Slave Power

The Slave Power (often called the "Slaveocracy") was a term used in the United States 1840-1865 to characterize the political power of the slaveholding class in the South. The argument was that this small group of rich men had seized control of their own states and was trying to take over the national government in illegetimate fashion to use it to expand and protect slavery.

Background

The problem posed by slavery, it was argued by opponents of the Slave Power was not so much the mistreatment of slaves (a theme that abolitionists emphasized), but rather the political threat to American republicanism, and more generally to American standards of liberty. The Free Soil Party first raised this warning in 1848, arguing that the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a terrible mistake. Their strong rhetoric became a central theme in the new anti-slavery Republican party, especially in the election of 1856.

The Republican argument was that slavery was economically inefficient, compared to free labor, and was a deterrent to the long-term modernization of America. Worse, said the Republicans, the Slave Power was systematically seizing control of the White House, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Senator and governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was an articulate enemy of the Slave Power, as was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Republican party leader Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. The Southerns replied that they wer committed to democracy and republicanism, and that assaults on their "peculiar institution" (slavery) was an illegitimate effort to make them second class citizens. By 1850 they talked of secession.

House divided

In his "House Divided" speech of June 1858, Abraham Lincoln charged that Senator Stephen A. Douglas, President James Buchanan, his predecessor, Franklin Pierce, and Chief Justice Roger Taney were all part of a plot to nationalize slavery, as proven by the Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Other Republicans pointed to the violence in Kansas, the brutal assault on Senator Sumner, attacks upon the abolitionist press, and efforts to take over Cuba as new slave territory, as evidence that the Slave Power was violent, aggressive, and expansive.

The only solution, Republicans insisted, was a new commitment to free labor, and a deliberate effort to stop any more territorial expansion of slavery. Northern Democrats answered that it was all an exaggeration and that the Republicans were paranoid. Their Southern colleagues spoke of secession, arguing that the John Brown raid of 1859 proved that the Republicans were ready to attack their region and destroy their way of life.

In congratulating President-elect Lincoln in 1860, Salmon P. Chase exclaimed, "The object of my wishes and labors for nineteen years is accomplished in the overthrow of the Slave Power", adding that the way was now clear "for the establishment of the policy of Freedom" — something that would come only after four destructive years of Civil War.

Henry Adams' views

Historian Henry Adams explained that the Slave Power was a force for centralization:

“

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" [rather than treaty]; 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.

”

Bibliography

• Ashworth, John. "Free Labor, Wage Labor, and Slave Power: Republicanism and the Republican Party in the 1850s," in The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880, edited by S. M. Stokes and S. Conway (1996), 128-46.
• Blue, Frederick J. No Taint Of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (2004)
• Davis, David Brion. Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (1986)
• Earle, Jonathan. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (2004)
• Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970)], esp pp. 73-102 online edition
• Gara, Larry . "Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction" Civil War History v15 (1969), pp 5-18
• Gienapp, William E. "The Republican Party and the Slave Power," in Robert H. Abzug and Stephen E. Maizlish, eds., New Perspectives on Race and Slavery in America (1986), pp 51-78
• Richards, Leonard L. Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (2000), the standard scholarly history; excerpt and text search

Primary sources

• Cairnes, John Elliott. The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs (1862) online text of the second edition; complete text online
• Mason I. Lowance Jr., ed. House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865 (2003)
• Thompson, C. Bradley ed. Anti-Slavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader (2003)
• Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (in 3 volumes, 1872 & 1877) vol 2 online; vol 3 online
• The Slave Power speeches of abolitionist Theodore Parker, 1841-52

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