One Nation Divided by Slavery by Michael Conlin

Author:Michael Conlin [Conlin, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9781631011160
Publisher: The Kent State University Press
Published: 2015-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

5

Finishing What the Founders Started

Antebellum Americans were devoted to the Revolution. They mourned the passing of rank-and-file Revolutionaries. They apotheosized the leading Revolutionaries. They revered the leading Revolutionaries’ descendants (and even their friends). They made pilgrimages to Revolutionary battlefields. They erected monuments to the men, battles, documents, and ideas that marked the progress of the Revolution. They thronged the shrines that held the relics of the Revolution. While the Revolution brought Americans together, it also divided them. At the same time Americans shared a common reverence for the Revolution, they quarreled over exactly what it was. By the mid-1840s, this quarrel intensified and became sectional. As historian Michael Morrison observes: “increasingly the nation was unable either to recapture the spirit or to agree on the essence of their Revolution.” Indeed, this struggle over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution was both a controversy in the sectional conflict and an exercise in national myth-making. While Southern hotspurs emphasized the Revolutionary legacy of self-determination and resistance to encroachment on individual rights, slaves, abolitionists, and some Free-Soilers looked to the Revolutionary legacy of natural rights for all, and sectional moderates in the North and the South took pride in the notion that the common sacrifice of the Patriots in the North and the South had bestowed a Revolutionary legacy of individual liberty that made the slaveholding United States the most free nation on earth. By the 1850s, fire-eaters and fugitive slaves invoked the right to rebellion—to different ends—while at the same time moderates tried to keep the fire of the old Revolution alight while smothering that of the new. As historians Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese noted, the “more pronounced the quarrel over slavery, the more important the interpretation of the Revolution became” to Americans in the North and the South.1

Perhaps no legacy of the Revolution put the issue of slavery in American nationality in bolder relief than Northern emancipation. If slavery was an essential component of American nationalism, if all original thirteen states had once been “Slave States,” then how to explain the decision by the worthies of the Revolution to abolish it, in some cases even before independence itself was won? At the same time, the persistence of slavery in the Southern half of the new nation raised its own questions. All antebellum Americans acknowledged that the Founders had established a union of thirteen slave states in 1776. As the Anti-Slavery Bugle observed, when the original thirteen had declared independence, “slaves were held, to a greater or lesser extent, in every one of them.” Making the same point from the other side of the slavery divide, the Delaware State Reporter cautioned Northerners to remember that slavery “existed originally in all the States, and not just the South only.” But their agreement on that historical fact only served to focus their conflict on what came next. Seven of the original thirteen slave states freed their chattels, while nine more slave states joined the remaining six original slave states in the Union.2

Just

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