For once I'm writing an essay here that I plan to use part of in some online forum discussion. Because of such a discussion on one such forum, I began reviewing the history of the American Civil War in Jeffrey Rogers Hummel's masterful 1996 overview EMANCIPATING SLAVES, ENSLAVING FREE MEN. I won't go into the many complexities of Hummel's work, but even in the first chapter I found an interesting statement that corrects one of my claims in this not-really-a-series agglomeration of essays. In Part 3, I said: Though anti-slavery abolitionists campaigned for the end of the institution even before the signing of the Constitution, Northern politicians did not become highly invested in anti-slavery rhetoric until the 1830s-- which just happens to coincide with the establishment of the "Tariff of Abominations," whose purpose was to make Northern goods more appealing than the lower-priced European goods, all of which led to the Nullification Crisis.
Hummel, however, pegged the genesis of the anti-slavery issue as about ten years earlier. "Not until the decade following the War of 1812 did slavery fully divide the South from the North... Opponents beat back last efforts to legalize the institution in Indiana and Illinois. Simultaneously, the free states were beginning to overwhelm the slave states in total population. Already in 1819, the North outvoted the South in the lower house of Congress, 105 to 81. Only the Senate maintained a balance between the country's two sections: eleven free states to eleven slave states." Hummel cites the 1819 efforts of New York Representative James Tallmadge to set arbitrary limits on slave-state Missouri's admissibility to the Union. I've been aware of Tallmadge's influence on the slave-free conflict for many years, not least because the conflict that legislator introduced led to Henry Clay's "Missouri Compromise" of 1820. But I didn't realize that the Northern states had swelled in population so early, though Hummel specifies in the same section that a number of Northern politicians, termed "doughfaces," sometimes made common cause with Southerners, being "northern men with southern principles." Hummel concludes this line of thought thusly: "Southerners furthermore became advocates of inviolate states' rights. What particularly disturbed them was that Tallmadge's amendment would have imposed antislavery upon a full-fledged state, and not just a territory. Previously states' rights had been an ideological issue with support and opposition in all parts of the country. But once the Missouri controversy exposed the South's vulnerability as a minority, states' rights increasingly turned into a sectional issue. Southerners came to realize that only strict limits upon national authority could protect their existing slave system from hostile interference."
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