To consolidate their political support, the Republicans had used the method of attacking
an outside group, the South, and using slavery as the rationalization.
By its explicit guarantee of property rights against governmental interference, and therefore its implicit guarantees of the right to property in slaves, the constitution ruled out the possibility of a direct attack on the institution of slavery on its home ground.
If a direct confrontation was ruled out, then indirect means had to be found by abolitionists and Republicans. Over the years the slavery issue searched out the weak spots in the work of the Founding fathers. One such spot was found in the provisions for the return of fugitive slaves, but by far the most important lay in the uncertainty of the constitution on the question of slavery in the territories.
This proved to be the fatal point of sectional controversy: it mattered not just in its own right but because it stood for greater and wider issues.
Or so the politicians and newspapers said.
For Southerners, constitutional theory and political reality became one. As more non slave holding states were about to be admitted to the Union, their section became more doomed to a minority position in the Union. Southerners feared being ruled by a hostile majority. No longer would they have the option of compromise with the North.
Many in the press and government gave factual status to the concept that westward expansion was the complicating factor, the one which threatened the survival of slavery. They relegated the increasing division of the two economic and political worlds as secondary factors. The opposite was, in fact, true.
The feigned apprehension of the Northern Abolitionists and their allies, such as Lincoln, that Southern slaveholders would begin to flock northward and westward with their slaves ignored the clear historical fact that slavery had died out in the Northern States and that the slave population had shifted almost entirely to the Gulf States primarily because of the inability of the Negro to acclimatize to the harsh Northern climate and his natural affinity for the near-tropical climate of the deep South.
There was absolutely no reason at all for Southern plantation owners to move North with their slaves, and they had no inclination to do so. There was also no real inclination for most slaveholders to migrate into the Territories: They demanded a right which they could not actively use — the legal right to carry slaves where few would or could be taken. The one side fought rancorously for what it was bound to get without fighting; the other, with equal rancor, contended for what in the nature of things it could never use.
Consequently, the whole controversy over the expansion of slavery into the territories was rapidly becoming a phony issue.
Slavery was dying in the rest of the world. It had little chance of spreading further into new territories of the continent. If slavery spread, then it would take the slaves out of the United States.
Slavery had reached the limits imposed on its expansion by geography and climate, as Kansas, New Mexico, and Utah amply showed. The census of 1860 revealed that there were precisely two slaves in Kansas, and only a handful more in all the remaining territories. Even the Congressional Republicans had recognized that slavery posed no real threat in the territories, when, early in 1861, they provided for the organization of the new territories of Colorado, Nevada, and Dakota without any ban on slavery.
North and South were not divided by their mutual racism. Slavery was not a genuine issue and there was no need to go to war over it. The men of 1860-1 allowed an academic argument about an imaginary negro in an impossible place to end in a bloody civil war.
If the question was merely one of slavery in the territories, then competent political leadership would have been able to cope with it.
Instead, the Northern political class, seeing that the South was steadily becoming a minority in the United States, remained frustrated at the South's ability to cling to power. Not merely was the Northern stand against the threat of slavery in the territories a straw man argument and designed to inflame passions, but Northern expressions of moral repugnance towards slavery were nonsense, arising more out of totalitarian excess than logic.
I’ve read this three times, and I’m having trouble understanding what your point is. If you’re saying that slavery would have died of natural causes anyway, I don’t think I disagree with you, although I do think it would have made it into the 20th century. I disagree with you, though, on your glossing over of the importance of the return of fugitive slaves. It was the first cause listed by South Carolina in their “Declaration of Causes”, so they clearly thought it was important. I also vehementally disagree with your statement “the inability of the Negro to acclimatize to the harsh Northern climate and his natural affinity for the near-tropical climate of the deep South.” The more than 6 million African Americans who moved from the South to Northern cities between 1917 and 1960 would probably disagree with you as well.
So, if your point is that it was illogical for the South to secede from the Union over slavery, I am in total agreement with you. However, the number of Vulcans in Southern legislatures must have been extremely low, because they did secede, and the secession was due to slavery. I could cite multiple sources as proof of this, but I will go to my old fallback, the first sentence of the second paragraph of the Mississippi: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery— the greatest material interest of the world.”