Congressman David Wilmot
Wilmot himself proposed his proviso on
essentially racist grounds. He intended
to preserve Western lands for white
men free of “the disgrace” of mixing
slavery and free labor.AN IMPERFECT UNIONE
ven before the War with Mexico
ended, the debate about the future
of slavery in the newly conquered
territories divided Congress. In 1846,
Pennsylvania Democratic Congressman
David Wilmot introduced a proviso,
or amendment, to an Army finance
bill that would ban slavery from all
territories acquired from Mexico. In
the House, 52 out of 56 Northern
Democrats and all Northern Whigs
voted for the Wilmot Proviso—a unityIn the 1820s and 1830s, sectional divisions
over slavery were always an issue, but
never dominated politics in the way they
would after the War with Mexico.THE NULLIFICATION CRISIS
Men like President Andrew Jackson
❮❮ 20–21 were passionate supporters
of the Union and strongly resisted the
demands of individual states whenever
they threatened national unity. One
such moment was the Nullification
Crisis of 1832 ❮❮ 21 when, in an
assertion of states’ rights, South Carolina
refused to implement the import tariffs
imposed by the federal government.SLAVERY AND THE WEST
As cotton production spread into the new
lands of Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri,
Arkansas, and Texas, the soil of the Eastern
states’ plantations was becoming
exhausted. The expansion of cotton production
meant the spread of slavery to the West.Slavery Divides the Country
In the 30 years prior to the Civil War, churches, political parties, and families split on the nature of the
American republic and the status of slavery. Victory over Mexico fixed the national boundaries, but
the question of how new lands would be organized—free or slave—fractured national institutions.
Sutter’s gold
In 1848, John Sutter found gold on his land in Calfornia,
sparking off the Gold Rush. The free-or-slave status of the
new territory proved controversial. Pro-slavery advocates
pointed out that slaves could work in gold mining.During this same period,
more than 800,000
slaves from the Eastern
states were sold or moved
to work on the new cotton
lands of the Southwest,
breaking the ties of slave families
in the process.
Southerners started to see their society
as distinctive and threatened. Politicians
and intellectuals began to defend
slavery as a “positive good.” Paternalism
on the plantation was compared with
the situation of Northern workers
desperately seeking employment,
which created class tension.Splits emerge
Church ministers and congregations
were divided. Well before the rise of
sectional political parties, the three
largest Protestant groups—Baptists,
Presbyterians, and Methodists—
formally split their national
denominations into sectional factions.
The Presbyterians were first to split in
1837, followed by the Baptists in 1844.
In the Methodist Church, the largest
denomination, a lengthy debate over
the right of a slaveholder to serve as
a presiding bishop triggered the
formation of the breakaway Methodist
Episcopal Church South in 1846. For
the vast majority of Southerners,
slavery was not a sin—slaveowners
provided their slaves with Christian
instruction and “rescued”
them from barbarism and
heathenism.
Northerners, meanwhile,
were fearful of this new
militant defense of slavery.
As West and East grew closer
through railroads, telegraph,
and print, the South was
aggressively seeking to send
slavery into new territories and
states where it had been outlawed for
decades. One response to this trend
was the Free-Soil Party, established in
1848 under the slogan, “Free Soil, Free
Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men.”
Free-Soilers contended that a society
where free men worked free soil wasBEFORE
not only morally superior to a slave
society, but also more efficient
economically. By 1849, they had won
14 seats in the U.S. House of
Representatives and two in the Senate.
At the same time, Northern workers
feared economic competition from
black labor. As tens of thousands of
European immigrants arrived in the
North, urban crowding and a scarcity
of work increased pressures on the free
black community there, with riots and
mob actions from New England
through the Midwest.
It was against this background that
the federal government had to decide
the future of the territory acquired
after the War with Mexico. The
solution, the Compromise of 1850,ANDREW JACKSONacross party lines that
foreshadowed future
Northern opposition to
the extension of slavery
to the West. In the
Senate, however, the
proviso met defeat.
Southerners condemned
it as an attempt to block
their right to take their
property to the territories.Slave ownership
The South by this time was a
socially and economically diverse
region. In the mountainous areas of
northern Alabama, eastern Kentucky,
Tennessee, and western Virginia, there
were few plantations. Most whites farmed
to support their families and traded
locally. The majority of these yeomen
farmers owned no slaves, although
they still supported the institution.It was on the cotton and tobacco
plantations where most slaves toiled.
Other slaves were house servants, and
a growing number worked as skilled
artisans or were hired out in urban
areas. The price of a slave quadrupled
between 1800 and 1860, indicating a
growing demand for black labor even
as the number of slaves increased.The number of
Southerners
who owned slaves in 1850—less than
25 percent of the white population. Half of
slaveowners had five slaves or fewer; only
one percent owned a hundred or more.350,000