Jacksonian antislavery Sen. Thomas Morris
Given the name of my blog, it shouldn't surprise anyone that I would be intrigued by a book entitled Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (2004) by Jonathan Earle. Earle credits Ohio Democratic Senator Thomas Morris (1776-1844) with embedding the phrase "the Slave Power" as a labor for the pro-slavery block, in Congress and out, in the antebellum political vocabulary. He didn't invent it, he picked it up from the Abolitionist movement. But he employed it as part of the "petition controversy", the Congressional dispute over formally receiving antislavery petitions that began to roil the Congress in the 1830s and in which John Quincy Adams played a leading role.
Responding to a proslavery speech by Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay in February 1839, Morris invoked the phrase "Slave Power" and characterized it in terms that were familiar to the country after President Jackson's successful battle against the "Money Power" embodied in the Bank of the United States. How had it come to the pass that the Congress treated antislavery resolutions from citizens with contempt, while the proslavery resolutions of South Carolina Sen. John Calhoun were debated and voted upon:
The answer, he said, was that a conspiracy of slaveholders had seized control of the federal government: "The power of slavery ... is aiming to govern the country, its Constitutions and laws. ... The slave interest has at this moment the whole power of the country in its hands. It has the President ... the cabinet ... five out of nine judges of the Supreme Court ... the President of the Senate, the Speaker of the House ... the army and the navy." Morris then drew a direct connection between the two master symbols of antebellum America, the Money Power represented by the bank and the slaveholding power that, he said, posed an even greater threat. Both banking and slavery, he said, were based on the "unrequited labor of others." He continued: "Let it be borne in mind that the Bank power, some years since, had influence sufficient in this body, and upon this floor, to prevent the reception of petitions against the action of the Senate. ... The same power though double in means and in strength, is now doing the same thing. ... The slave power of the South, and the banking power of the North, are now uniting to rule this country." At several points, Morris’s rhetoric presaged that used by Abraham Lincoln two decades later: "I am not now contending for the rights of the negro, rights which his Creator gave him and which his fellow man has taken away No, sir! I am contending for the rights of the white person in the free States, and am endeavoring to prevent them from being trodden down by that power which claims the black person as property." In his conclusion Morris insisted that if democracy and human progress were to continue, enslaved people must be set free.With variations of the Lost Cause version of history, including the Blundering Generation version we discussed earlier in this year's series, Abolitionists were regarded as fanatics and the Slave Power image dismissed as an unrealistic "conspiracy theory". Richard Hofstadter used it as an example of such a conspiracy theory in his famous The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (1965). Pat Lang in an exchange at his blog (an exchange he subsequently took down) once called it an example of "information operations", borrowing the military term for propaganda against a wartime enemy.
But this is not an accurate characterization of the use of the Slave Power as political propaganda. For one thing, Morris and other abolitionists, as well as critics of the pro-slavery bloc in politics who were not necessarily abolitionists, didn't talk about his as some secret cabal manipulating events outside the public eye. The Slave Power conspiracy was painfully visible even in politics, and its manifestations became more and frequent in the years leading up to the Civil War. Certainly, like all politics it involved backroom deals, like John Calhoun's arguably treasonous, pro-slavery maneuvering during the Nullification Crisis.
When the slave states that formed the Confederate States of America seceded and formed their own government, they became a Slave Power in a more literal sense, though perhaps Slavery Power is better description. In the end, the fact that the Confederacy's domestic economy was critically dependent on slave labor proved to be a fatal flaw. The Emancipation Proclamation produced a mass exodus of slaves from their masters' plantations, acting like a massive labor strike and badly damaging the Confederacy's economy and ability to make war against the United States government.
Morris' statement quoted above:
I am not now contending for the rights of the negro, rights which his Creator gave him and which his fellow man has taken away No, sir! I am contending for the rights of the white person in the free States, and am endeavoring to prevent them from being trodden down by that power which claims the black person as property.... is a reminder that his biographers have questioned whether he shared the moral opposition to slavery that motivated other famous Abolitionists.
That kind of statement is also used by Lost Cause advocates to try to discredit the Union and pro-democracy cause, and to reinforce the pseudohistorical argument that slavery had nothing to do with the war. But it's a disingenuous argument. Even free black males weren't all allowed to vote, and even if they all had the vote, they were a relatively small constituency in Norther elections. Politicians had to make arguments to appeal to voters. The argument that slavery was destroying freedom for whites was such an argument.
It also had the advantage of being manifestly true. By 1839, when Morris made the speech quoted here, the freedom for even white males to openly discuss, debate and criticize the institution of slavery, much less to politically advocate against it, was being actively suppressed in the slave states. And even in free states like Ohio and New York, violent vigilante repression was being carried out against Abolitionist activists and newspapers. The Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision and other measures supported by the slaveowners and the political bloc called the Slave Power were later to drive home even more the reality that slavery for African-Americans meant a progressive loss of freedom for white citizens.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2010, slavery, thomas morris, us south
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