A History of the American People

was joined by a white man in chains and a deputy sheriff. The man was about to be hanged for
killing a slave in a card-game. The sentence had been passed on him not for murder but for
breaking the law against gambling with slaves. A bottle was handed around and they all got
drunk, as equals. So shut up as I was in a vehicle with such a horrid combination of beings,' he reflected on the cultural paradoxes of the Old South. The traveler was later entertained by Calhoun in his mansion, Fort Hill; it waslike spending an evening in a gracious Tuscan villa
with a Roman senator.'
In Congress 1811-17, Calhoun instantly made his mark as an eloquent War Hawk and was
soon chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. After serving Monroe as secretary of war,
1817-25, he won election as vice-president and ran the Senate 1825-32. He favored the War of
1812 because he wanted America to annex Florida and Texas and turn them into slave states. We
come here to the key mechanism in the political battle over slavery-the need of the South to
extend it, state by state, in order to preserve its share in the power-balance of Congress. The
South felt it could not sit still and fight a defensive battle to preserve slavery, because the
population of the North was rising much faster and non-slave states were being added all the
time. Once the non-slave states controlled not just the House but the Senate too, they could
change the Constitution. So the South had to be aggressive, and it was that which eventually led
to the Civil War. As we have seen, the Constitution said little about slavery. Article I, stating the
three-fifths rule, merely speaks of free persons' andother persons' (slaves). But more
significant was Article IV, Section 2, Paragraph 3: `No person held to Service or Labor in one
State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or
Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim
of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due.' This obliged free states to hand over
runaways. The South was terrified of a constitutional amendment abolishing this clause which
would lead to a mass escape of slaves across its unpoliced borders. The constitutional duty to
hand over escaped slaves caused more hatred, anger, and venom on both sides of the slave line
than any other issue and was a prime cause of the eventual conflict. And it was fear of losing this
constitutional guarantee which determined the tactics of the South in creating new states.
In February 1819 Congress faced a demand from Missouri to become a state, as its population
had passed the 60,000 mark. There were then eleven slave and eleven free states. The line
between them was defined by the southern and western boundaries of Pennsylvania. This line
had been determined by a survey conducted by the English astronomers Charles Mason and
Jeremiah Dixon in 1763-7, to settle disputes between Pennsylvania and Maryland. So it was
known, then and ever after, as the Mason-Dixon Line, the boundary between freedom and
slavery, North and South. By 1819 slavery, though still existing in some places in the North, was
rapidly being extinguished. But no attempt had yet been made to extend the dividing line into the
Louisiana Purchase territory, let alone beyond it, though the area was being rapidly settled.
Missouri already had 10,000 slaves and was acquiring more. It was obviously going to become
another slave state if allowed statehood.
A New York congressman now introduced an anti-slavery measure, which prohibited the
introduction of more slaves into the Territory, and automatically freed any slaves born after it
became a state on their twenty-fifth birthday. In short, this would have turned Missouri from a
slave territory into a free state. The measure passed the House, where the free states already had
a majority of 105 to 81, but was rejected by the Senate, where the numbers were equal, 22-22.
The Senate went further and agreed to statehood being given to Maine, which had long wanted to
be separate from Massachusetts, and which of course was free, provided Missouri were admitted