Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation

The Decline of Antislavery Politics, 1815–1840

The Decline of Antislavery Politics, 1815–1840 Donald J. Ratcliffe The 1830s have traditionally been regarded as the time when sectional tensions over slavery heightened suddenly, dramatically, decisively. Historians have assumed that after the constitutional debates of 1787 argument over slavery disappeared for four decades. Then, the appearance of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831, the organization of the American Antislavery Society in1833, and the evangelizing abolitionist campaigns that followed across the North, revived awareness of the issue and provoked a gradually intensifying confrontation with the slave states. Thus, the evolution of antislavery agitation is viewed from the perspective of the Civil War, as a key part of the story that tells how after 1830 a peaceable republic was carved apart by an issue that no one had cared about previously. Such a view, as some older historians have protested,underestimates the power of earlier antislavery movements.∞ Recent work has established that Northern antislavery sentiment had a significant impact on national politics before 1830, frequently provoking bitter arguments within Congress over whether the United States should be a slaveholders’ republic. From that perspective, it becomes reasonable to see the 1830s as marked not by ‘‘the rebirth of antislavery,’’ but by antislavery decline—as a period when the slavery issue was deliberately removed from the mainstream of national political argument.≤ This process had begun before1830, as Northern politicians responded to the rising sectional sensitivity of the South, so evident by the late 1820s. Thus, in the early1830s Garrison and his coadjutors were not starting a new, unprecedented crusade, but rather trying to breathe life into one that was fizzling out. For them, political antislavery had already lost out in the world 268 Donald J. Ratcliffe of the nascent Second Party System, and they appreciated that the only way to achieve abolition was by stressing reform rather than politics, by transforming public consciousness in the North, both morally and racially. The apparent extremism of their standpoint had the effect, however, of accelerating the process of pushing the slavery issue still further to the political margins. Between 1815 and 1825, politicians had debated slavery openly in the North and had raised issues surrounding it in Congress. By 1835, public discussion of slavery in the North had become the preserve of perceived extremists, and Northern representatives sought to avoid the issue in national forums. As the slavery issue became more fraught, so it ceased to be the stuff of mainstream politics. From this perspective, my object here is, first, to underline the political significance of antislavery sentiment before the late 1820s; second, to demonstrate how far things had changed by the late 1830s; and third, to suggest when and why this change came over American politics after 1825. Basic to this argument is a distinction between ‘‘antislavery’’ and ‘‘abolitionism ,’’ a distinction not commonly made by historians, but one that illuminates the historical process. In this essay, ‘‘antislavery’’ refers to the growing belief that developed in the Revolutionary era that slavery was morally wrong, socially harmful, and inconsistent with the highest American ideals of liberty and democracy. This hatred of the institution could be compatible with racism, with respect for property, and with an unwillingness to threaten the sectional understandings upon which the Union had been erected. Some racial liberals embraced the antislavery point of view, but it was also compatible with those who favored the colonization of free blacks and who refused to interfere with slavery where it already existed. The term ‘‘abolitionism,’’ as used here, refers to the approach to slavery associated with William Lloyd Garrison, the Tappan brothers, and Theodore Dwight Weld in the 1830s. Their morally absolutist stand insisted on the immediate, uncompensated abolition of the institution, rejecting colonization as a solution, and they were willing to agitate for this point of view even in states where slavery already existed. True, earlier writers had preached immediate abolition—notably George Bourne in 1816 and John Rankin in 1824—but those men did not rouse the response that Garrison did in the evangelized Greater New England of the 1830s, when cultural conditions and techniques of organizational agitation were clearly different.≥ But even after 1831, the older stream of antislavery persisted, with its proponents condemning the counterproductive extremism of what they called ‘‘modern abolitionism.’’ Arguably, this older antislavery stream later The Decline of Antislavery Politics 269 provided much of the impulse supporting the free-soil movements that ultimately...