Americans at their best are a pragmatic “can do” folk, be it “Yankee ingenuity” or good old fashioned “get ‘r done.” We are at our worst when we stray from this pragmatic bent into the misty fields of sacerdotal ideology, which is to say when we ascribe to our pet ideologies a sacred nature, and confer a sainthood, or at the very least, a priestly ordination upon our favored ideologues. In the antebellum period, abolitionist ideology exercised over the course of time a profound effect upon the Yankee mind. More and more northerners, even those whom the abolitionists annoyed, came to accept the idiocy of the “slave power conspiracy.” For the innocent and uninitiated, this conspiracy theory asserted that southern slaveholders were planning to use the powers of the federal government to expand slavery into the territories and throughout the Union. Once this was accomplished, free white labor would be degraded, and the stout wheat farmers of the Midwest would find themselves enslaved. Of course this was nonsense.
During the crisis of the 1850s Southerners did insist on being allowed equal access to the territories, which did mean that slaveholders could settle in the territories with their slaves, but everyone knew this was not happening and was not going to happen. There was a bare handful of slaves in the territories; ironically the anti-slavery, Mormon dominated Utah territory had the most (29) according to the 1860 census. Realities, however, no longer mattered. Symbols defined people’s views of each other whether one was opposing the “Black Republicans” or the “Slave Power.” Thus Southerners and Northerners, who had a great deal in common, were now ready to kill each other.
