Nashville Convention

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Events leading to the American Civil War
  1. Northwest Ordinance (1787)
  2. Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions (1798–99)
  3. End of Atlantic slave trade
  4. Missouri Compromise (1820)
  5. Tariff of 1828
  6. Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831)
  7. Nullification crisis (1832–33)
  8. Abolition of slavery in the British Empire (1834)
  9. Texas Revolution (1835–36)
  10. United States v. Crandall (1836)
  11. Gag rule (1836–44)
  12. Commonwealth v. Aves (1836)
  13. Murder of Elijah Lovejoy (1837)
  14. Burning of Pennsylvania Hall (1838)
  15. American Slavery As It Is
     (1839)
  16. United States v. The Amistad (1841)
  17. Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842)
  18. Texas annexation (1845)
  19. Mexican–American War (1846–48)
  20. Wilmot Proviso (1846)
  21. Nashville Convention (1850)
  22. Compromise of 1850
  23. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
  24. Recapture of Anthony Burns (1854)
  25. Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854)
  26. Ostend Manifesto (1854)
  27. Bleeding Kansas (1854–61)
  28. Caning of Charles Sumner (1856)
  29. Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
  30. The Impending Crisis of the South (1857)
  31. Panic of 1857
  32. Lincoln–Douglas debates (1858)
  33. Oberlin–Wellington Rescue (1858)
  34. John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859)
  35. Virginia v. John Brown (1859)
  36. 1860 presidential election
  37. Crittenden Compromise (1860)
  38. Secession of Southern states (1860–61)
  39. Peace Conference of 1861
  40. Corwin Amendment (1861)
  41. Battle of Fort Sumter (1861)

The Nashville Convention was a political meeting held in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 3–11, 1850. Delegates from nine slave states met to consider secession, if the United States Congress decided to ban slavery in the new territories being added to the country as a result of the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican–American War. The compromises worked out in Nashville paved the way for the Compromise of 1850, including the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and for a time, preserved the union of the United States.

Proceedings of the Nashville Convention

The previous year, firebrand

states rights advocate John C. Calhoun had urged that a preliminary bipartisan Southern convention be held in Mississippi to address the growing issue of the Federal government placing limits on the growth of slavery. The delegates to the October 1, 1849, Mississippi Convention denounced the controversial Wilmot Proviso, a failed proposal to ban slavery in the Mexican Cession, the land taken from Mexico at the end of the Mexican–American War
. and the slaveholding states agreed to send delegates to Nashville to define a resistance strategy in the face of perceived Northern aggression. Mississippi's legislature appropriated $20,000 for the expenses of their Nashville delegates and $200,000 for any "necessary measures for protecting the state ... in the event of the passage of the Wilmot Proviso."

176 delegates from Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee and Kentucky convened at the McKendree United Methodist Church in Nashville for nine days in June 1850. 101 of these delegates were from Tennessee, where each county had been allowed to send whomever it wished. In the other cases, the delegates were selected by the state legislatures. A small delegation from Louisiana had been blocked from attending by that state's moderate legislature.

After heated debate, the Southerners who urged

Pacific Coast
. The convention adjourned without taking any action against the Union, and the issue of secession was temporarily tabled.

In September, the

U.S. Congress enacted the Compromise of 1850, and President Millard Fillmore signed it into law. As a result, in November a smaller group of Southern delegates met in Nashville in a second session of the Nashville Convention, this time dominated by the extremists. They denounced the compromise and affirmed the right of individual states to secede from the Union. This second session had little national impact, but the seeds continued to be sown for the American Civil War
.

Among the prominent pro-secession delegates at the Nashville Convention was

President of the Confederate States. One delegate who supported the compromise was famed adventurer Sam Houston
of Texas.

References

Further reading

  • Thelma Jennings, The Nashville Convention: Southern Movement for Unity, 1848–1850 (1980).
  • George L. Sioussat, "Tennessee, the Compromise of 1850, and the Nashville Convention." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 2, no. 3 (1915): 313–347. in JSTOR
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