Just a few words:
"Northern politicians were ever ready to sacrifice whatever anti-slavery sentiments they had for the sake of a tariff deal. Rumors after the Compromise of 1850 linked it to logrolling for tariff protection. Illinois votes for the Compromise were connected to railroad land grants that Illinois obtained in 1850..."
During this period, Southern politicians and merchants began a movement for Southern economic independence. Advocates supported banking, manufacturing, shipping, and transportation improvements in the South.
The movement to independence filled the merchants of New York with fear, not from worry that the movement would be successful, but that the abolition movement would add impetus to the movement and lead to the dissolution of the Union, thereby achieving much more than commercial conventions, direct trade conventions, and propaganda campaigns could accomplish.
Though the United States had withdrawn from the international slave trade in 1808, the internal slave trade between slaveholding states became a multi-million-dollar industry during the nineteenth century. Between 1830 and 1860 an estimated 300,000 Virginia African Americans were sold further south. Many slaveholding states attempted to regulate this trade, though efforts were poorly enforced and usually short-lived.
In the 1830s, a brisk trade was carried on between Baltimore and Havana in the sale of vessels built along the lines of the speedy and highly maneuverable Chesapeake Bay model “Baltimore clippers” used as privateers during the war of 1812. The clippers were publicly sold to Spanish or Portuguese slavers in Cuba who were willing to pay high prices for the rakish craft. It was almost impossible to convict Americans for selling the vessels because papers could never be found that the vessels were intended to be employed in the slave business.
Commercial ties between legitimate maritime trade and the slave trade further complicated the problem. American merchant ships carried rum, tobacco, flour, and cloth to trade along the bulge of Africa for palm oil, gum copal, ivory, gold dust, and peanuts.
Enoch Ware, trading agent aboard the Salem brig Northumberland, gloated over his arriving on the coast ahead of his competitors:
”Now if no envious competitor present himself the prospect could not be well better—that is if my Sierra Leone tobacco will suit for the slave trade. No! What am I to know for what purpose it is to be sold? I sell for produce or money. The use of it afterwards certainly am not accountable for. . . scarcely a hundred pounds of Tobacco or Powder that is sold but what sooner or later is used for purchasing slaves though it may go through half a dozen hands first.”
Further, the reason for outlawing this trade was far from humanitarian. Slaveholders in the Deep South had a fear of a rapid increase of “unmanageable,” African Americans shipped south. Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana all banned the importation of the enslaved via interstate trade after the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt. However, all three states permitted interstate trade again during the profitable cotton trade of the 1850s.
Most of the industrialists could not rationalize why some Northerners, abolitionists, had begun to quarrel with the manners and customs of the South, and were attempting to force upon them a new system of morality. In doing so, they were driving a wedge between the two sections which neither really desired.
In the beginning, the abolitionists consisted of unscrupulous politicians, clerical agitators, parsons with grandiose ideas, and reprobates of a variety of motivations.
Hence, a vast majority of New York merchants regarded the agitation of the slavery question and the interference with the rights of Southern slaveholders as inexpedient, unjust, and filled with evil.
It was not a question of morality with the merchants, but of millions of dollars in Southern trade, which would be jeopardized. Samuel J. May, a prominent New York abolitionist received this from a New York merchant:
“We cannot afford, Sir, to let you and your associates endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity…we mean, Sir, to put you abolitionists down, by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.”
The coming war did not just spring up overnight, nor was there one simple political or social issue involved.
The seeds were vigorously sown during this period.
Passages from http://www.etymonline.com/cw/economics.htm
Thanks for your comments. I have been focused today on responding to our Northern poster’s reply to my earlier post and didn’t realize that you had posted to me also. I should have cc’d you on post 1,644.