Foner Chapter 13: A House Divided, 1840-1861 PDF

C HAPTER 13 1820 Moses Austin receives Mexi- can land grant 1836 Texas independence from Mexico 1845 Inauguration of James Polk 1846– Mexican War 1848 1846 Henry David Thoreau jailed Wilmot Proviso 1848 Free Soil Party organized Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo...

C HAPTER 13 1820 Moses Austin receives Mexi- can land grant 1836 Texas independence from Mexico 1845 Inauguration of James Polk 1846– Mexican War 1848 1846 Henry David Thoreau jailed Wilmot Proviso 1848 Free Soil Party organized Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Gold discovered in foothills of Sierra Nevada Mountains 1849 Inauguration of Zachary Taylor 1850 Compromise of 1850 Fugitive Slave Act 1853 Inauguration of Franklin Pierce 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act Know-Nothing Party established Ostend Manifesto Republican Party organized 1856 Bleeding Kansas 1857 Inauguration of James Buchanan Dred Scott decision 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates 1859 John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry 1860 South Carolina secedes 1861 Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln Fort Sumter fired upon A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST THE RISE OF THE REPUBLI- DESTINY CAN PARTY Continental Expansion The Northern Economy The Mexican Frontier: New The Rise and Fall of the Mexico and California Know-Nothings The Texas Revolt The Free Labor Ideology The Election of 1844 Bleeding Kansas and the The Road to War Election of 1856 The War and Its Critics Combat in Mexico THE EMERGENCE OF Race and Manifest Destiny LINCOLN Redefining Race The Dred Scott Decision Gold-Rush California The Decision’s Aftermath California and the Boundaries Lincoln and Slavery of Freedom The Lincoln-Douglas Campaign The Other Gold Rush John Brown at Harpers Ferry Opening Japan The Rise of Southern Nationalism A DOSE OF ARSENIC The Democratic Split The Wilmot Proviso The Nomination of Lincoln The Free Soil Appeal The Election of 1860 Crisis and Compromise The Great Debate THE IMPENDING CRISIS The Fugitive Slave Issue The Secession Movement Douglas and Popular The Secession Crisis Sovereignty And the War Came The Kansas-Nebraska Act Abraham Lincoln’s nickname, “The Railsplitter,” recalled his humble origins. An unknown artist created this larger-than-life portrait. The White House is visible in the distance. The painting is said to have been displayed during campaign rallies in 1860.  F OCUS Q UESTIONS l©I n 1855, Thomas Crawford, one of the era’s most prominent American sculptors, was asked to design a statue to adorn the Capitol’s dome, still under construction in Washington, D.C. He proposed a statue of Freedom, a female figure wearing a liberty cap. Secretary of What were the major factors contributing to War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, one of the country’s largest U.S. territorial expansion slaveholders, objected to Crawford’s plan. A familiar symbol in in the 1840s? the colonial era, the liberty cap had fallen into disfavor among some Americans after becoming closely identified with the French Revolution. Why did the expansion of Davis’s disapproval, however, rested on other grounds. Ancient Romans, slavery become the most he noted, regarded the cap as “the badge of the freed slave.” Its use, he divisive political issue in feared, might suggest that there was a connection between the slaves’ the 1840s and 1850s? longing for freedom and the liberty of free-born Americans. Davis ordered What combination of the liberty cap replaced with a less controversial military symbol, a issues and events fueled the feathered helmet. creation of the Republican Crawford died in Italy, where he had spent most of his career, in 1857. Party in the 1850s? Two years later, the colossal Statue of Freedom, which weighed 15,000 pounds, was transported to the United States in several pieces and assem- What enabled Lincoln to emerge as president from bled at a Maryland foundry under the direction of Philip Reed, a slave the divisive party politics of craftsman. In 1863, it was installed atop the Capitol, where it can still be the 1850s? seen today. By the time it was put in place, the country was immersed in the Civil War and Jefferson Davis had become president of the What were the final steps Confederate States of America. The dispute over the Statue of Freedom on the road to secession? The original and final designs for Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi insisted that the liberty cap in the first design, a symbol of the emancipated slave in ancient Rome, be replaced. What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 493 offers a small illustration of how, by the mid-1850s, nearly every public question was being swept up into the gathering storm over slavery. FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY CONTINENTAL EXPANSION In the 1840s, slavery moved to the center stage of American politics. It did so not in the moral language or with the immediatist program of abolition- ism, but as a result of the nation’s territorial expansion. By 1840, with the completion of Indian removal, virtually all the land east of the Mississippi River was in white hands. The depression that began in 1837 sparked a large migration of settlers further west. Some headed to Oregon, whose Willamette Valley was reputed to be one of the continent’s most beautiful and fertile regions. Until the 1840s, the American presence in the area had been limited to a few fur traders and explorers. But between 1840 and 1845, some 5,000 emigrants made the difficult 2,000-mile journey by wagon train to Oregon from jumping-off places on the banks of the Missouri River. By 1860, nearly 300,000 men, women, and children had braved disease, starva- tion, the natural barrier of the Rocky Mountains, and occasional Indian attacks to travel overland to Oregon and California. During most of the 1840s, the United States and Great Britain jointly administered Oregon, and Utah was part of Mexico. This did not stop Americans from settling in either region. National boundaries meant little to those who moved west. The 1840s witnessed an intensification of the old belief that God intended the American nation to reach all the way to the Pacific Ocean. As noted in Chapter 9, the term that became a shorthand for this expansionist spirit was “manifest destiny.” A rare photograph of wagons on their way to Oregon during the 1840s.  ! VISIONS OF FREEDOM American Progress. This 1872 painting by John Gast, commissioned by the author of a travel guide to the Pacific QUESTIONS coast, reflects the ebullient spirit of manifest destiny. A female figure descended from earlier representations 1. How does Gast explain the conquest of the of the goddess of liberty wears the star of empire and West by white Americans? leads the movement westward while Indians retreat 2. What elements of Indian–white relations before her. Symbols of civilization abound: the eastern city does the artist leave out? in the upper right corner, railroads, fenced animals, stagecoaches, and telegraph wires and a “school book” held by the central figure. 494 What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 495 THE MEXICAN FRONTIER : NEW MEXICO AND CALIFORNIA Settlement of Oregon did not directly raise the issue of slavery. But the nation’s acquisition of part of Mexico did. When Mexico achieved its inde- pendence from Spain in 1821 it was nearly as large as the United States and its population of 6.5 million was about two-thirds that of its northern neigh- bor. Mexico’s northern provinces—California, New Mexico, and Texas— however, were isolated and sparsely settled outposts surrounded by Indian country. New Mexico’s population at the time of Mexican independence consisted of around 30,000 persons of Spanish origin, 10,000 Pueblo Indians, and an indeterminate number of “wild” Indians—nomadic bands of Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes. With the opening in 1821 of the Santa Fe Trail linking that city with Independence, Missouri, New Mexico’s commerce with the United States eclipsed trade with the rest of Mexico. California’s non-Indian population in 1821, some 3,200 missionaries, soldiers, and settlers, was vastly outnumbered by about 20,000 Indians living and working on land owned by religious missions and by 150,000 members of unsubdued tribes in the interior. In 1834, in the hope of reduc- ing the power of the Catholic Church and attracting Mexican and foreign settlers to California, the Mexican government dissolved the great mission landholdings and emancipated Indians working for the friars. Most of the land ended up in the hands of a new class of Mexican cattle ranchers, the Californios, who defined their own identity in large measure against the sur- rounding Indian population. Californios referred to themselves as gente de razón (people capable of reason) as opposed to the indios, whom they called A watercolor of a scene on a ranch near gente sin razón (people without reason). For the “common good,” Indians Monterey, California, in 1849 depicts were required to continue to work for the new landholders. Californios supervising the work of Native Americans. 496 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY THE TRANS-MISSISSIPPI W E S T, 1830s–1840s OREGON Portland COUNTRY UNORGANIZED WISCONSIN TERRITORY IOWA TERRITORY TERRITORY MICHIGAN OHIO Salt Lake City Nauvoo INDIANA ILLINOIS San Francisco Independence Monterey MISSOURI KENTUCKY TENNESSEE Santa Fe INDIAN TERRITORY ARKANSAS San Diego MEXICO MISSISSIPPI ALABAMA Pacific Ocean TEXAS (Independent 1836–1845) LOUISIANA San Jacinto Battle The Alamo Mormon Trek Oregon Trail Gulf of Mexico Boundaries disputed with United States Mexico after independence from 0 200 400 miles Spain, 1821 0 200 400 kilometers Westward migration in the early and mid-1840s took American settlers across By 1840, California was already linked commercially with the United Indian country into the Oregon Territory, States. New England ships were trading with the region, as illustrated in ownership of which was disputed with Richard Henry Dana’s popular novel Two Years before the Mast (1840), an Great Britain. The Mormons migrated account of a young man’s voyage to California and his experiences there. west to Salt Lake City, then part of California also attracted a small number of American newcomers. In 1846, Mexico. Alfred Robinson, who had moved from Boston, published Life in California. “In this age of annexation,” he wondered, “why not extend the ‘area of free- dom’ by the annexation of California?” THE TEXAS R E V O LT The first part of Mexico to be settled by significant numbers of Americans was Texas, whose non-Indian population of Spanish origin (called Tejanos) numbered only about 2,000 when Mexico became independent. In order to develop the region, the Mexican government accepted an offer by Moses Austin, a Connecticut-born farmer, to colonize it with Americans. In 1820, Austin received a large land grant. He died soon afterward and his son What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 497 Stephen continued the plan, reselling land in smaller plots to American settlers at twelve cents per acre. By 1830, the population of American ori- gin had reached around 7,000, considerably exceeding the number of Tejanos. Alarmed that its grip on the area was weakening, the Mexican govern- ment in 1830 annulled existing land contracts and barred future emigra- tion from the United States. Led by Stephen Austin, American settlers demanded greater autonomy within Mexico. Part of the area’s tiny Tejano elite joined them. Mostly ranchers and large farmers, they had welcomed the economic boom that accompanied the settlers and had formed eco- nomic alliances with American traders. The issue of slavery further exacer- bated matters. Mexico had abolished slavery, but local authorities allowed American settlers to bring slaves with them. When Mexico’s ruler, General Antonio López de Santa Anna, sent an army in 1835 to impose central authority, a local committee charged that his purpose was “to give liberty to our slaves and make slaves of ourselves.” The appearance of Santa Anna’s army sparked a chaotic revolt in Texas. The rebels formed a provisional government that soon called for Texan independence. On March 13, 1836, Santa Anna’s army stormed the Alamo, a mission compound in San Antonio, killing its 187 American and Tejano defenders. “Remember the Alamo” became the Texans’ rallying cry. In April, forces under Sam Houston, a former governor of Tennessee, routed Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of San Jacinto and forced him to recognize Texan independence. Houston was soon elected the first president of the Republic of Texas. In 1837, the Texas Congress called for union with the United States. But fearing the political disputes certain to result from an attempt to add another slave state to the Union, Presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van A flag carried at the Battle of San Jacinto during the Texas revolt of 1836 portrays a female figure displaying the rallying cry “Liberty or Death.” 498 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY The plaza in San Antonio not long after the United States annexed Texas in 1845. Buren shelved the question. Settlers from the United States nonetheless poured into the region, many of them slaveowners taking up fertile cotton land. By 1845, the population of Texas had reached nearly 150,000. THE ELECTION OF 1844 Texas annexation remained on the political back burner until President John Tyler revived it in the hope of rescuing his failed administration and securing southern support for renomination in 1844. In April 1844, a letter by John C. Calhoun, whom Tyler had appointed secretary of state, was leaked to the press. It linked the idea of absorbing Texas directly to the goal of strengthening slavery in the United States. Some southern leaders, indeed, hoped that Texas could be divided into several states, thus further enhancing the South’s power in Congress. Late that month, Henry Clay and former president Van Buren, the prospective Whig and Democratic candi- dates for president and two of the party system’s most venerable leaders, met at Clay’s Kentucky plantation. They agreed to issue letters rejecting immediate annexation on the grounds that it might provoke war with Mexico. Clay and Van Buren were reacting to the slavery issue in the tradi- tional manner—by trying to keep it out of national politics. Clay went on to receive the Whig nomination, but for Van Buren the let- ters proved to be a disaster. At the Democratic convention, southerners bent on annexation deserted Van Buren’s cause, and he failed to receive the two-thirds majority necessary for nomination. The delegates then turned to the little-known James K. Polk, a former governor of Tennessee whose main assets were his support for annexation and his close association with Andrew Jackson, still the party’s most popular figure. Like nearly all the presidents before him, Polk was a slaveholder. He owned substantial cotton plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi, where conditions were so brutal that only half of the slave children lived to the age of fifteen, and adults fre- quently ran away. To soothe injured feelings among northern Democrats over the rejection of Van Buren, the party platform called not only for the What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 499 “reannexation” of Texas (implying that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase and therefore once belonged to the United States) but also the “reoccupation” of all of Oregon. “Fifty-four forty or fight”—American con- trol of Oregon all the way to its northern boundary at north latitude 54°40!—became a popular campaign slogan. But the bitterness of the north- ern Van Burenites over what they considered to be a betrayal on the part of the South would affect American politics for years to come. Polk was the first “dark horse” candidate for president—that is, one whose nomination was completely unexpected. In the fall, he defeated Clay in an extremely close election. Polk’s margin in the popular vote was less than 2 percent. Had not James G. Birney, running again as the Liberty Party candidate, received 16,000 votes in New York, mostly from antislav- ery Whigs, Clay would have been elected. In March 1845, only days before Polk’s inauguration, Congress declared Texas part of the United States. THE ROAD TO WAR James K. Polk may have been virtually unknown, but he assumed the pres- idency with a clearly defined set of goals: to reduce the tariff, reestablish the independent Treasury system, settle the dispute over ownership of Oregon, and bring California into the Union. Congress soon enacted the first two goals, and the third was accomplished in an agreement with Great Britain dividing Oregon at the forty-ninth parallel. Many northerners were bitterly disappointed by this compromise, considering it a betrayal of War News from Mexico, an 1848 Polk’s campaign promise not to give up any part of Oregon without a fight. painting by Richard C. Woodville, shows But the president secured his main objectives, the Willamette Valley and how Americans received war news the magnificent harbor of Puget Sound. through the popular press. Acquiring California proved more difficult. Polk dispatched an emissary to Mexico offering to pur- chase the region, but the Mexican government refused to negotiate. By the spring of 1846, Polk was planning for military action. In April, American sol- diers under Zachary Taylor moved into the region between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, land claimed by both countries on the disputed border between Texas and Mexico. This action made con- flict with Mexican forces inevitable. When fighting broke out, Polk claimed that the Mexicans had “shed blood upon American soil” and called for a declara- tion of war. THE WAR AND ITS CRITICS The Mexican War was the first American conflict to be fought primarily on foreign soil and the first in which American troops occupied a foreign capital. Inspired by the expansionist fervor of manifest des- tiny, a majority of Americans supported the war. They were convinced, as Herman Melville put it in his novel White-Jacket (1850), that since Americans “bear the ark of Liberties” for all mankind, “national 500 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY selfishness is unbounded philanthropy... to the world.” But a significant minority in the North dissented, fearing that far from expanding the “great empire of liberty,” the administration’s real aim was to acquire new land for the expansion of slavery. Ulysses S. Grant, who served with distinction in Mexico, later called the war “one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation,” an indication that the United States was beginning to behave like “European monarchies,” not a democrat- ic republic. Henry David Thoreau was jailed in Massachusetts in 1846 for refusing to pay taxes as a protest against the war. Defending his action, Thoreau wrote an important essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” which inspired such later advocates of nonviolent resistance to unjust laws as Martin Luther King Jr. “Under a government which imprisons any unjust- ly,” wrote Thoreau, “the true place of a just man is also a prison.” Among the war’s critics was Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected to Congress in 1846 from Illinois. Like many Whigs, Lincoln questioned whether the Mexicans had actually inflicted casualties on American soil, as Polk claimed, and in 1847 he introduced a resolution asking the president to specify the precise “spot” where blood had first been shed. But Lincoln was also disturbed by Polk’s claiming the right to initiate an invasion of Mexico. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring country whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion,” he declared, “and you allow him to make war at pleasure.... If today he should choose to say he thinks it neces- sary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him?” Lincoln’s stance proved unpopular in Illinois. He had already agreed to serve only one term in Congress, but when Democrats captured his seat in 1848, many blamed the result on Lincoln’s criticism of the war. But the concerns he raised regarding the president’s power to “make war at pleasure” would continue to echo in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. COMBAT IN MEXICO More than 60,000 volunteers enlisted and did most of the fighting. Combat took place on three fronts. In June 1846, a band of American insurrection- ists proclaimed California freed from Mexican control and named Captain John C. Frémont, head of a small scientific expedition in the West, its ruler. Their aim was California’s incorporation into the United States, but for the moment they adopted a flag depicting a large bear as the symbol of the area’s independence. A month later, the U.S. Navy sailed into Monterey and San Francisco Harbors, raised the American flag, and put an end to the “bear flag republic.” At almost the same time, 1,600 American troops under General Stephen W. Kearney occupied Sante Fe without resistance and then set out for southern California, where they helped to put down a Mexican uprising against American rule. The bulk of the fighting occurred in central Mexico. In February 1847, Taylor defeated Santa Anna’s army at the Battle of Buena Vista. When the Mexican government still refused to negotiate, Polk ordered American forces under Winfield Scott to march inland from the port of Vera Cruz toward Mexico City. Scott’s forces routed Mexican defenders and in September occupied the country’s capital. In February 1848, the two gov- ernments agreed to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which confirmed the annexation of Texas and ceded California and present-day New Mexico, What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 501 THE MEXICAN WAR, 1846–1848 Platte R. m o nt Frém ont UNORGANIZED ILLINOIS Missouri R Fré Sonoma TERRITORY Fort Leavenworth. ont San Francisco Frém y Kearn MISSOURI R. do CEDED BY Bent's Fort UNITED STATES olo ra Monterey MEXICO rny rk C A an Kea Santa Fe sas R. ARKANSAS i R. Las Vegas INDIAN TERRITORY sipp Santa Barbara Albuquerque Los Angeles U.S. Missis Red R. San Pasqual DISPUTED BY MISSISSIPPI Na Gila R. TEXAS AND MEXICO vy San Diego Kearny LOUISIANA Pec El Paso R. TEXAS os Sabine R. Rio New Orleans Gra MEXICO San Antonio nd Chihuahua e Nuece R. U.S s Corpus Christi. Na tt Sco vy lor Palo Alto Tay Buena Vista Gulf of Mexico Pa c i f i c O ce an Santa Anna La Paz Ta ylor Mazatlán San Lucas San Jose 0 150 300 miles Tampico Sco San Luis Potosí tt 0 150 300 kilometers Santa Ann a American victory U.S. Mexican victory Mexico City Scott Veracruz American forces Pueblo Cerro N avy Santa A American naval blockade nna Gordo Mexican forces Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Lands disputed by United States and Mexico Lands ceded by Mexico The Mexican War was the first in which an American army invaded another Arizona, Nevada, and Utah to the United States. In exchange, the United country and occupied its capital. As a States paid Mexico $15 million. The Mexican Cession, as the land annexed result of the war, the United States from Mexico was called, established the present territorial boundaries on acquired a vast new area in the modern- the North American continent except for the Gadsden Purchase, a parcel of day Southwest. additional land bought from Mexico in 1853, and Alaska, acquired from Russia in 1867. The Mexican War is only a footnote in most Americans’ historical mem- ory. Unlike other wars, few public monuments celebrate the conflict. Mexicans, however, regard the war (or “the dismemberment,” as it is called in that country) as a central event of their national history and a source of continued resentment over a century and a half after it was fought. As the 502 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY A map of the United States from 1848 reveals how the size of the country had Mexican negotiators of 1848 complained, it was unprecedented to launch a grown during the past four years: Texas war because a country refused to sell part of its territory to a neighbor. (its western boundary still unfixed) had been annexed in 1845; the dispute with RACE AND MANIFEST DESTINY Great Britain over Oregon was settled in 1846; and the Mexican Cession—the area With the end of the Mexican War, the United States absorbed half a million of present-day Arizona, New Mexico, square miles of Mexico’s territory, one-third of that nation’s total area. A Utah, Nevada, and California—was region that for centuries had been united was suddenly split in two, divid- added in 1848 at the end of the Mexican ing families and severing trade routes. An estimated 75,000 to 100,000 War. Spanish-speaking Mexicans and more than 150,000 Indians inhabited the Mexican Cession. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed to “male citizens” of the area “the free enjoyment of their liberty and property” and “all the rights” of Americans—a provision designed to protect the property of large Mexican landowners in California. As to Indians whose homelands and hunting grounds suddenly became part of the United States, the treaty referred to them only as “savage tribes” whom the United States must pre- vent from launching incursions into Mexico across the new border. The spirit of manifest destiny gave a new stridency to ideas about racial superiority. During the 1840s, territorial expansion came to be seen as proof of the innate superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race” (a mythical con- struct defined largely by its opposites: blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and Catholics). “Race,” declared John L. O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, was the “key” to the “history of nations” and the rise and fall of empires. What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 503 “Race” in the mid-nineteenth century was an amorphous notion involving color, culture, national origin, class, and religion. Newspapers, magazines, and scholarly works popularized the link between American freedom and the supposedly innate liberty-loving qualities of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The annexation of Texas and conquest of much of Mexico became triumphs of civilization, progress, and liberty over the tyranny of the Catholic Church and the innate incapacity of “mongrel races.” Indeed, calls by some expan- sionists for the United States to annex all of Mexico failed in part because of fear that the nation could not assimilate its large non-white Catholic popula- tion, supposedly unfit for citizenship in a republic. REDEFINING RACE The imposition of the American system of race relations proved detrimen- tal to many inhabitants of the newly acquired territories. Texas had already demonstrated as much. Mexico had abolished slavery and declared persons of Spanish, Indian, and African origin equal before the law. The Texas con- stitution adopted after independence not only included protections for slavery but also denied civil rights to Indians and persons of African origin. Only whites were permitted to purchase land, and the entrance of free blacks into the state was prohibited altogether. “Every privilege dear to a The gold rush brought thousands of free man is taken away,” one free black resident of Texas complained. fortune seekers, from nearly every corner Local circumstances affected racial definitions in the former Mexican of the globe, to California. territories. Texas defined “Spanish” Mexicans, especially those who occupied important social positions, as white. GOLD-R USH CALIFORNIA The residents of New Mexico of both Mexican and Indian origin, on the other hand, were long deemed “too Mexican” for democratic self-government. With white migration OREGON TERRITORY lagging, Congress did not allow New Mexico to become a state until 1912. Eureka GOLD -RUSH CALIFORNIA UTAH California had a non-Indian population of less than 15,000 Lassens Ranch TERRITORY when the Mexican War ended. For most of the 1840s, ten times as many Americans emigrated to Oregon as to Donner Pass 0 50 100 miles S California. But this changed dramatically after January 0 50 100 kilometers I E 1848, when gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sacramento Carson Pass R R (Sutter's Fort) Sierra Nevada Mountains at a sawmill owned by the Swiss Stockton A immigrant Johann A. Sutter. A mania for gold spread San Francisco throughout the world, fanned by newspaper accounts of N E instant wealth acquired by early migrants. By ship and A V D NEW land, newcomers poured into California. The non-Indian Monterey A MEXICO TERRITORY population rose to 200,000 by 1852 and more than 360,000 eight years later. California’s gold-rush population was incredibly Routes to gold fields diverse. Experienced miners flooded in from Mexico and Gold-bearing areas Mother lode South America. Tens of thousands of Americans who had East gold belt never seen a mine arrived from the East, and from overseas West gold belt came Irish, Germans, Italians, and Australians. Nearly 504 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 FRUITS OF MANIFEST DESTINY A contemporary depiction of mining operations during the California gold rush shows Native Americans, Mexicans, and numerous other miners all searching for gold. 25,000 Chinese landed between 1849 and 1852, almost all of them young men who had signed long-term labor contracts with Chinese merchants, who in turn leased them to mining and railroad companies and other employers. San Francisco, a town of 1,000 in 1848, became the gateway to the El Dorado of northern California. By 1850, it had 30,000 residents and had become perhaps the world’s most racially and ethnically diverse city. Unlike farming frontiers settled by families, most of the gold-rush migrants were young men. Women played many roles in western mining communi- ties, running restaurants and boardinghouses and working as laundresses, cooks, and prostitutes. But as late as 1860, California’s male population out- numbered females by nearly three to one. CALIFORNIA AND THE BOUNDARIES OF FREEDOM As early surface mines quickly became exhausted, they gave way to under- ground mining that required a large investment of capital. This economic development worsened conflicts among California’s many racial and ethnic groups engaged in fierce competition for gold. The law was very fragile in gold-rush California. In 1851 and 1856, “committees of vigilance” took con- trol of San Francisco, sweeping aside established courts to try and execute those accused of crimes. White miners organized extralegal groups that expelled “foreign miners”—Mexicans, Chileans, Chinese, French, and American Indians—from areas with gold. The state legislature imposed a tax of twenty dollars per month on foreign miners, driving many of them from the state. California would long remain in the American imagination a place of infinite opportunity, where newcomers could start their lives anew. But the boundaries of freedom there were tightly drawn. The state constitution of 1850 limited voting and the right to testify in court to whites, excluding Indians, Asians, and the state’s few blacks (who numbered only 962 per- sons). California landowners who claimed Spanish descent or had inter- What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 505 married with American settlers were deemed to be white. But with land titles derived from Mexican days challenged in court, many sold out to newcomers from the East. For California’s Indians, the gold rush and absorption into the United States proved to be disastrous. Gold seekers overran Indian communities. Miners, ranchers, and vigilantes murdered thousands of Indians. Determined to reduce the native population, state officials paid millions in bounties to private militias that launched attacks on the state’s Indians. Although California was a free state, thousands of Indian children, declared orphans or vagrants by local courts, were bought and sold as slaves. By 1860, California’s Indian population, nearly 150,000 when the Mexican War ended, had been reduced to around 30,000. THE OTHER GOLD RUSH In a remarkable coincidence, the California gold rush took place almost simultaneously with another located halfway around the world. In 1851, gold was discovered in Australia, then a collection of British colonies. During the 1850s, California and Australia together produced 80 percent of Transportation of Cargo by Westerners the world’s gold. Like California, Australia attracted gold-seekers from at the Port of Yokohama, 1861, by the across the globe. The population of Victoria, the colony where gold was Japanese artist Utagawa Sadahide, found, grew from 77,000 in 1851 to 411,000 six years later. Like San depicts ships in port, including an Francisco, the Australian city of Melbourne rose to prominence on the American one on the left, eight years after basis of its proximity to the gold fields. Commodore Perry’s first voyage to Japan. As in California, the gold rush was a disaster for the aboriginal peoples (as native Australians are called), whose population, already declining, fell precipitously. In Australia, like California, significant numbers of Chinese miners took part in the gold rush, only to face persistent efforts by miners of European origin to drive them from the fields. Indeed, Australians frequently mod- eled anti-Chinese legislation—especially their tax on foreign miners—on measures that had been pioneered in California. OPENING JAPAN The Mexican War ended with the United States in possession of the magnificent harbors of San Diego and San Francisco, long seen as jumping off points for trade with the Far East. In the 1850s, the United States took the lead in opening Japan, a coun- try that had closed itself to nearly all foreign contact for more than two centuries. In 1853 and 1854, American warships under the command of Commodore Matthew Perry (the younger brother of Oliver Perry, a hero of the War of 1812) sailed into Tokyo Harbor. Perry, who had been sent by President Millard Fillmore to negotiate a trade treaty, demanded that the Japanese deal with him. Alarmed by European intrusions into China and impressed by Perry’s armaments as well as a musical pageant he presented that included a blackface minstrel show, Japanese leaders agreed to do so. In 1854, they opened two ports to American shipping. Two years later, Townsend Harris, a mer- 506 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 A DOSE OF ARSENIC CONTINENTAL EXPANSION THROUGH 1853 WA 1853 (1889) MT ND ME 1864 (1889) 1861 (1889) MN OR 1849 (1858) 1848 (1859) ID VT 1863 (1890) WI NH SD 1836 (1848) WY 1861 (1889) MI NY MA 1868 (1890) 1805 (1837) CT RI IA PA NV NE 1838 (1846) NJ 1861 (1864) 1859 (1867) OH UT IL IN (1803) 1850 (1896) 1809 1800 DE CA CO (1818) (1816) WV MD (1850) 1861 (1876) KS MO (1863) VA 1854 (1861) 1805 (1821) KY (1792) TN NC AZ OK (1796) 1863 (1912) 1890 (1907) AR NM 1819 (1836) SC 1850 (1912) MS AL GA 1798 1804 (1817) (1819) TX (1845) LA 1804 (1812) Original 13 states 1783 Acquired from Great Britain 1842 FL 1822 Great Britain Cession 1783 Texas Annexation 1845 (1845) Louisiana Purchase 1803 Oregon Country 1846 0 250 500 miles Acquired from Great Britain 1818 Mexican Cession 1848 0 250 500 kilometers Florida Purchase 1819 Gadsden Purchase 1853 1912 Date of organization as territory (1912) Date of statehood Borders represent present-day state borders By 1853, with the Gadsden Purchase, the chant from New York City, arrived as the first American consul (and, present boundaries of the United States in according to some accounts, was the inspiration for Puccini’s great opera, North America, with the exception of Madame Butterfly, about an American who marries and then abandons a Alaska, had been created. Japanese woman). Harris persuaded the Japanese to allow American ships into additional ports and to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries. As a result, the United States acquired refueling places on the route to China—seen as Asia’s most important trading partner. And Japan soon launched a process of modernization that transformed it into the region’s major military power. A DOSE OF ARSENIC Victory over Mexico added more than 1 million square miles to the United States—an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase. But the acquisition of this vast territory raised the fatal issue that would disrupt the political sys- tem and plunge the nation into civil war—whether slavery should be allowed to expand into the West. Events soon confirmed Ralph Waldo Emerson’s prediction that if the United States gobbled up part of Mexico, “it will be as the man who swallows arsenic.... Mexico will poison us.” Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s? 507 THE WILMOT PROVISO Before 1846, the status of slavery in all parts of the United States had been settled, either by state law or by the Missouri Compromise, which deter- mined slavery’s status in the Louisiana Purchase. The acquisition of new land reopened the question of slavery’s expansion. The divisive potential of this issue became clear in 1846, when Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico. Party lines crumbled as every northerner, Democrat and Whig alike, supported what came to be known as the Wilmot Proviso, while nearly all southerners opposed it. The measure passed the House, where the more populous North possessed a majority, but failed in the Senate, with its even balance of free and slave states. The Proviso, said one newspaper, “as if by magic, brought to a head the great question that is about to divide the American people.” In 1848, opponents of slavery’s expansion organized the Free Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren for president and Charles Francis Adams, the son of John Quincy Adams, as his running mate. Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, who proposed that the decision on whether to allow slavery should be left to settlers in the new territories (an idea later given the name “popular sovereignty”). Van Buren was motivated in part by revenge against the South for jettisoning him in 1844. But his campaign struck a chord among northerners opposed to the expansion of slavery, and he polled some 300,000 votes, 14 percent of the northern total. Victory in 1848 went to the Whig candidate, Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and a Louisiana sugar planter. But the fact that a former president and the son of another abandoned their parties to run on a Free Soil platform showed that antislavery sentiment had spread far beyond abolitionist ranks. “Antislavery,” commented Senator William H. Seward of New York, “is at length a respectable element in politics.” THE FREE SOIL APPEAL The Free Soil position had a popular appeal in the North that far exceeded the abolitionists’ demand for immediate emancipation and equal rights for blacks. While Congress possessed no constitutional power to abolish slav- ery within a state, well-known precedents existed for keeping territories (areas that had not yet entered the Union as states) free from slavery. Congress had done this in 1787 in the Northwest Ordinance and again in the Missouri Compromise of 1820–1821. Many northerners had long resented what they considered southern domination of the federal govern- ment. The idea of preventing the creation of new slave states appealed to those who favored policies, such as the protective tariff and government aid to internal improvements, that the majority of southern political lead- ers opposed. For thousands of northerners, moreover, the ability to move to the new western territories held out the promise of economic betterment. The depression of the early 1840s had reinforced the traditional equation of land ownership with economic freedom. The labor movement promoted access to western land as a way of combating unemployment and low wages in the East. “Freedom of the soil,” declared George Henry Evans, the 508 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 A DOSE OF ARSENIC editor of a pro-labor newspaper, offered the only alternative to permanent economic dependence for American workers. Such views merged easily with opposition to the expansion of slavery. If slave plantations were to occupy the fertile lands of the West, northern migration would be effectively blocked. The term “free soil” had a double meaning. The Free Soil platform of 1848 called both for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government to provide free homesteads to settlers in the new territories. Unlike abolitionism, the “free soil” idea also appealed to the racism so widespread in northern society. Wilmot himself insisted that his controversial Proviso was motivated not by “morbid sympathy for the slaves” but to advance “the cause and rights of the free white man,” in part by preventing him from having to compete with “black labor.” To white southerners, the idea of barring slavery from territory acquired from Mexico seemed a violation of their equal rights as members of the Union. Southerners had fought and died to win these territories; surely they had a right to share in the fruits of victory. To single out slavery as the one form of property barred from the West would be an affront to the South and its distinctive way of life. A majority of slaves in 1848 lived in states that had not even existed when the Constitution was adopted. Many older plantation areas already suffered from soil exhaustion. Just as north- erners believed westward expansion essential to their economic well- being, southern leaders became convinced that slavery must expand or die. Moreover, the admission of new free states would overturn the delicate political balance between the sections and make the South a permanent minority. Southern interests would not be secure in a Union dominated by non-slaveholding states. CRISIS AND COMPROMISE In world history, the year 1848 is remembered as the “springtime of nations,” a time of democratic uprisings against the monarchies of Europe and demands by ethnic minorities for national independence. American principles of liberty and self-government appeared to be triumphing in the Old World. The Chartist movement in Great Britain organized massive demonstrations in support of a proposed Charter that demanded democratic reforms. The French replaced their monarchy with a republic. Hungarians proclaimed their independence from Austrian rule. Patriots in Italy and Germany, both divided into numerous states, demanded national unifica- tion. But the revolutionary tide receded. Chartism faded away. In France, the Second Republic was soon succeeded by the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. Revolts in Budapest, Rome, and other cities were crushed. Would their own experiment in self-government, some Americans wondered, suffer the same fate as the failed revolutions of Europe? With the slavery issue appearing more and more ominous, established party leaders moved to resolve differences between the sections. Some dis- putes were of long standing, but the immediate source of controversy arose Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts from the acquisition of new lands after the Mexican War. In 1850, in a daguerreotype from 1850, the year his California asked to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Many southern- speech in support of the Compromise of ers opposed the measure, fearing that it would upset the sectional balance 1850 contributed to its passage. in Congress. Senator Henry Clay offered a plan with four main provisions Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s? 509 THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 BRITISH CANADA OREGON ME COUNTRY MINNESOTA VT TERRITORY NH WI NY MA MI RI UNORGANIZED PA CT TERRITORY IA on Line NJ UTAH OH Mason-Dix TERRITORY IL IN DE CA MD VA MO KY Missouri Compromise Line 36°30'N NC NEW MEXICO TN TERRITORY AR SC MI AL GA TX LA MEXICO FL Unorganized territory Free states and territories Slave states 0 250 500 miles Open to slavery by popular sovereignty (Compromise of 1850) 0 250 500 kilometers The Compromise of 1850 attempted to that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850. California would enter settle issues arising from the acquisition the Union as a free state. The slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be of territory from Mexico by admitting abolished in the nation’s capital. A stringent new law would allow south- California as a free state and providing erners to reclaim runaway slaves. And the status of slavery in the remain- that the status of slavery in Utah and New ing territories acquired from Mexico would be left to the decision of the Mexico would be determined by the local white inhabitants. The United States would also agree to pay off the settlers. massive debt Texas had accumulated while independent. THE GREAT DEBATE In the Senate debate on the Compromise, the divergent sectional positions received eloquent expression. Powerful leaders spoke for and against com- promise. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts announced his willingness to abandon the Wilmot Proviso and accept a new fugitive slave law if this were the price of sectional peace. John C. Calhoun, again representing South Carolina, was too ill to speak. A colleague read his remarks rejecting the very idea of compromise. Slavery, Calhoun insisted, must be protected by the national government and extended into all the new territories. The North must yield or the Union could not survive. William H. Seward of New 510 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 A DOSE OF ARSENIC York also opposed compromise. To southerners’ talk of their constitutional rights, Seward responded that a “higher law” than the Constitution con- demned slavery—the law of morality. Here was the voice of abolitionism, now represented in the U.S. Senate. President Zachary Taylor, like Andrew Jackson a southerner but a strong nationalist, was alarmed by talk of disunion. He accused southern leaders in Congress of holding California hostage to their own legislative aims and insisted that all Congress needed to do was admit California to the Union. But Taylor died suddenly of an intestinal infection on July 9, 1850. His suc- cessor, Millard Fillmore of New York, threw his support to Clay’s proposals. Fillmore helped to break the impasse in Congress and secure adoption of the Compromise of 1850. THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ISSUE For one last time, political leaders had removed the dangerous slavery ques- tion from congressional debate. The new Fugitive Slave Act, however, made further controversy inevitable. The law allowed special federal commission- ers to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even testimony by the accused individual. It prohibited local authorities from interfering with the capture of fugitives and required individual citizens to assist in such capture when called upon by federal agents. Thus, southern leaders, usually strong defenders of states’ rights and local autonomy, sup- ported a measure that brought federal agents into communities throughout the North, armed with the power to override local law enforcement and judi- cial procedures to secure the return of runaway slaves. The security of slavery was more important to them than states’-rights consistency. The fugitive slave issue affected all the free states, not just those that bordered on the South. Slave catchers, for example, entered California attempting to apprehend fugitives from Texas and New Mexico who hoped to reach freedom in British Columbia. The issue drew into politics individ- uals like Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, although antislavery, had previously remained aloof from the abolitionist crusade. Emerson and others influ- enced by transcendentalism viewed the Fugitive Slave Act as a dangerous example of how a government doing the bidding of the South could over- ride an individual’s ability to act according to his conscience—the founda- tion, for Emerson, of genuine freedom. During the 1850s, federal tribunals heard more than 300 cases and ordered 157 fugitives returned to the South, many at the government’s expense. But the law further widened sectional divisions. In a series of dra- matic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resis- ted recapture. A large crowd in 1851 rescued the escaped slave Jerry from jail in Syracuse, New York, and spirited him off to Canada. In the same year, an owner who attempted to recapture a fugitive was killed in Christiana, Pennsylvania. Later in the decade, Margaret Garner, a Kentucky slave who An 1855 broadside depicting the life of had escaped with her family to Ohio, killed her own young daughter rather Anthony Burns, a runaway slave than see her returned to slavery by federal marshals. (At the end of the captured in Boston and returned to the twentieth century, this incident would become the basis for Toni South in 1854 by federal officials enforcing Morrison’s celebrated novel Beloved.) the Fugitive Slave Act. In the North, several thousand fugitives and free-born blacks, worried Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s? 511 that they might be swept up in the stringent provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act, fled to safety in Canada. The sight of so many refugees seeking liberty in a foreign land challenged the familiar image of the United States as an asylum for freedom. “Families are separating,” reported a Toronto newspaper in October 1850, “leaving their homes, and flying in all direc- tions to seek in Canada, under the British flag, the protection denied to them in the free republic.” DOUGLAS AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY At least temporarily, the Compromise of 1850 seemed to have restored sec- tional peace and party unity. In the 1852 presidential election, Democrat Franklin Pierce won a sweeping victory over the Whig Winfield Scott on a platform that recognized the Compromise as a final settlement of the slav- ery controversy. Pierce received a broad popular mandate, winning 254 electoral votes to Scott’s 42. Yet his administration turned out to be one of the most disastrous in American history. It witnessed the collapse of the party system inherited from the Age of Jackson. In 1854, the old political order finally succumbed to the disruptive pressures of sectionalism. Early in that year, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a bill to provide territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, located within the Louisiana Purchase. With Calhoun, Clay, and Webster (the “great triumvirate”) all having died between 1850 and 1852, Douglas, although only forty-one, saw himself as the new leader of the Senate. A strong believer in western development, he hoped that a transcontinental railroad could be constructed through Kansas or Nebraska. But he feared that this could not be accomplished unless for- mal governments had been established in these territories. Southerners in Congress, however, seemed adamant against allowing the organiza- tion of new free territories that might further upset the sectional bal- ance. Douglas hoped to satisfy them by applying the principle of popu- lar sovereignty, whereby the status of slavery would be determined by the votes of local settlers, not Congress. To Douglas, popular sovereignty embodied the idea of local self-government and offered a middle ground between the extremes of North and South. It was a principle on which all parts of the Democratic Party could unite, and which might enable him to capture the presidential nomination in 1856 to succeed the ineffectu- al Pierce. THE KANSAS -NEBRASKA ACT Unlike the lands taken from Mexico, Kansas and Nebraska lay in the nation’s heartland, directly in the path of westward migration. Slavery, moreover, was prohibited there under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which Douglas’s bill repealed. In response to Douglas’s proposal, a group of anti- slavery congressmen issued the Appeal of the Independent Democrats. Written by two abolitionists from Ohio—Congressman Joshua Giddings and Senator Salmon P. Chase—the Appeal proved to be one of the most effective pieces of political persuasion in American history. It arraigned Douglas’s bill as a “gross violation of a sacred pledge,” part and parcel of “an atrocious 512 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 A DOSE OF ARSENIC THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA A C T, 1854 WASHINGTON TERRITORY BRITISH CANADA ME OREGON MINNESOTA VT TERRITORY TERRITORY NH NEBRASKA TERRITORY WI NY MA MI RI IA PA CT e ixon Lin NJ UTAH OH Mason-D TERRITORY IL IN DE CA KANSAS MD see inset VA TERRITORY MO KY Missouri Compromise Line 36°30'N TN NC NEW MEXICO INDIAN TERRITORY TERRITORY AR SC MI AL GA TX LA BLEEDING KANSAS FL MEXICO Free states and territories Atchison i R. Leavenworth M issour Slave states Lecompton Indian territory (unorganized) KANSAS Lawrence MISSOURI Open to slavery by popular sovereignty TERRITORY Osawatomie under the Compromise of 1850 Pottawatomie 0 250 500 miles Open to slavery by popular sovereignty Massacre under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 0 250 500 kilometers The Kansas-Nebraska Act opened a vast area in the nation’s heartland to the plot” to convert free territory into a “dreary region of despotism, inhabited possible spread of slavery by repealing the by masters and slaves.” It helped to convince millions of northerners that Missouri Compromise and providing that southern leaders aimed at nothing less than extending their peculiar insti- settlers would determine the status of tution throughout the West. slavery in these territories. Thanks to Douglas’s energetic leadership, the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law. But it shattered the Democratic Party’s unity. Even as Congress debated, protest meetings sprang up throughout the North. Fearing that the bill’s unpopularity among their constituents would harm their chances for reelection, half the northern Democrats in the House cast negative votes. Loyalty to Pierce, Douglas, and their party led the other half to sup- port the measure. It is difficult to think of a piece of legislation in American history that had a more profound impact on national life. In the wake of the bill’s passage, American politics underwent a profound reorganization. During the next two years, the Whig Party, unable to develop a unified response to the political crisis, collapsed. From a region divided between the two parties, the South became solidly Democratic. Most northern Whigs, augmented by thousands of disgruntled Democrats, joined a new organization, the Republican Party, dedicated to preventing the further expansion of slavery. Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s? 513 T H E R I S E O F T H E R E P U B L I C A N PA R T Y THE NORTHERN ECONOMY The disruptive impact of slavery on the traditional parties was the imme- diate cause of political transformation in the mid-1850s. But the rise of the Republican Party also reflected underlying economic and social changes, notably the completion of the market revolution and the begin- ning of mass immigration from Europe. The period from 1843, when pros- perity returned, to 1857, when another economic downturn hit, witnessed explosive economic growth, especially in the North. The catalyst was the completion of the railroad network. From 5,000 miles in 1848, railroad track mileage grew to 30,000 by 1860, with most of the construction occur- ring in Ohio, Illinois, and other states of the Old Northwest. Four great trunk railroads now linked eastern cities with western farming and com- mercial centers. The railroads completed the reorientation of the Northwest’s trade from the South to the East. As late as 1850, most western farmers still shipped their produce down the Mississippi River. Ten years later, however, railroads transported nearly all their crops to the East, at a fraction of the previous cost. By 1860, for example, 60 million bushels of wheat were passing through Buffalo on their way to market in eastern cities and abroad. The economic integration of the Northwest and An 1853 broadside for one section of the Northeast created the groundwork for their political unification in the Illinois Central Railroad. One of the most Republican Party. important new lines of the 1850s, the By 1860, the North had become a complex, integrated economy, with Illinois Central opened parts of the Old eastern industrialists marketing manufactured goods to the commercial Northwest to settlement and commercial farmers of the West, while residents of the region’s growing cities con- agriculture, and it helped to cement sumed the food westerners produced. Northern society stood poised Chicago’s place as the region’s foremost between old and new ways. The majority of the population still lived not in city. large cities but in small towns and rural areas, where the ideal of economic independence—owning one’s own farm or shop—still lay within reach. Yet the majority of the northern workforce no longer labored in agricul- ture, and the industrial revolution was spreading rapidly. The Lackawanna Valley, an 1855 painting by George Inness commissioned by the president of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. In the background is the roundhouse at Scranton, Pennsylvania. Like The Mill on the Brandywine in Chapter 9, the scene emphasizes the harmony of technological progress and nature. The factory on the right is almost entirely hidden by trees. Yet the tree stumps in the foreground suggest some regret that the natural environment is giving way to progress. 514 C H. 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861 THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY THE RAILROAD NETWORK, 1850s Lake Superio