Alistair Cooke's America by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141909226
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2002-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

As the pioneers flooded into the Western lands, and old territories turned into new states, not only machines followed them but independent farmers who were soundly against slavery. With them it was not simply a matter of principle. They had gone West to work free land for their own prosperity. They did not intend to compete with slave labor. So the awkward question came up: what would happen when the two streams of settlers flowed together on the same ground?

‘This momentous question,’ wrote the aging Jefferson, ‘like a firebell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.’ The bell was rung by Missouri’s request in 1819 to come into the Union as a slave state. Missouri had been settled by slaveholders, but it lay north of the horizontal line that divided the free states of the North from the slave states of the South. If Missouri were let in as a slave state, a Northerner would look at the map and see a precedent, an invasion, at best a buffer state. In the event, the Congress bowed to Missouri but to maintain its custom of balancing one free state and one slave, it also admitted Maine as a free state. In the same act, it prohibited, from then on, all slavery north of the line of latitude 36° 30’. It is known as the Missouri Compromise line. It was destined to be also a battle line.

This geographical balance lasted, precariously, for about thirty years. But it was thunderingly upset by the United States’ war with Mexico, in 1848, out of which the Union acquired vast new lands, most of them south of the Missouri Compromise line: Texas, Territory of New Mexico, California, and Utah well to the north. They had their own strong traditions. Texas had slavery, California had not, and the two territories would test the power to legislate either system. This massive challenge to the compromise greatly aggravated the enmity between the North and South. It quickened the agitation in the North to keep slavery out of all the new states and territories, and it united the Southerners in a kind of self-protective defiance. The new Westerners in the North were confirmed in their prejudices, many of them gross and bigoted, about the brutality and peonage of the South. Not all Northerners by any means believed the fire and brimstone propaganda of the Abolitionists, which had been brewing for a quarter of a century. Anti-Abolitionist mobs beat up a Bostonian in 1837. In the same year, in Illinois, a clergyman was killed.

The issue came to a head, as great issues tend to, first in the United States Senate and then in the Supreme Court. The House passed a proviso prohibiting slavery in the territories taken from Mexico and made it apply to Texas, where many slave-owning Southerners had died in the cause of bringing their republic into the Union. The Senate defeated it. What had the

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