Did 1860 Republicans Want to Ban the Spread of Slavery or the Spread of Blacks?

Philip Leigh

formerly Harvey Johnson
Joined
Oct 22, 2014
Venerable historian James McPherson claims that the 1860 Republican Party plank prohibiting the spread of slavery into the Federal territories prompted the South to cause the Civil War. Although it is commonly averred that the Republican goal was to quarantine slavery in the South, the true objective may have been to restrict the geographic spread of blacks to the rest of America.

Consider, for example, that all but two of the twenty-two states granted statehood after Texas in 1845—down to the present day 175 years later—joined the Union when blacks represented only about one percent of their respective populations. The two exceptions were the Southern border states of West Virginia and Oklahoma. Ninety percent of America’s blacks still lived in the South in 1910, nearly fifty years after the Civil War.

The 1860 Republican Party’s “ban-on-slavery-expansion” plank originated fourteen years earlier in 1846 when Pennsylvania Congressman and future Republican David Wilmot introduced a rider to a $2 million funding bill for the then-current Mexican War. If passed, which it was not, his rider would ban slavery in any territories acquired because of the war. It was not, however, an enlightened racial gesture. Wilmot admitted, “I make no war upon the South, nor upon slavery in the South. I have no . . . sympathy for the slave. I plead the cause . . . of white freemen. I would preserve for free white labor a fair country . . . where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.”

Eight years later in 1854 future President Lincoln said: “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these [western] territories. We want them for the homes of free white people.” Four years afterward in 1858 Illinois Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull said, “We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party.” That same year Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Wilson said, “I do not believe in the equality of the African with the white race.”

The year Lincoln was elected President in 1860 his future Secretary of State, William Seward, said, “The great fact is now fully realized that the African race here [in America] is a foreign element incapable of assimilation. . . ” Frank Blair, whose brother would become Lincoln’s Postmaster General, told audiences that the “Republican Party is the white man’s party and will keep the Territories for white men.” Prior to the War the so-called Free States contained only two percent of America’s black population and 94% of them could not vote.

During the Civil War in April 1864 Congress “scorned” a proposal by Kentucky Senator Garrett Davis that refugee blacks be redistributed to the Northern states in “proportion to their white populations.” That same year it rejected an amendment to the Freedmen’s Bureau bill by West Virginia Senator Waitman Willey that would empower the Bureau to contact the governors and mayors of Northern states and cities to arrange for black settlements in the North. When Lincoln’s Interior Secretary suggested in December 1863 that blacks be sent to the far West where he believed “Negro labor was in great demand,” his Party turned him down. Instead, on July 4, 1864, the Republicans passed America’s first major immigration law basically targeted at white Europeans.

The Northern Republicans that generally controlled of the Federal Government until Woodrow Wilson’s presidency kept blacks mostly quarantined in the South until World War I. It took almost fifty years after the Civil War before they truly started to diffuse into other parts of the country. Even then Northerners only accepted blacks due to worker shortages triggered by the World War demand surge combined with the war’s disruption of European immigration. From 1860 to 1920 America absorbed 50 million white immigrants mostly into the Northern manufacturing economy, leaving little opportunity for the South’s four million ex-slaves and their descendants.

According to historian C. Vann Woodward, the antebellum states of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois set the racial norms for the future states to the Missouri River and beyond. He wrote, “[Their] chief argument against slavery was that it would eventually produce a free black population.” Even as “black exclusion” became a top political goal for the Midwestern states, the region never had more than one percent of its population composed of blacks until well into the twentieth century.

Thirty years before the Civil War when French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in 1831-32 he indirectly warned of the racism endemic to the whites North and West of the Ohio River. His journal reveals that racial prejudice was “stronger in the states where [Americans] have abolished slavery than where it still existed [and] nowhere stronger than in those states where servitude has never been known.” Among the states and territories he visited where slavery had never existed were Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio.

In What Lincoln Believed: The Values of America’s Greatest President author Michael Lind writes:

"For Lincoln . . . the movement against the extension of slavery was half of a program to create a white West, the other half of which consisted of state laws designed to keep blacks out of Northern and Western states. For example, the Indiana territorial legislature outlawed black court testimony in cases involving whites (1803), blacks in the militia (1807) and black voting (1810). In 1815 an annual tax was imposed on all black men. . . The nearby Illinois territory legislature passed a bill in 1813 requiring every incoming black . . . to leave. Failure to comply . . . [was punishable by] 39 lashes, repeated every fifteen days until the [black offender] left. Lincoln was well-aware of such Black Laws and voted for them repeatedly in Illinois because he felt they were necessary to prevent racial integration. . . "(p. 130)

J. P. Morgan once said, “A man always has two reasons for the things he does—a good one and the real one.” The legendary banker was implying that the “good” reason is a false, benevolent explanation that conceals the true self-serving one.

(The above script is available in audio and visual form in the YouTube video below.)

 
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