I Think Even The Tinfoil Hat Feels More Loose

Anyway.

Wilmot Proviso. We all know the Wilmot Proviso, right? Something something Mexican War, something something, acquired territory, amendment to some bill in Congress that definitively denied possibility of slavery in the new territory, everyone goes apeshit it gets defeated. Therefore, slavery is again pointed to as a cause of the Civil War. Voted down along sectional and not party lines as additional proof.

I'm guessing that that last part is a tough pill to swallow, if you're of the "civil war was not about slavery" mindset. My knee-jerk mindset is that I don't want to hear anything good or laudable about the early Republican Party so far as it was a resurrected Whig Party with its economic platform.

My (hopefully) more reasoned mindset is that the first states to secede may well have seceded so as to protect "the Southron way of life" and any politician in the South at the time would damn well have agreed that slavery was a part of it. But the war started, going from First Manassas, over secession itself. I count Fort Sumter being bombarded as what anyone else would have been within their right to do; the political wisdom of attacking it instead of starving them out being another issue.

[But oh oh ooooh the tariffs! Well then, if that's the case, how was there a Whig Party in the South at all? Henry Clay was from Kentucky. oops! ]

So...we straight? If by Civil War you mean everything from 1860-65 then I got nothing for you. I break it up into Pre-Sumter, slavery may have been a motivating factor in secession; it was secession over which the Tyrant King played out Ft. Sumter, which drove other states to secede, which brought us to First Manassas, the first meeting of armies...over the right of secession and the Revolutionary Ideal of 1776, the right of consent of the governed. I allow for the condemnation of the institutional American slavery. I'm not Southron so I don't really care for approval by any, but roll my eyes at "omg Southron=dumb hick." It made the Civil War class I just got a B+ in (quite likely on account of my distracting rambling as such) seem more like...like same old, same old.

Where was I? Wilmot Proviso, yeah. From Michael F. Holt's Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. The title explains the book and it supposedly is not written with a view to "everything inevitably led to the Civil War," 985 small print pages before 263 pages of notes and index. Read this.

Developing a distinctive party stance and record on the [Mexican] war also required continued cooperation with southern Whigs, which could never be achieved on the Wilmot Proviso. [Wilmot was a northern Democrat from Ohio.] To the dismay of extreme antislavery Whigs...most northern Whigs, like their southern colleagues, were primarily concerned in 1846 and 1847 with returning to power, not with venting sectional grievances. ...control of the House depended upon the ninety seats to be contest in 1847, and most of those seats were in the South...of course, party unity would be necessary to carry the presidential election of 1848. The problem was not simply that the Proviso divided southern Whigs against northern Whigs. It was that opposition to the Proviso in the South, like support for it in the North, could not provide southern Whigs with a distinctive party position to it in 1847 and 1848 because of the bipartisan sectional consensus against it. To compound the problem, southern Whigs were even more eager than their northern colleagues to demonstrate that they matched Democratic support for American armies...because enthusiasm about their exploits in battle was especially avid in the South. Just like northern Whigs, however, southern Whigs quickly realized that opposition to all territorial acquisition offered them a viable and distinct platform.

Finish checking your email? Opposing Wilmot Proviso in the South wasn't enough to distinguish a Democrat from a Whig, as supporting it in the North didn't define, either. There was no viable "they don't support the troops" tag to pin on the Whigs...Henry Clay and Daniel Webster both lost sons in the war and everyone fell for the rah-rah bullshit. But what the Whigs can do...is oppose any acquisition of oil reserves from the war, as Democrats in both north and south were down for that along party lines and not regional.

Territory! I meant territory! Not oil reserves, how...utterly silly of me.

Read this now.

To fathom southern Whig confidence in the issue, one must understand the reasons for southern opposition to the Proviso. Contrary to the accusations of northern antislavery men, there was no widespread southern conspiracy to spread slavery by attacking Mexico. Most southern Whigs and many southern Democrats, including John C. Calhoun, who joined the Whigs in opposing a war of conquest against Mexico, believed and openly argued that slavery could not possibly exist in any territory to be acquired from it. Whatever the accuracy of that analysis--and it was undoubtedly wrong about California--for most Southerners the significance of the Proviso was symbolic, not substantive. They regarded it as a humiliating insult by the northern majority, a denial of the equal rights of white Southerners even when they had no intention of exercising those rights, and an attempt to subjugate Southerners to northern dictation, that is, as an attempt symbolically to reduce white Southerners to the status of slaves. Southerners who were particularly sensitive about defending their individual and collective honor and particularly fearful of enslavement to someone else's power refused to tolerate it. Some Southerners did indeed expect to carry slaves to acquisitions wrested from Mexico. But to most--and especially to most Whigs--Southern Rights, the defense of republican liberty and equality, were at stake, not the extension of slavery.

Bwahahahahaha....what a reasonable...totally coherent to today's students of history and political economy, manner of approaching an issue. What I put in bold I'd really love to check out, but the notation at the end of the paragraph is to Holt's other book, which I bet has the directions to get the speeches/whatevers that gave him that impression, because that sounds like one helluvan inference.

And yeah sure, tariffs this, tariffs that, Damyankees sux0rz, the idea of a Slave Power conspiracy is pretty up there with 9-11 Truthers (and I say that as someone related to probably three of 'em) on the "you've got to be fucking kidding me" scale, depending on who you're reading, but...

So the North had Yankees and the Burned-Over District up in their grill. The South had the FireEaters. Starting to look more and more like a tie.