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The college's namesake, Alexander Hamilton, grew up in the Caribbean and saw plantation slavery first-had there. His patron at King's College was a slave owner. Hamilton married into the prominent New York Schyler family, which owned slaves. [48] He was generally opposed to slavery, but his writings did not prioritize it as an issue.
States' rights advocates also cited the Fugitive Slave Clause to demand federal jurisdiction over slaves who escaped into the North. Anti-slavery forces took opposite stances on these issues. The Fugitive Slave Clause in the Constitution was the result of compromises between North and South when the Constitution was written.
Thus, at mid-19th century, the free-versus-slave status of the new territories was a critical issue, both for the North, where anti-slavery sentiment had grown, and for the South, where the fear of slavery's abolition had grown.
Slavery was defended in the South as a "positive good", and the largest religious denominations split over the slavery issue into regional organizations of the North and South. By 1850, the newly rich, cotton-growing South threatened to secede from the Union. Bloody fighting broke out over slavery in the Kansas Territory.
Whereas the North was dirty, dangerous, industrial, fast-paced, and greedy, pro-slavery proponents believed that the South was civilized, stable, orderly, and moved at a 'human pace.' According to the 1860 U.S. census , fewer than 385,000 individuals (i.e. 1.4% of whites in the country, or 4.8% of southern whites) owned one or more slaves.
Even as the large Armies surrendered, some Confederates held on to hope for victory and for the reassertion of slavery throughout the South. [110] At the war's end, some Southern whites fled to South America where they could escape Federal law, and in some cases, continue slaveholding, although such cases were the exception. [111]
[88] [89] Both the South and the North believed: "The power to decide the question of slavery for the territories was the power to determine the future of slavery itself." [ 90 ] [ 91 ] By 1860, four doctrines had emerged to answer the question of federal control in the territories, and they all claimed to be sanctioned by the Constitution ...
The admission of Texas (1845) and the acquisition of the vast new Mexican Cession territories (1848), after the Mexican–American War, created further north–south conflict. Although the settled portion of Texas was an area rich in cotton plantations and dependent on slave labor, the territory acquired in the Mountain West did not seem ...