Many of the planters and farmers viewed Indian slaves and White indentured servants as unreliable. They turned towards importing African slaves to sow, toil, and reap their crops. Slavery grew ever increasingly more as various acts and wars engulfed Indian lands west and south of the original British colonies. New land subsequently meant more plantations and African field hands. However, as the transatlantic slave trade was prohibited and the discovery of commercial crops, such as rice and cotton, helped lead the region into an era of economic growth and prosperity, many Southern plantation owners were less relenting to the growing Northern, Anti-slavery rhetoric. For decades, the Western World viewed African American slaves as nothing more than commodities bought, sold, retrieved or punished for insubordinate, sometimes mundane, behavior. Many Southerners turned to natural or religious reasons to justify their superiority over Blacks. Paternalism further idealized slavery by symbolizing the slaveholder as a paternal benefactor to his …show more content…
Stephan A. Douglas in his ambition for western development and construction of a transcontinental railroad, proposed a bill for the formation of territorial governments in Kansas and Nebraska. With the territories lying just above the Missouri Compromise line, through the Constitution, Kansas and Nebraska were outside the realm of slavery. However, the Cotton Kingdom states of the Deep South feared cessation of the land to the North’s slavery-free policy would result in the tipping of the Senate’s political balance in favor of the North. Douglas, in the hopes of claiming a ticket in to future presidency, came up with the principle of popular sovereignty that left local governments the power to decide, by popular vote, the legalization of slavery in the territories. This, understandably, escalated sectional division and ended the two-party system of the Jacksonian