Unit 3

The Compromise of 1850

• the last act of Congress by Henry Clay was seen as a vital compromise to keep the peace between the North and South

Southern Wins

• Utah and New Mexico Territory decide if slavery is allowed by popular sovereignty once they become states, but the vote is never carried out as population growth is slow because the land is not fertile

  • takes the question out of the hands of Congress, where there had been a heated debate

• The Fugitive Slave Act - it becomes a federal crime for anybody to help a fugitive slave and not help return them to their owner because of the constitutional obligation by each state to respect each other’s property

  • the North had never really put in the effort to respect the constitutional obligation beforehand, as most Northerners were anti-slavery (to varying degrees)

  • it nationalizes slavery because the federal government forces the Northerners to help Southerners capture their slaves, and the Northerners are forced to accept slavery even in states where it is illegal

  • it also terrifies all free African-Americans, escaped slaves because they could be brought back to their old owners, and freed slaves because they could be mistaken for fugitive slaves and enslaved to someone they don’t know

Northern Wins

• California becomes a free state because it’s over the 36^o 30 line and Gold Rush Economics

  • Gold Rush Economics - people didn’t want slavery in California because they wanted white people to get paid to work on fertile land

  • ?California became a state so easily because of the `49 Gold Rush, which caused a large migration of Americans to the new territory of California from the Méxican-American War

• The slave trade is banned in Washington, DC because Congress has the authority to govern DC as it’s a federal territory

  • the slave trade was popular and made the country look bad in front of foreign diplomats

Garrisonism and Abolition

• Abolitionists - a small but vocal majority in the North who were completely against slavery and consistently advocated for a nationwide ban

• William Lloyd Garrison - from Boston, a mentor to Fredrick Douglas, and a radical abolitionist who declared the Declaration of Independence was not carried out by the Constitution because the Declaration of Independence declared all people equal and the Constitution was, in his eyes, pro-slavery

  • is known for publically burning a copy of the Constitution because of the 3/5ths Compromise and the Fugitive Clause

• The Liberator - first published in 1831 by Garrison, an anti-slavery magazine

• Garrisonism - the belief that interacting at all with slave-holders is being complicit with slavery, so followers would not vote or hold public office

  • believes that the Declaration of Independence was being trampled on and that its ideas would crumble and weaken the union

    • accepting of disunion because they can’t support the sin of slavery, so they’re for South Carolina seceding during the Nullification Crises

  • absolutely no compromising with slaveholders because then you become a part of the problem

• Fredrick Douglas - an escaped slave and radical abolitionist and prolific orator whose most known speech is What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin - a best-selling novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, after gathering stories from former slaves, wrote a fictional story about slavery

  • gave slaves a voice in the fight against slavery because now they were not just slaves but as real as the people who owned them and who had to endure abuse and exploitation

  • the North saw it as shocking and the South tried to dismiss it as overdramatic, but the book was a big contributor to the civil war

Apple of Gold and Frame of Silver

• an allegory for the two founding documents of the United States

• the Declaration of Independence - the apple because it’s about ideals for an American union; equality, natural rights, liberty, and the consent of the governed

• the Constitution - the silver frame because it’s the means to go about preserving and achieving the ideals of an American union with the branches of government, separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, and popular sovereignty

What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

• “The Ringbolt for America’s Future” - Douglas calls the Declaration of Independence the ringbolt of the chain of America, without it America would be lost, and it’s a reference to slavery

• Douglas delivers the Fourth of July speech in Upstate New York but intends for the entire nation to hear what he is saying, especially Northern government officials so they would do more for the cause of slavery

• Douglas says that if slaves weren’t human, there would be no slaves because they don’t make laws for cattle so they know slaves are human and therefore are guaranteed the rights in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

  • they aren’t allowed to learn how to read or write because then they could hear about abolitionism and revolt against their owners

• He believes that slavery is doomed because slavery is becoming more and more divisive

• “Glorious Liberty Document” - Douglas believes that the Constitution is anti-slavery, deviating from his mentor William Lloyd Garrison’s philosophy that the Constitution condoned slavery by not outright outlawing it, citing the Founding Fathers intended to create a “more Perfect Union”

Internal vs. External Slave Trade

• the foreign slave trade - was outlawed in 1808 by Thomas Jefferson because the Constitutional Convention decided to wait 20 years as part of the slavery compromise

• the internal slave trade started growing when the foreign trade was outlawed and occurred between the upper South and the deep South because cotton was a rapidly growing cash crop

  • was seen as just as unethical as the foreign trade because it was still displacing people at a whim from their families, people, and places they knew to another place where they didn’t know anybody

  • it also hindered escape plans since it was harder to escape in the deep South, where no states bordered free states

• Mason-Dixon Line - the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland, seen as the border between free states and slave states

Increasing Tensions over Slavery

• For every trial after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act, judges were paid $5 if a person was not deemed a fugitive slave and $10 if a person was determined to be, so defendants were more likely to be found guilty

  • as many people as possible were being accused of being slaves just for the judges to earn money, and they didn’t even get the opportunity to defend themselves

• Personal Liberty Laws - some Northern states tried to pass laws to help people being accused of being fugitive slaves, but it was hard to override national law

• Conflict in Religion - churches throughout the nation started splitting up based on whether they interpreted the scripture to condone or condemn slavery

  • southern churches - believed the scripture justified slavery

  • northern churches - believe slavery is the exact opposite of Christianity

• Abolitionists vs. Slave Owners - abolitionists advocated for a nationwide ban on slavery on moral grounds, while slave owners wanted each state to determine whether or not they would allow slavery because slavery was seen as allocated for the states by the Founding Fathers

• Brooks–Sumner Affair - an abolitionist senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, slanders several Southern politicians in 1856, including South Carolinian Andrew Butler, so Butler’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a South Carolinian Representative, brutally assaults him with a cane

  • Instead of condemning the violence, South Carolinians celebrated Brooks and sent him replacement canes, telling him to do it again, while Sumner took a long time to recover from the assault

Kansas-Nebraska Act

• Stephen Douglas - a Democratic senator from Illinois who wanted a railroad from Illinois to the Pacific and proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act to support possible construction

• the Kansas-Nebraska Act - proposed by Douglas and passed under President Pierce to separate the remaining Louisiana Territory into Kansas and Nebraska and let popular sovereignty decide if the states would allow slavery, overturning the old Missouri Compromise

• Lincoln is against the act because when someone governs themselves, that is self-government, but if they are allowed to govern another, that is more than sel-government - that is despotism

  • not a popular opinion because many took natural rights guaranteed by the Constitution for granted and disregarded them whenever they wanted too

• Once the act was passed, pro-slavery people moved into Kansas so it would become a slave state while anti-slavery people did the same thing

• Bleeding Kansas - slavery was becoming so divisive that violence was breaking out in the territories, showing that tensions were going to boil over soon

  • Lorens, Kansas - an anti-slavery town burned down by pro-slavery forces, so John Brown and his sons kidnap a pro-slavery family in the middle of the night and brutally murder them in a field

• Two Governments - for the vote on whether or not Kansas should be a slave state, anti-slavery groups boycotted the vote, creating a pro-slavery government so the anti-slavery groups created their own government

• Republican Party - founded in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and aimed to prevent the spread of slavery to the federal territories

Scott vs. Sanford

• a supreme court case brought by former slave Dred Scott, suing for his freedom based on the fact he traveled to several free states with his master, before he died, and said that because he entered the state, he was free

  • to pay for legal fees, he was funded by several abolitionist groups

• Roger Taney - the chief justice during the Dred Scott case who wrote the majority opinion

• Dred Scott - a slave owned by an army surgeon who died, so Scott sued for his freedom and the case made it up to the Supreme Court

• Benjamin Curtis - one of two dissenters on the Supreme Court for Scott vs. Sanford, later resigned in protest of the majority opinion

Majority Opinion

• Taney was trying to end the debate about slavery once and for all and said the Constitution was pro-slavery and never intended for Black people to be seen as citizens

• The majority believed that since Scott was a slave, he was not a citizen and did not have the right to sue for his freedom

  • they believed that as a Black person, he was “naturally inferior” to white people

• Free or enslaved, the majority believed Black people didn’t have any rights white men were bound to respect and that slavery was apparently for the benefit of Black people

• It also says that citizenship is only owed to those who were around during the founding of America

• Cites the fifth amendment, which is that the government cannot take away somebody’s property, so if slaves are property, Congress can not restrict where your property goes, attempting to make the foundation of the Republican Party unconstitutional

• The Missouri Compromise is also declared unconstitutional because the power to decide on slavery is given to the states, not to the government

Dissenting Opinion

• in five out of the original thirteen states, free blacks could participate in their state conventions for ratifying the US Constitution, meaning they never were written out of the Constitution and are therefore owed rights given to them by the constitution

• free and enslaved Black people also fought in the Revolutionary War, showing they helped form the country just as much as white people

• Curtis also brings up the Preamble, as it says, “We the People,” meaning everyone within the country of the United States

• Taney is also accused of inaccurately reading the Constitution to favor his personal beliefs

• A major criticism of the majority opinion was that immigrants from Europe were guaranteed citizenship, but Black people born on US soil were still denied citizenship because of their race

1858 Debates

• The 1858 Senate election for Illinois was between Democrat Stephen Douglas, the current Senator, and Republican Abraham Lincoln, who had served as a one-time representative and was called out of his private practice by the Kansas-Nebraska Act

• Douglas and Lincoln agreed to seven 3 hour debates across the state of Illinois to gain people’s votes

• The Southern State in the North - Illinois could be considered the most conservative of the Northern states, having outlawed slavery but a lot of citizens from slave states, especially in the south of the state

• Current perception about secession - some people wanted the South to secede from the Union but others still wanted to negotiate with the South because the only way the slaves could be freed was under the Union

• Douglas won the Senate seat again, but the election made Lincoln more popular across the nation, especially the East Coast

Douglas’ Platform

• Douglas’ opinion on “a house divided” - he believes the country was meant to be divided into free states and slave states by the founders because it has already survived so long as a divided nation

• Douglas’ opinion on popular sovereignty - he saw it as a Union-saving measure and a way to promote democracy throughout the nation

• He was very hypocritical, arguing that the Union was both stable and unstable and was more interested in getting votes than having a strong argument

• democrat’s perception of the founding fathers - they believed, like Roger Taney, that white men created the nation for white men, and what they meant to say with “all men are created equal” was “all white men are created equal”. Additionally, they thought each state had the right to decide on slavery because, throughout the nation, each region was so diverse and suited for different things.

• he supports the Constitution but doesn’t like the Declaration of Independence, so he’s for the laws but not what the laws were based on, which is hypocritical

Lincoln’s Platform

• “a house divided against itself cannot stand” - Lincoln says this while accepting the Republican nomination to be a senator from Illinois, meaning that slavery was either going to go away completely or every state would have to legalize slavery

• was against popular sovereignty because white men had the power to make decisions for their black slaves without their consent, which violated the idea of the consent of the governed and it could become tyranny if the majority believed in something wrong

• “Black Republican” - Douglas says Lincoln is a radical and wants complete racial equality, which is considered radical abolitionism at the time, but in reality, Lincoln is more moderate at this time

  • the audience is also quite conservative, they were against slavery but didn’t like all the ideas about abolitionism

    • he says he’s not for equal rights for Black people so white citizens and immigrants could have a chance at the American Dream

  • he’s okay with slavery in the states, but his main point is it spreading to the federal territories like a disease because of how much it was already dividing the nation

    • he cites the Northwest Ordinance, which banned slavery in some of the first territories of the nation

• “fruits of your labor” - Lincoln is personally against slavery because it robs Black people of the chance to get rewarded for their work, instead their master gets to live comfortably while they have to labor every day

• slavery as despotism - Lincoln saw slavery as despotism because it was controlling somebody without their consent, connecting to old European ways

• “Ancient faith” - Lincoln saw following the beliefs of the founding documents as vital to the survival of the country

• "moral, political, and economic evil” - Lincoln viewed slavery as completely wrong but was willing to be moderate because of his conservative audience