Alarmed to no end, Napoleon Bonaparte sent some 60,000 troops, armed to the teeth with guns, cannons, dogs, and other sundry munitions to the now autonomous French colony, which had drawn up its own constitution that abolished slaveholding.
How will the nature of the two regimes the volatility and enterprising spirit of democratic Athens, the conservatism and caution of slaveholding Sparta shape the contest?
By the end of the 1850s, the North feared complete control of the country by slaveholding interests, and whites in the South believed that the North was determined to destroy its way of life.
The Republican Party formed during this decade around the idea that the territories should remain free; i.e., slaveholding should not be permitted in them.
When the war started, Lincoln was committed not to emancipation but instead to maintaining the Union, coercing those slaveholding states that had left the Union into rejoining it.
The slaveholding class existed in a state of constant paranoia about slave rebellions, escapes, and a litany of more subtle attempts to undermine the institution.
Congressional Republicans were certainly satisfied with themselves after passing the 1862 Emancipation Act: they had leveraged the power of government to end the scourge of slavery, and achieved it so cleverly that the phantom hope for compensation might entice slaveholding states to remain within the Union.
Were slaveholding Virginians expressing their "independence," to borrow McDonnell's term, when they insisted that federal marshals in free states kidnap people on their behalf?
The President's early plea, in an open letter to Horace Greeley — "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it" — was calculated to keep slaveholding border-state politicians from bolting the Union, but it obscured the President's lifelong, animating conviction that "if slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong".
A similar transformation is what slaveholding castes ultimately intend for their slaves.
And in a famous 1837 speech on the Senate floor, John C. Calhoun declared: "I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good".
