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.42 For the time being, says Roger L.Ransom of the Compromise,  thedeal that had worked in 1787 had worked again in 1820. 43Moreover, the second-party system institutionalized arrangementsfor sectional compromise with a series of measures that gave the Southprotection from the voting majorities of the nonslave North.The strat-egy of balancing the admission of new slave states with new free states,and thus  balancing representation in the Senate, was complementedby the nomination of  balanced tickets for president and vice presi-dent by the intersectional parties, thus assuring veto power to the slavestates.44 The Democratic Party went further, with a rule that guaran-teed substantial representation to the South at their national conven-tion, and a further rule that required a two-thirds vote of theconvention for the nomination of their presidential candidate,45arrangements that persisted well into the twentieth century.Sectional conflict flared again in 1846 1847 over the annexation ofTexas and the Mexican War, through which the United States acquiredsome 650,000 square miles of new territory.46 Northerners were out-raged over the tactics the Tyler administration had employed to pryTexas away from Mexico and open it to American slave-grown cotton.47They responded with the Wilmot Proviso, an amendment banningAfrican Americans (slave or free) from any territory acquired fromMexico.The amendment failed, but it signaled the growing oppositionof the North to the southern thrust for expansion and political power.A new compromise was struck in 1850, under the leadership ofHenry Clay who decried the  intemperance of party spirit, which heattributed to the desire of northern representatives to woo  a small66 | CHAPTER 4party called Abolitionists. 48 In the new pact, California was admitted asa free state, while other territories would be organized without mentionof slavery, slaveholders would be better protected with a new fugitiveslave act, and there would be no slave trade in Washington, D.C.49  Tothe militants of the South, as of the North, the Compromise of 1850was surrender. 50 Neither section was satisfied by the resolution of theconflict over the Mexican territories.Foner quotes an Indiana con-gressman addressing southern representatives on the question:  It is notroom that you are anxious to obtain, but power political power. 51Still, given the enormous costs of dissolution of the Union, whywasn t continuing compromise, although difficult and conflict laden, nev-ertheless possible? After all, most northerners were not opposed to slav-ery in the South, and neither were powerful northern interests.True, asthe sectional conflict escalated, the South came to be excoriated by north-ern politicians as the  slave power, but few northerners were preoccu-pied with slavery.The issues that divided the sections, and made sectionalpower in the national government so important high tariffs, a central-ized banking system, internal improvements, free land in the west weresusceptible to compromise, as Eric Foner and others have pointed out.52Indeed, the history of the Union up to the mid-nineteenth century wasa history of more-or-less successful sectional accommodation.Barrington Moore thinks that the expansion of western commercialfarming, which was increasingly tied to the North by its trade relations,is a possible explanation for the growing sectional rift.Moreover, thesefamily farmers feared competition from slavery, just as the South fearedindependent farming as a threat to their agricultural system.Egnalmakes a similar argument, pointing to the growth of the Great Lakeseconomy and its demand for internal improvements as the root causeof the quarrel.53 Moore points out that plantation interests in the Senatekilled the Homestead Bill of 1852, for example.54 However, Moore ulti-mately considers this conflict to have been negotiable, and posits insteadas the explanation for civil war the  incompatibilities between two dif-ferent kinds of civilizations.Labor-repressive agricultural systems,and plantation slavery in particular, are political obstacles to a particu-lar kind of capitalism, at a specific historical stage: competitive democ-ratic capitalism we must call it for lack of a more precise term. 55DISSENSUS POLITICS | 67But this explanation is not only unsatisfying for its generality, but italso fails to take account of the subsequent accommodation betweenthe sections.After the interruptions of the Civil War and a short-livedReconstruction, a new sectional compromise was struck that allowedthe South to restore its feudal labor system.That compromise lasteduntil well into the twentieth century.What made sectional agreementimpossible in the mid-nineteenth century was the strident and disrup-tive abolitionist campaign with its demand for immediate emancipa-tion.Abolitionism fractured the institutional arrangements that hadundergirded the sectional accord.The Roots of AbolitionismAs is characteristic of great social movements, abolitionism representedthe convergence of different forms of defiance among different groups.Zinn writes of  that mixed crew of editors, orators, run-away slaves,free Negro militants, and gun-toting preachers known as the abolition-ists. 56 The interaction of these different groups shaped the course ofthe movement and contributed to its disruptive power.The polarizingeffects of disruption, in turn, fractured the intersectional parties and ledto civil war and legal emancipation, the ultimate achievement of themovement.Only when an infuriated South was driven out of the sec-tional compromise did emancipation become possible.Abolitionism had multiple and intertwined roots.One set of rootsdeveloped in the postrevolutionary period, sparked by the egalitarianideology of the era, and nourished by the Protestant dissenting faiths.The Quakers were originally especially important.57  It would be diffi-cult to exaggerate, writes David Brion Davis,  the central role Quakersplayed in initiating and sustaining the first antislavery movements. Asearly as 1774, the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting authorized the expulsionof anyone for buying or transferring slave property, or for serving asexecutors of estates involving slaves, or for failing to manumit slaves atthe earliest opportunity.58Stirred by this theological current, and by the ideas of radical democ-racy, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire endedslavery.In the immediate aftermath of the Revolution, abolitionist ideas68 | CHAPTER 4also spread in the South, or at least in the upper South.59 But as revolu-tionary fervor faded, and the invention of the cotton gin made slaveryeven more profitable and important, the southern system becameharsher, including its treatment of free blacks.60 As for abolitionists, scores, probably hundreds of outspoken antislavery whites wereharassed into migrating out of the slave South.61 In any case, if anyinclined toward abolition remained in the region, they were silenced.62The religious revival movement that began in the 1820s and sweptthrough New England, and the New England diaspora to the west,reenergized abolitionism [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]