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Yes, indeed. It was part of the Compromise of 1850, a set of laws to deal with rising tensions between the states over slavery and it’s westward spread, that included the Fugitive Slave Act - so the supremacy clause won out here. This put abolitionist into high gear, and shifted the target location of the underground railroad and refugees from slavery, from just going to the northern states without slavery (which still carried risks, see 12 Years a Slave) to Canada instead. It also brought in more moderates into the abolitionist camp, mainly those who believed that slavery would die a natural death. They came to understand that slave owners in power would never vote away their wealth, which was counted in people and land (mostly people… the biggest set of assets in the south for the wealth was in people).
The next biggest attack on states rights came with the Dred Scot decision in the late 1850s, which basically said going to a free state did not result in freedom for the enslaved.
So, in fact, the states rights argument (much like it is right now with the local control argument of conservatives in red states) is complete and utter bullshit from the start, because it was always about powerful southerner slavers looking to control the government and impose their amoral world view on the entire country.
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I’m in the middle of reading This Republic of Suffering, a book about the many ways the unprecedented scale of death in the Civil War changed America. Another innovation that came out of the war - national cemeteries. City cemeteries were filling up so fast the government had to step in and dedicate new spaces just for the military dead.* The war also saw the first widespread use of embalming in the US, in response to families wanting to see their loved ones, who had died far away, as they remembered them one last time before burial.
*The Gettysburg Address was given on the occasion of the consecration of the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery which held the bodies of those killed at the Battle of Gettysburg.
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They did. They even asked them to be returned after the Civil War started. There is a very memorable exchange where they asked Benjamin Butler for three people that had escaped to his lines:
“Do you mean, then, to set aside your constitutional obligation to return them?”
“I mean to take Virginia at her word. I am under no constitutional obligations to a foreign country, which Virginia now claims to be.”
“But you say we cannot secede, and so you cannot consistently detain the Negroes.”
“But you say you have seceded, so you cannot consistently claim them. I shall hold these Negroes as contraband of war, since they are engaged in the construction of your battery and are claimed as your property.”
And apparently that is where the Union’s policy of not returning them was set.
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Northern states were forced to render all assistance to slave takers from the South, who’d weren’t careful at all about making sure that they actually had an escaped slave.
Even Canada wasn’t always far enough. I think there were instances of people being kidnapped from the docks of Toronto, taken across the lake, and then sold down the river.
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Hm. Coming across the whole issue of mortgaging slaves, bundling the mortgages as bond issues, and then trading and owning the bonds in places where slavery was illegal has got me wondering what part of the whole story has been carefully covered over.
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Caitlin Doughty talks about this in one of her videos on embalming…
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This is an important detail often lost on the Confederacy apologists who say “if Lincoln wanted to end slavery, why didn’t the Emancipation Proclamation apply to the [comparatively small number of] slaves in Union states??”
The legal theory behind the Emancipation Proclamation rested on the idea that it fell under Lincoln’s broad authority to wage war. So ending slavery in the Confederacy could be legally justified by arguing that doing so would hurt the rebels’ war effort, but permanently ending chattel slavery across the United States required a Constitutional Amendment.
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War is hell and war is ■■■■■ - so I’m not surprised.
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Sad that it was an afterthought. It should have been the first thought.
Again, as actual historians here have pointed out above, it was not just an afterthought. Abolitionism was a political and cultural phenomenon that predated the start of the war by decades. Sell that “States’ Rahts” BS to the rubes on FB and Twitter – we’re not buying it here.
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The entire reason the South tried to secede was because they knew that the North would soon have enough popular support and political power to end chattel slavery in the United States. For the most part abolitionists like Lincoln would have preferred avoiding a civil war even if that meant that slavery continued longer, but the Confederacy took that option off the table.
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Go pick up a book by someone who isn’t peddling lost cause lies.
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Conservative bigots in America doing an end-run around democracy when it becomes increasingly clear things won’t go their way in a fair contest … that sounds familiar.
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That decision undermined the Missouri Compromise, but did it have any legal effect on the Compromise of 1850?
Union troops were singing “John Brown’s Body” no later than a month into the war, which suggests a popular conception in the North that the war was, in fact, about slavery.
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I wonder why there never really was a movement of Crimean reenactors (at least to my knowledge) the way the Napoleonic Wars and American Civil War have.
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Because there have been actual wars going on there in the meantime? No need for re-enactment.
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