Demographic and political shifts eroded Southern national dominance by the 1840s

Evidence

But immense power at home could not compensate for declining power in national politics. Despite the Three-Fifths Clause in Article I of the Constitution, which gave enslavers an almost uninterrupted hold on the presidency from 1789 to 1850, there were clear signs in the first decades of the nineteenth century that the South’s influence was coming to an end. Immigration to the North and the growth of the North’s white population in general, as well as the growth of the free Northwest, threatened Southern dominance in Congress. Major rebellions of enslaved people in Louisiana and Virginia, as well as the rise of Haiti as an independent Black nation, left the owners of enslaved people paranoid to the point of hysteria. A steady stream of escaped enslaved men and women threatened the defense of chattel slavery, as the formerly enslaved unsettled the ideological foundations of the South with their own lives and testimony. And the movement to end slavery, once a small fringe, had gained strength and numbers, as well as new arguments and new advocates. By the 1840s, political abolition had come into its own as a movement with real weight on the stage of American politics. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 629

Categorization

• XREF: Documents the multiple pressures that drove Southern pro-slavery ideology into defensiveness — the causal chain behind Calhoun’s later extremism.