Northern reactions to the antebellum South can only be
fully understood
in the context of northern concerns for the future of the American
republican experiment, which was at base the search for an American
national identity. Central to antebellum concerns in this regard was the
issue of freedom in a nation which yet retained slave labour. In the
nineteenth century, the belief in freedom was, in Fred Somkin's words,
“the res Americana, the matter of America.” In the
decades preceding the
Civil War, however, North and South came to hold very different ideas of
what freedom meant, and what it entailed. In time, northern concerns
over slavery and the society that relied upon it found political expression
in what Eric Foner termed the “Republican critique of the South.”
This
critique was not focussed on slavery alone but on the South as a whole;
its society, culture, industry, and intellectual achievements. It was both
an
attack on the South and an affirmation of northern superiority.
Ultimately, it was a sectional message with national ambitions.
The “matter of America” became the matter of the North. How
this
happened, however, has never been adequately explained.This essay seeks to shed some light on the background to the
“Republican critique” by looking in particular at the career
of Horace
Mann of Massachusetts, specifically at his brief period in Congress
(1848–52) during which he adopted an increasingly confrontational
stand
toward slavery and the South.