The Union did not begin the Civil War as a moral abolitionist project. Lincoln said as much in his inauguration speech.
I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.
To be clear, you should not read this as Lincoln’s personal views. He was opposed to the institution. But Lincoln recognized a fundamental problem that had plagued America since its inception. From the Constitutional Convention onward, Southern slaveholding interests had repeatedly made clear that their participation in the Union depended on the protection of slavery.
During the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the topic of the slave trade was heavily debated. If you read through the page I linked to, you will see an array of opinions on this topic by the framers. But the main takeaway you should get from it is that the framers feared some or all of the Southern states would not join the Union or accept the Constitution if the slave trade was not protected. Charles Pinckney, Hugh Williamson, and John Rutledge basically say this outright. Roger Sherman, though personally opposed to the slave trade, expressed the underlying logic of the compromise most succinctly:
Sherman (CT) (who was not an enslaver) did not want to change this language, even though he “disapproved of the slave-trade.” “The public good did not require” a ban on the slave trade. He noted that several states had already abolished slavery and believed that the remaining states would do so “by degrees.” He urged the importance of quickly finishing the Constitution.
Sherman stated “it was better to let the Southern States import slaves” than to have the Southern states leave the United States. He didn’t want the slave trade to be taxed “because it implied they [enslaved Africans] were property.” He admitted that if Congress had the power to ban the slave trade, it would do so and be right to do so.
Roger Sherman ‘urged the importance of quickly finishing the Constitution’ because the nation was weak under the Articles of Confederation. Congress had no reliable power to enforce taxes, treaties, pay debts, or quell internal unrest. Shay’s Rebellion, suppressed only months earlier, exposed just how fragile the Confederation government really was. It made the creation of a stronger constitutional framework an urgent matter.
And if every state did not accept this new constitutional framework and join the Union, the US would have rival states perpetually competing and weakening their power. It would also set a dangerous precedent: that any state, Northern or Southern, could threaten secession if they disliked what the national government was doing.
Think about who the framers had to look to for how that went. For centuries, Europe was marked by generational wars. These were elite coalitions that would plunge an entire continent into a 14-year-long war just so a few people in one royal house could claim a dead king’s throne. They were the true monarchs the South resembled in practice. What would happen if they were left to their own devices? How long would it be until the rival states decided to plunge North America into generational wars for their own petty reasons, again and again and again? The Constitution and the shared institutions it enforced bound the nation together. As Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist No. 6:
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.
So the framers, fearing the South would not join the Union otherwise, protected and accommodated slavery in the Constitution.
But the compromise inevitably gave the Southern slaveholding class tremendous power within the Union in relation to their size. The Three-Fifths Clause inflated slave-state representation in the House and Electoral College, the Fugitive Slave Clause gave slaveholders a national enforcement claim, and the Slave Trade Clause prevented Congress from banning the international slave trade before 1808. These provisions helped create the constitutional framework in which the antebellum slave South would grow. The Three-Fifths Clause is especially revealing, as it shows how these constitutional compromises directly expanded slaveholders’ political power on the national stage.
There were around 3.95 million enslaved people in 1860. Under the Three-Fifths Clause, that represented roughly 2.37 million apportioned persons. There were about 395,000 recorded slaveholders, representing roughly 20% of White Southern family units. The planter class, those who held twenty or more slaves, was much smaller: about 47,500 slaveholders, or roughly 2.4% of White Southern family units and about 12% of all slaveholders. Yet this small planter class held roughly half of the enslaved population, meaning about 2 million enslaved people. Under the Three-Fifths Clause, that alone represented roughly 1.2 million apportioned persons.
Compared with the roughly 29.55 million people living in the United States in 1860, this gave the South a hugely inflated share of representation. The planter class itself amounted to roughly 0.8% (47,500 households x average 5 per household) of the national apportionment base, yet the slaves they held generated apportioned population equivalent in size to about 4%. If we include the broader slaveholding class, which made up roughly 6.7% of the national apportionment base (same calculation), the slaves they held generated an apportioned population equivalent to about 8% of the national apportionment base. That amounted to the equivalent of roughly 19 additional House seats and, therefore, 19 additional electoral votes, far beyond what slave states would have had if only free persons had counted for apportionment.
This power alone gave slaveholders leverage over presidents and presidential candidates, Congress, the Supreme Court, fugitive slave enforcement, and nearly any other issue that touched their interests. There are even strong arguments that without the Three-Fifths Clause, Thomas Jefferson would never have won the presidency, and the Virginia dynasty may not have emerged in the same way. Regardless of your opinion of these presidents, it illustrates just how much national influence a single clause gave this tiny class.
With this disproportionate national political power, slaveholders and their political allies were able to demand repeated concessions from Northern Democrats and the federal government. Meanwhile, the United States was adding new territories. These two factors led to an expansion crisis in the 1850s, when slaveholders increasingly treated any restriction on slavery’s spread as an existential threat to the institution’s survival.
In 1850, they transformed the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause into something far more aggressive through the Fugitive Slave Act. Then in 1854 they repealed the Missouri Compromise that reopened land north of 36°30′ to possible slavery through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, opening the door for expansion in the new territories. And in 1857, the Supreme Court went even further in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruling that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit slavery in the federal territories. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney justified this decision by claiming:
the right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.
From that premise, the Supreme Court held that Congress had no constitutional power to stop slaveholders from taking slaves into federal territories. That basically meant most of the West.
Map of Kansas Nebraska Act, 1854
And in the mind of Republicans, if the slave states could claim these territories, it would give them extraordinary political power.1 They believed the United States and democracy would be increasingly strangled by a tiny slaveholder class.2
Republicans were also aware of the absolute degradation the institution of slavery imposed upon free and unfree labor and spoke to northerners about the southern economy primarily through this lens.3 The institution’s possible expansion into the new territories, then, drove deep fear into the northerners:
In 1855, Charles Francis Adams observed that it was a weakness of political anti-slavery that it seemed to many voters to be an abstraction, lacking the immediate impact of “temporal, absorbing self-interest.” But the issue of slavery in the territories struck millions of northerners in a way in which abstract discussions of the condition of the slave could not.4
And this brings us back to Lincoln. Lincoln understood the fundamental problem the framers faced in creating the Constitution, and likely also understood that running on the moral abolition of slavery was not a winning campaign strategy. But he also recognized something important about the specific language the framers used regarding slavery. In his 1860 Cooper Union Address, delivered while he was campaigning for president, Lincoln explained this recognition when referring to the Supreme Court’s decision:
If they had only pledged their judicial opinion that such right is affirmed in the instrument by implication, it would be open to others to show that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” is to be found in the Constitution, nor the word “property” even, in any connection with language alluding to the things slave, or slavery; and that wherever in that instrument the slave is alluded to, he is called a “person;” – and wherever his master’s legal right in relation to him is alluded to, it is spoken of as “service or labor which may be due,” – as a debt payable in service or labor. Also, it would be open to show, by contemporaneous history, that this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.
This gave the Republican position against slavery’s expansion constitutional legitimacy and made Lincoln’s potential presidency feel like a full-blown existential crisis for the South. Once he won, despite his guarantee not to abolish slavery where it already existed, the Southern states seceded. And the Union, remembering Hamilton’s warning, whether consciously or in spirit, could not allow that to stand.
Footnotes
- In reality, the harsh environments and mountainous regions in the west would have made the transportation of slave labor into these territories extremely difficult for slaveholders. ↩
- Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 54. ↩
- Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 45-47. ↩
- Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 57. ↩