Slavery In The South Dbq Essay

Known as the “peculiar institution” in the South, slavery was perhaps the most divisive issue America faced during its early days. Rapid westward expansion encouraged by the American idea of manifest destiny highlighted the issues that came with protecting the institution of slavery, resulting in various compromises drawn up by the government in an effort to qualm the intensifying division in the country. Moreover, movements like the Second Great Awakening revitalized America’s moral conscience, revealing the ugly injustice and dehumanization hidden in the institution of slavery. In the decades leading up to the civil war, economic and moral arguments were what fueled the growing opposition to slavery. Analyzing the differences between the

With the power of their state constitutions, states such as Vermont and Maine emancipated slaves in 1777 and 1780 respectively, just a few short years after America gained independence from Britain. Slaves in the North became free blacks relatively quickly after the war, in part due to ideas of liberty and equality promoted during the American Revolution, but also due to the economy of the region in comparison to that of the South. Land in the North was rocky, infertile and the climate was rough, making it difficult to grow the kinds of profitable crops sustained by slave labor that the southern economy relied on. This difference was the start of the division between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South. As settlers moved westward and more states began to join the union, agreements like the Northwest Land Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the Missouri Compromise, which decided the states in which slavery would exist, reinforced this divide between the North and South. Moreover, the various agreements and rules about westward expansion that this difference gave rise to demonstrated that the containment of slavery, not necessarily the immediate eradication of it, was the goal of these economic arguments. Agreements such as the Northwest Land Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise didn’t abolish slavery from all of America,

The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ceded much of the west and southwest territory of the present-day America and accepted America’s annexation of Texas. The acquisition of all this new land intensified the debate over how the spread of slavery should be handled. With the Wilmot Proviso, a failed proposal which suggested prohibiting slavery in the Mexican Cession, congressman David Wilmot proposed another economic argument, claiming that slavery posed a threat to free white labor. It was difficult for free, white, wage-demanding laborers to compete with slaves in the job market, because while it was extremely cruel, slavery was free. Wilmot, in proposing the Wilmot Proviso, wanted to ensure that slavery would remain in the South, and that the acquisition of new land would prove beneficial to free white workers. Again, the idea that the containment of slavery would be economically advantageous is present in this argument. Wilmot states explicitly that he has “no squeamish sensitiveness upon the subject of slavery, nor morbid sympathy for the slave” (Document H). Rather, he is concerned with “the rights of White freemen” and preserving the “inviolability of free territory” (Document H). His interest, grounded in an economic argument, is in keeping slavery from infiltrating free land and threatening free White men, not necessarily in