The politics of radicalism

2017-10-02

Response

Compare Douglass from this week to Garrison from last. Both are writing abolitionist texts, but with very different tones.

  • Who do you think would be more persuasive to the average person that slavery should end?
  • Which one do you think would be more likely to promote violence as a solution? Why?

Violence and Slavery

Nat Turner, 1830

William Lloyd Garrison

The beginning of the spiral

Mexican Cession

"The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent; let us keep what remains to ourselves and our children"

Antislavery northerner David Wilmot's justification for banning slavery in the Mexican Cession.

Compromise of 1850

  • Fugitive Slave Act
  • No Slave Trade in Washington, DC
  • California accepted as free state
  • Utah and New Mexico as territories open to slavery
  • Texas given $10 million in debt forgiveness for giving territory to New Mexico

Stephen Douglas

(Not as it happened)

The normalization of violence

The collapse of the two-party system

Party 1852 1854
Democracts 158 83
Whigs 71 54
No-Nothing 0 51
Free Soil 4 37



Bleeding Kansas

The Rise of the Republicans

Free Labor Ideology

  • To work is the highest calling
  • Equality can be of opportunity, not just of circumstance.
  • Unfree labor diminishes everyone.
  • Industry ("Capital") should be supported because it makes labor available.

What is the true condition of the laborer? I take it that it is best for all to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can. Some will get wealthy. I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else. [Applause.] When one starts poor, as most do in the race of life, free society is such that he knows he can better his condition; he knows that there is no fixed condition of labor, for his whole life. I am not ashamed to confess that twenty five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat---just what might happen to any poor man's son! [Applause.] I want every man to have the chance---and I believe a black man is entitled to it---in which he can better his condition ---when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally to hiremen to work for him! That is the true system.

Lincoln on Free Labor at New Haven, 1860

Preston Brooks

Charles Sumner