Struggle for a vast future

The Slave Power writ large

When the United States went to war with Mexico in 1846, antislavery supporters immediately suspected the hand of the Slave Power lay behind the conflict. For years they had warned of the growing menace of the slaveholding Democracy. During the 1830s white abolitionists had flooded the South with antislavery tracts, but planters met this problem by having the postmaster-general, with the blessing of slaveholding President Andrew Jackson, refuse to deliver this mail. Protests lodged in Congress went nowhere. Beginning in 1836, the Congress instituted a gag rule on abolition petitions that automatically tabled them without a hearing. War with Mexico, which acquired territory predominantly below the Missouri Compromise line, seemed just another step toward protecting the political power of the slaveocracy.

The war that broke out in 1846 attracted more than abolitionists to this interpretation.To some northern Whigs, and even some Democrats, it appeared that the conflict had begun through an unjust pretext by a slaveholding, Democratic president. In 1847, Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois issued his Spot Resolutions, demanding that President James K. Polk prove that the first shot of the Mexican War had been fired on US soil. The skirmish between US and Mexican forces had occurred on disputed territory. It was possible to think that US forces had instigated the first shots, thus bearing culpability for the war. Opponents believed that Polk wanted the additional land to create more room for the slave empire - a point underscored when he vigorously pursued the Mexican lands but gave in to a compromise over the border with the British over the Oregon territory. Lincoln was joined in his suspicions by abolitionists, free soilers, and northern Democrats who had tired of bowing to the southern oligarchy.

Consequently, the country emerged from the Mexican War as a greater power with its current territorial posture on the North American continent, yet this new might came at the price of internal divisions that could have torn the nation apart. A crisis was delayed only through strenuous legislative efforts that resulted in the Compromise of 1850. The components of this agreement, however, contained the seeds of bitter fruit that would feed the perceptions that a slaveocracy existed that was intent on spreading slavery everywhere.

The key provision for discontent involved the enhanced federal posture to enforce the capture and return of fugitive slaves. The Constitution of 1787 gave the federal government the power to return laborers who fled from a variety of work arrangements, including indenture, apprenticeship, and slavery. As early as 1793, the Congress enacted a Fugitive Slave Act, but resistance was relatively easy.The Compromise of 1850 changed this, but in the process it brought to communities in the North the visible hand of the Slave Power. The new laws established federal commissioners to hear cases, instead of the state courts that had supervised these laws. And the new system hardly provided fair justice. Slaveowners could testify and bring witnesses, but the African American defendants could not. The commissioners who heard the cases received double the pay if defendants were found guilty. White citizens could be imprisoned and fined if they obstructed capture or refused to help when deputized. Although the controversy during the 1850s concerned the expansion of slavery in the territories, the fugitive slave laws brought the sectional crisis to a personal level for residents of states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, the natural escape routes for the enslaved. To people along the border of freedom, it appeared that the slaveholders' democracy - one that threw out the usual forms of justice - had impinged on the freedom of white people.