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Notes -
Sure. Here I was not talking about the Cotton Plantations in the new southwest, but slavery in Virginia, Kentucky, and the Carolinas that mainly was concerned with providing new slaves for plantations in the west. Without the expansion of those plantations, slavery would be no longer be profitable for these states. And these were the states that most powerful and influential in congress: without Virginia and the Carolinas the Confederacy would have been short-lived indeed.
I'm not sure I buy the slave revolt argument fully. The south was continually expanding its slave population to work new plantations. You see an exponential (in the mathematical sense) of the enslaved population from ~700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860. Now during that time the number and size of slave states also increased substantially, but if you look at this map, the percentage of enslaved peoples in Eastern counties doesn't seem to really decrease with Western expansion. Looks to me like the economics of the plantation were more important than the fear of slave revolt.
However, I do see your argument that this was a powerfully motivating political force behind Southern Extremism. Funnily enough, the Republican Party also didn't really want black people to stick around in the union: Lincoln was a strong proponent of colonization and repatriation of African-Americans to Liberia.
This is difficult to square with the fact that the most enthusiastic proponents of slavery were from the Deep South. The necessary/intractable evil view survived the longest in the Upper South and the only Southern Slave State to get even mildly close to abolishing on its own was Virginia. Publicola actually misses this, too: The reason Southern emancipationists wanted to 'spread out' slavery wasn't to dilute the possibility of post-emancipation genocide, but to draw as many slaveowners out of Virginia as possible so the emancipationists could have any shot at all at winning elections.
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