James L. Roark ● Michael P. Johnson Patricia Cline Cohen ● Sarah Stage

Susan M. Hartmann

CHAPTER 14 The House Divided,

1846-1861

The American PromiseA History of the United States

Fifth Edition

Copyright © 2012 by Bedford/St. Martin's

I. The Bitter Fruits of WarA. The Wilmot Proviso and the Expansion of Slavery

1. Slavery in the territories 2. The Wilmot Proviso

• August 1846, Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot proposed that Congress bar slavery in all lands acquired in the war with Mexico; Mexico had already abolished slavery there; Northerners of both parties supported the Wilmot Proviso; they wanted to preserve the West for free labor and to reserve the land for the settlement of whites.

3. The South’s outrage 4. Popular sovereignty

• House, dominated by northern states, passed the Wilmot Proviso• Senate, with a slave state majority, rejected it; in 1847, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan

offered a compromise through the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”: letting the people who actually settled in the territories determine the fate of slavery for themselves

B. The Election of 18481. Democrats, Whigs, and Free-Soilers

• Democratic convention nominated Lewis Cass, the man most closely associated with popular sovereignty

• Whigs nominated Mexican-American War hero Zachary Taylor and declined to adopt a platform; hoped to unite their party by nominating a military hero and remaining silent on the slavery issue; Taylor himself owned more than 100 slaves; Whigs looked for an alternative; Charles Sumner called for “one grand Northern party of Freedom”; in the summer of 1848, antislavery Democrats and antislavery Whigs founded the Free-Soil Party nominated Martin Van Bure

2. Slavery’s impact on the major parties• November election dashed the hopes of the Free-Soilers, who made slavery the

campaign’s central issue but failed to carry a single state• Taylor won the election, but the struggle over slavery in the territories had shaken the

major parties badly.

I. The Bitter Fruits of WarC. Debate and Compromise

1. Taylor’s plan • encouraged California and New Mexico to draw up state constitutions and apply for

statehood as quickly as possible; 2. Clay’s resolutions

• Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky proposed a series of resolutions that sought to balance the interests of the free and slave states

• admit California as a free state but organize the rest of the Southwest without restrictions on slavery; Texas would agree to a new boundary with New Mexico; abolish the slave trade but not slavery in Washington, D.C.; create a more effective fugitive slave law; but antislavery advocates and “fire-eaters” (radical secessionist Southerners) both savaged Clay’s plan.

3. The Omnibus Bill• May 1850, a Senate committee produced a bill known as the Omnibus Bill that

combined Clay’s resolutions into a single comprehensive package• Clay predicted that a majority of Congress wanted compromise and that each would

vote for the package even if it contained provisions it disliked• the Omnibus Bill failed.

4. Douglas’s strategy• Illinois senator Stephen Douglas broke the Omnibus Bill into its various parts and

skillfully ushered each part through Congress• agreement looked very much like Clay’s original plan; California entered the Union as

a slave state, New Mexico and Utah would be decided by popular sovereignty, Texas accepted a new boundary with New Mexico, and the slave trade in Washington, D.C., would be abolished, but the fugitive slave laws would be more stringent

• in September 1850, Millard Fillmore, who had become president when Taylor died suddenly in July, signed each bill, collectively known as the Compromise of 1850, into law.

II. The Sectional Balance UndoneA. The Fugitive Slave Act

1. The debate over runaway slaves 2. Fugitive Slave Act

• seize a slave, a slaveholder simply had to appear before a commissioner and swear that the runaway was his; commissioner earned $10 for every returned slave and $5 for every slave set free; law also stipulated that all citizens had to assist officials in apprehending runaways; very unpopular in the North, where brutal enforcement of the law had a radicalizing effect; Southerners believed the North had betrayed the Compromise.

B. Uncle Tom’s Cabin1. Harriet Beecher Stowe 2. Response to the book

• blockbuster hit; sold 300,000 copies in its first year and more than 2 million copies within ten years; humanized slaves and showed slavery’s destructive impact on the family; Northerners accepted the book as truth, while Southerners considered it slanderous; crystallized northern sentiment against slavery.

3. The writings of ex-slaves• Solomon Northup published Twelve Years a Slave (1853) and Frederick

Douglass’s 1845 memoir eventually sold more than 50,000 copies; but no work touched the North’s conscience like Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

II. The Sectional Balance UndoneC. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

1. The election of 1852 2. Foreign expansion

• Pierce sent James Gadsden to negotiate the purchase of 30,000 square miles of territory south of the Gila River in present-day New Mexico and Arizona.

3. Douglas and the railroad• Douglas badly wanted the transcontinental railroad for

Chicago; in 1854, he introduced a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory; called for popular sovereignty in a region where the Compromise of 1820 had prohibited slavery; at southern insistence, he added an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 in the bill.

4. Kansas-Nebraska Act• Kansas-Nebraska Act split the huge territory in half: Nebraska,

west of the free state Iowa, and Kansas, west of the slave state Missouri; with this act, the government also pushed the Plains Indians further west, making way for farmers and railroads.

III. Realignment of the Party SystemA. The Old Parties: Whigs and Democrats

1. The collapse of the Whigs 2. The southern-dominated Democrats

• Stephen Douglas’s use of popular sovereignty divided northern Democrats and destroyed the dominance of the Democratic Party in the free states; by 1854, the Democrats, although still a viable party, had become a southern-dominated party; breakup of the Whig Party and the disaffection of significant numbers of northern Democrats set many Americans politically adrift, looking for a new alternative.

B. The New Parties: Know-Nothings and Republicans1. Nativism and Know-Nothings

• a tidal wave of immigrants produced a nasty backlash among Protestant Americans who believed the American government would be overrun by Catholics from Ireland and Germany; led to the formation of the American, or “Know-Nothing,” Party; exploded onto the political scene in 1854, capturing state legislatures in the Northeast, West, and South and claiming dozens of seats in Congress.

2. Antislavery and the Republican Party• attempted to unite all those who opposed the extension of slavery into any territory of the United

States; tapped into the basic beliefs and values of Northerners; argued slavery degraded the dignity of white labor and that the southern “Slave Power” was conspiring to take control of the Democratic Party and expand slavery; believed only if slavery was restricted to the South could the system of free labor flourish elsewhere.

3. Women in party politics• rushed to the Republican Party; they participated by writing campaign literature, marching in

parades, giving speeches, and working to influence voters; ultimately nurtured the woman’s rights movement.

III. Realignment of the Party SystemC. The Election of 1856

1. The Republican platform • revealed that the Republicans had become the Democrats’ main

challenger; slavery, not nativism, had become the election’s principal issue; Know-Nothing Party split over the Kansas-Nebraska Act but still managed to nominate Millard Fillmore in 1856; Republicans focused on making every territory free; had written off the South; nominated a political newcomer, John C. Frémont.

2. The Democratic platform • Chose “a northern man with southern principles,” James

Buchanan of Pennsylvania; took refuge in the ambiguity of popular sovereignty and portrayed the Republicans as extremists.

3. Struggle for national power • Democratic strategy helped carry the day for Buchanan, but

Frémont did astonishingly well; Republicans carried all but five states north of the Mason-Dixon line; revealed the Democrats were badly strained.

IV. Freedom under SiegeA. “Bleeding Kansas”

1. Free-state versus slave-state• Kansas, free-state and slave-state settlers each sought majorities at the ballot box; in the

North and South, emigrant aid societies sprang up to promote settlement from free or slave states; Missourians thought it important to secure Kansas for slavery.

2. Rival governments • proslavery candidates swept the territorial election of November 1854; new legislature

enacted proslavery laws; free-soil Kansas enacted its own legislature, which banned both slaves and free blacks from the territory.

3. The fighting begins • fighting broke out on the morning of May 21, 1856, when several hundred proslavery men

entered the town of Lawrence, the center of free-state settlement; the “Sack of Lawrence” inflamed northern opinion; in retaliation, John Brown led a posse to massacre five allegedly proslavery settlers; guerrilla warfare engulfed the territory.

4. “Bleeding Sumner” • Bleeding Kansas” gave the fledgling Republican Party fresh ammunition; the party also

capitalized on northern outrage when Preston Brooks, a young South Carolina member of the House, caned Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, who had delivered a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas”; like “Bleeding Kansas,” “Bleeding Sumner” provided the Republican Party with a symbol of the South’s “twisted and violent civilization.”

B. The Dred Scott Decision

1. Scott’s argument • Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Scott argued that because his master had taken

him to Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory, then according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, he and his family were free.

2. The Supreme Court’s ruling • Justice Roger B. Taney, who hated Republicans and racial equality, handed

down the Court’s decision: Dred Scott could not legally claim violation of his constitutional rights because blacks were not citizens of the United States, and the laws of Scott’s home state, Missouri, determined his status, and thus his travels in free areas did not make him free; additionally, the Taney court ruled that Congress lacked the right to prohibit slavery in the territories and the Missouri Compromise was therefore unconstitutional (though it already had been voided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act).

3. Curtis’s dissent• Scott was a citizen of the United States, because free black men could vote in

five states at the writing of the Constitution; since Wisconsin had barred involuntary servitude, a slave’s status would cease to exist entering the territory; the Missouri Compromise was constitutional; resistance to the decision strengthened the young Republican Party.

IV. Freedom under SiegeC. Prairie Republican: Abraham Lincoln

1. Lincoln joins the Republican Party 2. Racial views 3. Political views

• envisioned the western territories as “places for poor people to go to, and better their conditions”; believed that slavery’s expansion threatened westward-moving free men’s basic right to succeed; warned that slaveholders were engaging in a conspiracy to nationalize slavery; believed the nation could not “endure permanently half slave and half free”; Lincoln’s convictions that slavery was wrong, that Congress must stop its spread, and that it must be put on the road to extinction formed the core of the Republican ideology; impressed Illinois Republicans, who chose him to challenge Stephen Douglas in 1858.

D. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates 1. The Lecompton constitution

• in 1857, President Buchanan approved a proslavery constitution (the Lecompton constitution) for the state of Kansas, even though Free-Soilers outnumbered proslavery settlers by at least two to one; Douglas broke with the Democratic administration and came out against the proslavery constitution; in doing so, he declared his independence from the South; he hoped his actions would make him appealing to voters.

2. Debating the crucial issues• Lincoln challenged the incumbent Douglas to debate him face to face; they met in a

legendary series of seven debates; Lincoln badgered Douglas with the question of whether he favored the spread of slavery; Douglas worked the racial issue, calling Lincoln an abolitionist and an egalitarian enamored with “our colored brethren”; Douglas won the hard-fought, closely contested election, but the debates thrust Lincoln into the national spotlight.

V. The Union CollapsesA. The Aftermath of John Brown’s Raid

1. Brown’s fate • John Brown stood trial for treason, murder, and incitement of a slave insurrection; he was executed on December 2, 1859.

2. National response • denunciation gave way to grudging respect, although most did not advocate bloody slave insurrection; churches marked the

hanging with toiling bells, hymns, and prayer vigils; Southerners wondered what they had in common with people who celebrated Brown as a martyr and a Christian hero, rather than a murderer and a robber.

B. Republican Victory in 1860

1. Sectional hostility • a southern business convention even called for the reopening of the African slave trade; even the normally routine business of

electing a Speaker of the House threatened to turn bloody as Democrats and Republicans battled over control of the office.

2. The Charleston convention • they denounced Stephen Douglas and demanded a platform that featured a federal slave code for the territories; the

Democrats split; the northern wing nominated Stephen Douglas for president and approved a platform with popular sovereignty.

3. Southern Democrats • Democrats nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge and approved a platform with a federal slave code; southern

moderates refused to support Breckinridge and formed a new party, the Constitutional Union Party, to provide voters with a Unionist choice.

4. The Republican platform • needing to make their platform more broadly appealing, they expanded beyond antislavery, advocating free homesteads, a

protective tariff, a transcontinental railroad, and a guarantee of immigrant political rights; Lincoln emerged as the Republican Party candidate for president.

5. Sectional contests• in the North, Lincoln faced Douglas; in the South, Breckenridge confronted Bell; after a unprecedented number of voters cast

ballots, Lincoln won in all eighteen free states except New Jersey, which split electoral votes between him and Douglas; Breckenridge, running on a southern-rights platform, swept the Lower South plus Delaware, Maryland, and North Carolina.

V. The Union CollapsesC. Secession Winter

1. Southern Unionists2. Secessionists

• South Carolina, which seceded on December 20, 1860; by February 1861, six other Lower South states followed suit.

3. The Confederate States of America• February 4, 1861, representatives from the seven southern states that

had seceded formed the Confederate States of America, with Jefferson Davis as president and Alexander Stephens as vice president

• Lincoln’s election had split the Union and secession had split the South• the eight slave states of the Upper South rejected secession, at least for

the moment; they had a smaller stake in slavery and thus fewer fears that Republican ascendancy would bring economic catastrophe, social chaos, and racial war.

4. Lincoln takes office• wait until March 4, 1861, when Lincoln took office, to see what he would

do• began his inaugural address with assurances to the South, conciliatory

about slavery, but inflexible about the preservation of the Union, declaring that the decision for civil war or peace rested in the South’s hands.