> Carrol wrote:
> >The causes of the Slave Drivers' Rebellion are complicated, *but*
> >it is doubtful that all the other reasons would have led to actual war
> >were it not for the belief of the Southern Slaveocrats that slavery was
> >in danger.
>
> There's a whole lit on this that suggests that it wasn't the Northern will
> to end slavery as much as the Southern plantation-owners fear of its end
> that sparked the conflagration. The owners saw their slaves as assets and
> would suffer from severe capital losses even from a mere murmur about
> manumission. (It's as if the stock-market goons started hearing about a
> proposal to expropriate their shares.) So they over-reacted (in the sense
> of starting a war, since it made sense from their own view-points).
> Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~JDevine
Southern slavocracy had earlier played 'great refusal' card on anti-
extension policy. Amidst calls for secession, Kentucky Sen. Henry
Clay's so-called Compromise of 1850 gave slavers most of what they
wanted: stronger fugitive slave law, no restrictions on slavery in
territories, congressional cession of interstate commerce regulation
of slave trade. The 'compromise' did mean that California was admitted
as non-slave state, that slave trade, but not slavery, was abolished
in District of Columbia and that Texas gave up claims to New Mexico
in exchange for Feds assuming state's public debt (and as territory,
there were no slavery restrictions in NM). Whigs did what their
'compromiser' brethren before them had always done: they made major
concessions to slave interests.
btw: Michael Parenti has noted that policy of containing spread of
slavery was promptly reversed following death of President Zachary
Taylor (southern slaveowner opposed to extension of slavery and
secession) death. Parenti's article "The Strange Death of President
Zachary Taylor" (*New Political Science*, Vol. 20, #2: June 1998)
raises questions about official cause of death (severe indigestion
from eating too many iced cherries with milk after sitting too long
in sun, or something like that), looks askance at mainstream
historians' parroting of official line despite insufficient evidence,
and critiques conclusion drawn from 1991 exhumation that Taylor was
not poisoned. Michael Hoover
