Talk:Wilmot Proviso

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Much of this article is still awkwardly worded; I will try to fix this after examining it for a bit longer. Furthermore, it would be worth noting that the proviso bounced back and forth between the House and the Senate, passing in the former and being rejected in the latter. However, I am not familiar enough with the details behind this to comment. Matthew Plough

I completly agree. The last paragraph is very poorly worded and i'm not exactly sure what it even means. I'll look into some and see if i can decipher what the intent was. --Tainter 09:17, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

It says the "recently completed Mexican-American War," which is innaccurate, as the Proviso first came into existence in 1846, the same year the war began. I'll be changing that now.

Democrats with their northern base of support? I wish I knew more for certain about party politics in the 1840s, but I'm tolerably sure this is nonsense. Since the Jackson days, Democrats had actually had a northern and western appeal. (New York state was, and has nearly always been, a Democratic stronghold, but this is just New York being different.) The Whigs – a party starting to fall apart at the time of the Wilmot Proviso – were the party more commonly associated with anti-slavery sentiments, and their base was primarily Northern and mercantile, although they had a certain Southern following in places like Kentucky where Henry Clay was popular. Wilmot was actually doing something unusual for a Northern Democrat by making a strong stand on the slavery issue. QuartierLatin1968 18:46, 10 Jan 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Needs some change...

I just finished reading a book largely dealing with the subject matter here: The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War by Michael F. Holt. I don't reccommend anyone read it, as the book is incredibly dry and uninteresting, but I had to for class. I think the original author of this article knew relatively what he was talking about, but happened to be less than elegant in expressing it. I'll rewrite the section, unless anyone has any serious objections.

 -revwolfe Dec. 15th

[edit] Vis a Vis Burgundy Declaration

Quite ironic that nobody has mentioned the Burgundy Declaration at all... I think at a minimum, that should be included as a counterpoint. 71.194.6.238 05:46, 23 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] What?

Southerners saw slaves as property, and since their rights y was expanding.

I tidied up some grammar and questionable word choice, but I can't make out what this somewhat crippled sentence was meant to say. . . . --Michael K. Smith 14:23, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I don't know what that sentence was supposed to mean, but historically, both some Northerners and some Southerners thought that if the territory in which slavery was allowed didn't keep on expanding, then eventually slavery would stagnate economically, and those who supported the continuation of slavery would find their political position weakened. Many Southerners had fantasies of the U.S. acquiring Cuba, and large chunks of Mexico and Central America, as slave territories (some to be eventually admitted as slave states to balance out the votes of northern states in Congress) -- which is why they were so vehemently opposed to restrictions on slavery in newly-acquired territories, such as the Wilmot Proviso. In 1861, the Crittenden compromise basically failed because of a dispute about whether slavery would be forbidden in territories which might be acquired in future -- there was no disagreement about continuing slavery in the the states where it then existed, and little dispute that New Mexico was pretty much the only existing territory possibly suitable for slavery (in the aftermath of the Kansas fiasco), but the real sticking point was whether or not slavery should be allowed in territory "hereafter acquired"... AnonMoos 15:54, 5 April 2007 (UTC)