Chapter 13: Slavery and the Road to Disunion, 1850–1861

TIMELINE

1850	Fugitive Slave Law passes, wreaking havoc in the North
1852	Uncle Tom’s Cabin published in book form  • Franklin Pierce elected president
1853	American Party dominates the Whigs in many Northern states
1854	Kansas-Nebraska Act passed  • Republican Party formed
1856	John Brown leads attacks on farmers in “Bleeding Kansas”  • James Buchanan elected president
1857	Supreme Court decides Dred Scott case
1858	Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate for Illinois senate seat
1859	John Brown organizes raid on Harper’s Ferry
1860	Abraham Lincoln nominated by Republicans  • Democratic Party splits into Douglas and Breckinridge wings  • John Bell forms Constitutional Union Party, making a four-way election  • Abraham Lincoln elected  • South Carolina secedes in December, followed by the rest of the Southern tier

IMPORTANT PEOPLE, PLACES, EVENTS, AND CONCEPTS

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”

James Breckinridge

John Fremont

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

Southern tier

American Party

John Brown

Harper’s Ferry

national slave code

Roger Taney

Bleeding Kansas

Stephen Douglas

Kansas-Nebraska Act

popular sovereignty

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

border ruffians

Dred Scott case

Abraham Lincoln

Republican Party

We protest the Kansas and Nebraska Bill, which excludes “immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States,” converting that “vast unoccupied” area “into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”

—adapted from the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, January 24, 1854

INTRODUCTION

From 1850 to 1861, the national discussion was dominated by the controversy over slavery. Literature, Congress, the territories, the parties, the Supreme Court, and the presidential election of 1860 were all arenas for these debates. In the past, some historians have blamed sectional differences, abolitionists, or the fight over states’ rights for the Civil War. The consensus is now that slavery was behind all the controversies.

CONFLICTS OVER SLAVERY

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The firestorm that grew as a result of the Fugitive Slave Law was fueled by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted the fate of runaways and the experience of slavery in heart-wrenching language. The popularity of the book and the plays based on it have been included as causes of the Civil War. Free blacks and runaways alike were captured on the streets of Northern cities, creating riots between the slave catchers and the abolitionists trying to protect the accused blacks.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

In Congress, Illinois Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill to organize the territory called Kansas and Nebraska. In an attempt to please all sides, he based the admission of states in the territory on a principle called popular sovereignty. The bill stated that “All questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories … are to be left to the people residing therein ….” Southern senators forced Douglas to include a repeal of the Missouri Compromise line in his bill so that they could have a chance at expanding slavery. It was then that the “independent Democrats” wrote that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was “a gross violation of a sacred pledge” because it would turn Kansas into a “dreary region of despotism inhabited by masters and slaves.”

The Old Parties Split

President Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, but not before “anti-Nebraska” meetings and petitions signed by thousands of northern Democrats and Whigs splintered the two major parties in the North into the popular sovereignty and free-soil groups. The meetings, begun in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, formed the basis of the Republican Party, whose main slogan expressed the Free Soil position: no extension of slavery to the west.

The Whig Party virtually disappeared during the battle over the bill. In 1852, the nativist anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American Party, or Know-Nothings, had attracted many Northern Whigs. The Kansas-Nebraska issue took precedence in 1854, however, forcing the nativists to take sides on the question of slavery. When the Northern Whigs joined the Republicans or the Douglas Democrats in the North, the only remaining political party with a presence both in the North and the South was the Democratic Party. The Republicans, of course, had no support in the South. In 1856, the Republicans ran John Fremont, or “the Pathfinder,” an explorer of California, for president. Pennsylvania Democrat James Buchanan, who favored popular sovereignty, won the election with a majority only in the South.

Bleeding Kansas

In Kansas, Douglas’s solution to allow the voters to decide the slavery question produced a miniature civil war. Even though the majority of settlers in Kansas were antislavery, most boycotted the election because the questions in the referendum on the Lecompton Constitution did not exclude slavery. To bolster their numbers, the pro-slavery border ruffians brought in residents of Missouri and used names from the Cincinnati, Ohio, city directory as “votes.” In this atmosphere, after pro-slavery forces sacked the city of Lawrence in 1856, militant abolitionist John Brown led a small group in brutally murdering five pro-slavery farmers who lived along Pottawatomie Creek. Both sides engaged in acts of violence in “Bleeding Kansas,” which resulted in about 200 deaths in the next few years. Kansas was admitted to the union as a free state in 1861.

The Dred Scott Case (1857)

In the Dred Scott case, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney tried to resolve all the conflicts over slavery. Scott had been a slave in Missouri and had traveled with his master as a free man in the states of Illinois and Michigan. He later sued for his freedom in Missouri since he had been free during his “sojourn.” Taney’s decision answered three main questions: Was Scott a citizen and so could sue? Did Scott’s sojourn in free territory make him free? And could Congress prohibit slavery in the territories? In an anti-Northern ruling Taney and the Supreme Court answered no to all three. The third no made the Missouri Compromise and the political positions of “popular sovereignty” and “no extension of slavery” unconstitutional. The first no asserted that blacks were property, rather than citizens of the states, and that they had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, John Brown led a group of 5 blacks and 17 whites to foment an uprising of slaves by taking over the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Brown was soon overpowered by troops led by J. E. B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee. It was later discovered that a group of New England abolitionists had financed Brown. As he walked to the gallows, Brown handed this note to his jailer: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Southerners blamed him for initiating violence, while abolitionists celebrated the eloquence and courage of this man who believed that, like Nat Turner, he was driven by God’s word.

LINCOLN AND SECESSION

The final arena for the conflict was the presidential election. Abraham Lincoln became the candidate of the Republican Party in 1860. He took the position that, although slavery should not go into the territories, he would not interfere where it already existed. Two years previously, in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates during a campaign to represent Illinois in the Senate against the leading Northern Democrat, Stephen Douglas, Lincoln had stated of the country that, “A house divided against itself cannot stand…. It will become all one thing, or all the other.” These positions—“no slavery in the West” and the “house divided” idea—taken together, would effectively cut the slave South out of the future growth of the nation if Lincoln were to win.

The Election of 1860

When the Democrats met to choose a candidate, the winner was Stephen Douglas, who advocated the popular sovereignty position. Militant Southerners walked out, forming a Southern Democratic Party, and nominated James Breckinridge of Kentucky. Breckinridge called for a national slave code to make slavery legal in all the states. The last North-South party had split. Ex-Whig John Bell formed a fourth party called the Constitutional Union Party based on a vague position of the “union as it was.” The two positions in the political middle, Douglas and Bell, were ground down to dust, and the electoral vote majority went to Lincoln, while Breckinridge picked up the second-highest number of electors. Because Lincoln won by calling for no extension of slavery to the West, South Carolina and the whole Southern tier, including Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, all voted for secession (to leave the Union) before Lincoln took office in March of 1861.

SUMMARY

It was the interests of the sections regarding slavery that drove the events leading to the political separation of the South from the North. From the fight over Kansas to the election of the Republican president, fueled by the fight over fugitive slaves and the controversy over Dred Scott, the same debate intensified in different forms until the Southern states declared independence as a revolutionary act. The secessionists wanted to preserve and spread their “peculiar institution.”

•  Free blacks: Blacks who had been freed from slavery or were not born slaves; they lived in the cities and countryside in both the North and the South. In 1860, there were about 500,000 free blacks evenly divided between the North and the South.

•  Nativism: The political and social conviction that only white Protestant Americans deserved civil rights and employment; nativists tried to prevent the Irish and the new immigrants of the 1880s–1920s from becoming citizens or entering the country. The Know-Nothings and the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s were nativists.

•  Popular sovereignty: (1) The political theory that the people hold the fundamental power in a democracy; (2) The proposal by Stephen Douglas in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act stating that the people of the territory of Kansas and Nebraska could decide through their representatives whether or not to include slavery in their constitutions

•  Secession: The political act of leaving the Union; the Southern states formed their own country during 1860–1861 after they seceded from the United States.

REVIEW QUESTIONS

1.   Place these events in chronological order:

  I.    Kansas-Nebraska Act

 II.    Missouri Compromise

III.    secession

IV.    Bleeding Kansas

 V.    Uncle Tom’s Cabin published

Answer choices:

(A)    II, V, IV, I, III

(B)    III, II, I, IV, V

(C)    V, IV, I, II, III

(D)    II, V, I, IV, III

(E)    V, I, II, III, IV

2.   Which position had the most unpredictable outcome?

(A)    “No extension of slavery to the west”

(B)    Supporting a national slave code

(C)    Popular sovereignty

(D)    Immediate abolition

(E)    Gradual abolition

3.   The Know-Nothings were

(A)    pro-immigrant.

(B)    anti-immigrant.

(C)    supported by slaveholders.

(D)    supported by Catholics.

(E)    supported by the Ku Klux Klan.

4.   Why did the Southern states secede after the election of 1860?

(A)    They were attacked.

(B)    The tariff was too high.

(C)    They wanted to preserve slavery.

(D)    Virginia encouraged them.

(E)    They had lost Missouri.

ANSWERS AND EXPLANATIONS

1.    D

The correct order is the Missouri Compromise (1820), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), Bleeding Kansas (1856), and secession (1860 and 1861). Bleeding Kansas has to come after the people in the territory try to make a constitution, and secession is the act after Lincoln is elected. The Missouri Compromise was 30 years before, but to be repealed, it had to come before the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850.

2.    C

Stephen Douglas used popular sovereignty to get the territory settled as quickly as possible. The reason there was so much fighting in Kansas was that Douglas left the question of slavery to be decided by the settlers. That is not a clear answer. Each of the other choices is more definite: for slavery (B), against all slavery (D), against slavery in the West (A), or for getting rid of slavery by having children of slaves become free at the age of 21 after a certain date (E).

3.    B

The Know-Nothings were an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic group who were also in the American Party. These nativist groups (pro-native-born American) were almost all in the Northeast and destroyed the Whig Party. The Ku Klux Klan, though they might have supported them, didn’t exist until 1866.

4.    C

To maintain slavery, slave states had to expand to the West or become a minority in both houses of the U.S. Congress. When Lincoln was elected, it was clear they could not expand enough to maintain parity with the North. Missouri was in dispute all through the Civil War, and Virginia was supposedly reluctant to secede. The tariff was an issue in the 1830s, not the 1860s.