Sectional Challenges and Congressional Challenges to Slavery

¶ … Nation Divided

Sectional and Constitutional Issues Surrounding the Institution of Slavery in Nineteenth Century America

As the Nineteenth Century dawned, the institution of slavery appeared to be on its way out in the new United States. Independence from Great Britain had removed many of the incentives for growing the cash crops upon which the Southern States had depended. Without the lucrative bounties on rice and indigo, these were no longer worth the expense of producing on a large scale. Tobacco remained a major export, but even so it was insufficient to sustain the entire Southern economy. Luckily, technology came to the rescue. Eli Whitney developed the cotton gin - a machine designed to remove the seeds from cotton bolls. Until the advent of this invention, the harvesting of cotton had been a laborious, time-consuming, and extremely labor intensive business. It was not even worth the labor of the slaves that worked the tobacco, rice, and indigo plantations. However, with the help of Eli Whitney's machine, slaves could provide the manpower to turn the cotton gins, and cotton - a crop which grew well in the South - could be raised on a vast scale. And as this was also the time when England was industrializing, and mechanized cotton mills were springing up everywhere in Manchester and is environs, there was an astronomical increase in the demand for raw cotton. But cotton, was a difficult master. The crop required its harvesters to toil under a blistering sun - hard work that scarcely attracted free labor. Yet, the burgeoning cotton plantation demanded more and more hands to work them. There remained only one answer to this labor shortage - import more slaves.

Nonetheless, this was not as easy as it sounded. At the end of the Eighteenth Century a change in the moral climate, coupled with the decline in the old plantation crops led to a growing anti-slavery movement. This movement was especially strong in the Northern States. By 1800, several states had already outlawed slavery and, by the second third of the Nineteenth Century America's "peculiar institution" had all but disappeared north of the Mason-Dixon Line. The constitution forbade the importation of slaves after 1808 - ironically just the point in time when cotton began to establish itself as the major cash crop. While some amount of smuggling continued, on the whole, masters concentrated on "breeding" as many slaves as possible. The enormous success of "King Cotton" seemed to mark the beginning of a whole new empire of slavery. As the cotton quickly depleted the resources of the soil, plantation owners moved eagerly into the new Western lands. Here they had not only the room to grow more cotton, but also a whole new horizon for the expansion of slavery. Unfortunately, their dreams of an America filled sea to sea with gangs of sweating slaves toiling under the lash ran into conflict with the tenets of the anti-slavery movement. Abolitionists, still mostly Northerners - demanded a halt to the spread of slavery. They would have outlawed the institution altogether were it not for the constitutional provision allowing it to exist, and mandating that the slave be counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. However, or so they believed, they could prevent its spread into the new Western territories.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 marked the beginning of an uneasy peace between the pro- and anti-slavery forces. By prohibiting - with the exception of Missouri itself - the creation of Slave States north of 36°30'N latitude it maintained a precarious balance between South and North. Henceforth, the admission of new states into the Union would be conducted with an eye toward maintaining a balance between the number of Slave and Free States. The United States would be a nation divided - half-slave and half-free. Yet despite these "obstacles," slavery continued to expand, and the Abolitionist Movement grew apace. Cotton was as land-hungry as ever, and it wasn't long before the supporters of freedom, and the supporters of slavery came to blows for a second time. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise. Though both territories lay to the north of the dividing line between slavery and freedom, the overwhelmingly Southern origin of the settlers in Kansas, combined with pressure from the existing Southern States resulted in Kansas' admission to the union as a Slave State and Nebraska as a Free State. Another blow was leveled against the Abolitionists only a few years later, when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Dred Scott Case. Upholding the principles of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the 1857 decision confirmed Dred Scott's status as a slave, despite his having fled to a Free State. The decision also underscored the Free States' responsibility to return fugitive slaves as stipulated under the Fugitive Slave Act. Southerners saw the Supreme Court's ruling as a vindication of both their economic system, and of the doctrine of State's Rights which declared that States should have the freedom to manage the bulk of their own affairs free from federal interference.