Antislavery politics and the Pearl incident of 1848.

As the debate over slavery intensified in the United States before the Civil War, antislavery agitators exploited events to increase public indignation against slavery and the "Slave Power." The Daily Union of Washington, D.C., labeled two such agitators, Senator John Hale of New Hampshire and Representative Joshua Giddings of Ohio, "abolitionist incendiaries." But these men were not abolitionists; instead, they advocated the disassociation of the federal government from the institution of slavery by ending slavery and the slave trade in the nation's capital, denying slavery's…