United States History

D

The Fugitive Slave Law

The one element of the Compromise of 1850 that explicitly favored the South was the Fugitive Slave Law. A federal law of 1793 required that slaves who escaped to a free state be returned if the master could offer proof of ownership to a state court. The new law turned these cases over to federal commissioners, and it denied a captured slave the right to testify in his or her own behalf or to be tried before a jury. The law violated Northerners’ notions of states’ rights, it infringed on civil liberties in the North, and it turned Northerners into direct participants in Southern slavery. Northern citizens, even those who had not previously opposed slavery, refused to support the law. While some hid fugitives or helped spirit them into Canada, nine Northern states passed personal liberty laws that forbade state officials from helping to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published a sentimental antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a direct challenge to slavery in general and the Fugitive Slave Law in particular. It sold 300,000 copies that year, and 1.2 million by summer 1853.

E

The Kansas–Nebraska Act

The Compromise of 1850 created a smoldering truce that lasted only a few years. By 1853 settlers had moved west of Missouri into what is now Kansas. Congress drew up legislation organizing the remaining federal lands in the Louisiana Purchase into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Under the Missouri Compromise, none of this land was open to slavery. But Southerners, along with 15 of 20 Northern Democrats in the Senate, organized the new territories under popular sovereignty: The new states could decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. The Kansas–Nebraska Act thus abolished the Missouri Compromise line and enacted popular sovereignty—a measure that was becoming the Democratic Party’s answer to the question of slavery in the territories.

Northern Whigs in Congress all voted against the act, leading Southern Whigs to leave the party and join the Democrats. At the same time, many Northern Democrats openly opposed the legislation. Thus the Democratic Party shifted and became more overtly Southern, while Northern Whigs and many Northern Democrats joined coalitions that in 1854 became the Republican Party, exclusively Northern and antislavery. Political parties were reorganizing along sectional lines.

F

Bleeding Kansas

With the territory organized under popular sovereignty, voters would decide the question of slavery in Kansas. Antislavery settlers flooded the territory, and in response, proslavery Missourians moved in. When elections were held for the territorial legislature in 1854, about 5,000 Missourians crossed the border to vote illegally for proslavery candidates. The resulting legislature legalized slavery in Kansas. Antislavery forces refused to accept these results. They organized a convention that wrote an antislavery constitution and they elected their own legislature.

---

---

While this controversy raged in Kansas, Charles Sumner, an antislavery senator from Massachusetts, gave an impassioned antislavery speech in which he insulted a number of Southern senators. He said that one of them, Andrew Butler, “had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows … the harlot, Slavery.” Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina was Butler’s nephew. He was determined to punish Sumner’s attack upon his family’s honor. He walked onto the floor of the Senate, found Sumner at his desk, and beat him unconscious with a cane. White Southerners almost unanimously applauded Brooks, while Northerners ranted against Southern savagery. At almost the same time as the attack on Sumner, in May 1856, proslavery Kansans attacked an antislavery stronghold at Lawrence. In retribution, an antislavery fanatic named John Brown murdered five proslavery settlers in what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre. A small–scale civil war was being fought in Kansas.

G

The Dred Scott Case

At this point the Supreme Court, with a Southern majority among the justices, tried to settle the problem of slavery in the territories. It chose the Dred Scott case to do so. Scott was a slave owned by a U.S. Army doctor who had brought him to the free state of Illinois and the Territory of Wisconsin, which was free under the Missouri Compromise. Scott sued for his freedom on that basis.

The Supreme Court answered with a powerful proslavery decision in 1857. First, the majority stated that blacks (whether free or slaves) could not be citizens of the United States. As a result, Dred Scott’s case should never have entered the federal courts. The court went on to declare that the Missouri Compromise was invalid because Congress had no right to exclude slaves (who were legal property and therefore protected under the Constitution) from any territory. With that, the Supreme Court had adopted the extreme Southern position on the question of slavery in the territories, and declared the policy of the Republican Party and of a majority of Northerners unconstitutional.

Meanwhile, Kansas submitted two constitutions in its application for statehood—one that permitted slavery and one that did not. President James Buchanan, a Northern Democrat and a solid supporter of the South, sent the Lecompton (proslavery) Constitution to Congress with a strong recommendation that it be accepted. In a congressional debate that at one point broke into a fistfight, enough Northern Democrats finally defected from their party to reject the Lecompton Constitution. The controversy deeply divided the Democratic Party in the North and made the election of an antislavery Republican as president in 1860 very likely.

H

The Election of 1860

The breakup of the party system produced four presidential candidates in the election of 1860. The Democratic Party split angrily into Northern and Southern wings. Southern Democrats nominated Buchanan’s vice president, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, while Northern Democrats chose Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. What remained of the Whigs renamed themselves Constitutional Unionists and nominated Senator John Bell of Tennessee (see Constitutional Union Party). Republicans passed over better–known candidates and nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.

Lincoln had become known nationally when he staked out the Republican position on slavery in the territories and held his own in a series of public debates in a Senate race with Douglas in 1858. He was also known for a speech in which he stated that the United States could not long endure as a “house divided” between Northern free–labor capitalism and Southern slavery. On the crucial question of slavery in the territories, Lincoln assured the South that no president could constitutionally dismantle the institution in the states. But he would preserve the territories for free labor, thus putting slavery “in the course of ultimate extinction.”

The election results were starkly sectional. Breckinridge carried 11 states in the Deep South. Bell carried a few Upper South states. Douglas, while coming in second in the popular vote, won only in Missouri and a part of New Jersey. Lincoln carried every Northern state and thus won an overwhelming victory in the Electoral College—and he did so without a single electoral vote from a slave state. The Republican Party, with an antislavery platform and an entirely Northern constituency, had elected a president of the United States. No possible new coalition would enable the South to keep that from happening repeatedly.

XII

The Civil War