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One of the most consistent strains in Civil War historiography has been the argument that sectional crises over slavery's westward expansion had more to do with bringing on the conflict than protective tariffs, Northern resistance to returning fugitive slaves, and other issues dividing Northerners and South- erners in the antebellum decades. If Southerners wanted out of the Union in 1860-61 after Lincoln's election as president, it was primarily because of the determination of Lincoln and his Republican Party to prevent slavery from expanding. Neither Lincoln in his speeches, nor his party in its platforms, advocated, prior to the war, that the U.S. government abolish slavery in states where it already existed. Countless scholars, in making their case for the pri- macy of slavery expansion, make the obligatory allusion to Thomas Jefferson's foreboding, in the midst of the Missouri struggle of 1820, that the question of slavery's expansion would ultimately spell the "knell of the Union." The matter disturbed Jefferson "like a fire bell in the night" because he sensed that acquisitions of territory in the future would render that year's settle- ment, which divided remaining territory in the Louisiana Purchase between slavery and freedom at the 36o30' parallel, was impermanent. Sooner or later the disposition of other territory would kill the Union. 1 Straddling the boundary between popular history and original scholarship, Steven E. Woodworth's Manifest Destinies argues convincingly that prior to the Texas annexation crisis of the mid-1840s, the problem of slavery within a democratic republic, though disruptive, was contained by America's political party system, which superseded the nation's geographical divisions. That is, the country's most important political disagreements were partisan rather than regional and focused on economic issues like banking rather than the moral- ity of slavery. In 1840, the abolitionist Liberty Party's presidential candidate, James G. Birney, mustered a pitiful 7,069 votes—about one quarter of a percent of the electorate. However, once the nationalist president John Tyler's South- ern sectionalist secretaries of state—the Virginian Abel P. Upshur and South

In the 1830s American abolitionists argued that the federal government by virtue of its authority over interstate commerce possessed the power to prohibit movement of slaves across state lines. The founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AA-SS) adopted a constitution which declared that the society intended to influence Congress "to put an end to the domestic slave trade." The convention also endorsed a "Declaration of Sentiments," written primarily by William Lloyd Garrison, which asserted that Congress had both the right and the duty "to suppress the domestic slave trade between the several States." Subsequently, Henry B. Stanton, William Jay, Alvan Stewart, and many other abolitionists produced a barrage of books, articles, tracts, and speeches that agitated for such a ban. Meanwhile, antislavery societies both inundated Congress with petitions on the subject and successfully lobbied the legislatures of Vermont and Massachusetts to call upon Congress to end the interstate slave traffic. At the close of the decade, when Stanton and Stewart, together with James G. Birney, William Goodell, Myron Holley, Joshua Leavitt, Gerrit Smith, and Elizur Wright, moved to establish an antislavery political party, all of those veteran abolitionists agreed that destruction of the interstate slave trade should be a major objective of their enterprise.1 By 1840 the stage was set for a vigorous political assault upon the slave trade, and for a time such an assault occurred. But then everything changed. Instead of increasing in importance, the slave trade issue received less and less attention from antislavery politicians, as the Liberty men of 1840 and 1844 gave way first to the Free Soilers and Free