Hidden History: How Pressure to Expand Slavery Led to the US War on Mexico

Episode 11: A Restless South Expansion and Conflict

A New History of the American South

Dr Edward Ayers (2018)

Film Review

Ayers uses this lecture to explain the development of the US two-party system in the 1820s and how pressure to expand slavery led to the US War on Mexico. The founding fathers had warned against political parties, worried scheming opportunists would seize control of them.

The election of America’s first populist president Andrew Jackson (1828) would play a major role in the formation of the two party system. Also important was the decision by many legislatures to eliminate property qualifications for voting. In 1828 the popular vote for president was double that of 1820.

Identifying himself as a man of the people, Jackson claimed to have wrested control of the country from the wealthy elite. In doing so, he also increased the powers of the presidency beyond those described in the Constitution. Although his forced march of Native Americans to Oklahoma supported southern interests, he sided against the South when he shut down the South Carolina nullification movement in 1933.*

Jackson’s opponents (men with business and trade interests) saw themselves as a counterbalance to the “monarchical” powers of the Jackson presidency and began calling themselves Whigs.** His supporters (small farmers and urban immigrants) became known as Democrats.

In 1845 a 3rd party candidate split the Whig vote and Jackson protege and expansionist*** James K Polk narrowly won the presidency. In 1846, Polk seized on a border skirmish north of the Rio Grande as an excuse to invade Mexico. After a two year war (1846-48), Mexico and the US signed a peace treaty that gave the US undisputed control of Texas,**** established the U.S.-Mexican border along the Rio Grande, and ceded to the United States the present-day states of California,

Although the Whigs (and most northerners) had opposed the war, they sought to capitalize on General Zachary Taylor’s military prestige by offering him the 1848 nomination. Following his election, growing congressional conflict over slavery led to a law declaring California a slave free territory and the Fugitive Slave Act (requiring northern states to return escaped slaves to their masters)

The Whigs split in 1854, following enactment of the Kansas-Nebraska Act proclaiming new states could decide for themselves whether they would allow slavery (effectively repealing the Missouri Comprise banning slavery north of the 33rd parallel). Most northern Whigs joined the anti-slavery Republican Party (formed in Wisconsin in 1854) and most southern Whigs joined the American Party and later the Constitutional Union Party.

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*The Nullification Crisis was a confrontation between South Carolina and the federal government in 1832–33 over the former’s attempt to declare null and void the federal Tariffs of 1828 and 1832. The resolution of the crisis in favor of the federal government helped to undermine nullification doctrine, the constitutional theory that upheld the right of states to nullify federal acts within their boundaries.

**The Whigs were a British political party between the 1680s and 1850s.

***The southern states favored westward expansion of the US as acquisition of new plantation land was essential to the health of the southern economy.

****The major fighting in the Texas war of independence (with several hundred state militiamen fighting the 3,000-strong Mexican army) ended on April 21, 1836. However the Mexican Congress refused to recognize the independence of the Republic of Texas, as the treaty was signed by Mexican President General Antonio López de Santa Anna under duress as prisoner of state militias. The United States recognized the Republic of Texas in March 1837 but declined to annex the territory as a state until its economy, based entirely on slaves and cotton, collapsed follow the panic of 1837. Texas formally became a state in 1845

Can be viewed with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/restless-south-expansion-and-conflict

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What Causes Civilization to Collapse?

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive

Jared Diamond

Penguin Books (2005)

Book Review

This book was very different from what I expected. I anticipated an account of the environmental mismanagement that caused the collapse of prehistoric civilizations such as Easter Island. Collapse is actually a detailed historical analysis of a wide spectrum of both failed and successful societies. In addition to Easter Island, Diamond also covers the vanished Anazazi civilization in New Mexico, the Mayan civilization, the Viking settlements of Iceland (which persists to the present day), Greenland and Vineland (present day Newfoundland and New Brunswick), pre-1853 Japan, the New Guinea highlands and modern day Rwanda and Australia (the modern society he describes at highest risk for collapse).

Diamond’s thesis is that the ability of any society to meet the survival needs of its members depends on certain basic preconditions. He maintains historical forest management is the most critical – deforestation features in every historical collapse he mentions. Forests are not only essential to provide fuel for cooking, heating and refining metal, but loss of forest cover leads to soil erosion and destruction of topsoil, as well as decreased rainfall and fresh water shortages.

In some societies Diamond analyzes, collapse was the direct result of environmental mismanagement. In others, the odds of survival were extremely low to begin with, due to low rainfall, a cold or windy latitude or poor soils. In many cases, a political factor such as war, lack of external supports (eg trade), overpopulation and/or a greedy ruling elite diverting resources to luxuries were important contributing factors.

The section I found most interesting concerns the New Guinea highlanders, who (prior to the arrival of Europeans) maintained an environmentally sustainable civilization via bottom up direct democracy for over 46,000 years.

How Rigged Voting Machines Are Stealing Our Elections

Hacking Democracy

Directed by Simon Ardizzone and Russell Michaels (2006)

Film Review

Hacking Democracy is about Bev Harris, founder of Black Box Voting, and her efforts to end the systematic use of voting machines to alter American election results. At the time the documentary was made (2006), computers counted 80% of the votes cast in US elections. However because the software programs that run voting machines are considered “trade secrets,” neither candidates nor election officials have any way of auditing whether voting machines are accurately recording and tabulating votes.

A visit to the group’s website (http://blackboxvoting.org/) indicates the vote tampering Harris uncovered continues to be widespread. Big discrepancies between exit polls and “official” (machine tabulated) results suggest that vote rigging is even more widespread today than it was ten years ago. If anything these discrepancies are worse than ever in 2016. See What is #Exitpollgate?

The film mainly focuses on Diebold corporation, owing to a fluke in which Harris obtained copies of software code one of their employees (a whistleblower?) mistakenly uploaded to an old Diebold website. With the help of various software engineers, Harris successfully elucidated exactly how vote tampering occurred in various counties in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.

She first became interested in the role of voting machines in vote rigging after finding a voting machine in Volusia County Florida that awarded Al Gore a grand total of minus 16,022 votes. Programming computers to record negative votes is essential to ensure that vote totals don’t exceed the total number of voters.

The film poses a number of unresolved mysteries, such as why John Kerry didn’t challenge the vote rigging in New Mexico and Ohio in 2004 – despite promises he made his supporters to fight voting machine tampering. Shortly after his concession speech Kerry, whose victory was assured by exit polls, acknowledged that vote counting in New Mexico (where every single Hispanic district voted for Bush) had been rigged.

Watch film free at https://watchdocumentaries.com/hacking-democracy/