MARXISM VS. THE ‘NEW HISTORIANS OF CAPITALISM’: Part 2 of 3

SLAVERY OBSTACLE TO INDUSTRIAL DEVELOPMENT

Slavery as obstacle to industrial development

Slavery, on the other hand, no matter how thoroughly it became financially and commercially intertwined with capitalism, was unable to produce the kind of rapid industrial development that was characteristic of capitalism. Slave labor remained a form of production radically different from wage labor throughout all the varieties of slavery’s interactions with capitalism. This was a result of the slavocracy’s interest in the maximization of profit from the slave plantations to the exclusion of other economic goals throughout the slave-owner dominated South. The slave plantation system, became increasingly profitable in the North American colonies, as well as in the Caribbean, during the fifty years before the Civil War. The slave-labor plantations and related enterprises absorbed the bulk of the available funds for productive investment and stunted the opportunities for industrial development (factories, mines, infrastructure construction, etc.).

Capitalism develops on the basis of private ownership of all varieties of productive property. Capitalists could invest their wealth in the slave trade, in plantation production, in banks that lend to planters, etc. On the other hand, they could invest in productive activities in the North— an iron foundry, a wagon-making factory, a textile mill, or a forest-products complex. But for a limited period of time, cotton was king. George Novack, in his essay, “The rise and fall of the cotton kingdom” (ibid., p. 233) explained:

“Free labor differs from slave labor in two essential respects. In the first place, the free laborer has the right to sell his or her own labor power upon the market. Their persons are their own property. In the second place, they sell their labor power only for a definite, limited period.

“Chattel slaves, on the other hand, cannot sell themselves for they belong to another. They are bought and sold in the market like any other kind of merchandise, and not only they but their offspring belong to the owner for life. From the standpoint of the laborer, it makes all the difference in the world whether he or she is enslaved or free. But the capitalist is indifferent to the form of labor he employs. His aim is to obtain the maximum amount of profit from it. So long as slave labor can produce more surplus than other forms of labor, well and good. When it cannot, the planter-capitalist will turn to a different system of labor in which the prospects of profit seem surer. It is all one with him.”

The South remained relatively backward compared to the North, not because slavery was necessarily “less productive” than free labor in the same industry, but because in the South there was not a rounded development of all the industrial sectors. The Northern capitalists devoted a growing share of the working population to industrial development: metallurgy, mechanics, machine-building, textile production, land and river transport, manufactures of tools and implements, and they developed training facilities for all the skills that these enterprises required. In addition, the North planned for the future expansion of the production and exchange of products, building canals, river transport facilities, rail tracks and road improvements. The South lagged behind in all these areas. As Eugene Genovese argues in Political Economy of Slavery, p. 50,

“Negro slavery retarded technological progress in many ways: it prevented the growth of industrialism and urbanization; it retarded the division of labor, which might have spurred the creation of new techniques; it barred the labor force from that intelligent participation in production which has made possible the steady improvement of implements and machines; and it encouraged ways of thinking antithetical to the spirit of modern science. . . .

“Southern farmers suffered especially from technological backwardness, for the only way in which they might have compensated for the planters’ advantage of large-scale operation would have been to attain a much higher technological level.

The social pressure to invest in slaves and the high cost of machinery in a region that had to import much of its equipment made such an adjustment difficult.”

In order for capitalism to develop fully it needed to take control of all branches of production and become a truly all-encompassing economic system—and this is true no matter where it developed, North or South, Europe or the Americas. The key to capitalist growth has been the constant revolution in productive technology, and lowering the cost of production by the substitution of machinery for labor. Capitalist competition engenders a technical culture dominated by a constant quest for advanced techniques in engineering and machine production.

One of the leaders who promoted the independent development of the United States was Henry Clay, senator from Kentucky. In volume 9 of The Papers of Henry Clay, the Whig Leader, p. 699, it is explained how Clay advocated the diversification of manufacturing and agriculture in the new nation, and the subordination of government trade policy to these goals. Clay argued (April 26, 1842):

“Without a diversity in the occupations of society, if all are engaged in one common pursuit, there can be no subjects produced for mutual domestic exchanges, and consequently no home market, by far the best, most steady, in war and peace, and most valuable of all markets.

“We shall not, I fear, rise from our embarrassed condition until we produce, within our own country, more of the supplies necessary to consumption, and depend less on foreign countries. . . . One of the obvious modes of accomplishing that object is the regulation of our foreign trade by means of a properly adjusted tariff, stimulating production at home, and diminishing importations from abroad. And all experience has shown that, on whatever object our manufacturing industry has been successfully employed, its price to the consumer has been almost invariably reduced. This is the necessary effect of the law of competition.”

But there was a brake on capitalist development in the Southern U.S. It is true that the plantocracy wanted to achieve an extensive and diversified economic development in the Southern states. Some states did make attempts to accelerate Southern development in many different fields: in transport infrastructure (especially railways and shipping), in coal, iron and steel production, in textile and garment production, and in manufacturing of machinery, weapons and tools. But their progress was substantially slower than that of the North, and they remained relatively economically underdeveloped. There was a desire to promote industrial development, but the capital was lacking for long-term, forward-looking investments. “Get rich quick” perspectives tended to prevail. The production of cotton and other cash crops absorbed the bulk of the available investment funds (from investors in both North and South) simply because that was the field that provided the highest rate of profit. There was little left for other economic pursuits.

In order to fortify their capacities to rapidly get their agricultural products to the markets of the world, Southern states accelerated the development of the infrastructure of commerce: more extensive rails, more steamships on the rivers, more ocean-going vessels. There were also efforts to build up a financial and banking colossus to rival New York, whether in New Orleans or in Charleston. But these efforts, though effective in the near term, met with increasing obstacles over time, the major one being the irrepressible drive of the planter class to absorb the bulk of the loan capital available to purchase more slaves and land, to increase cotton production. Under optimal circumstances one could make more money from cotton-growing than any other pursuit. This left few resources to finance other projects. The Massachusetts abolitionist Joshua Leavitt attributed the panic of 1837, and similar economic downturns, to the mania for investments in slavery throughout the country. “Slavery absorbs the available capital of the North, and thus creates periodical revulsions, each one more severe than the last.” And “as long as northern capital drained into the south in the form of credit, it would be lost periodically, and economic depressions would become for northerners ‘as natural as the tides’.” (Quoted from John R. McKivigan’s book, Abolitionism and American Reform, Garland Publishing, 1999.)

Gavin Wright’s book, Slavery and American Economic Development (LSU Press), contains an extensive explanation of why the North developed industrially while the South languished. He asserts

“. . . slavery retarded regional economic growth by absorbing the savings of slaveowners, “crowding out” investment in physical capital—including the forms of capital deployment represented by improvements in the value of land . . . the average free southerner was 50 percent wealthier than the average northerner in 1850, 80 percent wealthier in 1860. But the accumulation of non-slave wealth by the southern economy was 40 to 45 percent below the northern standard. Slaveowners accumulated wealth in a form that had no counterpart in non-slave societies, a form that vanished when slavery was forcibly ended. Compared to an alternative scenario in which the South had been settled by free family farmers, the South was impoverished by slavery.”

Gavin Wright continues a little further on:

“Slaveholding planters were more “labor-lords” than “landlords.” Hence the relative underdevelopment of transportation, towns, cities, and other forms of infrastructure in the South, not merely by “crowding out” other assets in wealth portfolios, but by channeling entrepreneurial and political energies in directions that matched the processes through which asset values were determined. The culmination was the emergence of a regional political coalition whose main priority was protection and enhancement of the huge store of wealth held as slave property.”

As the divergence between North and South came closer to the breaking point, observers and commentators increasingly pointed to the weaknesses of chattel slavery for the long-term, all-round industrialization of the country. J.E. Cairnes (1823–1875), an Irish economist, studied the slave-labor system, and noted its deficiencies, as compared to free labor. In his book, The Slave Power (1862), he summarized,

“. . . the economical defects of slave labour are very serious. They may be summed up under the three following heads: it is given reluctantly; it is unskillful; it is wanting in versatility. . . . The moment the master’s eye is withdrawn, the slave relaxes his efforts. . . . if the nature of the work requires that the workmen be dispersed over an extended area, the number of overseers, and therefore, the cost of the labour which requires this supervision, will be proportionately increased. . . . fear is substituted for hope as the stimulus to exertion. . . . “By displaying superior capacity, the slave would only raise the measure of his ordinary duties; by a work of supererogation he would only prepare punishment for himself. . . . His ambition is the reverse of that of the freeman; he seeks to descend in the scale of industry, rather than to ascend. (Bentham)”

On the question of the unskillfulness of the slave, Cairnes continues:

“He is therefore unsuited for all branches of industry which require the slightest care, forethought or dexterity. He cannot be made to cooperate with machinery; he can only be trusted with the coarsest of instruments; he is incapable of all but the rudest forms of labor. . . . Slave labor is eminently defective in point of versatility. . . . If tobacco be cultivated, tobacco becomes the sole staple, and tobacco is produced whatever be the state of the market, and whatever be the condition of the soil.”

There are those who would argue that the statements of Cairnes are too sweeping, and only apply in limited fields of work. Indeed, it is true that there were many noteworthy exceptions in the form of slave labor, but Cairnes’ comments generally apply to the production of a single cash crop on large plantations: cotton, sugar, tobacco. We should keep in mind that these plantations were the economic core of the slave system, the source of its profits, and the root of its strength in America. Critics could point to the versatility and dexterity of slaves who were put to work in machine-assisted factory production, masonry, construction of buildings and railroads, etc. To one degree or another the South developed these areas of slave labor, but they were less successful in the South than in the North. Further, the variegated forms of slavery and slave-labor that prevailed in the large urban areas: St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, demonstrated not just the skill and versatility of slaves, but also the coupling of education and versatility with the emancipation process. The more versatile the slave became, the more feasible was manumission. This only reaffirms the judgment of Cairnes on the dependence of slave labor on the ignorance of the slaves. See, for example, Scraping By, by Seth Rockman and Cathy Matson.

https://www.amazon.com/Scraping-Survival-Baltimore-American-Philadelphia/dp/0801890071/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1517771242&sr=8-1&keywords=seth+rockman+scraping+by

Aside from the unsuitability of the existing slaves for multi-faceted skilled labor, beaten down by drudgery and held in ignorance, their negligible chance of finding a way to freedom dulled their enthusiasm for life. The typical free wage laborers of the North, enmeshed as they were in the workings of the capital-labor relationship, could at least own their own body and personality and thus retained the possibility of a change of status—a new job, a new skill, a new working environment. Further, the worker confronted the capitalist as an owner of a commodity (labor power), while the capitalist confronted the worker as the owner of wages (the workers’ means of subsistence), so that, in a legal sense, the relationship between them was a relation of equality. This made a big difference. Marx explained this relationship.

“So long as both sides exchange their labour with one another in the form of objectified labour—as products, which are commodities—the relation is impossible. It is equally impossible if the worker himself appears as the property of the other side, himself belongs among the objective conditions of labour, and not as a person engaged in exchange. (That slavery can exist at individual points within the bourgeois system of production, does not contradict this. But slavery is then possible only because it does not exist at other points, and represents an anomaly in relation to the bourgeois system itself.)” (MECW, Vol. 34, p. 246)

[Further, Marx added]: “In North America, where the development of wage labour has least of all been affected by reminiscences of the old guild system, etc., this variability, this complete indifference to the specific content of labour, this ability to transfer from one branch to another, is shown particularly strongly. Hence the contrast between this variability and the uniform, traditional character of slave labour, which does not vary according to the requirements of production, but rather the reverse, requiring that production should itself be adapted to the mode of labour introduced originally and handed down by tradition, is emphasised by all United States writers as the grand characteristic of the free wage labour of the North as against the slave labour of the South.”

Most Northern promoters of national unity favored the construction of a prosperous nation through westward expansion to utilize the vast territories as the world’s greatest free-labor empire, and thus become the envy of the world. They fully understood the need to overcome slavery’s sluggish and self-absorbed economic culture. But they also recognized that the achievement of this goal would require time. During the years of the Revolutionary War, the nation was yet too young to tackle such a weighty burden. Benjamin Franklin, a strong advocate of building a national population of robust and creative citizens, once proclaimed:

“Slavery is such an atrocious debasement of human nature, that its very extirpation, if not performed with solicitous care, may sometimes open a source of serious evils. The unhappy man who has been treated as a brute animal, too frequently sinks beneath the common standard of the human species. The galling chains, that bind his body, do also fetter his intellectual faculties, and impair the social affections of his heart . . . To instruct, to advise, to qualify those, who have been restored to freedom, for the exercise and enjoyment of civil liberty . . . and to procure for their children an education calculated for their future situation in life; these are the great outlines of the annexed plan, which we have adopted.”
— Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, 1789.

The westward expansion of the nation took place by the formation of western territories for settlement, followed by the eventual inclusion of these territories as states of the nation. Once statehood was achieved, the voters of the state would be entitled to add their elected representatives to the Senate and the House of representatives. Were the new states to be added in the 1830s to 1850s to allow slavery to exist? Would these new states be slave or free? This question became critical in the 1850s as the debates reached a high pitch. This question gave rise to the foundation of the Republican Party, and provided the motivation for the great Lincoln-Douglas debates. George Novack explains this contentious issue (ibid. p. 214):

“Yet there is another side to the coin which American sectionalist historians have sedulously avoided revealing. And this is—the far greater significance of the western lands for the plantation oligarchy. For that class, the existence of a western reserve was economically decisive, because without room to expand the Cotton Kingdom was doomed. The vast land reserves facilitated more than any other single factor the growth of the plantation system after 1800. Considered in this light, the open West made possible the barbaric atavism of an expanding chattel slave system in the nineteenth century! Shall we disregard the armies of slaves thus created, as the Jacksonian “democrats” of that day did? Those who talk of the exemplary democracy of the Jackson period do just that.”

Wealth invested in cotton lands and slaves to work them were only useful for money-making as long as the world cotton market kept growing, and as long as the cotton competitors in South America, Turkey, Egypt and India were unable to mount a stiff competition to the U.S. In Joshua Rothman’s contribution to Slavery’s Capitalism, “The Contours of Cotton Capitalism: Speculation, Slavery and Economic Panic in Mississippi, 1832–1841,” there is a good description of the attraction of capital to a part of the South where land was easily had, and the climate was good for cotton cultivation: Mississippi. The rising price of cotton on the world market caused a feverish rush to invest in plantation development, and was accelerated by a major expansion of credit. Rothman writes:

“The more slaves a man owned, the more land he could cultivate and the more cotton he could bring to market. It was no secret that slave labor made everything about the flush times possible. . . . “To sell cotton in order to buy negroes—to make more cotton to buy more negroes, ‘ad infinitum,’ is the aim and direct tendency of all the operations of the thorough-going cotton planter; his whole soul is wrapped up in the pursuit . . . Without slaves, there could be no cotton; without cotton no wealth.”
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B06W587B5M/?bestFormat=true&k=slavery%27s%20capitalism&ref

Rothman does a good job of explaining the credit-fueled boom which led to the crash of 1837. But Rothman, unlike Wright, focuses primarily on the issue of the business cycle and the conditions of credit in the relationship between capitalism and slavery. It is this narrow perspective that shows his allegiance to the NHC. Wright, on the other hand, focuses on how slavery diverted wealth away from the industrial development of the Southern states, and towards investments in plantation-grown cotton. Rothman’s discussion focuses on the temporary and unstable alliance between the wealth generated by the property of the slave-owning class and the financial institutions that facilitated world capital flows. Thus he avoids the underlying antagonism that was building up during this period. Wright, on the other hand, looks deeper and shows the reason for the ultimate divergence of the two systems.

Slave production in the South, especially in the cotton-growing sector, gave a big boost to capitalist development in the North due to the colossal profits flowing back to the United States from overseas cotton sales. At the time, the system of wage labor was still going through its formative stages, developing an all-embracing system of independent American industry and agriculture, with infinite possibilities for further expansion, and in the course of this development the cotton profits reaped by Northern merchants, shippers and bankers helped to speed it up.

NHC radical, not Marxist

The NHC spokespersons have declared their discordance with Marxism. In the introduction to the new book, Capitalism's Slavery, Rockman and Beckert say, "one distinguishing characteristic of the field [the 'new historians of capitalism’] has been its departure from Marxist theorizations that separate slavery and capitalism into antithetical modes of production. . . ." They view themselves as “radical” interpreters of American history in the sense that they are advancing a stinging criticism of capitalism, an economic system condemned for its promotion of slavery and its extraction of profit from such an inhuman form of exploitation. They illustrate slavery’s deep involvement not only with the vile persecution of human beings but also with the most vital elements of capitalist relations: primarily commerce and finance, but also insurance, accounting and technology. As Beckert and Rockman explain,

“A scholarly revolution over the past two decades, which brought mainstream historical accounts into line with long-standing positions in Africana and Black Studies, has recognized slavery as the foundational American institution, organizing the nation’s politics, legal structures and cultural practices with remarkable power to determine the life chances of those moving through society as black or white. . . . Only in the past several years has scholarship on finance, accounting, management and technology allowed us to understand America’s economic development as “slavery’s capitalism.” . . . To recognize slavery’s national reach and to argue for its national economic importance is to challenge one of the most persistent myths in American history, namely, that slavery was merely a regional institution, surely indispensable for understanding the South, but a geographically confined system of negligible importance to the nation as a whole.”

The NHC differentiate themselves from “Marxist theorizations that separate slavery and capitalism into antithetical modes of production.” Marxists do indeed separate capitalism and slavery into antithetical modes of production, and it is critical for all those interested in issues of history and social change to recognize the underlying truth of this separation. If we don’t see the divergence between these conflicting modes of production, we can't understand the underlying reason why a bloody Civil War broke out. Nor can we understand why the outcome of this Civil War was vital for the development of capitalism in the nineteenth century and up to the present time. Marx and Engels explained:

“The progressive abuse of the Union by the slave power, working through its alliance with the Northern Democratic Party, is, so to say, the general formula of United States history since the beginning of this century. The successive compromise measures mark the successive degrees of the encroachment by which the Union became more and more transformed into the slave of the slave-owner. Each of these compromises denotes a new encroachment of the South, a new concession of the North. At the same time, none of the successive victories of the South was carried but after a hot contest with an antagonistic force in the North, appearing under different party names with different watchwords and under different colors. If the positive and final result of each single contest told in favor of the South, the attentive observer of history could not but see that every new advance of the slave power was a step forward to its ultimate defeat.” (Marx, The American Question in England, New-York Daily Tribune, October 11, 1861.)

But when Marxists say that capitalism and slavery are antithetical modes of production, that’s only true in the long run and in the final analysis. There are many historical conflicts that initially appear incidental or trivial, but whose subsequent development proves, in the final analysis, to be decisive at the highest level. The analysis advanced by the NHC, due to its superficial approach to the definition of social classes, confuses what was superficial and temporary with what was fundamental and lasting. In the short term, when the demand for cotton on the world market was rapidly accelerating, there was a period of very fruitful synergy between capitalism and slavery—fruitful for the merchants and bankers of the North as well as for the lords of the lash. And the overall arc of this reciprocal relationship is well documented in Slavery’s Capitalism.

But what Beckert & Co. leave unexplored is the deeply felt need of the planter aristocracy to dominate the national government and to extend and strengthen the slave system throughout the nation. And what choice did the enslavers have? If they were to be serious about the protection of their peculiar mode of production the enslavers were forced, come what may, to demand that all new states admitted to the union be slave states. The slavocracy understood that, were they to remain in the union, their only hope of survival lay in preserving their control over the Senate (they lacked sufficient voting strength to dominate the House of Representatives). This would give them decisive sway over the federal government. Given the electoral victory of slaveowner Andrew Jackson in 1828, as George Novack (ibid., p 242) explains, the slavocracy did everything in their power to maintain and expand its control over the federal authority:

“The cotton nobility came to form the First Order in the federal government and its armed forces. They controlled the president, the cabinet, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the foreign service, and they dictated the major policies made in Washington. The social prestige and influence of the slaveowners were enhanced by intermarriage between the leading families of the North and South, just as their political power was multiplied and fortified by the alliance between the southern and northern wings of the Democratic Party.”

But in spite of the slavocracy’s grip on federal power, the weaknesses of the plantation system more and more undermined the slavocracy’s political edge. The battle of “bleeding Kansas” in 1855 revealed the weakening position of the slave-masters—even under the presidency of the pro-slavery Democrat Franklin Pierce. "Bleeding Kansas" showed that the handwriting was already on the wall for the slave-holders. Both North and South were preparing themselves to draw the line then and there over the question of slavery.

The future of the U.S. belonged to capital with free labor

The future belonged to free labor. History has demonstrated that truth. But to develop a class of free laborers is not only an economic question; it is a legal question as well. Throughout the many decades of growth of capitalism, the political and legal representatives of the rising bourgeois class fought to alter the legal and political framework in Europe and in America to accommodate their needs, including their need for an available pool of landless proletarians. But to be a free worker, one must be legally free to choose residence and employment. Would there be in the United States a law of the land granting to every human being the rights of personhood, or citizenship?

Workers would have to be free to develop their lives, personalities, skills and families in accordance with the opportunities and obstacles that they faced. Would they be free to seek, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”? For the slave-owning class there was not, nor could there be, any such “law of the land,” or any law whatsoever that would prevail over all the states of the union (unless it were the “law of the lash”). In fact, the slave states denied the existence of the national “union” as a valid legal entity. They only recognized the federal government as far as it would continue to protect their interests as slave-owners. It was critical for them, during the period between the revolution and the Civil War, to keep control of the federal government. They recognized the political representatives of Northern industry as their rivals for the state power.

The fatal flaw at the heart of the new “republic” was recognized at its founding. At the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention in 1787 difficulties emerged in efforts to define a sort of U. S. citizenship which would be valid in all the states. The delegates were unable to do so because of the existence of slavery. Were the slaves—considered as residents of the United States—persons or property? If they were to be classified as persons, then how could their status be defined in such a way as to exclude them from all citizenship rights? But if they were property, would they have any legal rights within states that did not allow slavery?

As the new nation expanded westward, new states were admitted to the union. This process provoked debates among the congressmen and senators about whether slavery should be allowed in the new states. If slavery were permitted, the slaveowners would rush to populate the states with plantations or farms using slaves for labor. Slavery would then become the dominant mode of production, and the slavemasters would strengthen their control over congress and the senate. In this way, the course of development would favor the expansion of the slave economy. But if slavery were to be outlawed in the newly admitted states, the free labor sector would increase its strength in the national government.

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a part of the compromise of 1850 which authorized the admission to the Union of California as a free state while creating Utah and New Mexico territories as “slavery optional.” The Fugitive Slave Law provided for the oversight of authorities in Northern states in the capture and return of escaped slaves who had managed to reach the Northern states. With this law, the right of the enslavers to keep their chattel property was protected by the entire nation. Thus slaves, property in the South, remained property in the North.

The issue of where slavery could be legally recognized came up in the Dred Scott Supreme Court case, in 1857, which involved the principle of slaves, as legal property in the South, being treated as equally legal in the North. The Supreme Court, dominated by judicial representatives of the slavocracy, ruled that Dred Scott, a slave residing in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin, was the rightful property of his owner, claiming that the U.S. Constitution classified slaves as property. If this were taken as the “law of the land,” as “constitutionally authorized activity,” then it would be legally permissible for the slave-masters to set up innumerable slave plantations throughout New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio (not that this would be economically feasible).

Going back to the early years of the republic, on the hotly-debated question of proportional representation for the U.S. Congress from the slave states, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 considered that the slaves, lacking all rights, could not count as electors or voters (but the word “slaves” was not used, instead they were referred to as “all other persons,” in contrast to free persons). If slaves did not count at all for representation in Congress, the slave-owning class, a small minority of the population, would not have sufficient voters to achieve congressional representation for their interests. This conundrum resulted in the absurd three-fifths compromise, whereby each slave was to be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of representation to the U.S. Congress. They were not just “property,” then, but a form of property that could play a role in the political “law of the land” in the new “republic.” This clause was a major concession to the representatives of the slave states at the Constitutional Convention. It allowed the slave states a better than even chance at dominating the U.S. Congress and the federal government. But it had nothing to do with democracy. The new republic was maimed at birth—a wound that could not be healed. As David Brion Davis explained in his book, Inhuman Bondage (Oxford University Press, 2006),

“Yet the entire structure of national politics had been designed to prevent any faction from directly threatening Southern slaveholders and thereby common national interests. . . . It is therefore not surprising that before 1819 slavery never became a truly central issue in national politics, except for the brief but furious Southern response in the First Congress of 1790 to two moderate antislavery petitions. Slavery was thus an issue that sat like an inactivated bomb in the minds of the foremost political leaders.”

In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed the settlers themselves in those territories to decide whether those new states would be slave or free. This opening touched off major battles among the settlers. This fighting, which provoked strong passions on both sides, helped to awaken the nation to the fact that there had developed a do-or-die split between the two factions. Growing sectors of the population believed that the nation was approaching a decisive turning point. That same year the Republican Party was founded.

Richard Yates, Republican candidate for Illinois governor, explained the significance of the Republican Party in 1860 (from Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men by Eric Foner, p. 11:

“’The great idea and basis of the Republican party, as I understand it,’ he proclaimed, ‘is free labor. . . To make labor honorable is the object and aim of the Republican party.’ Such statements, which were reiterated countless times by Republican orators in the 1850s, were more than mere election-year appeals for the votes of laboring men. For the concept of ‘free labor’ lay at the heart of the Republican ideology, and expressed a coherent social outlook, a model of the good society.”
-- https://www.amazon.com/Free-Soil-Labor-Men-Republican/dp/0195094972

Only if free labor were the law of the land could the burgeoning nation offer expanding opportunities for the mass of the workers, farmers, artisans and traders. But with the country in the grip of the slavers’ oligarchy, every new state admitted to the union would be turned into hellish tracts of drudgery. The Republicans understood this, and they pledged themselves to avoid that fate. The Republicans understood how a nation of free labor would develop the lands to the west by populating it with vigorous and resourceful pioneers; they also understood why the slave society of the South, if it continued as a dominant force in the national government, would continue to produce a deformed social existence, founded on a degrading and bloody business. This was not a future that decent people desired.

In the enslaver-dominated South free laborers, white or Black, could not be secure in their freedom while the real power resided in the power structure of the slave states; and as long as the constitutions of these states were considered more valid than the U.S. Constitution, the slave-owning class continued to occupy the position of the final arbiter. In these states, free African-Americans were considered as a contradiction in their very existence, a violation of the principle that Black = slave. Thus, the freed former slaves constituted a nuisance and a slap in the face to “public morals,” and had to face a wide variety of public dangers as well as the prospect of kidnapping and re-enslavement. Their legal rights were often transgressed in respect to their ownership of property, their right to work alongside whites in factories and shops, and their right to appear in court as witnesses or jurors.

Development of anti-slavery political forces

As national development proceeded in the nineteenth century, political opposition to slavery developed within the Whig Party, formed in 1834. The Whigs wished to create more political support for economic modernization and protectionism for the development of U.S. manufacturers, but in the long run were weakened by their inclusion of both Northern capitalists and Southern planters. In many ways, the evolution of the antagonism between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs foreshadowed the crisis that culminated in the Civil War. As the slavery issue moved to the fore in the party politics of the 1850s, the split in the Whig Party created the conditions that produced the formation of the Republican Party in 1854.

Lincoln, a Whig, fought against the right to own slaves in the states newly admitted to the union. He spoke in Peoria, Illinois, October 16, 1854, against the Kansas-Nebraska bill (a bill that would allow the state to decide the question of the right to own slaves), and left no doubt as to the harm that would be done to the nation by the extension of slavery to the new states. Although not an abolitionist, but rather a democratic-minded politician, Lincoln represented the crying need for the nation to break free from the stranglehold of the enslavers, who were in reality the enemies of national self-government and democracy. Lincoln exclaimed,

“Again, is not Nebraska, while a territory, a part of us? Do we not own the country? And if we surrender the control of it, do we not surrender the right of self-government? It is part of ourselves. If you say we shall not control it because it is ONLY part, the same is true of every other part; and when all the parts are gone, what has become of the whole? What is then left of us? What use for the general government when there is nothing left for it [to] govern?”

In answering those who supported the right of persons to own slaves in the new states of Kansas and Nebraska, Lincoln declared:

“But if it is a sacred right for the people of Nebraska to take and hold slaves there, it is equally their sacred right to buy them where they can buy them cheapest; and that undoubtedly will be on the coast of Africa; provided you will consent to not hang them for going there to buy them. You must remove this restriction too, from the sacred right of self-government. I am aware you say that taking slaves from the States of Nebraska, does not make slaves of freemen; but the African slave-trader can say just as much. He does not catch free negroes and bring them here. He finds them already slaves in the hands of their black captors, and he honestly buys them at the rate of about a red cotton handkerchief a head. This is very cheap, and it is a great abridgement of the sacred right of self-government to hang men for engaging in this profitable trade!”

Lincoln genuinely hated slavery, and would have eagerly joined the abolitionists were it not for his belief that, in order to fight against it, he would need to find a place for fighters such as himself within the national government. Lincoln and his allies in the Whig Party saw the slave-holder dominated governments in Washington granting more and more privileges and opportunities to the slave states, and their opposition grew apace. Lincoln believed in the honesty, creativity, hard work and initiative of common people as the key to the future of the young republic.

The slave-owners thought that it was unjust to deny enterprising western settlers the right to own slaves. To the Southern aristocracy, and to many capitalists North and South, it was apparent that slaves were the main engine of wealth in the new world—not only in plantation-grown cotton and sugar, but also for the merchants and banks of New York. Indeed, that was the reality from 1800 to 1860. For this slave-owning class, it seemed senseless that the people of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and New York should raise objections to what was the most profitable enterprise in America, slave-grown cotton.

Upon responding to this sentiment, Lincoln declared in his inaugural address, March 4, 1861, "One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended." But he insisted that the rule of law must be defended as it pertained to both sections, and that neither had the right to transgress against the other. He conceived of the rule of law as a single law applying to all the states of the union. He spoke against the Southern threats of secession, saying, "We cannot remove our respective sections from each other nor build an impassible wall between them." Confident of the ultimate victory of the system of free labor, Lincoln was willing to wait for a political solution. He asked, "why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?" In a final recognition of the decisive significance of the impending struggle, Lincoln added,

“If the Almighty Ruler of Nations, with His eternal truth and justice, be on your side of the North, or on yours of the South, that truth and that justice will surely prevail by the judgment of this great tribunal of the American People. . . . In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you.”

Lincoln viewed the matter as so essential it required the action of the people as a whole, and not just the politicians acting on behalf of the people. Lincoln's offer of peace was met with the guns of Fort Sumter, the secessionists having finally recognized that further compromise could not gain them anything.