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Constitutional Amendment The U.S. Constitutional amendment process guarded Slave Power’s power. As William Lloyd Garrison conceded, the federal government would need a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery. Three-fourths of existing states had to approve constitutional amendments. In 1860, the nation contained seventeen free labor states and fifteen slave states. If all fifteen states perpetually rejected anti-slavery, only a union swollen to sixty states, forty-five of them free labor states, could have forced abolition upon the South. In some future century, the Union might balloon to sixty states. No such gargantuan swelling could be imagined in the mid-nineteenth century. Southern Poor Whites White’s mid-nineteenth century egalitarian republican ideology also fused rich and poor in a black belt area. The poorest citizen relished his white skin, which allegedly made him the equal of all white males and superior to all blacks. Proudly equal plebeians could not bear holier-than-thou Yankees, with their posture of moral superiority to all who helped enslave blacks. Nor could rednecks tolerate any abolitionist effort to raise black slaves to the level of white citizens. Egalitarianism, the great reason why some colorblind Yankees opposed slavery, was also the great reason why racist whites massed to keep blacks ground under. How Did Slavery cause the Civil War? That slavery above all else caused this historic war, both within the South and between the Union and the Confederacy, seems indisputable. ...Yet how slavery caused the Civil War remains elusive despite these puffed up antagonisms, for heightened resentments often plague human affairs without ending in the blow-up. (Witness, for example, the twentieth-century cold war between the United States and Russia). Most northerners, after all, never much liked abolitionists, or voted for Lincoln in 1860 as some Great Emancipator, or disapproved of that unamenable proposed Thirteenth Amendment, keeping federal hands off slavery. So too, most Southerners never liked fire-eaters, or saw slavery as a permanent blessing, or disapproved of remaining in the union, unless and until Lincoln committed the overt antislavery act or coerced departing brothers. Nor did most white Southerners ever own a slave (or much dream of owning one, after the 1850s inflation in slave prices made the investment forbiddingly expensive). Nor did many fugitive slaves escape to the North in any year, or many slaves inhabit Kansas, or many avid disunionists care much about Caribbean expansion, or many avid Caribbean imperialists care much about disunuion. Out of such decidedly minority materials, how could the slavery issue have smashed the union? ...... throughout the nation's movement toward civil war, and especially at the crucial turning points, recurring impersonal forces wrenched the sections apart and made some form of civil war, at some time, highly probable. Embattled minorities' power over sleepy majorities, for example, repeatedly drove the drama. Outnumbered Southerners scored numerous national victories by controlling the National Democratic Party. Outnumbered abolitionists inspired more sympathy for black's rights by fanning Yankee outrage at whites' trampled rights. Outnumbered slaves brought an ultimately emancipating civil war closer (and helped win that war and point it toward emancipation) by wielding the leverage of individual massacres and especially of flight. Outnumbered secessionists impelled most of the South toward Armageddon by pressing the leverage of one state's disunion on the next state's decision. And outnumbered slaveholders demagogically used racism to provoke black belt whites to vote for the supposed supremacy of their skin, whatever the inferiority of their purse. ...The collisions between democratic and despotic systems added the killing force to the leverage of minorities and to the dialectic of southern division and unity. A thriving democracy usually must allow dissenting voices. A thriving despotism usually must repress contrary opinions. Thus despotic social systems usually strain democratic political systems, often to the breaking point. Slaveholders' attempts to silence critics, whether by cries of disloyalty to slavery or by lynch mobs or by gag rules or by censoring the mails or by precluding Lincoln's appointees' campaigning - all these dictatorial methods demonstrated the increasing tension between the Old South's colliding governing systems. |