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As the issue of slavery arose in the 1840s and 1850s to become the chief political issue in the nation, Indiana politicians had to respond to an electorate who generally believed slavery was wrong. At the same time, to maintain the viability of both major political parties to achieve victory in national elections, Indiana politicians had to accede to at least some of the demands of their slaveholding Southern brethren. Fortunately for Hoosier politicians, much of their electorate appreciated the need to compromise. Most Hoosiers’ antislavery beliefs did not outweigh their devotion to the Union, in part because their concerns about slavery were limited by their racist beliefs. Some even condemned Northern abolitionists for promoting a politics that threatened the Union. Over the late 1840s and through the 1850s, though, many Hoosiers of both parties, like many other Northerners, came to believe that efforts at compromise with the South were doomed to failure. These Hoosiers saw that every compromise with the South begat a new Southern demand for additional concessions, leading them to believe that Southerners placed the institution of slavery above the Union. When the Southern states began to secede after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Hoosiers of many political stripes came together to condemn the South for attempting to destroy the Union. Hoosiers and Slavery before 1850
While many Hoosiers thought slavery was wrong, few could be labeled as abolitionists—persons who desired the abolition of slavery. Many 1840s Hoosiers appreciated that the institution of slavery was undesirable—they or their parents had left slaveholding states to settle in a state that declared unequivocally in its 1816 Constitution that slavery could never be permitted in the state—to the point of making the slavery clause un-amendable. Nevertheless, the undesirability of slavery was rooted only partially in the moral condemnation of what the institution did to enslaved African Americans. Some Hoosiers opposed slavery precisely because they opposed living in a society with African Americans, in part because of racist fears, and in part because they did not believe free white laborers could compete with African American laborers, especially those held in slavery. Others opposed slavery because they believed that slavery gave slaveholders undue wealth and power. Finally, some Hoosiers, even while aware of the wrongness of slavery, thought the moral problem belonged to the South entirely; it was not their concern, having left the South and washed their hands of the sin. Many of these positions could coalesce in support of the policy of “Free Soil,” the belief that the nation’s territories should be free from slavery, so that white men could prosper. The “Free Soil” spirit emphasized that slavery wronged white men, not African Americans, and could be embraced even while reassuring Southerners that they could keep slavery where it already existed. However, a small group of Indiana men and women, including the state’s small African American population, believed that slavery needed to come to an end. These abolitionists founded the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society in 1838; the abolitionist cause, rooted in the Friends church, as well as portions of Presbyterian, Baptist, and Methodist churches, raised its voice in Indiana, sometimes at personal peril. But any such sympathy for African Americans was limited.
