Reviews for The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860

The average rating for The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-17 00:00:00 Denise Seeley-navarre Sometimes the paranoid really are being followed. During the 1830s American abolitionists asserted that the United States, ostensibly a free republic, had fallen under the sway of a "slave power," a ruthlessly exploitative clique of rich slave owners and their lackeys. The Free Soil and Republican parties subsequently moved this hypothesis from the fringe to the mainstream, and added their own paranoid gloss. The slave power, they said, had become a conspiracy between Southern masters and ambitious Northerners, who together had turned the federal government into a plaything of the Southern master class. Twentieth-century historians dismissed this belief as either sheer delusion or cynical rhetoric. Leonard Richards argues they were wrong to do so. In this provocative book, he observes that Southern whites did indeed enjoy disproportionate power in the early U.S. government. They dominated federal leadership positions like the House speakership and the presidency, and repeatedly used the legislature and executive to promote sectional interests: non-enforcement of the international slave-trade ban, acquisition of new slave states, and enforcing the South's "intellectual blockade" of abolitionist publications. A foreign observer, visiting the antebellum national capital - a slave-owning city crouched in muggy, morbid swampland - and surveying its leaders and policies, would have found it easy to apply the label "slaveocracy." Northern politicians had a simple explanation for this disproportionate Southern power: the three-fifths compromise in Article I of the Constitution. With 60 percent of their slaves counted as free persons in each Census, the slave states got 15-25 more Congressmen and Electoral College votes than they otherwise deserved. Richards cautions against overstating this advantage. The rapid growth of the free states' population and the slave states' demographic stagnation eventually (by 1840) vitiated the advantages granted by the 3/5 clause. He finds other explanations for Southern whites' influence. Southern Congressmen, coming as they did from police states, displayed rigid solidarity on matters pertaining to slavery. Southern white politicians also tended to cluster within one of the two national parties that formed in the 1790s and re-formed in the 1820s: the Democratic-Republicans and, later, the Democrats. Sectional solidarity gave the South control of these parties' caucuses and presidential nominations, and party discipline ensured that it could draw on the votes of Northern D-Rs and Democrats when it needed them. When that discipline broke down, Southern whites had another weapon in their quiver: parity in the U.S. Senate. The practice of admitting slave and free states in pairs meant that, between 1812 and 1849, there were an equal number of both in the Senate. Southern Senators could block unfavorable but popular legislation that passed the House, such as the Tallmadge Amendment (1819) and the Wilmot Proviso (1846). Their voting strength in the Senate and their control of the presidency - slave owners occupied the White House for 50 of the federal republic's first 70 years - also gave them control of executive appointments and patronage, a powerful weapon to use against Northerners who fell out of line. The willingness of Northern Congressmen to toe the Southern line, either out of loyalty to party or desire for public salaries, earned the most egregiously pro-slavery Northerners a derogatory name: "doughfaces." Richards identifies over 300 federal legislators who fell into this group. They became the indispensable stooges of the slave power. Without their help Southern politicians could only block or influence legislation; with it they could implement Indian Removal, impose the "gag rule" on antislavery petitions, and annex Texas. The Slave Power collapsed, abruptly and spectacularly, when Southern politicians decided to resort to war rather than tolerate any federal threat to slavery. Their decision grew from a realization that the white South's dominant status within the federal government had become untenable. The erosion of Southern control began in the 1840s, when voters and legislators from both free and slave states began a war of words over the future of American imperial expansion. Slave-state leaders recognized that unless new territories opened to slavery, the market value of human property (the white South's largest investment) would plummet. Moreover, without the admission of new slave states to the Union, the South could not retain its indispensable voting parity in the Senate. Northerners concurrently wanted new western territories closed to slavery, not out of idealism but because they believed slave labor and free labor were fighting a zero-sum battle for resources, a battle in which slave-owners enjoyed an unfair advantage. For all their alleged devotion to "manifest destiny," white American politicians had by mid-century come to see their continental empire as finite, and internal competition for land as more important than external competition for markets. These latter observations come primarily from other historians of the American Civil War and its origins. Richards's original contribution to their conversation comes from his study of the Doughfaces, whose political immolation in the 1840s and '50s eliminated one of the few groups in Congress willing to compromise. The author identifies two presidents, James Polk and James Buchanan, as the Doughfaces' assassins, and the patronage power as their weapon of choice. When Northern Democrats hesitated to support the addition of new slave states to the Union, knowing these would prove unpopular with their constituents, Democratic presidents retaliating by denying appointments and other favors to politicos who failed to toe the party line. The patronage weapon, however, fired in both directions. Once Doughface Democrats could no longer offer their constituents either lucrative government jobs or abundant free soil in the West, voters abandoned them. The Democratic Party splintered in its Northern stronghold of New York and virtually collapsed in neighboring New England, as once-conciliatory Democrats shifted their allegiance to the Free Soil movement and the anti-slavery Republican Party. In 1860 they gave the latter party an Electoral College majority. We all know where Southern Democrats chose to go after that.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-02-21 00:00:00 Cassandra Williams This book changed the way I looked at American History, politics in American and so much more. The focus of the book is on the pre-Civil War South, a place of uncompromising undemocratic power and how those elements served as a strangle hold for the Northern states. The book is well written and the argument is thought provoking. It sheds a new light on American political heroes and questions institutions and processes that are still in existence today. I read it as a junior at UC Berkeley for one of my history courses and quickly changed the course of my studies from modern American history to history before the Civil War.