One of the motivations behind the anti-slavery movement in the 1850s in the United States was the belief in the Slave Power conspiracy. Abolitionists and their allies argued that a confederation of powerful slaveholders secretly plotted to capture the federal government of the US and direct its might towards the preservation and extension of slavery. The abolitionists were wrong about one major thing: it wasn't that much of a secret.
SOURCES
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/free-soil-free-labor-free-men-9780195094978?cc=us&lang=en&
Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35100.Battle_Cry_of_Freedom
This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy by Matthew Karp
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674737259
The Slave Power Conspiracy: 1830-1860 by Russel B. Nye
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40399768?seq=1
The Appeal of the Independent Democrats
https://www.loc.gov/resource/mss15610.028_0602_0607/?sp=2
Thomas Morris' speech in the Senate
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llcg&fileName=006/llcg006.db&recNum=430&itemLink=r%3Fammem%2Fhlaw%3A%40field%28DOCID%2B%40lit%28cg0062%29%29%3A%230060683&linkText=1
JQ Adams' Speech on the Slave Power
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1848-03-10/ed-1/seq-1/
George Fitzhugh's Horace Greely's Lost Book:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/moajrnl/acf2679.0031.003/239:9?page=root;rgn=full+text;size=100;view=image
Fitzhugh's Sociology For the South:
https://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/fitzhughsoc/fitzhugh.html
James Henry Hammond's Mudsill Speech:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3439t.html
John C. Calhoun's Slavery a Positive Good Speech
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/
