The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [13]
The U.S. Constitution contained several protections for slavery, notably the fugitive slave clause, which required the return of runaways, and the three-fifths clause, which gave the slave states increased representation in Congress and added electoral votes by counting part of their disenfranchised slave population. Nonetheless, many of the nation’s founders hoped that slavery might eventually die out. Instead, with the opening of fertile land in the Deep South and the spectacular growth of world demand for cotton, the key raw material of the early industrial revolution, American slavery received a new lease on life. As the nation expanded westward, so did slavery. Cotton became by far the most important American export, an indispensable source of the foreign earnings that enabled the country to import manufactured goods.
The free states shared in the profits of slavery. As Lincoln experienced on his journeys to New Orleans, the slave states provided a crucial market for the produce of free western farmers. On the strength of its control of the transatlantic trade in cotton, New York City rose to commercial dominance. Even the abolition of the slave trade from Africa in 1808, a year before Lincoln’s birth, did not slow slavery’s growth. A flourishing domestic slave trade replaced the importation of slaves. By the eve of the Civil War, the slave population in the United States had reached nearly four million. The economic value of these men, women, and children when considered as property exceeded the combined worth of all the banks, railroads, and factories in the United States. In geographical extent, population, and the institution’s economic importance, the South was home to the most powerful slave system the modern world has known.33
Nevertheless, abolition in the North drew a geographical line across the country. The Mason-Dixon Line, a boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland drawn by a colonial-era surveyor, became a dividing line between freedom and slavery. Although the antislavery impulse inspired by the struggle for independence waned in the early nineteenth century, slavery remained a divisive political issue, and plans for abolition continued to be discussed. Between 1790 and 1830, dozens of proposals for gradual, compensated emancipation came before Congress.34
Increasingly, supporters of emancipation coupled their proposals with “colonization”—the removal of the black population from the United States. Until around 1830, most organized antislavery activism, at least among white Americans, took place under this rubric. In this respect, the United States was truly exceptional. As Harper’s Weekly later pointed out, nowhere else in the Western Hemisphere was it seriously proposed “to extirpate the slaves after emancipation.” Absurd as the idea of colonization may appear in retrospect, it seemed quite realistic to its advocates. Many large groups had been expelled from their homelands in modern times—for example, Spanish Muslims and Jews after 1492 and Acadians during the Seven Years’ War. Virtually the entire Indian population east of the Mississippi River had been removed to the West by 1840. In an era of nation-building, colonization formed part of a long debate about what kind of nation the United States was to be. It allowed its advocates to imagine a society freed—gradually, peacefully, and without sectional conflict—from both slavery and the unwanted presence of blacks. At mid-century, the prospect of colonizing American slaves probably seemed more credible than immediate abolition.35
Colonization was hardly a fringe movement. “Almost every respectable man,” as Frederick Douglass observed, supported it. Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay, the statesmen most revered by Lincoln, favored colonization. Jefferson remained committed to the idea to his dying day. In 1824, he proposed