He analyses an argument by Michael Holt looking at the shift in party allegiances in the 1850s, which led to the demise of the Whig Party and left Republicans confronting a Democratic Party that was divided on slavery-related issues. Thomas gives this quotation from Holt, which Thomas takes to be too abstracted from the actual conflicts over the slavery system:
"Always nervous that republican society might be undermined or corrupted, Americans were determined to protect self-government, liberty, and equality for whites from anything that threatened those most cherished possessions. lt was that obsession … that drove Americans to the point of killing each other in 1861.” (1)Thomas notes in response that the tensions over slavery:
... were very deep-seated. David Brion Davis reminds us that in the free states by 1820 [year of the Missouri Compromise] "the main ingredients of the sectionalist Slave Power thesis bad appeared". Don Fehrenbacher argues that the crisis of that time over the admission of slaveholding Missouri into the Union showed a virtual Southern unanimity in the face of Northern hostility, which demonstrated a Southern "commitment to the permanency of slavery ... that made sectional conflict irrepressible".Actually, the pro-slavery advocates realized more and more as time went on that even the white-dominated herrenvolk democracy of the time was itself a threat to slavery. The “Slave Power” reference is to the characterization that antislavery advocates used to describe the slaveowning oligarchy of the South, which preferred to think of itself as a culturally-superior aristocracy.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 resolved a political clash over the expansion of slavery in the territories. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that slavery was an expand-or-die-out institution. The slaveowners whose wealth was invested in human property didn’t want to give it (i.e., them, the slaves) up. But unless the free states would cooperate in returning escaped slaves and refrain from attempt at abolishing the institution, preserving it was a part-slave, part-free country became increasing difficult and ultimately impossible.
Referring to John Tyler’s Presidency of 1841-1845, Thomas endorses an argument of Holt’s:
[Holt] points out how the Tyler administration's linking of the protection of slavery with the annexation of Texas for the first time elevated the peculiar institution to national prominence. This presented for many Americans in the free states, who regarded their nation as the instrument of God's purpose in the world, a crisis of national identity. [my emphasis]
But the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was also about the expansion or limitation of the institution of slavery. The annexation of Texas and then the Mexican-American War of 1846-48 were closely intertwined with the conflict over the spread of slavery and the challenge that presented for the democratic institutions of the time.
Thomas also calls attention to the intensification of religious and patriotic hostility to slavery that came with the recognition that there was no practical hope that slavery would some how fade out on its own:
James Moorhead demonstrates the strong millinerial content of contemporary evangelical religion. Though it promoted conflicting views about appropriate social and political action, millinerial visions, under the stimulation of a religious revival which swept the North during the depression of 1857, convinced many evangelicals that the sectional conflict between North and South was the supreme struggle between Good and Evil in God's model republic. Indeed, intellectual historians argue that many people in the free states saw slavery as compromising the national promise of freedom set forth by the founding fathers and conforming to God's plan for the world. Previously it had been allowed to exist in the expectation that it would die out, but now in the 1850s its expansion threatened a permanent corruption of the Union. [my emphasis]
Notes:
(1) Thompson, Roger C. (1981): Slavery Sectionalism and Secession: Six More Years of the Debate on the Causes of the American Civil War. AJAS 1:2 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41053292>
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