![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The opening of these territories to the possibility of slavery, which had been prohibited there by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, was widely seen by anti-slavery northerners as a part of a southern plot to extend slavery throughout the nation, the so-called Slave Power Conspiracy. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed voters in these new territories to decide for themselves whether slavery would be legal in them, an arrangement known as popular sovereignty. The developments that would lead the state to secession turned on the dissolution of the Whig Party and the rise of Yancey’s faction among the Democrats following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. It is clear, in short, that as late as the early 1850s, the Yanceyites still had the backing of only a tiny handful of Alabama voters. They received just 4.6 percent of the poll and carried only Barbour and Lowndes Counties. Quitman of Mississippi, respectively-against both the Democratic and the Whig nominees. In the presidential election of 1852, the Yanceyites ran their own candidates for president and vice-president-George M. But with the passage of the Compromise of 1850, which balanced California’s admission with a number of other provisions including a law facilitating the recovery of slaves who had fled into the free states, pro-Compromise Democrats formed a coalition with the Whigs and trounced Yancey’s southern rights candidates in the state elections of 1851. In the developing crisis over the admission of California as a free state during 1848-50, Yancey and his allies attempted to push the state’s Democrats into adopting an extreme southern rights stance. Though the Calhounites were deeply hostile to the Whigs’ desire for a vigorous national program of economic development, they were never really in sympathy with the anti-planter, anti-corporate beliefs of the Democrats’ overwhelming Jacksonian majority.įollowing Dixon Lewis’s death in 1848, the leadership of the Calhounite faction passed to Montgomery attorney William Lowndes Yancey. But as the Democratic and Whig parties began to take final form in 1839, in preparation for the presidential election of 1840, the Calhounites reluctantly cast their lot with the Democrats. ![]() They consequently attempted to remain aloof from the developing two-party system. These Calhounites, as they became known, accepted Calhoun’s warning that national parties inevitably caused their members to compromise their principles in pursuit of political victory, and therefore that for southerners, party membership would always mean making concessions to the northern opponents of southern interests. Calhoun’s radical states’ rights principles coalesced under the leadership of congressman and future senator Dixon Hall Lewis of Lowndes County. As northern attacks on the institution of slavery began to mount, beginning with the controversy over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1819-20, pro-slavery extremists in Alabama and other southern states increasingly referred to secession as their ultimate defense to protect their region’s society and economy.ĭuring the nullification crisis of 1828-33 in South Carolina, a small group of Alabamians who admired South Carolina senator John C. White, but earlier in the nineteenth century it had been widely discussed. Supreme Court in 1869 in the case of Texas v. This prerogative was declared to be unconstitutional by the U.S. Secession is the doctrine that the people of each state, having voluntarily entered the Union, have the right to withdraw from it whenever they come to believe that continued membership represents a threat to their liberties. ![]()
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