1850 and Subsequent National Crises

I'm half way transcribing and writing up my notes for that focus on the decade preceding the official break out of the U.S. Civil War.  Though the more you learn about this period it becomes inescapable that we were already at war.  The defining moment for the war's inevitability was Texas's recognition as a state.  Those f*ckers were from the gitgo bugf*ck insane -- so naturally the South Carolinian slaveholding power elite loved them and egged them on.  In the meantime Limbaugh, Fox News, Bachman, Beck, et al. Calhoun had successfully dispersed his toxic slave society pride and hatred for the New Englanders throughout what would become the confederacy.  He had done so, so successfully, that on his deathbed in 1850, his last words predicted correctly, with specific detail, when and how Secession would come about, even calling it over a presidential election. Even before that, Nashville, TN hosted conventions that discussed Secession.


I cannot express how much everything that we've been experiencing in the last ten years looks so much like 1850 -- the year the elected politicians gridlocked for good, the constant rhetoric -- and even actions -- of violence employed on constant basis by the southerners against what they saw as trespasses against their rights -- which was the right to trample on everyone else, and curtail everyone's freedom for the sake of them keeping their slaves and spreading slavery everywhere, and what follows. With the Fugitive Slave Act in action, people in the free states were not only digusted by what they were seeing, but by what they were told  they, by law, had to do to aid the slave owners.  Their inevitable conclusion, based on this, and what the slave owners actually said, was that ultimately even white men could be enslaved by the same slave owners who were forcing them to recover slaves.


After I finish this task, I'm going to go backwards, to the 1830's, specifically Washington D.C.  The one part of the Little Compromise that Stephen Douglas got through at the end of the longest legislative session ever, by lobbying incessantly that "the non-slave states had to be given a mite (while the slave states got the Fugitive Slave Act, which did more to turn the non-slave states abolitionist than anything else)," was the end of the slave trade in D.C.  It was a national disgrace, that all other nations regarded with shaken horror and bewilderment that this could go on within the capital of the nation that so trumpeted freedom and liberty.  Of course by the time of 1850, most of the actual trade had been removed, due to this disgrace and embarrassment, to outside of D.C., to Alexandria, which part had been retroceded to Virginia, so it was no longer in the District of Columbia's precincts.

I've read quite a few accounts, if only in passing, by first hand witnesses of the slave trade and the treatment of slaves in Washington D.C.  Now I'm going to concentrate on it for a while.