Chapter 13: The Sectional Crisis
The Sectional Crisis
Introduction
The westward expansion of slavery created problems for the United States from the beginning. There were battles over slavery's expansion and the federal government's role in protecting enslavers' interests. Northern workers believed slavery suppressed wages and stole land from poor white Americans, preventing their economic independence. Southerners feared that without slavery's expansion, abolitionists would dominate national politics, and a dense population of enslaved people would lead to insurrection and race war. Constant resistance from enslaved people required a strong pro-slavery government to maintain order. As the North abolished slavery, enslaved people escaped north on the Underground Railroad. Northerners and southerners disagreed on the federal government's role in capturing and returning freedom seekers. Northerners appealed to states' rights to refuse to capture people escaping slavery, while southerners demanded a national commitment to slavery. Enslaved laborers were vital to the nation's economy, fueling the southern plantation economy and providing raw materials for the industrial North. Disagreements over slavery remained central to American politics as the United States expanded. By November 1860, an opponent of slavery's expansion arose from within the Republican Party, leading to the secession crisis and ultimately the Civil War.
Sectionalism in the Early Republic
Prior to the American Revolution, slavery was widely accepted. English colonies relied on enslaved workers for tobacco, indigo, and sugar, generating wealth for the British crown. This wealth inspired new ideals that became the ideological foundations of the sectional crisis. English political theorists began to rethink natural-law justifications for slavery, rejecting the idea that slavery naturally suited some people. A new transatlantic antislavery movement argued that freedom was the natural condition of humankind.
Revolutionaries in the United States, France, and Haiti began to dismantle the old order, with each revolution becoming more radical. The Haitian Revolution in 1803 turned France's most valuable sugar colony into an independent country administered by formerly enslaved people, marking an early origin of the sectional crisis. It shattered the assumption that African-descended enslaved people could not be rulers. The American Revolution, despite its limitations in attacking slavery, marked a powerful break in slavery's history. Military service and the turmoil of war freed thousands of enslaved people, leading to the emergence of free Black communities that continually reignited the antislavery struggle.
The national breakdown over slavery occurred over a long period and across a broad geography. Debates over slavery in the American West were especially important. The framers of the Constitution did little to resolve these early questions, but Article VI of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north and west of the Ohio River. The admission of Vermont (1791) as a free state and Kentucky (1792) as a slave state suggested a balancing act that became increasingly important, especially when considering power in the United States Senate. By 1820, preserving the balance of free states and slave states was seen as an issue of national security.
New pressures arose in the West with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, which doubled the size of the United States and raised questions about whether these lands would be slave or free. The rapid expansion of plantation slavery, fueled by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, further complicated matters. The Ohio River Valley became an early fault line in the coming sectional struggle, with Kentucky and Tennessee emerging as slave states, while Ohio, Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818) gained admission as free states along the river's northern banks. Borderland negotiations and accommodations along the Ohio River fostered a distinctive kind of white supremacy, as laws tried to keep Black people out of the West entirely. Ohio's so-called Black Laws of 1803 foreshadowed the exclusionary cultures of Indiana, Illinois, and several subsequent states of the Old Northwest and later, the Far West. These laws often banned African American voting, denied Black Americans access to public schools, and made it impossible for nonwhites to serve on juries and in local militias.
The Missouri Territory marked a turning point in the sectional crisis. In 1817, Congress opened its debate over Missouri's admission to the Union. Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed laws that would gradually abolish slavery in the new state, leading to outrage from southern states and an undeniable sectional controversy.
Congress reached a compromise on Missouri's admission, largely through the work of Henry Clay. Maine would be admitted as a free state, and Missouri would come in as a slave state. Legislators sought to prevent future conflicts by making Missouri's southern border at the new dividing line between slavery and freedom in the Louisiana Purchase lands. South of that line, slavery could expand, while north of it, there would be no slavery.
The Missouri Compromise exposed the divisiveness of the slavery issue, filling newspapers, speeches, and congressional records. Debates over the framers' intentions and the meaning of phrases like “all men are created equal" were hotly contested. While questions over the expansion of slavery remained open, nearly all Americans concluded that the Constitution protected slavery where it already existed.
Southerners insisted that the framers supported slavery and wanted to see it expand, pointing to Article I, Section 2, which enabled representation in the South to be based on rules defining an enslaved person as three-fifths of a voter. The Constitution also stipulated that Congress could not interfere with the slave trade before 1808 and enabled Congress to draft fugitive slave laws.
Antislavery participants argued that the framers never intended slavery to survive the Revolution and hoped it would disappear through peaceful means. They pointed out that the framers never used the word slave, referring to enslaved people as “persons held in service.” They also claimed that the Tenth Amendment said slavery could be banned in the territories and pointed to the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which said that property could be seized through appropriate legislation. The Missouri debates became an all-encompassing referendum on the American past, present, and future.
Despite the furor, the Missouri crisis did not yet inspire hardened defenses of either slave or free labor, but it did trouble the nation's African Americans and Native Americans, who saw that whites never intended them to be citizens of the United States. The debates over Missouri's admission offered the first sustained debate on the question of Black citizenship, as Missouri's state constitution wanted to impose a hard ban on any future Black migrants.
The Crisis Joined
Missouri's admission to the Union in 1821 exposed deep fault lines in American society. The compromise created a new sectional consensus that most white Americans hoped would ensure a lasting peace. 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 line.
Westward expansion once again challenged this consensus, and this time the results proved even more damaging. A rebellion led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 threatened lives and property throughout the Carolinas. Religious leaders also expressed a rising discontent with the new status quo. The Second Great Awakening further sharpened political differences by promoting schisms within the major Protestant churches, schisms that also became increasingly sectional in nature. Between 1820 and 1846, sectionalism drew on new political parties, new religious organizations, and new reform movements.
As politics grew more democratic, leaders attacked old inequalities of wealth and power, but in doing so many pandered to a unity under white supremacy. Slavery briefly receded from the nation's attention in the early 1820s, but that would change quickly. By the last half of the decade, slavery was back, and this time it appeared even more threatening.
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. In this post-Missouri context, leaders arose to push the country's new expansionist desires in aggressive new directions, deepening the sectional crisis.
The Democratic Party initially seemed to offer a compelling answer to the problems of sectionalism by promising benefits to white working men of the North, South, and West, while also uniting rural, small-town, and urban residents. Huge numbers of western, southern, and northern workingmen rallied behind Andrew Jackson during the 1828 presidential election. The Democratic Party tried to avoid the issue of slavery and instead sought to unite Americans around shared commitments to white supremacy and desires to expand the nation.
Northerners seen as especially friendly to the South had become known as “Doughfaces” during the Missouri debates. Whites discontented with the direction of the country used the slur and other critiques to help chip away at Democratic Party majorities. The accusation that northern Democrats were lapdogs for southern enslavers had real power.
The Whigs offered an organized major-party challenge to the Democrats. Whig strongholds often mirrored the patterns of westward migrations out of New England. Whigs drew from an odd coalition of wealthy merchants, middle- and upper-class farmers, planters in the Upland South, and settlers in the Great Lakes. Because of this motley coalition, the party struggled to bring a cohesive message to voters in the 1830s. Their strongest support came from places like Ohio's Western Reserve, the rural and Protestant-dominated areas of Michigan, and similar parts of Protestant and small-town Illinois, particularly the fast-growing towns and cities of the state's northern half.
Whig leaders stressed Protestant culture and federal-sponsored internal improvements and courted the support of a variety of reform movements, including temperance, nativism, and even antislavery, though few Whigs believed in racial equality. These positions attracted a wide range of figures, including Abraham Lincoln.
The Whig Party blamed Democrats for defending slavery at the expense of the American people, but antislavery was never a core component of the Whig platform. Activists in Warsaw, New York, organized the antislavery Liberty Party in 1839. Liberty leaders demanded the end of slavery in the District of Columbia, the end of the interstate slave trade, and the prohibition of slavery's expansion into the West. But the Liberty Party also shunned women's participation in the movement and distanced themselves from visions of true racial egalitarianism. Few Americans voted for the party.
Democrats and Whigs fostered a moment of relative calm on the slavery debate, partially aided by gag rules prohibiting discussion of antislavery petitions. Arkansas (1836) and Michigan (1837) became the newest states admitted to the Union, with Arkansas coming in as a slave state, and Michigan coming in as a free state. The balancing act between slavery and freedom continued.
Events in Texas would shatter the balance. Independent Texas soon gained recognition from a supportive Andrew Jackson administration in 1837. The 1844 democratic presidential candidate James K. Polk sought to bridge the sectional divide by promising new lands to whites north and south. Polk cited the annexation of Texas and the Oregon Territory as campaign cornerstones. Yet as Polk championed the acquisition of these vast new lands, northern Democrats grew annoyed by their southern colleagues, especially when it came to Texas.
For many observers, the debates over Texas statehood illustrated that the federal government was clearly pro-slavery. Texas president Sam Houston managed to secure a deal with Polk and gained admission to the Union for Texas in 1845. Antislavery northerners also worried about the admission of Florida, which entered the Union as a slave state in 1845. As Americans embraced calls to pursue their manifest destiny, antislavery voices looked at developments in Florida and Texas as signs that the sectional crisis had taken an ominous and perhaps irredeemable turn.
The 1840s opened with a number of disturbing developments for antislavery leaders. The 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania ruled that the federal government's Fugitive Slave Act trumped Pennsylvania's personal liberty law. Antislavery activists believed that the federal government only served southern enslavers and were trouncing the states' rights of the North. A number of northern states reacted by passing new personal liberty laws in protest in 1843.
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. Born into slavery in 1818 at Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass grew up and managed to learn how to read and write. He used these skills to escape from slavery in 1837, when he was just nineteen. By 1845, Douglass put the finishing touches on his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The book launched his lifelong career as an advocate for the enslaved and helped further raise the visibility of Black politics. Other formerly enslaved people, including Sojourner Truth, joined Douglass in rousing support for antislavery, as did free Black Americans like Maria Stewart, James McCune Smith, Martin Delaney, and numerous others. They also attacked fugitive slave laws by helping thousands to escape.
The year 1846 signaled new reversals to the antislavery cause and the beginnings of a dark new era in American politics. In January 1846, Polk ordered troops to Texas to enforce claims stemming from its border dispute along the Rio Grande. Polk asked for war on May 11, 1846, and by September 1847, the United States had invaded Mexico City. After 1846, the sectional crisis raged throughout North America. Debates swirled over whether the new lands would be slave or free. At the same time, Congressman David Wilmot submitted his Wilmot Proviso late in 1846, banning the expansion of slavery into the territories won from Mexico. The proviso gained widespread northern support and even passed the House with bipartisan support, but it failed in the Senate.
Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men
The conclusion of the Mexican War led to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. Antislavery activists vowed that no new territories would be opened to slavery. 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. Antislavery leaders had thought that their vision of a federal government divorced from slavery might be represented by the major parties in that year's presidential election, but both the Whigs and the Democrats nominated candidates hostile to the antislavery cause. Left unrepresented, antislavery Free Soil leaders swung into action.
Demanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called Conscience Whigs, the remnants of the Liberty Party, and antislavery Democrats. The new coalition called for a national convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, New York. The 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 on slavery's expansion in the territories.
The Free Soil movement hardly made a dent in the 1848 presidential election, but it drew more than four times the popular vote won by the Liberty Party earlier. In 1848, Free Soil leaders claimed just 10 percent of the popular vote but won over a dozen House seats and even managed to win one Senate seat in Ohio, which went to Salmon P. Chase. In Congress, Free Soil members had enough votes to swing power to either the Whigs or the Democrats.
The admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May 1848 helped cool tensions after the Texas and Florida admissions. Meanwhile, news from a number of failed European revolutions alarmed American reformers, but as exiled radicals filtered into the United States, a strengthening women's rights movement also flexed its muscle at Seneca Falls, New York. Frederick Douglass also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated the Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions. By August 1848, it seemed plausible that the Free Soil Movement might tap into these reforms and build a broader coalition. But come November, the spirit of reform failed to yield much at the polls. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor bested Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan.
The upheavals of 1848 came to a quick end. Taylor remained in office only a brief time until his unexpected death from a stomach ailment in 1850. During Taylor's brief time in office, the fruits of the Mexican War began to spoil. While Taylor was alive, his administration struggled to find a good remedy. Increased clamoring for the admission of California, New Mexico, and Utah pushed the country closer to the edge. By 1850, California wanted admission as a free state. With so many competing dynamics under way, and with the president dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were off to a troubling start.
Congressional leaders like Henry Clay and newer legislators like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois were asked to broker a compromise, but this time it was clear no compromise could bridge all the diverging interests at play in the country. Legislators rallied behind the Compromise of 1850, an assemblage of bills passed late in 1850, which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise alive.
The Compromise of 1850 tried to offer something to everyone, but in the end it only worsened the sectional crisis. For southerners, the package offered a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered the federal government to deputize regular citizens in arresting runaways. The New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory would be allowed to determine their own fates as slave or free states based on popular sovereignty. The compromise also allowed territories to submit suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of freedom-seeking people within their bounds.
The admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners. In addition to California, northerners also gained a ban on the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but not the full emancipation abolitionists had long advocated. Texas, which had already come into the Union as a slave state, was asked to give some of its land to New Mexico in return for the federal government absorbing some of the former republic's debt. But the compromise debates soon grew ugly.
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, where it hoped to make slavery a national institution. These northern complaints pointed back to how the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution gave southerners proportionally more representatives in Congress. In the 1850s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that Washington worked on behalf of enslavers while ignoring the interests of white working men.
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 benefit of a jury trial or even court testimony. Under its provisions, local authorities in the North could not interfere with the capture of fugitives. Northern citizens, moreover, had to assist in the arrest of fugitives when called upon by federal agents. The Fugitive Slave Act created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal power, including an alarming increase in the nation's policing powers. The law itself fostered corruption and the enslavement of free Black northerners. The federal commissioners who heard these cases were paid if they determined that the defendant was enslaved and only if they determined he or she was free. Many Black northerners responded to the new law by heading farther north to Canada.
The 1852 presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and effectively ended their existence as a national political party. With the Compromise of 1850 and plenty of new lands, peaceful consensus seemed to be on the horizon. Antislavery feelings continued to run deep, however. One measure of the popularity of antislavery ideas came in 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe published her best-selling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Sales for Uncle Tom's Cabin were astronomical. The book became a sensation and helped move antislavery into everyday conversation for many northerners. Despite the powerful antislavery message, Stowe's book also reinforced many racist stereotypes.
Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with confidence. Emboldened, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late 1853 to help organize the Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In 1853, the Nebraska Territory was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian border. Altogether, it encompassed present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, and Montana. Douglas's efforts to amend and introduce the bill in 1854 opened dynamics that would break the Democratic Party in two and, in the process, rip the country apart.
Douglas proposed a bold plan in 1854 to cut off a large southern chunk of Nebraska and create it separately as the Kansas Territory. Douglas had a number of goals in mind. The expansionist Democrat from Illinois wanted to organize the territory to facilitate the completion of a national railroad that would flow through Chicago. But before he had even finished introducing the bill, opposition had already mobilized. Salmon P. Chase drafted a response in northern newspapers that exposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a measure to overturn the Missouri Compromise and open western lands for slavery. Kansas-Nebraska protests emerged in 1854 throughout the North. Kansas would become slave or free depending on the result of local elections, elections that would be greatly influenced by migrants flooding to the state to either protect or stop the spread of slavery.
Ordinary Americans in the North increasingly resisted what they believed to be a pro-slavery federal government on their own terms. The rescues and arrests of enslaved men like Anthony Burns in Boston and Joshua Glover in Milwaukee signaled the rising vehemence of resistance to the nation's 1850 fugitive slave law. The case of Anthony Burns illustrates how the Fugitive Slave Law radicalized many northerners. On May 24, 1854, twenty-year-old Burns, a preacher who worked in a Boston clothing shop, was clubbed and dragged to jail. One year earlier, Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia, and a group of slave catchers had come to return him to Richmond. News of Burns's capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob gathered outside the courthouse demanding Burns's release. Two days after the arrest, the crowd stormed the courthouse and shot a deputy U.S. Marshal to death. News reached Washington, and the federal government sent soldiers. Boston was placed under martial law. Federal troops lined the streets of Boston as Burns was marched to a ship, where he was sent back to slavery in Virginia. After spending over , the U.S. government had successfully reenslaved Anthony Burns. A short time later, Burns was redeemed by abolitionists who paid to return him to freedom, but the outrage among Bostonians only grew.
As northerners radicalized, organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company provided guns and other goods for pioneers willing to go to Kansas and establish the territory as antislavery through popular sovereignty. On all sides of the slavery issue, politics became increasingly militarized.
The year 1855 nearly derailed the northern antislavery coalition. A resurgent anti-immigrant movement briefly took advantage of the Whig collapse and nearly stole the energy of the anti-administration forces by channeling its frustrations into fights against the large number of mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants in American cities. Calling themselves Know-Nothings, the Know-Nothing or American Party made impressive gains in 1854 and 1855, particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic. But the anti-immigrant movement simply could not capture the nation's attention in ways the antislavery movement already had.
The antislavery political movements that started in 1854 coalesced with the formation of a new political party. Harking back to the founding fathers, its organizers named it the Republican Party. Republicans moved forward into a highly charged summer.
Following an explosive speech before Congress on May 19-20, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was violently beaten with a cane by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the Senate chamber. Brooks felt that he had to defend his relative's honor and nearly killed Sumner as a result.
The violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas. Pro-slavery raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas. Radical abolitionist John Brown retaliated, murdering several pro-slavery Kansans in retribution. As all of this played out, the House failed to expel Brooks. Brooks resigned his seat anyway, only to be reelected by his constituents later in the year. He received new canes emblazoned with the words “Hit him again!".
With sectional tensions at a breaking point, both parties readied for the coming presidential election. In June 1856, the newly named Republican Party held its nominating convention at Philadelphia and selected Californian John Charles Frémont. Frémont lost, but Republicans celebrated that he won eleven of the sixteen free states. Ulysses S. Grant of Missouri, for example, worried that Frémont and Republicans signaled trouble for the Union itself. In abolitionist and especially Black American circles, Frémont's defeat was more than a disappointment.
From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis
White antislavery leaders hailed Frémont's defeat as a “glorious" one and looked ahead to the party's future successes. Kansas loomed large over the 1856 election, darkening the national mood. From there, the crisis only deepened and democratic norms collapsed. Kansas voted to come into the Union as a free state, but the federal government refused to recognize their votes and instead recognized a sham pro-slavery legislature.
The sectional crisis had at last become a national crisis. As the national mood grew increasingly grim, Kansas attracted militants representing the extreme sides of the slavery debate.
In the days after the 1856 presidential election, Buchanan made his plans for his time in office clear. The Dred Scott decision, Scott v. Sandford, ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States and therefore could be transported as chattel from any state to another regardless of state law. This gave the Buchanan administration and its southern allies a direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise. The court ruled that Scott, a Missouri slave, had no right to sue in United States courts. The Dred Scott decision signaled that the federal government was now fully committed to extending slavery as far and as wide as it might want.
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 1857, Buchanan sent U.S. military forces to Utah, hoping to subdue Utah's Mormon communities. Far more important than the Utah invasion, however, were the ongoing events in Kansas. It was Kansas that at last proved to many northerners that the sectional crisis would not go away unless slavery also went away.
The Illinois Senate race in 1858 put the scope of the sectional crisis on full display. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln challenged the greatly influential Democrat Stephen Douglas. Douglas hammered the Republican opposition as a "Black Republican" party bent on racial equality. Republicans fired back with warnings of divisiveness and assertions that all Americans deserved equality of opportunity. Lincoln actually lost his contest with Stephen Douglas but in the process firmly established himself as a leading national Republican.
In the troubled decades since the Missouri Compromise, the nation slowly tore itself apart. Across the country, cities and towns were in various stages of revolt against federal authority. Fighting spread even farther against Native Americans in the Far West and against Mormons in Utah. John Brown planned to attack Harper's Ferry, a federal weapons arsenal in Virginia. Brown's raid embarked on October 16. By October 18, a command under Robert E. Lee had crushed the revolt. Northerners made a stunning display of sympathy on the day of his execution. Southerners took their reactions to mean that the coming 1860 election would be, in many ways, a referendum on secession and disunion.
Republicans wanted little to do with Brown and instead tried to portray themselves as moderates opposed to both abolitionists and pro-slavery expansionists. The Democratic Party fared poorly as its southern delegates bolted its national convention at Charleston and ran their own candidate, Vice President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. The Democrats decided to meet again at Baltimore and nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
The Republicans held their convention in Chicago. The Republican platform made the party's antislavery commitments clear, also making wide promises to its white constituents, particularly westerners, with the promise of new land, transcontinental railroads, and broad support of public schools. Abraham Lincoln won the nomination, and with the Democrats in disarray, Republicans knew their candidate Lincoln had a good chance of winning.
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. On December 20, South Carolina voted to secede and issued its Declaration of the Immediate Causes." The declaration highlighted failure of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act over competing personal liberty laws in northern states. The primary complaint of the very first ordinance of secession listed the federal government's failure to exert its authority over the northern states.
The seceded states grappled with internal divisions right away, as states with enslavers sometimes did not support the newly seceded states. By early February, Texas had also joined the newly seceded states. In February, southerners drafted a constitution protecting slavery and named Jefferson Davis of Mississippi their president. 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 American Civil War had begun.
Conclusion
Slavery had long divided the politics of the United States. As westward expansion continued, these fault lines grew even more ominous, particularly as the United States managed to seize even more lands from its war with Mexico. The country seemed to teeter ever closer to a full-throated endorsement of slavery. But an antislavery coalition arose in the middle 1850s calling itself the Republican Party. Eager to cordon off slavery and confine it to where it already existed, the Republicans won the presidential election of 1860 and threw the nation on the path to war.
Throughout this period, the mainstream of the antislavery movement remained committed to a peaceful resolution of the slavery issue through efforts understood to foster the “ultimate extinction" of slavery in due time. Secession, in the end, raised the possibility of emancipation through war, a possibility most Republicans knew, of course, had always been an option, but one they nonetheless hoped would never be necessary. By 1861 all bets were off, and the fate of slavery, and of the nation, depended on war.