S1E3 – American Slavery

This is episode three of Breaking Nation, a Civil War podcast. If you haven't listened to previous episodes, I recommend going back to listen to Episode 1, an Introduction, to get a running start as to why this podcast exists. Then episode 2, the Father of All, will prepare you for what is to follow. Or just jump right in, and you can go back and get caught up later. Either way, this will be a difficult conversation. As I sit down to record this episode, every fiber in me wants to squeeze the emotions out of the issue in order to take an objective look at slavery in the United States, to focus on the facts, the causes and effects, the political decisions, the acts of legislation, and so on. But then the naked reality of human bondage, chattel slavery, people as property looks me square in the face, and I am moved to sorrow, grief, and outrage. The gross sin of dehumanization that slavery represents is abhorrent and revolting. It literally makes my skin crawl. So in full disclosure and transparency, this episode will no doubt betray my strong bias against slavery in its historical context while trying to present the facts as description. And again, as I've mentioned previously, we must strive to avoid the presentism of judging the past through the lens of the present. Let us try to understand the past through the lens of that past. It won't be easy. As I said, this is a difficult conversation. One was a work of fiction, inspired by several written firsthand accounts and numerous interviews. The second book was a memoir of a life lived. As we discussed in the previous episode, Americans in the middle of the 19th century were highly literate. Approximately 90% of the free population could read and write. And at the time, books and novels were starting to be published and printed in large numbers. And the clamoring public at the time consumed these works. The authors may sort of read like a list of your high school reading classes, your literature classes from years gone by. I'm not quite sure whether these authors are still even read anymore, but some of them may ring a bell for you. At the time, Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of the most prominent authors. He wrote short stories and novels that were set in his native New England. Hawthorne's most famous book is most likely The Scarlet Letter, which was written in 1850. It was one of the first mass-produced books, and it sold 2,500 copies in 10 days. Another author, I'm sure you're familiar with, is Herman Melville. He was a New Yorker, and he wrote novels and stories, his most famous being Moby Dick, written in 1851, depicting exploits at sea, of which Melville had firsthand knowledge. But this book only sold a few thousand copies. A third author you may remember or know about is Walt Whitman, another New Yorker. Whitman was a poet, he was an essayist and a journalist. And his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, which was published in 1855, was one of the first sort of national pieces of poetry that garnered recognition across the country. Whitman also actually served in a Civil War hospital in Washington, D.C. The fourth is Henry David Thoreau. He was a New Englander and he was an essayist and a poet and a philosopher, and his book, Walden, published in 1854, sold 2,000 copies in five years. So against this backdrop, as part of this literary mosaic of the 1850s, the first book I want to talk about exploded into the American consciousness. Uncle Tom's Cabin was written by abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe. She was the sister of famous preacher and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. The novel tells the story of a noble slave, Uncle Tom, who saves the life of a young girl, little Eva, and the efforts of the sinister slave owner Simon Legree, who has Tom whipped to death when he won't betray the location of other runaway slaves. While Stowe based the novel on actual slave narratives and her own research, it was written in the romantic language of the day. But it resonated and rallied white Americans to the abolitionist message of the horrors of slavery. And it was a massive success. It first appeared as a 40-part serial in a newspaper called The National Era, starting on June 1st, 1851. When it was released as a book the following year in 1852, it was a mega bestseller. Over 300,000 copies sold that year alone in the United States. Remember those earlier books by those earlier authors that sold 2,000, 3,000 copies? Over 300,000 copies were sold of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the U.S. And then the first London edition sold another 200,000 copies in Great Britain. Uncle Tom's Cabin was the second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Bible. The second book I want to talk about is Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, and it was published in 1853. It was a bestseller in and of itself with 30,000 copies sold. It's still a powerful story, even today, having been adapted into an award-winning movie in 2013. Removed from some of the melodramatic and romanticist narrative stylings of novels of the day like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Northup's memoir tells of his experience as a free black man in New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery for 12 years in Louisiana. In the end, he covertly made contact with people he knew in New York who worked to secure his return to freedom and his family. In order to immerse ourselves in that time, imagine yourself as a reader in the 1850s, brought into Solomon Northup's story. Consider this account that he writes of the separation of a mother from her child in the slave market. Quote After some further inspection, he finally offered Freeman, who was the one selling the slaves, seven hundred for Eliza. After a little shrewd reflection, he announced his acceptance of the offer. As soon as Eliza heard it, she was in agony again. By this time she had become haggard and hollow eyed with sickness and with sorrow. It would be a relief if I could consistently pass over in silence the scene that now ensued. It recalls memories more mournful and affecting than any language can portray. I have seen mothers kissing for the last time the faces of their dead offspring. I have seen them looking down into the grave as the earth fell with a dull sound upon their coffins, hiding them from their eyes forever. But never have I seen such an exhibition of intense, unmeasured, and unbounded grief as when Eliza was parted from her child. She broke from her place in the line of women, and rushing down where Emily was standing, caught her in her arms. Freeman sternly ordered her to be quiet, but she did not heed him. He caught her by the arm and pulled her rudely, but she only clung the closer to the child. Then with a volley of great oaths, he struck her such a heartless blow that she staggered backward and was like to fall. The personal misery of legal helplessness and the injustice of the system of human bondage and commodity is here depicted in all its awful and dreadful reality. I consider slavery in North America a cancer, a growth within that nefariously attacks from within and with indiscrimination. For people living in 1860, it may have felt that way as well, although perhaps not to everyone. But just like the state of medicine and healthcare in the US at that very same time, people didn't have a clue as to what to do about it. Think about this. In 1860, if you were ill or injured and you had to look to the knowledge and wisdom of the experts of the day, you could look forward to treatments like bloodletting, blistering, or doses of plant or mineral substances or even poisons. And then often the experts had to let the illness run its natural course. Remember that prognosis. Treat the symptoms, but let the illness run its course. This won't be the last time we see this attitude as we talk about slavery. If we apply that mindset toward the cancer of slavery in America leading up to the Civil War, we might gain a better perspective on what people did and why, rather than looking at it with our 21st century point of view, our presentist point of view. The lens of the past shows us a different mindset. Treat the symptoms, but let the illness run its course. It didn't matter whether the disease was within a human body or the entire country itself. We ended the last episode with an understanding of the causes of the American Civil War. It's simplistic to say that slavery was the cause, and it is a true statement. But to not be simplistic, we have to acknowledge the constitutional tension between federal and state powers at the time. We have to acknowledge how the second party system, the Democrats and the Whigs, politicized this tension. We have to acknowledge the sectionalism that was growing in the North and the South following the War of 1812. And we have to acknowledge the failings and faults of many, many people who led the country down a path to civil war. All these factors should encourage us to steer away from the word cause, to steer away from being simplistic. Perhaps a better word to use is fuel. What fueled the American Civil War? Why fuel? Well, let's look at an automobile as the analogy. A car is built with all sorts of systems. There's the engine, the transmission, suspension, the steering, the brakes, safety, body design, etc. Well, likewise, the US leading up to the war had a structure with systems of government, political representation. It had an economy, it had a society, an infrastructure, etc. But the car moves into action when the fuel provides the energy to run. The issue of slavery was that fuel. Slavery was the thing that would test the structural integrity of the systems of the country. Then lastly, the fuel is activated by ignition. It needs a spark. And the spark was really a succession of sparks, about 40 years of sparks. I tend to think of it more like a package of firecrackers, because once they start popping in succession, they don't stop. To me, that's more an accurate picture of what we're going to see in the next couple of episodes. One spark affects the next, and so on and so on. One thing leads to another. Before we dig into this topic of American slavery, I want to acknowledge Dan Carlin's incredible podcast, one of his hardcore history blitz episodes. It's called Human Resources. It is a thorough, in-depth, wide-ranging conversation about the Atlantic slave trade. I highly recommend you listen to it right now. He explores the scope, the sequence, and firsthand horrors of slavery, unique to what occurred between the 1490s and early 1800s, in ways that I won't pretend to approximate. Again, invest in listening to that episode and then come back here. What I will say is simply meant to provide a high-level overview compared to Carlin's granular odyssey. Up until about 200 years ago, slavery has always been a legal part of human history and experience. Even today illegally, slavery still occurs and is being perpetrated behind closed doors. That said, I would attribute slavery to the depraved attitudes of mankind and its civilizations. Slavery has existed on every continent, among nearly every people group, for almost every reason, where violence, oppression, and a subjection based form of law has been found. Slavery includes what we Americans must wrestle with in our collective historical past. But it is also far more expansive than just that. In ancient times and cultures, there are records after records of wars fought between kingdoms and empires when conquered peoples were captured and taken into bondage and brought back as slaves, entire populations. Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks. Once we get to the Roman world, then expand that all across Europe and Asia into Africa. We have Europeans enslaving Europeans, Asians enslaving Asians, Africans enslaving Africans. Now expand that across continents, and religion was often the primary instigator. People groups were defined by their kings and their gods, and when one group overcame another, they punished them for their beliefs by either killing them or enslaving them. So conquered peoples became slaves. Additionally, criminals would become slaves. Criminals were technically slaves of the king or of the kingdom. Sure they could be executed, but if they could work, then there was free labor, so why not just work them to death? Either way, it was a death sentence for criminals. There was also indentured servitude, slavery in the form of debt collection, where someone owed you and their only hope of paying off the debt was to work it off. But during that time you were bonded, so you could be bought and sold and you were not free. So if we can avoid presentism and see the world as the ancient world saw itself, slavery had a function in conquest, in punishment, and in debt. So with that overly simple background, we come to the year 1500. Starting in 1492, Columbus planted the flag of Spain in the Caribbean, and another explorer by the name of Pedro Alvarez Cabral planted the flag of Portugal on the eastern tip of what is now Brazil. And so Spain and Portugal had led the way in the exploration and conquest of the New World. Spain and Portugal were kind of like the US and Soviets in the space race in the 1950s and 60s. Spanish and Portuguese sailing ships crossed the oceans and claimed lands for their own countries. It would soon become confusing and an ongoing disagreement between the two countries. Who had the right to which lands? And what about new lands that had yet to be discovered? Shortly thereafter, together the two countries, Spain's King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, and Portugal's King John, signed the Treaty of Tordesias, which was sanctioned by the Pope at the time, Julius II. The treaty basically drew a line from top to bottom right down the globe. Imagine starting at the southern tip of Greenland and then drawing a straight line and going south through the Atlantic Ocean, then cutting straight through the eastern tip of Brazil before continuing on through to the South Atlantic. The treaty line divided the entire world into two halves. You had a Portuguese hemisphere and a Spanish hemisphere. And everything to the right of the line, all the African coast and the eastern tip of Brazil, that would belong to the Portuguese. And then everything to the left of the line, all the lands of the New World except that eastern tip of Brazil, well that all would belong to Spain. That was very convenient for those two kingdoms. The issue was settled, right? So let it be written, so let it be done. Well, not so fast. Of course, the other European powers decided to simply ignore the treaty and its little line drawn around the globe. Not only was it not possible for the Spanish and the Portuguese to enforce this line, the other countries really didn't even care what the Pope had to say, especially the English. Remember, Henry VIII broke with the Pope in the 1530s and said, hey, I'm going to start my own church. And by the way, the English, the French, and the Dutch, they all had their own fleets, and nothing was going to stop them from expanding and profiting from what the new world had to offer. But this helps explain how it came to be that the Portuguese and the Spanish were the ones who truly instigated the beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade. Over the next 300 years, European exploration decimated the native populations of the Americas by way of disease and death. Everyone on the mainland of South America, across all the Caribbean islands, into Mexico, and along the Gulf and Shore of the American South. Millions died and spread the diseases to those further in the interior. That explains why workers were needed from elsewhere as colonies were established. And so criminals and indentured servants make up a portion of enslaved peoples who are brought primarily to Spain's holdings in the Caribbean and South America. The other lands were seen as belonging to the Portuguese, especially along the western coast of Africa. As certain African tribes conquered others and enslaved those captured people, they found Spanish and Portuguese merchants and traders more than willing to buy slave laborers to take back across the Atlantic to the New World to mine for gold and to cultivate cash crops like sugar, rice, and tobacco. Over time, other Europeans, like the English, the French, and the Dutch, also saw profit in slave labor and also began to participate in the human trade. There's a very economic and financial game being played here. And that's because it works, it produces goods and profits, it aids these European powers, and it benefits trade with the Africans who are doing the slave selling. But missing from this period is the question, what we would say is the obvious and the only question. Is it right to do this? Where was the moral voice? I have to remind myself that that's my presentism pushing itself to the forefront. I am a product of a global worldview in the 21st century that sees issues through the lens of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It establishes individual rights for life that prohibit slavery and torture. It establishes rights within community for freedom of movement and property and residence and nationality. And it established liberties and freedoms of thought and expression, religion and conscience that was agreed upon by nearly all the countries that were part of the United Nations in 1948. But before then, international human rights, and I'm doing air quotes, that wasn't a thing. International justice was not what we see today. There was no such thing as a global ideology. It didn't exist. Rather, nations acted in their own self-interest. And so the progressive European countries at that time, the ones exploring and pushing their boundaries out and sending their fleets around the world and creating colonies and driving an economy, they all made deals and alliances that would benefit them. And slavery as a moral problem, be damned. Remember that for thousands of years, slavery just simply was. Justice, as we know it, wasn't a global idea. It was a regional idea, and each region had its own laws when it came to slavery. Whether the slaves were conquered peoples, whether they were criminals or indentured servants. And what was happening back and forth across the Atlantic was a combination of all three. But what would become new was the redefinition of slave that stripped away every bit of humanity or personhood from the term. Another type of slavery would now come into focus, chattel slavery. Chattel was a term that was used with property to describe that property which was movable, in contrast to, say, real property, which was like land or buildings. Those weren't movable. But movable chattel property included animals or goods or money, and now it included people. Chattel slavery was people becoming things. Africans who were captured by other Africans were now traded for goods to Spanish and Portuguese merchants, who brought them to the New World as a commoditized labor force to replace the indigenous people of the Americas who were killed by conquest or who died by genocidal disease. That's what happens when the versions of slavery that were, by extension, systems of the age of discovery morphed into the age of colonization or expansion. By the closing of the period of the slave trade in the mid-19th century, about 40% of all enslaved Africans were sent to Brazil, about 50% were sent scattered all across the Caribbean, northern South America, and the Spanish possessions, and about 10% were sent to British North America. It's that very last segment where our story will lead, since that lays the groundwork for what will become slavery in the U.S. Again, Dan Carlin's podcast on slavery explores these hundreds of years of history with far more detail than I can cover, especially the Haitian Revolution leading to the country's independence in 1804 from France. You really should listen to that episode. Because what happened in the French colony of Saint Domingue from 1791 through 1803 was a slave rebellion that led to an insurrection that established an independent Haiti. Slavery was abolished, and the ex-slave general Toussaint L'Ouverture became a legendary leader. And that story, the story of Saint Domingue, would loom over the American South for decades. But right now, let's turn our attention to Great Britain. For the United States that finds itself on a pathway to civil war is a country that emerged from the English and British relationship with slavery. Most of the African slaves who were imported to what is now the US arrived between 1725 and 1825. But even prior to then, there were a few who are recorded in history. For example, from 1619 to 1625, there are records of a slave named Angela in the Virginia colony. She was enslaved first by other Africans, and then she was one of three hundred and fifty sold to a Portuguese captain. Subsequently, while sailing west across the Atlantic, the ship was then attacked by Dutch English privateers, who captured Angela and others. They were taken to Virginia, where she was sold to Captain William Pierce. After several years surviving attacks by local native tribes and food shortages and famines, Angela is then listed on a sixteen twenty five record as the one black slave remaining with the Pierces. It is the last record of her existence. Today, some would say she was the first known and named slave in America. As the British colonies grew, then as Swedish, French, and German colonists settled, as the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam grew and eventually became New York, the free people of North America found themselves an extension of British oversight and rule. Throughout the 1700s, then, a triangular trade solidified an incredibly profitable three-way trade route for the British. Goods left England bound for Africa and were traded via Portuguese handlers to African rulers, for other enslaved peoples. The slave ships then crossed the Atlantic, where they were sold for profit, to Caribbean and coastal plantations, before crops and commodities were loaded up to bring back for sale to England and ports and cities. It was all a very lucrative business model. But what about that pesky moral question? Was it right? Should it have been happening at all? As the Age of Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason, grew and developed across Europe in the 1600s and 1700s, it advanced ideas and philosophies that would have a ripple effect across the globe. It affected philosophy, sociology, politics, economics, law, science and learning. Think of the Frenchman Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the Englishman Isaac Newton and John Locke. Think of Scottish economist Adam Smith and the Prussian Immanuel Kant. Their ideas and writings would inspire both the American and French Revolutions and emphasize human happiness, ideas of progress, ideas of liberty and reason. The ideas around the rights of man were what Thomas Paine wrote about. And Jefferson used this as his base for the Declaration of Independence, and helped the Marquis de Lafayette draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, core to what happened in France after their revolution. So how did these thoughts square with slavery in Britain? Weren't the Africans who were enslaved included in such noble pursuits as liberty, progress, and happiness? In theory? Certainly not in practice. It was out of the Quaker movement, along with evangelical Christians and some philosophers involved, that a mindset began to see slavery as a violation of Enlightenment thinking and Christian teaching. One group that emerged was based in Southwest London, in Clapham. Most prominent and famous of these reformers was a man named William Wilberforce, a member of Parliament. Forming the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, this group from Clapham was sought out by those who fought to challenge the legality of the slave system. Abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson and Aluda Aquino worked during the 1780s and 1790s to speak, write, educate, and encourage the public and British government to end the slave trade. Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the famous China and Porcelain Company that bears his name, was an outspoken abolitionist, and he produced a famous and enduring symbol of the movement. It was kind of a logo or an icon. It was a black man in chains on one knee with the question printed around him saying, Am I not a man and a brother? In 1772, a legal case drew a judicial line in the sand for slavery. James Somerset had been born in Africa around 1740 as an African and had been captured by Africans when he was a child. Those Africans sold him to European slave traders who took him first to Jamaica and then to the Virginia colony. And a Scottish merchant named Charles Stewart bought him in 1749 and took him to Boston. In 1769, Stewart moved to London and brought his slave with him. Now, while many of the details are lost to history, we do know this: that in 1771, James Somerset was baptized, and he had three English sponsors acting as godparents. Now, this may be due to Stuart having freed him, but keeping him on as a servant. But the former slave decided he didn't want to stay, so he left. However, two months later he was kidnapped and put on a boat bound for the Caribbean so he could be sold for profit. Well, when Somerset's abolitionist godparents found out, they obtained a writ of habeas corpus. The writ of habeas corpus is a pillar of English common law dating back to the 12th century. It essentially entitles a person arrested to appear in a court of law and have the reason for their detention explained, and have the court determine if it is law. Its purpose is to prevent unlawful detention. Now, Somerset's godparents could have simply purchased Somerset and then freed him, but the abolitionist movement wanted more than just an expedient outcome. They wanted a legal decision, and the slave owners did so as well. Therefore, the case went before the Lord Chief Justice Lord Mansfield. And on june twenty second, seventeen seventy two, Mansfield gave his opinion. A foreigner cannot be imprisoned here on the authority of any law existing in his own country. Let's look at this a little bit closer. Because there was no explicit law that legalized slavery in England, Somerset was freed. Notice that the principle in effect is where was this detention taking place? The judgment was specific to the place of the writ of habeas corpus and the laws of that place. And notice the reference to his own country. That could be a slippery term. Though there was not a moral component to the decision, the case was still heralded as progress for abolitionists who wanted to end slavery in Britain. Believe it or not, that 1772 Somerset case will be remembered and argued in the United States leading up to the Civil War. No one at the time of the case had any idea that would happen. Unfortunately, James Somerset disappears into history after the case that bears his name. Eventually, the anti-slavery movement in England claimed a victory. In 1807, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act that prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire. Note that it didn't end slavery, but supporters believed it was the first step down that path. And they were right. In 1823, the abolition movement coalesced in London into the formal anti-slavery society, with Wilberforce and Clarkson as founding members. Publications and campaigning continued to appeal that slavery was wrong and was even unsupported by the law in England. In 1831, a slave revolt in Jamaica that was initially peaceful but eventually became violent was put down. But the government investigations into why and how it happened led Parliament to look unfavorably on the institution. Two years later, in 1833, the Slavery Abolition Act began the gradual emancipation of slaves across the British Empire. Now imagine being an American while all of this is happening across the sea. And as you look around, you've seen your own country wrestle with the slave issue. You might be a New England abolitionist who is fist pumping in time with the bold action of the British. Maybe you're a Western farmer in Illinois or Missouri who doesn't really care what other people are doing. But perhaps you're a southern planter who sees abolition as an oppressive intrusion and a possible threat into your way of life. Or maybe you're a slave looking to escape north via what some call an underground railroad of way stations and conductors that bring passengers to a safe passage to the north and freedom. Regardless, you've been watching the United States grapple with slavery itself and the issue of its expansion or its restriction for years. One giant shift in America takes place in 1808, when the act prohibiting the importation of slaves signed by President Jefferson goes into effect. In the last episode we saw that year, 1808, named specifically in the Constitution in Article 1, Section 9. For the next dozen years, no new slaves were legally brought into the country. There does remain a covert and illegal trade, but by and large the flow of enslaved Africans into the U.S. slows. Instead, slaves are allowed and encouraged to reproduce domestically. This is somewhat unique when it comes to slaves in the Americas. But due to this, the slave population grows. But with slavery prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance, it would not expand north of the Ohio River as new states were formed there. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and part of Minnesota. They would all eventually be free states. Where would slavery begin to challenge expansion? Well, the answer comes in 1820, when President James Monroe and Congress has to deal with a new state being admitted into the Union. And it's a state outside of the area, the territory of the Northwest Ordinance. As settlers move west into the new lands acquired as part of the Louisiana Territory, many who came from the South bring their slaves with them. In the region that would eventually become Missouri, slaves would come to number about 15% of the total population. And residents eventually begin to draft a state constitution and select delegates. Missouri needs to become a state. Well, when Congressman James Talmadge of New York introduces amendments to the statehood bill, these would prohibit any further slavery in the new state, and that any children born slaves would be emancipated when they turn 25. An abolitionist gauntlet is now thrown down. Perhaps this was the first firecracker going off, the first spark of igniting the issue of slavery for the country as a whole. This Missouri problem initiates a rift in the political tranquility of the U.S., and it becomes a subject of great concern for the elder statesmen of the young republic. Many of the founding fathers are, by now, by 1820, old men. But the issue of slavery and what to do about its expansion has haunted them because they had done nothing proactive to address it decades before. In the last episode, I mentioned Dennis Rasmussen's amazing book, Fears of a Setting Sun. And in it he unpacks the doubts and the fears of the founding fathers, the fears they had about whether the United States would survive its worst vices. When it came to the issue of slavery, each one had opinions and thoughts on the peculiar institution, which was a euphemism that was used to reference slavery without actually naming it. George Washington is gone by 1820. He had died in 1799. But later in his life he had been outspoken about slavery. In letters written to John Francis Mercer and Robert Morris in 1786, Washington stated that it was Among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by the legislature by which slavery in this country may be abolished. touched by slow, sure, and imperceptible degrees, there is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it. In 1799, Washington wrote to one Robert Lewis that he was quote principled against traffic in the human species. And in an eighteen eighty seven book by John Bernard, the writer describes one Englishman who remembered the founding father saying to him the year before Washington's death I can clearly foresee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our Union by consolidating it in a common bond of principle. End quote By eighteen twenty and the Missouri problem, Washington had been gone for two decades. But his presidential successors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were still alive and well and made their thoughts known in correspondence with one another and acquaintances. Adams wrote Robert Evans in eighteen nineteen that quote Negro slavery is an evil of colossal magnitude, end quote. He thought that the country should abolish it. He wrote his daughter in law, Louisa Catherine in eighteen nineteen this quote The Missouri question hangs like a cloud over my imagination. I shudder when I think of the calamities which slavery is likely to produce in this country. You would think me mad if I were to describe my anticipations. If the gangrene is not stopped, I can see nothing but insurrections of the blacks against the whites and massacres by the whites in their turn of the blacks, till at last the whites exasperated to madness shall be wicked enough to exterminate the Negroes. In spite of his fears John Adams still held out hope for the strength of the government he was instrumental in creating. He optimistically wrote Jefferson in eighteen nineteen that quote the Missouri question will follow the other waves under the ship and do no harm. I know it is high treason to express a doubt of the perpetual duration of our vast American empire. James Madison also minimized the problem when he wrote the Marquis de Lafayette in eighteen twenty A government like ours has so many safety valves giving vent to overheated passions that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human institutions cannot be exempt. Many figured it would just need to run its course. Remember that medical analogy treat the symptoms but let the illness run its course. Jefferson believed slavery would eventually die out, though he couldn't grasp the cure. In August of eighteen fourteen he wrote to Edward Coles, who was secretary to President Madison in the midst of war with Britain Yet the hour of emancipation is advancing in the march of time. It will come and whether brought on by the generous energy of our own minds or by the bloody process of sand excited and conducted by the power of our present enemy is a leaf of our history not yet turned over. As to the method by which this difficult work is to be effected, if permitted to be done by ourselves, I have seen no proposition so expedient on the whole end quote by the time of the Missouri problem Jefferson along with many other Southerners saw any political conflict surrounding slavery as being a byproduct of northern meddling. In 1820 Jefferson told Charles Pinckney that the Missouri question is a mere party trick. Jefferson wrote Albert Gallatin in 1820 the Federalists completely put down and despairing of ever rising again under the old division of Whig and Tory devised a new one of slaveholding and non-slave holding states, which has a semblance of being moral if there were any morality in the question it is on the other side. End quote but Adams could not gloss over the ultimate problem. He knew that slavery hadn't been dealt with and that it would not just go away to Robert Walsh junior in 1820 Adams wrote that a misstep with the Missouri situation would stamp our national character and lay a foundation for calamities if not disunion There. He said it he actually said it he said disunion Americans would begin to wonder if the issue of slavery would break the nation the Missouri Compromise eventually took shape through Henry Clay's efforts to build a coalition of support in Congress and through the Missouri Compromise it admitted Missouri as a slave state and added Maine as a free state. Congressional balance had been preserved. Now there were 12 free states and 12 slave states. Additionally slavery would be prohibited in the remainder of the lands acquired by the Louisiana Purchase north of the 3630 parallel, a line that actually ran underneath the new state of Missouri. This settled the immediate sectional animosity over slavery. But the can had just been kicked down the road. Adams ultimately wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1821 about slavery I have been so terrified with this phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern gentleman, I cannot comprehend this object, I must leave it to you. I will vote for forcing no measure against your judgments. What we are to see God knows and I leave it to him and his agents in posterity Again in effect he's saying it is too great to deal with we'll leave it to the next generation so why was slavery at the crux of Southern society? How could something so morally reprehensible to you and I not be to Americans in the first half of the nineteenth century in the previous episode we took some time to get acquainted with Henry Clay, politician from Kentucky Congressman, Speaker of the House, Secretary of State under President John Quincy Adams, candidate for president three times, and senator for more than forty years he helped shape American politics. But he was not alone in Congress. Along with two other politicians he made up what was known as the Great Triumvirate of American statesmen Clay of Kentucky Daniel Webster of Massachusetts and another from the South John C. Calhoun was from South Carolina and he embodied the political mindset for the majority of the South those same forty years that Clay and Webster represented the border states and the North portraits and later in life photographs of him show wide and piercing eyes below an iron brow and a thick flow of hair like waves off the bow of a ship. His gaze attested to a resolute focus for life and politics. One description of Calhoun by historian Merrill Peterson seems to capture the South Carolinian well intensely serious and severe, he could never write a love poem, though he often tried, because every line began with the word whereas he was Secretary of war to Monroe, Secretary of State to Tyler and Polk, and vice president to John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, and he was a long term senator and he owned slaves. He was a firm defender of Southern beliefs, the Southern way of life, states rights, and the growing ideology of nullification, which said that a state could ignore a federal law if the state thought it was unconstitutional. Time and time again Calhoun would face off in Congress against other lawmakers to uphold and advance Southern advocacy. As a son of the South he summarized his views specifically on the slaves on february fourth, eighteen thirty six, when working to prohibit the circulation of abolitionist materials through the US mail, he said The difficulty is in the diversity of the races, so strongly drawn is the line between the two in consequence, and so strengthened by the force of habit and education that it is impossible for them to exist together in the same community, where their numbers are so nearly equal as in the slaveholding states under any other relation than that which now exists in eighteen sixty on the eve of the Civil War, the census shows just how bifurcated the southern states were in South Carolina fifty seven percent of the state's population were slaves more than half. Next was Mississippi at fifty five percent also more than half. Louisiana forty six percent of its residents were enslaved. Alabama forty five percent Florida forty four percent and on down to Tennessee with twenty four percent of the state's population enslaved. And yet those who legally owned slaves were a fragment of the free population. Of the five and a half million free people in the eleven Confederate states there were three hundred and sixteen thousand who were slaveholders that's less than six percent of all the free people in these states three hundred and sixteen thousand people owned four million other people. And of those three hundred sixteen thousand slaveholders, thirty eight percent of them owned three or fewer slaves. Forty seven percent of them owned from four up to twenty slaves, and just fifteen percent owned more than twenty slaves. It was a strange pyramid of demographics, but it had been growing into that for decades. John Calhoun's South was a culture that had been built on decades and layers of English gentlemanliness. Charleston, South Carolina had existed since sixteen seventy, Savannah, Georgia since seventeen thirty three, mix in heaping helpings of Spanish and French society via New Orleans founded in seventeen eighteen, and you've got a richly established way of life and a worldview that was solidified over more than a hundred years. Across the Upper South Virginia Tennessee to Missouri and Arkansas and down through the Middle and lower south Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida, the society inherently drew its strength from the celebration of individuals as kings of their own domains. They would be the embodiment of the heroic yeoman farmers and planters, of Jefferson's idyllic republicanism. They owned their own land. They were self-sufficient, they were not beholden to an aristocracy of wealth, and the strength of English common law that justified life and actions upheld this principle by its legal pillars. The gentleman knew this, that his liberty cannot be infringed upon without just cause, that he is presumed innocent until proven guilty, that his home is his castle, and that his personal rights are sacred. These agreed upon truths were the fabric of Southern society, somewhat unspoken with understandings and honor bound codes. Much of this was undocumented and not codified into law, but rather a byproduct of one's noble conscience. In his series The Americans, historian Daniel Borston recounts a defender of the Southern worldview in the volume The National Experience, who described the prototypical Southern gentleman like this Quote He is every inch bold, self reliant, conscientious, knowing his own convictions of duty and daring to heed them. What that duty is, the divine teacher has inculcated in the well known precept Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and impartial, knowing that you also have a master in heaven. This the Southern gentleman delights to do. It is almost impossible for a citizen of the North to realize the strong ties which bind the Southern gentleman to his bondservants and vice versa. End quote unlike Northerners who they saw as abiding by the endless code of law that regulated labor, trade in their communities, Southerners abided by their honor, a different kind of law. Now, combine that with the fact that English law had no say on slavery in the 1700s, remember the Somerset case that we talked about earlier this created a stage for an unwritten code about slavery as well. This was completely unique when it came to the institution in the New World. The Spanish colonies brought along their Latin framework of European slavery of the many races and a Catholic structure for conversion to Mexico, Brazil and the Caribbean which included slave laws and even basic rights since it was a rudimentary form of employment. In fact a slave could own property get married and was understood to be a person. But in British America no such framework existed and the law decided that if it had to choose between persons and things slaves were things. And without the racial plurality that existed across the skin colors from the Caribbean to South America, slavery was seen in the simple terms of just the black person Borston again from the national experience Southerners thus came to believe that the difference of race itself justified slavery. The elaborate ancient laws meant for a world in which war or poverty might make anyone a slave seemed superfluous and irrelevant. Here we see a new iteration of slavery something altogether unique from global slavery that had always been a part of human history. A person was a slave because of the color of their skin. Add to this a common singularity of how the social code of the yeoman planner became time bound truths that weren't interested in conflicting views or interests. Unlike northerners who with greater streams of immigrants also sought greater streams of ideas and innovation Southerners preferred things as they were if you remember old Eli Whitney the innovator of change who invented the cotton gin, don't forget he was a northerner from Connecticut. But new ideas born of differing interests found less fertile soil in the South Frederick Law Olmsted, who is most famous for designing New York's Central Park, traveled through the South as a journalist in the years before the Civil War. In eighteen fifty four he observed this about the South's contentment in its present tense quote The Southerner naturally accepts the institutions, manners and customs in which he is educated as necessities imposed on him by Providence. He is loyal to society and it is opposed to his fundamental idea of a gentleman to essentially deduct from them or add to them. From eighteen twenty to eighteen sixty the North saw waves of social reform bubble out of cities and these included things like tax reform, spiritual revivalism, there were temperance movements, there were anti-banking societies, there were those groups for the abolition of slavery and those who were proponents of women's rights. At the same time experimental and utopian communities and colonies sprouted up across the north from the Oneida colony in New York to New Harmony in Indiana. Then there was this thing called the Lyceum Movement and it grew across the North and Midwest and it was made up of hundreds of associations dedicated to improving the social and intellectual health of Americans. And so the Lyceum movement was all about presenting lectures and debates and readings because the ideas and the opinions of others generated curiosity and intellectual inquiry now while a few of these ideas did find a stage in the larger southern cities none of them took root in the south like they did in the north there was a faith in the southern way of life that was timeless and stable and the unwritten laws would not change nor would its changeless society together the Southern culture strove for unity and uniformity in the eyes of observers one that stifled the brewing conflict within and drew critical examination from northerners and Europeans alike. But as the transportation revolution like we talked about in the last episode brought more boats and more ships and more trains into its sphere of operation the cracks began to show because slavery as a system was being looked at through abolitionist spectacles in England like we saw and in New England in the early 1800s. And so because of this the Southern culture pushed back they said hey let's offer our own set of spectacles to look through in this way the defenders of the South became Scientific in their stance. For as much as Jefferson would insist that the planters were not to be oppressed by any sort of aristocracy, by economic necessity, a planter aristocracy did in fact exist and evolve, especially when it came to divisions of labor. In the North, we see it in the huge influx of German and Irish immigrants who filled the working class that powered northern factories and manufacturing. In the South, the social structure became known as the mudsill theory. James Hammond, a Democratic senator from South Carolina and a wealthy planter, said that every society identified a class of people who would perform the necessary menial labor. The analogy was with a building, whereby the layer supporting the foundation was called the mudsill, the lowest threshold. Therefore, blacks, by nature as slaves, were the lowest class. Hammond gave a speech to the U.S. Senate on March 4, 1858, where he stated In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life, that is, a class requiring but a low order of intellect and but little skill. Its requisites are vigor, docility, fidelity. Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. It constitutes the very mudsill of society and of political government, and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air as to build either the one or the other, except on this mudsill. Fortunately for the South, she found a race adapted to that purpose to her hand. Nearly twenty years before, a Virginia planter and a judge named Abel Upshur expressed his thoughts in writing. Upshur would serve in President John Tyler's cabinet as Secretary of the Navy and as Secretary of State. He wrote in October of eighteen thirty nine. Another accepted theory was paternalism, which was societal code for slave owners as authoritarian rulers over all that they owned, land, goods, persons, animals, and there was no distinction between these, all objectified as inhuman. Historian Walter Johnson, in his book, River of Dark Dreams, Slavery in the Empire and the Cotton Kingdom, shares a section that describes how unprofitable slave owners were dropping the ball by not exhibiting this paternalism. This is an excerpt from M.W. Phillips, who wrote in the American Cotton Planter in 1853 about those planters who were lazy and careless. They were, quote, overseers not interested in raising children or meat or improving land or improving the productive qualities of seeds or animals. End quote. Understand what the sentence is saying. Look at the list. Animals, seed, land, slave children, meat, all these things, were of equal importance because they all belonged to the planter himself. That the offspring of two other people was nothing more than his property. Here we see not just dehumanization of slaves, but the power exerted over slave procreation that bluntly bred more slaves. William Harper, a senator from South Carolina and an acquaintance of Calhoun's, was an outspoken advocate of the religious angle on paternalism, saying, quote, The Creator did not intend that every individual human being should be highly cultivated morally and intellectually. Slavery has done more to elevate a degraded race in the scale of humanity. Paternalism was their justification of power being held by the new aristocracy. And while I have to again set aside my presentist anger and reaction to all this, I can find an ally who expressed his thoughts at the very same time. In eighteen fifty seven, Abraham Lincoln wrote his response to the supposed goodness of slavery. Slavery is good for some people, but as a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar in this that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of for himself. Besides mudsill theory and paternalism, there was also the study and research conducted by doctor Samuel Cartwright. In eighteen fifty, the Medical Association of Louisiana appointed Cartwright to chair a committee investigating the diseases and physical peculiarities of the Negro race. After considering a host of nineteenth century maladies, such as pulmonary congestion, bilious fever, scrofula, and consumption, Cartwright insists on two new disorders. The first one he called draptomania, and he called it a mental illness that caused slaves to want to escape. The second was called dysasthesia theopisia, another mental illness that caused slaves to be lazy. Now both could be cured, and his cure was punishment and hard work. Though northern medical journals found no credibility in Cartwright's claims, and some Southerners considered him an outlier, his conclusions were still reprinted across the South and found a place within the social and economic journals that fueled the cotton industry. Cartwright represents science being manipulated to produce principles for political, societal, and economic power and control. Not the only time. There was phrenology that measured bumps on the skull to predict mental traits, not to mention the Arianism of the early 20th century. In 1846, these many voices of paternalism and the mudsill theory and Cartwright's mental illness descriptions, these were all gathered by a publisher and an editor in New Orleans named James Dunwoody Brownson DeBot. And he published his monthly reader called DeBeau's Review that served as a resource for Southern agricultural, commercial, and industrial progress. Think of DeBot's Review as being kind of like the Wall Street Journal for the South before the Civil War. To illustrate how slavery was not just a social issue, but an economic issue that had to be justified and defended, historian Walter Johnson points out how in the South, capital was difficult to shift shape. Southern businessmen could liquidate their holdings when they faced a challenging situation. They could sell land or goods or animals, etc. But slave holding was not like that. It was an inflexible system. Their capital was people, people who would starve or die, people who would revolt or run away. DeBeau himself spoke before the Southern Commercial Convention in Jackson, Mississippi in 1852, and he observed, quote, does it not encourage dark forebodings of the future that slaves are becoming consumers in a larger degree than they are producers? End quote. Slavery was intertwined in the society and the economy and the sustainability of the southern way of life. So Southern planters and merchants alike could pick up de beauti and find political op-eds and commentary. They could read economic reports and agricultural analysis. They could get caught up on the latest production statistics and forecasts. You could find Dr. Cartwright's slave disease written there. You could also read Senator Hammond's exhortations in its pages, and the agricultural innovations of Edmund Ruffin, who grew in his political activism. The voices of political activism that grew from those loudest in their pro-slavery rhetoric became a chorus of leaders that became known as the fire eaters. Originally a term to describe anybody far to the fringe of the political spectrum, it eventually settled on a growing group of pro-slavery Southern Democrats who began as a minority point of view and grew to a fervent force and advocating for separation and disunion. Edmund Ruffin was one of these outspoken fire eaters. So was publisher J.D.B. DeBoe. As were two of the most vocal leaders of the group, Robert Rhett of South Carolina and William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama. Rhett was a member of the South Carolina legislature. He was a state attorney general, he was a congressman, and a U.S. Senator. He also happened to own the Charleston Mercury, the newspaper in Charleston, two plantations and 190 enslaved persons. His allegiance to the Democratic Party drifted away from a national party and landed squarely on a secessionist and sectional Democratic platform, all at the service of pro-slavery sentiments. Robert Rhett of South Carolina. Yancey of Alabama was known as the Orator of Secession due to his powerful and spellbinding speeches. He also edited a newspaper and defended his honor with vigor. In 1838, he killed a doctor in a brawl that originated with a political slur. Convicted of manslaughter, he was pardoned after a few months. It wouldn't be the last time he'd fight to uphold his honor. William Lowndes Yancey's own frustration with how the party system would fail the South came out in a letter he wrote on june sixteenth, eighteen fifty eight. No national party can save us, no sectional party can do it. But if we could do as our fathers did, we shall fire the southern heart, instruct the southern mind, give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into a revolution. These foundation stones, cultural, legal, social, theoretical, so called scientific, journalistic, and political, were all built to fortify the structure of a slave holding South. And like with any cause or movement today, the final stone, the keystone perhaps, requires us to follow the money. It's hard to wrap my brain around just how much money was flowing through the American South leading up to the Civil War. I don't think it's too great a stretch to draw a parallel between its profitability from cotton and Middle Eastern oil today in the same breath. But it wasn't that way from the beginning. In the 1700s, as the Atlantic slave trade grew to its busiest, the primary cash crops in the Americas and the Caribbean were sugar, rice, indigo, and tobacco. But cotton production struggled. Most of the world's cotton was produced in India, Egypt, and the rest of Asia. But then in 1785, a ship arrived in Liverpool, from the U.S. carrying seven bales of cotton, imported by the firm of Peel Yates and Company. Impossible, thought English textile manufacturers. This was sea island cotton, first grown along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina. When it was planted further inland, it didn't thrive, but another species did, upland cotton, which grows in a variety of soils and also grows much faster. Combine an easier and faster growing type of cotton, upland cotton, with Eli Whitney's cotton gin, and suddenly cotton plantations began dotting the South. In one decade, from 1790 to 1800, cotton exports from South Carolina exploded from 10,000 pounds to 6.4 million pounds. After that, add the arrival of some French planters who had fled San Domingue after the slave revolt there. And now suddenly a cotton industry starts flowing west across Georgia to the new territories of Alabama and Mississippi. Planters and tobacco growers converted to cotton and they brought in thousands more slaves. The more they grew, the more they realized the cotton depleted the nutrients in the soil. So in order to not completely sap the land, they had to keep pushing west. Historian Sven Beckert, in his fascinating book, Empire of Cotton, traces this explosive growth from an industrial revolution and global perspective. Because during the 1800s, cotton exports from the South became the primary global cash crop that fueled the British textile economy around the world. And slavery was the force that drove it. It had the land, the capital, the labor, and political power behind it. Beckard shows how the scales tipped once the American South ramped up its cotton production. In 1801, the three largest regions in the world producing cotton were India, 35%, the rest of Asia, 30%, and the US, 10%. Twenty years later, in 1821, the US had tripled to 30%, ahead of India and Asia at 25% each. And in 10 more years, by 1831, the US produced nearly half the world's cotton, more than India and the rest of Asia combined. Beckard also illustrates how Great Britain was the great engine of textile production and where it got its raw material. In 1800, Great Britain imported 25% of its cotton from the US, 35% from the British West Indies, and 10% from the East Indies. By 1850, it imported 80% from the US, 15% from the East Indies, and the rest from Brazil and the Mediterranean. In the prior episode, we saw that in 1860, New Orleans was the sixth largest city in America, and by far the largest city in the South. New Orleans was bigger than Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis combined. The entire Mississippi Valley and its river system fed the flow of cotton from the upper and lower south to the great port of New Orleans. In River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson paints a picture of the Crescent City on the eve of the Civil War. Imagine hundreds of barges conveying cotton to steamboats that would ply their routes to the wharves and the docks, where a fleet of ocean-going vessels waited to carry their cargo out into the Gulf of Mexico and to the Atlantic and beyond. Imagine thirty, five hundred boats docked in the city. Imagine them carrying two million tons or four billion pounds of cotton valued at about two billion dollars. As De Beau's review put it at the time, quote, no city of the world has ever advanced as a market of commerce with such gigantic strides as New Orleans. And while New Orleans and the other major ports of the South were the places where you could touch the actual bales of cotton, it was also in New York that you could touch part of the trade, the profits of the city's businesses and banks. New York became a sister city to New Orleans and an integral part of the European cotton trade. As cotton bound for Liverpool was first transported north along the eastern coast of the U.S. for a layover in New York. And there the cotton was inspected, it was insured, and it was consigned to a buyer in Europe. And then it shipped off. Nearly 40 cents of every dollar spent on cotton would find its way into the balance sheets of New York businesses and banks. Of all American banks, they could offer longer credit at better rates for those who were buying cotton. And credit was the currency of the empire of cotton. Without it, the empire would have collapsed. The economy worked this way, utilizing a flow of credit and debt, a fictitious capital, if you will. As the cotton crop flowed into New Orleans and other ports, merchants would provide advances against the cotton's future sale to men who were called factors. These were agents who would serve as intermediaries or brokers for planters, and they would sell their cotton and then supply them with credit and then get them their necessary goods from the cities. The factors took these advances and would use it to accumulate goods, seed, supplies, and slaves for the planters they represented. The credit wouldn't be paid off until the cotton was eventually sold to a manufacturer, and all the middlemen would be paid their commissions and fees. Unfortunately, there were times when the eventual sale didn't yield enough profit for the planter and they would have to go into debt until the next crop was harvested. The system mitigated the risks for the middlemen, the interests on loans and the commissions, etc., for the banks and the shippers and the handlers. They got their money regardless of the market fluctuations in Europe. And since the Transatlantic Telegraph wouldn't be completed until the 1860s, the actual market conditions in London and other European centers remained speculative in nature. A lot could happen from the time the cotton was shipped to when it was ultimately sold. This was a type of capitalism the world had never seen before. Historian Sven Beckert proposes in Empire of Cotton that it began as war capitalism. It was capitalism based on a state of war, but not nation war like when two nations fought. Rather it was human war, war on humans themselves as the institution of slave labor. This was bondage driven by economic and capitalistic objectives and strategies. It was not just the capitalism of factories and materials, but it involved lands and laborers, lands that were expropriated by sea powers that could project their force with weapons. Laborers that were expropriated via slavery were worked via violence and coercion. The means of war were what made war capitalism possible. By the end of the 18th century, though, the war capitalism was beginning to give way. First, the British colonies declared their independence from Mother England in 1776. This severely cut British projection of force on the North American continent. Then the Haitian Revolt on the French colony of Saint-Domingue provided a major setback. The island had produced more sugar than all the British West Indies combined, but very little food. Napoleon had seen that the Mississippi Valley could be the breadbasket for feeding it. But once the slave uprising ended with Haitian independence, there was no need to hold on to it. So he sold Louisiana to Jefferson in 1803. French projection pivoted to Europe, where Napoleon focused all his energy. And finally, Great Britain ended the slave trade and abolished slavery altogether as the textile industry around Liverpool and Manchester was moving the empire of cotton from war capitalism to one of industrial capitalism. What remained was the American South and its peculiar institution. But it was not lost on the British cotton manufacturers that they were becoming increasingly dependent on the southern U.S. supply of cotton. And that dependency also depended on the current system of slavery, as one British essayist called it, the bloodstained produce. The southern economy was also uniquely a product of this new type of slavery. Historian Dale Tomich and others describe it as second slavery, in that it is inexorably connected with capitalism. Capitalism produced slavery and slavery produced capitalism. This is an accurate distinction between the history of global slavery up until this point and what took place during and as a result of the Age of Expansion. Tomich writes in his 2018 paper on the second slavery in world capitalism. The concept of the second slavery attempts to come to terms with integral aspects of the formation of the 19th century world political and economic order. As opposed to linear narratives of slavery and the binomial opposition of slavery and freedom, this approach formulates the problem of slave production in terms of global local relations. The global discloses the local as the local discloses the global. We've seen the global history of slavery ancient through the age of exploration and discovery. We've seen the national history of slavery, from British colonies to a new independent nation. We've seen the cultural and societal development. We've seen the political and philosophical wrestling. We've seen the legal tensions over economic and personal freedoms. We've seen the statistical and dogmatic justifications. And we've seen the global and local forces of capitalism and labor. And at the end of the day, when an enslaved person on a plantation in South Carolina woke up in 1860, they knew they were prisoners of a system, forced to work to survive, forced by coercion, not by their own freedom of will. They knew the daily provision of the simplest food and shelter, and they might know simple charity and kindness. And they also knew they could see themselves or their family members beaten, abused, raped, sold, or killed at any moment. It was an existence of labor for survival. And they had no idea what was about to happen. The Southern socioeconomic foundations had been legally permissible and geographically pragmatic. Those swept up in its profitability never bothered to assess its sustainability in the light of its moral cancer. It was a system built because it worked. But the full cost in human suffering was never counted. Slavery filled the fuel tank of the American machine built on its systems and structures, and then all it took were sparks of ignition. The first of the firecrackers started to go off one by one. We've mentioned the Missouri Crisis of 1820, which resulted in Henry Clay offering the compromise of 1820 to address the issue of expansion and the addition of new states. We've also seen the slave revolt on San Domingue that ended in 1803, a thousand miles to the south in the Caribbean. That planted the fear of a slave uprising in the minds of many Americans. In the late summer of eighteen thirty one, those fears came alive. In Southampton County, Virginia, the largest slave uprising in the United States took place. The bloody facts were this. On the morning of august twenty second, a slave named Nat Turner, helped by seven other slaves, killed his owner and his owner's family. Nat Turner and his small band enlisted more slaves until his numbers grew to about seventy men. Over the next twenty four hours, Turner and his followers killed about sixty white people, many women and children, while freeing more and more slaves. By the next day, four companies of Virginia militia, supported by federal troops, local paramilitary societies, and handfuls of hard drinking vigilantes, descended on and scattered Turner's rebellion. More than one hundred blacks were killed, whether part of the uprising or not. Dozens were captured and brought to trial. A few were acquitted, but most were either hanged or sold out of state. Turner himself avoided capture for six weeks until he was discovered. He was tried a week later and hanged on November 11th. This was an explosive event. Nat Turner's rebellion created ripples that fanned out across the country. First, Turner was distinct. His was not the first time slaves fought back against their masters. There were hundreds of cases of slaves fighting back and rising up against the cruelty and abuse by their owners. And this is documented across the country. But Turner's own testimony described his owner as kind, and that he had no cause to complain of his treatment. So Turner's uprising was not necessarily just against individuals, it was against the institution of slavery as a whole. This was a different type of uprising. Second, Turner was religious. He may have considered himself called by God to lead his people to freedom. He had prayed for signs and for leading, and he acted upon them. Many religious Southerners believed bringing religion to slaves was the right thing to do, but Turner defied that thinking. What was going on? Southerners were very confused. Weeks after the uprising, an article titled The Insurrection was published in the North, in Boston. It appeared in the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator. Its publisher was a man named William Lloyd Garrison. From Massachusetts, Garrison worked for a local paper as a teenager. He learned the trade and then matured into a journalist and editor that promoted the temperance movement and anti-slavery societies. For a time, Garrison was associated with the American Colonization Society, which was an organization dedicated to funding the relocation of freed blacks back to Africa. The effort was ultimately a failure, and that only several thousand out of millions would emigrate to what would become the country of Liberia. Instead, Garrison saw the only cure for slavery as immediate emancipation, and he used his newspaper to influence both public and political opinion. He clearly expressed his purpose when he wrote in 1831 on his attitude about slavery. Quote On this subject I do not wish to think or speak or write with moderation. No, no. Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm. But urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest. I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard. End quote. As William Lloyd Garrison broadcast this abolitionist perspective on Turner's rebellion, the Virginia General Assembly gathered to address what had just happened in their state and what they should do next in order to make sure that this never happened again. While we might assume the Virginia Assembly quickly clamped down on slavery with new laws and vigorous enforcement, that's not exactly what happened. They did take steps. But in December of 1831, in January of 1832, the Virginia legislature held a remarkable two-week debate that would be the very last time any Southern public political gathering would seriously debate the pros and cons of slavery. During the proceedings, the majority of tidewater Virginians, those are Virginians living on the east, uh on the eastern side of the state, closer to the Atlantic Ocean, they argued pro-slavery actions, while the majority of the Western Virginians or the mountain Virginians, they opposed slavery. The discussions resurrected all the same problems and all the potential solutions that we've seen already. How do we emancipate? Do we do it immediately or gradually? How do we reduce the slave population? How do we relocate freed slaves? How do we pay for it all? But at the end of the day, sadly, the motion to enact legislation to abolish slavery by the Virginia legislature was shot down. As Virginians congratulated themselves for at least having the conversation, one professor published a review of the proceedings that became the pro-slavery party line and aggregated many of the threads of Southern slavery that we've already looked at. His name was Thomas R. Dew, and he was from William and Mary College. He wrote his review of the debate in the Virginia legislature of 1831 and 1832 in a way that formalized and popularized an accepted view of slavery in the South. It was a matter of simple economics and again the pragmatism of everyday life. There was nothing to be done about slavery since the slaves couldn't be sent away. It became an emigration problem, and Dews' narrative was republished in various forms and pocket editions across the South. About this review, JDB DeBoe said that Dews, quote, able essay on the institution of slavery entitles him to the lasting gratitude of the whole South. The Nat Turner Rebellion had fired sparks, both in the North and in the South, because of slavery. And each spark left fresh burn marks lingering in the North and in the South. The next firecracker to go off would be caused by the constitutional problem of federal versus state powers. At the very same time as Turner's rebellion, politicians in the South were responding to a tariff signed into law in 1828. None other than John C. Calhoun, the vice president at that time, strongly opposed the tariff, which raised taxes on European imports. This made British goods more expensive for Southerners and would make it more difficult to pay for Southern cotton. Calhoun urged that his home state of South Carolina should nullify the tariff. Now, nullification was the idea that a state could simply invalidate a federal law that it believed to be unconstitutional. And now South Carolina argued that this new tariff was unreasonable and that it violated the compact theory of the United States. They were going to nullify an act of Congress. Remember Robert Rhett, the fire eater from South Carolina who we met earlier? Well, in 1828 he was a state representative, and he challenged his fellow Carolinians not to remain passive. He exhorted Impotent resistance will add vengeance to your ruin. Live in smiling peace with your insatiable oppressors and die with the noble consolation that your submissive patience will survive triumphant your beggary and despair. This attitude to act gained momentum. In due time, Senator William Smith, a Democrat from South Carolina, rose in Congress and stated on February 25th, 1830, that if a state has, quote, a right to withdraw and say to the rest of the Union, we no longer belong to you because you have violated the compact with us. We have decided for ourselves that you have oppressed us, your laws are unconstitutional, and we will no longer continue a member of the Union. Nothing definitive happened then until South Carolina itself produced an ordinance of nullification on november twenty fourth, eighteen thirty two. In part it states, We will not submit to the application of force on the part of the federal government to reduce this state to obedience, but that we will consider any act authorizing the employment of a military or naval force against the state of South Carolina, or any act of closing her ports, etc., as inconsistent with the longer continuance of South Carolina in the Union, and that the people of this state will henceforth hold themselves absolved from all further obligation to maintain or preserve their political connection with the people of the other states, and will forthwith proceed to organize a separate government. So as Virginia is navigating its own internal problems following Turner's rebellion, trying to answer the issue of slavery, we've got South Carolina now looking to go rogue in its defiance of Congress. This is the 1830s. We're still a full generation away from the 1860s, but you can already see and hear the opening notes of the chorus of voices that are just going to get louder and louder over the next 30 years. If you were a merchant in Charleston, South Carolina in 1832, what were you thinking? Was there a slave uprising coming right around the corner? Hey, it happened in Virginia last year. The San Domingue revolt wiped out an entire French colony. How do we make sure it doesn't happen here? And now a bunch of northern politicians want to steal my profits from me by taxing goods I need? And my buyers in England don't want to buy my cotton. Forget it, South Carolina can go it alone. What would happen? Well, enter President Andrew Jackson. Say what you will about the legacy and presentist opinions on the seventh president. He wasn't going to let disunion occur. There would be no rebellion. In fact, to a visitor from South Carolina who asked if the president had a message he could take back home with him, Jackson said this. Yes, please give my compliments to my friends in your state and say to them that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct upon the first tree I can reach. End quote. In addition to his bold words, Jackson acted. He sent a naval force to Charleston, and then he moved the customs revenue collection for the tariffs from the mainland out to Fort Moultrie, which was five miles away from the city, to collect the tariff, anyways. Jackson also weighed in with a proclamation regarding nullification. This was his POV on the whole subject, on December 10th, 1832. He said that the ordinance, quote, prescribes to the people of South Carolina a course of conduct in direct violation of their duty as citizens of the United States. The strange position that any one state may not only declare an act of Congress void, but prohibit its execution, the power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, is incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed. Did we pledge ourselves to the support of an airy nothing, a bubble that must be blown away by the first breath of disaffection? End quote. It was a strong argument. On february first, eighteen thirty three, the state of Louisiana formally condemned South Carolina for its efforts. Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi all concurred. In the end, tensions eased. Meanwhile, Henry Clay stepped forward and ushered through Congress a new tariff act that diffused the situation. Congress also passed the Force Bill of 1833. Not for our Star Wars fans, you know, use the force, but basically giving Jackson the authority to use armed force against South Carolina if necessary. South Carolina defiantly nullified the force bill. And then the president basically ignored them. In this way, Rocky as it was, the nullification crisis passed. However, though secession did not occur, the idea of it now had. Before we move on, I want us to listen to three quotes from James Madison, as provided by historian Dennis Rasmussen in Fears of a Setting Sun. Because in 1832, at the height of the nullification crisis, Madison was 81 and declining in health. But like his fellow founders, Jefferson and Adams, later in life he was concerned with the staying power of the young country. In 1829, when the tariff caused the brewing storm, he wrote Treasury Secretary Richard Rush that nullification would, quote, convert the federal government into a mere league, which would quickly throw the states back into a chaos, out of which not order a second time, but lasting disorder of the worst kind could not fail to grow. End quote. In 1832, Madison also wrote young Nicholas Trist, who was in the State Department. He wrote that, quote, the idea that a constitution which has been so fruitful of blessings and a union admitted to be the only guardian of the peace, liberty, and happiness of the people of the states comprising it should be broken up and scattered to the winds without greater than any existing causes is more painful than words can express. And finally, to his former private secretary, Edward Coles, Madison wrote in 1834 that nullification would put powder under the Constitution and Union and a match in the hand of every party to blow them up at pleasure. If South Carolina alone could produce this doubt and fear in the heart and mind of the father of the Constitution, what might happen if several states agreed together to blow up the Constitution and Union at pleasure? As often happens, another event, especially an external event, can distract the country from internal issues for a period of time. Let's turn our gaze southwest from the early United States and focus on the area beyond the Louisiana Purchase. Let's turn our gaze to Texas. In 1821, Mexico won its independence from Spain. During the 1820s, hundreds of Americans crossed into the Mexican province of Texas and settled there. At first, Mexico saw the new settlers as a useful buffer between its own citizens and raiding Comanches to the north and west. But eventually Mexico decided it should demand more from the Texans, including higher tariffs and the abolition of slavery. As tensions escalated, Stephen Austin called the settlers to arm themselves. Then, Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana led his Mexican army to invade after Texas declared independence in 1836. After wiping out the Texans at the Alamo, Sam Houston defeated the Mexicans and captured Santa Ana. In 1845, the Republic of Texas agreed to annexation by the U.S., and it became the twenty eighth state. However, there was a dispute about the border between Texas and Mexico. Was the border the Rio Grande or the Nueces River? Both sides occupied disputed land, and both sides sent in troops. President Polk saw Mexican aggression toward an eighty-man detachment he had sent into the area as an unwarranted attack, and a few weeks later, Congress declared war. The Mexican-American War lasted from 1846 until 1848, and was mainly an invasion by American forces at two points within Mexico, in the north culminating in the Battle of Buena Vista, and in the south, where a naval invasion of Veracruz ended with the capture of Mexico City by General Winfield Scott. This conversation is primarily about the aftermath of the war and the territorial gains that the U.S. secured. But let me just say the Mexican-American War would be the testing ground for a great number of the military leaders who would face off against one another during the Civil War. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848 to end the war, Joseph Johnston, George McClellan, Thomas Jackson, George Meade, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee all served together in the American Army. And they had no idea that in more than a dozen years they would find themselves enemies. Now that treaty accomplished several things. Number one, the border was fixed along the Rio Grande. Number two, the U.S. assumed three million dollars in debt that Mexico owed U.S. citizens. And lastly, the U.S. paid Mexico $15 million for a massive tract of land that went from Texas all the way west to the Pacific Ocean. That area now makes up areas that are parts of present-day New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. It was a ton of land. It's 529,000 square miles, massive. And now the United States went from sea to shining sea. But the questions remained, what would become of it, and would slavery be allowed in it? Not everyone in America was in favor of the war. The Democrats were unified behind Democratic President Polk's decision to go to war, and how strongly he pressed it. Many Whigs were against it, including former President John Quincy Adams, Joshua Giddings, and Abraham Lincoln. And while Henry Clay was out of Congress during the war, he privately saw it as wrong and immoral. Indeed, he suffered his own personal tragedy when his son, Henry Clay Jr. was killed fighting in the war. Abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell wrote in 1845 the poem This present crisis to protest the idea of war with Mexico in order to gain more territory, which would allow for the expansion of slavery. Here are two stanzas We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great, slow of faith how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate. But the soul is still oracular amid the market's din, list the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within. They enslave their children's children, who make compromise with sin. Slavery the earth born cyclops, fellest of the giant brood, sons of brutish force and darkness who have drenched the earth with blood, famished in his self made desert, blinded by our purer day, gropes in yet unblasted regions for his miserable prey. Shall we guide his gory fingers where our helpless children play? One Democrat who saw the situation through different lenses than just the war was David Wilmot. The thirty two year old Pennsylvanian congressman supported Polk and the policy that led to war, but he grew increasingly frustrated with Polk's Southern leanings, especially when it came to slavery. Wilmot and a group of anti-slavery Democrats begin to strategize how they could stop its spread. Their opportunity came on August 8th, 1846. Just a few months after the war with Mexico was declared, the president confidently requested from Congress the approval of $2 million to be used when the war was over to settle negotiations. It was kind of a last-minute thing. Congress was going to adjourn in two days, and only two hours were allocated for any and all debate. The anti-slavery Democrats saw their chance. Wilmot, seen as friendly to Polk, would have no problem taking the floor. He would present an amendment to the appropriations bill, a proviso that would carry his name. And unlike Jefferson's missed opportunity to handle the issue of slavery with the Louisiana Purchase like the Northwest Ordinance had for its territory, the Wilmot Proviso applied similar language to the newest expanse of land that might be added following the war. It said, quote, provided that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to use by the executive of the monies herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime whereof the party shall first be duly convicted. Once again a line was being drawn in the sand. When new states were to be added to the Union from this new expanse of territory secured from Mexico, would they be slave or would they be free? How would the balance of power be tipped in the government in terms of pro-slavery or anti-slavery representation? Legal historian Arthur T. Downey, in his amazing book, Civil War Lawyers, cites John C. Calhoun's use of the word equilibrium to describe the political objective of keeping slave and free states equal in terms of senatorial representation and votes. The ideal was when a free state was admitted, so was a slave state, and vice versa. But as territory was added, the question of sectional balance became more and more difficult as the moral issue of slavery could not be held in stasis. Wilmot's proviso would prohibit slavery in any territory gained from Mexico through the negotiations after the war. Northern Whigs and Northern Democrats supported it. All the South opposed it. Sectionalism was now beginning to trump political party boundaries. The proviso initially passed in the House, but not in the Senate. The following year, it resurfaced when Polk upped his request to three million dollars. Illinois Representative Stephen A. Douglas suggested extending the line of the Missouri Compromise all the way to the West Coast, but that plan was defeated. In the end, the Senate passed the appropriation, but without the proviso. But the Wilmot Proviso lingered in the halls of Congress. That desire to limit slavery wouldn't go away. Some tried to detach it to the treaty to end the war, but that failed. Calhoun tried in many ways to thwart the proviso by tact. First, in January of 1849, he called a caucus of Southern congressmen across party lines, both Democrats and Whigs, to work together for pro-slavery purposes. Second, in October of 1849, he called a Mississippi Convention of Slaveholders, who predicted that in a half dozen years the Northerners would have a constitutional majority and slaves would outnumber whites, which would be a recipe for an uprising. This necessitated a convention for the entire South. Third, this Greater Southern Convention actually occurred in Nashville in June of 1850. It was contentious, with moderates urging preservation of the Union and radicals like Jefferson Davis suggesting secession. The convention produced 28 resolutions, 28, one of which declared that anyone who would deny a slaveholder the ability to enter a territory would deny them their constitutional right, and was thus the true disunionist. The question is, was regionalism beginning to drive a wedge through the heart of the country? A year later in 1850, the country was again shaking with political tension from multiple directions. The Whigs had won the White House in the election of 1848 after President Polk honored his promise to only serve one term. The war hero, General Zachary Taylor, beat out Democratic candidate Lewis Cass of Michigan. And a brand new political party coalesced around the idea of limiting the spread of slavery. It was called the Free Soil Party. It was made up of anti-slavery Democrats and anti-Talor Whigs, and these Free Soilers won a dozen seats in the House of Representatives. The spirit of the Wilmot Proviso was firmly in the wind. The next spark of ignition, fueled by the issue of slavery, was about to come to a head across three distinct problems. First, how big would Texas be? The Rio Grande would be the southern border, but how far west toward modern New Mexico would it extend? Texas wanted slavery, so in essence, how far would it go to? Number two, what would be done with California? Following the war, gold had been discovered in 1848, and people flooded into the territory. The gold rush was on. And it immediately had more people than either Florida or Delaware. It was ready for statehood. But again, would a line be drawn for slavery and where? And then thirdly, what again about slavery? Many northerners were adamant that it should not be permitted in the nation's capital, even though it was allowed in surrounding Maryland. And with explosive growth and transportation via waterways and railroads, states could not agree on how to apply the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. That's the act that said runaway slaves needed to be returned to their owners. Since that time, many northern states had passed their own personal liberty laws that allowed for jury trials and hindrances for state authorities from aiding slaves being returned. Mix in with that an 1842 Supreme Court case, which was called Prig versus Pennsylvania, that upheld the 1793 Act and removed the ability of states to enforce it at the state level. In other words, the federal government would have to enforce the federal act. All of this compounded now in 1850. Thirty years before, the Missouri problem threatened to tear the country apart in 1820, and one man stepped in to hold the Union together. In 1850, with these problems straining the nation, he did it again. Henry Clay was 73 and once again answered the call of his state elected senator from Kentucky. In January 1850, Clay reunited in Washington with his compatriots Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun to debate the issues. What would happen now? Could anything be done? Would slave states decide nullification would be the answer, unless they got their way? No one knew the answer, not Clay, Webster, or Calhoun, and not several other statesmen waiting in the wings as it all played out. Politicians such as Senator William Seward, an antislavery whig from New York, Democrat Stephen A. Douglas, Senator from Illinois, Free Soil Senator Salmon Chase, from Ohio, and a Democrat Senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis. On january twenty ninth, Clay presented an omnibus bill made up of eight bills that included admission of California as a free state, definitive Texas borders along with debt relief, establishment of Utah and New Mexico territories, a ban on the slave trade in the District of Columbia, and a clearer and stricter fugitive slave law. By combining these issues, Clay hoped he'd garner support across both North and South, even if they disagreed with specifics. It didn't help that the president opposed the whole thing. The debate would go on for months. While the border and territory questions were the initial priorities, there could be no denial that slavery became the overriding topic that would affect everything. On february fifteenth, Daniel Webster wrote this to abolitionist William Henry Furnace, revealing his personal beliefs. From my earliest youth I have regarded slavery as a great moral and political evil. I think it unjust, repugnant to the natural equality of mankind, founded only in superior power, a standing and permanent conquest by the stronger over the weaker, opposed to the whole spirit of the gospel and to the teachings of Jesus Christ. On March fourth, John C. Calhoun appeared in the Senate, but he was too ill from tuberculosis to speak or stand. Virginia Senator James Mason, his friend, read Calhoun's speech to the chamber. In it he warned of the destruction of his necessary equilibrium to keep the balance between North and South. He affirmed the South's right to leave the Union if necessary, demonstrating his firm belief in the principles of nullification, and he put the onus of responsibility firmly on the stronger party, the antislavery North, to solve the problem that was subjugating the weaker party, the pro slavery South. Near the end, Calhoun threw down his gauntlet. If you, who represent the stronger portion, cannot agree to settle them on the broad principle of justice and duty, say so and let the states we both represent agree to separate and part in peace. If you are unwilling, we should part in peace. Tell us so, and we shall know what to do when you reduce the question to submission or resistance. A week later, on March eleventh, Webster took the floor and spoke for three and a half hours. He concluded that if compromise failed, the South was right and the North was wrong. The Constitution needed to be upheld. The Union was the real issue, more important than solving the slavery problem. He tempered the Northern anti-slavery response and blamed abolitionists as absolutists and perfectionists, saying, quote, there is found to exist a state of crimination and recrimination between the North and the South. There are lists of grievances produced by each. And those grievances, real or supposed, alienate the minds of one portion of the country from the other, exasperate the feelings, subdue the sense of fraternal connection and patriotic love and mutual regard. There has been found at the North a disinclination to perform fully their constitutional duties in regard to the return of persons bound to service, who have escaped into the free states. In that respect, it is my judgment that the South is right and the North is wrong. Every member of every Northern legislature is bound by oath, like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution of the United States. Webster was lambasted by abolitionists. They called him a worthless traitor, guilty of apostasy, fit to keep company with folks like Benedict Arnold and Judas Iscariot. Horace Mann, the great educator, named Webster a fallen star or Lucifer descended from heaven. However, Webster spoke for the majority of Northerners and for many Whig Southerners. He lost respect in his home state of Massachusetts, but nationally he garnered great respect. In fact, in a few years he would unsuccessfully run for president, but eventually become Secretary of State. The abolitionists had their rising man of the hour stand up on March eleventh, the freshman senator from New York, William Seward, who said what many had hoped Webster would have said. It assumes that slavery, if not the only institution in a slave state, is at least a ruling institution, and that this characteristic is recognized by the Constitution. But slavery is only one of many institutions there. Freedom is equally an institution there. Slavery is only a temporary, accidental, partial, and incongruous one. Freedom, on the contrary, is a perpetual, organic, universal one, in harmony with the Constitution of the United States. The Constitution regulates our stewardship, the Constitution devotes the domain to union, to justice, to defense, to welfare, and to liberty. But there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part, no inconsiderable part of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards and must so discharge our trust as to secure in the highest attainable degree their happiness. Seward's higher law speech catapulted him to the forefront of anti-slavery supporters and was widely reprinted. On march thirty first, four weeks after his speech was read in the Senate, John C. Calhoun died at the Old Brick Capitol Boarding House. His body was taken back to Charleston. In the Senate, someone suggested to Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton that he eulogize Calhoun. Benton declined, saying He is not dead, sir, he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines. Benton's statement could not have been more true. In the end, the compromise of eighteen fifty was passed as five separate bills, including the main topics as proposed by Clay and repurposed and supported by Stephen Douglas. Together they didn't completely satisfy any one group, but together they represented an adequate solution to problems that needed answers. But the spirit of Calhoun lingered in the most important part of the compromise, and the most incendiary part, the next spark of ignition that lit up the cancer of slavery, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The new and improved version of the 1793 Act now mandated that federal judicial officials in all states and territories must assist with the return of escaped slaves back to their owners in slave states. Any federal marshal or official who did not would now be fined $1,000. Everyone tasked with law enforcement, no matter what state they were in, now had to arrest anyone suspected of being a fugitive slave. It was their duty, even if the only evidence was the testimony of the person making the claim. Fugitives could not request a jury trial, and anyone aiding or abetting a fugitive with food or shelter was also guilty of a crime, punishable by a thousand dollar fine and six months in prison. Lastly, officials who captured fugitives were paid by the federal government for their work. It was a blatant deferral to the South in order to get the other bills of the compromise passed. And yet it was praised because the Union was saved. Another crisis had been averted. Clay, the great compromiser, had done it again. And then he too would die of tuberculosis a few years later in 1852. No one knew how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would affect the country. Most leaders figured they had finally figured out how to pragmatize the peculiar institution of slavery. But like the package of firecrackers, what had started as slow pop popping would year by year gain speed and intensity as events continued to explode out of control. What no one could have known was that the act now made slavery everybody's business. It didn't matter if you lived in the North or the South, if you were in a free state or a slave state. Slavery was a national issue now, and one that favored slave owners. Since the 1830s, there had been a secretive network of anti-slavery routes and safe houses all across the country that enabled runaway slaves to escape north to freedom, further north to Canada, or even south to Mexico. Over time, the term underground railroad was used to describe this network, and code words were employed to describe how it worked. Those who initially helped fugitive slaves get on board were known as agents. Hiding places were called stations, and those who guided the runaways were conductors. Abolitionist William Still was a free black man in Pennsylvania who helped hundreds of slaves escape. Harriet Tubman was nicknamed Moses for her dangerous missions to help dozens and dozens of slaves escape from Maryland. And many church congregations, from Quakers to Congregationalists and mainline denominations, all joined in with other abolitionist societies. Often people involved would only know their one small part of the network, so as to not jeopardize the whole route to which they were connected. Tens and tens of thousands would make their way out of bondage. But the Fugitive Slave Act would change things. If you were caught helping a fugitive escape, it wasn't just the slave who was in trouble. You were now in trouble. And being a criminal or an informant or a bounty hunter made things different. It didn't matter if you lived in the north or the south, in the expanding west or in a border state. The reality was that at any moment slavery might knock on your front door. A fugitive slave is loose, a federal marshal here requests your help to capture and return him. What will you do? It's the law that you must help. There's no riding the fence. What will you do? It's the beginning of the eighteen fifties. What would America look like now? Let's consider what we can learn from this conversation about American slavery. Building off last episode's encouragement to not be simplistic. The positive action when we are confronted with something or someone that is thoroughly complex is to take the time to understand. People, scenarios, and situations all may have layers and layers of complicating factors that we'd do well to heed. Cancer often grows and spreads undetected, and when discovered, cannot simply be removed. When I find myself presented with a confusingly complicated problem, do I take the time to ask good questions and to be a better listener? But like the cancer illustration at the outset, often problems are just expected to run their course. How does that help? Another lesson is to not do nothing. Too many people's reply to the cancer of slavery was to throw their arms up and say it's too big an issue, nothing can be done. That's an effortless way out. Simple steps forward are still steps. How do I remain proactive when it comes to problems even when they seem insurmountable? Lastly, everyone has a perspective on this chapter of American history. It is a backdrop for our current ideas around politics, freedoms, rights, justice, race relations, and social tensions. The subject touches on power and greed, exploitation, manipulation, profits and control. It pulls in states, cities, monuments, churches, flags, and the preservation of our collective past as a country. And it is a difficult conversation and story. But we need to be willing to have it. Resist the temptation to avoid it. As I hope, we're willing to learn from it, not lecture at it. In our next episode, we're going to watch as the firecrackers keep exploding faster and louder through the 1850s. America's leaders will grasp at straws for empty solutions. Political parties will completely unravel. The country morphs into three countries. And everyone looks for someone, someone to stand up and lead to do something about the cancer of slavery that is breaking the nation apart. If this is compelling for you, please tell others about it. This is a passion project of my own that doesn't have a huge marketing engine behind it. I truly believe that if something has value, people will tell others. So let your friends and family know about Breaking Nation. They can listen on our website or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and it's also on Amazon and Audible. Be sure to sign up for email updates on the website as well, since new episodes will be released intermittently. So when a new one drops, you'll get an email. Lastly, thank you for listening. I genuinely appreciate the support of listeners and can't wait to keep learning along with you. Breaking Nation, a Civil War podcast, is a production of Waveland Creative. Check out our website at breakingnation.com. I'm Scott Holmgren, your host. Thank you for listening. And if you're not learning, you're not living.