#slave power

[cureattroy]

hey boosting this

[objectivistnerd]

Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas ‘by joint resolution’; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision—all triumphs of the slave power—did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.

Henry Brooks Adams

[evilelitest2]

Neglected Historical Fact of the Day: The Great Awakening and Fugitive Slave Law

Alright, now we are getting into the Civil War proper.  See, the ugly truth is, with a few exceptions (John Brown) even the non slave owning North didn’t like or respect black people.  When the Great Awakening happened, the north went from fanatically Christian to super fanatically christian and the new sects had some targets.  Sexuality, alcohol, and of course...slavery.  Again this is the time period where the crazy fundamentalist Protestants are mostly the good guys, because they saw slavery as a moral degeneration and opposed it.  Through their efforts, slavery effectively became outlawed in all the Northern States, though of course not in the south.  It is worth noting that slavery was never as economically useful in the North as it was in the South and most slavery in the North was small farming or house/personal slaves, so it wasn’t a great loss.  After that, the North was for the most part content to just ignore slavery, because as one of the reoccurring themes of this series is, white people don’t give a fuck about blacks unless their is a secondary economic motive.   So as a rule, the North was perfectly fine to just ignore slavery as long as they didn’t have to personally see it.  However, that went down hill quite straight for slavery (and i’m not sympathetic) because of the issue of Fugitive Slaves.  See for black slaves in the south, escaping to the north was very tempting because if you could get there, the locals were not particularly inclined to hand you back.  This led to a weird legal circumstance where a black guy was a person above the Dixie Line, and property below the line, which doesn’t make sense.  And the fact is, the South was constantly upset because it isn’t that far to get from say South Carolina to Free States, and while the vast majority of run away slaves were captured, many did manage to escape, about 150,000 of them fled up into the North.  Also even those captured slaves forced the slavers to waste precious resources, time, and money hunting the slave down and returning them, and the temptation to run off meant that they had to constantly watch their farms, it was very stressful....less stressful than being a FUCKING SLAVE but still.  And the South was very determined to try to find a way to make run away slave’s time harder.  After all, it is MUCh harder to walk from South Carolina to Canada, trust me i’ve tried, doubly so if you have never seen a cold climate in your life, and if the North could be somehow convinced to give slaves back, less slaves would try to escape.  So the South tried to put pressure on the North to help with this whole slavery process.  This was a massive miscalculation, see the South basically figured “Well we think slavery is ok, the North must think its ok because they are allowing us to do it, so lets have them live up to their standards” while the North was more like “We are tolerating slavery because its easier to ignore the problem then address it, but that doesn’t mean we like you” aka the great American tradition of ignoring racial problems until we are forced too.  

The fugitive Slave act basically meant that if black slaves escaped to the North, the South was legally allowed to send gangs in to find them and bring them back to the south.  Now beyond the obvious moral problem (because lets face it, morality has long since ceased to be a factor here, this has three major problems.  Firstly, Northerners didn’t want to feel complacent in Slavery and effectively was making them part of the the slavery system they would rather just ignore, thus making slavery a front and center issue.  The second issue is that these slave hunters sent north didn’t necessarily distinguish between escaped Slaves and Free Blacks, and northerners were not witnessing before their eyes free black neighbors they grew up with being sent into slavery which got the whites to start to give a damn about slavery.  And finally, it was a complete and utter violation of states, rights, AKA the justification the South had used to support slavery the whole time, because it was basically rendering null and void the north’s claim to not want to be involved in slavery, supported by the Federal Government.   Which is why you can tell Neo Confederates to go straight to hell...not that you didn’t already need a reason.  

This culminated in the Dread Scott Decision, where an escaped slave, named Dredd Scot was taken by his master up north to Illinois, while there he sued his master saying that since slavery was illegal in Illinois therefore he was free.  Thecase went all the way up to the Supreme Court, and Chief Justice Roger B Taney attempted to settle the slavery question one and for all, basically saying that black Americans by virtue of their skin color did not have rights.  In addition to be utterly racist bullshit, it didn’t even make legal sense, because according to the Law, Free Blacks in the North did have rights in Free states, even in slave states if they were granted freedom, hell there were even some Free Black slaveowners.  In essence this was imposing the Southern interoperation of the Law unto the North, which pissed the North off A LOT.  The north, who had a larger population, were the industrial economic and cultural center, and really was the more powerful of the two, now having to serve SOuthern interests.  This anger got even more pronounced after a law was passed that effectively forced all Northerners, not just the law, to turn over black slaves who had escaped (as an attempt to kill the underground railroad) which was seen again as the south’s attempt to force the North to listen to the South.  This led to the belief of the so called “Slave Power” cabal, a conspiracy theory of the South secretly controlling Congress in order to force the North to adopt slavery.  The undertone here is the northern fear that the southern aristocratic life style would be forced upon the North in an attempt to create a new American nobility.  Which...while un true, wasn’t the worse conspiracy theory.