Cheers,
Richard F.
I am not agreeing with this statement,however I'm a bit busy. This is as far as I could get without retching
A. Lincoln, 8/23/63
Walt
I have been reading extensively new scholarship on the South and slavery in the antebellum period. A couple of things stand out, unmistakeably in all the new scholarship.
The first is, whether one is looking at riots North and South, at the newspaper business, or at what was happening in the lives of non-slaveholding whites in the South, slavery was dominating every aspect of political thought and comment. It has resulted in a "six degrees of separation" in which almost every issue, if you get to the core---tariff, land, Texas, immigration, whatever---ultimately came down to slavery.
For example, riots occurred in both North and South, but in the South, where they were almost exclusively racially-oriented after 1835, the civil authorities increasingly backed off, ceding the rule of law to the forces of chaos.
Or take free speech: the ability of non-slaveholding whites to challenge slavery, let alone pass out or publish abolitionist tracts, was under severe attack after the 1830s.
Efforts were being made to not only extend slavery across the "Missouri Compromise line" but to rescind or otherwise deny the rights of free blacks who came into the South as merchantmen aboard northern ships, or, at the same time, deny citizenship rights to free blacks who entered the territories. Whites who disagreed with slavery increasingly in the South were being forced, by state and local laws, to join posses and mobs chasing runaway slaves. Papers were required to run ads about runaways, even if the publishers disagreed with slavery.
Thus, in every way, what was happening in the South was not confined to the South, nor was it "just" about the slaves: it was an all-out assault on white freedom---on HUMAN liberty in the North, eventually. It is logical to assume that down the line, had the Calhounites and Taneys prevailed, it would have been FORBIDDEN IN THE NORTH to advocate abolition, and there would have been NORTHERNERS dragooned into slave-catching squads, which, after all, was the point of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.
Lincoln perceived this as early as his Lyceum Speech where he spoke about the basis of society being the Law, and he derided not just the slaveowners but also the abolitionists like Garrison and Brown (not by name, because they were not disruptive forces yet) who would destroy order and the Law to advance their agenda.
In a sense, then, the Civil War was all about the Law---about whether or not we would be a society of law, or of Southern lawlessness (force) wherein anyone who disagreed would be shut up.