I recently read a Lincoln quote from the house divided speech on the Dred Scott case wikipedia.
"Put this and that together, and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a State to exclude slavery from its limits ... We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake to the reality instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave State."
So this seems to me to be a states rights argument. That they had to protect their right to not have slavery against an overbearing federal government imposing slavery on them.
So, How important to the republican party thinking was the idea that the north was protecting a state's right to block slavery in the lead up to the secession crisis? Wouldnt this be a separate debate from the spreading of slavery into the territories ?
Wouldnt this be a separate debate from the spreading of slavery into the territories ?
I don't think you can separate the two that easily. As always, context is king. In Lincoln's rhetoric one can see not only echoes of the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that a slave owner has the right to bring his slave with him to a free state for an indefinite "sojourn," but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This act, part of the larger Compromise of 1850 which hashed out the status of the new southwestern territories, was a get-tough measure intended to mollify the South. In practice, it compelled peace officers and government officials in free states to take an active part in returning runaway slaves and penalized ordinary citizens who sheltered, aided, or failed to report the presence of runaways. Runaways were defined loosely: essentially, if a southerner showed up in your little town in Ohio one day and said the black fellow down the street was his property but offered no more compelling proof, you had to turn the guy over to him.
Understandably, this act enraged anti-slavery people in the north. Those who had found it possible to tolerate slavery at a distance found the new situation of compelled support intolerable. Vermont and Wisconsin passed state laws to countermand it, while juries nullified violations of the act in other states. Much of the opposition was cloaked in the language of states rights, but that's not unusual - anytime the federal government did anything people didn't like, they tended to criticize it on those grounds.
It also helped to radicalize the northern public, which had always been somewhat anti-slavery, but not virulently so. The rise of the Republican Party to national prominence in 1856-60 can be attributed in large part to northern anger at the various pro-southern compromises of the 1850s. Anti-slavery people did not distinguish between the attempts to spread slavery to the territories and to allow slaves in free states. They saw behind both a "slave power conspiracy" which had seized control of the federal government and was intent on making slavery universally legal throughout the United States.
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EDIT: Pinging /u/petite-acorn and /u/Rittermeister since these are their responses