The Whigs and Democrats had taken turns to dominate America’s “Second Party System” since the last two-term presidency of Andrew Jackson. The Democrats won the presidency in 1836, 1844 and 1852 while Whig presidents were elected in 1840 and 1848. However by the time Meagher arrived in America, the issue of slavery was fracturing the Second Party System. The Whigs were under pressure from internal leaders like New York’s William Seward and Liberty party leader Salmon P. Chase to take a stronger pro-abolition line while the Democrats were also fracturing along north-south lines between those for and against slavery.
America’s relationship to slavery remains controversial to this day thanks to critical race theory, an academic framework centred on the idea that racism is systemic. Critics say that 21st century bans on teaching critical race theory in Republican-dominated legislatures such as Louisiana’s are “a bid to downplay slavery and other grim chapters in both Louisiana’s and the nation’s history.” Slavery has been an issue for America since colonial times and the African slave population rose in the late 17th and early 18th century to meet labour demands in southern plantations.
The Atlantic slave trade was a vital part of 18th century triangular commerce involving European merchants, African traders and American planters and slaves made a harrowing journey in the “middle passage” to tobacco plantations in the Chesapeake and rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Slavery was less crucial to the northern economy but slaves were still used as servants, farm hands and dockers. By 1776 one in five of the population were black and with the revolutionary focus on “liberty” African Americans saw the war with Britain as an opportunity to claim freedom. Slavery existed in every colony and nearly all the founding fathers were slave owners, as were 10 of the first 12 presidents (John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams the exceptions). Anti-slavery essayist John Jay Chapman called the issue “a sleeping serpent” which lay “coiled up under the table” during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. The first Constitution did not mention slavery but had protections including the fugitive slave clause which require runaways to be returned, and the three-fifths clause which gave the slave states increased representation in Congress by counting part of their disenfranchised slave population in the census.
Between 1777 and 1804 every state north of Maryland took steps towards emancipation. Abolitionists hoped slavery would also die out in the south. Then came the cotton engine. Cotton was a fairly minor crop until 1793 when northerner Eli Whitney invented a gin to make it easier to separate cotton from its seeds. Beforehand it took a worker ten hours to produce a single pound of lint, but now the cotton gin could produce a thousand pounds a day. Demand for slaves increased as production soared. Cotton rose dramatically in importance from 70,000 bales annually in 1800 to four million by the time of the civil war, and became, by far, America’s largest export commodity.
Slavery was the south’s “peculiar institution,” an apt euphemism as by the middle of the 19th century, slavery set it apart from the north and increasingly, the rest of the world. Cotton farms were the bedrock of the southern economy. Out of a southern population of nine million, 3.5 million were slaves. Most toiled in the fields six days a week from “can see to can’t see” (sunrise to sundown) while families lived in constant fear of being destroyed by sale. Owners held all rights to slaves including sexual rights. After the Missouri slave Celia was charged for killing her master Newsome while resisting sexual assault in 1855, the prosecution successfully argued against self-defence in such circumstances by claiming slaves were not “women”. Celia had no right to kill Newsome even if “he was in the habit of having intercourse with the defendant.” She was found guilty and sentenced to death. Popular opinion has it that her execution was postponed so as not to deprive the owners of the property rights of her unborn child, however Celia’s biographer doubts she was pregnant.
Laws across the south such as in Maryland prevented slaves like Frederick Douglass, born 1818, from learning to read and write. With the help of his owner’s wife and white children, Douglass disobeyed the law, understanding that knowledge “was the pathway from slavery to freedom.” He escaped to the north in 1838. Another who thought deeply about the pathway to freedom was founding father and third president Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was a slave owner though he was opposed to the institution. In 1784, he proposed an ordinance to ban slavery in the northwest territories but Congress rejected it by a single vote. Jefferson’s ambiguity showed in his Notes on the State of Virginia written a year later where he said slavery had a negative effect on “the manners of our people” while he also claimed blacks lacked reason and advanced the “suspicion” they were inferior to whites “in body and mind.” He maintained that the decision to emancipate slaves would have to be part of a democratic process and abolition would be stymied until slaveowners consented to free their human property. Under his presidency America doubled with the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. However Jefferson refused to bar slavery in the new territory, having been scared off by Haiti’s successful slave rebellion (which had convinced Napoleon to sell the territory in the first place) and South Carolina’s aggressive pro-slavery attitude and threats to leave the union.
The Mason-Dixon line, the colonial era boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, became a line dividing slave states from free. New York was north of the line but was dependent on slavery having rose to commercial dominance on the strength of its control of the transatlantic cotton trade. Though the British Empire abolished slavery in 1833, American slavery was crucial for Britain too. Around 80 percent of its cotton came from America and by 1860 the cotton trade was a $600 million a year business which provided employment for five million people in the north of England.
By 1819 the 13 colonies had become 22 states, split evenly between free and slave. The 1820 Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state to keep the balance in the Senate where each state elected two senators. The compromise prohibited slavery in the Louisiana Territory north of the 36° 30´ latitude line. Jefferson worried that the extension of slavery in the west would destroy the union. In an 1820 letter to one of Maine’s new senators, he wrote: “we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go”. Anti-slavery societies sprung determine to release the wolf though racism was as rife in the north as the south – Abraham Lincoln’s own Illinois barred African-Americans from entering the state while abolitionist editor Elijah Lovejay was murdered by a mob in Alton. While property qualifications for voting were eliminated in nearly every state between 1800 and 1828, few free black men could vote even in the North.
As the border moved westward the slavery problem went with it. In 1846 Congressman David Wilmot proposed the Wilmot Proviso requiring slavery prohibition in any territory acquired from Mexico. It passed the House but died in the Senate along sectional lines. When California wanted to join the union as a free state in 1849, it had the potential to upset the equilibrium between slave and free states in the Senate. Congress passed the compromise of 1850 which allowed entry to California but pacified slave states with an even stricter Fugitive Slave Act which required all states to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves, denied slaves the right to a jury trial, and made assisting them an offence. Resentment towards the Act in the north further heightened tensions.
Democrat Senator from Illinois, Stephen Douglas, was a key player in the compromise of 1850, and was expected to win the 1852 presidential nomination. But delegates at the convention split between Douglas, former Secretary of State James Buchanan, and two others before nominating outsider Franklin Pierce, who saw federal action against slavery as an infringement on southern states’ rights. The uneasy 1850 compromise lasted until 1854 when Congress debated the impending territories of Kansas and Nebraska to establish a territorial government in unorganised portions of the Louisiana Purchase. Douglas proposed the idea of “popular sovereignty” to get around the Missouri Compromise ruling of no slavery rule north of latitude 36°30′ by suggesting a popular vote instead to determine whether Kansas and Nebraska would be slave or free. Douglas got the support of the south, and of president Pierce’s northern Democrats. Nebraska in the north was unlikely to hold slaves, but Kansas was in the heart of the trans-Mississippi west and Douglas and Pierce were over-optimistic in believing whichever side lost the vote there would accept the results. The decision caused a storm of protest in the north concerned by what Free Soiler Salmon Chase called “an atrocious plot” to spread slavery through the west. The question was of national importance once Kansas became a state, because its two new senators would affect the balance of power in the Senate. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise, and the new territory became known as “Bleeding Kansas” when it was flooded by pro-slavery “border ruffians” and anti-slavery “free-staters” who fought with each other intermittently for the next five years.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act also redrew the political map. While southern Whigs supported Douglas, northern Whigs flocked to new parties dedicated to halting the expansion of slavery. The electoral sea change began in the 1854 mid-terms when so-called “Fusion movements” uniting Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, Free Soilers, prohibitionists and nativists swept to power in nearly all the free states. The balance of power varied from state to state and in many, the nativist Know Nothings dominated, in others antislavery advocates calling themselves the Republican Party dominated. Among the Whigs searching for a new political home was Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was no admirer of the Irish but no nativist either. In 1855 he wrote that if the Know Nothings got control the declaration would read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.”
Lincoln had been elected to Congress in 1848 for one term under Democrat president James Polk, before returning to his Illinois law career in the early 1850s. He gravitated to the new Republican Party by 1856. Though not an abolitionist, Lincoln inherited a belief from his Baptist parents that slavery was immoral and thought slave labour took opportunities away from whites, giving slaveholders an unfair advantage in the marketplace. Yet as Eric Foner writes, Lincoln made a sharp distinction between his personal wish that “all men everywhere could be free” and his official duties as a legislator and president in a legal system that recognised the Southern states’ right to property in slaves. No such obligations were due to the territories and he was determined to maintain a distinction between “the existing institution and the extending of it”. Lincoln greeted the Kansas-Nebraska Act of fellow Illinoisian Douglas with horror. Nearly every speech he made in the next six years was in response to Douglas and his oratory on the slavery question would make Lincoln a national figure. Watching from the sidelines was the soon-to-be American citizen Thomas Francis Meagher. In 1856 he gradually started to come off the fence and play a bigger role in the controversy that was gripping his adopted nation.
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