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The South committed treason in defense of slavery, yes, and it's certainly an economic system but it is not solely an economic system. Southern slavery was also a political and social system. It would be too much to say that it's a perfectly complete, comprehensive, and coherent one of any of these but it coheres enough and informs enough that we could probably call it a kind of worldview. Much the same, if to a somewhat lesser degree, is true of the free labor system which had developed in the North.

We take a lot of this for granted today, but it's worth a bit of unpacking. Until perhaps the 1750s, at the earliest, and maybe as late as the 1830s or so, most white Americans have thoroughly traditional ideas about labor. By this I mean that they hate it and want to be rid of it or at least subjected to it strictly on their own terms. That is, essentially, that they will not have a boss and will work for themselves. They believe that being employed, working for a wage for someone else, is degrading and unpleasant. It might render them actually incapable of the virtues necessary to be citizens of a republic. The high-end goal of a good life would involve being essentially idle rich, but more realistically a person might hope for an elite profession removed from manual labor -law and clergy are popular ones- and/or establishing oneself on land one owns to work with one's own labor as one wills, interacting with the wider economic world only as much as one wishes. This is the proverbial yeoman farmer, who may perhaps be a master of other men -this is a very gendered imagination, I should add- but is certainly the master of himself.

The vision here, at least in the American context, largely depends on the ready availability of large tracts of cheap land, the kind you get when you genocide away the people who already lived there. The complicating factor there, especially as white colonization expands, is that you can't actually just pick up and move and hope for the best whenever you feel like it. Migration comes with its own costs, physical and economic, on top of the incalculable cost already paid in lives to cleanse that land for white American men to come take. As a practical matter, somewhere between 1750 and 1840 it becomes clear to large numbers of white American men that the old dream of yeoman farming is not actually realistic. They will work for a wage not just as a transitory thing as young men getting started but likely for most or all of their lives. They do not, shockingly enough, believe that this then entails they are degraded people of inferior character. Instead, they decide that they are as good as anyone else and their moral rectitude flows from their ability and willingness to work for that wage and idleness is the real danger to the republic.

This transformation is largely a Northern affair. There are certainly Southern whites who think similar things, but the presence of enslaved Black Americans who do hard manual labor and whom whites absolutely do view as manifestly inferior dramatically mitigates against such a development becoming widespread. Likewise the spread out nature of slave labor camp agriculture makes it much harder to get cities on a scale developing in the north where large numbers of wage-earning people frequently dwell. This is even true, to a lesser, degree down to the scale of individual villages. The rural North is fairly well-supplied with villages where skilled tradesmen work, where people go to get lawyers, visit the general store, and so forth. The South is mostly not like that, particularly in the most-enslaving regions. There large-scale enslavers tend to create their own semi-private spaces and their slave labor camps, rather than the town square, frequently become the centers of community activity. Hence the places called "X Court House" in the South because at one point they were literally just the court house and maybe a few associated businesses.

All of that is no great shakes to white Northerners, so long as it remains far away. They are not even remotely interested in the welfare of enslaved people to any substantial degree, beyond a radical fringe of white abolitionists. Enslaving people might be a distasteful business -and to at least a plurality and possibly an outright majority of Yankees it surely was- but it was also someone else's problem. It had nothing to do with them, except perhaps on an abstract level as a national problem that might in the remote future need a national solution.

The fuss, for the white North, comes in a few different ways that combine to make slavery suddenly threatening in a way it had not been before. It was clear to most of the white North paying attention -which is far from the whole of them- that any understanding they might have had with the white South that slavery would go away in good time was one-sided at least as far back as the Missouri Controversy. That one ended in a complete defeat for the antislavery side, a capitulation secured with a pinky swear that Missouri and points south of it were the last slave territories in the nation. This concord is adequately fragile that when the enslaving Republic of Texas seeks annexation to the United States to preserve and secure its enslaving in perpetuity, no less a proslavery operator than Martin Van Buren turns them down. (Van Buren has a later-life conversion to antislavery which, we might conservatively say, has a lot to do with the Democracy refusing him nomination for a second term and rather less to do with his theories on labor systems. That's all well after this point.)

John Tyler is nowhere near so timid about picking a slavery battle and, indeed, is very keen on getting one going to win himself a second term after he manages to make an enemy of himself to both the Democracy and the Whigs, the latter to the point that they essentially disown him and he was the guy they chose to be VP. Tyler thinks he'll turn his accidental presidency -William Henry Harrison died a month in- into a really for real one by making his own party with slavery and Texas. As a proslavery radical he knows there's a huge appeal for that in the white South and the Whigs are clearly never taking him back, so why not? He hits up against the problem that the South already has at least one proslavery party on tap in the form of the Democracy. So through much chicanery and for the explicit purpose of spreading slavery, Tyler arranged the annexation of Texas.

For this, he is rewarded with retirement in favor of proslavery radical James K. Polk. Polk is very happy to have Texas, which expands slavery and he loves that as an enslaver himself, and intends to use Texas' ludicrous boundary claims -essentially the Rio Grande on the south and west, no more than a third of which Texas had ever actually controlled- to make slavery bigger still. Antislavery whites are not best pleased by this. Willing to accept Texas as a fait accompli, they insist that the war Polk gins up with the Texan boundary as a pretext should probably result in stealing a lot of Mexican land but none of that land should have slavery. This will be put into the legislation authorizing funds to negotiate a peace with Mexico.

Cute a massive, multiyear fight replete with thunderous rhetoric, secession threats, an actual secession conspiracy, and a rattletrap capitulation in favor of slavery on every substantive point with an extra kicker: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Imagine a draft of every able-bodied white man in the North to help southerners steal into slavery any black person they happen to want to enslave, essentially at the drop of a hat. This is unspeakably odious even to those who are otherwise not much fussed with slavery. The South had it far away and that was fine, but now they're making Yankees get their hands visibly dirty.

All that, maybe, could have settled down with time. The controversy of 1850 was much longer and more dramatic than prior ones, but largely just the same thing and bigger. The nation's whites had more or less gotten past the other ones. But we're into the 1850s now and the white South just did not have enough. There are several other serious aggressions against free labor, as a system and ideology, in that tumultuous decade but by far the most substantial is the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

Remember that bit with the pinky swear from 1820, with Missouri? The famous Missouri Compromise is no more enslaving in the Louisiana Purchase, except for Missouri and points south of it. That had stood for thirty years, during white an entire generation had come up and entered politics. For various reasons, including the desire to build a Pacific railroad in places advantageous to free labor or slavery and, they hoped, lucrative to themselves and various other pols and backers, the time had come for white Americans to steal a bunch more land and commit a bit more genocide, just to the west of Missouri. Specifically, right next door to Missouri's most enslaving region.