Who were the members of the free-soil coalition, and what arguments did they use to demand that slavery not spread to the territories?
Why did the issue of statehood for California precipitate a crisis for the Union?
What were the major elements of the Compromise of 1850?
How did the Kansas-Nebraska Act initiate the collapse of the second party system?
Why did the southern states secede?
J
Ohn C. Calhoun of South Carolina and Ralph Waldo Emerson of Massachusetts had little in common, but both men saw in the Mexican War the omens of a national disaster. Mexico, Calhoun warned, was “the forbidden fruit; the penalty of eating it would be to subject our institutions to political death.” Calhoun knew that the addition of new territory acquired from Mexico would ignite a political firestorm over the expansion of slavery. Emerson agreed. “The United States will conquer Mexico,” Emerson conceded, “but it will be as the man swallows the arsenic. . . . Mexico will poison us.” Wars, as both men knew, have a way of corrupting ideals and breeding new wars, often in unforeseen ways. America’s victory in the war with Mexico spawned heated quarrels over newly acquired lands, quarrels that set in motion a series of fractious disputes that would fracture the union.
Slavery in the Territories
The dispute over the motives behind the Mexican War carried over into American political life during the 1850s. During the mid-nineteenth century, the United States remained a largely rural nation. Its 23 million people were increasingly diverse in ethnic background and religious beliefs, but they shared a passion for politics and political issues. Participation in civic life was high. Nearly three fourths of the electorate participated in the two presidential elections during the 1850s. People flocked to hear political speeches and avidly read the partisan daily newspapers. A European tourist reported that in America “you meet newspaper readers everywhere.” At midcentury, newspapers spread the word that political storm clouds over the fate of slavery were forming. In 1833, Andrew Jackson had predicted that southerners “intend to blow up a storm on the slave question.” He added that the pro-slavery firebrands “would do any act to destroy this union and form a southern confederacy bounded, north, by the Potomac River.” In 1848, the storm over the expansion of slavery swept across the nation.
The WILMOT proviso The Mexican War was less than three months old when the seeds of a new political conflict began to sprout. On August 8, 1846, a Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania, David Wilmot, delivered a provocative speech to the House in which he endorsed the annexation of Texas as a slave state. But slavery had come to an end in the rest of Mexico, he noted, and if new Mexican territory should be acquired, Wilmot declared, “God forbid that we should be the means of planting this institution [slavery] upon it.” If any additional land should be acquired from Mexico, Wilmot proposed, then “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist” there.
The proposed Wilmot Proviso ignited the festering debate over the extension of slavery. For a generation, since the Missouri controversy of 1819-1821, the issue had been lurking in the wings. The Missouri Compromise had provided a temporary solution by protecting slavery in states where it already existed but not allowing it in any newly acquired territories. Now, with the addition of new territories taken from Mexico, the stage was set for an even more volatile national debate. In 1846, the House of Representatives adopted the Wilmot Proviso, but the Senate balked. When Congress reconvened in December 1846, President James K. Polk, who believed a debate over slavery had no place in the conduct of the war in Mexico, dismissed the proviso as “mischievous and foolish.” He convinced David Wilmot to withhold his amendment from any bill dealing with the annexation of Mexican territory.
By then, however, others were ready to take up the cause. In one form or another, Wilmot’s idea kept cropping up in Congress for years thereafter. Abraham Lincoln later recalled that during his one term as a congressman, in 1847-1849, he voted for it “as good as forty times.”
Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, meanwhile, devised a thesis to counter Wilmot’s proviso, which he set before the Senate on February 19, 1847. Calhoun began by reasserting his pride in being a slaveholding cotton planter. He made no apologies for holding slaves and insisted that slaveholders had an unassailable right to take their slaves into any territories. Wilmot’s effort to exclude slaves from territories acquired from Mexico, Calhoun declared, would violate the Fifth Amendment, which forbids Congress to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, and slaves were property. By this clever stroke of logic, Calhoun took that basic guarantee of liberty, the Bill of Rights, and turned it into a basic guarantee of slavery. The irony was not lost on his critics, but the point became established southern dogma—echoed by his colleagues and formally endorsed by the Virginia legislature.
The burly senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, himself a slaveholder but also a nationalist eager to calm sectional tensions, found in Calhoun’s stance a set of abstractions “leading to no result.” Wilmot and Calhoun between them, he said, had fashioned a pair of shears. Neither blade alone would cut very well, but joined together they could sever the nation in two. One factor increasing the political tensions over slavery was the sharp rise in the price paid for slaves during the 1850s. The expansion of slavery into the new southwestern states created a spike in demand that meant that only the wealthy could afford to purchase slaves. Owning slaves and controlling the fruits of their labors became the foremost determinants of wealth in the South during the 1850s. And with wealth came political power. Large slaveholders and their supporters grew increasingly fierce in their insistence that owners be allowed to take their slaves into the new territories. To them, there was too much at stake to be denied access to new lands. Slavery thus played the crucial role in the series of events dividing the nation and prompting secession and civil war.
POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY Senator Benton and others sought to bypass the brewing conflict over slavery in the new territories. President Polk was among the first to suggest extending the Missouri Compromise, dividing free and slave territory at the latitude of 36°30', all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan suggested that the citizens of a territory “regulate their own internal concerns in their own way,” like the citizens of a state. Such an approach would take the contentious issue of allowing slavery in new territories out of the national arena and put it in the hands of those directly affected.
Popular sovereignty, or “squatter sovereignty,” as the idea was also called, appealed to many Americans. Without directly challenging the slaveholders’ access to the new lands, it promised to open the lands quickly to non-s laveholding farmers, who would almost surely dominate the territories. With this tacit understanding the idea prospered in the Midwest, where Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and other prominent Democrats soon endorsed it.
In 1848, when the Mexican War ended, the issue of introducing slavery into the new territories was no longer hypothetical. Nobody doubted that Oregon would become a free-soil (non-slave) territory, but it, too, was drawn into the growing controversy. Territorial status for Oregon, pending since 1846, was delayed because its provisional government had excluded slavery. To concede that provision would imply an authority drawn from the powers of Congress, since a territory was created by Congress. After much wrangling, an exhausted Congress let Oregon organize without slavery but postponed a decision on the Southwest territories. President Polk signed the bill on the principle that Oregon was north of 36°30', the latitude that had formed the basis of the Missouri Compromise in 1820.
President Polk had promised to serve only one term; exhausted and having accomplished his major goals, he refused to run again. At the 1848 Democratic Convention, Michigan senator Lewis Cass won the presidential nomination, but the party refused to endorse Cass’s “squatter sovereignty” plan. Instead, it simply denied the power of Congress to interfere with slavery in the states and criticized all efforts by anti-slavery activists to bring the question before Congress. The Whigs devised an even more artful shift. Once again, as in 1840, they passed over their party leader, Henry Clay, in favor of General Zachary Taylor, whose fame had grown since the Battle of Buena Vista. Taylor, born in Virginia and raised in Kentucky, was a Louisiana resident who owned more than a hundred slaves. He was an apolitical figure who had never voted in a national election, but he was also unusual among slaveholders in that he vigorously opposed the extension of slavery into new western territories and denounced the idea of secession.
THE FREE-SOIL COALITION As it had done in the 1840 election, the Whig party adopted no platform in an effort to avoid the divisive issue of slavery. But the anti-slavery impulse was not easily squelched. Congressman David Wilmot had raised a standard for resisting the expansion of slavery, to which a broad coalition could rally. Those Americans who had qualms about slavery but shied away from calling for abolition where it already existed could readily endorse the exclusion of slavery from the western territories. The Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise supplied honored precedents for doing so. Free soil in the new territories, therefore, rather than abolition in the slave states, became the rallying point for those opposed to slavery—and also the name of a new political party.
Three major groups combined to form the free-soil coalition: rebellious northern Democrats, anti-slavery Whigs, and members of the Liberty party, which was formed in 1840. Disaffection among the Democrats centered in New York, where the Van Burenite “Barnburners” seized upon the free-soil issue as a moral imperative. The Whigs who promoted Free-soil principles were centered in Massachusetts, where a group of “Conscience” Whigs battled the “Cotton” Whigs, a coalition of northern businessmen and southern planters. Conscience Whigs rejected the slaveholding nominee of their party, Zachary Taylor.
In 1848 these groups—Van Burenite Democrats, Conscience Whigs, and followers of the Liberty party—combined to create the Free-Soil party at a convention at Buffalo, New York, and nominated Martin Van Buren for president. The party’s platform stressed that slavery would not be allowed in the new territories acquired from Mexico. The new party infuriated John C. Calhoun and other southern Democrats committed to the expansion of slavery. Calhoun called Van Buren a “bold, unscrupulous and vindictive demagogue.” Other Democrats, both northern and southern, denounced Van Buren as a traitor and a hypocrite, while the New Yorker’s supporters praised his service as a “champion of freedom.”
The impact of the new Free-Soil party on the election was mixed. The Free-Soilers split the Democratic vote enough to throw New York to the Whig Zachary Taylor, and they split the Whig vote enough to give Ohio to the Democrat Lewis Cass, but Van Buren’s 291,000 votes lagged well behind the totals of 1,361,000 for Taylor and 1,222,000 for Cass. Taylor won with 163 to 127 electoral votes, and both major parties retained a national following. Taylor took eight slave states and seven free; Cass, just the opposite: seven slave and eight free.
THE CALIFORNIA GOLD RUSH Meanwhile, a new dimension had been introduced into the vexing question of the western territories: on January 24, 1848, on the property of John A. Sutter along the south fork of the American River, gold was discovered in the Mexican province of California, which nine days later would be ceded to the United States as a result of the treaty ending the Mexican War. Word of the gold strike spread quickly.
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren was nominated as the presidential candidate for the Free-Soil party, at the party’s convention in Buffalo, New York. In this cartoon, he is shown riding a buffalo past the Democratic and Whig party candidates.
In 1849 nearly one hundred thousand Americans, mostly men, set off for California, determined to find riches; by 1854 the number would top three hundred thousand. The California gold rush constituted the greatest mass migration in American history—and one of the most significant events in the first half of the nineteenth century. The infusion of California gold into the U. S. economy triggered a surge of prosperity and dramatic growth that eventually helped finance the Union military effort in the Civil War. The gold rush transformed the sleepy coastal village of San Francisco into the nation’s largest city west of Chicago.
The gold rush also shifted the nation’s center of gravity westward, spurred the construction of railroads and telegraph lines, and excited dreams of an eventual American empire based in the Pacific. The massive migration to California had profound effects nationwide. So many men left New England, for instance, that it would be years before the region’s gender ratio evened out again. The “forty-niners” included people from every social class and every state and territory, as well as slaves brought by their owners. Most forty-niners went overland; the rest sailed around South America or to Panama, where steamship passengers would have to disembark and make
Gold miners, ca. 1850
Miners panning for gold at their claim.
Their way across the isthmus to the Pacific coast, where they would board another steamship for the trip to San Francisco. Getting to California by sea could take as long as six months.
Unlike the land-hungry pioneers who traversed the overland trails, the miners were mostly unmarried young men with varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Few were interested in establishing a permanent settlement. They wanted to strike it rich and return home. The mining camps in California’s valleys and canyons and along its creek beds thus sprang up like mushrooms and disappeared almost as rapidly. As soon as rumors of a new strike made the rounds, miners converged on the area, joined soon thereafter by a hodgepodge of merchants and camp followers. When no more gold could be found, they picked up and moved on.
Women were as rare in the mining camps as liquor and guns were abundant. In 1850 less than 8 percent of California’s population was female, and even fewer women dared to live in the camps. Those who did could demand a premium for their work, as cooks, laundresses, entertainers, and prostitutes. In the polyglot mining camps, white Americans often looked with disdain upon the Hispanics and Chinese, who were most often employed as wage laborers to help in the panning process, separating gold from sand and gravel. But the whites focused their contempt on the Indians in particular. In the mining culture, it was not a crime to kill Indians or work them to death.
American miners tried several times to outlaw foreigners in the mining country but had to settle for a tax on foreign miners, which was applied to Mexicans in express violation of the treaty ending the Mexican War.
CALIFORNIA STATEHOOD In 1849 the new president, Zachary Taylor, turned out to be a southern man who championed Union principles. He decided to use California’s request for statehood as a lever to end the stalemate in Congress brought about by the slavery issue. Inexperienced in politics, Taylor had a soldier’s practical mind. Slavery should be upheld where it existed, he believed, but he had little patience with abstract theories about slavery in territories where it probably could not exist. Why not make California and New Mexico free states immediately, he reasoned, and bypass the vexing issue of slavery?
But the Californians, in desperate need of organized government, were ahead of him. By December 1849, without consulting Congress, Americans in Hispanic California had put a free-state (no-slavery) government into operation. New Mexico responded more slowly, but by 1850 Americans there had adopted a free-state constitution. The Mormons around Salt Lake, meanwhile, drafted a basic law for the state of Deseret, which embraced most of the Mexican cession, including a slice of the coast from Los Angeles to San Diego.
In his annual message on December 4, 1849, President Taylor endorsed immediate statehood for California and urged Congress to avoid injecting slavery into the issue. The new Congress, however, was in no mood for simple solutions. By 1850, tensions over the morality and the future of slavery were boiling over. At the same time that tempers were flaring over the issue of allowing slavery into the new western territories, anti-slavery members of the House of Representatives were proposing legislation to ban slavery in the District of Columbia. Further complicating the political debate was the claim by Texas, a slave state, to half of the New Mexico Territory. These were only a few of the complex dilemmas confronting the nation’s statesmen as they assembled in Washington, D. C., for the 1850 legislative session.
The Compromise of 1850
At the end of 1849, southerners fumed over President Taylor’s efforts to bring California and New Mexico into the union as free states. After all, some of them reasoned, mostly southerners had fought in the Mexican War, and therefore their desire for the expansion of slavery should be given more weight. Other southerners demanded a federal fugitive slave law that would require northern authorities to arrest and return runaways. Irate southerners threatened to leave the Union. “I avow before this House and country, and in the presence of the living God,” shouted Robert Toombs, a Georgia congressman, “that if by your legislation you seek to drive us [slaveholders] from the territories of California and New Mexico. . . and to abolish slavery in this District [of Columbia] . . . I am for disunion”
As the new legislative session opened, the spotlight fell on the Senate, where a stellar cast—the triumvirate of Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, with William H. Seward, Stephen A. Douglas, and Jefferson Davis in supporting roles—enacted one of the great dramas of American politics: the Compromise of 1850. With southerners threatening secession, leaders again turned to seventy-two-year-old Henry Clay, who, as Abraham Lincoln later said, was “regarded by all, as the man for the crisis.” Clay had earlier fashioned the Missouri Compromise, and those seeking peace between the regions looked to him again. Unless some compromise could be found, the senator warned, a war “so furious, so bloody, so implacable and so exterminating” would fracture the Union.
THE GREAT DEBATE On January 29, 1850, having gained the support of Daniel Webster, Clay presented to Congress a package of eight resolutions meant to settle the “controversy between the free and slave states, growing out of the subject of slavery.” His proposals represented what he called a “great national scheme of compromise and harmony.” He proposed (1) to admit California as a free state; (2) to organize the territories of New Mexico and Utah without restrictions on slavery, allowing the residents to decide the issue for themselves; (3) to deny Texas its extreme claim to much of New Mexico; (4) to compensate Texas by having the federal government pay the pre-annexation Texas debts; (5) to retain slavery in the District of Columbia; but (6) to abolish the slave trade in the nation’s capital; (7) to adopt a more effective federal fugitive slave law; and (8) to deny congressional authority to interfere with the interstate slave trade. His complex cluster of proposals became in substance the Compromise of 1850, but only after the most celebrated debate in Congressional history.
On February 5-6, Clay summoned all his eloquence in promoting his proposed settlement to the Senate. In the interest of “peace, concord and harmony,” he called for an end to “passion, passion—party, party—and intemperance.” Otherwise, he warned, continued sectional bickering would lead to a “furious, bloody” civil war.
On March 4, John C. Calhoun, the uncompromising defender of slavery, left his sickbed to sit in the Senate chamber, a gaunt, pallid figure draped in a black cloak, as a colleague read his defiant speech in which he blamed the North for inciting civil war. “I have, Senators, believed from the first that the agitation of the subject of slavery would, if not prevented by some timely and effective measure, end in disunion,” said James M. Mason on Calhoun’s behalf. Neither Clay’s compromise nor Taylor’s efforts would serve the Union, he added. The South simply needed Congress to accept its rights: equality of treatment in the territories, the return of fugitive slaves, and some guarantee of “an equilibrium between the sections.” Otherwise, Calhoun warned, the “cords which bind” the Union would be severed. The South would leave the Union and form its own government.
Three days later, Calhoun, who would die in three weeks, returned to the Senate on March 7 to hear Daniel Webster speak. He chose as the central theme of his much-anticipated three-hour speech the preservation of the Union: “I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern
Man, but as an American____I speak today for the preservation of the Union.”
The geographic extent of slavery had already been determined, Webster insisted, by the Northwest Ordinance, by the Missouri Compromise, and in the new territories by the law of nature. He criticized extremists on both sides.
Clay’s compromise
Warning against an impending sectional conflict, Henry Clay outlines his plan for “compromise and harmony” on the Senate floor.
Webster’s conciliatory speech brought down a storm upon his head. New England anti-slavery leaders lambasted him for betraying the ideals of his region. On March 11, William Seward, the Whig senator from New York, gave the anti-slavery reply to Webster. He declared that any compromise with slavery was “radically wrong and essentially vicious.” There was, he said, “a higher law than the Constitution,” and it demanded the abolition of slavery. Abolitionists loved Seward’s address, but southerners as well as northern conservatives despised it. “Senator Seward is against all compromise,” the New York Herald reported. His “views are those of the extreme fanatics of the North, looking forward to the utter destruction of the institutions of the South.”
TOWARD A COMPROMISE On July 4, 1850, supporters of the Union staged a grand rally at the base of the unfinished Washington Monument in Washington, D. C. President Zachary Taylor went to hear the speeches, lingering in the hot sun and humid heat. Five days later he died of cholera, likely caused by tainted food or water.
President Taylor’s sudden death strengthened the chances of a congressional compromise over the slavery issue. Taylor, a soldier, was replaced by Vice President Millard Fillmore. The son of a poor upstate New York farmer, Fillmore supported Henry Clay’s compromise. It was a strange switch: Taylor, the Louisiana slaveholder, had been ready to make war on his native region; Fillmore, who southerners thought opposed slavery, was ready to make peace.
Millard Fillmore
Fillmore’s support of the Compromise of 1850 helped sustain the Union through the crisis.
At this point, the young senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, a rising star in the Democratic party, rescued Henry Clay’s faltering compromise. Brash and brilliant, short and stocky, and famous for his large head, Douglas argued that given nearly everybody’s objections to one or another provision of Clay’s “comprehensive scheme,” perhaps the solution was to break it up into separate measures. Few members were prepared to vote for all of them, but Douglas hoped to mobilize a majority for each.
The plan worked. By September 20, President Fillmore had signed the last of the measures into law. The Union had muddled through another crisis, and the settlement went down in history as the Compromise of 1850. For a time it defused an explosive situation, settled each of the major points at issue, and postponed secession and civil war for ten years.
In its final version, the Compromise of 1850 included the following elements: (1) California entered the Union as a free state, ending forever the old balance of free and slave states; (2) the Texas-New Mexico Act made New Mexico a territory and set the Texas boundary at its present location. In return for giving up its claims, Texas was paid $10 million, which secured payment of the state’s debt; (3) the Utah Act set up the Utah Territory. The territorial act in each case omitted reference to slavery except to give the territorial legislature authority over “all rightful subjects of legislation” with provision for appeal to the federal courts. For the sake of agreement, the deliberate ambiguity of the statement was its merit. Northern congressmen could assume that the territorial legislatures might act to exclude slavery; southern congressmen assumed that they could not; (4) a new Fugitive Slave Act put the matter of apprehending runaway slaves wholly under federal jurisdiction and stacked the cards in favor of slave catchers; and, (5) as a gesture to anti-slavery forces, the public sale of slaves, but not slavery itself, was abolished in the District of Columbia. The awful spectacle of chained-together slaves passing through the streets of the nation’s capital, to be sold at public auctions, was brought to an end.
President Millard Fillmore pronounced the five measures making up the Compromise of 1850 “a final settlement.” Still, doubts lingered that both North and South could be reconciled to the measures permanently. In the South the disputes of 1846-1850 had transformed the abstract doctrine of secession into a growing reality fed by “fire-eaters” such as Robert Barnwell Rhett of South Carolina, William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama, and Edmund Ruffin of Virginia.
But once the furies aroused by the Wilmot Proviso had been spent, the compromise left little on which to focus pro-slavery agitation. Ironically, after its formation, California tended to elect pro-slavery men to Congress. New Mexico and Utah were far away, and in any case at least hypothetically open to slavery. In fact, both states adopted slave codes, but the census of 1860 reported no slaves in New Mexico and only twenty-nine in Utah.
THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT The Fugitive Slave Act was the most controversial element of the compromise. It was the one clear-cut victory for the cause of slavery, but would the North enforce it? Southern insistence on the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise of 1850 outraged abolitionists. The act did more than strengthen the hand of slave catchers; it offered a strong temptation to kidnap free blacks in northern “free” states. The law denied alleged fugitives a jury trial. In addition, federal marshals could require citizens to help locate and capture runaways. Abolitionists fumed. “This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write,” Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled in his diary. He advised neighbors to break the new law “on the earliest occasion.” The occasion soon arose in Detroit, Michigan, where only military force stopped the rescue of an alleged fugitive slave by an outraged mob in October 1850. There were relatively few such incidents, however. In the first six years of the Fugitive Slave Act, only three runaways were forcibly rescued from slave catchers. On the other hand, probably fewer than two hundred were returned to bondage during those years. The Fugitive Slave Act was a powerful emotional and symbolic force arousing the anti-slavery impulse in the North.
UNCLE tom’s cabin During the 1850s, anti-slavery forces found their most persuasive appeal not in the Fugitive Slave Act but in the fictional drama of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The pious daughter, sister, and wife of Congregationalist ministers, Stowe epitomized the powerful religious underpinnings of the abolitionist movement. She had decided to write the novel because of her disgust with
“The Greatest Book of the Age”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as this advertisement indicates, was a best seller.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a smashing commercial success; by 1855 it was called “the most popular novel of our day.” The novel depicts a combination of unlikely saints and sinners, stereotypes, fugitive slaves, and melodramatic escapades, and made the brutal realities of slavery real to readers. The abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, a former slave himself, said that Stowe’s powerful novel was like “a flash” that lit “a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery.” Slaveholders were incensed by Stowe’s bestselling book. One of them mailed Stowe an anonymous parcel containing the severed ear of a disobedient slave. Yet it took time for
The novel to work its effect on public opinion. At the time of its publication, the country was enjoying a surge of prosperity fueled by California gold, and the course of the presidential campaign in 1852 reflected a common desire to lay sectional quarrels to rest.
THE ELECTION OF 1852 In 1852, the Democrats chose Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire as their presidential candidate; their platform endorsed the Compromise of 1850. For their part, the Whigs repudiated the lackluster Millard Fillmore, who had faithfully supported the Compromise of 1850, and once again tried to exploit martial glory. It took fifty-three ballots, but the convention finally chose General Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War and a Virginia native backed mainly by northern Whigs. The Whig Convention dutifully endorsed the compromise, but with some opposition from the North. Scott, an able army commander but an inept politician, had gained a reputation for anti-slavery and nativist sentiments, alienating German - and Irish-American voters. In the end, Scott carried only Tennessee, Kentucky, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Pierce overwhelmed him in the Electoral College, 254 to 42, although the popular vote was close: 1.6 million to 1.4 million. The third-party Free-Soilers mustered only 156,000 votes, for John P. Hale, in contrast to the 291,000 they had tallied for Van Buren in 1848.
Forty-eight-year-old Franklin Pierce, an undistinguished but handsome former congressman and senator who had fought in the Mexican War, was, like James Polk, touted as another Andrew Jackson. He eagerly promoted western expansion, even if it meant adding more slave states to the Union. But the youngest president to date was unable to unite the warring factions of his party. He was neither a statesman nor a leader. After the election, Pierce wrote a poignant letter to his wife in which he expressed his frustration at the prospect of keeping North and South together. “I can do no right,” he sighed. “What am I to do, wife? Stand by me.” By the end of Pierce’s first year in office, the leaders of his own party had decided he was a failure. By trying to be all things to all people, Pierce was labeled a “doughface”: a “Northern man with Southern principles.”
The Kansas-Nebraska Crisis
America’s growing commercial interests in Asia during the midnineteenth century helped spark a growing desire for a transcontinental railroad line connecting the eastern seaboard with the Pacific coast. During the 1850s the only land added to the United States was a barren stretch of some thirty thousand square miles south of the Gila River in present-day New Mexico and Arizona. By the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the United States paid Mexico $10 million for land offering a likely route for a transcontinental railroad. The idea of building a railroad linking the far-flung regions of the new continental domain of the United States reignited sectional rivalries and reopened the slavery issue.
Douglas’s Nebraska proposal In 1852 and 1853, Congress debated several proposals for a transcontinental rail line. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis favored the southern route and promoted the Gadsden Purchase. Any other route, he explained, would go through the territories granted to Indians, which stretched from Texas to the Canadian border. Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois offered an alternative: Chicago should be the transcontinental railroad’s eastern terminus. Since 1845, Douglas and other supporters of a northern transcontinental route had offered bills for a new territory west of Missouri and Iowa bearing the Indian name Nebraska.
In 1854, settlers in Kansas and Nebraska asked Congress to grant them official status as U. S. territories eligible for statehood. New territories, however, raised the vexing question of slavery. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Senator Douglas introduced a bill, later called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that included the entire unorganized portion of the Louisiana Purchase, extending to the Canadian border. To win the support of southern
Legislators, Douglas championed the principle of “popular sovereignty,” whereby voters in each territory could decide whether to allow slavery.
Stephen A. Douglas, ca. 1852
It was a clever dodge, since the 1820 Missouri Compromise would exclude slaves until a territorial government had made a decision. Southerners quickly spotted the barrier, and Douglas just as quickly made two more concessions. He supported an amendment for repeal of the Missouri Compromise insofar as it excluded slavery north of latitude 36°30', and he agreed to the creation of two new territorial governments, Kansas, west of Missouri, and Author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Nebraska, west of Iowa and Minnesota.
Douglas’s motives remain unclear. Railroads were foremost in his mind, but he was also influenced by the desire to win support for his bill in the South, by the hope that his promotion of “popular sovereignty” would quiet the slavery issue and open the Great Plains to development, or by a chance to split the Whigs over the issue. Whatever his reasoning, he had blundered, damaging his presidential chances and setting the country on the road to civil war. In abandoning the long-standing Missouri Compromise boundary line and allowing territorial residents to decide the issue of slavery for themselves, Douglas renewed sectional tensions and forced moderate political leaders to align with the extremes. In the end the Kansas-Nebraska Act would destroy the Whig party, fragment the Democratic party, and spark a territorial civil war in Kansas.
The tragic flaw in Douglas’s reasoning was his failure to appreciate the growing intensity of anti-slavery sentiment spreading across the country. His proposal to repeal the Missouri Compromise was less than a week old when six anti-slavery congressmen published a protest, the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats.” It denounced the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act as a “gross violation of a sacred pledge [the Missouri Compromise].” The manifesto urged Americans to use all means to defeat Douglas’s bill and thereby “rescue” the nation “from the domination of slavery, . . . for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.” Across the North, editorials, sermons, speeches, and petitions echoed this indignation. What had been the opinion of a radical minority was fast becoming the common view of northerners.
In Congress, however, Douglas had masterfully assembled the votes for his Kansas-Nebraska Act, and he forced the issue with tireless energy. The inept President Pierce impulsively added his support. Southerners lined up behind Douglas, with notable exceptions, such as Texas senator Sam Houston, who denounced the act’s violation of two solemn compacts: the Missouri Compromise and the confirmation of the territory deeded to the Indians “as long as grass shall grow and water run.” He was not the only one concerned about the Indians; federal agents were already busy hoodwinking or bullying Indians into relinquishing their lands or rights. Douglas and Pierce whipped reluctant Democrats into line (though about half the northern Democrats refused to yield), pushing the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill by a vote of 37 to 14 in the Senate and 113 to 100 in the House. The anti-slavery faction in the Congress had been crushed.
Many in the North reasoned that if the Missouri Compromise was not a sacred pledge, then neither was the Fugitive Slave Act. On June 2, 1854, Boston witnessed the most dramatic demonstration against the act. Free
THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT, 1854
I I Free states and territories
I I Slave states
I I Open to slavery by popular sovereignty, Compromise of 1850
I I Open to slavery by popular sovereignty, Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
Battle site
What were the terms of the Kansas-Nebraska Act? How did it lead to the creation of the Republican party? What happened at Pottawatomie and Osawatomie?
Blacks in Boston had taken in a runaway Virginia slave named Anthony Burns; federal marshals then arrived to arrest and return him. incensed by what had happened, a crowd of two thousand abolitionists led by a minister stormed the jail in an effort to free Burns. In the melee a federal marshal was killed. At Burns’s trial, held to determine whether he indeed was a fugitive, a compromise was proposed that would have allowed Bostonians to buy Burns his freedom, but the plan was scuttled by President Pierce, who was determined to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. On June 2, the day that state militia and federal troops marched Burns through Boston to a ship waiting
To return him to Virginia, some fifty thousand people lined the streets. Many of them shouted insults at the federal officials. As it happened, Anthony Burns was the last fugitive slave to be returned from Boston and was soon freed through purchase by the African American community of Boston.
THE EMERGENCE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY By the mid-1850s, the sharp tensions over slavery were fracturing the nation. The national organizations of Baptists and Methodists, for instance, had split over slavery by 1845 and formed new northern and southern organizations supported the two denominations. The national parties were also beginning to buckle under the strain of slavery. The Democrats managed to postpone disruption for a while, but their congressional delegation lost heavily in the North, enhancing the influence of their southern wing.
The strain of the Kansas-Nebraska Act soon destroyed the Whig party. Southern Whigs now tended to abstain from voting, while northern Whigs gravitated toward two new parties. One was the American (“Know-Nothing”) party, which had emerged in response to the surge of mostly Catholic immigrants from Ireland and Germany. The anti-Catholic “Know-Nothings” embraced nativism (opposition to foreign immigrants) by promoting the denial of citizenship to newcomers. In the early 1850s, Know-Nothings won several local elections in Massachusetts and New York.
The other new party, which attracted even more northern Whigs, was formed in 1854 when the so-called conscience Whigs, those opposed to slavery, split from the “cotton Whigs” and joined with independent Democrats and Free-Soilers to form the Republican party. A young Illinois Congressman named Abraham Lincoln illustrated the transition of many northern Whigs to the new Republican party. He said that the passage of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act angered him “as he had never been before.” It transformed his views on slavery. Unless the North mobilized to stop the efforts of pro-slavery southerners, the future of the Union was imperiled. From that moment on, Lincoln focused his energies on reversing the Kansas-Nebraska Act and promoting the anti-slavery movement.
“bleeding Kansas” After the controversial passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, attention swung to the plains of Kansas, where opposing elements gathered to stage a rehearsal for civil war. While Nebraska would become a free state, Kansas soon exposed the potential for mischief in Senator Douglas’s idea of popular sovereignty. The ambiguity of the law, useful to Douglas in getting it passed, only added to the chaos. The people living in the Kansas Territory were “perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution.” That in itself invited conflicting interpretations, but the law said nothing about the timing of any decision, adding to each side’s sense of urgency in getting political control of the fifty-million-acre territory.
The settlement of Kansas therefore differed from the typical pioneering efforts. Groups sprang up in North and South to hurry right-minded migrants westward. When Kansas’s first federal governor arrived, in 1854, he ordered a census taken and scheduled an election for a territorial legislature in 1855. On election day, several thousand “border ruffians” crossed the river from Missouri, illegally swept the polls for pro-slavery forces, and vowed to kill every “God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.” The governor denounced the vote as a fraud but did nothing to alter the results, for fear of being killed himself. The territorial legislature expelled its few anti-slavery members, adopted a drastic slave code, and made it a capital offense to aid a fugitive slave and a felony even to question the legality of slavery in the territory.
Outraged free-state advocates rejected this “bogus” government and moved directly toward application to Congress for statehood. In 1855, a constitutional convention, the product of an extralegal election, met in Topeka, drafted a state constitution excluding both slavery and free blacks from Kansas, and applied for admission to the Union. By 1856 a free-state “governor” and “legislature” were functioning in Topeka; thus there were two illegal governments in the Kansas Territory. The prospect of getting any government to command authority seemed dim, and both sides began to arm.
Finally, the tense confrontation began to slip into violent conflict. In May 1856 a pro-slavery mob entered the free-state town of Lawrence, Kansas, destroyed newspaper presses, set fire to the free-state governor’s home, stole property, and demolished the Free-State Hotel.
The “sack of Lawrence” resulted in just one casualty, but the excitement aroused a zealous abolitionist named John Brown, who had a history of mental instability. The child of fervent Ohio Calvinists who taught their children that life was a crusade against sin, Brown believed that slavery was the most wicked of sins. Two days after Lawrence was sacked, Brown set out with four of his sons and three other men for Pottawatomie, Kansas, the site of a pro-slavery settlement near the Missouri border, where they dragged five men from their houses and hacked them to death with swords in front of their screaming families. “God is my judge,” Brown told his son upon their return. “We were justified under the circumstances.”
The Pottawatomie Massacre (May 24-25, 1856) set off a guerrilla war in the Kansas Territory that lasted through the fall. On August 30, Missouri ruffians raided the free-state settlement at Osawatomie, Kansas. They looted and burned the houses and shot John Brown’s son Frederick through the heart. The elder Brown, who barely escaped, looked back at the town being devastated by “Satan’s legions” and swore to his surviving sons and followers, “I have only a short time to live—only one death to die, and I will die fighting for this cause.” Altogether, by the end of 1856, about 200 settlers had been killed in Kansas and $2 million in property destroyed during the territorial civil war over slavery. Approximately 1,500 federal troops were dispatched to restore order.
Kansas a Free State
This broadside advertises a series of mass meetings in Kansas in support of the free-state cause, based on the principle of “squatter” or popular sovereignty.
VIOLENCE IN THE SENATE
The violence in Kansas over slavery spilled over into Congress. On May 22,
1856, the day after the burning of Lawrence and two days before the Pottawatomie Massacre, a sudden flash of
Violence on the Senate floor electrified the whole country. Just two days earlier, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an unyielding foe of slavery, had delivered an inflammatory speech on “The Crime against Kansas.” His incendiary two-day speech insulted slaveowners. Sumner singled out the elderly senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina for censure. Butler, Sumner charged, had “chosen a mistress. . . who. . . though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”
Sumner’s indignant rudeness might well have backfired had it not been for Butler’s cousin Preston S. Brooks, a fiery-tempered South Carolina congressman. For two days, Brooks brooded over the insult to his relative, knowing that Sumner would refuse a challenge to a duel. On May 22 he confronted Sumner at his Senate desk, accused him of slander against South Carolina and Butler, and began beating him about the head with a cane while stunned colleagues looked on. Sumner, struggling to rise, wrenched the desk from the floor and collapsed. Brooks kept beating him until his cane broke.
Brooks had satisfied his rage, but in doing so had created a martyr for the anti-slavery cause. For two and a half years, Sumner’s empty Senate seat was a solemn reminder of the violence done to him. When the House censured Brooks, he resigned, only to return after being triumphantly reelected. The South Carolina governor held a banquet in Brooks’s honor, and hundreds of southern admirers sent him new canes. The editor of the Richmond Enquirer urged Brooks to cane Sumner again: “These vulgar abolitionists in the Senate. . . must be lashed into submission.” Northerners hastened to Sumner’s defense. The news of the beating drove John Brown “crazy,” his eldest son remembered, “crazy” The brutal beating of Senator Sumner had a direct political effect by driving more northerners into the new Republican party. By the late spring of 1856 there were Republican party offices in twenty-two states and the District of Columbia.
SECTIONAL POLITICS Within the span of five days in May of 1856, “Bleeding Kansas,” “Bleeding Sumner,” and “Bully Brooks” had set the tone for another presidential election. The major parties could no longer evade the slavery issue. Already in February it had split the infant American Party wide open. Southern delegates, with help from New York, killed a resolution to restore the Missouri Compromise and nominated Millard Fillmore for president. Later what was left of the Whig party endorsed him as well.
At its first national convention, the Republican party passed over its leading figure, New York senator William H. Seward, who was awaiting a better chance in I860. The party instead fastened on a military hero, John C. Fremont, “the Pathfinder,” who had led the conquest of Mexican California. The Republican platform also owed much to the Whigs. It favored federal funding for a transcontinental railroad and, in general, more government-financed internal improvements. It condemned the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Democratic policy of territorial expansion, and “those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy and Slavery.” It was the first time a major-party platform had taken a stand against slavery.
The Democrats, meeting two weeks earlier in June, had rejected Franklin Pierce, the hapless victim of so much turmoil. Pierce, who struggled most of his life with alcoholism and self-doubt, may have been the most hated person in the nation by 1856. The Pierce presidency, a Philadelphia newspaper charged, was one of “weakness, indecision, rashness, ignorance, and an entire and utter absence of dignity.” Pierce remains the only elected president to be denied renomination by his party. The Democrats also turned their back on Stephen A. Douglas because of the damage done by his Kansas-Nebraska Act. The party therefore turned to
James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, a former senator and secretary of state who had long sought the nomination. The party and its candidate nevertheless supported Pierce’s policies. The Democratic platform endorsed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, called for vigorous enforcement of the fugitive slave law, and stressed that Congress should not interfere with slavery in either states or territories. The party reached out to its newly acquired Irish and German voters by condemning nativism and endorsing religious liberty.
The campaign of 1856 resolved itself as a sectional contest in which parties vied for northern or southern votes. The Republicans had few southern supporters and only a handful in the border states, where fear of disunion held many Whigs in line. Buchanan thus went into the campaign as the
Candidate of the only remaining national party. Fremont swept the northernmost states with 114 electoral votes, but Buchanan added five free states—Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and California—to his southern majority for a total of 174.
The sixty-five-year-old Buchanan, America’s first unmarried president, brought to the White House a portfolio of impressive achievements in politics and diplomacy. His political career went back to 1815, when he served as a Federalist legislator in Pennsylvania before switching to Andrew Jackson’s party in the 1820s. He had served in Congress for over twenty years and had been ambassador to Russia and Britain as well as James K. Polk’s secretary of state. His long quest for the presidency had been built on his commitment to states’ rights and his aggressive promotion of territorial expansion. His political debts reinforced his belief that saving the Union depended upon concessions to the South. Republicans charged that he lacked the backbone to stand up to the southerners who dominated the Democratic majorities in Congress. His choice of four slave-state men and only three free-state men for his cabinet seemed another bad omen. It was.
The Deepening Sectional Crisis
During James Buchanan’s first six months in office in 1857, three major events caused his undoing: (1) the Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, (2) new troubles in strife-torn Kansas, and (3) a financial panic that sparked a widespread economic depression. For all of Buchanan’s experience as a legislator and diplomat, he failed to handle those and other key issues in a statesmanlike manner. The new president proved to be a mediocre chief executive.
The dred SCOTT CASE On March 6, 1857, two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Supreme Court rendered a decision in the long-pending case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott, born a slave in Virginia in about 1800, had been taken to St. Louis in 1830 and sold to an army surgeon, who took him to Illinois, then to the Wisconsin Territory (later Minnesota), and finally back to St. Louis in 1842. While in the Wisconsin Territory, Scott had married Harriet Robinson, and they eventually had two daughters.
After his owner’s death, in 1843, Scott had tried to buy his freedom. In 1846, Harriet Scott persuaded her husband to file suit in the Missouri courts, claiming that residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory had made him free. A jury decided in his favor, but the state supreme court ruled against him. When the case rose on appeal to the Supreme Court, the nation anxiously awaited its opinion on whether freedom once granted could be lost by returning to a slave state.
Seventy-nine-year-old Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, an ardent supporter of the South and slavery, wrote the Court’s majority opinion. He ruled that Scott lacked legal standing because he lacked citizenship, as did all former slaves. At the time the Constitution was adopted, Taney claimed, blacks “had for more than a century been regarded as. . . so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” On the issue of Scott’s residency, Taney argued that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had deprived citizens of property by prohibiting slavery in selected states, an action “not warranted by the Constitution.”
The upshot was that Chief Justice Taney and the rest of the Supreme Court had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional for the first time since Marbury v. Madison (1803). Congress had repealed the Missouri Compromise in the Kansas-Nebraska Act three years earlier, but the Dred Scott decision now challenged the concept of popular sovereignty. If Congress itself could not exclude slavery from a territory, then presumably neither could a territorial government created by an act of Congress.
Far from settling the issue of slavery in the territories, Taney’s ruling fanned the flames of dissension. Republicans protested the Dred Scott decision because it nullified their anti-slavery program. It had also reinforced the suspicion that the pro-slavery faction was hatching a conspiracy. Were not all but one of the justices who had voted with Taney in the Dred Scott case southerners? And President Buchanan had sought to influence the Court’s decision both before and during his inaugural ceremony. Besides, if Dred Scott were not a citizen and had no standing in court, there was no case before the Court. The majority ruling about slavery in the territories was an obiter dictum—a statement not essential to deciding the case and therefore not binding.
Pro-slavery elements greeted the Court’s opinion as binding. Now the most militant among them were emboldened to make yet another demand. It was not enough to deny Congress the right to interfere with slavery in the territories; Congress had an obligation to protect the property of slaveholders, making a federal slave code the next step in the militant effort to defend slavery.
THE LECOMPTON CONSTITUTION Meanwhile, out west, in the Kansas Territory, the struggle over slavery in the future state continued. Just before President Buchanan’s inauguration, in early 1857, the pro-slavery territorial legislature called for a constitutional convention. Since no provision was made for a referendum on the constitution, however, the governor vetoed the measure, and then the legislature overrode his veto. The Kansas governor resigned on the day Buchanan took office, and the new president replaced him with Robert J. Walker. A native Pennsylvanian who had made a political career first in Mississippi and later as a member of Polk’s cabinet, Walker had greater prestige than his predecessors, and he put the fate of the Union above the expansion of slavery. In Kansas he sensed a chance to advance the cause of both the Union and his party. Under Stephen A. Douglas’s principle of “popular sovereignty,” fair elections would produce a state that would be both free and Democratic.
Walker arrived in Kansas in 1857, and with Buchanan’s approval the new governor pledged to the free-state Kansans (who made up an overwhelming majority of the residents) that the new constitution would be submitted to a fair vote. In spite of his pleas, however, he arrived too late to persuade free-state men to vote for convention delegates in elections they were sure had been rigged against them. Later, however, Walker did persuade the free-state leaders to vote in the election of a new territorial legislature.
As a result a polarity arose between an anti-slavery legislature and a proslavery constitutional convention. The convention, meeting at Lecompton, Kansas, drafted a constitution under which Kansas would become a slave state. Free-state men boycotted the vote on the new constitution because in their view it was rigged. At that point, President Buchanan took a fateful step. Influenced by southern advisers and politically dependent upon powerful southern congressmen, he decided to renege on his pledge to Governor Walker and endorse the pro-slavery Lecompton convention. A new wave of outrage swept across the northern states. Democratic senator Stephen A. Douglas dramatically broke with the president over the issue, siding with Republicans because the people of Kansas had been denied the right to decide the issue. Governor Walker resigned in protest, and the election went according to form: 6,226 for the constitution with slavery, 569 for the constitution without slavery. Meanwhile, the acting governor had convened the anti-slavery legislature, which called for another election to vote the Lecompton Constitution up or down. Most of the pro-slavery settlers boycotted this election, and the result, on January 4, 1858, was overwhelming: 10,226 against the constitution, 138 for the constitution with slavery, 24 for the constitution without slavery.
The combined results suggested a clear majority against slavery, but the pro-southern Buchanan stuck to his support of the unpopular Lecompton Constitution, driving another wedge into the Democratic party. In the Senate, administration forces convinced enough northern Democrats to follow his lead, and in 1858 the Lecompton Constitution was passed. In the House enough anti-Lecompton Democrats combined to put through an amendment for a new, carefully supervised popular vote in Kansas. On August 2, 1858, Kansas voters rejected the Lecompton constitution, 11,300 to 1,788. With that vote, Kansas, now firmly in the hands of its new anti-slavery legislature, largely ended its provocative role in the sectional controversy.
THE PANIC OF 1857 The third emergency of Buchanan’s first half year in office, a national financial crisis, occurred in August 1857. It was brought on by a reduction in foreign demand for American grain, overly aggressive railroad construction, a surge in manufacturing production that outran the growth of market demand, and the continued confusion caused by the state banknote system. The failure of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company on August 24, 1857, precipitated the panic, which was followed by an economic slump from which the country did not emerge until 1859.
Every major event in the late 1850s seemed to get drawn into the vortex of the festering sectional conflict, and business troubles were no exception. Northern businessmen tended to blame the depression on the Democratic Tariff of 1857, which had cut rates on imports to their lowest level since 1816. The agricultural South weathered the crisis better than the North. Cotton prices fell, but slowly, and world markets for cotton quickly recovered. The result was an exalted notion of King Cotton’s importance to the world economy and an apparent confirmation of the growing argument that the southern system of slave-based agriculture was superior to the free-labor system of the North.
DOUGLAS VERSUS LINCOLN Amid the recriminations over the Dred Scott decision, “Bleeding Kansas,” and the floundering economy, the center could not hold. The controversy over slavery in Kansas put severe strains on the most substantial cord of union that was left, the Democratic party. To many, Senator Stephen A. Douglas seemed the best hope for unity and union, one of the few remaining Democratic leaders with support in both the North and the South. In 1858 he faced reelection to the Senate against the opposition of both Buchanan Democrats and Republicans. The year 1860 would give him a chance for the presidency, but first he had to secure his home base in Illinois.
To oppose him, Illinois Republicans named a small-town lawyer from Springfield, Abraham Lincoln, the lanky, rawboned former Whig state legislator and one-term congressman. Lincoln had served in the Illinois legislature until 1842 and in 1846 had won a seat in Congress. After a single term, he had retired from active politics to cultivate his law practice in Springfield. In 1854, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act drew Lincoln back into the political arena. When Douglas appeared in Springfield to defend his idea of popular sovereignty, Lincoln countered
World History
