THE ANTISLAVERY MOVEMENT AND SOUTHERN RESPONSE

By the mid-1850s the spirit of accommodation had all but vanished. Northern interest in emancipation, pushed by abolitionists, eroded relations between families north and south. William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator was the extremist voice of abolitionism, calling for immediate emancipation of the slaves by extralegal means if necessary. Although not representative of majority abolitionist opinion, this voice roused the deep-seated fear of slave insurrection among Southerners, who pointed to the actions of Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and finally John Brown as examples of what could become a horror as great as Haiti's bloodbath. As the Northern antislavery movement changed its tactics from direct political action--for example, attacks on slavery in the state legislatures--to general moral condemnation of all Southerners, Southern attitudes began to set. In the early 1830s the South had claimed the largest number of antislavery societies; by the mid-1850s all such societies were north of the Mason-Dixon line. From an uneasy mood over slavery, Southerners evolved a "positive good" philosophy and argued that slaveowners provided shelter, food, care, and regulation for a race unable to compete in the modern world without proper training. After Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) indicted all slaveowners to the world, most creative Southern minds turned toward the defense of slavery. Increasingly threatened by a wealthy and developing North, Southerners evolved almost a "garrison philosophy" as they clung to the past for protection. There was much to cherish in the society of the Old South--an agrarian humanism, a leisurely pace of life for the privileged, gracious manners, and the stability that came from a sense of kin and place. Yet this fading Eden existed on the backs of the slaves who worked the cotton plantations. Slavery was not only a cause for moral indictment but an anachronism. Britain had abolished it decades earlier; even Russia's serfs were nearing emancipation; and South America offered the example of assimilation as a solution to the problem of social control that so troubled the Southerners. The South, however, wore its burden as a badge of tradition that it stood ready to defend. In that frame of mind, it faced the election of 1860, an election made fateful by the emergence of the Republican party and its new standard-bearer, Abraham Lincoln.

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