Henig gives a helpful summary of development in the fight over slavery after the Missouri Compromise of 1820:
In the period of Andrew Jackson's first administration [1829-1833] the slavery problem led to numerous incidents throughout the country. After nine years of relative calm provided by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, the "peculiar institution" once again emerged as a serious and potentially explosive issue. In 1829 the abolition of slavery in Mexico roused concern among the American settlers of Texas for their slave property. In that same year David Walker, a free Negro residing in Boston, attempted to circulate in the South a pamphlet in which he described American Negroes as "the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began," and urged the slaves to fight for their freedom. Heated congressional debate on the slave trade in the District of Columbia added to the uneasiness during Jackson' s first year as Chief Executive. (1) [my emphasis in bold]In my April 5 installment, I referred to Nat Turner’s slave rebellion of 1831, which caught the attention of slaveowners and whites generally. Henig writes:
The slavery issue became further inflamed when William Lloyd Garrison, on January 1, 1831, launched the first issue of the Liberator.
His uncompromising attitude toward Negro slavery and his irreverent attacks on the Constitution not only provoked extreme alarm in parts of the South but created a good deal of apprehension in the North. Within eight months of the founding of the Liberator a major crisis was precipitated when a slave, Nat Turner, led a revolt of some seventy Negroes in Southampton County in southeast Virginia. The uprising was ruthlessly put down, but not before sixty whites had been massacred. The Turner rebellion, as one historian has noted, produced a trauma that swept the entire South. For the next three decades the slightest rumor of slave unrest was often sufficient to instill a wave of panic and repression.In retrospect, the polarization over slavery and the increasing militancy of slaves and the opponents of slavery seem like an inevitable development. But no one then knew for sure where the historical trend was going or how fast. As Henig’s account illustrates, the politicians of the 1820s were still heavily influenced by the example of the Missouri Compromise, which tried to avoid national divisions (among whites) around the issue of slavery by incremental compromises. But by 1932, Nat Turner and John C. Calhoun (the main schemer behind the Nullification Controversy) had made the old way of viewing the conflict obsolete.
The Missouri Compromise, signed into law by James Monroe in 1920, was the resolution over a controversy about the admission of Missouri territory as a slave state into the Union. Because Southern agriculture made slavery much more important and profitable in the Southern states, and the Northern states phased the institution out, the slavery issue became deeply intertwined with sectional divisions, which made the cohesion of the Unites States as a nation a major concern:
[James] Madison remarked to [James] Monroe [US President 1817-1825] that the prime concern of the promoters of the anti-Missouri movement was obviously not the welfare of the slaves. He inclined to the opinion that "an uncontrolled dispersion" of the slaves in the United States would be most favorable both to their emancipation and their condition in the meantime. The argument for "mitigation by diffusion" was being heard in Congress, but the northern determination was to keep the vast reaches of the Northwest for free men, not slaves, and, as some put it, for white men, not black. Southerners were believed by many to have too large a part in the government anyway. According to the Constitution their representation in Congress was based on their white population and three-fifths of their slaves. (2)The "mitigation by diffusion" concept was held by gradual emancipationist as being the optimal way to abolish slavery. In the Northern states, as whites became an increasing part of the population, the states began adopted gradual emancipation programs.
One strange effect of that experience was that whites came to associate slavery with the absence of Black people. This is a big reason for the seeming paradox – which Lost Cause advocates use to argue that Yankee anti-slavery was somehow fake – that white citizens could be both very much opposed to slavery and also distinctly racist against blacks.
Notes:
(1) Henig, Gerald S. (1969): The Jacksonian Attitude Toward Abolitionism in the 1830's. Tennessee Historical Quarterly 28:1, pp. 42-56. <http://www.jstor.com/stable/42623057>
(2) Malone, Dumas (1981): Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello, 334. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.
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