The effects of Slavery on the Civil War

The two dominant political parties of the 1850s were the Jefferson-Democratic party and the emerging National Republican party. The single divisive issue between them, and for the nation as a whole, was the long term status of the institution of slavery in America.

The Democrats were a mixed lot; Southern slave owners wanted to be left alone, Northern industrialists were irritated that the issue of slavery was distracting and thwarting the westward expansion and growth of the nation. Compromise and maintaining the status quo, and states rights, were paramount concerns.

The Republican Party grew out of the older Whig party, mostly those Northern Whigs like Abraham Lincoln who feared recent congressional action threatened to "have placed that institution (slavery - ed.) on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery" (First Douglas-Lincoln Debate).

Although, as Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Senator from Illinois whose priorities of expansion and growth of the nation were in danger of getting sidelined by the slavery issue, pointed out in his first Debate with Abraham Lincoln, "(A)t the time the Constitution was framed, there were thirteen States in the Union, twelve of which were slaveholding States and one free State", most of those states had actually implemented formal plans toward gradual emancipation long time ago and had reached fruition.

Seven Northern and Mid Atlantic states had passed legislation that prohibited further slavery by 1800 and had ended the existing practices before 1850. New Jersey passed legislation in 1804 and formally ended slavery within that state by 1865. The Northwest Ordinance of 1789, which organized the land between the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys in the Midwest, specifically forbade slavery in those Territories.

These various state and national legislative actions towards a gradual emancipation was sufficiently acceptable to most people who wanted slavery abolished. The Missouri Compromise of 1820, which forbid slavery in the territories of the Louisiana Purchase north of the southern border of Missouri (except for Missouri), was resolved peaceably as it allowed the admission of Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state. This maintained a delicate representational balance in Congress between slave and free states and set a precedent for the next four decades.

However in the 1850s, the issue began to polarize on whether slavery was to be a permanent institution or phased out throughout the country. This time it was about the admission of California as a free state and the status of recently acquired territory in the Southwest from Mexico. The Compromise of 1850 split the difference on many issues, but it also dealt a severe blow to the alliance between Northern industrial Whigs and Southern slave owner Whigs.

Four years later, Congressmen, such as Douglas, again attempted to reach a compromise with the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. But the balancing act finally failed. Those who believed in the eventual demise of slavery lost hope with each compromise and that slavery would never really be abolished.

As Lincoln argues in the First Debate,

“(The Democrats) have placed that institution on a new basis, which looks to the perpetuity and nationalization of slavery. [Loud cheers.] And while it is placed upon this new basis, I say, and I have said, that I believe we shall not have peace upon the question until the opponents of slavery arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction” ... “I believe if we could arrest the spread, and place it where Washington, and Jefferson, and Madison placed it, it would be in the course of ultimate extinction, and the public mind would, as for eighty years past, believe that it was in the course of ultimate extinction.”

Between the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Douglas-Lincoln Debates, the Supreme Court had ruled in the Dred Scott case that a slave was property and could not be taken from their owner because of any travel through states where slavery was illegal.

To many Northern Whigs, that was just too much. The Whig party fell apart and the National Republican Party emerged with a platform to put slavery back on the gradual road to extinction. “Popular sovereignty” efforts by the Democratic Party to allow each new state to decide whether it would be a free or slave state heated up the debate as the Republicans and Abolitionists saw this as proof of conspiratorial alliances to thwart any resolution of the slavery issue.

Of course, states that were already slave states did not see any need to have the slavery issue resolved beyond what they saw as their constitutional right to own slaves. Maintaining a parity between slave and free states was more important, and these increasingly conflicting priorities ultimately set the free and slave states on its collision course toward civil war.