Case in point - "Abolitionism." By one estimate, free blacks numbered around 59,000 in 1790. By the start of the Civil War, the total had increased eightfold to about 488,000. In the run-up the the Revolutionary War, slavery issues were contentious with hints early on about what later might develop.
In spite of owning slaves himself, Jefferson's first Declaration of Independence draft included grievances against the Crown's involvement in trafficking. Southern representatives took issue, the clause was dropped, and to build postwar consensus the South had to be reassured that their slave system would remain intact.
It led to Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution saying that slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of allocating congressional representation. According to historian Gary Wills: For southern states, this issue was "a nonnegotiable condition for their joining the Union" and with it they got "a large and domineering representation in Congress."
Consider some other relevant facts:
-- large slave owners had disproportionate power; they controlled state legislatures and selected senators;
-- most American presidents until the Civil War were southerners and slaveholders (including Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson);
-- the first US 1790 census reported 757,000 blacks or nearly one-fifth of the total four million population;
-- in 1807, Congress outlawed the importation of African slaves after 1808, yet trafficking illegally brought in another 250,000 until 1860;
-- enacted slavery provisions were for the North as well as the South; only Pennsylvania and the New England states outlawed the practice; in 1787, most states were slave states, and the new Constitution protected their holdings;
-- intersectional planter, commercial, banking and manufacturing interests tied the North and South together; slavery and cotton enriched the South, production boomed, and northern manufacturing also benefitted;
-- the human bondage system affected radical abolitionists; they knew that ending slavery meant "overturning" the Constitution;
-- to accommodate consensus politics, compromise was preferable to conflict; to protect the South from the majority nonslave North, "balanced" admission of new slave and free states was agreed on as well as a similar arrangement for presidential and vice-presidential tickets;
-- nonetheless, compromises were fragile and sectional conflicts arose; one instance was over the Mexican War, annexation of Texas, and disposition of 650,000 square miles of new territory; neither side was satisfied even though compromise was achievable on matters of tariffs, centralized banking, internal improvements, and free western land.
Given the enormous costs of dissolution, why weren't both sides committed to preventing it? Piven cites "the strident and disruptive abolitionist campaign with its demands for immediate emancipation. Abolitionism fractured....the sectional accord" that held disparate elements together - until 1860.
Who were the abolitionists? According to Howard Zinn, they were "editors, orators, run-away slaves, free Negro militants, and gun-toting preachers." Together they "shaped....the movement and contributed to its disruptive power." Its effects fractured intersectional parties, divided the nation, and led to the Civil War and legal emancipation.
"Evangelical revivalists" were committed to reform. They believed slavery was sinful, and would accept nothing less than ending it. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison founded The Liberator. It became the voice of militant abolitionism. "Garrison was no gradualist." He refused compromise and demanded "immediate and unconditional emancipation."
I am a 72 year old, retired, progressive small businessman concerned about all the major national and world issues, committed to speak out and write about them.
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