1.2
Problems arising from the implementation of the Compromise of 1850
The calm of 1850 was short-lived. The Missouri Compromise had lasted for more than 20 years, but the Compromise of 1850 broke down within five. On the surface the agreement of established party leaders concealed some important changes in American attitudes towards slavery, especially in the North.
Most of the Compromise of 1850 was implemented without too much dispute: California did become a free state, the slave trade in Washington DC was abolished, and Utah and New Mexico did eventually made their own choices between freedom and slavery.
One part, however, became more and more contentious: the new Fugitive Slave Act. The problems which it created revealed the extent to which attitudes towards slavery had hardened in both sections. Its impact was reinforced by the publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a fictional attack on the practice of slavery and especially on the Fugitive Slave Act. The novel became a bestseller in both the USA and Europe, and was highly influential. Indeed, when Stowe met President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, he is believed to have greeted her with the words, 'So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War!'
The application of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act
Throughout the 1850s, the new Fugitive Slave Act provoked many local disturbances, all in the North.
However, local newspapers made sure that by using the new invention of the electric telegraph, Southern readers knew of Northern hostility to the Fugitive Slave Act.
There was already a Fugitive Slave Act, dating from 1793. Dealing with escaping slaves was even part of the Constitution, although slaves were not named as such.
Article 4, Section 2, Clause 3 stated: 'No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on the claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due.'
This 1793 Act detailed how this clause was to be implemented, but it did not compel states to enforce the law and thus its effect was limited. The much stricter 1850 Act included the following clauses:
A slave-owner's claim that a slave was a fugitive was sufficient for the slave to be arrested.
Fugitive slaves could not ask for trial by jury nor legally represent themselves in court (in place of a lawyer representing them).
Any federal official who failed to arrest a known fugitive slave, even in states where slavery was banned, would be fined $1000.
The act also created new federal officials to ensure the law was properly enforced.
At a time when federal interventions in state laws and lives were rare, the act caused much resentment in the North. The act limited the rights of the escaping slaves. It punished those who were found to help escaping slaves. It also stated that Personal Liberty Laws passed by certain states were illegitimate interferences with slave-owners' rights. Many free African Americans were arrested and became slaves in Southern states due to the act, as they could not defend themselves in court. As the Fugitive Slave Act applied to both Northern and Southern states, abolitionists and their supporters had to decide whether to support the law (and indirectly support slavery), or to resist the new law, either secretly or publicly.
Underground Railroad
Fugitive slaves escaping their southern homes often used the Underground Railroad to do so. 'Railroad' implies an organised, even centralised system, but this was an informal series of networks of those willing to help fugitive slaves evade capture and make their way to freedom. It was not centralised and the links between different groups involved were disjointed. No one planned it. It just developed at the local level from around 1840 onwards. There are understandably few records of its work. Even in the North, it had to remain partially secret, especially in the later 1850s. The most contemporary account was an 1872 book called The Underground Railroad, the title page of which stated that it was: 'A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters & C. Narrating the hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in their efforts for Freedom as related By themselves and Others or Witnessed by the Author, William Still.' Some 800 pages long, it is more a series of individual narratives than a history. Harriet Tubman was much better known for her work on the railroad and was much more significant, She was a fugitive slave who, in the 1850s, kept returning to the South, and so risked everything, to help others escape from slavery. As a result she became known as the Moses of her people. How many slaves travelled to freedom on the Underground Railroad is impossible to say with any accuracy. Estimates suggest that, between 1830 and 1860, somewhere between 1000 and 5000 people each year travelled the Underground Railroad. Even if these numbers are overestimates, these figures show that a considerable number of slaves were prepared to take great risks to gain their freedom. On a small but significant scale, slaves were already taking freedom for themselves. Implementing the Fugitive Slave Act caused much resentment across many Northern states. This new law made escaping from slavery even more difficult, but it probably helped to strengthen the Underground Railroad. When cases did come to Northern courts, they often provoked mass demonstrations in support of the fugitive.
Two early examples of Northern opposition to the act came just a year after it passed into legislation.
The escape of William Parker, 1851
One example of resistance came in Christiana, Pennsylvania, in September 1851. Edward Gorsuch was a Maryland slave- owner who crossed state lines to recover his escaping slaves with some slave-catchers. He was met with resistance led by a former slave called William Parker. Shots were fired and the slave-owner was killed. Parker escaped via the Underground Railroad. US marines were called in to restore order. Those suspected of being involved in the resistance to the slave-owner were rounded up. Only one was tried, and he was acquitted.
The Jerry Rescue, 1851
A second example of opposition, which occurred in Rochester, New York in October 1851, became known as the Jerry Rescue. Jerry was the preferred name of William Henry, arrested under the Fugitive Slave Act.
The anti-slavery Liberty Party was holding its state party convention at the time of Jerry's detention. A large crowd assembled, determined to free him. The demonstrators' protests were so threatening that Jerry was handed over to the crowd before travelling the Underground Railroad to Canada. The authorities then attempted to prosecute the ringleaders of the demonstration. The case lasted two years. Just one person was found guilty.
Frederick Douglass, a former slave himself and a leading abolitionist, later commented that the Jerry Rescue led to the act becoming a 'dead letter', as slave owners realized that the Act failed to return escaped slaves and also led to anti-slavery protests.
Anthony Burns and the Boston Slave Riot, 1854
In fact, the act did not become a 'dead letter' as Douglass wrote. Prosecutions continued. Demonstrations took place. Troops were called out to keep order. Not all fugitive slaves got away. One of the most significant cases involved Anthony Burns, a former slave now living as a free man in Boston, Massachusetts. On 24 May 1854, he was charged under the Fugitive Slave Act. The events which followed were also labelled a riot, this time the Boston Slave Riot. It too saw a defender of law and order die. This time, however, the protestors did not succeed in freeing Burns before his trial. This outcome was a result of intervention by the president, Franklin Pierce. He was determined to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Hundreds of federal troops lined the streets of Boston to control the thousands of protestors.
A Massachusetts businessman gave a more concise summary of the impact of the Burns case and wrote: "We went to bed one night old fashioned Compromise Union Whigs and woked up [sic] stark mad abolitionists.' (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War, Penguin, 1990, p.120.)
The case of Anthony Burns became a national, not just a local issue, perhaps because it took the force of federal government to return him to his owner. Feelings were slow to cool. Burns did eventually regain his freedom.
William Lloyd Garrison, 1854
Just a month after the Boston Slave Riot, the annual rally of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was held in Framingham, a few miles west of Boston. The day was 4 July, Independence Day. The 1854 rally attracted many leading abolitionists: Sojourner Truth, a former slave and a powerful speaker addressed the crowd, as did the leading abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison. He had founded the abolitionist newspaper, the Liberator, some 23 years previously, in 1831. The Fugitive Slave Act, which had been intended to form part of a compromise, only served to widen sectional differences. It supported property rights by empowering slave-owners to have runaway slaves returned to them. However, it weakened states' rights by overruling state laws which had been intended to protect slaves who had escaped to free states.
The issue of Kansas and its impact
The implementation of the Fugitive Slave Act was causing problems so severe that dealing with them required the president to send in the army. At the same time, another political problem appeared - or recurred.
Westward territorial expansion had not ceased and the political challenges the process created had not gone away either. In 1820, Missouri had been the problem. The Missouri Compromise stipulated that Missouri was the only slave state which could be established within the Louisiana Purchase above the 36° 30' line. In the early 1850s, the unorganised lands in the Midwest called Nebraska became the focus of attention. An area much larger than the current state of that name, this stretched up to the Canadian border and across to the foothills of the Rockies. It had formed part of 'Indian territory', with a population of Native Americans. Some of them had relocated from other parts of the country further to the settled and organised east. The proposal before Congress was to convert these unorganised lands into an organised US territory. This represented a vast area of potential farmland and offered the possibility of further railway development. Newly settled areas created new customers and there had been talk for some time about a national railway that would run across the USA from the east coast, through Chicago to the west coast, unifying the country.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
In 1852 and 1853, Congress considered various proposals for Nebraska to become a US territory. But while legislators might have been happy to support the extension of the railway, they could not reach agreement on an old question which had returned in a new form: would the Louisiana Purchase lands west of the Mississippi become slave states or free?
During 1853, Stephen Douglas and others, mindful of the possibility of a transcontinental railway, decided to take the lead in persuading Congress to pass a bill. The Democrats had a comfortable majority in both Houses of Congress. The president, Franklin Pierce, was a Democrat. That dominance was indeed enough to pass any other kind of legislation, but the slavery issue was not a party question; it was a sectional one. The Nebraska Bill would only pass in the face of fierce opposition from Northern representatives, both Whig and Democrat. The vote saw both parties split along sectional lines, with votes for and against the bill based on section, rather than party.
Douglas understood that he would need the support of Southern politicians to push through any legislation. The bill he proposed at the beginning of 1854 would divide the area, cutting roughly a quarter from Nebraska's south to form the separate territory of Kansas. This was sensible in itself, as establishing government infrastructure would have been difficult across such a vast area. In addition, each of the new territories could vote on whether to become slave or free states. This was again the principle of popular sovereignty on which he had stood four years earlier. To Douglas, letting the local people decide was a sensible democratic move. It had been accepted in 1850 for Utah and New Mexico. Why not in 1854 for Nebraska?
However, the Nebraska Bill turned the calm into a storm in both Congress and across the country by reopening the question of slavery which the Compromise of 1850 had temporarily settled.
The bill explicitly replaced the Missouri Compromise guidelines for establishing whether a new territory was slave or free with those guidelines of 1850. The geographical line of 36° 30', which had proved so important in 1820, would be replaced by the political principle of popular sovereignty.
Opponents quickly replied that it was unacceptable because:
Nebraska was part of the Louisiana Purchase, to which the 1820 line applied
it was never agreed that the popular sovereignty could replace the Missouri Compromise
Douglas himself had accepted the continued existence of the Missouri Compromise until the Nebraska Bill
removing the Missouri Compromise line would allow the expansion of slavery into the Midwest.
This last point united what became known as the Anti- Nebraska Movement. It meant that the Nebraska Bill was very different from the Missouri Act of 1820 or the Utah Act of 1850. Both of these had been achieved by the two sections working together. In 1854, it seemed that the Democrats were working on their own to impose their bill on other parties and interests. The one group which would benefit from the bill were the slave-owners. To its opponents, the Nebraska Bill was clear evidence of 'slave power'.
There was bitter opposition across the North, in newspapers and in many Christian churches. Anti- Nebraska supporters held rallies across Northern states, protesting the pro-slavery and pro-Southern changes to the Compromise of 1850. Even the proposed split of Nebraska into two states, Kansas and Nebraska, which would probably have reduced the area which might vote for slavery, did not help. After lengthy and bitter debate, Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, but the vote showed how divided the Whigs were over the issue. The president signed the bill on 30 May 1854. In a speech Lincoln gave in October 1854 on the subject of the act, he demanded, 'Could there be a more apt invention to bring about collision and violence on the slavery question than this Nebraska project?'
William Lloyd Garrison's inflammatory act on Independence Day 1854 had been in protest against the Fugitive Slave Law. But it came at a time when Congress had just passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act was the second main development which made the Compromise of 1850 so hard to implement and which revealed the growing divisions between South and North.
Bleeding Kansas, 1854-58
In the new US territories of Nebraska and Kansas, there was a rush by both sides, slave and free, to gain the upper hand as a consequence of the passage of the Kansas- Nebraska Act. This led to what is called Bleeding Kansas.
Stephen Douglas's idea of popular sovereignty meant that whoever occupied a territory would decide its status. Kansas was virtually empty of white men, who were the only recognised citizens and voters. Thus both pro- and anti-slavery forces encouraged people to move to Kansas.
Anti-slavery supporters came by train from the East, funded by the New England Emigrant Aid Society. Meanwhile, pro-slavery supporters came across the border from the adjoining slave state of Missouri. The latter were soon labelled Border Ruffians, presumably by their opponents. Both sides were armed. Even clergymen wanting to end slavery argued for the use of guns. The Reverend Henry Beecher, brother of the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, argued that the new breech-loading rifles were the moral equivalent of a hundred bibles. Clashes soon occurred. Some men died. Some people, then and since, have described the politically inspired violence in Kansas as a civil war, even if only a small one. Among the key events in a series of sporadic conflicts between two disorganised groups were:
The Sacking of Lawrence, May 1856. Lawrence, a small, new free-state town, was attacked by some 800 'border ruffians', who destroyed the printing presses of free-state newspapers as well as the Free State Hotel.
The Massacre of Pottawatomie, May 1856. In reaction to the destruction of Lawrence, a leading white abolitionist, John Brown, led an attack on a couple of family households. The attackers killed five men, on the assumption that they had taken part in the sack of Lawrence.
The Battle of Osawatomie, August 1856. Osawatomie was another free-state town attacked and destroyed by a band of border ruffians.
Though fighting continued in Kansas for two more years, the time when these events had their greatest national impact was 1856, a presidential election year.
The Caning of Senator Sumner, 1856
The impact of events in Kansas was reinforced by violence in another, unexpected place in May 1856 - the chamber of the US Senate. In a long speech about Kansas, Senator Charles Sumner, a leading abolitionist, criticised one of his opponents in very personal terms. Two days later, as he sat at his desk, he was attacked by Preston Brooks, a Southern Democrat who was a relative of the man Sumner had insulted. He beat him senseless with a stick in an incident which became known as the Caning of Sumner. Sumner took many months to recover. The incident provoked protests and demonstrations in both sections: in the North they protested against the attack, in the South against Sumner's insult. From Boston, via Kansas to Washington DC, political violence was spreading across the USA.
This violence caused anti-slavery supporters, alarmed by such events, to turn to the party most closely linked with opposition to slave power, a new party just two years old, the Republican Party. The events of 1854-56 can help to explain the sudden emergence of a party which just four years later was to provide the US president.
The Kansas question had made a major impact on the country's politics and people. The admission of the State of Missouri in 1821 had been negotiated peacefully. The lands acquired from the war with Mexico were accommodated, albeit more fractiously. The issue of Nebraska and then Kansas had led to the formation of a new dynamic and strong political party - one which would move quickly to win the presidential election of 1860. The issue had also, as we have seen, started both something approaching a local civil war in Kansas and an assault on a legislator in the nation's capital.
Much of the emancipation movement was as committed to a peaceful resolution of the problem of slavery in 1860 as it had been in 1840 or 1820. But with each crisis, suspicions grew on both sides, the willingness to compromise grew weaker and the willingness to turn to violence grew stronger. Events in Kansas and Brooks' attack on Sumner might have seemed like isolated departures from a political norm, but they were signs pointing the way to an approaching war.
Changes in the party-political system
The rapid decline of the Whig Party
In 1854-56, the two-party system in US politics underwent a major change. The Whig Party quickly disappeared and the Republican Party emerged as quickly. These changes were a result of slavery becoming a national issue, as the combination of the controversy regarding the Fugitive Slave Act and that over the Nebraska Bill provoked an upheaval in the US party-political system.
In 1854, the Whig Party was 20 years old. Historian Sean Wilentz has claimed, with challenging precision, that it was on 22 May 1854 that the National Whig Party died. The key word here is 'national'. As already detailed, on 22 May 1854, the US House of Representatives approved the Nebraska Bill. It had already been approved by the Senate. The divisions of the Whigs in that vote were clear to see. Further evidence of the death of the Whigs soon came about. In early 1853, the US president was a Whig, Millard Fillmore. In late 1856, the Whig Party did not put up a presidential candidate. Why did the Whig party fade so quickly? Given that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a Democratic Party bill, the Whigs should have gained the anti-Nebraska vote. In the 1854 mid-term elections, the Democrats certainly lost seats - some 75 out of 156, and mainly in the North - but the Whigs also lost seats.
In the North, the anti-Democratic vote switched from the Whigs to several small parties. The most successful was the American Party (formerly the Native American Party), which represented the strong anti-immigrant feeling of the early 1850s. Others went by various names, usually with an anti-Nebraskan reference somewhere in the title.
These smaller parties gained from the Whigs because many voters saw the Whigs as partly to blame for the Nebraska Act and also for the Compromise of 1850. Aspects of these deepened sectional tensions by causing Northern opposition. When William Lloyd Garrison burned copies of the Fugitive Slave Act and the US Constitution, he also burned a copy of the court judgement against Anthony Burns. Wendell Phillips, another leading abolitionist, also linked the two issues, Nebraska and slavery, when, speaking to a mass meeting in Boston. Following the arrest of Burns he said: 'Nebraska I call knocking a man down, this [the arrest of Burns] is spitting in his face after he is down.'
In the mid-term elections a few months later, all 11 Whigs representing Massachusetts in the House of Representatives lost their seats to American Party candidates. Following the Nebraska Bill, the Whig Party, unable to maintain unity over the issue of slavery, split in two:
Southern Whigs, who had voted in favour of the Bill, joined the American Party
Northern Whigs, who were firmly opposed to any expansion of slavery in the new territories, joined the new Republican Party or left politics altogether.
The rise of the Republican Party
One great consequence of the passage of the Kansas. Nebraska Act was Bleeding Kansas. A second was that its opponents, who had been divided among several parties, came together and quickly formed a new party, the Republican Party. It broadly replaced the several other abolitionist parties, and drew substantial strength and leadership from Northern former Whigs. Within two years, it emerged as the main challenger to the Democratic Party.
'Free Speech, Free Press, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont and Victory' was the chorus of a Republican rallying song in the 1856 presidential election. To the party's main aims it added the name of its candidate, John Frémont, The opening statement of the party's 1856 platform (proposed programme of action in government) gave more details. It was aimed at all 'who are opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise; to the policy of the present Administration; to the extension of Slavery into Free Territory; in favour of the admission of Kansas as Free State; of restoring the action of the Federal Government to the principles of Washington and Jefferson'.
Frémont was an explorer more than a politician and was so well known that he was likely to attract votes. He was leading a very new party, still being born state by state.
The creation of the Republican Party began in the states of the Midwest - Wisconsin and Michigan - in the spring of 1854, even before the arrest of Burns and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The new party was called Republican to show a link with Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the USA and a president whose party had been the Democratic-Republican.
Those in other Northern states opposed to slavery followed the examples of the Midwest and set up their own Republican parties. Conscience Whigs, Free Democrats, Free Soilers and some American Party members joined because they all agreed on the need to contain the advance of slave power and prevent the expansion of slavery. Abolitionists joined even though the Republican Party was not an abolitionist party. Their joining shows the tendency of US party politics to move towards a two-party system: better to be part of a large party with some chance of gaining power than remain a small party with little or no chance.
By early 1856, Republican parties had been formed in enough states to establish a national organisation. One of the last states to form a state Republican party, Illinois, did so in May 1856. One of the speakers at the conference was a lawyer called Abraham Lincoln. At the Republican National Convention the following month, he was nominated as the party's vice-presidential candidate. He was a rising star of the new party but he did not win that nomination. After many years as a Whig, Lincoln had come to realise that the only chance of containing the slave power was in the Republican Party.
For a new party, the Republican Party did well in the 1856 elections. For example in Congress, in Massachusetts, it replaced the American Party in all 11 seats. For the presidency, Frémont came second to Buchanan, the winning Democratic candidate. In the North, he polled more votes than Buchanan did. Although Buchanan won states both in North and South, the split of five Northern states to 14 Southern states showed that voters, in addition to political parties, were beginning to separate along sectional lines.
Significance of states' rights
The concept of states' right was common to the arguments about both the Fugitive Slave and the Kansas- Nebraska acts. The USA was formed in a process that culminated in 1787-89, when 13 states agreed on the form of national government they wanted. That government and its rules were explained in the US Constitution, which the member states agreed to abide by. Thus there were two levels of government, state and federal. The Constitution identifies the roles and responsibilities of the new federal government, so each level has its defined responsibilities. The Constitution, however, is a brief document, written in the late 18th century and needed clarification to take account of changing circumstances. Who has the final say? How far could a state ignore a decision or law of federal government? Conversely, how far could federal government tell a state what to do?
Those who advocated states' rights wanted to give individual states the right to opt out of federal, country- wide laws - and even the right to leave the USA, if a state decided it was necessary. Indeed, it was seen that it might be necessary if the careful relationship between the two sections became imbalanced. Thus states' rights became identified with the South, especially as its slave-based way of life was criticised more and more from Northern abolitionists.
Every ten years, the census (an official survey of the population) showed the disproportionate growth of the free states. That change was then reflected in the distribution of seats in the US House of Representatives. Southerners cheered in 1845 when Texas joined the Union as a slave state. They were downcast by the inclusion of a California as a free state in 1850. They watched the increasing immigration from Europe into the free labour North with growing alarm. Slowly but surely, the balance of US politics would shift to the North. In this respect, time was not on the side of the South.
Southerners became determined to protect their position.
They based their argument on the assertion that states which had given up their sovereignty in 1787 could take it back whenever they chose to. Unionists replied that the 13 states which had surrendered their sovereignty had done so unconditionally. Certainly the Constitution had nothing to say about the question of secession. The difference was deep. By the mid-1850s it was growing wider as the anxieties of the South increased.An important feature of the article is that it makes no mention of the South - even though the concept of states' rights was almost entirely used by Southerners opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Could the concept also apply to a Northern state opposed to the Fugitive Slave Act? The article was the interpretation of a journalist. The Washington Sentinel was very confident in its assertions about the US Constitution. The organisation which had been given - or, more accurately, which had taken - the interpreter's job was the US Supreme Court. In 1857, it entered the debate about state rights and slavery in a very dramatic fashion, making the issue even harder to resolve.
The balance between the power held by the federal government and states' rights was a fault line in American politics in the period up to 1860. Northern states had refused to comply with fugitive slave legislation. In its 1842 ruling on Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the US Supreme Court ruled that the Fugitive Slave Act was law in Pennsylvania, and that state's own personal liberty legislation could not be pleaded as a defence or in rebuttal. This was a declaration of the superior authority of federal over state government. States' rights would later be pleaded as the driving force behind the secession of Southern states. At the time, however, Northern states were equally likely to adopt a states' rights view and Southern states were equally right to argue for the rule of law and the authority of the federal government. Later South Carolina voted to secede and set out its Declaration of the Immediate Causes with reasons in imitation of the 13 former British colonies' original Declaration of Independence. It pointed to the failure of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.