That’s one lesson drawn from Steven Hahn’s review of David Brion Davis’ The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation:
Rather than portraying the age of emancipation as an inevitable process once it commenced, Davis suggests that the Haitian Revolution and the British emancipation may have steeled the resistance of American slaveholders, who came to regard abolition as a fatal blow to the world they knew. That resistance, in turn, worsened tensions in national politics over the future of slavery, and led slaveholders to demand greater protection for their property and greater power in the federal government. They had been especially exercised by abolitionists aiding fugitives from slavery and driving off slave-catchers who came to retrieve them. As a consequence, slaveholders pushed a new Fugitive Slave Law through Congress in 1850 that both strengthened their hands and increased the vulnerabilities of all people of African descent, whether or not they were enslaved. Growing numbers of white Northerners – not just abolitionists – saw in this a fundamental attack on religious principles and civil rights.
The Dish 