The Slave Power Conspiracy

In his 1858 speech accepting the Illinois Republican nomination for US senator, Abraham Lincoln astutely described the crisis the nation had been facing for decades. The nation was divided—half slave and half free—and he warned that it could not stand much longer. He did not expect the nation to fall, but he predicted that it would “become all one thing, or all the other.” As he spoke these words, odds were in favor of slavery spreading throughout the nation, and he realized it. A very small minority of people in the US wanted to do away with slavery all together, but even they realized that the federal government could not force this outcome. Most who opposed slavery at all simply opposed the spread of the system into the new territories, and Lincoln and his fellow Republicans took this stand. On the other hand, however, was an aggressive force that sought to spread slavery throughout the nation, even back into the northern states that had banned it. Lincoln’s Republican colleagues and many historians since have referred to this group as the “slave power.”

While many historians have built upon the work of Leonard Richards in describing the slave power’s domination of US politics in the antebellum era, none have explained it as thoroughly as Patrick Rael has in his synthetic, yet path-breaking, work on antislavery in the Atlantic. Rael puts the US antislavery movement into an international context to describe just how powerful the slaveholding interests were. After showing how strong the slave power really was and how likely it was to win the fight to spread slavery, he illustrates how difficult abolition was in a nation ruled by such a strong special interest group. His goal is to explain why it took eighty-eight years and a civil war to end slavery in the United States, and he achieves this through tight, yet thorough, analysis and the elegant, yet clear, prose his works are known for.

Before Rael explores the antislavery movements that developed throughout the Atlantic World, he explains the significance of the southern slave interest that Lincoln and others have blamed for “somehow” causing the Civil War by showing “how exactly” they did so. He looks to the Constitutional Convention and the deals made there, particularly the Three Fifths Compromise, to show that slaveholders managed to amass a disproportionate share of power from the beginning. This particular clause allowed southern states to use their enslaved populations to gain extra representation in Congress, and this in turn gave those states power to dominate the federal government until 1860. Only at that time would the northern population grow enough to pose a challenge to the slave power’s grip over the nation.

The slave power also dominated the nation in other ways, notably through fugitive slave laws that forced even non-slaveholders to participate in human bondage. Through these laws (one passed in 1793 and another in 1850), residents of the free states were required to help slaveholders track down and capture escaped slaves. This violated the consciences of those who opposed slavery on moral grounds, and it cost federal resources after 1850, as that version of the law called for federal marshals to be hired as slave catchers. Residents of free states argued that the rights of their states were being ignored and infringed upon to protect the interests of slaveholders. By the late 1850s, the slave power was arguing increasingly that laws banning slavery in northern states violated their property rights and that they should be allowed to take their slaves with them wherever they chose. Far from simply defending their way of life in their home states, these aggressive leaders were seeking to force their system on the entire nation.

The arena where this played out most dramatically, however, was in the western territories. With each new state that formed came another battle as to whether or not slavery would be allowed. The federal system gave the nation...