- Joined
- Aug 17, 2011
- Location
- Birmingham, Alabama
@Harvey Johnson thanks for your encouragement.
For the purpose of this thread, "beck and call of the South" means political dominance.
I'll start with reviews.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5564
For the purpose of this thread, "beck and call of the South" means political dominance.
I'll start with reviews.
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5564
No unifying principle more effectively energized the insurgent Republican party of the 1850s than the concept of the Slave Power. The thrust of this brief, but engagingly written, study by Leonard Richards is to demonstrate that Northerners had good reason to believe in the existence of a Slave Power. After an historiographically oriented opening chapter, he lays out the evidence in seven succeeding chapters of slaveholder dominance of the federal government from its very inception in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 to the secession crisis of 1860-61. This dominance was especially noteworthy in the sixty-two years down to the Compromise of 1850. During this period, slaveholding Southerners controlled the presidency for fifty years; they held such key congressional positions of power as speakers of the House, chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee, and presidents pro tem of the senate two-thirds of the time; they accounted for just under 60 percent of all Supreme Court justices; and they received (relative to the South's free population) twice as many major cabinet and diplomatic appointments as Northerners.
Just how Southern politicians fashioned and maintained such overwhelming dominance at the federal level lies at the heart of Richards's study. The structuring of power calibrated at the Constitutional Convention provides part of the answer. The stipulation that all states would have an equal voice in the Senate, a provision adopted at the behest of the predominately Northern small states, not the slaveholding ones, soon became a main prop for Southern political power. Contrary to the expectations of the delegates at Philadelphia, nonslaveholding states and territories outpaced slaveholding areas in population growth. Combined with a conscious and successful effort down to 1850 to maintain a parity between free and slave states (even at the expedient of admitting to statehood slaveholding territories with a far smaller free population than their Northern counterparts), the result was a structural impediment to the full expression of Northern voting power. For example, as the abolitionist William Jay pointed out in the 1850s, six slave states, with twelve senators, had an "aggregate free population of 189,791 less than Pennsylvania" (p. 49).
The South's other constitutional advantage stemmed from the three-fifths clause, the stipulation that slaves were to be counted as three fifths of free persons in apportioning direct taxes and seats in the House of Representatives. Since the federal government rarely resorted to direct taxes, the fiscal impact of this clause was minimal, but its political impact was enormous. On average, the slave states received in each decade one-third more members in the House than their free population alone would warrant. Moreover, these additional seats translated into more Southern votes in the electoral college. In the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800, these votes accounted for the margin of Jefferson's victory.
Although not as readily apparent, the three-fifths clause was also fundamental to Southern control of party politics. The dominant parties throughout most of the antebellum period were the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats. The power base of both was firmly rooted in the South, and Northern members jockeyed among themselves to curry patronage and other political favors from party caucuses and national conventions and administrations in which slaveholders, their unity and influence enhanced by the three-fifths clause, maintained controlling leverage over party affairs.
Just how Southern politicians fashioned and maintained such overwhelming dominance at the federal level lies at the heart of Richards's study. The structuring of power calibrated at the Constitutional Convention provides part of the answer. The stipulation that all states would have an equal voice in the Senate, a provision adopted at the behest of the predominately Northern small states, not the slaveholding ones, soon became a main prop for Southern political power. Contrary to the expectations of the delegates at Philadelphia, nonslaveholding states and territories outpaced slaveholding areas in population growth. Combined with a conscious and successful effort down to 1850 to maintain a parity between free and slave states (even at the expedient of admitting to statehood slaveholding territories with a far smaller free population than their Northern counterparts), the result was a structural impediment to the full expression of Northern voting power. For example, as the abolitionist William Jay pointed out in the 1850s, six slave states, with twelve senators, had an "aggregate free population of 189,791 less than Pennsylvania" (p. 49).
The South's other constitutional advantage stemmed from the three-fifths clause, the stipulation that slaves were to be counted as three fifths of free persons in apportioning direct taxes and seats in the House of Representatives. Since the federal government rarely resorted to direct taxes, the fiscal impact of this clause was minimal, but its political impact was enormous. On average, the slave states received in each decade one-third more members in the House than their free population alone would warrant. Moreover, these additional seats translated into more Southern votes in the electoral college. In the Adams-Jefferson election of 1800, these votes accounted for the margin of Jefferson's victory.
Although not as readily apparent, the three-fifths clause was also fundamental to Southern control of party politics. The dominant parties throughout most of the antebellum period were the Jeffersonian Republicans and the Jacksonian Democrats. The power base of both was firmly rooted in the South, and Northern members jockeyed among themselves to curry patronage and other political favors from party caucuses and national conventions and administrations in which slaveholders, their unity and influence enhanced by the three-fifths clause, maintained controlling leverage over party affairs.
Bringing the