Episode 9: The Slave Power

Conspiracy You Can Believe In

One of the motivations behind the anti-slavery movement in the 1850s in the United States was the belief in the Slave Power conspiracy. Abolitionists and their allies argued that a confederation of powerful slaveholders secretly plotted to capture the federal government of the US and direct its might towards the preservation and extension of slavery. The abolitionists were wrong about one major thing: it wasn't that much of a secret.

SOURCES
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner

https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/free-soil-free-labor-free-men-9780195094978?cc=us&lang=en&

Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35100.Battle_Cry_of_Freedom

This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737259

The Slave Power Conspiracy: 1830-1860 by Russel B. Nye

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40399768?seq=1

The Appeal of the Independent Democrats

https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss15610.028_0602_0607/?sp=2

Thomas Morris' speech in the Senate

http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=006/llcg006.db&recNum=430&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fhlaw%3A%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28cg0062%29%29%3A%230060683&linkText=1

JQ Adams' Speech on the Slave Power

https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1848-03-10/ed-1/seq-1/

George Fitzhugh's Horace Greely's Lost Book:

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acf2679.0031.003/239:9?page=root;rgn=full+text;size=100;view=image

Fitzhugh's Sociology For the South:

https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html

James Henry Hammond's Mudsill Speech:

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3439t.html

John C. Calhoun's Slavery a Positive Good Speech

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/