The Union in Peril, 1848 - 1861 Lecture Notes

The Compromise of 1850

• The Problem of Slavery in the Mexican Session

1. Traditionally, slavery had been kept out of American politics, with the result that no practical program could be devised for its elimination in the southern states.

2. Congress, however, had the power to set the conditions under which territories became states and to forbid slavery in new states.

3. In the late 1840s, as the result of expansion, Congress faced the problem of determining the status of slavery in the territories taken from Mexico.

   1. The Wilmot Proviso Launches the Free-Soil Movement

4. As soon as the United States declared war against Mexico, antislavery groups wanted to make sure that slavery would not expand because of American victory.

5. David Wilmot introduced a bill in Congress that would have banned all African Americans, slave or free, from whatever land the US took from Mexico, thus preserving the area for white small farmers.

6. This blend of racism and antislavery won great support in the North, and in a clearly sectional division, the House of Representatives passed the Proviso, while the Senate defeated it.

7. The battle over the Proviso foreshadowed an even more urgent controversy once the peace treaty with Mexico was signed.

   1. Squatter Sovereignty and the Election of 1848

8. The issue of slavery in the Mexican cession became an issue in the 1848 election.

9. Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass offered a clever solution. He proposed that Congress allow the settlers in the territories to decide the issue (popular sovereignty).

10. The proposal found support among antislavery forces, who assumed that the territorial settlers would have a chance to prohibit slavery before it could get established.

11. Popular sovereignty, however, was unacceptable to those who wanted a definite limit placed on the expansion of slavery. The Free-Soil party formed running former President Martin Van Buren as its candidate. (Van Buren had only served one term.)

12. The Whigs nominated war hero Zachary Taylor, who took no stand on the territorial question and who won with less than half the popular vote.

    1. Taylor Takes Charge

13. Taylor proposed to settle the controversy by admitting California and New Mexico as states right away even though New Mexico technically had too few people to be a state.

14. The white South reacted angrily.

15. A convention of the southern states was called to meet at Nashville, perhaps to declare secession.

    1. Forging a Compromise

16. The Whig leader, Henry Clay, put together a compromise package (as an omnibus package).

    1. The North would get

       1. California as a free state

       2. prohibition on the slave trade in the District of Columbia

    2. The South got

       1. a strong fugitive slave law

       2. a chance to settle the New Mexico territory, which was also enlarged

17. When President Taylor, who opposed the compromise, died in August 1850, the Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, adopted each of Clay’s proposals as a separate measures.

Political Upheaval, 1852-1856

• The Party System in Crisis

1. Once the Compromise of 1850 seemed to have settled the territorial controversy, Whigs and Democrats looked for new issues.

2. The Democrats claimed credit for the nation’s prosperity and promised to defend the compromise.

3. Whigs, however, could find no popular issue and began to fight among themselves. Their candidate in 1852, General Winfield Scott, lost in a landslide to Democrat Franklin Pierce, a colorless nonentity.

   1. The Kansas-Nebraska Act Raises a Storm

4. In 1854, Stephen Douglas (of Illinois) introduced a bill to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories.

5. These areas were north of the Missouri Compromise line and had been off-limits to slavery since 1820, but Douglas proposed to apply ‘popular sovereignty’ to them in an effort to get southern votes (support) and avoid another controversy.

6. Douglas expected to revive the spirit of Manifest Destiny for the benefit of the Democratic party and for his own benefit when he ran for president in 1860.

7. The South insisted, and Douglas agreed to add an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, thus provoking a storm of protest in the North, where it was felt that the South had broken a long-established agreement.

8. The Whig party, unable to decide what position to take on the Kansas-Nebraska Act, disintegrated.

9. The Democratic party suffered mass defections in the North.

10. In the Congressional elections of 1854, coalitions of “anti-Nebraska” candidates swept the North, and the Democrats became virtually the only political party in the South.

11. In the midst of the uproar, President Pierce made an effort to buy, or seize, Cuba from Spain, but northern anger at any further extension of slavery forced the president to drop the idea.

    1. An Appeal to Nativism: The Know-Nothing Episode

12. As the Whigs collapsed, a new party, the Know-Nothings, or American party, gained in popularity.

13. The Know-Nothing party especially appealed to evangelical Protestants, who objected to the millions of Catholics immigrating to America.

14. By the 1850s, the Know-Nothings also picked up support from former Whigs and Democrats disgusted with politics as usual.

15. In just a few years, the Know-Nothings collapsed for reasons that are still obscure. Most probably, Northerners worried less about immigration as it slowed down, and turned their attention to the slavery issue.

    1. Kansas and the Rise of the Republicans

16. The Republican party emerged as a coalition of former Whigs, Know-Nothings, Free-Soilers and Northern Democrats by emphasizing the sectional struggle and by appealing strictly to northern voters.

17. Republicans promised to save the West as a preserve for white, small farmers.

18. Events in Kansas helped the Republicans. Abolitionists and proslavery forces raced into the territory to gain control of the territorial legislature.

19. Proslavery forces won and passed laws that made it illegal even to criticize the institution of slavery.

20. Very soon, however, those who favored free soil became the majority and set up a rival government.

21. President Pierce recognized the proslavery legislature, while the Republicans attacked it as the tyrannical instrument of a minority.

22. In Kansas, fighting broke out, and the Republicans used “Bleeding Kansas” to win more northern voters.

    1. Sectional Division in the Election of 1856

23. The Republicans, who sought votes only in the free states, nominated John C. Fremont for President.

24. The Know-Nothings ran ex-President Millard Fillmore as a champion of sectional compromise.

25. The Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, defended the Compromise of 1850 and carried the election, despite clear gains for the Republicans.

The House Divided, 1857-1860

• Cultural Sectionalism

1. Cultural and intellectual cleavages surfaced in the 1840s.

2. Even religion divided North and South. Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians split into northern and southern denominations because of their attitudes toward slaveholding.

3. Southern literature romanticized life on the plantation, and the South attempted to become intellectually and economically independent in preparation for nationhood.

4. At the same time, northern intellectuals condemned slavery in prose and poem. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was an immense success in the North.

   1. The Lecompton Controversy

5. Once again events in Kansas created sectional conflict. The proslavery faction met in a rigged convention at Lecompton to write a constitution and apply for admission as a state.

6. Free-Soilers in Kansas overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton constitution, but President Buchanan and the Southerners in Congress accepted it and tried to admit Kansas as a state.

7. The House defeated this attempt.

8. The Lecompton constitution was referred back to the people of Kansas, who repudiated it.

9. The Lecompton controversy split the Democrats when Douglas broke with Buchanan over the issue, but Douglas made himself unpopular in the South by doing so.

   1. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857

10. The Dred Scott decision (1857) crystallized the conflict between free and slave labor.

11. The case concerned Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri who sued for his freedom after his master took him to live in Illinois. Scott claimed that residency in a free state had made him a free man.

12. The Supreme Court (the majority of its members from the South) held that Scott was still a slave, and as such did not have the right to sue in court since he did not qualify as a citizen.

13. Instead of limiting itself to a narrow determination of the case, the Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional because Congress could not restrict the right of a slaveowner to take his slaves into a territory.

14. The ruling outraged the North and strengthened the Republicans.

    1. Debating the Morality of Slavery

15. In 1858, Republican Abraham Lincoln faced Democrat Stephen Douglas in the Illinois Senate race.

16. In debates, Lincoln claimed that there was a southern plot to extend slavery throughout the nation. He promised to take measures that would ensure the eventual extinction of the institution.

17. Above all, Lincoln made the point that he considered slavery a moral problem, while Douglas did not.

18. Douglas answered by accusing Lincoln of favoring racial equality, a potent charge that forced Lincoln to defend white supremacy.

19. Lincoln lost the election but gained a national reputation.

    1. The South’s Crisis of Fear

       1. A series of events in 1859 and 1860 convinced Southerners that Republicans intended to foment rebellion among African Americans and white small farmers.

       2. John Brown tried to capture an arsenal at Harpers Ferry in order to arm slaves. When Brown was executed for treason, the North mourned him as a martyr.

       3. The white South was disgusted and became convinced that the Republican party would use armed force to abolish slavery. The only solution, it seemed, was to secede if the next president was a Republican.

    2. The Election of 1860

       1. Republicans nominated Lincoln in 1860 because he was from Illinois and because he was not as controversial as other Republican leaders.

       2. In order to widen the party’s appeal, the Republicans promised high tariffs for industry, free homesteads for small farmers, and government aid for internal improvements.

       3. Democrats could not agree on a candidate. The northern wing nominated Stephen Douglas; the southern Democrats nominated John Breckinridge.

       4. The Constitutional Union party ran John Bell, who promised to compromise the differences between North and South.

       5. Lincoln received less than 40% of the popular vote, but won virtually every northern electoral vote, giving him the victory.

Explaining the Crisis

• The breakup of the Union would not have happened without slavery or the rise of a strictly sectional party, like the Republicans.

  • But the conflict arose from a fundamental difference between two different ideals of society.

    1. The South saw itself as paternalistic, generous, and prosperous and defended slavery on the grounds of race.

    2. The North, inspired by evangelical Protestantism, believed that each person should be responsible for himself and free to make his own way in the world. To the North, slavery was tyrannical and immoral.

The Storm Gathers

• The Deep South Secedes

  1. South Carolina seceded on December 20, 1860, and by February 1861, six more states, all in the Deep South, had joined South Carolina in forming the Confederate States of America.

  2. Significantly, the new Confederate government was headed by men who were moderates and who had not led the secession movement.

  • The Failure of Compromise

    1. There was a last-minute effort to save the Union. In Congress, support grew for a plan put forward by Senator John Crittenden, the essence of which was to settle the problem of slavery in the territories by extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific.

    2. Lincoln rejected this plan because he did not think it would end secession and because he viewed it as a repudiation of the principles on which he had been elected.

  • And the War Came

    1. President Buchanan had made no attempt to coerce the South back into the Union, and many Northerners wanted to let the South “go in peace.” Most Northerners, however, wanted forceful action to preserve the Union.

    2. When Lincoln took office, he discovered that he must either quickly resupply the federal garrison in Fort Sumter, South Carolina, or surrender it.

    3. He opted for resupply and informed the governor of South Carolina of that decision.

    4. Before the supplies could arrive, South Carolina forces opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12 and captured it.

    5. Lincoln called out the northern state militias to suppress the insurrection in the South.

    6. Lincoln’s actions united the South. Virginia now seceded, followed by the rest of the upper South.

    7. Only four slave states remained in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

    8. In the North, the general public responded eagerly to what they expected would be a short war.

    9. Although it had been the issue of slavery that led to secession, people at the time defined the war in terms of whether or not the Union was indissoluble