Slave Power

rdf:langString Slave Power

rdf:langString The Slave Power, or Slavocracy, referred to the perceived political power in the U.S. federal government held by slave owners during the 1840s and 1850s, prior to the Civil War. Antislavery campaigners, led by Frederick Douglass, during this period bitterly decried what they saw as disproportionate and corrupt influence wielded by wealthy Southerners. The argument was that this small group of rich slave owners had seized political control of their own states and were trying to take over the federal government in an illegitimate fashion in order to expand and protect slavery. The argument was later widely used by the Republican Party that formed in 1854–55 to oppose the expansion of slavery. The main issue expressed by the term slave power was distrust of the political power of the slave-owning class. Such distrust was shared by many who were not abolitionists; those who were motivated more by a possible threat to the political balance or the impossibility of competing with unwaged slave labor, than by concern over the treatment of slaves. Those who differed on many other issues (such as hating Black people or liking them, denouncing slavery as a sin or promising to guarantee its protection in the Deep South) could unite to attack the slavocracy. The "Free Soil" element emphasized that rich slave owners would move into new territory, use their cash to buy up all the good lands, then use their slaves to work the lands, leaving little opportunity room for free farmers. By 1854, the Free Soil Party had largely merged into the new Republican Party. The term was popularized by antislavery writers such as Frederick Douglass, John Gorham Palfrey, Josiah Quincy III, Horace Bushnell, James Shepherd Pike, and Horace Greeley. Politicians who emphasized the theme included John Quincy Adams, Henry Wilson and William Pitt Fessenden. Abraham Lincoln used the concept after 1854 but not the term. They showed, through a combination of emotive argument and hard statistical data, that the South had long held a disproportionate level of power in the United States. Historian Allan Nevins contends that "nearly all groups ... steadily substituted emotion for reason.... Fear fed hatred, and hatred fed fear." The existence of a Slave Power was dismissed by Southerners at the time, and rejected as false by many historians of the 1920s and 1930s, who stressed the internal divisions in the South before 1850. The idea that the Slave Power existed has partly come back at the hands of neoabolitionist historians since 1970, and there is no doubt that it was a powerful factor in the Northern anti-slavery belief system. It was standard rhetoric for all factions of the Republican Party. This power extended to American ambassadors and consuls: That was the time when slavery ruled all. There was scarce an American consul or political agent in any quarter of the globe, or on any island of the seas, who was not a supporter of the slave power. I saw a large portion of these national representatives in my circumnavigation of the globe, and it was impossible to find at any office over which the American flag waved a newspaper that was not in the interests of slavery. No copy of the New York Tribune or Evening Post was tolerated under an American official roof. Each embassy and consulate, the world over, was a centre of influences for slavery and against freedom. We ought to take this into account when we blame foreign nations for not accepting at once the United States as an antislavery power, bent on the destruction of slavery, as soon as our civil war broke out. For twenty years foreign merchants, shipmasters, or travellers had seen in American officials only trained and devoted supporters of the slave power, and the only evidences of public opinion at home to be found at those official seats, so much resorted to and credited, were all of the same character.