Historian Henry Adams explained that the Slave Power was a force for centralization: Henry Adams , ''John Randolph'' (1882) pp 178-79]
Between the slave power and states' rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states' rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas "by joint resolution" than treaty ; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision — all triumphs of the slave power — did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states' rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states' rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.
In congratulating the president-elect in 1860, Salmon Chase exclaimed, "The object of my wishes and labors for nineteen years is accomplished in the overthrow of the Slave Power." The way was now clear "for the establishment of the policy of Freedom." In fact it took a bloody Civil War and Reconstruction to finally destroy the Slave Power.
- John Ashworth , "Free Labor, Wage Labor, and Slave Power: Republicanism and the Republican Party in the 1850s," in ''The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880'', edited by S. M. Stokes and S. Conway (1996), 128-46.
- Frederick J. Blue, ''No Taint Of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics'' (2004)
- Davis, David Brion. ''Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style'' (1986)
- Jonathan Earle, ''Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854'' (2004)
- Eric Foner, ''Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Zany of the Republican Party Before the Civil War'' (1970) , esp pp. 73-102
- Larry Gara,. "Slavery and the Slave Power: A Crucial Distinction" ''Civil War History'' v15 (1969), pp 5-18
- Leonard L. Richards, ''Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860'' (2000)
- John Elliott Cairnes, ''The Slave Power: Its Character, Career, and Probable Designs'' (1862; reprinted 2003)
- Mason I. Lowance Jr., ed. ''House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, 1776-1865'' (2003)
- C. Bradley Thompson, ed. ''Anti-Slavery Political Writings, 1833-1860: A Reader'' (2003)
- Henry Wilson, ''History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power'' --- [(1874) Wilson was elected Vice President in 1868.
- Theodore Parker, ''The Slave Power'' abolitionist speeches, 1841-52
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