The term used by northerners in the mid-1800s to criticize what they believed was the excessive political power of shouthern slave owners is slave power.
The Slave Power or Slaveocracy was the perceived political power in the U.S. federal government held by slave owners during the 1840s and 1850s, prior to the Civil War.
The main issue that the term slave power conveyed was distrust of the political power of the slave-owning class.
