1800-1850: Congressional Power Struggles
“[T]hroughout the long 1820s those conceiving the American System were thoroughly preoccupied with slavery.”
While importation of enslaved persons stopped, the growth slavery as an institution continued.
As agreed during the Constitutional Convention, in 1808 Congress outlawed the importation of slaves via the Atlantic Slave trade. While this stopped the preponderance of slave ships arriving from Africa, it did not affect plantation slavery, where masters relied on female slaves to continue to replenish their labor source. Nor did the legal change alter the racial hierarchy that whites believed was “God-ordained” and by which they had structured their political, legal, and social systems.
Henry Clay speaks in favor of the Compromise of 1850.
Credit: Public Domain
Throughout the nineteenth century, the pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions in Congress debated the morality of the institution.
Southern states felt threatened by abolitionist activities fostered in the North. As populations in the West grew and more territories petitioned to be recognized as states, these debates increased. The southern states feared that if states entered as non-slave that this imbalance would put the pro-slavery elements of the government in the minority. Northern states, increasingly convinced of the immorality of slavery, argued vehemently against its continuation.
Aside from the racial ideologies that sustained slavery, the South’s entire economy was dependent upon the institution. The confrontation, therefore, involved morality and economics. As historian Andrew Shankman (Mason and Hammond, 2011) noted, “throughout the long 1820s those conceiving the American System were thoroughly preoccupied with slavery” (p. 248).