Sectionalism in the Early Republic

• Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone in the world accepted slavery as a natural part of life

  • Enslaved workers also helped give rise to revolutionary new ideas that in time became the ideological foundations of the sectional crisis

    • A new transatlantic antislavery movement began to argue that freedom was the natural condition of humankind

• In the United States, France, and Haiti, revolutionaries began the work of splintering the old order

  • Each revolution seemed to radicalize the next, with bolder and more expansive declarations of equality and freedom followed one after the other

• The Haitian Revolution marked an early origin of the sectional crisis

  • It helped splinter the Atlantic basin into clear zones of freedom and unfreedom, shattering the long-standing assumption that African-descended enslaved people could not also be rulers

• Despite the clear limitations of the American Revolution in attacking slavery, the era marked a powerful break in slavery’s

  • Military service on behalf of both the English and the American army freed thousands of enslaved people, while others simply used the turmoil of war to make their escape

• Though Americans at the time made relatively little of the balancing act suggested by the admission of a slave state and a free state, the pattern became increasingly important, particularly when considering power in the United States Senate

  • By 1820, preserving the balance of free states and slave states would be seen as an issue of national security

• The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 more than doubled the size of the United States

  • Questions immediately arose as to whether these lands would be made slaved or free

  • Complicating matters further was the rapid expansion of plantation slavery fueled by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793

  • Many Americans, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that slavery was a temporary institution and would soon die out

• The Missouri Compromise marked a major turning point in America’s sectional crisis because it exposed to the public just how divisive the slavery issue had grown

The Crisis Joined

• Through sustained debates and arguments, white Americans agreed that the Constitution could do little about slavery where it already existed and that slavery, with the State of Missouri as the key exception, would never expand north of the 36°30′ line

  • Once again westward expansion challenged this consensus, and this time the results proved even more damaging

  • As politics grew more democratic, leaders attacked old inequalities of wealth and power, but in doing so many pandered to unity under white supremacy

• Inspired by the social change of Jacksonian democracy, white men, regardless of status, would gain not only land and jobs but also the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to attend public schools, and the right to serve in the militia and armed forces

• The rising controversy over the status of freedom-seeking people swelled partly through the influence of escaped formerly enslaved people, including Frederick Douglass

  • Douglass’s entrance into northern politics marked an important new development in the nation’s coming sectional crisis

Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

• But knowing that the Liberty Party was also not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders fostered a new and more competitive party, which they called the Free Soil Party

  • Demanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called Conscience Whigs

  • Free Soil Party’s platform bridged the eastern and western leadership together and called for an end to slavery in Washington, D.C., and a halt to slavery’s expansion in the territories

• After the Compromise of 1850, antislavery critics became increasingly certain that enslavers had co-opted the federal government, and that a southern Slave Power secretly held sway in Washington

  • None of the individual measures in the Compromise of 1850 proved more troubling to antislavery Americans than the Fugitive Slave Act

    • In a clear bid to extend slavery’s influence throughout the country, the act created special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without the benefit of a jury trial or even court testimony

    • The Fugitive Slave Act created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal power, including an alarming increase in the nation’s policing powers

From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis

• “Bleeding Kansas” was the first place to demonstrate that the sectional crisis could easily be, and in fact already was, exploding into a full-blown national crisis

  • As the national mood grew increasingly grim, Kansas attracted militants representing the extreme sides of the slavery debate

• The Dred Scott decision, Scott v. Sandford, ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States

  • This gave the Buchanan administration and its southern allies a direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise

• The Dred Scott decision seemed to settle the sectional crisis by making slavery fully national, but in reality, it just exacerbated sectional tensions further

• In the troubled decades since the Missouri Compromise, the nation slowly tore itself apart

  • Congressmen clubbed each other nearly to death on the floor of Congress, and by the middle of the 1850s Americans were already at war on the Kansas and Missouri plains

• Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6, gaining just 40 percent of the popular vote and not a single southern vote in the Electoral College

  • Within days, southern states were organizing secession conventions

  • Weeks after Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, rebels in the newly formed Confederate States of America opened fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina

  • Within days, Abraham Lincoln would demand seventy-five thousand volunteers from the North to crush the rebellion, the Civil War had begun