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From Compromise to Secession,1850–1861

CHAPTER 14

In early July 1859 a man calling himself Isaac Smith and claiming to be a cat-tle dealer rented a dilapidated farmhouse some seven miles from Harpers

Ferry in northern Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. Neighbors soon noticedthat others had joined “Smith,” including two young women, and perhapsthey observed a wagon loaded with fifteen boxes pull up to the farm one day.But nothing seemed out of the ordinary. True, the men stayed out of sight,but the women chatted amiably with neighbors, and “Smith” referred to thecontents of the boxes merely as “hardware.”

But in reality, everything was out of the ordinary. “Smith” was JohnBrown, a brooding abolitionist with a price on his head for the massacre ofwhite southerners in Kansas in 1856 and with a conviction that God hadordained him “to purge this land with blood” of the evil of slavery. One of thewomen was his daughter, the other his daughter-in-law. The boxes con-tained rifles and revolvers, with which Brown and his recruits— white ideal-ists (including three of Brown’s sons), free blacks, and fugitive slaves—planned to raid Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal arsenal and armory, as aprelude to igniting a slave insurrection throughout the South.

In some respects, Brown was a marginal figure in the abolitionist move-ment. Unlike better-known abolitionists, he had written no stirring tractsagainst slavery. But in Kansas, where civil war between free-staters and

CHAPTER OUTLINE

The Compromise of 1850

The Collapse of the Second PartySystem, 1853–1856

The Crisis of the Union, 1857–1860

The Collapse of the Union, 1860–1861

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407

slave-staters had broken out in the mid-1850s, Brownhad acquired a reputation as someone who could han-dle the rough stuff. Eastern abolitionists—most of whomwere philosophical pacifists, but who were starting tosuspect that only violence would end slavery—were fast developing a fascination with Brown. Little sus-pecting his plans for Harpers Ferry, they accepted his disavowal of a role in the Kansas massacre andendorsed, with contributions, his plans to carry on thefight against those who would forcibly turn Kansas into aslave state.

On the moonless evening of October 16, 1859,Brown and eighteen recruits (three were left behind toguard the farmhouse) entered Harpers Ferry and quicklyseized the arsenal and armory. Expecting slaves—half ofHarpers Ferry’s population was enslaved—to rally atonce to his cause, Brown then did nothing, while localwhites, jumpy about the possibility of a slave insurrec-tion ever since Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion (see Chapter12), spread the alarm. Soon armed locals, their couragesteeled by liquor, militia from surrounding areas, andU.S. Marines dispatched by President James Buchananand under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee,clogged the streets of Harpers Ferry. On October 18 theMarines stormed the armory where Brown and most ofhis men had taken refuge, severely wounded and cap-tured Brown, and killed or mortally wounded ten others,including two of Brown’s sons. Five men, including oneof Brown’s sons, escaped; the remaining recruits wereeventually captured and executed. Brown himself wasspeedily tried, convicted, and hanged.

In the immediate wake of Brown’s capture, promi-nent northerners distanced themselves from him. Hislawyers contended that he was insane and hence notculpable for his deeds. But Brown himself derided theinsanity defense. His conduct during his brief imprison-ment was serene, his words eloquent. He told his captorsthat he had rendered to God the “greatest service mancan.” For their part, white southerners came to reject thenotion that Brown’s plot was the work of an isolatedlunatic. A search of the farmhouse after Brown’s cap-ture quickly turned up incriminating correspondencebetween Brown and leading northern abolitionists. Asproslavery southerners saw it, Brown had botched theraid, but his plan to arm nonslaveholding southernwhites with guns and disaffected slaves with pikes(Brown had contracted for the manufacture of a thou-sand pikes) was plausible. In all the southern statesslaveholding whites were outnumbered by people whodid not own slaves (slaves, free blacks, and nonslave-holding whites) by more than three to one. Northern

opinion increasingly shifted toward sympathy for Brown.Ralph Waldo Emerson exulted that Brown’s executionwould “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

This chapter focuses on four major questions:

■ To what extent did the Compromise of 1850 repre-sent a genuine meeting of the minds between north-erners and southerners? How, specifically, did thecontroversy over enforcement of the Fugitive SlaveAct contribute to the undoing of the Compromise?

■ Why did the Whig party collapse in the wake of theKansas-Nebraska Act? Why did the Democraticparty not also collapse?

■ How did the outbreak of conflict in Kansas influencethe rise of the Republican party? Why was theRepublican doctrine of free soil able to unify north-erners against the South?

■ What led southerners to conclude that the North wasbent not merely on restricting territorial slavery butalso on extinguishing slavery in southern states?

THE COMPROMISE OF 1850Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grim prediction that an Americanvictory in the Mexican War would be like swallowingarsenic proved disturbingly accurate. When the warended in 1848, the United States contained an equalnumber of free and slave states (fifteen each), but thevast territory acquired by the war threatened to upsetthis balance. Any solution to the question of slavery inthe Mexican cession ensured controversy, if not hostility.The doctrine of free soil, which insisted that Congressprohibit slavery in the territories, horrified southerners.The idea of extending the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30’ to the Pacific angered free-soilers because it would allow slavery in New Mexico and southernCalifornia, and southern proslavery extremists becauseit conceded that Congress could bar slavery in some ter-ritories. A third solution, popular sovereignty, whichpromised to ease the slavery extension issue out ofnational politics by allowing each territory to decide thequestion for itself, pleased neither free-soilers norproslavery extremists.

As the rhetoric escalated, events plunged the nationinto crisis. Utah and then California, both acquired fromMexico, sought admission to the Union as free states.Texas, admitted as a slave state in 1845, aggravated mat-ters by claiming the eastern half of New Mexico, where

408 CHAPTER 14 From Compromise to Secession, 1850–1861

the Mexican government had long since abolished slavery.

By 1850 these territorial issues had become inter-twined with two other concerns. Northerners increas-ingly attacked slavery in the District of Columbia, withinthe shadow of the Capitol; southerners complainedabout lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.Any broad compromise would have to take both trou-blesome matters into account.

Zachary Taylor at the Helm

Although elected president in 1848 without a platform,Zachary Taylor came to office with a clear position onthe issue of slavery in the Mexican cession. A slavehold-er himself, he took for granted the South’s need todefend slavery. Taylor insisted that southerners wouldbest protect slavery if they refrained from rekindling theissue of slavery in the territories. He rejected Calhoun’sidea that the protection of slavery in the southern statesultimately depended on the expansion of slavery in-to the western territories. In Taylor’s eyes, neitherCalifornia nor New Mexico was suited to slavery; in 1849he told a Pennsylvania audience that “the people of theNorth need have no apprehension of the further exten-sion of slavery.”

Although Taylor looked to the exclusion of slaveryfrom California and New Mexico, his position differedfrom that embodied in the Wilmot Proviso, the free-soilmeasure proposed in 1846 by a northern Democrat. Theproviso had insisted that Congress bar slavery in the territories ceded by Mexico. Taylor’s plan, in contrast,left the decision to the states. Recognizing that mostCalifornians opposed slavery in their state, Taylor hadprompted California to bypass the territorial stage thatnormally preceded statehood, to draw up its constitu-tion in 1849, and to apply directly for admission as a freestate. The president strongly hinted that he expectedNew Mexico to do the same.

Taylor’s strategy appeared to guarantee a quick,practical solution to the problem of slavery extension. Itwould give the North two new free states. At the sametime, it would acknowledge a position upon which allsoutherners agreed: a state could bar or permit slaveryas it chose. This conviction in fact served as the veryfoundation of the South’s defense of slavery, its armoragainst all the onslaughts of the abolitionists. Nothing inthe Constitution forbade a state to act one way or theother on slavery.

Despite its practical features, Taylor’s plan dismayedsoutherners of both parties. Having gored the Democrats

in 1848 as the party of the Wilmot Proviso, southernWhigs expected more from the president than a propos-al that in effect yielded the proviso’s goal—the banningof slavery in the Mexican cession. Many southerners, inaddition, questioned Taylor’s assumption that slaverycould never take root in California or New Mexico. Toone observer, who declared that the whole controversyover slavery in the Mexican cession “related to an imagi-nary negro in an impossible place,” southerners pointedout that both areas already contained slaves and thatslaves could be employed profitably in mining gold andsilver. “California is by nature,” a southerner proclaimed,“peculiarly a slaveholding State.” Calhoun trembled atthe thought of adding more free states. “If this schemeexcluding slavery from California and New Mexicoshould be carried out—if we are to be reduced to a merehandful . . . wo, wo, I say to this Union.” Disillusionedwith Taylor, nine southern states agreed to send delega-tions to a southern convention that was scheduled tomeet in Nashville in June 1850.

Henry Clay Proposes a Compromise

Taylor might have been able to contain mounting south-ern opposition if he had held a secure position in theWhig party. But the leading Whigs, among them DanielWebster of Massachusetts and Henry Clay of Kentucky,each of whom had presidential aspirations, never recon-ciled themselves to Taylor, a political novice. Early in1850 Clay boldly challenged Taylor’s leadership by forg-ing a set of compromise proposals to resolve the range ofcontentious issues. Clay proposed (1) the admission ofCalifornia as a free state; (2) the division of the remain-der of the Mexican cession into two territories, NewMexico and Utah (formerly Deseret), without federalrestrictions on slavery; (3) the settlement of the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute on terms favorable toNew Mexico; (4) as a pot-sweetener for Texas, an agree-ment that the federal government would assume theconsiderable public debt of Texas; (5) the continuance ofslavery in the District of Columbia but the abolition of the slave trade; and (6) a more effective fugitive slave law.

Clay rolled all of these proposals into a single“omnibus” bill, which he hoped to steer throughCongress. The debates over the omnibus during thelate winter and early spring of 1850 witnessed the lastmajor appearances on the public stage of Clay,Webster, and Calhoun, the trio of distinguished sena-tors whose lives had mirrored every public event ofnote since the War of 1812. Clay played the role of the

The Compromise of 1850 409

conciliator, as he had during the controversy overMissouri in 1820 and again during the nullification cri-sis in the early 1830s. He warned the South against theevils of secession and assured the North that naturewould check the spread of slavery more effectively thana thousand Wilmot Provisos. Gaunt and gloomy, adying Calhoun listened as another senator read hisaddress, in which Calhoun summarized what he hadbeen saying for years: the North’s growing power,enhanced by protective tariffs and by the MissouriCompromise’s exclusion of slaveholders from thenorthern part of the Louisiana Purchase, had createdan imbalance between the sections. Only a decision bythe North to treat the South as an equal could now savethe Union. Three days later, Daniel Webster, whobelieved that slavery, “like the cotton-plant, is confinedto certain parallels of climate,” delivered his memo-rable “Seventh of March” speech. Speaking not “as aMassachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as anAmerican,” Webster chided the North for trying to“reenact the will of God” by legally excluding slaveryfrom the Mexican cession and declared himself a forth-right proponent of compromise.

However eloquent, the conciliatory voices of Clayand Webster made few converts. With every call for com-promise, some northern or southern speaker would riseand inflame passions. The antislavery New York WhigWilliam Seward, for example, enraged southerners bytalking of a “higher law than the Constitution”—namely,

the will of God against the extension of slavery. Clay’scompromise became tied up in a congressional commit-tee. To worsen matters, Clay, who at first had pretendedthat his proposals were in the spirit of Taylor’s plan,broke openly with the president in May, and Taylorattacked Clay as a glory-hunter.

As the Union faced its worst crisis since 1789, aseries of events in the summer of 1850 eased the waytoward a resolution. When the Nashville conventionassembled in June, extreme advocates of “southernrights,” called the fire-eaters because of their reckless-ness, boldly made their presence felt. But talk of south-ern rights smelled suspiciously like a plot to disrupt theUnion. “I would rather sit in council with the six thou-sand dead who have died of cholera in St. Louis,”Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri declared,“than go into convention with such a gang of scamps.”Only nine of the fifteen slave states, most in the LowerSouth, sent delegates to the convention, where moder-ates took control and isolated the extremists. ThenZachary Taylor, after eating and drinking too much at anIndependence Day celebration, fell ill with gastroenteri-tis and died on July 9.

His successor, Vice President Millard Fillmore,quickly proved to be more favorable than Taylor to theSenate’s compromise measure by appointing DanielWebster as his secretary of state. After the compromisesuffered a devastating series of amendments in late July, Illinois Democrat Stephen A. Douglas took over the

floor leadership from the exhaust-ed Clay. Recognizing that Clay’s“omnibus” lacked majority supportin Congress, Douglas chopped itinto a series of separate measuresand sought to secure passage ofeach bill individually. To securesupport from Democrats, heincluded the principle of popularsovereignty in the bills organizingNew Mexico and Utah. By sum-mer’s end, Congress had passedeach component of the Com-promise of 1850: statehood forCalifornia; territorial status forUtah and New Mexico, allowingpopular sovereignty; resolution ofthe Texas-New Mexico boundarydisagreement; federal assumptionof the Texas debt; abolition of theslave trade in the District ofColumbia; and a new fugitive slavelaw (see Map 14.1).


ME.

N.H.MASS.

VT.

N.Y.

R.I.CONN.

N.J.PA.

DEL.MD.

VA.

N.C.

S.C.

MICH.

OHIO

KY.

IND.ILL.

TENN.

GA.ALA.MISS.

FLA.

LA.

ARK.

MO.

IOWA

WIS.

TEXAS

INDIANTERR.

NEW MEXICO TERR.1850

UTAH TERRITORY1850

UNORGANIZED

TERRITORY

OREGONTERRITORY

1848

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA(CANADA)

MEXICO

PACIFICOCEAN

ATLANTIC OCEAN

L. OntarioMINNESOTATERRITORY

1849

0 500 Miles

0 500 Kilometers

L. Erie

L. Huron

L.M

ichi

ga

n

L. Superior

Free state or territory

Slave state or territory

Opened to slavery by principleof popular sovereignty

CALIFORNIA1850

MAP 14.1The Compromise of 1850The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state. Utah and New Mexico were leftopen to slavery or freedom on the principle of popular sovereignty.

Assessing the Compromise

President Fillmore hailed the compromise as a “final set-tlement” of sectional divisions, and Clay’s reputation forconciliation reached new heights. Yet the compromisedid not bridge the underlying differences between thetwo sections. Far from leaping forward to save theUnion, Congress had backed into the Compromise of1850; the majority of congressmen in one or anothersection opposed virtually all of the specific bills thatmade up the compromise. Most southerners, for exam-ple, voted against the admission of California and theabolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia;the majority of northerners opposed the Fugitive SlaveAct and the organization of New Mexico and Utah with-out a forthright congressional prohibition of slavery.These measures passed only because the minority ofcongressmen who genuinely desired compromise com-bined with the majority in either the North or the Southwho favored each specific bill.

Each section both gained and lost from theCompromise of 1850. The North won California as a freestate, New Mexico and Utah as likely future free states, afavorable settlement of the Texas-New Mexico boundary(most of the disputed area was awarded to New Mexico,a probable free state), and the abolition of the slavetrade in the District of Columbia. The South’s benefitswere cloudier. By stipulating popular sovereignty forNew Mexico and Utah, the compromise, to most south-erners’ relief, had buried the Wilmot Proviso’s insistencethat Congress formally prohibit slavery in these territo-ries. But to southerners’ dismay, the position of the free-soilers remained viable, for the compromise left openthe question of whether Congress could prohibit slaveryin territories outside of the Mexican cession.

Not surprisingly, southerners reacted ambivalentlyto the Compromise of 1850. In southern state electionsduring the fall of 1850 and in 1851, procompromise, orUnionist, candidates thrashed anticompromise candi-dates who talked of southern rights and secession. Buteven southern Unionists did not dismiss the possibilityof secession. Unionists in Georgia, for example, forgedthe celebrated Georgia platform, which threatenedsecession if Congress either prohibited slavery in NewMexico or Utah or repealed the Fugitive Slave Act.

The one clear advantage gained by the South, amore stringent fugitive slave law, quickly proved a mixedblessing. Because few slaves had been taken into theMexican cession, the question of slavery there had ahypothetical quality. However, the issues raised by thenew fugitive slave law were far from hypothetical; thelaw authorized real southerners to pursue real fugitives

on northern soil. Here was a concrete issue to which theaverage northerner, who may never have seen a slaveand who cared little about slavery a thousand milesaway, would respond with fury.

Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act

Northern moderates accepted the Fugitive Slave Act asthe price the North had to pay to save the Union. But thelaw contained a string of features distasteful to moderatesand outrageous to staunchly antislavery northerners. Itdenied alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury, did notallow them to testify in their own behalf, permitted theirreturn to slavery merely on the testimony of the claimant,and enabled court-appointed commissioners to collectten dollars if they ruled for the slaveholder but only fivedollars if they ruled for the fugitive. In authorizing federalmarshals to raise posses to pursue fugitives on northernsoil, the law threatened to turn the North into “one vasthunting ground.” In addition, the law targeted not onlyrecent runaways but also those who had fled the Southdecades earlier. For example, it allowed slave-catchers towrench a former slave from his family in Indiana in 1851and return him to the master from whom he had fled in1832. Above all, the law brought home to northerners theuncomfortable truth that the continuation of slaverydepended on their complicity. By legalizing the activitiesof slave-catchers on northern soil, the law remindednortherners that slavery was a national problem, notmerely a peculiar southern institution.

Antislavery northerners assailed the law as the “vilestmonument of infamy of the nineteenth century.” “Let thePresident . . . drench our land of freedom in blood,” pro-claimed Ohio Whig Congressman Joshua Giddings, “buthe will never make us obey that law.” His support for thelaw turned Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts intoa villain in the eyes of the very people who for years hadrevered him as the “godlike Daniel.” The abolitionist poetJohn Greenleaf Whittier wrote of his fallen idol,

All else is gone; from those giant eyesThe soul has fled:When faith is lost, when honor dies,The man is dead.

Efforts to catch and return fugitive slaves inflamedfeelings in both the North and the South. In 1854 aBoston mob, aroused by antislavery speeches, brokeinto a courthouse and killed a guard in an abortive effortto rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Determinedto prove that the law could be enforced “even in Boston,”President Franklin Pierce sent a detachment of federal


troops to escort Burns to the harbor, where a ship car-ried him back to slavery. No witness would ever forgetthe scene. As five platoons of troops marched with Burnsto the ship, some fifty thousand people lined the streets.As the procession passed, one Bostonian hung from hiswindow a black coffin bearing the words “THE FUNER-AL OF LIBERTY.” Another draped an American flagupside down as a symbol that “my country is eternallydisgraced by this day’s proceedings.” The Burns incidentshattered the complacency of conservative supportersof the Compromise of 1850. “We went to bed one nightold fashioned conservative Compromise Union Whigs,”the textile manufacturer Amos A. Lawrence wrote, “andwaked up stark mad Abolitionists.” A Boston committeelater successfully purchased Burns’s freedom, but thefate of many fugitives was far less happy. One suchunfortunate was Margaret Garner, who, about to be cap-tured and sent back to Kentucky as a slave, slit herdaughter’s throat and tried to kill her other childrenrather than witness their return to slavery.

In response to the Fugitive Slave Act, vigilance com-mittees sprang up in many northern communities tospirit endangered blacks to safety in Canada. As anotherploy, lawyers used obstructive tactics to drag out legalproceedings and thus raise the slave-catchers’ expenses.Then, during the 1850s, nine northern states passed“personal-liberty laws.” By such techniques as forbid-ding the use of state jails to incarcerate alleged fugitives,

these laws aimed to preclude state officials from enforc-ing the law.

The frequent cold stares, obstructive legal tactics,and occasional violence encountered by slaveholderswho ventured north to capture runaway slaves helpeddemonstrate to southerners that opposition to slaveryboiled just beneath the surface of northern opinion. Inthe eyes of most southerners, the South had gained littlemore from the Compromise of 1850 than the FugitiveSlave Act, and now even that northern concessionseemed to be a phantom. After witnessing riots againstthe Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in 1854, a youngGeorgian studying law at Harvard wrote to his mother,“Do not be surprised if when I return home you find mea confirmed disunionist.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The publication in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novelUncle Tom’s Cabin aroused wide northern sympathy forfugitive slaves. Stowe, the daughter of the famed evan-gelical Lyman Beecher and the younger sister ofCatharine Beecher, the stalwart advocate of domesticityfor women, greeted the Fugitive Slave Act with horrorand outrage. In a memorable scene from the novel, shedepicted the slave Eliza escaping to freedom, clutchingher infant son while bounding across ice floes on theOhio River.


Yet Stowe targeted slavery itself more than merelythe slave-catchers who served the institution. Much ofher novel’s power derives from its intimation that evengood intentions cannot prevail against so evil an institu-tion. Torn from his wife and children by sale and shippedon a steamer for the Lower South, the black slave UncleTom rescues little Eva, the daughter of kindly AugustineSt. Clare, from drowning. In gratitude, St. Clare purchas-es Tom from a slave trader and takes him into his homein New Orleans. But after St. Clare dies, his cruel widowsells Tom to the vicious (and northern-born) SimonLegree, who whips Tom to death. Stowe played effective-ly on the emotions of her audience by demonstrating toan age that revered family life how slavery tore the fami-ly apart.

Three hundred thousand copies of Uncle Tom’sCabin were sold in 1852, and 1.2 million by the summerof 1853. Dramatized versions, which added dogs tochase Eliza across the ice, eventually reached perhapsfifty times the number of people as the novel itself. As aplay, Uncle Tom’s Cabin enthralled working-class audi-ences normally indifferent, if not hostile, to abolition-ism. During one stage performance, a reviewer for a NewYork newspaper observed that the gallery was filled withmen “in red woollen shirts, with countenances as hardyand rugged as the implements of industry employed bythem in the pursuit of their vocations.” Astonished bythe silence that fell over these men at the point whenEliza escapes across the river, the reviewer turned to dis-cover that many of them were in tears.

The impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin cannot be precise-ly measured. Although the novel stirred deep feelings, itreflected the prevailing stereotypes of blacks far morethan it overturned commonly held views. Stowe por-trayed only light-skinned blacks as aggressive and intel-ligent; she depicted dark-skinned blacks such as UncleTom as docile and submissive. In addition, some of thestage dramatizations softened the novel’s antislaverymessage. In one version, which P. T. Barnum produced,Tom was rescued from Legree and happily returned as aslave to his original plantation.

Surgery on the plot, however, could not fully excisethe antislavery message of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thoughthe novel hardly lived up to the prediction of a proslav-ery lawyer that it would convert 2 million people to abo-litionism, it did push many waverers toward a moreaggressively antisouthern and antislavery stance.Indeed, fear of its effect inspired a host of southerners topen anti-Uncle Tom novels. As historian David Potterconcluded, the northern attitude toward slavery “wasnever quite the same after Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The Election of 1852

The Fugitive Slave Act fragmented the Whig party. Bymasterminding defiance of the law, northern Whigs putsouthern Whigs, who long had come before the southernelectorate as the party best able to defend slavery withinthe Union, on the spot.

In 1852 the Whigs’ nomination of Mexican War heroWinfield Scott as their presidential candidate widenedthe sectional split within the party. Although a Virginian,Scott owed his nomination to the northern free-soilWhigs. His single feeble statement endorsing the Com-promise of 1850 undercut southern Whigs trying to por-tray the Democrats as the party of disunion and them-selves as the party of both slavery and the Union.

The Democrats bridged their own sectional divi-sion by nominating Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire,a dark-horse candidate whose chief attraction was thatno faction of the party strongly opposed him. The “ultramen of the South,” a friend of Pierce noted, “say they


can cheerfully go for him, and none, none, say theycannot.” North and South, the Democrats ralliedbehind both the Compromise and the idea of applyingpopular sovereignty to all the territories. In the mostone-sided election since 1820, Pierce swept to victory.Defeat was especially galling for southern Whigs. In1848 Zachary Taylor had won 49.8 percent of theSouth’s popular vote; Scott, by comparison, limpedhome with only 35 percent. In state elections during1852 and 1853, moreover, the Whigs were devastated inthe South; one Whig stalwart lamented “the decisivebreaking-up of our party.”

THE COLLAPSE OF THESECOND PARTY SYSTEM,

1853–1856Franklin Pierce had the dubious distinction of being thelast presidential candidate for eighty years to win thepopular and electoral vote in both the North and theSouth. Not until 1932 did another president, Franklin D.Roosevelt, repeat this accomplishment. Pierce was alsothe last president to hold office under the second partysystem—Whigs against Democrats. For two decades theWhigs and the Democrats had battled, often on eventerms. Then, within the four years of Pierce’s administra-tion, the Whig party disintegrated. In its place two newparties, first the American (Know-Nothing) party, thenthe Republican party, arose.

Unlike the Whig party, the Republican party was apurely sectional, northern party. Its support came fromformer northern Whigs and discontented northernDemocrats. The Democrats survived as a national party,but with a base so shrunken in the North that theRepublican party, although scarcely a year old, swepttwo-thirds of the free states in 1856.

For decades the second party system had kept theconflict over slavery in check by giving Americans otherissues—banking, internal improvements, tariffs, andtemperance—to argue about. By the 1850s the debateover slavery extension was pushing such issues into thebackground and exposing raw divisions in each party. Ofthe two parties, Whig and Democratic, the Whigs had thelarger, more aggressive free-soil wing, and hence theywere more vulnerable than the Democrats to disruption.When Stephen A. Douglas put forth a proposal in 1854 toorganize the vast Nebraska territory without restrictionson slavery, he ignited a firestorm that consumed theWhig party.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

Signed by President Pierce at the end of May 1854, theKansas-Nebraska Act dealt a shattering blow to thealready weakened second party system. Moreover, thelaw triggered a renewal of the sectional strife that manyAmericans believed the Compromise of 1850 had satis-factorily silenced. The origins of the act lay in the seem-ingly uncontroversial advance of midwestern settle-ment. Farm families in Iowa and Missouri had longdreamed of establishing homesteads in the vast prairiesto their west, and their congressional representativeshad repeatedly introduced bills to organize the territorywest of these states so that Native American land titlescould be extinguished and a basis for government pro-vided. Too, since the mid-1840s, advocates of nationalexpansion had looked to the day when a railroad wouldlink the Midwest to the Pacific; and St. Louis, Milwaukee,and Chicago had vied to become the eastern end of theprojected Pacific railroad.

In January 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas ofIllinois proposed a bill to organize Nebraska as a territo-ry. An ardent expansionist, Douglas had formed hispolitical ideology in the heady atmosphere of ManifestDestiny during the 1840s. As early as the mid-1840s, hehad embraced the ideas of a Pacific railroad and theorganization of Nebraska as ways to promote a continu-ous line of settlement between the Midwest and thePacific. Although he preferred a railroad from his home-town of Chicago to San Francisco, Douglas dwelled onthe national benefits that would attend construction of arailroad from anywhere in the Midwest to the Pacific.Such a railroad would enhance the importance of theMidwest, which could then hold the balance of powerbetween the older sections of the North and South andguide the nation toward unity rather than disruption. Inaddition, westward expansion through Nebraska withthe aid of a railroad struck Douglas as an issue, compa-rable to Manifest Destiny, around which the contendingfactions of the Democratic party would unite.

Douglas recognized two sources of potential con-flict over his Nebraska bill. First, some southernersadvocated a rival route for the Pacific railroad that wouldstart at either New Orleans or Memphis. Second,Nebraska lay within the Louisiana Purchase and north ofthe Missouri Compromise line of 36°30’, a region closedto slavery (see Map 14.2). Unless Douglas made someconcessions, southerners would have little incentive tovote for his bill; after all, the organization of Nebraskawould simultaneously create a potential free state and


increase the chances for a northern, rather than a south-ern, railroad to the Pacific.

As the floor manager of the Compromise of 1850 inthe Senate, Douglas thought that he had an ideal con-cession to offer to the South. The Compromise of 1850had applied the principle of popular sovereignty to NewMexico and Utah, territories outside of the LouisianaPurchase and hence unaffected by the MissouriCompromise. Why not assume, Douglas reasoned, thatthe Compromise of 1850 had taken the place of theMissouri Compromise everywhere? Believing thatexpansion rather than slavery was uppermost in thepublic’s mind, Douglas hoped to avoid controversy overslavery by ignoring the Missouri Compromise. But hequickly came under pressure from southern congress-men, who wanted an explicit repudiation of theMissouri Compromise. Soon they forced Douglas tostate publicly that the Nebraska bill “superseded” theMissouri Compromise and rendered it “void.” Still underpressure, Douglas next agreed to a division of Nebraskainto two territories: Nebraska to the west of Iowa, andKansas to the west of Missouri. Because Missouri was aslave state, most congressmen assumed that the divisionaimed to secure Kansas for slavery and Nebraska for free soil.

The modifications of Douglas’s original bill set off astorm of protest. Congress quickly tabled the Pacific rail-road (which, in the turn of events, would not be builtuntil after the Civil War) and focused on the issue of slav-ery extension. A group of “Independent Democratic”

northern congressmen, composed of antislavery Whigsand free-soil Democrats, assailed the bill as “part andparcel of an atrocious plot” to violate the “sacred pledge”of the Missouri Compromise and to turn Kansas into a“dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters andslaves.” Their rage electrified southerners, many ofwhom initially had reacted indifferently to the Nebraskabill. Some southerners had opposed an explicit repeal ofthe Missouri Compromise from fear of stimulating sec-tional discord; others doubted that Kansas would attractmany slaveholders. But the furious assault of antislaverynortherners united the South behind the Kansas-Nebraska bill by turning the issue into one of sectionalpride as much as slavery extension.

Despite the uproar, Douglas successfully guided the Kansas-Nebraska bill through the Senate, where itpassed by a vote of 37 to 14. In the House of Repre-sentatives, where the bill passed by little more than awhisker, 113 to 100, the true dimensions of the conflictbecame apparent. Not a single northern Whig represen-tative in the House voted for the bill, whereas the north-ern Democrats divided evenly, 44 to 44.

The Surge of Free Soil

Amid the clamor over his bill, Douglas ruefully observedthat he could now travel to Chicago by the light of hisown burning effigies. Neither a fool nor a politicalnovice, he was the victim of a political bombshell thatexploded under his feet.

The Collapse of the Second Party System, 1853–1856 415

ME.

N.H.MASS.

VT.

N.Y.

R.I.CONN.

N.J.PA.

DEL.MD.

VA.

N.C.

S.C.

MICH.

OHIO

KY.

IND.ILL.

TENN.

GA.ALA.MISS.

FLA.

LA.

ARK.

MO.

IOWA

WIS.

TEXAS

UTAH TERRITORY

OREGONTERRITORY

CALIFORNIA

BRITISH NORTH AMERICA(CANADA)

Slave state or territory

MINNESOTATERRITORY

0 500 Miles

0 500 Kilometers

KANSAS TERRITORY1854

NEBRASKATERRITORY

1854

NEW MEXICOTERRITORY

Opened to slavery by principle of popularsovereignty, Compromise of 1850

Opened to slavery by principle of popularsovereignty, Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

INDIANTERR.

WASHINGTO

NT

ER

R.

Free stateor territory

Missouri CompromiseLine 36

L. Superior

L.M

ichi

ga

nL. Huron

L. Erie

L. Ontario

30'

Mason and

Dixon Line

MAP 14.2The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854Kansas and Nebraska lay within the LouisianaPurchase, north of 36°30′, and hence wereclosed to slavery until Stephen A. Douglasintroduced his bills in 1854.

Support for free soil united northerners who agreedon little else. Some free-soilers opposed slavery onmoral grounds and rejected racist legislation, but otherswere racists who opposed allowing any African-Americans, slave or free, into the West. An abolitionisttraced the free-soil convictions of many westerners to a“perfect, if not supreme” hatred of blacks. Racist free-soilers in Iowa and Illinois secured laws prohibiting set-tlement by black people.

One opinion shared by free-soilers of all persua-sions was that slavery impeded whites’ progress.Because a slave worked for nothing, the argument ran,no free laborer could compete with a slave. A territorymight contain only a handful of slaves or none at all, butas long as Congress refused to prohibit slavery in the ter-ritories, the institution would gain a foothold and freelaborers would flee. Wherever slavery appeared, a free-soiler proclaimed, “labor loses its dignity; industry sick-ens; education finds no schools; religion finds nochurches; and the whole land of slavery is impover-ished.” Free-soilers also blasted the idea that slavery hadnatural limits. One warned that “slavery is as certain toinvade New Mexico and Utah as the sun is to rise”; oth-ers predicted that if slavery gained a toehold in Kansas, itwould soon invade Minnesota.

To free-soilers, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, with itserasure of the Missouri Compromise, was the last straw,for it revealed, one wrote, “a continuous movement byslaveholders to spread slavery over the entire North.” Fora Massachusetts Whig congressman who had voted forthe Compromise of 1850 and opposed abolitionists, theKansas-Nebraska Act, “that most wanton and wickedact, so obviously designed to promote the extension ofslavery,” was too much to bear. “I now advocate the free-dom of Kansas under all circumstances, and the prohi-bition of slavery in all territories now free.”

The Ebbing of Manifest Destiny

The uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act embarrassedthe Pierce administration. It also doomed ManifestDestiny, the one issue that had held the Democratstogether in the 1840s.

Franklin Pierce had come to office championingManifest Destiny, but increasing sectional rivalries side-tracked his efforts. In 1853 his emissary James Gadsdennegotiated the purchase from Mexico of a strip of landsouth of the Gila River (now southern Arizona and partof southern New Mexico), an acquisition favored byadvocates of a southern railroad route to the Pacific.Fierce opposition to the Gadsden Purchase revealed

mounting free-soilers’ suspicion of expansion, and theSenate approved the treaty only after slashing nine thou-sand square miles from the parcel. The sectional rival-ries beginning to engulf the Nebraska bill clearly threat-ened any proposal to gain new territory.

Cuba provided even more vivid proof of the changein public attitudes about expansion. In 1854 a formerMississippi governor, John A. Quitman, planned a fili-buster (an unofficial military expedition) to seize Cubafrom Spain. Eager to acquire Cuba, Pierce may haveencouraged Quitman, but Pierce forced Quitman toscuttle the expedition when faced with intense opposi-tion from antislavery northerners who saw filibusters asjust another manifestation of the Slave Power; the con-spiracy of slaveholders and their northern dupes to grabmore territory for slavery.

Pierce still hoped to purchase Cuba, but eventsquickly slipped out of his control. In October 1854 theAmerican ambassadors to Great Britain, France, andSpain, two of them southerners, met in Belgium andissued the unofficial Ostend Manifesto, calling on theUnited States to acquire Cuba by any means, includingforce. Beset by the storm over the Kansas-Nebraska Actand the furor over Quitman’s proposed filibuster, Piercerejected the mandate.

Despite Pierce’s disavowal of the Ostend Manifesto,the idea of expansion into the Caribbean continued toattract southerners, including the Tennessee-bornadventurer William Walker. Slightly built and so unas-suming that he usually spoke with his hands in his pock-ets, Walker seemed an unlikely soldier of fortune. Yetbetween 1853 and 1860, the year a firing squad inHonduras executed him, Walker led a succession of fili-bustering expeditions into Central America. Takingadvantage of civil chaos in Nicaragua, he made himselfthe chief political force there, reinstituted slavery, andtalked of making Nicaragua a U.S. colony.

For all the proclamations and intrigues that sur-rounded the movement for southern expansion, itsstrength and goals remained open to question. With fewexceptions, the adventurers were shady characterswhom southern politicians might admire but on whomthey could never depend. Some southerners, amongthem Louisiana sugar planters who opposed acquiringCuba because Cuban sugar would compete with theirproduct, were against expansion. But expansionistsstirred enough commotion to worry antislavery north-erners that the South conspired to establish aCaribbean slave empire. Like a card in a poker game,the threat of expansion southward was all the moremenacing for not being played. As long as the debate on


the extension of slavery focused on the continentalUnited States, prospects for expansion were limited.However, adding Caribbean territory to the pot changedall calculations.

The Whigs Disintegrate, 1854–1855

While straining Democratic unity, the Kansas-NebraskaAct wrecked the Whig party. In the law’s immediateaftermath, most northern Whigs hoped to blame theDemocrats for the act and to entice free-soil Democratsto their side. In the state and congressional elections of1854, the Democrats were decisively defeated. But theWhig party failed to benefit from the backlash againstthe Democrats. However furious they felt at Douglas forinitiating the act, free-soil Democrats could not forgetthat the southern Whigs had supported Douglas. Inaddition, the northern Whigs themselves were deeplydivided between antislavery “Conscience” Whigs, led bySenator William Seward of New York, and conservatives,led by former President Millard Fillmore, who were con-vinced that the Whig party had to adhere at all costs tothe Compromise of 1850 to maintain itself as a nationalparty.

Divisions within the Whig party not only repelledantislavery Democrats from affiliating with it but alsoprompted many antislavery Whigs to look for an alterna-tive party. By 1856 the new Republican party wouldbecome the home for most of these northern refugeesfrom the traditional parties; but in 1854 and 1855, whenthe Republican party was only starting to organize, theAmerican, or Know-Nothing, party emerged as the prin-cipal alternative.

The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothings, 1853–1856

The Know-Nothings evolved out of a secret nativistorganization, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner,founded in 1850. (The party’s popular name, Know-Nothing, derived from the standard response of itsmembers to inquiries about its activities: “I know noth-ing.”) One of many such societies that mushroomed inresponse to the unprecedented immigration of the1840s, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner had soughtto rid the United States of immigrant and Catholic polit-ical influence by pressuring the existing parties to nomi-nate and appoint only native-born Protestants to office,and by advocating an extension of the naturalizationperiod before immigrants could vote.

Throughout the 1840s nativists usually voted Whig,but their allegiance to the Whigs started to buckle duringWinfield Scott’s campaign for the presidency in 1852. In an attempt to revitalize his party, which was badlysplit over slavery, Scott had courted the traditionallyDemocratic Catholic vote. But Scott’s tactic backfired.Most Catholics voted for Franklin Pierce. Nativists,meanwhile, felt betrayed by their party, and after Scott’sdefeat, many gravitated toward the Know-Nothings. TheKansas-Nebraska Act cemented their allegiance to theKnow-Nothings, who in the North opposed both theextension of slavery and Catholicism. Indeed, an obses-sive fear of conspiracies unified the Know-Nothings. Justas they denounced the pope for allegedly conspiring tosubvert the American Republic, they saw the evil influ-ence of Slave Power everywhere.

The Know-Nothings’ surge was truly stunning. In1854 they captured the governorship, all the congres-sional seats, and almost all the seats in the state legisla-ture in Massachusetts. Know-Nothings were sufficientlystrong in the West to retard the emergence of theRepublican party, and so strong in the East that theyexploded any hopes that the Whigs had of capitalizingon hostility to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

After rising spectacularly between 1853 and 1855,the star of Know-Nothingism nevertheless plummetedand gradually disappeared below the horizon after 1856.The Know-Nothings proved as vulnerable as the Whigsto sectional conflicts over slavery. Although primarily aforce in the North, the Know-Nothings had a southernwing, composed mainly of former Whigs who loathedboth the antislavery northerners who were abandoningthe Whig party and the southern Democrats, whom theyviewed as disunionist firebrands. In 1855 these southernKnow-Nothings combined with northern conservativesto make acceptance of the Kansas-Nebraska Act part ofthe Know-Nothing platform, and thus they blurred theattraction of Know-Nothingism to those northern voterswho were more antislavery than anti-Catholic.

One such Whig refugee, Illinois CongressmanAbraham Lincoln, asked pointedly: “How can anyonewho abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor ofdegrading classes of white people?” “We began bydeclaring,” Lincoln continued, “that ‘all men are createdequal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are createdequal except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings getcontrol, it will read ‘all men are created equal, exceptNegroes and foreigners and Catholics.’ ” Finally, evenmost Know-Nothings eventually came to conclude that,as one observer put it, “neither the Pope nor the foreign-ers ever can govern the country or endanger its liberties,


but the slavebreeders and slavetraders do govern it, andthreaten to put an end to all government but theirs.”Consequently, the Know-Nothings proved vulnerable tothe challenge posed by the emerging Republican party,which did not officially embrace nativism and whichhad no southern wing to blunt its antislavery message.

The Republican Party and the Crisis in Kansas, 1855–1856

Born in the chaotic aftermath of the Kansas-NebraskaAct, the Republican party sprang up in several northernstates in 1854 and 1855. With the Know-Nothings’demise after 1856, the Republicans would become themain opposition to the Democratic party, and theywould win each presidential election from 1860 through1880; but in 1855 it was unclear whether the Re-publicans had any future. While united by opposition tothe Kansas-Nebraska Act, the party held various shadesof opinion in uneasy balance. At one extreme were con-servatives who merely wanted to restore the MissouriCompromise; at the other was a small faction of formerLiberty party abolitionists; and the middle held a sizablebody of free-soilers.

In addition to bridging these divisions, the Re-publicans confronted the task of building organizationson the state level, where the Know-Nothings werealready well established. Politicians of the day knew thatthe voters’ allegiances were often shaped by state issues,including temperance. Maine’s passage of the nation’sfirst statewide prohibition law in 1851 spurred calls else-where for liquor regulation. Linking support for temper-ance with anti-Catholicism and antislavery, the Know-Nothings were well positioned to answer these calls.

Frequently, the same voters who were antislaverywere also protemperance and anti-Catholic. The com-mon thread was the belief that addiction to alcohol andsubmission to the pope were forms of enslavement thathad to be eradicated. Intensely moralistic, such votersviewed the traditional parties as controlled by unprinci-pled hacks, and they began to search for a new party. Incompeting with the Know-Nothings on the state level,the Republicans faced a dilemma, stemming from thefact that both parties were targeting many of the samevoters. The Republican leadership had clearer antislav-ery credentials than did the Know-Nothing leadership,but this fact alone did not guarantee that voters wouldrespond more to antislavery than to anti-Catholicism ortemperance. Thus, if the Republicans attacked theKnow-Nothings for stressing anti-Catholicism overantislavery, they ran the risk of alienating the very vot-

ers whom they had to attract. If they conciliated theKnow-Nothings, they might lose their own identity as aparty.

Sometimes attacking, sometimes conciliating, theRepublicans had some successes in state elections in1855; but as popular ire against the Kansas-Nebraska Actcooled, they also suffered setbacks. Even at the start of1856, they were organized in only half the northernstates and lacked any national organization. TheRepublicans desperately needed a development thatwould make voters worry more about the Slave Powerthan about rum or Catholicism. No single occurrencedid more to unite the party around its free-soil center, togalvanize voters’ antislavery feelings, and, consequently,to boost the Republicans’ fortunes than the outbreak ofviolence in Kansas, which quickly gained for the territo-ry the name Bleeding Kansas.

In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Boston-based abolitionists had organized the New EnglandEmigrant Aid Company to send antislavery settlers intoKansas. The abolitionists’ aim was to stifle escalatingefforts to turn Kansas into a slave state. But antislaveryNew Englanders arrived slowly in Kansas; the bulk of theterritory’s early settlers came from Missouri or else-where in the Midwest. Very few of these early settlersopposed slavery on moral grounds. Some, in fact,favored slavery; others wanted to keep all blacks, whetherslave or free, out of Kansas. “I kem to Kansas to live in a free state,” exclaimed a clergyman, “and I don’t want niggers a-trampin’ over my grave.”

Despite most settlers’ racist leanings and utterhatred of abolitionists, Kansas became a battlegroundbetween proslavery and antislavery forces. In March1855 thousands of proslavery Missourian “border ruffi-ans,” led by Senator David R. Atchison, crossed intoKansas to vote illegally in the first election for a territori-al legislature. Drawing and cocking their revolvers, theyquickly silenced any judges who questioned their rightto vote in Kansas. These proslavery advocates probablywould have won an honest election because they wouldhave been supported by the votes both of slaveholdersand of nonslaveholders horrified at rumors that aboli-tionists planned to use Kansas as a colony for fugitiveslaves. But by stealing the election, the proslavery forcescommitted a grave tactical blunder. A cloud of fraudu-lence thereafter hung over the proslavery legislaturesubsequently established at Lecompton, Kansas. “Thereis not a proslavery man of my acquaintance in Kansas,”wrote the wife of an antislavery farmer, “who does notacknowledge that the Bogus Legislature was the result ofa gigantic and well planned fraud, that the elections


were carried by an invading mob from Missouri.” Thislegislature then further darkened its image by expellingseveral antislavery legislators and passing a successionof outrageous acts. These laws limited officeholding toindividuals who would swear allegiance to slavery, pun-ished the harboring of fugitive slaves by ten years’imprisonment, and made the circulation of abolitionistliterature a capital offense.

The territorial legislature’s actions set off a chainreaction. Free-staters, including a small number of abo-litionists and a much larger number of settlers enragedby the proceedings at Lecompton, organized a rival gov-ernment at Topeka, Kansas, in the summer and fall of1855. In response, the Lecompton government in May1856 dispatched a posse to Lawrence, where free-staters,heeding the advice of antislavery minister Henry WardBeecher that rifles would do more than Bibles to enforcemorality in Kansas, had taken up arms and dubbed theirguns “Beecher’s Bibles.” Riding under flags emblazoned“southern rights” and “let yankees tremble and aboli-tionists fall,” the proslavery posse tore through the townlike a hell-bent mob. Although the intruders did not killanyone, they burned several buildings and destroyedtwo free-state printing presses—enough for theRepublican press to label their actions “the sack oflawrence.”

The next move was made by John Brown. The sackof Lawrence convinced Brown that God now beckonedhim, in the words of a neighbor, “to break the jaws of thewicked.” In late May Brown led seven men, including hisfour sons and his son-in-law, toward the Pottawatomie

Creek near Lawrence. Setting upon five men associatedwith the Lecompton government, they shot one to deathand hacked the others to pieces with broadswords.Brown’s “Pottawatomie massacre” struck terror into thehearts of southerners and completed the transformationof Bleeding Kansas into a battleground between theSouth and the North (see Map 14.3). A month after themassacre, a South Carolinian living in Kansas wrote tohis sister,

I never lie down without taking the precaution tofasten my door and fix it in such a way that if it isforced open, it can be opened only wide enough forone person to come in at a time. I have my rifle,revolver, and old home-stocked pistol where I canlay my hand on them in an instant, besides ahatchet and an axe. I take this precaution to guardagainst the midnight attacks of the Abolitionists,who never make an attack in open daylight, and noProslavery man knows when he is safe in thisTer[ritory.]

In Kansas popular sovereignty flunked its major test.Instead of quickly resolving the issue of slavery exten-sion, popular sovereignty merely institutionalized thedivision over slavery by creating rival governments inLecompton and Topeka. The Pierce administration thenshot itself in the foot by denouncing the Topeka govern-ment and recognizing only its Lecompton rival. Piercehad forced northern Democrats into the awkward posi-tion of appearing to ally with the South in support of thefraudulently elected legislature at Lecompton.


Nor did popular sovereignty keep the slavery issueout of national politics. On the day before the sack of Lawrence, Republican Senator Charles Sumner ofMassachusetts delivered a bombastic and wrathfulspeech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” in which he verbal-ly whipped most of the U.S. Senate for complicity inslavery. Sumner singled out Senator Andrew Butler ofSouth Carolina for his choice of “the harlot, slavery” ashis mistress and for the “loose expectoration” of hisspeech (a nasty reference to the aging Butler’s tendencyto drool). Sumner’s oration stunned most senators.Douglas wondered aloud whether Sumner’s real aim was “to provoke some of us to kick him as we would adog in the street.” Two days later a relative of Butler,

Democratic Representative Preston Brooks of SouthCarolina, strode into the Senate chamber, found Sumnerat his desk, and struck him repeatedly with a cane. Thehollow cane broke after five or six blows, but Sumnerrequired stitches, experienced shock, and did not returnto the Senate for three years. Brooks became an instanthero in the South, and the fragments of his weapon were“begged as sacred relics.” A new cane, presented toBrooks by the city of Charleston, bore the inscription“Hit him again.”

Now Bleeding Kansas and Bleeding Sumner unitedthe North. The sack of Lawrence, Pierce’s recognition ofthe proslavery Lecompton government, and Brooks’sactions seemed to clinch the Republican argument that


NEBRASKA TERRITORY

UTAHTERR.

NEW MEXICOTERRITORY

INDIAN TERRITORYMarais des Cygnes

May 19, 1858

OswatomieAug. 31, 1856

LawrenceMay 21, 1856

Lecompton

Topeka

KansasCity

Leavenworth

MISSOURI

Attacks byfree-state forces

Attacks byproslavery forces

Present-day Kansas

Pottawatomie CreekMay 24,1856

Mis sour i R.

Kansas R.

Osage

R.

ShawneeMission

KANSAS TERRITORY

MAP 14.3Bleeding KansasKansas became a battlegroundbetween free-state and slave-state factions in the 1850s.

an aggressive “slaveocracy” held white northerners incontempt. Abolitionists remained unpopular in north-ern opinion, but southerners were becoming even lesspopular. Northern migrants to Kansas coined a namereflecting their feelings about southerners: “the pukes.”Other northerners attacked the slaveholding migrants toKansas as the “Missouri savages.” By denouncing SlavePower more than slavery itself, Republican propagan-dists sidestepped the issue of slavery’s morality, whichdivided their followers, and focused on portrayingsouthern planters as arrogant aristocrats and the naturalenemies of the laboring people of the North.


The election of 1856 revealed the scope of the politicalrealignments of the preceding few years. In this, its firstpresidential contest, the Republican party nominatedJohn C. Frémont, the famed “pathfinder” who hadplayed a key role in the conquest of California during theMexican War. The Republicans then maneuvered thenorthern Know-Nothings into endorsing Frémont. Thesouthern Know-Nothings picked the last Whig presi-dent, Millard Fillmore, as their candidate, and theDemocrats dumped Pierce for the seasoned JamesBuchanan of Pennsylvania. A four-term congressmanand long an aspirant to the presidency, Buchanan finallysecured his party’s nomination because he had the goodluck to be out of the country (as minister to GreatBritain) during the furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.As a signer of the Ostend Manifesto, he was popular inthe South: virtually all of his close friends in Washingtonwere southerners.

The campaign quickly turned into two separateraces—Frémont versus Buchanan in the free states andFillmore versus Buchanan in the slave states. In theNorth the candidates divided clearly over slavery exten-sion; Frémont’s platform called for congressional prohi-bition of slavery in the territories, whereas Buchananpledged congressional “non-interference.” In the SouthFillmore appealed to traditionally Whig voters and calledfor moderation in the face of secessionist threats. But bynominating a well-known moderate in Buchanan, theDemocrats undercut some of Fillmore’s appeal.Although Fillmore garnered more than 40 percent of thepopular vote in ten of the slave states, he carried onlyMaryland. In the North Frémont outpolled Buchanan inthe popular vote and won eleven of the sixteen freestates; if Frémont had carried Pennsylvania and eitherIllinois, Indiana, or New Jersey, he would have won theelection. As it turned out, Buchanan, the only trulynational candidate in the race, secured the presidency.

The election yielded three clear conclusions. First,the American party was finished as a major nationalforce. Having worked for the Republican Frémont, mostnorthern Know-Nothings now joined that party, and inthe wake of Fillmore’s dismal showing in the South,southern Know-Nothings gave up on their party andsought new political affiliations. Second, although inexistence scarcely more than a year, lacking any base in the South, and running a political novice, theRepublican party did very well. A purely sectional partyhad come within reach of capturing the presidency.Finally, as long as the Democrats could unite behind a single national candidate, they would be hard todefeat. To achieve such unity, however, the Democratswould have to find more James Buchanans—“dough-face” moderates who would be acceptable to southern-ers and who would not drive even more northernersinto Republican arms.

THE CRISIS OF THE UNION,1857–1860

No one ever accused James Buchanan of impulsivenessor fanaticism. Although he disapproved of slavery, hebelieved that his administration could neither restrictnor end the institution. In 1860 he would pronouncesecession a grave wrong, but would affirm that hisadministration could not stop it. Understandably, con-temporaries hailed his election as a victory for modera-tion. Yet his administration encountered a succession ofcontroversies, first over the famed Dred Scott decision ofthe Supreme Court, then over the proslavery Lecomptonconstitution in Kansas, next following the raid by JohnBrown on Harpers Ferry, and finally concerning seces-sion itself. Ironically, a man who sought to avoid contro-versy presided over one of the most controversy-riddenadministrations in American history.

Buchanan’s problems arose less from his ownactions than from the fact that the forces driving thenation apart were already spinning out of control by1856. By the time of Buchanan’s inauguration, southern-ers who looked north saw creeping abolitionism in theguise of free soil, whereas northerners who looked southsaw an insatiable Slave Power. Once these images hadtaken hold in the minds of the American people, politi-cians like James Buchanan had little room to maneuver.

The Dred Scott Case, 1857

Pledged to congressional “non-interference” with slav-ery in the territories, Buchanan had long looked to thecourts for a nonpartisan resolution of the vexatious

The Crisis of the Union, 1857–1860 421

issue of slavery extension. A case that appeared to prom-ise such a solution had been wending its way throughthe courts for years; and on March 6, 1857, two days afterBuchanan’s inauguration, the Supreme Court handeddown its decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

During the 1830s Dred Scott, a slave, had been takenby his master from the slave state of Missouri intoIllinois and the Wisconsin Territory, areas respectivelyclosed to slavery by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787and the Missouri Compromise. After his master’s death,Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds of his resi-dence in free territory. In 1856 the case finally reachedthe Supreme Court.

The Court faced two key issues. First, did Scott’s res-idence in free territory during the 1830s make him free?Second, regardless of the answer to this question, didScott, again enslaved in Missouri, have a right to sue inthe federal courts? The Court could have resolved thecase on narrow grounds by answering the second ques-tion in the negative, but Buchanan wanted a far-reach-ing decision that would deal with the broad issue of slav-ery in the territories.

In the end, Buchanan got the broad ruling that hesought, but one so controversial that it settled little. Inthe most important of six separate majority opinions,Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a seventy-nine-year-oldMarylander whom Andrew Jackson had appointed tosucceed John Marshall in 1835, began with the narrowconclusion that Scott, a slave, could not sue for his free-dom. Then the thunder started. No black, whether aslave or a free person descended from a slave, couldbecome a citizen of the United States, Taney continued.Next Taney whipped the thunderheads into a tornado.Even if Scott had been a legal plaintiff, Taney ruled, hisresidence in free territory years earlier did not make himfree, because the Missouri Compromise, whose provi-sions prohibited slavery in the Wisconsin Territory, wasitself unconstitutional. The compromise, declaredTaney, violated the Fifth Amendment’s protection ofproperty (including slaves).

Contrary to Buchanan’s hopes, the decision touchedoff a new blast of controversy over slavery in the territo-ries. The antislavery press flayed it as a “willful perver-sion” filled with “gross historical falsehoods.” Taney’sruling gave Republicans more evidence that a fiendishSlave Power conspiracy gripped the nation. Althoughthe Kansas-Nebraska Act had effectively repealed theMissouri Compromise, the Court’s majority now reject-ed even the principle behind the compromise, the ideathat Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories.Five of the six justices who rejected this principle were

from slave states. The Slave Power, a northern paper bel-lowed, “has marched over and annihilated the bound-aries of the states. We are now one great homogenousslaveholding community.”

Like Stephen Douglas after the Kansas-NebraskaAct, President Buchanan now appeared as a northerndupe of the “slaveocracy.” Republicans restrained them-selves from open defiance of the decision only by insist-ing that it did not bind the nation; Taney’s comments onthe constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise, theycontended, amounted merely to obiter dicta, opinionssuperfluous to settling the case.

Reactions to the decision underscored the fact thatby 1857 no “judicious” or nonpartisan solution to slaveryextension was possible. Anyone who still doubted thisneeded only to read the fast-breaking news from Kansas.

The Lecompton Constitution, 1857

While the Supreme Court wrestled with the abstractissues raised by the expansion of slavery, Buchanansought a concrete solution to the gnawing problem ofKansas, where the free-state government at Topeka andthe officially recognized proslavery government atLecompton viewed each other with profound distrust.Buchanan’s plan for Kansas looked simple: an electedterritorial convention would draw up a constitution thatwould either permit or prohibit slavery; Buchananwould submit the constitution to Congress; Congresswould then admit Kansas as a state.

Unfortunately, no sooner had Buchanan devised hisplan than it began to explode in his face. Popular sover-eignty, the essence of Buchanan’s plan, demanded fairplay, a scarce quality in Kansas. The territory’s history offraudulent elections left both sides reluctant to committheir fortunes to the polls. An election for a constitution-al convention took place in June 1857, but free-staters,by now a majority in Kansas, boycotted the election on the grounds that the proslavery side would rig it.Dominated by proslavery delegates, a constitutionalconvention then met and drew up a frame of govern-ment, the Lecompton constitution, that protected therights of those slaveholders already living in Kansas totheir slave property and provided for a referendum inwhich voters could decide whether to allow in moreslaves.

The Lecompton constitution created a dilemma forBuchanan. A supporter of popular sovereignty, he hadgone on record in favor of letting the voters in Kansasdecide the slavery issue. Now he was confronted by aconstitution drawn up by a convention that had been


elected by less than 10 percent of the eligible voters, byplans for a referendum that would not allow voters toremove slaves already in Kansas, and by the prospectthat the proslavery side would conduct the referendumno more honestly than it had other ballots. Yet Buchananhad compelling reasons to accept the Lecompton con-stitution as the basis for the admission of Kansas as astate. The South, which had provided him with 112 of his174 electoral votes in 1856, supported the constitution.Buchanan knew, moreover, that only about two hundredslaves resided in Kansas, and he believed that theprospects for slavery in the remaining territories wereslight. The contention over slavery in Kansas struck himas another example of how extremists could turn minorissues into major ones. To accept the constitution and speed the admission of Kansas as either a free stateor a slave state seemed the best way to pull the rug from beneath the extremists and quiet the ruckus inKansas. Accordingly, in December 1857 Buchanan for-mally endorsed the Lecompton constitution.

Buchanan’s decision provoked a bitter attack fromSenator Stephen A. Douglas. What rankled Douglas andmany others was that the Lecompton convention, hav-ing drawn up a constitution, then allowed voters todecide only whether more slaves could be brought intothe territory. “I care not whether [slavery] is voted downor voted up,” Douglas declared. But to refuse to allow avote on the constitution itself, with its protection ofexisting slave property, smacked of a “system of trickeryand jugglery to defeat the fair expression of the will ofthe people.”

Even as Douglas broke with Buchanan, events inKansas took a new turn. A few months after electing del-egates to the convention that drew up the Lecomptonconstitution, Kansans had gone to the polls to elect aterritorial legislature. So flagrant was the fraud in thiselection—one village with thirty eligible voters returnedmore than sixteen hundred proslavery votes—that thegovernor disallowed enough proslavery returns to givefree-staters a majority in the legislature. After the draft-ing of the Lecompton constitution, this territorial legis-lature called for a referendum on the entire document.Whereas the Kansas constitutional convention’s goalhad been to restrict the choice of voters to the narrowissue of the future introduction of slaves, the territoriallegislature sought a referendum that would allowKansans to vote against the protection of existing slaveproperty as well.

In December 1857 the referendum called earlier bythe constitutional convention was held. Boycotted byfree-staters, the constitution with slavery passed over-

whelmingly. Two weeks later, in the election called bythe territorial legislature, the proslavery side abstained,and the constitution went down to crushing defeat.Having already cast his lot with the Lecompton conven-tion’s election, Buchanan simply ignored this secondelection. But he could not ignore the obstacles that thedivision in Kansas created for his plan to bring Kansasinto the Union under the Lecompton constitution.When he submitted the plan to Congress, a deadlock inthe House forced him to accept a proposal for stillanother referendum. This time, Kansans were given thechoice between accepting or rejecting the entire consti-tution, with the proviso that rejection would delay statehood. Despite the proviso, Kansans overwhelming-ly voted down the constitution.

Not only had Buchanan failed to tranquilize Kansas,but he had alienated northerners in his own party. Hissupport for the Lecompton constitution confirmed thesuspicion of northern Democrats that the southernSlave Power pulled all the important strings in theirparty. Douglas became the hero of the hour for northernDemocrats and even for some Republicans. “The boneand sinew of the Northern Democracy are with you,” aNew Yorker wrote to Douglas. Yet Douglas himself couldtake little comfort from the Lecompton fiasco, as hischerished formula of popular sovereignty increasinglylooked like a prescription for civil strife rather than harmony.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, 1858

Despite the acclaim he gained in the North for his standagainst the Lecompton constitution, Douglas faced astiff challenge in Illinois for reelection to the UnitedStates Senate. Of his Republican opponent, AbrahamLincoln, Douglas said: “I shall have my hands full. He isthe strong man of his party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker with his droll ways and dryjokes, in the West.”

Physically as well as ideologically, the two men formeda striking contrast. Tall (6’4″) and gangling, Lincoln oncedescribed himself as “a piece of floating driftwood.”Energy, ambition, and a passion for self-education hadcarried him from the Kentucky log cabin in which hewas born in 1809 through a youth filled with odd occu-pations (farm laborer, surveyor, rail-splitter, flatboat-man, and storekeeper) into law and politics in his adopt-ed Illinois. There he had capitalized on westerners’support for internal improvements to gain election to Congress in 1846 as a Whig. Having opposed the


Mexican-American War and the Kansas-Nebraska Act,he joined the Republican party in 1856.

Douglas was fully a foot shorter than the toweringLincoln. But his compact frame contained astonishingenergy. Born in New England, Douglas appealed prima-rily to the small farmers of southern origin who populat-ed the Illinois flatlands. To these and others, he was the“little giant,” the personification of the Democratic partyin the West. The campaign quickly became more thanjust another Senate race, for it pitted the Republican

party’s rising star against the Senate’s leading Democratand, thanks to the railroad and the telegraph, receivedunprecedented national attention.

Although some Republicans extolled Douglas’s standagainst the Lecompton constitution, to Lincoln nothinghad changed. Douglas was still Douglas, the author of the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act and a man whocared not whether slavery was voted up or down as longas the vote was honest. Opening his campaign with the “House Divided” speech (“this nation cannot exist


permanently half slave and half free”), Lincoln remindedhis Republican followers of the gulf that still separatedhis doctrine of free soil from Douglas’s popular sover-eignty. Douglas dismissed the house-divided doctrine asan invitation to secession. What mattered to him was notslavery, which he viewed as merely an extreme way tosubordinate an allegedly inferior race, but the continuedexpansion of white settlement. Like Lincoln, he wantedto keep slavery out of the path of white settlement. Butunlike his rival, Douglas believed that popular sover-eignty was the surest way to attain this goal without dis-rupting the Union.

The high point of the campaign came in a series ofseven debates held from August to October 1858. TheLincoln-Douglas debates mixed political drama with theatmosphere of a festival. At the debate in Galesburg, forexample, dozens of horse-drawn floats descended onthe town from nearby farming communities. One borethirty-two girls dressed in white, one for each state, anda thirty-third who dressed in black with the label“Kansas” and carried a banner proclaiming “they won’tlet me in.”

Douglas used the debates to portray Lincoln as a vir-tual abolitionist and advocate of racial equality. Bothcharges were calculated to doom Lincoln in the eyes ofthe intensely racist Illinois voters. In response, Lincolnaffirmed that Congress had no constitutional authorityto abolish slavery in the South, and in one debate heasserted bluntly that “I am not, nor ever have been infavor of bringing about the social and political equalityof the white, and black man.” However, fending offcharges of extremism was getting Lincoln nowhere; so inorder to seize the initiative, he tried to maneuverDouglas into a corner.

In view of the Dred Scott decision, Lincoln asked inthe debate at Freeport, could the people of a territorylawfully exclude slavery? In essence, Lincoln was askingDouglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the DredScott decision. Lincoln had long contended that theCourt’s decision rendered popular sovereignty as thin assoup boiled from the shadow of a pigeon that hadstarved to death. If, as the Supreme Court’s rulingaffirmed, Congress had no authority to exclude slaveryfrom a territory, then it seemingly followed that a territo-rial legislature created by Congress also lacked power todo so. To no one’s surprise, Douglas replied that notwith-standing the Dred Scott decision, the voters of a territorycould effectively exclude slavery simply by refusing toenact laws that gave legal protection to slave property.

Douglas’s “Freeport doctrine” salvaged popular sov-ereignty but did nothing for his reputation among

southerners, who preferred the guarantees of the DredScott ruling to the uncertainties of popular sovereignty.Whereas Douglas’s stand against the Lecompton consti-tution had already tattered his reputation in the South(“he is already dead there,” Lincoln affirmed), hisFreeport doctrine stiffened southern opposition to hispresidential ambitions.

Lincoln faced the problem throughout the debatesthat free soil and popular sovereignty, although distin-guishable in theory, had much the same practical effect.Neither Lincoln nor Douglas doubted that popular sov-ereignty, if fairly applied, would keep slavery out of theterritories. In the closing debates, in order to keep theinitiative and sharpen their differences, Lincoln shiftedtoward attacks on slavery as “a moral, social, and politi-cal evil.” He argued that Douglas’s view of slavery asmerely an eccentric and unsavory southern customwould dull the nation’s conscience and facilitate thelegalization of slavery everywhere. But Lincoln compro-mised his own position by rejecting both abolition andequality for blacks.

Neither man scored a clear victory in argument,and the senatorial election itself settled no majorissues. Douglas’s supporters captured a majority of theseats in the state legislature, which at the time wasresponsible for electing U.S. senators. But despite theracist leanings of most Illinois voters, Republican can-didates for the state legislature won a slightly largershare of the popular vote than did their Democraticrivals. Moreover, in its larger significance, the contestsolidified the sectional split in the national Democraticparty and made Lincoln famous in the North and infa-mous in the South.

The Legacy of Harpers Ferry

Although Lincoln rejected abolitionism, he called freesoil a step toward the “ultimate extinction” of slavery.Similarly, New York Republican Senator William H.Seward spoke of an “irrepressible conflict” betweenslavery and freedom. Predictably, many southernersignored the distinction between free soil and abolitionand concluded that Republicans and abolitionists werejoined in an unholy alliance against slavery. To many inthe South, the North seemed to be controlled bydemented leaders bent on civil war. One southerndefender of slavery equated the doctrines of the aboli-tionists with those of “Socialists, of Free Love and FreeLands, Free Churches, Free Women and Free Negroes-of No-Marriage, No-Religion, No-Private Property, No-Law and No-Government.”


Nothing did more to freeze this southern image ofthe North than the evidence of northern complicity inJohn Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and northern ser-mons that turned Brown into a martyr. In Philadelphia,some 250 outraged southern students seceded from thecity’s medical schools to enroll in southern schools.True, Lincoln and Seward condemned the raid, butsoutherners suspected that they regretted the conspira-cy’s failure more than the attempt itself.

Brown’s abortive raid also rekindled southern fearsof a slave insurrection. Rumors flew around the South,and vigilantes turned out to battle conspiracies thatexisted only in their minds. Volunteers, for example,

mobilized to defend northeastern Texas against thou-sands of abolitionists supposedly on their way to pillageDallas and its environs. In other incidents, vigilantesrounded up thousands of slaves, tortured some intoconfessing to nonexistent plots, and then lynched them.The hysteria fed by such rumors played into the hands ofthe extremists known as fire-eaters, who encouraged thewitch hunt by spreading tales of slave conspiracies in thepress so that southern voters would turn to them asalone able to “stem the current of Abolition.”

More and more southerners concluded that theRepublican party itself directed abolitionism anddeserved blame for Brown’s raid. After all, had not influ-


ential Republicans assailed slavery, unconstitutionallytried to ban it, and spoken of an “irrepressible conflict”between slavery and freedom? The Tennessee legislaturereflected southern views when it passed resolutionsdeclaring that the Harpers Ferry raid was “the naturalfruit of this treasonable ‘irrepressible conflict’ doctrineput forth by the great head of the Black Republican partyand echoed by his subordinates.”

The South Contemplates Secession

A pamphlet published in 1860 embodied in its title thegrowing conviction of southerners that The South AloneShould Govern the South. Southerners reached this con-clusion gradually and often reluctantly. In 1850 fewsoutherners could have conceived of transferring theirallegiance from the United States to some new nation.Relatively insulated from the main tide of immigra-tion, southerners thought of themselves as the mostAmerican of Americans. But the events of the 1850s per-suaded many southerners that the North had desertedthe true principles of the Union. Southerners interpret-ed northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and toslavery in Kansas as either illegal or unconstitutional,and they viewed headline-grabbing phrases such as“irrepressible conflict” and “a higher law” as virtual dec-larations of war on the South. To southerners, it was theNorth, not the South, that had grown peculiar.

This sense of the North’s deviance tinged reportssent home by southern visitors to the North in the 1850s.A Mississippi planter, for example, could scarcelybelieve his eyes when he witnessed a group of northernfree blacks refusing to surrender their seats to whitewomen. When assured by northern friends of their sup-port for the South, southerners could only wonder why northerners kept electing Republicans to office.Southerners increasingly described their visits to theNorth as forays into “enemy territory.” More and morethey agreed with a South Carolinian’s insistence that theSouth had to sever itself “from the rotten Northern ele-ment.”

Viewed as a practical tactic to secure concrete goals,secession did not make a great deal of sense. Somesoutherners contended that secession would make iteasier for the South to acquire more territory for slaveryin the Caribbean; yet the South was scarcely united indesiring additional slave territory in Mexico, Cuba, orCentral America. States like Alabama, Mississippi, andTexas contained vast tracts of unsettled land that couldbe converted to cotton cultivation far more easily than

the Caribbean. Other southerners continued to com-plain that the North blocked the access of slaveholdersto territories in the continental United States. But it isunclear how secession would solve this problem. If theSouth were to secede, the remaining continental territo-ries would belong exclusively to the North, which couldthen legislate for them as it chose. Nor would secessionstop future John Browns from infiltrating the South toprovoke slave insurrections.

Yet to dwell on the impracticality of secession as achoice for the South is to miss the point. Talk of seces-sion was less a tactic with clear goals than an expressionof the South’s outrage at what southerners viewed as theirresponsible and unconstitutional course that theRepublicans were taking in the North. It was not merelythat Republican attacks on slavery sowed the seeds of slave uprisings. More fundamentally, southernersbelieved that the North was treating the South as itsinferior—indeed, as no more than a slave. “Talk ofNegro slavery,” exclaimed southern proslavery philoso-pher George Fitzhugh, “is not half so humiliating anddisgraceful as the slavery of the South to the North.”Having persuaded themselves that slavery made it pos-sible for them to enjoy unprecedented freedom andequality, white southerners took great pride in theirhomeland. They bitterly dismissed Republican portray-als of the South as a region of arrogant planters anddegraded white common folk. Submission to theRepublicans, declared Democratic Senator JeffersonDavis of Mississippi, “would be intolerable to a proudpeople.”

THE COLLAPSE OF THEUNION, 1860–1861

As long as the pliant James Buchanan occupied theWhite House, southerners did no more than talk aboutsecession. Once aware that Buchanan had declined toseek reelection, however, they approached the electionof 1860 with anxiety. Although not all voters realized it,when they cast their ballots in 1860 they were decidingnot just the outcome of an election but the fate of theUnion. Lincoln’s election initiated the process by whichthe southern states abandoned the United States for anew nation, the Confederate States of America. Initially,the Confederacy consisted only of states in the LowerSouth. As the Upper South hesitated to embrace seces-sion, moderates searched frantically for a compromisethat would save the Union. But they searched in vain.The time for compromise had passed.

The Collapse of the Union, 1860–1861 427


As a single-issue, free-soil party, the Republicans haddone well in the election of 1856. To win in 1860, howev-er, they would have to broaden their appeal in the North,particularly in states like Pennsylvania and Illinois,which they had lost in 1856. To do so, Republican leadershad concluded, they needed to forge an economic pro-gram to complement their advocacy of free soil.

A severe economic slump following the so-calledPanic of 1857 furnished the Republicans with a fittingopening. The depression shattered more than a decadeof American prosperity and thrust economic concernsto the fore. In response, in the late 1850s, the Rep-ublicans developed an economic program based onsupport for a protective tariff (popular in Pennsylvania)and on two issues favored in the Midwest, federal aid forinternal improvements and the granting to settlers offree 160-acre homesteads out of publicly owned land. Byproposing to make these homesteads available to immi-grants who were not yet citizens, the Republicans wentfar in shedding the nativist image that lingered fromtheir early association with the Know-Nothings. CarlSchurz, an 1848 German political refugee who had cam-paigned for Lincoln against Douglas in 1858, nowlabored mightily to bring his antislavery countrymenover to the Republican party.

The Republicans’ desire to broaden their appealalso influenced their choice of a candidate. At their con-vention in Chicago, they nominated Abraham Lincolnover the early front-runner, William H. Seward of NewYork. Although better known than Lincoln, Seward failedto convince his party that he could carry the key states ofPennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey. (RuefulRepublicans remembered that their presidential candi-date John C. Frémont would have won in 1856 if he hadcarried Pennsylvania and one of the other three states.)Lincoln held the advantage not only of hailing fromIllinois but also of projecting a more moderate imagethan Seward on the slavery issue. Seward’s penchant forcontroversial phrases like “irrepressible conflict” and“higher law” had given him a radical image. Lincoln, incontrast, had repeatedly affirmed that Congress had noconstitutional right to interfere with slavery in the Southand had explicitly rejected the “higher law” doctrine.The Republicans now needed only to widen their north-ern appeal.

The Democrats, still claiming to be a national party,had to bridge their own sectional differences. The DredScott decision and the conflict over the Lecompton con-

stitution had weakened the northern Democrats andstrengthened southern Democrats. While Douglas stilldesperately defended popular sovereignty, southernDemocrats stretched Dred Scott to conclude thatCongress now had to protect slavery in the territories.

The Democratic party’s internal turmoil boiled overat its Charleston convention in the spring of 1860.Failing to force acceptance of a platform guaranteeingfederal protection of slavery in the territories, the dele-gates from the Lower South stalked out. The conventionadjourned to Baltimore, where a new fight broke outover the question of seating hastily elected pro-Douglasslates of delegates from the Lower South states that hadseceded from the Charleston convention. The decisionto seat these pro-Douglas slates led to a walkout by dele-gates from Virginia and other states in the Upper South.The remaining delegates nominated Douglas; the seced-ers marched off to another hall in Baltimore and nomi-nated Buchanan’s vice president, John C. Breckinridge ofKentucky, on a platform calling for the congressionalprotection of slavery in the territories. Unable to rallybehind a single nominee, the divided Democrats thusran two candidates, Douglas and Breckinridge. The dis-ruption of the Democratic party was now complete.

The South still contained an appreciable number ofmoderates, often former Whigs who had joined with the Know-Nothings behind Fillmore in 1856. In 1860these moderates, aided by former northern Whigs whoopposed both Lincoln and Douglas, forged the newConstitutional Union party and nominated John Bell, aTennessee slaveholder who had opposed both theKansas-Nebraska Act and the Lecompton constitution.Calling for the preservation of the Union, the new partytook no stand on the divisive issue of slavery extension.

With four candidates in the field, voters faced a rela-tively clear choice. Lincoln conceded that the South hada constitutional right to preserve slavery but demandedthat Congress prohibit its extension. At the otherextreme, Breckinridge insisted that Congress had to pro-tect slavery in any territory that contained slaves. Thisleft the middle ground to Bell and Douglas, the latter stillcommitted to popular sovereignty but in search of a ver-bal formula that might reconcile it with the Dred Scottdecision. Lincoln won a clear majority of the electoralvote, 180 to 123 for his three opponents combined.Although Lincoln gained only 39 percent of the popularvote, his popular votes were concentrated in the North,the majority section, and were sufficient to carry everyfree state. Douglas ran a respectable second to Lincolnin the popular vote but a dismal last in the electoral vote.


As the only candidate to campaign in both sections,Douglas suffered from the scattered nature of his votesand carried only Missouri. Bell won Virginia, Kentucky,and Tennessee, and Breckinridge captured Marylandand the Lower South (see Map 14.4).

The Movement for Secession

As the dust from the election settled, southerners faced adisconcerting fact: a man so unpopular among south-erners that his name had not even appeared on the bal-lot in much of their section was now president. Lincoln’selection struck most of the white South as a calculatednorthern insult. The North, a South Carolina planter tolda visitor from England, “has got so far toward being abolitionized as to elect a man avowedly hostile to ourinstitutions.”

Few southerners believed that Lincoln would fulfillhis promise to protect slavery in the South, and mostfeared that he would act as a mere front man for moreJohn Browns. “Now that the black radical Republicanshave the power I suppose they will Brown us all,” a SouthCarolinian lamented. An uneducated Mississippianresiding in Illinois expressed his reaction to the electionmore bluntly:

It seems the north wants the south to raise cottonand sugar rice tobacco for the northern states, alsoto pay taxes and fight her battles and get territoryfor the purpose of the north to send her greasyDutch and free niggers into the territory to get rid of them. At any rate that was what elected old AbePresident. Some professed conservative Repub-licans Think and say that Lincoln will be conser-vative also but sir my opinion is that Lincoln willdeceive them. [He] will undoubtedly please theabolitionists for at his election they nearly all wentinto fits with Joy.

Some southerners had threatened secession at theprospect of Lincoln’s election. Now the moment ofchoice had arrived. On December 20, 1860, a SouthCarolina convention voted unanimously for secession;and by February 1, 1861, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida,Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had followed SouthCarolina’s lead (see A Place in Time: Charleston, SouthCarolina, 1860–1861). On February 4 delegates fromthese seven states met in Montgomery, Alabama, andestablished the Confederate States of America.

Despite the abruptness of southern withdrawalfrom the Union, the movement for secession had been,

and continued to be, laced with uncertainty. Manysoutherners had resisted calls for immediate secession.Even after Lincoln’s election, fire-eating secessionistshad met fierce opposition in the Lower South from so-called cooperationists, who called upon the South to actin unison or not at all. Many cooperationists had hopedto delay secession in order to wring concessions fromthe North that might remove the need for secession.Jefferson Davis, who was inaugurated in February 1861as the first president of the Confederacy, was a mostreluctant secessionist, and he remained in the UnitedStates Senate for two weeks after his own state ofMississippi had seceded. Even zealous advocates ofsecession had a hard time reconciling themselves to secession and believing that they were no longer citi-zens of the United States. “How do you feel now, dearMother,” a Georgian wrote, “that we are in a foreignland?”

In the month after the establishment of theConfederate States of America, moreover, secession-ists suffered stinging disappointments in the UpperSouth. Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas,and the border slave states of Maryland, Kentucky,Delaware, and Missouri all rejected calls for secession

The Collapse of the Union, 1860–1861 429

RepublicanAbraham Lincoln

John C. BreckinridgeDemocratic, Southern

180

72

1,865,593

848,356

39.8

18.1

ElectoralVote

PopularVote

Percentage ofPopular Vote

13

46R 4

38

8

55

35

2723

1311

1215

10

8

10

12

97

9

6

WASH.

TERR.NEBRASKA

TERR.

UNORGANIZEDTERR.

KANSAS TERR.

INDIANTERR.

NEW MEXICOTERR.

UTAH TERR.

3

4

4

4

4

55

4

3

D 3

Stephen A. DouglasDemocratic, Northern

12 1,382,713 29.5

John BellConstitutional Union

39 592,906 12.6

Divided 34

MAP 14.4The Election of 1860

A Place in Time

Charleston, South Carolina1860-1861

After securing the nom-ination of Pennsylvania’sJames Buchanan for thepresidency in 1856, north-ern Democrats made aconciliatory gesture to theSouth. They agreed to holdtheir party’s 1860 conven-tion in Charleston, SouthCarolina. Time would give

northerners many opportunities to regret that gesture.Long in decline, with only a few overpriced hotels,Charleston offered little as a convention city. The sup-porters of Stephen A. Douglas had to convert the secondfloor of a meeting hall into a giant dormitory, where theyslept in rows of beds and baked in one-hundred-degreeheat. Even more troubling to the delegates whodescended on the city in April 1860 was the hysteria thatconsumed Charleston in reaction to John Brown’s raidon Harpers Ferry in Virginia six months earlier. Mountedpolice, armed with swords and muskets, patrolled thestreets, and vigilantes combed the byways in search ofabolitionists. Panicked Charlestonians viewed everynortherner in the city—whether a politician, a travelingsalesman, or a schoolteacher—as “necessarily imbuedwith doctrines hostile to our institutions.”

Suspicion and harassment greeted northern sojourn-ers, but Charleston’s blacks endured a virtual reign of ter-

ror after “the late outrage at Harpers Ferry.” A little underhalf the city’s population in 1860 was black, and 81 per-cent of the blacks were slaves. White southerners distrust-ed urban slaves, most of whom lived apart from theirrural masters and were hired out to city employers.Indeed, some slaves took advantage of the distance fromtheir masters to hire themselves out for wages, a practicethat whites feared would infect slaves with the notion thatthey were free. In addition, white workingmen resentedcompetition from urban slaves in the skilled trades, andthey used the furor over John Brown’s raid to pressure thecity’s mayor into enforcing an old and long-neglectedordinance that slaves working away from their masterswear badges. Those without badges were rounded up andjailed, and their masters fined.

Charleston’s enslaved blacks were not the sole tar-gets of the city’s increasingly repressive mood. Fewsouthern cities had more visible or well-organized com-munities of free blacks than Charleston. Composedmainly of mulattos who took pride in their light skin andassembled in the Brown Fellowship Society, Charleston’sfree people of color formed a brown aristocracy ofskilled tailors, carpenters, and small tradesmen. Freeblacks like John Marsh Johnson worshiped in the sameEpiscopal church as such elite whites as Christopher G.Memminger, a prominent lawyer and politician whowould soon become the Confederacy’s secretary of thetreasury. The financial prosperity of these free blacksdepended on the white aristocrats who frequented theirstores, admired their thrift and sobriety, and took com-fort in their apparent loyalty. When a bill calling for theenslavement or expulsion of South Carolina’s free blackscame before the state legislature in 1859, Memmingerreminded the legislators that a free black had helpedexpose Denmark Vesey’s planned uprising of slaves backin 1822. Heartened by the support of Memminger andothers, John Marsh Johnson congratulated himself forpredicting “from the onset that nothing would be doneaffecting our position.”

Johnson little realized the extent to which the worldof Charleston’s free blacks was in danger of falling apart.The city had been a center of southern-rights radicalism

430

431

since the days of the nullification crisis. Charleston wasthe home of the fire-eater Robert Barnwell Rhett, and italways rolled out the welcome carpet for EdmundRuffin, a Virginia drumbeater for slavery. Furthermore,after John Brown’s raid, even moderate citizens, includ-ing former Unionists, were embracing secession. Thecause of secession demanded, in turn, that elite whitesunite with working-class whites in a common frontagainst the North. During the 1850s Charleston’s work-ing-class whites had grown increasingly powerful andaggressive; the increase in their numbers gave the city itsfirst white majority in 1860. Working-class whites fearedcompetition from any blacks but had a special loathingfor free blacks, who on Sundays dared “to draw up in fineclothes” and “wear a silk hat and gloves” and who cele-brated weddings by drinking champagne and riding tothe church in elegant carriages.

Soon free blacks became the victims of the growingcooperation between elite and working-class whites.Indeed, by August 1860 Charleston was in the grip of an“enslavement crisis.” The same police dragnets that hadsnared urban slaves without badges now trapped innu-merable free blacks as well. Blacks who were notenslaved suddenly had to prove that they were free, a tallorder inasmuch as South Carolina had long prohibitedthe freeing of slaves. For decades white masters whowanted to free favored slaves had resorted tocomplicated legal ruses, with the result thatmany blacks who had lived for years as free peo-ple could not prove that they were free and wereforced back into slavery. Abandoning his initialoptimism, John Marsh Johnson wrote nervouslyto his brother-in-law to report “cases of persons

who for 30 yrs. have been paying capitation Tax [as freepersons of color] & one of 35 yrs. that have to go back tobondage & take out their Badges.” Many other freeAfrican-Americans fled to the North.

A religious man, Johnson believed that God helpedthose who helped themselves. Rather than “supinelywait for the working of a miracle by having a Chariot letdown to convey us away,” he resolved in late August 1860to stay and endure the “present calamity.” By then, how-ever, the Democratic party had snapped apart under thepressure of southern demands for the congressionalrecognition of slavery in all the territories. “The lastparty pretending to be a national party, is broken up,”the secessionist Charleston Mercury exulted, “and theantagonism of the sections of the Union has nothing toarrest its fierce collision.” In December 1860 anotherconvention meeting in Charleston proclaimed SouthCarolina’s secession from the United States. In April1861, only a year after the Democratic delegates hadassembled in Charleston for their party’s convention,shore batteries along Charleston’s harbor opened fire onFort Sumter. This action set in motion a train of eventsleading to the extinction of slavery itself. After the CivilWar, the free blacks who had weathered the enslavementcrisis of 1860 would emerge as the leaders of the city’sblack people, all of them now free.

(see Map 14.5). Various factors account for the UpperSouth’s unwillingness to embrace the movement. Incontrast to the Lower South, which had a guaranteedexport market for its cotton, the Upper South dependedheavily on economic ties to the North that would besevered by secession. Furthermore, with proportionate-ly far fewer slaves than the Lower South, the states ofthe Upper South and the border states doubted the loy-alty of their sizable nonslaveholding populations to theidea of secession. Virginia, for example, had every rea-son to question the allegiance to secession of its non-slaveholding western counties, which would soon breakaway to form Unionist West Virginia. Few in the UpperSouth could forget the raw nerve touched by the publi-cation in 1857 of Hinton R. Helper’s The ImpendingCrisis of the South. A nonslaveholding North Carolinian,Helper had described slavery as a curse upon poorwhite southerners and thereby questioned one of themost sacred southern doctrines, the idea that slaveryrendered all whites equal. If secession were to spark awar between the states, moreover, the Upper Southappeared to be the likeliest battleground. Whatever theexact weight assignable to each of these factors, onepoint is clear: the secession movement that South

Carolina so boldly started in December 1860 seemed tobe falling apart by March 1861.

The Search for Compromise

The lack of southern unity confirmed the view of mostRepublicans that the secessionists were more blusterthan substance. Seward described secession as the workof “a relatively few hotheads,” and Lincoln believed thatthe loyal majority of southerners would soon wrest con-trol from the fire-eating minority.

This perception stiffened Republican resolve toresist compromise. Moderate John J. Crittenden ofKentucky proposed compensation for owners of run-away slaves, repeal of northern personal-liberty laws, a constitutional amendment to prohibit the federal gov-ernment from interfering with slavery in the southernstates, and another amendment to restore the MissouriCompromise line for the remaining territories and pro-tect slavery below it. But in the face of steadfast Rep-ublican opposition, the Crittenden plan collapsed.

Lincoln’s faith in a “loyal majority” of southernersexaggerated both their numbers and their devotion tothe Union. Many southern opponents of the fire-eating


500 Kilometers

INDIANTERRITORY

TEXAS7

MISSOURI

ARKANSAS9

LA.6

WIS.

ILLINOIS

MICH.

IND.OHIO

W.VA.

PA.

N.Y.

ME.

VT.

N.H.

MASS.

R.I.CONN.

N.J.

DEL.

MD.

VIRGINIA8

NORTHCAROLINA

11

KENTUCKY

TENNESSEE10

SOUTHCAROLINA

1GEORGIA

5

FLA.3

ALABAMA4

MISS.2

N. MEX.TERR.(1861)

KANSAS(1861)

COLORADOTERRITORY

(1861)

IOWA

MINN.

(1863)

Seceded before fallof Fort Sumter

Seceded after fallof Fort Sumter

Slave state loyal tothe Union

Free state or territory

Order of secession

GULF OF MEXICO

ATLANTIC OCEAN

0

500 Miles0

L. Superior

L.M

ichi

gan

L. Huron

L. Erie

L. Ontario

1

MAP 14.5SecessionFour key states—Virginia, Arkansas,Tennessee, and North Carolina—did notsecede until after the fall of Fort Sumter. Theborder slave states of Maryland, Delaware,Kentucky, and Missouri stayed in the Union.

secessionists were sitting on the fence and hoping formajor concessions from the North; their allegiance tothe Union thus was conditional. Lincoln can be faultedfor misreading southern opinion, but even if his ass-essment had been accurate, it is unlikely that he would have accepted the Crittenden plan. The stickingpoint was the proposed extension of the MissouriCompromise line. To Republicans this was a surrender,not a compromise, because it hinged on the abandon-ment of free soil, the founding principle of their party. Inaddition, Lincoln well knew that some southerners still talked of seizing more territory for slavery in theCaribbean. In proposing to extend the 36°30’ line, theCrittenden plan specifically referred to territories “here-after acquired.” Lincoln feared that it would be only amatter of time “till we shall have to take Cuba as a condi-tion upon which they [the seceding states] will stay inthe Union.”

Beyond these considerations, the precipitous seces-sion of the Lower South subtly changed the questionthat Lincoln faced. The issue was no longer slaveryextension but secession. The Lower South had left theUnion in the face of losing a fair election. For Lincoln tohave caved in to such pressure would have violatedmajority rule, the principle upon which the nation, notjust his party, had been founded.

The Coming of War

By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, little morethan a spark was needed to ignite a war. Lincoln pledgedin his inaugural address to “hold, occupy, and possess”federal property in the seven states that had seceded, anassertion that committed him to the defense of FortPickens in Florida and Fort Sumter in the harbor ofCharleston, South Carolina. William Seward, whomLincoln had appointed secretary of state, now becameobsessed with the idea of conciliating the Lower Southin order to hold the Upper South in the Union. In addi-tion to advising the evacuation of federal forces fromFort Sumter, Seward proposed a scheme to reunify thenation by provoking a war with France and Spain. ButLincoln brushed aside Seward’s advice. Instead, thepresident informed the governor of South Carolina of hisintention to supply Fort Sumter with much-needed pro-visions, but not with men and ammunition. To gain thedubious military advantage of attacking Fort Sumterbefore the arrival of relief ships, Confederate batteriesbegan to bombard the fort shortly before dawn on April12. The next day, the fort’s garrison surrendered.

Proclaiming an insurrection in the Lower South,Lincoln now appealed for seventy-five thousand militia-men from the loyal states to suppress the rebellion. Hisproclamation pushed citizens of the Upper South off thefence upon which they had perched for three months. “Iam a Union man,” one southerner wrote, “but whenthey [the Lincoln administration] send men south it willchange my notions. I can do nothing against my ownpeople.” In quick succession, Virginia, North Carolina,Arkansas, and Tennessee leagued with the Confederacy.After acknowledging that “I am one of those dull crea-tures that cannot see the good of secession,” Robert E.Lee resigned from the army rather than lead federaltroops against his native Virginia.

The North, too, was ready for a fight, less to abolishslavery than to punish secession. Worn out from hisefforts to find a peaceable solution to the issue of slaveryextension, and with only a short time to live, StephenDouglas assaulted “the new system of resistance by thesword and bayonet to the results of the ballot-box” andaffirmed: “I deprecate war, but if it must come I am withmy country, under all circumstances, and in every con-tingency.”

CONCLUSIONThe expectation of most American political leaders thatthe Compromise of 1850 would finally resolve the vexingissue of slavery extension had a surface plausibility. Inneither 1850 nor 1860 did the great majority ofAmericans favor the abolition of slavery in the southernstates. Rather, they divided over slavery in the territories,an issue seemingly settled by the Compromise. StephenA. Douglas, its leading architect and a man who assumedthat he always had his finger on the popular pulse, wassure that slavery had reached its natural limits, that popular sovereignty would keep it out of the territories,and that the furor over slavery extension would diedown.

Douglas believed that only a few hotheads had keptthe slavery extension issue alive. He was wrong. The dif-ferences between northerners and southerners overslavery extension were grounded on different under-standings of liberty, which to northerners meant theirfreedom to pursue self-interest without competitionfrom slaves, and to southerners their freedom to disposeof their legally acquired property, slaves, as they chose.The Compromise, which had barely scraped throughCongress, soon unraveled. Enforcement of the FugitiveSlave Act brought to the surface widespread northern

Conclusion 433

resentment of slaveholders, people who seemingly livedoff the work of others, and a determination to excludethe possibility of slavery in the territories. Southern sup-port for Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill, with its repealof the Missouri Compromise and its apparent invitationto southerners to bring slaves into Kansas, persuadedmany northerners that the South harbored the design ofextending slavery. For their part, southerners, alreadyangered by northern defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act,interpreted northern outrage against Douglas’s bill asfurther evidence of the North’s disrespect for the rule oflaw.

By the mid-1850s the sectional division was spin-ning out of the control of politicians. Deep divisionsbetween the Whigs’ free-soil northern wing and pro-slavery southern wing led to the party’s collapse in thewake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Divisions betweennorthern and southern Democrats would be paperedover as long as the Democratic party could unite behindDouglas’s formula of popular sovereignty. But popularsovereignty failed its test in Kansas. The outbreak of

civil strife in Kansas pushed former northern Whigs andmany northern Democrats toward the new, purely sectional, Republicans, a party whose very existencesoutherners interpreted as a mark of northern con-tempt for them.

The South was not yet ready for secession. Before ittook that drastic step, it had to convince itself that theNorth’s real design was not merely to restrict slaveryextension but to destroy slavery and, with it, the Southitself. Northern hostility to the Dred Scott decision andsympathy for John Brown struck southerners as proof ofjust such an intent.

As an expression of principled outrage, secessioncapped a decade in which each side had clothed itself inprinciples that were deeply embedded in the nation’spolitical heritage. Both sides subscribed to the rule oflaw, which each accused the other of deserting. In theend, war broke out between siblings who, although theyclaimed the same heritage and inheritance, had becomevirtual strangers to each other.


CHRONOLOGY, 1850–1861

1846 Wilmot Proviso.1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends Mexican War.

Free-Soil party formed.Zachary Taylor elected president.

1849 California seeks admission to the Union as a free state.1850 Nashville convention assembles to discuss the South’s

grievances.Compromise of 1850.

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.Franklin Pierce elected president.

1853 Gadsden Purchase.1854 Ostend Manifesto.

Kansas-Nebraska Act.William Walker leads a filibustering expedition into Nicaragua.

1854–1855 Know-Nothing and Republican parties emerge.1855 Proslavery forces steal the election for a territorial

legislature in Kansas.Proslavery Kansans establish a government in Lecompton.Free-soil government established in Topeka, Kansas.

1856 “The Sack of Lawrence.”John Brown’s Pottawatomie massacre.James Buchanan elected president.

1857 Dred Scott decision.President Buchanan endorses the Lecompton constitution in Kansas.Panic of 1857.

1858 Congress refuses to admit Kansas to the Union under the Lecompton constitution.Lincoln-Douglas debates.

1859 John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.1860 Abraham Lincoln elected president.

South Carolina secedes from the Union.1861 The remaining Lower South states secede.

Confederate States of America established.Crittenden compromise plan collapses.Lincoln takes office.Firing on Fort Sumter; Civil War begins.Upper South secedes.

FOR FURTHER REFERENCE

READINGS

William W. Freehling, The Road to Disunion: Secessionists atBay, 1776–1854 (1990). A major study that traces theroots of secession.

Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology ofthe Republican Party Before the Civil War (1970). An out-standing analysis of the thought, values, and compo-nents of the Republican party.

William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party,1852–1856 (1987). A comprehensive account of the birthof a major party.

Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (1978). Alively reinterpretation of the politics of the 1850s.

Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union (vols. 1 and 2, 1947).A detailed, highly regarded account of the coming of theCivil War.

David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (1976). Thebest one-volume overview of the events leading to theCivil War.

Mark Stegmaier, Texas, New Mexico, and the Compromise of1850 (1996). A good study of the significance of theTexas-New Mexico boundary dispute for the sectionalcrisis.

WEBSITES

American History to 1865http://www.utep.edu/kc3312/clymer/lectures/Contains useful lecture outlines and political maps ofthe sectional crisis of the 1850s.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culturehttp://www.iath.virginia.edu/utcThis site recreates the story of the writing and receptionof Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel. It includes con-temporary reviews, African-American responses to thenovel, and proslavery responses.

The Valley of the Shadowhttp://jefferson.village.edu/vshadow2/contents.htmlAn award-winning site that investigates the experiencesof two communities—Augusta County, Virginia, andFranklin County, Pennsylvania—before, during, andafter the Civil War. Sources include newspapers, letters,diaries, photographs, maps, church records, populationand agricultural censuses, and military records.

For additional works please consult the bibliography atthe end of the book

For Further Reference 435

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