After multiple compromises between northern and southern Whigs and Democrats, President Fillmore falsely assumed that, \u201cCongress had achieved a final settlement of sectional discord\u201d (Wilentz, 349). Wilentz emphasizes how the truce of 1850 was in fact fruitless, for it once again avoided the question of slavery instead of trying to solve it. One of the compromises included a much more stringent Fugitive Slave Act, which inadvertently led to intensifying tensions between northerners and southerners. \u201cBy denying the fugitives jury trials, it attacked the most democratic aspect of American jurisprudence\u2026and brazenly violated the Fifth Amendment\u2019s due process clause\u201d (353). Slavery had marred the reputation of the Democratic Party, challenging the egalitarian doctrine and democratic principles that the party was originally founded upon. In the Republicans\u2019 eyes, a true democracy could not exist where the institution of slavery existed and denied people their basic human right of freedom.<\/p>\n

Wilentz also highlights a different side of the 1850’s nativist movement, one that opposed the expansion of slavery and the bloody consequences of the Kansas-Nebraska conflict. Based on our class discussion and the online article about Charleston\u2019s Irish laborers, the main reason poor Irish immigrants supported the slave system was because they were no longer stuck at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. The massive influx of Irish immigrants during the 1850\u2019s led to increased antipathy towards both free and enslaved blacks by immigrants who wanted to fit in to slave-societies. I believe that nativism, in a way, helped reduce the number of pro-slavery Irish in the South who would eventually side with the Confederates in their fight for slavery.<\/p>\n

Davis links the British emancipation of slaves to the growing paranoia of southerners over abolitionism. The southern slaveholders\u2019 defense was that the British were the ones who tried to oppress the American people, and the emancipation of slaves had greatly reduced profit from colonies in the Caribbean. However, the British were also the ones who took the initiative in freeing hundreds of thousands of slaves in the West Indies, which was undeniable evidence that the abolishment of slavery in the United States would be the ultimate test of American freedom and democracy. Britain\u2019s emancipation of slavery confirmed the southerners\u2019 senseless fear of northerners allying with Britain to ensure the destruction of slavery in the South. \u201cThe overreaction of Southern extremists had made it much easier for moderate Northerners to rally in a political campaign against a home-grown tyranny that threatened the very survival of democracy in America\u201d (Davis 286).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After multiple compromises between northern and southern Whigs and Democrats, President Fillmore falsely assumed that, \u201cCongress had achieved a final settlement of sectional discord\u201d (Wilentz, 349). Wilentz emphasizes how the truce of 1850 was in fact fruitless, for it once again avoided the question of slavery instead of trying to solve it. One of the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Road to Emancipation”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[80,96,117,208],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-compromise","tag-democracy","tag-emancipation","tag-nativist"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/126"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}