Civil War History - Secession and PoliticsWas it Slavery, or was it States Rights? Perhaps it was the election of Lincoln? What were the real reasons for Southern Secession and what were the political issues in this time of war? Find your answers here in the Secession and Politics Disussion.
It brings to the fore information alluded to but never expressed as clearly (or, at least, not to my recollection) on several older threads. Slave state governance was indeed sharply skewed in favor of the slaveholder; hence, a slaveocracy.
With sincere thanks,
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
Getting back to my original question, was the Constitution proslavery, the question on how the congressional districts were drawn is "slavery neutral" in my opinion, because "gerrymandering" has been an issue in both the slave and free states, and both before and after the CW. In fact, its a hot issue in Texas right now and other states as well. I believe the term "gerrymandering" was invented in Massachusetts.
I don't know the answer, but I'm perfectly willing to assume that there was gerrymandering in the North as well as in the South. But the point remains, I think, that in the South the general effect was to increase the power of slaveholding areas and interests. There was no countervailing effort or effect in the North to increase the power of areas within states that might have had greater antislavery tendencies.
By the way, I stumbled across a very thoughtful blog entry on this issue, which properly suggests that part of the uncertainty as to the answer may lie in the ambiguity of the question. Well worth reading:
I liked a comment earlier that the constitution went only so far as it had to in recognizing the rights of the slaveowner. In that, it was neither pro- nor anti-slavery -- just trying to strike the right, acceptable balance.
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
Henry argued that . . . Congress could tax slave property so severely to make slave holding economically impossible . . ..
Henry's argument is somewhat ironic given the origin of the "direct tax" provision. At the Constitutional Convention, the "direct tax" provision was placed in the three-fifths clause as political cover for northerners who were going to have to "sell" the three-fifths provision to their constitutents. In fact, it was generally recognized that direct taxes would rarely if ever be levied:
"After numerous motions and amendments, the Randolph-Williamson scheme was passed with a proviso suggesting that the three-fifths rule was primarily a rule for apportioning direct taxation among the states, and that the rule of representation simply followed the same formula. As Williamson noted, 'less umbrage would perhaps be taken agst. an admission of slaves into the Rule of representation' if it posed as an extension of a rule of taxation. The fact that few delegates expected such taxes to be levied posed no obstacle to a formula which was designed to legitimate a decision taken for political reasons."
Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Vintage 1997) at p. 74.
"Though a few delegates hinted that the new government might still resort to the 'federal principle, of requiring quotas' in the form of requisitions upon the states, experience had proved that the only workable revenue system was one that left the Union completely independent of the states. Consistent with their expectations about the modest responsibilities of the new government, the framers believed that its revenue needs would be met through a program of indirect taxation centering on import duties -- the most productive and least burdensome forms of revenue available to the prudent statesman."
Original Meanings at p. 180.
Indeed, the direct taxation measure seemed sufficiently unnecessary as a revenue-raising measure that Gouverneur Morris later proposed deleting it. "'He had only meant it as a bridge to assist us over a certain gulph;' -- that is, the issue of whether slaves should be counted at all -- 'having passed that gulph the bridge may be removed.'"
Original Meanings at p. 396, n. 44.
In fact, the expectation that direct taxes would rarely if ever be levied proved accurate:
"The direct tax provision of the three-fifths clause turned out to be almost meaningless, and accordingly all the three-fifths clause really did was give the slave states more power. As Morris predicted, the new federal government . . . depended on import duties for the lion's share of its income, and northerners paid the lion's share of the duties. Direct taxes, from the outset, were dismissed as unpopular, cumbersome, and impossible to enforce . . ..
"Only when the import trade was threatened by war did the federal government even consider direct taxes. In 1798 it appeared that the United States would soon be at war with France, and as a result many in Congress thought it dangerous for the federal treasury to be totally dependent on import duties. So Congress, with much grumbling, agreed to a direct tax of two million dollars. Similarly, during the War of 1812 the Madison administration desperately needed money, and Congress imposed direct taxes of three million dollars in 1813, six million dollars in 1814, and three million dollars in 1815. . . All in all, Congress resorted to direct taxes only four times in the seventy-two years between Washington's election and Lincoln's. In the other sixty-eight years direct taxes were neither enacted nor even seriously discussed."
Leonard Richard, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (LSU Press 2000) at p. 55.
William Lee Miller, in his book "Arguing About Slavery," has a nice section about the Constitution both recognizing slavery, "at its feet," while looking ahead to a slavery free America.
In earlier posts, I have explained some of the ways in which the Constitution magnified the power of the slave states in all three branches of the federal government. Now let me lay out a few more ways in which political developments, unforeseen by the Founders, interacted with the Constitution to further strengthen slave state power over the Executive Branch.
The Republican Party Caucus
As of 1787, “factions” and “parties” were dirty words. Although Madison, following David Hume, thought factions were probably inevitable, he hoped that multiple, local interests would cancel each other out and thus fail to coalesce into national factions that would disrupt the federal government. Even he did not foresee that within five years two national parties would begin to form, much less that party politics would quickly come to dominate the national political landscape. Nonetheless, the rise of the party that Madison and Jefferson formed, the Jeffersonian Republicans, and the methods that it used to select presidential candidates, interacted with the Constitution to magnify the power of the slave states in the selection of presidential nominees and thus presidents (since after 1800 the Federalists were an annoyance at best).
The method that the Republicans used to select their presidential candidates was the Republican Congressional Caucus. The Caucus consisted of members of the party sitting in both houses of Congress – both the House and the Senate.
The inherent structure of the caucus interacted with the Three-Fifths Rule and intra-state allocation to give the slave states additional power. Although the North was the majority section in the House as well as in the nation, that was not the case in the Caucus. From the Republican Party’s birth in the 1790s through 1816, the slave states always elected more Republicans than the free states.
Free states first obtained a slim, four-vote majority in the Caucus in 1817. (Without the effect of the Three-Fifths Rule, the northern majority would have been 19 or 20 votes.) However, in 1820 the party was running an incumbent (James Monroe of Virginia), and the Caucus system died as a method for presidential nominations after 1824.
In 1824, the Caucus nominated Georgian William Crawford, even though he had been disabled by a severe stroke earlier in the year. Many refused to accept the result, and a confused multi-candidate election ensued. No candidate obtained a majority of votes in the Electoral College. Selecting among the top three finishers, the House eventually elected John Quincy Adams president over Andrew Jackson and Crawford. Adams was the first northerner to hold the position since his father had been elected in 1796, twenty-eight years earlier. "King Caucus" was almost universally condemned as an antidemocratic, aristocratic cabal and was abandoned as a method for nominating presidential candidates.
The new Jacksonian Democratic party, however, thereafter replaced the Caucus with another device that buttressed the strength of the slave states in presidential elections.
The Democratic Convention Two-Thirds Rule
In 1828, the Jacksonian Democrats swept into office. Andrew Jackson won 92% of the electoral vote in the slave states, 49% of that vote in the north. The Democrats, who had denounced the Caucus, replaced it with the party convention, in which all states were represented by party delegates in proportion to each state’s number of votes in the Electoral College (which itself gave the slave states undue influence). Beginning with the vice presidential nomination in 1832 (Andrew Jackson’s renomination that year never being in question), the Democrats adopted a rule providing that candidates would receive the nomination only if they received the votes of two-thirds, rather than one-half, of the convention delegates. The rule proved extremely durable. The Democrats did not abandon it until 1936.
The Two-Thirds Rule gave the slave states in the Democratic Party a veto over all presidential and vice presidential nominations, and they knew it. For example, in 1844 Martin Van Buren of New York entered the convention with a majority of the delegates. Van Buren, however, had failed to endorse the proposed annexation of Texas. Pro-Texas men blocked Van Buren’s nomination, which eventually went to expansionist James K. Polk of Tennessee, who won the election over Whig Henry Clay.
The lesson was not lost. Northern politicians recognized that the way to the presidency lay through the south. While northern Democrats could win the nomination, they had to be doughfaces whose views were acceptable to the south: Lewis Cass of Michigan (the inventor of “popular sovereignty”, nominated 1848, lost to Zachary Taylor), Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire (elected 1852) and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania (elected 1856). In 1860, of course, Stephen Douglas of Illinois proved unacceptable to the southern delegates and the party ruptured. As I recall, some other guy won the election that year.
Isn't it inevitable that national candidates had to be acceptable to the nation as a whole? Were the Virginians(like Washington, Jefferson and Madison) seen as nationalists, rather than sectional candidates, even by Northerners?
I'm not sure how to answer your question. One answer is that the founders did not expect that men elected president would necessarily be well known to the nation as a whole. They thought (or hoped) that the Electors would tend to vote for the most prominent men in their locality, and that the House would then select the best of these men for the presidency. If that man was from Georgia, he might not be well know in New Hampshire, or vice versa.
Of course, the founders were wrong. National figures quickly emerged. But that doesn't mean that regional loyalties didn't play a part. If you look at the election of 1796, John Adams won substantially all of the Electoral votes from New Jersey and New York north; Thomas Jefferson won substantially all from Pennsylvania south. In 1800, the only material difference was that Jefferson won the electoral votes of New York.
From 1804 until 1824, opposition to the Jeffersonian Republican candidate was an annoyance at best. The real game was fought out within the party. The party selected candidates of stature -- Madison, Monroe -- but by the same token, had the party chosen others than Virginians they almost certain would have been elected president as well.
If I haven't adequately answered your question, let me know.
The Electoral College totals for the early elections may be found here:
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