George Washington lived until the edge of the 19th century. That century would transform the young commercial republic he founded in revolution into a transcontinental power that would, one day, send men to the moon and spread the spark of liberty around the world.
Upon his death, he freed his 123 slaves. Each was a human being made in the image of god, and the first President of the United States owned them. The second President of the United States, John Adams, was appalled by slavery, as was his son, the sixth President, John Quincy Adams, who was succeeded by a strong supporter of slavery, Andrew Jackson.
The confrontation over slavery was worsened by its postponement. The moral necessity of abolition collided with a thousand pragmatic objections. “It’s the economy, stupid” is not a late 20th century concept. The country grew westward. It grew westward relentlessly, and the great question of the day became about the spread of slavery. Its existence was one thing. Its spread was another. The pro-slave South understood the institution and the economy it sustained would not survive without political power. This required the expansion of slavery as new states were admitted to the Union of States, which was exploding in population and size.
1850 America was a nation of 23 million people. Among them, almost 3.5 million were slaves. The country had grown by an astounding 35 per cent over the previous decade, and was made up of 31 states and four territories. California made the 74-year-old nation a Pacific power, and Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington and Minnesota were territories. Florida was the least populous state with 87,000 residents. The north was the vastly more powerful region of the country, and the southern planter class knew its days were numbered. The economic model of slavery was failing and the only recipe – expansion – would not only worsen the impoverishment of the unequal south, but precipitate a political and moral crisis with an impatient north.
It was during the 1850s that America unraveled. The 1850s were the taxiway to one of the per capita bloodiest civil wars in world history. The unspooling occurred at a boundary, on a border line between territory and ideas. Massachusetts and Alabama were predictable, as were New Hampshire and South Carolina.
The fight was over who would get the next votes. Would they be free votes or slave votes? There was no common ground between the slaver and the abolitionist. Increasingly, the question before the country wasn’t about whether slavery would endure, so much as spread. This was the question that hardened lines because there wasn’t any room to compromise. It was zero sum. For or against.
The battleground was the territory next to the slave state of Missouri. Horace Greeley, the publisher of the New York Tribune, and one of the founders of the Republican Party, named this frontier “Bleeding Kansas.”