Based on my meager studies I agree and would add that allowing establishment of the peculiar institution in the new nation based on the precepts outlined in the Declaration of Independence was a basic factor in the ensuing trouble. The hopes of Lincoln and other supporters of the rule of law who hoped to see slavery die out on its own were defeated by Whitney's invention. I have come to understand that the battle between pro- and anti-slavery parties for control of the destiny of Kansas was fought so desperately because that is where the question would be answered. It would either be the beginning of the end of slavery or slavery would become ineradicable.
Wait till we get to Dred Scott v. Sanford, the decision that Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney thought would settle the question of slavery once and for all. To the kids in the “We The People” class, I make the point that in America, we tend to look down on violence as a means of promoting social change. Instead, when we have a beef, we go to Court. No other county sues as much as we do, but no other country has less of a history of organized civil violence. I offer as proof the argument that the only time we had a civil war, it was because the legal system failed to avert it in the Dred Scott case.
Maybe it’s a stretch, because the Civil War was inevitable, but it was probably the last chance to avert the Civil War, and instead of averting it, the decision helped bring it about.
So Chief Justice Taney did settle the question of slavery once and for all. But not in the way he intended.
We’ll get into that more later.
I want to introduce someone to the thread that I don’t believe has been mentioned.
Having lived in three border counties on the Kansas Missouri state line for 65 years, I am very much aware of the national and local influence of a Missouri Senator, David Rice Aitchison who spent much of this era in Platte County, Missouri.
Atchison had the vision of a split of the two states in Slavery versus non-slave in the Kansas Nebraska Act and got Douglas to introduce the measure. His pro-slavery vision was so prominent that Atchison, Kansas was chartered as a pro-slavery two named for him. The settlers that came to both areas, were predominantly abolitionist and wanted to go to Kansas and not Nebraska.
The “border ruffians” of Missouri people going over to vote in Kansas to tip the balance back and all the related violence were largely promoted by Aitchison to try to put his vision back on track.
As a young man, he worked for and gained prominence getting the Missouri line pushed all the way to the Missouri river. He felt he had a right to say how the area advanced and was the biggest cause of problems in many local historians accounts of the 1850s.