Sectionalism: Slavery, Territory & National Power — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Why the territories and not the states

It is easy to assume the argument was simply whether slavery should exist. For most politicians before 1860 it was not. Lincoln campaigned in 1860 on stopping slavery from spreading, and said repeatedly that he had no lawful power and no intention to interfere with it in the states where it stood.

The reason is constitutional. Slavery was a matter of state law, and the federal government had no authority to reach into South Carolina and end it. Territories were different: they were governed by Congress until they became states, so Congress unquestionably could decide whether slavery entered them.

That turned every acquisition into a crisis. Louisiana in 1803, Texas in 1845, the Mexican cession in 1848 -- each one reopened the same question, and each time the answer would decide which section gained senators for the next generation.

Look at the figure for the shape of the problem. In 1850 the free states held about 62 per cent of the House and exactly half the Senate. Southern politicians could read the census as well as anyone and knew the House was gone permanently. Holding the Senate was the whole strategy, and holding the Senate meant new slave states.

Part 2 · The balance rule

Missouri applied for statehood in 1819 as a slave state, which would have broken a tie of eleven and eleven. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri with slavery and Maine without it, keeping the chamber level, and drew a line west along latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes: slavery permitted below it in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, barred above.

The pairing then became a habit. Arkansas came in with Michigan, Florida with Iowa, Texas with Wisconsin. The Senate stayed at parity for thirty years not by accident but by an arrangement both sides understood and neither wrote into the Constitution.

The arrangement had an expiry date built into geography. The land left above the line was far larger than the land below it, and the land below it was mostly dry. Everyone could see that if the rule held, the free states would eventually have the Senate too.

Thomas Jefferson, then seventy-six, wrote that the news of the Missouri crisis woke him like a fire bell in the night and that he considered it the knell of the Union. He was forty-one years early, and right about the mechanism: a line drawn on a map had turned a moral argument into a permanent geographic one.

Part 3 · The three-fifths clause and the complaint about it

The Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when apportioning House seats and electoral votes. Enslaved people could not vote, so the effect was to give extra representation to the white voters of the states that held them -- a bonus of roughly twenty House seats by 1800 and the same number of extra electoral votes.

That margin decided things. Jefferson's win over Adams in 1800 would probably have gone the other way without it, and northern critics never let the point go, calling the effect the slave power.

The complaint is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to repeat it wrongly. The grievance was not that enslaved people were counted as less than whole human beings in some moral ledger; the three-fifths figure was a bargaining compromise over how much political credit enslavers got for people they denied any voice. The antislavery position in 1787 was to count them at zero for representation, precisely because counting them rewarded the enslaver.

Combined with Senate parity, the arrangement gave a minority section a durable veto over national policy. That veto held for seventy years, and the record of its use -- the gag rule, the Fugitive Slave Act, the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso -- is what convinced a growing number of northerners that the problem was structural rather than regional bad manners.

It is worth noticing how unusual that arrangement is. A system of government normally lets a majority eventually get its way; this one let a shrinking minority block change indefinitely, because the blocking power sat in a chamber that ignores population entirely. Americans argued then, as they argue now, about whether equal state representation is a flaw or the whole point of a senate, but nobody in 1850 doubted what it was holding in place.

Part 4 · The Wilmot Proviso

In August 1846, with the war against Mexico only months old, a first-term Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot attached an amendment to an appropriations bill: slavery should be barred from any territory acquired from Mexico.

What happened next is the clearest demonstration in the whole period of the two chambers. The proviso passed the House. It died in the Senate. It was reintroduced and passed the House again, and died in the Senate again. Members voted by section rather than by party, with northern Whigs and northern Democrats on one side and southern Whigs and southern Democrats on the other.

That realignment is the real news. The Whig and Democratic parties had been national organisations with wings in both sections, and a national party is a machine for making sectional compromise, because each wing needs the other to win a presidential election. Once voting ran along the Mason-Dixon line instead, the machine stopped working.

The Free Soil Party ran a presidential candidate in 1848 on Wilmot's position, won no states but took enough votes in New York to decide the election, and showed that an explicitly sectional party was viable. Six years later the Republicans were founded on the same principle, and in 1860 one of them won.

Wilmot himself is a useful corrective to a tidy story. He was no abolitionist and said so plainly: he wanted the new land kept for free white labour and objected to his own constituents competing against plantations, not to slavery as an injustice. A great deal of northern free-soil feeling was of exactly this kind, which is why the war that came began as a war about the Union and only later became a war about freedom.