Economic and Political Connections between Lowell and Southern States

By Gray Fitzsimons, University of Massachusetts Lowell

As the 19th century progressed, rising tensions in New England and the nation were prompted by rising mass social movements, notably temperance, antislavery, and labor reform. These were joined by a wave of evangelical Protestantism, a questioning of the role of women in society, a concern over the “threat” of immigrants to the young republic, and the widening displacement of skilled artisans in the wake of mechanized factory work. While these tensions were felt in rural and urban America alike, and especially provoked debate within the newly emergent two-party system, they were especially acute in industrializing cities, including Lowell, which was viewed by many as the nation’s leading manufacturing center.[ii]

The extent to which former merchants who, like Appleton, turned industrial capitalists, played important roles as leaders of these social and political transformations should not be underestimated. The changes they reaped, while bringing them tremendous wealth, proved beyond their powers to control. Nonetheless, they exerted a lot of time and energy trying to direct and react to the many social upheavals in antebellum America. This was particularly evident in the issue of slavery and the rising tide of sectional conflict between North and South.

Political Connections between Lowell and Southern States
Lowell’s emergence as a stronghold for the anti-slavery movement might seem unlikely, given the important economic and social bonds that existed between Boston’s textile industrialists who controlled the city’s mills and the Southern cotton planter class which provided the North with cotton produced by enslaved people. Indeed, among the more prominent Northern opponents of Garrison’s abolition movement in the 1830s and 1840s were Nathan Appleton and Amos Lawrence, each of whom held substantial investments in Lowell’s textile industry. Both men declared their hatred of slavery, but believed abolitionists like Garrison posed a serious threat to the union. Furthermore, both Appleton and Lawrence feared that immediate emancipation would cast a large, inassimilable Black population onto a hostile white America. Lawrence joined with the American Colonization Society, which had been established in 1817 and promoted the removal of newly-freed people to colonies in Africa, a view strongly opposed by Garrisonian abolitionists.[iii]

Appleton, who served as Massachusetts’s representative in the US House of Representatives (1831-1833, 1842), sought to constrain the political activities of the antislavery wing within the Whig Party, of which he was a leader. Labeled a “Cotton Whig” by antislavery sympathizers within his party, Appleton found it increasingly difficult to keep in check the “Conscience Whigs” who ultimately joined with the Free Soilers and the abolitionists. Critics of Appleton and the Cotton Whigs increasingly emerged in the 1840s in Lowell, the very city over which Appleton and his textile investors exerted considerable financial control. The political debate over free labor versus enslaved labor, as well as the growing perception among Conscience Whigs that the politically powerful enslavers threatened the ideological foundations of the republic, eventually eroded Whig unity and led to the demise of this national political party in the early 1850s.

While only a small percentage of New Englanders were members of William Lloyd Garrison’s Anti-Slavery Society that called for immediate emancipation and equal rights for African Americans, a rising number of the region’s rural and city dwellers signed antislavery petitions and supported antislavery candidates. Although most Lowell residents viewed abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison as extremists whose demand for immediate emancipation and equal rights for African Americans might lead to disunion and war, many residents believed that slavery was inhumane and immoral. Antislavery meetings and lectures consistently attracted large crowds in Lowell.

In contrast to the city’s abolitionist-minded clergy, Lowell’s Democratic politicians remained largely aloof from the antislavery cause or actively opposed it. The city’s Democrats included mechanics, artisans, newspaper editors, businessmen, and immigrants from Ireland and Britain. Although many Lowell Democrats campaigned for labor reform, they fervently contested abolitionists. Local party leaders allied themselves with presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, who maintained close ties to pro-slavery Southern Democrats. They supported the right of Southerners to own slaves and many endorsed political compromises that permitted the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

Lowell’s Whig Party, which dominated city politics, was far more divided over the issue of slavery. A handful of leading Whig politicians actively supported abolitionists, while others passionately attacked Garrison and his followers. Virtually all Whigs, however, voiced a moral disdain for the “peculiar institution,” but feared the union would splinter if the abolitionists succeeded, so many proclaimed that slavery should remain in the Southern states, where it was constitutionally protected. While many Whigs adhered to this strict legal interpretation of slavery, they also envisioned the eventual abolition of human bondage through orderly constitutional means.

As in other Northern cities, Lowell’s Whig Party was composed of men connected to powerful industrial corporations, as well as bankers, lawyers, shopkeepers, mechanics, artisans, and clergymen. These men promoted Protestant values of thrift, industriousness, temperance, and observance of the Sabbath, and they sought a strong federal government that would sponsor central banks, economic development of industry and transportation, and protective tariffs for American commerce and industry. Whigs not only opposed such labor reforms as the 10-hour day, they also were determined foes of trade union organizations. Although Lowell’s Whigs were generally united in their opposition to labor reform and frequently nativist in outlook toward the famine Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1850s, the issue of slavery proved far more divisive. Many of the city’s Whigs initially opposed abolitionism, yet many proclaimed their dislike of slavery and fought its expansion into Texas and the western territories.

For Democrats, Whigs, and successor parties to the Whigs, the debate over slavery and the fate of the republic intensified in the 1850s. This growing conflict resulted in large measure from incompatible ideologies of Northern free labor and Southern enslaved labor. Industrialists in the North prized capitalistic, market-oriented values of individualism, materialism, and free labor, all of which were antithetical to the Southern system of enslavement. These differing ideologies were manifested in the inability of the North and South to solve an array of political problems, ranging from the question of slavery in the western territories, to the sovereignty of states, to Northern challenges to the Fugitive Slave Act. Lowell residents heatedly debated these very issues. Their attempts to reckon with the ideological and moral problems that slavery posed to their emerging capitalistic society reflected the broader debates occurring throughout America.