-reform agenda that pressed for free land for poor settlers—realized by the Homestead Law of 1862—in addition to land free of slavery, Free Soil Democrats forced major political realignments in New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Ohio. Democratic politicians such as Wilmot, Marcus Morton, John Parker Hale, and even former president Van Buren were transformed into antislavery leaders. Many entered the new Republican party after 1854, bringing along Jacksonian ideas about property and political equality, helping transform antislavery from a struggling crusade into a mass political movement that came to power in 1860.[9]

All of Mexico Movement

Golden Circle (proposed country)

Ostend Manifesto

Slavery in the United States

Slavocracy

Walker affair

Ashworth, John. "Free Labor, Wage Labor, and Slave Power: Republicanism and the Republican Party in the 1850s," in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880, edited by S. M. Stokes and S. Conway (1996), 128–146.

Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in . Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press (1989), esp. pp. 39–47.

Jubilee

Blue, Frederick J. No Taint Of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (2004).

Boucher, Chauncey S. "In Re That Aggressive Slavocracy," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 8#1 (June–September, 1921), pp. 13–79 ; says slave owners were not united.

in JSTOR

Brooks, Corey M. Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics (University of Chicago Press, 2016). 302 pp.

Craven, Avery. "Coming of the War Between the States: An Interpretation," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1936), pp. 303–322; pro-South; rejects notion of Slave Power

in JSTOR

Davis, David Brion. The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1969).

Earle, Jonathan. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (2004).

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970), esp. pp. 73–102 Archived 2012-07-28 at the Wayback Machine

online

Gara, Larry. "Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction" Civil War History vol. 15 (1969), pp. 5–18.

Gerteis, Louis S. "The Slave Power and its Enemies," Reviews in American History, Sept. 1988, 16#3 pp. 390–95.

Gienapp, William E. "The Republican Party and the Slave Power," in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (1986), pp. 51–78.

Landis, Michael Todd. "'A Champion Had Come': William Pitt Fessenden and the Republican Party, 1854–60," American Nineteenth Century History, Sept. 2008, 9#3 pp. 269–285.

McInerney, Daniel J. "'A State of Commerce': Market Power and Slave Power in Abolitionist Political Economy," Civil War History 1991 37(2): 101–19.

Nye, Russel B. "'The Slave Power Conspiracy': 1830–1860," Science & Society Summer 1946 10(3): 262-274

in JSTOR

Richards, Leonard L. Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (2000).

Tewell, Jeremy J. A Self-Evident Lie: Southern Slavery and the Threat to American Freedom (Kent State University Press; 2012) 160 pages.