Chasing their tail.

jgoodguy · Aug 22, 2012

Southern political adventures from the Kansas-Nebraska Act (May 1854) to John
Brown's Raid (October 1859) resembled the proverbial dog chasing its tail. Round and round the slaveholders went, seeking protections abroad and consolidations at home. Whether in pursuit of a slave state for Kansas, or a slave empire in the Caribbean, safeguards from a US Supreme Court, or more slaves from Africa, or the reenslavement of Southern free blacks, Southerners mounted speculator initiatives and scored some apparent victories. But each triumph proved to be empty and/or counterproductive. By the end of the decade, thwarted crusades had honed an angrier edge to on a frustrated slavecracy

Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume II:Secessionists Triumphant. P59

During the 1850s the Yankees discovered they were a people and a majority. When the Democratic party accommodated the Southern wing of the party in the early 1850s, in 1854 the Yankees voted 84% the accommodationists out of office. It was not business as usual.

In the South, the Southerners traded, perhaps the only Western State where slavery could be profitable for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act only to have the Yankees effectively eviscerate it. The Dred Scott decision was everything the Southerns wanted only to see the threat of a Republican Supreme court overturn it. Annexing Cuba went nowhere.

In the end, the Slavecracy would order the firing of cannon balls on a masonry fort full of regimental band members and ignite a bloody civil war.

Red Harvest · Aug 22, 2012