After the Mexican War, the question of slavery, which had been put on hold for a time, was brought up again in its entirety. The availability of a large amount of land in the Western United States inevitably led to the question of whether or not slavery should be legal in the newly formed territory.
The first argument that was made against recognizing additional states as slave states were that doing so would throw off the balance between the number of states that recognized slavery and the number of states that did not.
The second argument that was hiding underlying all of this conversation was a fight for dominance between the North and the South; the area that emerged victorious in this argument would be in a stronger position to play the political game.
The third line of defense was to safeguard white workers, who would be pushed out of new regions if slavery was legalized there; as a result, the value of their labor would decrease, and they would be degraded. This was the third line of defense.
Generally, a state of affairs in which one human being belonged to another as property.
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