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Chapter VIII - Freedom or Slavery in the New Territories
Freedom or Slavery in the New Territories
The Mexican War was scarcely over when members of Congress eagerly began to plan the division of the newly won territories. An obscure, freshman Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania proposed a plan that would immortalize his name - the Wilmot Proviso. In part this plan advocated that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" should exist in any new territory won from Mexico. Though the proviso failed to pass, it once again politicized the dangerous slavery issues an issue which had been laid to temporary rest by the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Ironically, David Wilmot was not even an abolitionist. He Simply wanted California territory to be a spacious haven for "free white labor."
Responding to Wilmot's proposal to ban slavery in new territories, Senator John C. Calhoun devised an argument to justify slavery there. He vigorously claimed that Congress had absolutely no right to prevent any citizen from taking slaves into the territories. To do so would clearly violate the Fifth Amendment which prohibited Congress from depriving any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Slaves were valuable property. Thus, Calhoun blatantly attempted to turn the Bill of Rights, a basic guarantee of liberty, into a basic guarantee of slavery. Senator Benton of Missouri observed that between them Wilmot and Calhoun had fashioned a pair of shears. "Neither blade alone would cut very well but joined together [they] could sever the ties of the Union."
The question of slavery in the territories dominated the presidential election of 1848. Politicians frantically tried to devise a compromise between the rigid positions of the obstinate Wilmot and Calhoun. In one proposal, Secretary of State James Buchanan, later to become the fifteenth president, tentatively suggested that the Missouri Compromise line be extended to the Pacific Ocean. Critics, however, loudly complained that such a solution entirely avoided the questions of the morality of slavery and the limits of the constitutional power of Congress. Lewis Cass, a Democrat from Michigan, proposed an altogether different and conceivably dangerous solution called "unpopular sovereignty," which would permit residents of territories to make their own decision regarding slavery. Congress, he claimed, did not have the power to interfere in territorial decisions. Enthusiastic supporters of Cass's proposal argued that this approach would appeal to the American belief in local self-government and popular participation.
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