The Counterrevolution of Slavery by Manisha Sinha

Author:Manisha Sinha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2000-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

The breakup of the Democratic Party took place appropriately on Carolinian planter politicians’ turf. While Charleston, thanks to its disparate population of merchants and mechanics, had not been a stronghold of nullification and secession, it was also home to the planter aristocracy, the unrelenting Mercury, and the most advanced productions of proslavery thought. E. G. Mason reported that Charlestonians spent much time convincing outsiders that slavery was a “patriarchal institution” and the “best possible arrangement for the black man” and that “[e]very chance was seized upon to uphold the assumption of South Carolina’s independence of the rest of the world…. [T]he disunion feeling was universal.” Thomas Ravenel exemplified the attitude of separatist lowcountry planters when he noted in his diary, “Charleston was disgraced for a week by having her streets invaded at liberty by real genuine Abolitionists under the garb of National Democracy” and that it was “impertinence” on the part of others to force “the presence of the Convention” on the state. As one Douglasite said, “Charleston is the last place on Gods Earth where a national convention should have been held.” “Many Citizens” wrote in the Charleston Courier that the “free State section” men had flooded the city to “control” the convention and counteract the “political atmosphere of South Carolina.”28

Caleb Cushing, president of the convention, completed the irony of the Democratic Party meeting on Carolina soil when in his opening address he referred to Calhoun as a party leader par excellence. For Douglas’s followers more was at stake than the presidency since Douglas epitomized the principle of popular sovereignty, the only territorial platform that northern Democrats were willing to adhere to. The lower south delegations, however, were prepared to stake the existence of the party on federal protection of territorial slavery. Administration or Buchanan men formed a small third group, whose bitter hatred of Douglas matched that of the southern fire-eaters. Douglas had already made clear that he would not accept the nomination of the convention if it adopted the slave code, and most southerners viewed Douglas’s elevation to the presidency to be little better then the victory of a Republican president. There was, as Murat Halstead observed, “an irreconcilable difference in the doctrines respecting slavery in the Territories between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic party.”29

The impossibility of constructing a bisectional consensus on the issue of territorial slavery became evident. The only unanimous decision made by all sides was to dispose of the troublesome question of slavery in the territories by working out the party platform before the selection of a presidential nominee. On April 27, the fifth day of the convention, the committee on resolutions presented three reports on the party platform. W. W. Avery of North Carolina presented the majority report, which embodied the southern position. It proclaimed that neither the federal government nor the territorial legislatures had the power to abolish slavery, and that it was the “duty” of the federal government to protect slavery in the “high seas” and the “territories.” The Douglasite minority report, introduced by Henry B.

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