The North's opposition to Slavery In The Territories was based primarily on-
#1. Controlling Congress To Advance Northern Interests
The purpose was to gain control of the Senate (territories eventually become states- Kansas, etc) thereby consolidating control of the Federal government (the North already had a majority in the House).
With this power -controlling House, Senate, and the Presidency- they could enact any and all legislation to advance Northern interests.
__________________ POWER & MONEY
"Your New-York bankers and merchants are shrewd people, but I never gave them credit for so much sagacity as when they took the Government Loan. It was not merely patriotism, it was a high stroke of policy. It has saved the Government, and what they will regard as equally important, saved them from a great financial disaster."
#1. Controlling Congress To Advance Northern Interests
The purpose was to gain control of the Senate (territories eventually become states- Kansas, etc) thereby consolidating control of the Federal government (the North already had a majority in the House).
With this power -controlling House, Senate, and the Presidency- they could enact any and all legislation to advance Northern interests.
I don't see the purpose of this poll, and don't think the choices are particularly appropriate.
"Northern interests" were extremely diverse in relation to Southern ones. While NJ had a strong affiliation with the South overall, the northeastern section (Newark to Patterson) favored protective tariffs. Most northern manufacturers did not favor the Morrill Tariff -- but the ones in PA and northern NJ seem to have favored it. Support for the Morrill Tariff raw wool tax was largely from small farmers (even though most of the benefits went to large sheep ranches). While there was a lot more industrial employment in the North (particularly the Mid-Atlantic and New England states) than in the South, most of the people in the area outside the slave states still made their living through agriculture.
Personally, I have long been of the belief that the major reason there was a divide between the "South" and everyone else was simply the insistence of the "South" on the primacy of slavery and slave-property rights over all else. This Southern insistence consistently divided them from everyone else far more than anything Northerners ever did. But somehow that type of choice did not make it into your poll.
Tim
__________________ "Let us, then, consider all attempts to weaken this Union, by maintaining that each state is separately and individually independent, as a species of political heresy, which can never benefit us, but may bring on us the most serious distresses."
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina, 1740-1824, Revolutionary War soldier, one of the authors of the US Constitution in 1787, speaking at the South Carolina Ratifying Convention in 1788.
If I had to make a choice--and I don't--it was more a moral objection to slavery than anything else. It was widely believed, north and south, for quite a few decades, that slavery confined was slavery on the way to eventual extinction.
It has been well-argued that slavery could have survived in venues other than agriculture. That would be much like the leopard changing his spots. The politically powerful slave-owners were planters. So far as they were concerned, planting was the ultimate occupation and they saw continuation of restriction as the ultimate insult.
I don't entirely buy into the argument as tipping the balance of political power. As has been pointed out, an amendment prohibiting slavery today would be all but impossible today if the slave states stood against it.
By the way, an incredibly transparent poll.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
Thank you for at last fully explaining your postion on the causes of the Civil War.
It is my own opinion that this is not a serious attempt at a 'poll' but merely a declaration of what you believe to be right.
Your two 'choices' remind me of a part of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech.
"Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored--contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man--such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care--such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance--such as invocation to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and to undo what Washington did."
I am of the opinion that the majority of board members and those who visit our board, will not "be diverted" by such a "contrivance."
Sincerely,
Unionblue
__________________ "The American people and the Government at Washington may refuse to recognize it for a time but the inexorable logic of events will force it upon them in the end; that the war now being waged in this land is a war for and against slavery." Frederick Douglass
"Loyalty to our ancestors does not include loyalty to their mistakes." George Santayana
Well should the North desire the territories to come in as free states to cement Northern control of the Congress; the corollary is also true, that the South would want to extend slavery into the territories to expand the 'Slave Power'
"The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France."
The above excert is from Mississippi's Causes of Secession and clearly illuminates how bringing free states into the Union somehow deprives the South.
It goes to the very core of the sectionalist debate - slavery
I think the average citizen would identify with the moral concerns of the issue.
I think Northern politicians would cite both reasons and am not sure which would be the more important reason for them, gaining political power or the immorality of slavery.
__________________ "Those who forget to remember the past are condemned to repeat it", George Santayana.
No question in my mind it was #2. It seems to me, from Frehling, et al, that the South was much more worried about Northern dominance than the North was concerned about Southern control. There was, by the late '50s a consensus in the North that, what ever folks personally thought about the Negroes, that slavery was an evil institution and that, at the least, it should not be spread.
__________________ -
"It was a very peculiar time." - Franklin D. Cossitt
Ancestors in USA Army: 6th IA Inf, 11th IL Cav, 1st AL Cav; 122nd NY Inf; 6th MI Cav; 35th MA Inf; 100th IL Inf; 1st CO Inf/Cav; 22nd IN Inf
I believe the honorable samgrant has it about right. Although there may have been some northern politicians who wanted free states to tip the sectional power in their favor, I don't recall reading of one. The opposition of slavery in the territories was overwhelmingly intended to halt the spread of slavery.
Alternatively, it is far more frequently mentioned (by historians rather than southern politicians) that the goal of expansion was power in congress. It seems to me (unscientific observation) that the objection to prohibition was more one of states' rights to expand slavery than it was concern for political power.
I realize that I'm standing in the way of a tide of historical interpretation, but it does look to me like the prohibition on expansion of slavery was more a matter of exactly that than any real intent to gain congressional control.
ole
__________________ I never knew a man who wished to be himself a slave. Consider if you know any good thing that no man desires for himself. A. Lincoln
#1. Controlling Congress To Advance Northern Interests.
I vote in favor of #1.
The whole idea behind the Missouri Compromise was to compromise on the issue of salvery in the territories. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was just an extension of that premise designed to permit Local Control and Self-Determiniation on the issue. But then Congress and their Slave Wage Advocate cronies in the North saw fit to stack the deck with Immigrant Free Soilers from the New England Immigrant Aid Society.
Battalion is on the right track if you ask me. You all may not like it, but your goody two shoes blue belly Brahmain Yankess didn't give two cents for the plight of the black man. Slave Wages for their factories, mines and railroads. That's all they cared about. CHEAP LABOR and Slave Labor isn't Cheap!
CivilWarTalk.com -
A free and friendly Civil War community. 
The North's opposition to Slavery In The Territories was based primarily on- 
Slave Labor Isn't Cheap 
Linear Mode
