Slave Power
[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.
Those who differed on many other issues (such as viewing blacks as inferior to whites or as being equal, or denouncing slavery as a sin or promising to guarantee its protection in the Deep South) could unite to attack the slavocracy.
Worse, said the Republicans, the Slave Power, deeply entrenched in the South, was systematically seizing control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[9] In his celebrated "House Divided" speech of June 1858, Abraham Lincoln charged that Senator Stephen A. Douglas, President James Buchanan, his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney were all part of a plot to nationalize slavery, as allegedly proven by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857.
[10] Other Republicans pointed to the violence in Kansas, the brutal assault on Senator Sumner, attacks upon the abolitionist press, and efforts to take over Cuba (Ostend Manifesto) as evidence that the Slave Power was violent, aggressive, and expansive.
Their Southern colleagues spoke of secession, arguing that the John Brown raid of 1859 proved that the Republicans were ready to attack their region and destroy their way of life.
Her poems suggested that Northerners who conciliated the Slave Power were spreading their own sterility, while virile men voting Republican were reproducing, through their own redemption, a future free West.
The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision—all triumphs of the slave power—did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also Southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789.
We ought to take this into account when we blame foreign nations for not accepting at once the United States as an antislavery power, bent on the destruction of slavery, as soon as our civil war broke out.
