The Spread of Slavery and the Crisis of Southern Society, 1836-1848

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, planters successfully fended off challenges to their personal, political and economic authority from southerners who received fewer benefits from a slave-based economy. Enslaved and free Black people, Native Americans and nonslaveholding whites resisted the spread of the “peculiar institution,” as slavery was euphemistically called. Even some plantation mistresses criticized (if only in their private diaries) the effects of slavery on their families. White plantation employees, too, found fault with the planters who hired them. In response, enslavers were forced to develop new strategies to maintain their control and consolidate their authority in the household, the community and the region.

For many southern planters, Texas came to symbolize their ability to expand slavery and consolidate their power. Enslavers like Moses Austin began settling the fertile lands in eastern  Texas in the 1820s, when Texas was one of the outlying provinces of the Republic of Mexico. With only about 2000 Spanish-speaking residents, or tejanos, and a much larger number of Numunuus (Comanches) in the region, the Mexican government initially encouraged American settlement. Then in 1829, the Republic of Mexico outlawed slavery, but thousands of Americans continued to bring enslaved people into Texas By the early 1830s, a new government in Mexico, led by General Antonia Lopez de Santa Anna, sought to stem the tide of U.S. migrants by imposing greater control over Texas. When U.S. migrants and planters failed to recognize Santa Anna’s authority, he sought to drive the Americans out.

Skirmishes between Mexican troops and U.S. settlers began in 1835, and by March 2, 1836, Americans led by Moses Austin’s son Stephen declared independence from Mexico. Four days later 4,000 Mexican troops attacked the Alamo, an abandoned mission near San Antonio. When the 187 Americans defending the outpost, including Davy Crockett, refused to surrender, they were killed by Mexican soldiers. Soon after, more than 300 American rebels were killed at Goliad even after they agreed to surrender. By April, however, the tide had turned as eager volunteers from the United States joined their countrymen already in Texas to defend American interests.  Commanded by Sam Houston, U.S. forces routed the Mexican army at the battle of San Jacinto on April 21 and captured Santa Anna himself. As a result, Santa Anna signed a treaty in May 1836 granting independence to the Republic of Texas.  Although conflicts continued for more than a decade between Mexicans and Texans and Texans and Numunuus, southern slavery proponents viewed the triumph of U.S. forces in Texas as a victory for slavery.

The heady economic dreams that followed Texas independence from Mexico in 1836 were delayed, but not destroyed, by the onset of depression the following year. The Panic of 1837 destroyed the fortunes of plantation owners across the South as prices fell by almost half between 1837 and 1843. Yet those who survived the crash were rewarded when British and U.S. banks began extending credit on more favorable terms in the early 1840s. By that time, the failure of farms and businesses had lessened competition, and the demand for many goods, including cotton, once again rose. In fact, pent-up demand assured a steady market for both agricultural and manufactured items for the next several years.

Like some northern merchants and speculators, the most successful southern gentlemen took advantage of the devastation the Panic wreaked on more vulnerable neighbors to expand their holdings. The percentage of white families who owned large plantations shrank, but their power was growing along with their desire to make their wealth and status more visible. As cotton prices rose, these affluent planters began to replace their rough and unpretentious farmhouses with newer, more ostentatious mansions. Across the South, but especially in Alabama, Louisiana, and the Mississippi Delta—the areas along the Gulf Coast into which slavery was expanding—the new plantation houses were decorated with expensive, often imported, furnishings and filled with fine wines, fancy clothes, numerous guests, and a domestic labor force large enough to care for the new amenities.

This new aristocracy and opulent lifestyle was typified in Mississippi by the Natchez “nabobs,” a group composed of the region’s forty wealthiest families, who had begun to buy up land in the 1820s. During the Panic of 1837, members of this elite circle added both enslaved African Americans and acreage at depression-era prices, and then took advantage of rising cotton prices in the mid 1840s to complete their climb to the top. Nabob Stephen Duncan, for instance, was a Pennsylvania-born physician who had moved to Mississippi in 1808. In the early 1830s, he was a successful planter and banker with close ties to the Whig Party and the American Colonization Society. Two decades later, Duncan owned six cotton and two sugar cane plantations spread across three counties in two states, along with more than one thousand enslaved workers, twenty-three of whom labored as domestic servants at Auburn, his Natchez mansion.

Duncan and his fellow nabobs threw elaborate parties and balls, traveled extensively, bred and raced horses, and planted English-style boxed gardens. William Johnson, a free Black barber in Natchez, detailed the comings and goings of local aristocrats in his diary. In 1840, in the midst of the depression, he commented on the marriage of nabob Louis Bingaman, Duncan’s brother-in-law, to a New York socialite. “The N.P. [newspaper] speaks of the wedding Dress Costing $2000. And of the marriage Contract or Settlement $100,000—Not bad to take,” he concluded.

Marriage played a critical role in the economic strategies of southern planters. Stephen Duncan’s wealth, for instance, was built not only on his medical practice, shrewd land speculation, and effective management of enslaved workers, but also on two well-placed marriages (upon the death of his socially prominent first wife, he married into another wealthy family). For men, a good marriage required obtaining both a large financial settlement and a wife who understood her place. Planter society celebrated strongly patriarchal families. The father supervised the plantation’s production of the staple crop and the financial transactions directly linked to it, including the purchase and sale of enslaved persons. His wife was assigned the domestic sphere and denied access to most aspects of public life. “The proper place for a woman is at home,” declared the Southern Quarterly Review. “One of her highest privileges [is] to be politically merged in the existence of her husband.”

But a wealthy southerner’s business dealings often took him away from home, requiring his wife to assume many duties in running the plantation. This created enormous strains. Catherine Hammond, wife of prominent South Carolina planter and politician James Henry Hammond, found herself in charge of affairs at Silver Bluff plantation during her husband’s frequent travels. Catherine had inherited Silver Bluff at age eleven, when her father died. Six years later in 1831, Hammond, a dashing young lawyer of twenty-three, married the shy teenage heiress despite her family’s misgivings. In the summer of 1840, Catherine was pregnant for the seventh time in nine years. Yet she was suddenly forced to preside over the plantation when James decided that he needed “to go somewhere” to recover from the strain of his ongoing campaign for the governorship.

James spent the next six weeks in New York City, purchasing silver, linens, and furniture for a newly constructed residence in Columbia, while Catherine endured the hot and humid weather at Silver Bluff, overseeing the crops and enslaved workers and entertaining a full house of family members and guests.  Hammond returned to the plantation in September, just three days before Catherine gave birth. Women such as Catherine Hammond, although enjoying all the benefits of wealth and position that planter society had to offer, led lives restricted by the masculine authority that prevailed in the planter class.

Southern society’s dependence on enslaved people's labor strengthened traditional beliefs in the sanctity of social order and the strict subordination of the members of one (supposedly inferior) social group to those of another (supposedly superior). Planters viewed their children, wives, poorer neighbors, white employees, and enslaved African Americans as being, to one degree or another, inferior to themselves in social standing and personal rights. The enslaver’s power over his enslaved individuals was merely an extension of his power over his wife and children. “Do you say that the slave is held to involuntary service?” one spokesman asked rhetorically, before offering his justification. “So is the wife. Her relation to her husband, in the immense majority of cases, is made for her, not by her.” This linking of slavery with white family relations did not prevent the forcible breakup of enslaved families or keep planters from enslaving or selling children whom they conceived with enslaved females. It did, however, reinforce the patriarch’s supremacy within his own home and emphasize still more than in the North the wife’s subordinate position.

Although planters asserted their authority over their families, tensions often lurked just beneath the surface. First and foremost, the planter’s sexual access to enslaved females strained marital bonds and undermined the mistress’s self-respect and moral authority on the plantation. A proper lady would, of course, try to ignore evidence of sexual indiscretion. Mary Boykin Chesnut, in an oft-quoted passage from her diary, observed that “the Mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds or pretends so to think.”

Sometimes the evidence was so overwhelming that it could not be ignored. Catherine Hammond left her husband over his sexual relationship with the enslaved woman Louisa, but only after having overlooked earlier liaisons with Louisa’s mother, Sally Johnson, and with four of Catherine’s own nieces. The absence of testimony from Louisa, Sally Johnson, or Hammond’s nieces about the agonies they experienced as a result of this abuse makes it impossible to understand the full horror of the man’s actions. However, his flagrant infidelity, which eventually forced Catherine to leave him in order to save her own reputation, illuminates the dark underside of domestic relations that was often concealed to preserve the family honor. That Catherine eventually reconciled with her husband suggests the limited options available to even the most well-positioned southern women. Moreover, that Catherine apparently did nothing to stop the sexual exploitation of enslaved women or her own nieces also indicates the ease with which plantation mistresses became accomplices in the abusive system.

Prevailing attitudes not only minimized the private “indiscretions” of enslavers, they also denied the enslaver’s wife most public credit for the plantation’s upkeep. Yet the wife’s domestic sphere could be huge. She supervised not only a broad range of essential tasks in her family’s living quarters (often known as the Big House) but also in the separate kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, and storehouse. Managing the household budget and negotiating with local merchants might also fall within her sphere. If the husband was deceased or temporarily absent, she usually administered the plantation alone or with the aid of an overseer. But chattel slavery discredited menial labor, associating those who performed it with the enslaved workers' lowly status. Unlike industrious northern businessmen, planters generally prided themselves on being men of leisure and culture, freed from hard work and financial concerns. The popular image of the plantation mistress reflected those values, rendering her the very embodiment of grace, gentility, and refinement. Strict adherence to these ideals placed the plantation mistress in the contradictory position of having to appear to be a delicate woman of leisure while performing hard work on a daily basis.

Plantation mistresses, like northern women, were encouraged to find solace in religion; but they discovered fewer opportunities there for self-expression and social initiative. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, southern women, at least in more densely settled areas, had formed prayer, missionary, and benevolent associations. A scattering of temperance societies flourished in southern cities beginning in the 1820s. Soon, however, northern women’s increasing visibility in antislavery agitation, much of it linked to religious awakenings, triggered a backlash in the South that curbed women’s participation in voluntary associations, whether church-based or secular. While such restrictions severely limited women’s ability to launch collective and public protests against the abuses linked to male domination, they may have nurtured a more intimate form of guerrilla warfare in southern households when wives believed that their planter husbands had overstepped the boundaries of patriarchal authority.

Other individuals on the plantation also challenged planters’ ideal of total control. Overseers were the most important paid laborers on most large plantations, and often the most problematic as well. They were expected to force enslaved persons to work to their utmost capacity, keep them healthy and relatively content, and expend a minimum of funds on their care. Owners were demanding, but so too were the enslaved workers, who recognized overseers as a potentially weak link in the chain of command and withheld their labor power from or protested to owners against especially brutal overseers.

Many planters hired a new overseer every year, hoping to find one with the perfect mix of agricultural expertise, personal authority, and managerial integrity. In the diaries and letters of planters, problems with overseers loomed large: they were too harsh or too lenient; they were more interested in sexual exploitation than agricultural production; they were unhappy with their wages, or housing, or chances for becoming a planter themselves; they had gained too much control in the absence of the owner; they were out of control. This catalogue of complaints penned by owners of enslaved African Americans certainly must have had its counterpart among discontented overseers, although few had the leisure time or the education to leave a written record. Occupying a difficult middle ground between Black laborers and their white owners, overseers provided a constant reminder that planters’ authority was limited in numerous ways.

How did the medical care available to enslaved people on southern plantations reveal many of the contradictions inherent in the slave system?

On the plantations, time and work are dictated by the enslavers, but as one freedom seeker relates, enslaved families strive to make life in the quarters independent of his control. The narrator flees to the North, only to discover that her former enslaver's power extends even to New York City because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law. View 30-minute video in full or in sections.

Planters used various means to reinforce their control over family members, subordinates, and enslaved African Americans. Religion offered one vehicle for creating bonds among diverse groups in southern society. Evangelical Protestantism had inspired opposition to slavery among some poor white Americans and fueled resistance by free Black people and enslaved persons in the early 1800s. By the 1830s, however, slaveholding elites had gained more power within evangelical churches, and church leaders generally welcomed the approval and sponsorship of the planters and all the benefits their wealth and influence brought to the church.

Planters tried to use religion to bind enslaved African Americans more tightly to the southern system, and owners increasingly controlled their enslaved workers’ attendance at church. During his years of enslavement, Frederick Douglass was frustrated by the “many good, religious colored people who were under the delusion that God required them to submit to slavery and to wear their chains in meekness and humility.”

Other Black people, however, resisted this message of servility. Robert Ryland, a white pastor in Virginia, began preaching in Richmond’s First African Baptist Church in the 1840s. A defender of slavery, he claimed, as one free Black man recalled, “that God had given all this continent to the white man, and that it was our duty to submit.” Yet groups of African Americans lingered after Ryland’s services to listen to Black people preach. Ryland himself admitted that one of these Black preachers “was heard with far more interest than I was.” Another witness noticed that at these informal services the “most active were those who had slept during [Ryland’s] sermon.”

In a few cities, independent Black churches thrived. Membership in Baltimore’s African Methodist Episcopal conference more than doubled between 1836 and 1856, and other southern cities experienced a similar upsurge in religious enthusiasm. In rural districts, however, separate Black churches were rare, and enslaved persons were forced to convene secret “night meetings,” which continued despite their being prohibited. Moreover, enslaved individuals might pick up dangerous ideas even from preachers sanctioned by white leaders. Many white southerners worried that prayers, songs, and sermons intended for their ears (and so filled with references to human freedom and universal brotherhood) might be “misinterpreted” by enslaved and free Black people. Given the different meanings of salvation to Black and white people, Christian appeals to Black southerners and the development of uniquely African American forms of Christianity remained sources of conflict for decades.

Growing concerns over slavery among northern Christians also tested the alliance between southern evangelicals and enslavers. In the mid 1840s, northern Methodists and Baptists tried to convince their southern counterparts to oppose slavery on Christian grounds. The struggle intensified when slavery extended into new territories, which heightened northern opposition to the institution and prompted many northern churches finally to take a stand on issues they had long tried to ignore.

When southern congregations resisted northern entreaties, the national organizations of these denominations split. The most important schisms occurred among Methodists in 1844 and the Baptists in 1845 as both churches split along regional lines. White southerners, particularly planters, found the antislavery stand of northern ministers treasonous. While planters overemphasized the abolitionist beliefs of mainstream northern ministers, the division between northern and southern churches no doubt reinforced the belief among enslaved African Americans that southern white preachers did not have the final say on the Bible’s meaning.

As white men and women debated the proper role of the church in free and slave societies, many Black southerners continued to find solace in religion. Enslaved individuals who excelled at preaching, singing, and playing instruments provided role models for those with whom they shared their bondage and inspired some to resist their enslavement. Yet after Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, open revolts were extremely rare. Moreover, the rapid settlement of white populations in new areas of the South in the 1830s and 1840s deprived potential Black insurrectionists of a safe refuge where they might escape capture. African Americans in the South thus continued to depend on the forms of resistance developed earlier—feigning illness, destroying tools, injuring livestock, petty theft, arson, and running away—to survive within the confines of bondage. (See chapter 6)

Some Africans sought to escape the brutalities of slavery by rising up against their captors while being transported to the Americas. The United States had outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, but other nations still participated in the trade between Africa and the West Indies. In July 1839, captive West Africans under the leadership of Joseph Cinque revolted and took control of the Spanish slave ship Amistad. They ordered the owners to return them to Africa, but after a meandering course through the Atlantic Ocean, they were waylaid by a U.S. Navy brig. The Africans were charged with the murder of the Amistad’s captain and jailed in New Haven, Connecticut. Abolitionists came to their support, however, and former president John Quincy Adams represented them in court. After a long legal battle, the U.S. Supreme Court freed the “mutineers” in 1841. They returned to Africa the following year.

For those Black people already enslaved in the United States, frontier regions remained one of the few areas where open revolt against bondage was still possible. During the 1830s, one of the most successful and sustained battles against the white majority took place in Florida, which had long served as a haven for freedom seekers (known as “maroons”). Here, the swampy terrain provided protection for isolated groups of formerly enslaved escapees, the rich lands provided food and shelter, and the Seminole nation provided allies.

Although some Seminoles held enslaved African Americans, Seminole society was not rigidly racist. Here, bondage resembled the traditional slavery of Africa more than it did the commercially oriented institution fashioned by European settlers and their descendants. Enslaved Black people often lived on small farms with their own families and enjoyed many of the rights and liberties of full members of the nation. Many married into the nation, creating a mixed-race culture that drew on African, American, and Seminole traditions.

Seminoles and the maroons who lived among them fought two wars against the United States. The First Seminole War broke out in 1812 when U.S. marines invaded Florida, hoping to wrest control of the region from Spain. Seminoles and maroons repelled the invaders, with the formerly enslaved people resisting most fiercely. After Andrew Jackson again led U.S. troops against Spanish and Seminole settlements in Florida in 1818, Spain ceded Florida to the United States the next year. A decade later, the U.S. government sought to remove Seminoles from the region. Between 1832 and 1835, most of Seminole nation was resettled in Oklahoma and other western territories. A minority, however, refused to leave. Under the direction of a militant and charismatic leader named Osceola (Billy Powell), they fought a successful seven-year guerrilla action against the U.S. Army.

The Second Seminole War, which began in 1835, was expected to last only a few months. Instead it lasted years and cost the lives of some sixteen hundred U.S. troops as well as $30 to $40 million. It erupted partly because of federal efforts to drive all southeastern nations beyond the Mississippi, but slave traders, enslavers, and would-be enslavers who hoped to get their hands on formerly enslaved escapees also supported the war. Osceola counted many maroons and mixed-race warriors among his supporters. According to a contemporary account, “The negroes, from the commencement of the Florida war, have, for their numbers, been the most formidable foe, more bloodthirsty, active, and revengeful than the Indian.” Even more alarming to white military men was the fact that hundreds of enslaved Black people escaped from nearby white-owned plantations and joined Seminole ranks. American General Thomas Sidney Jessup wrote in late 1836, “This, you may be assured, is a negro, not an Indian war.”

Finally stalemated, General Jessup hoped to separate the mixed-race fighters from non mixed-race Seminoles. He offered to send those with African American blood to the Oklahoma Territory while allowing Seminoles to remain in southern Florida. “Separating the negroes from the Indians,” he wrote in 1838, would “weaken the latter more than they would be weakened by the loss of the same number of their own people.” Other white military feared that Black warriors, having tasted comparative freedom and proven themselves in battle, would prove more dangerous than ever if re-enslaved. “Ten resolute negroes,” warned one officer, “with a knowledge of the country, are sufficient to desolate the frontier, from one extent to the other.”

Ultimately the Second Seminole War ended in a U.S. victory, but only after Osceola was lured into the U.S. Army camp by false promises of a treaty. The Army took him captive, devastating the exhausted Seminole and maroon forces. Even then, however, the victors were forced to allow the formerly enslaved people among Seminoles to accompany Native peoples westward rather than be returned to their former white owners.

The fierce resistance by the formerly enslaved people and Seminole warriors speaks eloquently of the courage, determination, and military capacity that existed among Black and Native peoples in this area of the South, where a strong alliance between them was possible. Unfortunately for the enslaved people, such allies were extremely rare. Even other Native polities, such as the Cherokees, practiced a form of slavery from the 1830s on that was closer to that of white Americans than of Seminoles.

In the territory of Oklahoma, where the Five Civilized Tribes were resettled in the 1830s, enslaved persons held by Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Chickasaw, and Choctaw masters fled to the Seminoles, just as those owned by white Georgians had done decades before. Others fled north to find freedom. The enslaved Henry Bibb, for instance, escaped to Michigan and published his story, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, which was widely read among northerners. Mexico, too, though a great distance from most plantations, offered a safe haven much like that provided by Florida in the early nineteenth century. In 1842, two dozen enslaved people in Cherokees' settlements attempted a mass escape, fleeing southward in hopes of reaching Mexico. Enslaved persons among the Muscogees joined the group, which later liberated eight more Black people held by Choctaw slave catchers. Eventually, however, Cherokee militiamen overtook the freedom seekers, only two of whom escaped.

Free as well as enslaved Black people threatened planters’ authority. In fact, by the 1830s, free Black people were often seen as a more serious threat to white supremacy than rebellious enslaved people. The mere existence of free Black people in the South challenged any simple connection between race and enslavement.

Fearing the influence that free Black people exerted on enslaved persons, the Virginia General Assembly in 1837 reaffirmed an 1806 statute that allowed county courts to determine whether free Black people would be allowed to remain in residence permanently. To stay in Virginia, the petitioner had to demonstrate that he or she was “of good character, peaceable, orderly and industrious, and not addicted to drunkenness, gaming or other vice.” African American men had a more difficult time than women persuading courts to let them remain in the state as free persons. It was hard for them to be industrious without being viewed as competitors with white workingmen, and they were more likely to be considered disorderly by their mere presence in the population.

Free Black women posed less of a threat because their most marketable skills were in areas—laundry, domestic work, petty trades, and sewing—largely reserved for their sex and race. Harriet Cook, a washerwoman in Leesburg, Virginia, worked for twelve years after her 1838 emancipation to build an impressive and supportive clientele among that city’s white residents. When she petitioned to gain permanent residence status, leading citizens swore that “It would be a serious inconvenience to a number of the citizens of Leesburg to be deprived of her services as a washerwoman and in other capacities in which in consequence of her gentility, trustworthiness, and skill, she is exceedingly useful.” Her petition was granted.

The larger numbers of women who were emancipated, the job opportunities afforded them in cities, and the greater leniency of courts and legislatures in granting them permanent residency resulted in a skewed sex ratio in the South’s urban areas. As a result, free Black women often had to support themselves and their families and to fend off economic and sexual exploitation by white people without the assistance of husbands, fathers, or brothers. Nonetheless, they were able to build and sustain communities in many southern cities.

The number of free Black people in the South remained small throughout the mid nineteenth century, and most lived in towns and cities rather than plantation areas. Yet their presence still created considerable anxiety among white citizens. By 1840 the state of Mississippi had passed laws expressly prohibiting free Black people from testifying against white individuals, serving in the militia, voting, or holding office. A year later, a group of Natchez white people called a meeting at City Hall to consider “imposing a fine on the owners of slaves who permit them to go at large and hire their time; and also . . . requiring free persons of color to remove from [Mississippi] and to prevent their emigration into the state.”

Like planters, nonslaveholding white people often opposed the presence of free Black people in the South. They tended to see free Black workers as unwanted competition for jobs. In the North, immigrants from Ireland, Germany, and elsewhere reshaped the labor force and created tensions among white workers as well as between white and Black people. With smaller cities and less industry, the South attracted far fewer immigrants, leaving free Black Americans as the major source of economic competition. Still, a minority of white southerners believed that exemplary free Black people should be allowed to reside in southern communities, and some supported the petitions of free Black people who sought to remain in the region. Most of the white population who supported the presence of free Black people lived in small towns and rural areas of the upper South. Many belonged to small religious denominations such as German Moravians and Quakers. In Loudoun County, Virginia, for instance, some three dozen citizens, mostly Quakers and Germans, argued in 1843 that “every man [sic], not convicted of a crime, has a natural right, to reside in the community where he was born.” Although such sentiments were expressed more and more rarely after 1840, they did not entirely disappear.

In cities, however, where white workers competed directly with free Black laborers, tensions between the two groups often ran high. There many white people wanted to assure that restrictive laws were enforced. Throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, southern white workers strove to force Black people, enslaved and free, out of their neighborhoods and out of their occupations. Frederick Douglass remembered a white ship’s carpenter named Thomas Lanman who had murdered two enslaved sailors. Regularly boasting of the crime, Lanman added that “when others would do as much as he had done, they would be rid of the d——d niggers.” Douglass himself experienced this attitude more directly in 1836. Hired out by his owner as a caulker in a Baltimore shipyard, white workers severely beat Douglass. Such scare tactics occasionally achieved limited results. Douglass’s enslaver pulled him out of the shipyard just as the white workers wanted.

White workers largely depended on legislation to remove free Black people from the region and from the labor force. Some politicians expressed sympathy for demands to limit certain occupations to whites only. But to write such provisions into law and enforce them would have limited the freedom of the planters to make use of the Black people they held in bondage in whatever way they saw fit. No southern legislature was prepared to do that. Angered by such legislative failures but unwilling to champion emancipation, white workers generally blamed their woes on the helpless Black population.

Many white southerners hoped that the opening of western lands to white settlement would ease conflicts created by differences of wealth. The availability of lands once occupied by Native Americans or controlled by Mexico provided a temporary safety valve, especially for white yeomen hoping to join the plantation elite. There were other western areas, most notably the Appalachian foothills and highlands that ran from northwestern Virginia through Georgia, where slavery would never be profitable. These regions offered nonslaveholding white people the chance to carve out a living with only tenuous ties to the economic, political, and social system built on enslaved labor.

Yet as white southerners pushed further west, the planter elite faced new challenges. Both slave owners and non-slave owners in frontier areas demanded political representation and legislation that threatened the authority of planters back east. At the same time, the spread of plantations westward expanded the internal slave trade and fueled growing criticisms from northern abolitionists. In response, enslavers developed an elaborate pro-slavery ideology to justify their “peculiar institution.” Some wealthy southerners, anxious about the difficulties of sustaining a slave society, sought to diversify the South’s economy. However, this too was viewed as a threat to planters’ political and economic power.  Thus the expansion of slavery westward provided opportunities but also inspired new problems.

The vast majority of southern white workers and farmers betrayed no sympathy for enslaved African Americans. Most of those who lived on the margins of the rich plantation lands were closely tied to external cotton markets and large planters. Their counterparts who settled in the foothills and highlands, however, relied on diversified farming and benefited little from policies that enhanced the power of the big slave owners. Yet most wanted simply to be left to their own devices, and many still believed that slavery was the best way to maintain proper order in a society populated by both white and Black people. Meanwhile, white workers in the state’s urban areas, particularly those along the coast, benefited from the slavery-produced cotton boom because it improved the general business climate.

Throughout the 1840s, the South continued to expand in both population and areas settled. In the mid 1840s a rise in cotton prices increased the optimism and the profits of small farmers, rural merchants, and large planters alike. Between 1840 and 1860, the South’s total population grew by half (from seven to eleven million). In the wake of the removal of the Cherokee and other Native nations during the 1830s, white people flooded into former Native lands, and the railroad soon followed. The cotton kingdom, which in 1845 already extended from the Carolinas southwestward to Texas and from Tennessee down to Florida, now pushed into new areas. Frontier settlements in western Missouri and Arkansas, which contained but a tiny number of settlers in 1840, experienced the most rapid growth.

Life on the frontier was difficult, and for white people who had become used to living in more settled eastern regions, the move westward often required substantial adjustments. Small farmers had to carve fields out of forests without the aid of enslaved labor, and well-to-do planters were forced to subject their families to the ruder life on the cotton frontier. Having moved from North Carolina to Alabama with her slaveholder husband, May Drake expressed her discontent in letters to her family: “To a female who has once been blest with every comfort, and even every luxury, blest with the society of a large and respectable circle of relations and friends . . . to such people Mississippi and Alabama are but a dreary waste.” Another wrote, “The farmers in this country [Alabama] live in a miserable manner. They think only of making money, and their houses are hardly fit to live in.” Although some planters, like the Natchez nabobs, tried to bring luxury and refinement to the frontier, many relocating white families found themselves struggling to rebuild homes, communities, and social networks.

Yet even in these new territories where everyone faced some hardships, settlers of moderate means developed resentments against wealthy planters. For instance, the Mississippi Free Trader, published in Natchez, editorialized in April 1842 on the relative value of small farmers and larger planters to the city’s economy. The small farmers, it noted,

would crowd our streets with fresh and healthy supplies of home productions, and the proceeds would be expended here among our merchants, grocers, and artisans. The large planters . . . for the most part, sell their cotton in Liverpool; buy their wines in London or Havre; their negro clothing in Boston; their plantation implements and supplies in Cincinnati; and their groceries and fancy articles in New Orleans. . . .

Conflicts among white southerners centered on several issues, including political representation, taxation, debt, and common rights to land and waterways. Planters, for instance, successfully supported legislation that put a ceiling on the taxation of enslaved persons. This meant fewer state funds available for projects—such as roads, railroads, and canals—that might benefit the citizens at large. Nonslaveholding white people had a difficult time changing such laws because many southern states continued to use property qualifications to restrict voting rights and holding office. In the seaboard states, the eastern counties where large planters held sway were accorded much greater representation than were the western counties, which initially had been sparsely settled. As those western counties became more populated, the planter-dominated legislatures failed to reapportion representation.

In addition, the property limits on voting lessened the electoral leverage of small farmers and working-class white people throughout each state. In North Carolina, which had some of the most restrictive requirements in the South into the 1850s, only adult white males who owned at least fifty acres could cast a ballot in the state senate election. This requirement disenfranchised about one-half of the state’s potential voters. To run for the state senate a man had to own at least three hundred acres, and election to the state’s House of Commons required a one hundred-acre holding. The governor was required to own land worth $2,000 and was not chosen by popular election until after 1850.

Not all southern states imposed such severe restrictions on political participation. Mississippi, for instance, eliminated property qualifications for office much earlier than elsewhere in the South. Still, the vast majority of those who held office were planters, slave owners, or prosperous nonslaveholding yeomen. This was in part because party leaders were prominent and privileged men, such as the Natchez nabobs, and they set the agenda as well as the election slates for local, county, and state elections. In addition, elections were public events, presided over by local planters or merchants. The secret ballot was not yet utilized, assuring that most nonslaveholding white citizens, who depended on their economic superiors for credit, employment, or other forms of assistance, would support the planter candidate.

Yet nonslaveholding white citizens did not simply defer to the planter elite. Despite their limited electoral power, they made demands on legislators and through the courts. During the 1840s and 1850s, property qualifications for voting were eliminated in nearly all the southern states, and the number and proportion of representatives from western regions in state legislatures was increased. Like their counterparts in the early nineteenth century, less well-to-do white people continued to protest the confiscation of property for debts, the construction of dams that interfered with fishing rights, and the fencing of supposedly communal lands by individual farmers and planters. Sometimes the protests were orderly affairs, involving petitions to legislatures and claims made at court. At other times, near riots erupted as mobs of dispossessed or indebted white people railed against their treatment at the hands of wealthier neighbors or high-handed judges.

There were, however, significant barriers to sustaining opposition to planter policies among nonslaveholding white people. First, many poor and working-class white people were as deeply racist as their elite counterparts. When planters claimed that challenges to their authority would increase the chances of uprisings by enslaved people or an expansion of free Black rights, most white southerners toned down their grievances. Just as important, nonslaveholding white people were themselves a varied group. Yeomen farmers who owned land and made a good living joined planters in confiscating the goods of indebted landless white people. Even those at the very bottom of white society did not always share a common cause. Some lived as man and wife without benefit of marriage and found their only allies among petty criminals, free Black people, and other marginal groups. These were ostracized by their more respectable counterparts who, although landless, maintained steady work habits, stable families, and a proper distance from Black people and criminals.

Probably numbering some thirty to fifty percent of all white people in the South in the mid nineteenth century, landless whites comprised a large and diverse population at the bottom of the white social hierarchy. It was these very differences among the South’s nonslaveholding residents that limited their ability, and desire, to forge a meaningful opposition to planter control. Yet various groups outside the planter class continued to assert their own rights and interests, thereby complicating the lives of planters who hoped to achieve absolute authority over their inferiors, white as well as Black.

Until about 1850, as slavery expanded south- and westward, declining profits characterized older areas of cultivation, such as Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. The resulting losses were offset in part by monies made on the internal slave trade. Planters in the upper South could reap a significant return on early investments by selling the best field hands and most fertile mothers among their enslaved workers to planters in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and lands west. But without new enslaved African Americans coming into the upper South, the prospects for future income were limited and the ability to leave one’s heirs a planter lifestyle subverted.

The internal slave trade was one of the cruelest aspects of a harsh system. Although enslaved people had always been subject to sale, the possibility of being sold to a plantation hundreds of miles from one’s family increased dramatically in the 1840s with the extension of slavery into Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Because the enslaved laborers in greatest demand were between the ages of twenty and fifty, a high percentage of those sold left spouses and children behind. As slavery’s heartland moved southwestward, the forced migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans caused the massive destruction of families. Fannie Berry, a former enslaved Virginian, who was interviewed in 1937, recalled a day when

There was a great crying and carrying on among the slaves who had been sold. Two or three of them gals had young babies they were taking with them. . . . As soon as they got on the train this ol’ new master had the train stopped and made them poor gal mothers take babies off and laid them precious things on the ground and left them to live or die.

At other times it was the mothers who were left behind and the children who were sold away. Whether adults or children, enslaved African Americans sold into the Deep South faced even hotter and less hospitable climates, more demanding work schedules, and harsher punishments than those they had experienced in the upper South.

The internal slave trade also created problems for white people who resided in what had once been profitable plantation regions. The sale of enslaved individuals to other regions increased owners’ fears that enslaved people would retaliate against slaveholders and their families and sometimes assured that those left behind would be more recalcitrant and resistant than ever. In certain areas of Virginia and Maryland, the sale of large numbers of enslaved African Americans increased the relative proportion of free Black people in the population. This development raised further anxieties about free Black people’s influence on those left in bondage and their competition for jobs with poor whites, more of whom were now forced to seek work in urban areas. Some white people in the upper South wondered if slavery’s advantages still outweighed its costs.

During the 1830s and 1840s, revolts and escapes by enslaved African Americans, the growth of the free Black community, demands by nonslaveholding white Americans, and conflicts with overseers and wives all challenged the power of planters. The British abolition of West Indian slavery in 1833, the Panic of 1837, and the emancipation of enslaved people in the French West Indies in 1848 intensified slave owners’ concerns over the future of the South’s increasingly peculiar institution. Attacks from northern opponents—a growing abolitionist movement, the defection of the Grimke sisters and freedom seekers, the condemnation of church leaders, and massive petition campaigns—heightened slave owners’ concerns as well.

The defenders of slavery did not retreat, however. Believing that expansion into western lands presaged a new day for planters, they developed an aggressive defense of their way of life and further restricted possibilities for change. Previously referred to apologetically as a necessary but temporary evil, Black bondage was now described as the natural order of things. In the words of South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun, slavery was “a positive good,” an institution beneficial alike to planters, enslaved people, and all other social groups.

Calhoun held up enslaved labor as in all respects superior to wage labor. The sharpening of social conflicts in the North, he claimed, testified to the superiority of outright bondage. “There is and has always been, in an advanced stage of wealth and civilization,” Calhoun told the U.S. Senate, “a conflict between labor and capital. The condition of society in the South exempts us from the disorders and dangers resulting from this conflict.” This fact, he asserted, demonstrates “how vastly more favorable our condition of society is to that of other sections for free and stable institutions.” According to Calhoun and like-minded planters, the food, shelter, and clothing provided enslaved workers was superior to that available to free laborers of the North, and planters did not cut loose their enslaved African Americans when sick or aged.

Thomas Dew, a young professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, crafted the first significant proslavery document. His Review of the Debates in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 offered an argument on behalf of slavery in the guise of commentaries on the legislature’s debates. Drawing on historical examples from ancient civilizations and on Biblical justifications from the Old and New Testaments, Dew claimed that slavery was best both for the South and for the enslaved individuals. Planters, in this scenario, were both the instruments of God and the upholders of classical traditions and values. Indeed, Biblical support for slavery may have been the most widely cited rationale for maintaining the institution, because scripture offered the most effective response to northern abolitionists and ministers who claimed to have right and righteousness on their side.

South Carolina Governor George Duffie was one of many politicians who embraced Biblical justifications for slavery. Speaking before his state legislature in 1835, he clearly distinguished between the character and rights of white and of Black people, justifying slavery only for those of African ancestry. Black people, he proclaimed, were “destined by providence” for bondage. They were “in all respects, physical, moral, and political, inferior to millions of the human race” and therefore “unfit for self-government of any kind.”

During the next twenty-five years, proslavery politicians, professors, physicians, and publicists dutifully elaborated the racist argument, offering a stream of scientific as well as religious evidence in slavery’s defense. The culmination of these arguments appeared in the 1850s in two books written by Virginian George Fitzhugh. In Sociology for the South and Cannibals All, Fitzhugh claimed that the reckless individualism fostered by “free labor” in the North was far more exploitative than the paternal guardianship that characterized slavery. In his view, African Americans were a child-like race that required lifetime care and control.

Such racist doctrine was scientific nonsense, but it served three important purposes for the slave owners. First, it justified the bondage of African Americans by ruling out all arguments based on universal human rights. Second, it undermined the status and claims of free Black people. Third, it accomplished both of these objectives without explicitly threatening the rights of poor white southerners, whose support (or at least toleration) the slaveholders required.

The development of the proslavery argument both reflected and reinforced an increasingly rigid southern political and social structure at precisely the moment when reform and innovation were most necessary. The expansion of plantations into new geographical areas turned labor abundance into labor scarcity for many planters and exacerbated their financial dependence on single-crop, export-driven agriculture. As the Panic of 1837 had shown, dependence on a single crop and on foreign markets made white southerners vulnerable to economic developments over which they had little control. The spread of slavery also intensified challenges from northerners who opposed the system on moral, political, and economic grounds, from enslaved African Americans whose family and community networks were shattered by the internal slave trade, and from white southerners who feared competition from Black people or resented the tyranny of planters.

What role did one of the most popular statues in antebellum America play in the political debates about slavery?

Although few planters questioned the institution of slavery itself, some began considering the advantages of economic diversification in the South. But during the mid 1840s, despite serious fluctuations in the prices paid for cotton, tobacco, and rice, the profitability of plantation agriculture allowed those who supported the status quo to gain the upper hand. Advocates of diversification found it difficult to gain adherents when both agricultural production and the demand for plantation crops was on the increase. With the wealthiest residents of the South investing larger and larger sums in land and enslaved workers, nonstaple food crops remained marginal to the region’s economy.

Some investors, particularly in the cities and towns of the Southeast, did begin to diversify by investing in industry. In the 1840s, William Gregg’s textile factory in Graniteville, South Carolina, and Joseph Reid Anderson’s Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, Virginia, were among the most profitable southern industrial ventures. Whereas the textile labor force was composed primarily of poor white women and children, the iron industry recruited African Americans, enslaved and free, in large numbers. Although these employment patterns demonstrated the capacity of women and Black people for industrial labor, they limited the potential for industrial growth. Only the poorest white women could work for wages without damaging their family’s reputation; the increased employment of free Black men raised anxieties among skilled white men; and enslaved workers were generally more valuable in agriculture than in industry. Factories, then, could flourish only on the periphery of plantation society.

Although industrialization was marginal to the southern economy, some planters still saw it as a threat to the institution of slavery. Any work off of the plantation brought a enslaved person into close contact with free laborers and with new ideas about life and liberty. That exposure encouraged and assisted attempts to escape slavery. Frederick Douglass’s experiences provide a good example. Hostile southern white workers had once forced Douglass to return to his plantation from the docks of Baltimore. Later, however, he found himself hired out on the docks again in friendlier surroundings. There, according to Douglass, two Irish longshoremen “expressed the deepest sympathy for me, and the most dedicated hatred of slavery. They went so far as to tell me that I ought to run away and go to the North, that I should find friends there, and that I should then be as free as anybody.” Douglass “remembered their words and their advice,” and a few years later escaped to the North by passing as a free Black sailor, an impersonation aided by his experience in the shipyard and the assistance of real free Black people. Other enslaved workers simply took advantage of the relative anonymity that large cities provided and disappeared into the South’s urban free Black population.

It was urban life more than industrial labor that led to Douglass’s escape. In fact, in some areas, such as Richmond and Lynchburg, Virginia, enslaved persons worked in factories without any weakening of the system of bondage. Moreover, industrial slavery was one way to breathe new life into the southern economy without challenging the basic racial and labor relations of the region. Still, many planters assumed that industry and urbanization were synonymous and that both threatened the southern way of life.

For the cities’ detractors, flight from enslavement was by no means the only problem. The greater freedom (especially freedom of movement) that generally accompanied urban employment tended to erode the enslavers' power and ability to demand unquestioned deference from Black people. “The ties which bound together the master and the slave,” the New Orleans Daily Picayune complained, were being “gradually severed” in that city, as enslaved workers “become intemperate, disorderly, and lose the respect which the servant should entertain for the master.” The behavior of free Black people, freedom seekers, and resistant enslaved African Americans in cities was considered “contagious upon those who do not possess these dangerous privileges.”

Most slave owners, then, feared and despised the possibility of increased industrialization and the growth of cities in the South. “We have no cities. We don’t want them,” exclaimed one white Alabaman, who no doubt expressed the feelings of many of his neighbors. “We want no manufactures; we desire no trading, no mechanical or manufacturing classes. As long as we have our rice, our sugar, our tobacco, and our cotton, we can command wealth to purchase all we want.”

Above all, slave owners worried that free wage-earners and their employers would seek first to limit the use of enslaved labor and eventually collide with the whole slave-labor system. The small circle of southern leaders who advocated economic development and diversification agreed. One of their leading spokesmen, Senator George Mason of Virginia, complained that “slavery discourages arts and manufactures. The poor despise labor when performed by slaves.” To distinguish white from Black urban workers, white artisans demanded preferential hiring and voting rights based on their race, justifying planters’ fears that industrialization and urbanization was the beginning of a slippery slope that would disrupt their traditional power and privilege.

It was even more frightening to enslavers, however, that white and Black workers might make common cause, a situation more likely to occur in the few cities with high rates of immigration from Europe. In Baltimore, New Orleans, Charleston, and Richmond, for example, the urban working-class population increasingly included immigrants, who seemed to have little loyalty to or even respect for the region’s deeply rooted system of chattel slavery. A Richmond newspaper assured its white subscribers that a major advantage of enslaved labor was its tendency to exclude “a populace made up of the dregs of Europe.” But some African Americans viewed those “dregs” as potential allies and tried to assist them. For instance, in 1847, the members of Richmond’s First African American Baptist Church sent forty dollars to Ireland to help victims of the famine. Later they donated smaller sums to assist the Irish poor in their hometown. The Charleston Standard no doubt spoke for many enslavers when it branded foreign-born workers as “a curse rather than a blessing to our peculiar institution.”

The South might have sustained a plantation system based on slavery and staple-crop agriculture and, simultaneously, developed an extensive industrial base by encouraging immigrants to settle in the region. In fact, many southerners who advocated economic diversification insisted that commerce and manufacturing would complement, not threaten, agriculture. James D. B. DeBow, who was inspired by the Memphis commercial convention of 1845, established a journal, the Commercial Review of the South and the West, that proclaimed in print, “Commerce is King.” DeBow was also an ardent proslavery advocate who believed that only by creating southern commercial and industrial enterprises could the region maintain its existing traditions and institutions. This approach was rendered impossible, however, by planters’ fears of foreign workers and their refusal to recognize manufacturing or wage labor as more than unworthy stepchildren in the southern economy. Indeed, planters tended to regard free labor as subversive and actively disruptive of the benefits of bound labor.

By the time Debow’s Review gained a significant readership at mid-century, the opportunity to reshape the South’s economic structure had passed. Although complaints about planters’ dependency on northern capital and commerce persisted, when it came to practical action, most planters chose to invest in land and enslaved workers. By the late 1840s, as prices and profits for cotton, rice, sugar, and tobacco rose, ventures that would extend the geographical boundaries of plantation slavery generated more interest than those that would diversify the economy.

White southerners had long dreamed of extending their dominion into tropical climates. Congressmen and presidents cast greedy glances at Cuba and Central America throughout the early and mid nineteenth century. In New Orleans, the large number of French people, free Black people, and enslaved workers who arrived from St. Domingue (present-day Haiti) after the revolution there in the 1790s gave the city a Caribbean flair that made planters in the area think of the possibilities of exploiting the West Indies. Proslavery adventurers actually mounted invasions of Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua in this period. And the successful settlement and “emancipation” of Texas in the 1830s revitalized dreams of a slave empire that stretched into Mexico and the Caribbean.

Yet opening new lands to slavery created perils as well opportunities. Territories acquired by the United States in the 1830s and 1840s inspired increasingly heated debates over the boundaries of slave society. When war erupted with Mexico in 1846, the criticisms from abolitionists intensified. In its aftermath, Whigs and Democrats were faced with difficult choices as some Americans who were adamantly opposed to the extension of slavery began to take a stand in the partisan political arena.

After Texas, Cuba was perhaps the most appealing prospect for annexation. In 1823, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams claimed, “There are laws of political as well as physical gravitation, and if an apple, severed by a tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union. . . .” In 1848, President James K. Polk tried, unsuccessfully, to help this “natural” gravitation along by offering Spain $100 million for the island. Similar offers, supported by circles of Cubans dissatisfied with Spanish rule, were made several more times over the next decade, although without success.

Southern planters also investigated economic possibilities in California during the 1840s. To encourage larger numbers of U.S. residents to settle the region, immigrants to the West Coast described the rich lands of the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and the docile population of Native American workers. Initially, these pioneers cared little about the origins of the new settlers, so long as the United States gained control of the region from Mexico. But planters, such as Richard Fulton of Missouri, wanted to know, “Is California a slave state and could our citizens bring their slaves with them?”

Those already established in the area tried to reassure potential southern émigrés. Rancher John Marsh, who had gained significant experience in Native American affairs, admitted that Mexico did have laws against slavery, but he assured prospective migrants that the Native peoples were willing workers. He even claimed that they submitted to “flagellation with more humility than negroes.” Pierson B. Reading, a former New Orleans cotton broker who resettled in California, wrote to a friend back home in 1844, “The Indians of California make as obedient and humble slaves as the negroes in the south,” and “for a mere trifle, you can secure their services for life.” Although Native peoples proved more resistant than these descriptions suggest, white southerners, encouraged by increased demand for agricultural products, eagerly envisioned plantations, stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, worked by enslaved dark-skinned people.

The dreams of westward expansion fueled political conflicts within and between the North and the South since the 1810s. (See chapter 8) The Lone Star Republic of Texas generated intensive debates in the 1830s and 1840s. It had sought U.S. statehood from the moment it achieved independence in 1836, but northern hostility to admitting this immense slaveholding territory into the Union had postponed action for several years. In 1844, however, the Democratic Party platform tied support for Texas statehood to the demand—popular among northern farmers—for the annexation of all of Oregon (a region claimed by both England and the United States). Farmers from the Old Northwest had been eyeing Oregon’s Willamette Valley for years. By 1843, thousands of wagons were already following the Oregon Trail west from Missouri. Southern planters and politicians began to believe that the North’s appetite for new lands might at last provide the basis for Texas statehood. The election the following year turned on the issue of admitting Texas and annexing Oregon.

As noted earlier, the Democrats chose James K. Polk as their party standard-bearer, overlooking both President Tyler, who was considered ineffective, and Martin Van Buren, who was less enthusiastic about the admission of Texas. Andrew Jackson was a great fan of Polk who, like him, was a Tennessee Democrat with a vision of America as an expansive nation. The Whigs nominated Henry Clay, but the party was divided over the wisdom of westward growth. Southern Whigs were particularly angered at Clay’s failure to support the admission of Texas, whereas northern Whigs were annoyed that Clay even considered taking such a stand.

Polk’s election was viewed as a mandate for expansion. The new administration did not annex all of Oregon, however. Instead, it agreed with Britain to define the 49th parallel as the northern boundary of the United States, simply extending the eastern border with Canada westward. But even before this boundary dispute was settled, the U.S. Congress approved the annexation of Texas in December 1845.

President Polk had even grander plans for expansion. During his one term in office, he oversaw the acquisition of more territory by the United States than any other president. His predecessor, President John Tyler, completed the annexation of Texas, but Polk presided over the settlement of the disputed Oregon Territory and then turned his attention to wresting more land from Mexico. Knowing that this plan would necessitate war, Polk sent U.S. troops across the Nueces River in Texas in January 1846 and into territory claimed by Mexico. News that Mexican troops had crossed the Rio Grande River in April and attacked American soldiers then led Polk to demand war with Mexico. Whigs, however, thought Polk provoked the conflict, and a majority voted against the declaration of war. The newly elected Whig representative from Illinois, Abraham Lincoln, even demanded evidence about the precise spot where Mexicans had supposedly shed American blood.

Still, the Democratic majority carried the day. “As war exists,” the president then told Congress, “we are called upon by every consideration of duty and patriotism to vindicate with decision the honor, the rights, and the interests of our country.” Many, probably most, Americans, North and South, agreed. Another Illinois representative, for instance, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, was a fervent champion of westward expansion. He helped boost the war spirit in Congress and branded critics such as Lincoln as “traitors.”

Despite the arid lands that comprised most of northern Mexico, many slaveholders eagerly looked forward to creating new slavery supporting states from these hoped-for territories. “Every battle fought in Mexico,” cheered the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, “and every dollar spent there, but insures the acquisition of territory which must widen the field of Southern enterprise and power in the future. And the final result will be to readjust the power of the [southern] confederacy, so as to give us control over the operation of government in all time to come.”

For proslavery forces, the chance to acquire additional lands in the Southwest offered numerous benefits. The spread of slavery would aid planters in the upper South by creating an even greater demand and higher price for their excess enslaved workers. Small farmers who owned no enslaved persons (a group that would constitute three-fourths of southern white families by 1860) could hope for a better chance on the new western lands, thereby alleviating the pressures on the planter class to respond to their needs by redistributing existing wealth. And finally, the rapid growth of a nonslaveholding and increasingly antislavery North endangered the political autonomy of the slaveholding South. Geographical expansion would help ensure planters increased representation in the Senate through the admission of new slavery supporting states. This would prevent the North from using the federal government to block the interests of slaveholders.

In some parts of the country, however, the enthusiasm of slaveholders for war and their vision of a slave confederacy inspired vigorous opposition. Despite the passage of a resolution supporting the president’s declaration of war, a majority in the House of Representatives also voted in favor of a Whig proposal that declared that the war had been “unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” And while a pro-war demonstration on May 20, 1846, occupied one part of New York’s City Hall Park, George Henry Evans and John Commerford addressed an anti-war rally in another. Having “great reason to believe” that the Mexican War was the work of Texans and their business allies, the rally organizers urged “the Commander in Chief of the army to withdraw his forces, now on the Rio Grande, to some undisputed land belonging to the United States.” And if war proved finally unavoidable, then the American sponsors of prowar meetings and messages “ought to be the first to volunteer, and the first to leave for the seat of war.”

Opposition to the war was strong among northern farmers as well as some businessmen. The Massachusetts state legislature denounced the war and its “triple object of extending slavery, of strengthening the ‘Slave Power,’ and of obtaining control of the Free States” by gaining a slave-state majority in the Senate. The Cleveland Plain Dealer carried a speech by an Ohio Democrat who argued that the administration’s willingness to compromise with Britain on the Oregon boundary while going to war with Mexico over the Texas boundary demonstrated that “the administration is Southern! Southern! Southern! . . . Since the South have [sic] fixed boundaries for free territory, let the North fix boundaries for slave territories.” And Connecticut Congressman Gideon Welles probably spoke for a majority of his constituents when he declared, we must “satisfy the northern people . . . that we are not to extend the institution of slavery as a result of this war.”

Abolitionists helped foment and then reinforce northern fears that the war was a planter conspiracy to assure southern control over the nation. During the 1830s, nearly every acquisition of territory in the South inspired abolitionist outcries against the extension of slavery. Announcement of the outbreak of war with Mexico was received at the 1846 meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society by means of the new magnetic telegraph. Abby Kelley, an abolitionist who had not planned to speak at the New York gathering, impulsively rose in indignation to express her opposition to the war. “Our fathers were successful in the Revolution, because they were engaged in a holy cause, and had right on their side. But in this case we have not. This nation is doomed,” she proclaimed. She prayed for defeat, but envisioned instead a U.S. victory, followed by the day of reckoning, when enslaved southern African Americans would join forces with Nations in the western region, “who are only waiting to plant their tomahawks in the white man’s skull.”

As abolitionists engaged in acts of civil disobedience to protest the war, pacifists sometimes joined them. A young Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes in protest against the war, and was jailed in July 1846. The brief imprisonment inspired his classic essay, “Resistance to Civil Government.” Other antislavery advocates, however, followed Abby Kelley in taking a more belligerent pro-Mexico stance. Abolitionists across the country signed antiwar pledges and advocated military victory for Mexico. William Lloyd Garrison spoke for many abolitionists when he declared

I desire to see human life at all times held sacred; but in a struggle like this, so horribly unjust and offensive on our part, so purely of self-defence against lawless invaders on the part of the Mexicans, I feel as a matter of justice, to desire the overwhelming defeat of the American troops, and the success of the injured Mexicans.

The abolitionist campaign bolstered opposition to the war among some Americans, but popular enthusiasm was inspired by the rapid advancement of U.S. troops into Mexico.

Although the war lasted eighteen months, U.S. troops dominated the fighting. General Zachary Taylor captured northeastern Mexico, including Monterrey, in September 1846. Colonel Stephen Kearney captured Santa Fe that same fall and then joined the ongoing battle in California, where Mexican forces were quickly defeated. When Mexico refused to surrender, Polk sent General Winfield Scott to march troops north from Veracruz, on Mexico’s Gulf Coast. Scott’s army seized Mexico City in September 1847, forcing the Mexican government to negotiate the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo soon thereafter.

The success of the U.S. Army assured the dismemberment of Mexico. In March 1848, the Senate approved the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, granting the United States control over the provinces of California and New Mexico and moving the Texas-Mexican border southward from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande. The United States thus acquired vast new lands that offered seemingly limitless opportunities for economic advancement. But who would benefit most from these opportunities: southern planters, small farmers, or northern laborers? This question moved center stage in the nation’s political debates.

Most white Americans, and certainly most Whigs, were not opposed to expansion. They might oppose expansion by force of arms or in the interest of enslaver, but even antiwar northerners generally agreed that the conquest of western lands benefited the nation. Journalist Newspaper editor John L. O’Sullivan rallied support for westward expansion; in 1845, he claimed that it was Americans’ “manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” Although O’Sullivan’s New York colleague Horace Greeley cautioned that a “nation cannot simultaneously devote its energies to the absorption of others’ territories and the improvement of its own,” settlers in the disputed western territories were enthusiastic about expansion and relatively unconcerned about contradictions between American principles and practice.

In California, John C. Frémont, who worked with the U.S. Army’s topographical corps there, was happy to oblige when Polk indicated that the U.S. naval fleet in the Pacific would support a settler uprising along the West Coast. In 1846, he helped organize a rebellion among U.S. citizens living in California, and the “Bear Republic” soon declared its independence from Mexico. Frémont was certain that annexation would soon follow, counting on his brother-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, to carry the banner of California statehood in Congress.

With war underway and further expansion seeming inevitable, politicians turned their attention to the fate of slavery in the territories that were now sure to be acquired. Congressman David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, opened the debate almost immediately. In 1846, at Wilmot’s initiative, the House of Representatives voted to prohibit slavery in any territory acquired through the war with Mexico. Although defeated in the Senate, the Wilmot Proviso had received the endorsement of all but one northern state legislature by 1849.

Wilmot never considered his proposal a move “designed especially for the benefit of the Black race.” Nevertheless, it won fervent support among people in the free states who opposed slavery. This sentiment was strongest in New England, where clergymen, followers of Garrison, Liberty Party adherents, and free Black people were among the numerous contingents of antislavery advocates by the late 1840s. In 1846, a convention of working people protested the fact that “there are at the present time three millions of our brethren and sisters groaning in chains on the Southern plantations.” Delegates to the convention declared their refusal to do anything “to keep three millions of our brethren and sisters in bondage” and called upon other labor groups “to speak out in thunder tones” to secure for “all others those rights and privileges for which we are contending for ourselves.”

But the majority of working people in the North were more cautious about abolishing slavery throughout the nation. Some no doubt recognized the economic contradictions highlighted in the Richmond, Virginia, Enquirer’s attack on working-class abolitionists. Referring to shoemakers in Lynn, Massachusetts, an editorial noted that they are “a people working all day on brogan shoes for the negroes at the South,” but “who go to Abolition prayer meetings at night.” Others feared that concerns over abolition were taking attention away from the needs of free white workers. George Henry Evans, once an outspoken enemy of slavery, became convinced that the fight for the emancipation of Black people must be postponed until the war against the exploitation of wage labor was won.

Still, if most northerners were wary about the effects of abolishing slavery, they also hotly opposed its extension beyond what then constituted the borders of the South. Northern farmers wanted western lands held free for settlement as homesteads, not as slave plantations. Many urban workers and small producers also hoped eventually to populate the West’s towns and cities, or have them kept free for their children and grandchildren. Immigrants, too, saw the West as a land of opportunity, and many eastern residents hoped that immigrants would settle there and thus alleviate competition for industrial and commercial employment in the East. Finally, free Black northerners were appalled at the thought that slavery would spread beyond its present borders. They rightly feared that their own liberties would be jeopardized by such an expansion.

None of these groups wanted to live among enslaved workers and slave owners nor to compete with enslaved labor. They believed that slavery had imposed multiple indignities, political restrictions, depressed wages, and harsh conditions on free workers in the South, and at the same time it had encouraged industrial stagnation. To all these people, slavery signified the death of everything they cherished or aspired to—personal independence, mutual respect, political equality, the right to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. In attacks on their employers, Lynn shoemakers, Lowell mill operatives, and many other workers compared factory owners with slave owners, and proclaimed the degrading conditions of their own labor by calling themselves “wage slaves.” By accusing their employers of treating them like Black people, they hoped to horrify other white Americans and thereby gain their support.

With so negative a view of slavery, northern workers, farmers, merchants, and manufacturers could hardly relish having the institution gain new vigor by spreading farther west. Only a minority of them were abolitionists; most simply wanted slavery to remain restricted to the South. The vast majority of white northerners, including a number of abolitionists, believed that Black people were innately inferior and thus supported state laws that limited the economic, social, and political rights of free African Americans. They envisioned the western territories as a place where free white men could gain access to cheap and abundant land. Even though far more free white workers were now wage laborers than independent farmers or artisans, they were proud that they could sell their labor as free persons. Although in the midst of strikes and protests, they might wield the rhetoric of wage slavery, most would have agreed with the abolitionist who distinguished between enslaved and free workers by saying, “Does he not own himself?” Moreover, whatever their circumstances at that point, many northern workers still hoped one day to own their own home, land, or business, a hope that the image of wide-open spaces and new opportunities in the West kept alive.

This antipathy to slavery, and in many cases to African Americans, explains why the Wilmot Proviso was so appealing to white northerners. In addition, Free Soil clubs, which opposed the spread of slavery, sprang up quickly in cities and towns throughout the Northeast and upper Midwest at the start of the war with Mexico. By joining these clubs, workers, farmers, and shopkeepers—native-born and immigrant alike—announced that they would not tolerate chattel slavery in the territories acquired from Mexico.

The dispute over the spread of slavery became more and more important in American politics as the war with Mexico ended. This issue would remain central for the next decade and a half, splintering the two main political parties, the Whigs and Democrats. Even before 1848, abolitionists had run for political office under the auspices of the Liberty Party. But when ex-president Martin Van Buren bolted from Democratic ranks to become the candidate of the new Free Soil Party in 1848, the tension mounted. Although not an abolitionist, Van Buren ran on a platform that coupled opposition to the westward spread of slavery with support for “the free grant [of land] to actual settlers.”

In 1848, the Free Soil Party was not strong enough to oust the Whigs or Democrats from national power, in part because it inspired fierce opposition in the North and the South. William Lloyd Garrison and many other radical abolitionists dismissed the Free Soilers for supporting “whitemanism” (that is, keeping the West open to white men only). Most of the northern economic elite also denounced the Free Soil Party. Although in most cases they morally opposed slavery, they opposed even more strongly the organized antislavery movement. Their reasons were many: A mass campaign against slavery would dangerously polarize the nation. It would infuriate slave owners, whom the northern elite counted on as business and political partners. It would undermine the two major political parties and threaten the federal union itself. For instance, Whig leader and financier Philip Hone denounced Free Soilers as “firebrands” who were ready to tear down the edifice of government to erect “altars for the worship of their own idols.” And southern slaveholders were adamant in their opposition. As a result, Free Soil candidate Van Buren lost his bid for a second chance as president.

Despite this defeat, the issues raised by the Free Soil Party did not die. Instead, debates over land and labor grew more heated after 1848. Between 1845 and 1848, the United States had acquired 1.2 million square miles of territory. The victory over Mexico transferred California and the vast New Mexico territory to the United States and assured that the Rio Grande would be recognized as the Texas border. Nearly eighty thousand Spanish-speaking people, mostly of mixed Mexican-Native American descent, lived in the annexed areas. These people would perform much of the low-paid labor needed to make agriculture, ranching, mining, and industry profitable in the region. In addition, there were other racial and ethnic groups already settled in the western territories: Native peoples who had long inhabited the West, enslaved African Americans carried there by their owners, immigrants and free Black Americans migrating westward to gain land and a better chance for an independent livelihood, and Chinese arriving in increasing numbers to work on railroads and in mining camps. These various groups increased the labor force, the competition for land, and the difficulties of resolving questions about the nation’s social, racial, economic, and political order.

In 1848, however, white Americans focused more on their victory over Mexico than on the problems it spawned. Such vast territorial expansion in such a short time exhilarated many Americans. Didn’t the war demonstrate the country’s growing military prowess and finally seal its “manifest destiny” to dominate the continent from sea to sea? Certainly southern planters felt confident that expansion had given new life to the system of plantation slavery.

During the 1830s and 1840s, southern planters had expanded their reach westward, removed most Native Americans to Oklahoma Territory, developed an elaborate pro-slavery ideology, and consolidated their political and economic power in the region. Yet they could not rest easy. The acquisition of new territory and the expansion of a brutal internal slave trade inspired resistance among enslaved women and men, outcries from free Black Americans and formerly enslaved escapees, and growing criticisms of slavery from nonslaveholding white southerners and northern abolitionists. Tensions emerged even within the two major political parties over the best means for handling the increasingly volatile issues raised by slavery’s spread westward. Indeed, winning the war against Mexico greatly sharpened the internal conflict in the United States. The debate over what to do with the new land—specifically, whether to permit slavery there—aroused emotions that ultimately exploded in the Civil War.