At the time of the Constitutional Convention, slaveholding states were far stronger than their northern counterparts. After sixty years, the free states’ explosive growth had left the South far behind. It was as if the South was in a footrace wearing concrete boots. Hinton Helper, a mid-19th-century southerner, identifies that concrete as slavery.
The political implications are interesting. During this massive economic transition and with slavery under moral attack, slaveholders managed to retain dominating political power. How did they accomplish this feat?
Slaves were treasured assets in the antebellum South. Slaves defined social status. Slaves made plantation owners wealthy. Slaves made life easy. Slavery made everyone who was not a slave feel freer and privileged. Slavery wasn’t just property; it was a way of life and the linchpin of an aristocratic society.
How do you protect an asset that can walk away? How do you counter altruists who want to banish that asset? Humans are hard to manage under any circumstances, but slavery requires extraordinary vigilance. Overseers and whips were insufficient. Beyond the plantation, you need political control, and slaveholders wielded this power through the Democratic Party, a party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
For our first seventy years as an independent nation, slaveholding interests dominated our governmental institutions. Ten of our first fifteen presidents owned slaves. (The two Adamses did not, but the other three sympathized with slavery. Neither Adams won a second term, which might be indicative of a counteroffensive by slaveholder interests.) The Senate and House were largely dominated by the Democratic Party. Additionally, 19 of 33 antebellum Supreme Court justices were from the South, but 26 had owned slaves at some point in their lives.
To maintain political dominance, slaveholders built a national party to fend off abolitionists. Building a national party required appealing to people with interests beyond slavery itself. As a result, slaveholders constructed a broad coalition in the North, which they kept together through favors, obfuscation of differences, and brute force. This coalition included first-generation immigrants, Catholics, the poor, small rural farmers, banking interests, shipping interests, and ambitious politicians from the other parties.
Single-party politics controlled slaveholding states, while northern Democrats dominated big cities. Combined, this gave slaveholders enough clout to nullify objectionable legislation.
Some of the political tools antebellum slaveholders used to establish, build, and retain sufficient political power to protect slavery included: tight control of their coalition, preserving a king-maker role in presidential elections, balancing the Senate, dominating the House, controlling the Supreme Court, veiled schemas buried in legislation, propaganda, rigged elections, and, if all else failed, violence. (Bleeding Kansas was about using a heavy dose of violence to rig an election.)
Propaganda was arguably the most important. Whoever controls public opinion controls everything. During the Lincoln/Douglas debate at Ottawa, Illinois, Lincoln said, “In this and like communities, public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to execute.”
Democrats crafted specialized messages for the North and South and couched their worst ideas in lofty and patriotic terms.
In the North, they claimed that slaves were treated fairly, enjoyed legal protection, lived better lives than Northern factory workers, and, if freed, would starve. Slaves were denigrated as childlike heathens, an inferior race incapable of dealing with advanced culture. Simultaneously, Democrats instilled fear that emancipation would create a stampede of blacks to the north to take the jobs and daughters of the white working class.
In the South, slaveholders ingrained a conviction that slavery elevated all whites, and if emancipated, poor whites and former slaves would be lumped together as the dregs of society. Angry former slaves would take white jobs, women, status, and possibly their lives. The gentry implied that manual labor was degrading, so slaves needed to do the ugly work. While the aristocracy hobnobbed with Northerners, slaveholders instilled an intense hatred for Yankees that permeated lower-class whites. Northern meddlers were portrayed as villains, determined to destroy the South’s righteous way of life.
Both Northern and Southern propaganda worked in tandem to convince the public to leave slavery alone. In the South, commoners feared blacks and wanted to keep them metaphorically shackled. In the North, commoners hated blacks and similarly wanted to keep them metaphorically shackled. This alignment of narratives strengthened support for the status quo in both regions.
Democrats became the sole definers of what words meant. The most noxious example was the word “liberty.” Liberty included the right to own slaves and transport them as property to anywhere in the nation or the territories. Restricting this right was called "oppression." The South convinced nearly everyone that the Constitution did not passively acknowledge the existence of slavery but endorsed and protected it. Democrats in both regions relentlessly maintained that slavery was excluded from federal purview. They ruthlessly squashed any challenge to this narrative. Democrats maintained authority by intimidation, threats of calamity, stubborn inflexibility, and, when necessary, the cane.
The purpose of machine politics is to retain power by those who currently wield authority. That means rigging elections in favor of incumbents. Cheating was easy. There were party-printed ballots, ballot stuffing, lax residency rules, partisan control of polling places, and no secret ballots in many places. For example, Democrat James K. Polk defeated Whig Henry Clay in Plaquemines Parish by receiving twice as many votes as eligible voters. Tammany Hall in New York was notorious for voter fraud, including repeat voting, false registrations, and importing voters. Democrat operatives were convicted of falsifying cases of military “mail-in” ballots in the 1864 election.
In the South, Democrats retained power by keeping the general population uneducated, poor, and dependent. Upward mobility? Almost unknown. Income disparity was of feudal dimensions, social norms insisted on conformity, and politicians and the press constantly demonized the North while telling the lower classes that they lived in a morally superior society. Democrats held sway in the North through subtler means but still garnered enough support to thwart opposition parties.
Many will see many similarities to today’s politics. Democrats are skilled at securing and holding power when a significant majority opposes them. The tactics they use today were developed during the party’s formative years, and two centuries of practice honed their methods into reflexive engagement.
The Democratic Party is quite adept at winning, even when its programs are unpopular.
This article was originally published in the American Thinker.
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