Irrepressible Conflict: the Cause of the American Civil War: And the Sad, Tragic, Story of It Resulting in Deaths of so Many

By Stanley M. Harmon

The Civil War resulted from the insistence of Southern firebrands that the 1820 restrictions on where slavery could be practiced in the Western territories of the USA be removed. And the dogged determination of some Northerners to restrict the brutal treatment of blacks and finally put slavery on the road to extinction. In the 1850s big shoes dropped one after another in staccato fashion to dash such hopes. The final straws were the Dred Scott Decision in 1857 saying blacks werent even people and Congress had no power to restrict slavery anywhere ! And Civil War was going on in bleeding Kansas between adherents of the two stances. John Brown was radicalized there by the sacking of Abolitionist stronghold Lawrence. He and his sons killed some Jayhawkers (slavery adherents) from Missouri. Then Brown, his sons, and a few others, lit a fuse in Oct 1859 by a hare brained scheme to seize the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry to arm slaves and precipitate action to free them. So when Lincoln was elected in 1860the South bolted! As they had threatened for 15 years. America was almost destroyed. Until July 4, 1863 when two Union victories insured: that these honored dead (800,000) shall not have died in vain Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg, Pa Nov. 1863.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 28, 2014
• ISBN: 9781491899595

Stanley M. Harmon

Author Stanley Harmon was born in the Ozarks in rural Arkansas in 1935. An ancestor and others of his kin fought in Confederate units during the Civil War He earned his Bachelor’s in science at the University of Arkansas in Jan 1957 and later did graduate studies at the Masters and PhD level in Washington DC. He has a Liberal Arts education, as well as emphasis in the sciences including several college courses and even post graduate courses in history. He served in the U. S Army at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC in 1958 and 1959 during which service in the Medical Service Corps he was sent with a team of scientists to the A Bomb test site near Reno, Nevada to determine the killing power of t a Neutron A Bomb. That service gave him opportunity to visit iconic Battlefields of the Civil War and he wrote a history of the Civil War as follow on to an essay he wrote as a college student about the battle of Gettysburg... During that time, he considered attending Graduate School to become a Professor of History but when he got back from Nevada he did the bacteriological investigation of a mass food poisoning on a train bound for Washington that was caused by the gangrene germ. He subsequently spent the rest of his career as a research scientist with the US Food and Drug Administration in Washington, DC becoming a methods expert and World authority of the gangrene germ the commonest cause in that time of bacterial food poisoning. He was a Professor in the FDA Graduate School for Microbiology and as frequent guest lecturer at Universities and at scientific conferences. He also published some 50 papers in scientific journals about his research and chapters for the most prestigious books in the field. In retirement, he has authored several books including one about Presidential history and this one about the cause of the American Civil War in 2011 as well as one about Bipolar Disorder and another about Science.

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© 2014 Stanley M. Harmon. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/24/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9961-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9960-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-9959-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014905662

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CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PUBLISHED SOURCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

AS WE AMERICANS pause to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the beginning of our national trial by fire and blood that came close to extinguishing what President Abraham Lincoln presciently referred to as: the last best hope of earth, and immortalized the sacrifice made by a throng who defeated Lee at Gettysburg, let us pause and reflect. Some 50,000 Americans were either killed or wounded to start putting an end to the attempt to reverse the direction things had taken during the 15 years that preceded the Secession of 11 states of the Union in response to Mr. Lincoln’s election and the Confederate attack on Ft. Sumter.

Sadly, his choosing to remove the cause of the irrepressible conflict did not, in the end, right our national sin that some of the Founders tried to put on the road to extinction in 1787.

The more their reprehensible choices and behavior toward African Americans were opposed in states in the North after those states ended de jure slavery and admonished the holdouts in the South to do what many good hearted citizens there had already done and manumit their slaves even paying for many to be taken back to Africa after they were freed in the time after Washington freed his slaves in his will the more recalcitrant the wrongdoers became!

Washington did not leave his executor any wiggle room to follow thru on his dictates. Why might you ask did Washington keep some he owned in bondage for the natural lifetime of Martha Dandridge Custis Washington? Wasn’t that cynical on his part? No. It was a matter of basic fairness. Washington had undoubtedly come to own so many of them by marrying the widow Custis? And being who he was, Washington married Martha for her money, lands, and slaves. The minute she said I do in deference by tradition him saying it first Washington became the richest man in Virginia.

We in 2011, might reflect upon the greatness of our First Citizen. His cavalry general Light Horse Harry Lee called Washington: First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Hearts of his Countrymen! Such a tribute was richly deserved. His subordinate officers recommended that Washington seize power in a military Coup late in the Revolutionary War. He gently empathized with their frustrations. And pointed out the forbearance they must pursue to insure that what they themselves were fighting for was to reject once and for all arbitrary power embodied in a clueless King.

Washington had the character to realize we had set upon a new paradigm of self government that had eluded so many other nations through time. Washington lived long enough to see Napoleon seize power in a Military Coup in 1799 as his officers had proposed to him. He had barely reluctantly (so he said) and I quoted him in my first book of 2011 entitled: The Pros and Cons of Our American Presidents that was completed in March, 2011. Washington (tongue in cheek?) said as he journeyed to New York to assume the mantle of executive power that: I feel more like a culprit going to his place of execution! I fear my fellow citizens will expect too much of me? Rather than a Coronation. And the latter is about all it could have been compared to? King George to replace George III. In the last years of his life in retirement, politicians aligned with the misguided Jefferson and his acolyte Madison came to repudiate all Washington had stood for in being the essential Founder of the Nation. He became the embodiment of the Idea of the United States of America.

His own generation acknowledged it while he led. And we in the American Century reaffirmed it. We had to reject (finally) his wisdom in distancing America from quarrels lasting many generations between Kingdoms in Europe by declaring our weak, struggling, country Neutral in the European quarrels over Empire.

The last time we gave fealty to that precedent was refusing to stop the dictators Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo from trying to take over the World between 1931 and Dec 7, 1941. Reflect upon that statement we just made. And because of a Liberal response, we all had to live close to the extinction of life on earth. After 3,700 million years. See Stan’s 2011 book: A Scientist Speaks.

History teaches us lessons about greater human affairs. On the smaller scale, we as individual persons live history in our personal lives. Some lead. Others are led. Washington had the first Spin Machine. To enhance further his moxie the better to lead us. Jefferson didn’t want to be led. George Washington had the resources to lead us for nearly two decades, in part, because slaves toiled in their stead on his and Martha’s plantations.

Her son John Parke Custis served as one of many Aide de Camp to his famous stepfather during the Revolution. John died of camp fever during the siege of Yorktown that effectively caused Victory for the America in the Revolution. His widow remarried and gave John’s mother Martha and stepfather George the duty to raise John’s children George Washington Parke and Eleanor Nellie Parke Custis. Martha did a damned good job. Washington did a damned good job being Parent to America.

What ensued that was unseemly in Washington’s heirs? Martha Washington’s son’s boy George Washington Parke Cutis had only one child Mary. Mr. Custis inherited vast wealth through his kin. Including the White House Plantation on the Pamunkey near Richmond where his grandparents were married. He also bought land across the river from Washington City on what has long been called Arlington Heights. Now, the core of that plantation Arlington Hall is Arlington National Cemetery. That is a legacy of the Civil War! At the outset of WWII the Pentagon was built on the Arlington Plantation fields where slaves once toiled.

George Washington Parke Custis left all his property to his only child Mary. Though reluctant, Custis finally agreed to the marriage of his only child to Robert E Lee, a poor boy, in June 1831. Lee was poor for a simple reason. The lack of good sense and character of his father Light Horse Harry Lee. Go on Wikipedia. com or get a copy of: Reading The Man A Portrait of Robert E Lee. by Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Doing so will (through Lee correspondence) debunk the myth of who/what Lee really was in life. Some of the mythical beliefs will, thus, fade?

One of his most egregious acts was to (reluctantly?) fail to follow the dictate in the will of his father in law to free Custis’ 190 slaves on the eve of the Civil War. Like Lee, Mr. Custis left wiggle room for Lee not to comply. And, like the spot Lee was soon to be in, as the embodiment of the break away Confederate States of America: Abraham Lincoln had to intervene and free the slaves Lee wouldn’t!

Further, that great man Lee bought the States Rights platform Thomas Jefferson and his acolytes Madison had expressed in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolves in 1798. What those two political screeds did was: provide political cover for states (particularly in the South) to not really follow the dictates of the Founders to put Negro slavery on the road to extinction. The simple reason our Nation’s Capital is sited in what was before AC became widely available after WWII was a pestilential swamp is because of slavery. The central location made a certain sense for the original 13 states? But, it made more sense to site in cosmopolitan Philadelphia? Then that place could have been ruined as the site on the Potomac has been. But, proponents of slavery hated the Quaker resistance to its continuance there.

Through blackmail led by Secretary of State Jefferson and his friend Madison got put half in Virginia and half in Maryland our first 2 slave states. Paradoxically, it was about human propensity for vice. The colonists in those places took the land away from the Native inhabitants and grew rich growing their stimulant ceremonial plant Tobacco. It was still big in Virginia and Maryland during the Civil War. And is still grown. Why?

And, in the intervening decades since Washington’s first term as president when mechanic genius Eli Whitney had invented the Cotton Gin in 1793 that made growing short staple cotton a Bonanza!

So the weasel word provisions in the Constitution insisted upon by practitioners of slavery and their enablers in the new Government set up in the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, almost none of the hopes of the abolitionists among the Founders were actually realized. There were the exceptions of course. Many good hearted slave owners manumitted some or all their slaves in the United States after the Revolution. On principle But, the slaveholders in the South where slavery was essential to getting on feared slave rebellions and (to the slaveholders in the Upper South) the bad example free backs among them set to their enslaved brethren.

Such concerns had merit, because from time to time actual slave revolts did occur. Such as Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 when runaway armed slaves massacred about 65 whites. Like the race riots in many states in 1919, widespread quick retaliation was perpetrated locally in Virginia and throughout the South. No less a person than Jefferson had feared such a thing. And he was conflicted about the moral judgment on the question of slavery. It probably dwelt in other heads and hearts too? It seems likely being murdered in their beds was an additional motive for some southerners to free their slaves?

But, not enough to make up for the exalted status growing cotton with slave labor that enriched people like Jefferson Davis. Davis’ father Sam was of a Philadelphia family from Wales. Sam married Davis’ mother Jane in Kentucky and she bore 10 children. They named the baby Jefferson. who was then our 3rd president, at the time, in 1808.

When Davis was 2, the family left hardscrabble southern Kentucky where he was born and moved first to Louisiana; then afterwards to Mississippi. When he was of age Davis was appointed to West Point. He got in trouble there for high-jinks. He later served in the Army under Zachary Taylor. He sat out the Black Hawk war Lincoln served in. But, Taylor let the man who was sweet on his daughter Sarah, escort the Indian rebel Black Hawk to prison. The couple eventually married. Davis undoubtedly knew where his bread was buttered? General Zachary Taylor owed his commission to high rank in the army to none other than his cousin President James Madison. For reasons not clear, Gen Zachary Taylor developed a dislike of his son in law Davis. He and his wife Sarah both got Malaria in pestilential Louisiana and Sarah died. When the war with Mexico was started by President Polk in 1846 on the pretext that Mexican forces had invaded the state of Texas which the US had annexed against Mexican threat of war, Davis resigned his House seat in Mississippi and joined the American Army. No young man with ambitions would have missed that opportunity for anything! Davis is reported to have behaved bravely. Zachary Taylor was won over. President Polk offered Davis the rank of Brigadier General. Davis declined based upon the States Rights belief of whom he was namesake of Thomas Jefferson that such an appointment devolved to his state. Not to the Commander in Chief.

This posturing was undoubtedly tied to the subject of this book. All through the early years of the Republic, two competing visions of what America should better be. Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe a team won the argument for quite a while. But Jefferson and his political sidekick James Madison soon found out that a weak Federal Government couldn’t defend our nation from Colossi like Britain and Napoleonic France. But, they proceeded to downsize the pipsqueak U.S. Government based upon States Rights principles. After all, they in concert with fellow Governor Patrick Henry whom Jefferson hated; saying at one point: the only thing we can honestly do is pray for his [Henry’s] death!

But when Jefferson lost the presidency to John Adams in 1796, he went home to Monticello not to reflect; as to whether Washington was wise to favor the policies of Alexander Hamilton over Jefferson’s jaundiced view? That America’s future would better be managed and the Beau Ideal be slave plantations in the South like his, Madison’s and Monroe’s in Albemarle Co Va. in the Piedmont. Even Jefferson’s humiliation at the hands of the American traitor Benedict Arnold in Jan. 1781, and in April when Lord Cornwallis sent his scourge of Damn Rebels Banastre Tarleton to boot Va. Gov Jefferson off his mountain or bring in his hide! To be paraded through the streets of London.

Jefferson’s enfeebled, sick, wife Martha probably died after a difficult childbirth from the flight from Monticello across Lynch’s Ferry on the upper James to hide among slaves at Poplar Forest plantation Martha Wales Skelton had brought to the marriage. Their plantation was only about 5 miles from the farm on North Fork of Otter of the authors’ Harmon ancestors in Bedford Co Va. in April 1781. In the late summer and Fall 5 men of our family joined Washington in bringing Victory at Yorktown. Jefferson the effete had no part in that. He was up on charges of incompetence.

Jefferson was charged with dereliction of duty as Virginia’s Governor. We’ve stated repeatedly in our writings the observation that Americans have short memories. In our opinion way too much has been made of Jefferson’s penning the Declaration of Independence. A recourse to the currents of the time will probably reveal that Jefferson was just stating the obvious that had already been said previously by others. A common theme of the times in which he did as we am now doing. An all night-er. There are probably a few somewhere in this big world who appreciate our skill as a wordsmith. And we didn’t learn a darned thing from the writings of Thomas Jefferson. We’ve done our best to be true to the ideals we express in our writings. Thomas Jefferson was a waffling sort of guy. He would take a stand philosophically for years then find out it was not sound and quietly do a political180.

His admirers never seem to have noticed this? He condemned the Slave Trade in his draft of the Declaration blaming that evil on King George III. The practice in which he himself was a full practitioner of began at Jamestown in 1619. He put pen to paper as the owner of hundreds of slaves mostly brought to the marriage by his wife (Jefferson like Washington married up.). Even as he wrote the condemnation of slavery, there was one in his Monticello household who was the half sister of his wife who in a few years would be Jefferson’s mulatto concubine at 16 in Paris and bear him several unacknowledged children. This behavior from the author of the Declaration Lincoln turned to for inspiration regarding ideals not embodied in human bondage. Jefferson did free Sally Hemmings’ brother. His hand was forced in doing that by French law in Paris. Sally herself was convinced after he impregnated her to go back to America as chattel.

The cynical term for this sort of behavior is: Do as I say; (but not necessarily) as I act! Any reader who wants a copy, write the author and he’ll send a copy of his 2009 essay: Thomas Jefferson Was a Cad. Jefferson destroyed all the correspondence with intimates. Did he see that the mother of his mulatto children was tutored to read and write? After all, she was the daughter of his father in law whose wealth Jefferson inherited. He lived so high throughout his life that his heirs did not even get Monticello. And his son in law killed a slave—over a broken teacup. Nothing was done about it. But, his daughter Patsy shielded her father’s vaunted reputation from the fact of a mulatto family members from the common law marriage with a slave. Sally Hemmings who didn’t serve tea or bring his slippers to the common man’s champion in the White House. Did she? How many common American men had that deal?

But we can now move to the time surrounding the annexation of Texas in 1845, and our taking vast holdings from Mexico in 1846. It was like taking candy from a baby. By 1846, this sort of activity was almost genetic. That and enslaving Africans. We’ve asked: Who among us does not grow comfortable with what is? Well, what is" almost destroyed America! That happened to Jefferson and to Jefferson Davis and to his make weight Robert E Lee the son in law of Martha Custis’ grandson George Washington Park Custis.

Now we need to talk about the change in attitude of Zachary Taylor from the time he was a General in Mexico taking vast lands from that Republic then mostly ruled by the dictator Santa Anna. He had been captured in siesta with a concubine camp follower at the Battle of San Jacinto in April 1836. The Texans led by Sam Houston devastated the Mexican Army that had previously wiped out two holdout groups. At the mission called Alamo (cottonwood) in South Texas and at the Massacre at Goliad. The weak Republic of Mexico (1821) could not sensibly hang on to the vast areas the Spanish Grandees had spread onto adjacent to Mexico after Hernando Cortez conquered it in 1519. By the time of the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard, and later, a separatist movement led to the Revolution settlement in California and New Mexico were well established by the Spanish. And in Texas too. But, the well to do naturally wanted to stay close to the centers of Spanish power in Mexico City. Not in the hinterlands. Like in Texas and what is now Colorado at Pueblo, and Alamosa.

Before we get too deep into our main subject, we need to mention the origin of Negro slavery in the Americas. Columbus and his brothers commenced the thing by enslaving Caribs. Over the following years, such harsh treatment and disease brought by the Spaniards wiped then out. So the Spanish aped the neighbor Portuguese who were taking advantage of their contact along the west coast of Africa coming and going to the Orient by enslaving Africans and taking them to Brazil. Some Catholic readers might be dismayed to learn that the Vicar of Christ in Rome blessed all this exploitation. In fact, the Pope negotiated spheres of influence deals between rivals in Empire between his loyal Sovereigns in Portugal and Spain. A N.-S. line was drawn around the globe. The right to exploit W. of it was given to Spain. East of it was left to Portugal. It was a tacit recognition of World dominating ambitions of Ferdinand and Isabella and Prince Henry of Portugal. Dominions beyond the European world had commenced in the Age of Exploration. It might better,(and more accurately?) be called the Age of European Exploitation. The exploitation that had been going on since Roman times with the Bishop of Rome’s blessing was just moved beyond the petty fiefdoms of the Middle Ages, and the emerging Nation states ruled by Kings in the mode of the dictators of Rome after the fall of the Roman Republic.

When the Sacred trumps the Secular, the Sacred has to jump in bed with the Secular leaders the Religious leaders connect to the Divine. These petty tyrants eventually overstep themselves. Killing on a whim in the name of the Prince of Peace. Go figure. If you look into it, we think you will find Jefferson Davis was at Church praying for Victory when the Confederacy imploded. His last act in Richmond was to take the Gold, and to order the burning of Richmond. Damned Yankees had to help Richmonders salvage what they could. But, we are way ahead of ourselves.

The very devout Lee was praying his Army could escape and fight on. A fight his President Davis had picked and whose father in law President Zachary Taylor threatened to hang if he and other Southern Fire Brands actually tried to take their states out of the Union if their wrong-headed demands were not met in 1850.

The issue had been at fever pitch since the acquisition of the vast territories from Mexico (including Rick Perry’s Texas). Southerners maintained that Abolitionist agitators for example as epitomized by the Wilmot Proviso that proposed that slavery be excluded from all the territory acquired while James K Polk was president. Southerners in Texas were naturally outraged. They had grabbed Texas very specifically to perpetuate the Southern Way or Life. The leaders like Sam Houston were from East Tennessee, for instance? The main champion of its annexation was Andrew Jackson. It was an article of Faith with Jackson. This man of the people had vast holdings of slave plantations and wealth. It was mostly acquired at the expense of slaves and ordinary whites.

In August of this year 2011, Stan had a conversation with his neighbor’s brother from New York. The poor man neighbor of his’ brother opined we shouldn’t pick on the rich. They create all the jobs? Like most of the adherents of Jefferson and later Slave plantation owner Jackson who won fame taking land from Indians like the Creeks and Cherokee for Southern states to parcel out to whites like Zachary Taylor a slave plantation owner and Jefferson Davis and their families. How do we moderns square that with our religious and political ideals?

Such practices commenced at Jamestown, continued at St Mary’s (the mother of Christ) by Catholics the Calvert Aristocrats who were given a province they named Maryland in 1634. It was just permission to start on the lower Potomac (the Calverts got the Potomac river too) and the right to take it all the way North and West from the Native inhabitants. Here is an irony? The Anacostia river a tributary of the Potomac that runs near the US Capitol in former Maryland. before it was ceded as District of Columbia in 1791. Anacostia means in Indian the place to which tribute is brought. It silted up from runoff from tobacco plantations along it shores. The port for shipping tobacco could not be reached by sailing ships or boats to take the tobacco away by 1791. In the time after WWI something had to be done. So the Potomac and Anacostia were dredged. Making sites for Memorials to the Great Emancipator in 1922. And for Jefferson on the created Tidal Basin in 1943. Like he presciently predicted the first occupant of the White House Adams has no monument nor even a statue in Washington? John Adams and his accomplished son and namesake were lied out of office by Negro slave plantation owners. Jefferson and Madison and the snake James Callender did the honors for the father. They had help at the last minute by Jefferson’s most implacable political enemy Alexander Hamilton. Adams didn’t trust Hamilton with army command. Washington insisted upon it. As a condition of arming to counter French threats of war in 1797. Jefferson and Madison naturally took France’s side. Even after Napoleon seized dictatorial power in 1799. So instead of allying with Britain, we as a nation declared war on our Mother Country. Napoleon was defeated. Britain wiped up the floor with us.

Washington had tried his best to lead a quiet life in retirement. Mercifully the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes (Lancfield Type A) took him into Apotheosis before Jefferson was made president on March 4, 1801. It took 33 consecutive votes of the House of Representatives to decide whether Jefferson or Aaron Burr of New York got the nod. This was the same man who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, and hatched a scheme to split off the Western part of the United States attack Mexico and rule as Santa Anna later did a dictator. Phew! We dodged a bullet there! Without support for Burr in New York in the election of 1800, Jefferson would probably not have ever been president? Except for the political 180 he did to acquire Louisiana, and the Lewis and Clark expedition, what did America gain? Slave plantation owners were the majority of our presidential leaders until the 1850s. We will now explore how they failed America and us!

CHAPTER TWO

THE CONFLICT OVER slavery was long and torturous. To us living in the present times, with the most unlikely man serving as our president, the tolerance of that awful wrong for so long by peoples who came to America from Europe and other parts of the world to make a new start seems almost incredible. The person under 30 might well scratch their head? And scoff at their parents, and grandparents for tolerating even the last vestiges of it called Jim Crow. That unfortunate (Jim Crow) was almost as likely to reside in a ghetto-like circumstance in Boston, Chicago, St Louis, New York, Philadelphia, or even in the far West where blacks fled to after the devastating Civil War. The leaders who took their lead from resistance to rollbacks in blow after blow from resurgent Slave Power throughout the 1850s were naturally nonplused, to say the least when Lincoln triumphed in the fly apart election of 1860. The constant caving by 3 successive Democrat presidents after the tragic death from Cholera of President Taylor contracted most likely from a member of the cook-staff at the White House who was a carrier? Cholera spread widely in the United States in 1849. It had been recognized as a pernicious killer (of then unknown cause) before the groundbreaking work of Pasteur in the 1860s. A scientist had described the causative bacterium in 1848 that was later given the name Vibrio cholerae. It caused the premature death of James K. Polk in early 1849 when it spread up the Mississippi River and its tributaries to Nashville. It also killed some of our kin in Indiana when the whole town of Boston was almost wiped out. I believe the same thing happened in the Potomac valley that year. It appears to have caused the sudden, unexpected death of President Zachary Taylor July 9, 1850. He got it after he retreated to the White House from celebrating the 4th in the heat.

Thus, the fate of nations can sometimes hang upon the death of a single individual. The misfit slave power apologist Millard Fillmore from Buffalo NY succeeded Gen Taylor. He was completely out of touch with what needed to be enunciated from the White House. The unfortunate actions of Sen. Stephen A Douglas of Illinois also resulted in awful policy. He had married two slave plantation owning women from the South. So he had a vested financial interest in Negro slavery. And like many, a burning desire to be President. Being a Democrat, this ambition could only be realized by mollifying Southern firebrands on the slavery extension into the territories. The Southern advocates of this were willing to take it to the wall to insure it. General Zachary Taylor was all that stood in their way. The supporters of the basic concept of finally drawing a line in the sand as embodied in the near breakaway attitude in New England about their perceived motives for taking territory from Mexico. Even the annexation of Texas was viewed in New England with suspicion.

The more strident Northern agitation for finally beginning to move beyond the anemic efforts such as the repatriation of 13,000 American blacks to the enclave of Liberia by the American Colonization Society, and the subsequent disruption it caused there, was seen as just exporting trouble American proponents of African slavery had caused. The formal