Republican Party formed to counter rising planter class?

That's what Boston College Prof. Heather Cox Richardson says (CSPAN3, "History of the Republican Party").

The fear that with the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854, slaveowners would move into these new territories, become rich, take over these state governments, and from this superior numerical position, eventually take over the U.S. government.

Your thoughts please.
 

B-29_Bomber

Banned
Nope.


It was predominately an abolitionist regional party, a conglomeration of former Whigs and the Free Soilers.

Your Professor is wrong, boy-o.
 
There was definitely a fear of planters wielding disproportionate influence over the federal government, to the detriment of the interests of the citizens of free states. Search terms are "slave power" and "slavocracy". There was a popular current of extrapolating legitimate grievances to a conspiracy to spread slavery to free states: this was a major theme of Lincoln's House Divided Speech.

Directly related to the slavery issue, the big concerns were the infringements of civil liberties of free citizens that were considered necessary to maintain a system of slavery. The "gag rule" which forbad Congress from receiving citizen petitions against slavery, proposals to censor federal mail to prevent spreading abolitionist messages for fear that they'd incite a slave revolt, and the fugitive slave act were some of the specific issues in this category.

There was also a cross-current of divergent economic interests. The Republican Party inherited the Whig economic program (high tariffs on manufactured goods, benefiting Northeastern manufacturers by protecting their domestic market from foreign competition, with the proceeds spent on internal improvements that benefitted western yeoman), which was opposed by much of the Southern planter class because they captured little benefit from the internal improvements but had to pay higher prices for manufactured goods, and who feared encirclement by increasingly-abolitionist free states as internal improvements opened the Great Plains to settlement. The Kansas-Nebraska act came out of a standoff where northern Whigs (and some northern Democrats) wanted to open the balance of the Louisiana Purchase to settlement and lay the groundwork for a transcontinental railroad, while southern Democrats opposed the railroad and feared the consequences of allowing a new batch of free states to develop, and the southern counter-proposals were pattern-matched to Slave Power conspiracy theories.
 
Nope.

It was predominately an abolitionist regional party, a conglomeration of former Whigs and the Free Soilers.

Your Professor is wrong, boy-o.

I don't see how this is proof he's wrong. It's just a different spin and interpretation of the same facts.

The plantation aristocrats were the major enemy of the Republican interests. They were Democrats and so opposed the former Whigs. They were agriculturalists opposed to the industrialists. And as huge landowners using slaves, they were opposed to independent farmers. The farmers feared the plantations would take over the best land and then out-compete them with slave labor. For a very long time, independent farmers were an important bloc of the Republican party.
 
Nope.


It was predominately an abolitionist regional party, a conglomeration of former Whigs and the Free Soilers.

Your Professor is wrong, boy-o.

Most Republicans would have vehemently denied being abolitionists--they were only opposed to the *expansion* of slavery, they said. (True, radical and some moderate Republicans would acknowledge that they hoped that confining slavery to the South would result in its ultimate extinction.)

Of course southerners did not care much about such nuances, but to very large numbers of northerners, there was a difference between being an abolitionist and being opposed to "the aggressions of the Slave Power."
 
She also said following the 1860 elections, Democrats (pro-planter class?) blundered away a winning hand. They held committee chairmanships in Congress and more than enough votes to block. By seceding, she describes it as the South picking up their marbles and going home, probably not a winning move.

but perhaps good for overall human well-being that they did, but that's a whole other discussion

PS Prof. Richardson is someone I saw on CSPAN television. She seems to really know her stuff and I kind of wish she was my professor.
 
She also said following the 1860 elections, Democrats (pro-planter class?) blundered away a winning hand. They held committee chairmanships in Congress and more than enough votes to block. By seceding, she describes it as the South picking up their marbles and going home, probably not a winning move.

According to William Freehling, the big fear among Southern Planters following the 1860 election was the use of Federal patronage positions to build up support for anti-slavery movements within existing slave states. Since this was how political machines worked in that era, and since there had already been small-but-significant anti-slavery campaigns in the border states, this fear was not altogether outlandish.

Without secession, Democrats would have had a majority in the Senate, but the balance of that majority would have hailed from free states. The secessionists did not trust free-state Democrats to vote to block Lincoln's patronage appointments.
 
So to answer your question, I wouldn't quite agree with the professor that from a modern perspective, the Republicans formed to oppose a "rising" planter class--but that's because in retrospect we can see that the planter class wasn't so much "rising" as "arisen" already--and they were reaching their limits and they knew it. But it would be quite reasonable to say that the party emerged in response to a perception that the planter class was not done rising yet.

It is a gross caricature to reduce the entire secessionist movement, let alone the South as a whole, to just some monolithic "planter class." But on the level of gross caricatures, which are a major factor in political thinking after all, the "planter class" is indeed about as iconic an image of the North/South divide as one could have. They certainly were the leaders of southern society; that society certainly did align itself with their values and interests, and what the secessionists ultimately demonstrated in the Confederate constitution and the actions of that government and its constituent secessionist states was precisely the sort of threat that a large variety of Northerners unified against in the Republican party.

In order for the "planter class," and a wider range of interests associated with them, to survive on the terms they were accustomed to, let alone expand, they perceived a need to force the larger Union to accommodate their interests on an ever-expanding scale. This had been going on for generations before the Republican party formed and I think the Republicans were correct to believe they would need to organize and make a stand to stop it. I might quibble with the idea that the constellation of pro-slavery interests were "expanding" if this implies the notion that they suddenly started doing so out of a blue sky; they had expanded quite a lot, and strongly influenced Union policy as a whole in doing so. When I say that they were reaching the end of their rope, I assume in saying it that the northern and western interests increasingly exasperated by the imperatives of the slave-owning section of the nation would of course make such a stand. If they unaccountably failed to do so, well then I guess the slave power would indeed have continued to expand.

So--considering that one job professors have is to disseminate knowledge and provoke thought broadly, in a sound-bite age such as ours, I certainly forgive her for using such a simplistic image. On the level of simplistic, sound-bite, bumper-sticker images it is true enough. One hopes that people drawn into the discussion would learn or bring with them more nuanced information and detail.

I also realize she isn't putting this out in a vacuum. The past century and a half is full of all sorts of apologetic balderdash meant to obscure the reality of what was happening in the mid-19th century USA. Some counter-memes are in order.

In championing the Republican Party of the 1850s and '60s I hardly mean to suggest this has much bearing on what that party has come to stand for nowadays.
 
So to answer your question, I wouldn't quite agree with the professor that from a modern perspective, the Republicans formed to oppose a "rising" planter class--but that's because in retrospect we can see that the planter class wasn't so much "rising" as "arisen" already--and they were reaching their limits and they knew it. But it would be quite reasonable to say that the party emerged in response to a perception that the planter class was not done rising yet.

It is a gross caricature to reduce the entire secessionist movement, let alone the South as a whole, to just some monolithic "planter class." But on the level of gross caricatures, which are a major factor in political thinking after all, the "planter class" is indeed about as iconic an image of the North/South divide as one could have. They certainly were the leaders of southern society; that society certainly did align itself with their values and interests, and what the secessionists ultimately demonstrated in the Confederate constitution and the actions of that government and its constituent secessionist states was precisely the sort of threat that a large variety of Northerners unified against in the Republican party. . .
That the common working man wouldn't get a fair shake.

And this does answer a question I've long had: why were so many people so concerned about the expansion of slavery, when they didn't seem to give two shits about the human beings already trapped in slavery. In fact, they went out of their way to distance themselves from the kooksville abolitionists and deride them and say, 'oh no, we're not one of them.'

Because it didn't affect them personally, that's why.

And the way the causes of the Civil War are taught in school, even by teachers and professors who are not afraid to look at something with open eyes and be controversial if need be:

Dred Scott decision,

Fugitive Slave Act (great for discussions of clear effects on human beings vs. the law, and great for discussions of the whole "dilemma" approach to ethics which by the way I think is overplayed)

Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854,

tariffs,

rural South versus industrial North,

etc.

And this is overwhelmingly the way history is taught, multiple causes interacting to produce an effect, and you better know each and every one of them if you're going to do halfway decent on a test. Well, isn't that the case in real life and the real flow of human history? Of course it is, but sometimes some causes are a lot more significant than others.

So, I'm wondering if the Kansas Nebraska Act was 80% of the immediate cause of the Civil War? I certainly don't know that for a fact, but I am asking the question.
 
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