A House Divided, 1840-1861 Chapter Study Outline PDF

A House Divided, 1840-1861 Chapter Study Outline 1. \[Introduction: Statue of Freedom\] 2. Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1. Continental Expansion 1. In the 1840s, slavery moved to the center stage of American politics because of territorial expansion. 2. The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California...

A House Divided, 1840-1861 Chapter Study Outline 1. \[Introduction: Statue of Freedom\] 2. Fruits of Manifest Destiny 1. Continental Expansion 1. In the 1840s, slavery moved to the center stage of American politics because of territorial expansion. 2. The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California 1. Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. 1. The northern frontier of Mexico was California, New Mexico, and Texas. 2. California\'s non-Indian population in 1821 was vastly outnumbered by Indians. 3. The Texas Revolt 1. The first part of Mexico to be settled by significant numbers of Americans was Texas. 1. Moses Austin 2. Alarmed that its grip on the area was weakening, the Mexican government in 1830 annulled existing land contracts and barred future emigration from the United States. 1. Stephen Austin led the call from American settlers demanding greater autonomy within Mexico. 3. General Antonio López de Santa Anna sent an army in 1835 to impose central authority. 4. Rebels formed a provisional government that soon called for Texan independence. 1. The Alamo 2. Sam Houston 5. Texas desired annexation by the United States, but neither Jackson nor Van Buren took action because of political concerns regarding adding another slave state. 4. The Election of 1844 1. The issue of Texas annexation was linked to slavery and affected the nominations of presidential candidates. 1. Clay and Van Buren agreed to keep Texas out of the presidential campaign. 2. James Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder and friend of Jackson, received the Democratic nomination instead of Van Buren. 1. Supported Texas annexation 2. Supported \"reoccupation\" of all of Oregon 5. The Road to War 1. Polk had four clearly defined goals: 1. Reduce the tariff 2. Reestablish the Independent Treasury system 3. Settle the Oregon dispute 4. Bring California into the Union 2. Polk initiated war with Mexico to get California. 6. The War and Its Critics 1. Although the majority of Americans supported the war, a vocal minority feared the only aim of the war was to acquire new land for the expansion of slavery. 1. Henry David Thoreau wrote \"On Civil Disobedience.\" 2. Abraham Lincoln questioned Polk\'s right to declare war. 7. Combat in Mexico 1. Combat took place on three fronts. 1. California and the \"bear flag republic\" 2. General Stephen Kearney and Santa Fe 3. Winfield Scott and central Mexico 2. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 8. Race and Manifest Destiny 1. A region that for centuries had been united was suddenly split in two, dividing families and severing trade routes. 1\. \"Male citizens\" were guaranteed American rights. 2. Indians were described as \"savage tribes.\" 2. Territorial expansion gave a new stridency to ideas about racial superiority. 3. Mexico had abolished slavery and declared persons of Spanish, Indian, and African origin equal before the law. 4. The Texas constitution adopted after independence not only included protections for slavery but denied civil rights to Indians and persons of African origin. 9. Gold-Rush California 1. California\'s gold-rush population was incredibly diverse. 2. The explosive population growth and fierce competition for gold worsened conflicts among California\'s many racial and ethnic groups. 5/2/16, 8:25 AM Chapter 13: A House Divided, 1840-1861 \| Give Me Liberty! An American History \| Eric Foner: W. W. Norton StudySpacePage 2 of 4http://www.wwnorton.com/college/history/give-me-liberty3-brief/ch/13/outline.aspx3. The boundaries of freedom in California were tightly drawn. 1. Indians, Asians, and blacks were all prohibited basic rights. 2. Thousands of Indian children, declared orphans, were bought and sold as slaves. 10. Opening Japan 1. The U.S. navy\'s commodore Matthew Perry sailed warships into Tokyo Harbor and demanded that Japan negotiate a trade treaty with the United States (1853-1854). 2. Japan opened two ports to U.S. merchant ships in 1854. 3. The United States was interested in Japan primarily as a refueling stop on the way to China. 3. A Dose of Arsenic 1. The Wilmot Proviso 1. In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all territory acquired from Mexico. 2. In 1848, opponents of slavery\'s expansion organized the Free Soil Party. 1. The party nominated Martin Van Buren for president. 2. The Free Soil Appeal 1. The free soil position had a popular appeal in the North because it would limit southern power in the federal government. 2. The Free Soil platform of 1848 called for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government providing homesteads to settlers without cost. 3. Many southerners considered singling out slavery as the one form of property barred from the West to be an affront to them and their way of life. 4. The admission of new free states would overturn the delicate political balance between the sections and make the South a permanent minority. 3. Crisis and Compromise 1. 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe, only to be suppressed by counterrevolution. 2. With the slavery issue appearing more and more ominous, established party leaders moved to resolve differences between the sections. 3. The Compromise of 1850 included: 1. Admission of California as a free state 2. Abolition of the slave trade (not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia 3. Stronger Fugitive Slave law 4. In the Mexican Cession territories, local white inhabitants would determine the status of slavery. 4. The Great Debate 1. Powerful leaders spoke for and against the Compromise: 1. Daniel Webster (for the Compromise) 2. John C. Calhoun (against the Compromise) 3. William Seward (against the Compromise) 2. President Taylor, Compromise opponent, died in office, and the new president, Millard Fillmore, secured the adoption of the Compromise. 5. The Fugitive Slave Issue 1. The Fugitive Slave Act allowed special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even testimony by the accused individual. 2. In a series of dramatic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resisted capture. 3. The fugitive slave law also led several thousand northern blacks to flee to safety in Canada. 6. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty 1. Franklin Pierce won the 1852 presidential election. 2. Stephen Douglas introduced a bill to establish territorial governments for Nebraska and Kansas so that a transcontinental railroad could be constructed. 1. Slavery would be settled by popular sovereignty (territorial voters, not Congress, would decide). 7. The Kansas-Nebraska Act 1. Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery had been prohibited in the Kansas-Nebraska area. 2. The Appeal of the Independent Democrats was issued by antislavery congressmen opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska bill because it would potentially open the area to slavery. 3. The Kansas-Nebraska Act became law. 1. Democrats were no longer unified as many northern Democrats opposed the bill. 2. The Whig Party collapsed. 3. The South became solidly Democratic. 4. The Republican Party emerged to prevent the further expansion of slavery. 4. The Rise of the Republican Party 1. The Northern Economy 1. The rise of the Republican Party reflected underlying economic and social changes. 1. Railroad network 2. By 1860, the North had become a complex, integrated economy. 3. Two great areas of industrial production had arisen: 1. Northeastern seaboard 2. Great Lakes region Manifest Destiny A notion held by Americans that the United States was destined to rule the continent, from the Atlantic the Pacific. Mormons Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints; founded by Joseph Smith in 1830; began in upstate NY, \"burned-over district\"; moved to Salt Lake City, Utah Californios Mexicans who lived in California Texas Revolution War between Texas settlers and Mexico from 1835-1836 resulting in the formation of the Republic of Texas Tejanos Spanish settlers who lived in what is now southern Texas Election of 1844\* Candidates: Henry Clay (Whigs- in an upset over Van Buren) and James Polk (Democrat). Polk favored expansion, demanded that Texas and Oregon be added to the US and Clay had already spoken out against annexation. Polk won the election by the difference of one state (NY, because some of its votes went to the Liberty Party candidate, losing Clay the state) \"Dark Horse\" Polk- a political candidate who is not well known but could win unexpectedly Mexican-American War US defeated Mexico, acquired the Mexican Cession, led to debates over slavery in this newly acquired territory (Wilmot Proviso) Wilmot Proviso 1846 proposal that outlawed slavery in any territory gained from the War with Mexico Election of 1848 Candidates: 1. Zachary Taylor-winner, honest, ignorant (whig) 2. Martin Van Buren (Free Soil Party- made slavery an issue) 3. Lewis Cass-father of popular sovereignty (Democrat). Zachary Taylor became president, died in office, making his vice president Millard Fillmore president \"Gold Rush\" a period from1848 to 1856 when thousands of people came to California in order to search for gold. Free Soilers political party founded in 1848 that opposed expanding slavery into territories or admitting new slave states into the union Compromise of 1850 \(1) California admitted as free state, (2) territorial status and popular sovereignty of Utah and New Mexico, (3) resolution of Texas-New Mexico boundaries, (4) federal assumption of Texas debt, (5) slave trade abolished in DC, and (6) new fugitive slave law; advocated by Henry Clay and Stephen A. Douglas Popular Sovereignty\* Who: Stephen Douglas and Louis Cass\ What: People of a territory decide if they want slavery after voting\ When: 1840s-1850s\ Where: Western Territory\ Why: Try and solve slave problem\ \*Doesn\'t work, leads to violence Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854 - Created Nebraska and Kansas as states and gave the people in those territories the right to chose to be a free or slave state through popular sovereignty. Election of 1852 Caused many southern Whigs to defect to the Democrats. Huge win for Democrats. Republican Party 1854 - anti-slavery Whigs and Democrats, Free Soilers and reformers from the Northwest met and formed party in order to keep slavery out of the territories Know-Nothings nickname of the \"American political party\" for their ambiguity \"Bleeding\" Kansas A sequence of violent events involving abolitionists and pro-Slavery elements that took place in Kansas-Nebraska Territory. The dispute further strained the relations of the North and South, making civil war imminent. Election of 1856 In this presidential election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican candidate John C. Fremont. He won the general election by denouncing the abolitionists, promising not to allow any interference with the Compromise of 1850, and supporting the principle of noninterference by Congress with slavery in the territories. Dred Scott Decision A Missouri slave sued for his freedom, claiming that his four year stay in the northern portion of the Louisiana Territory made free land by the Missouri Compromise had made him a free man. The U.S, Supreme Court decided he couldn\'t sue in federal court because he was property, not a citizen. Lincoln-Douglas Debates 1858 Senate Debate, Lincoln forced Douglas to debate issue of slavery, Douglas supported pop-sovereignty, Lincoln asserted that slavery should not spread to territories, Lincoln emerged as strong Republican candidate John Brown\'s Raid Began when he and his men took over the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hopes of starting a slave rebellion. Ostend Manifesto The recommendation that the U.S. offer Spain \$20 million for Cuba. It was not carried through in part because the North feared Cuba would become another slave state. Fire Eaters refers to a group of extremist pro-slavery politicians from the South who urged the separation of southern states into a new nation, which became known as the Confederate States of America. Election of 1860\* Candidates- Lincoln (Republican), Douglas (N Democrat), Breckenridge (S Democrat), Bell (Constitutional Union)\ Issues- slavery: Lincoln-opposed, Douglas-pop. sov., Breckenridge-dred scott, Bell-ignores\ Results- Lincoln wins, SC+6 other states secede Secession Formal withdrawal of states or regions from a nation Confederate States of America\* Who- SC, TX, FL, GA, AL, MI\ What- New nation for slavery\ When- After Lincoln election\ Why- Claim states rights\ \*Lead to the Civil War Crittenden Compromise A last-ditch effort to resolve the secession crisis by compromise. It proposed to bar the government from intervening in the states\' decision of slavery, to restore the Missouri Compromise, and to guarantee protection of slavery below the line. Lincoln rejected the proposal, causing the gateway to bloodshed to be open. Fort Sumter\* Who: Robert Anderson(Union) v. P.G.T. Beauregard(Confederacy)\ What: P.G.T. attacks Union ships delivering water and supplies\ Where: Ft. Sumter, SC\ \*Beginning of Civil War Winfield Scott -siege of Mexico City\ -Whig in 1852 Stephen Douglas -pop. sov.\ -N Dem.\ -Sen. from IL\ -ran in 1860 and lost\ -KA-NE Act Joseph Smith -led Trek of Mormons\ -founder of Mormons John Brown -Harper\'s Ferry failed\ -violent abolitionist\ -led Pottawatome Massacre in KA\ -martyr Zachary Taylor -Whig\ -won 1848 Millard Fillmore -Whig VP- Taylor\ -Know-Nothing Pres\ -sign Comp. of 1850 Martin Van Buren -Free Soil candidate- 1845 John Fremont -1st Republican candidate Roger Taney -Supreme Court Justice\ -Dred Scott Decision Sam Houston -Gov. of TX **Manifest Destiny and Its Implications** **Concept of Manifest Destiny** - Manifest Destiny was a widely held belief in the 19th century that the United States was destined to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. - This ideology was used to justify the westward expansion of the U.S. and was often linked to a sense of American exceptionalism and a mission to spread democracy and capitalism. - The term was first coined by journalist John L. O\'Sullivan in 1845, emphasizing the belief that expansion was both justified and inevitable. - Manifest Destiny had significant implications for U.S. foreign policy, leading to conflicts such as the Mexican-American War and the displacement of Native American tribes. - The concept also fueled debates over slavery, as new territories were acquired and the question arose whether they would be free or slave states. **Key Figures and Groups** - **Mormons**: Founded by Joseph Smith in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints began in New York and later migrated to Salt Lake City, Utah, seeking religious freedom and community. - **Californios**: Refers to the Mexican residents of California before and after the U.S. annexation, who played a significant role in the state\'s early history. - **Tejanos**: Spanish-speaking settlers in Texas who contributed to the cultural and social landscape of the region, particularly during the Texas Revolution. **Political Landscape and Key Events** **The Texas Revolution and Its Aftermath** - The Texas Revolution (1835-1836) was a rebellion by Texas settlers against Mexican rule, leading to the establishment of the Republic of Texas. - Key figures included Sam Houston, who became the first president of Texas after leading the Texan army to victory at the Battle of San Jacinto. - The revolution was fueled by tensions over issues such as slavery, land rights, and governance, ultimately leading to Texas\' annexation by the U.S. in 1845. **The Mexican-American War** - The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) was a conflict between the U.S. and Mexico, resulting from the U.S. annexation of Texas and disputes over borders. - The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, where Mexico ceded a vast amount of territory to the U.S., including present-day California, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. - The Wilmot Proviso, proposed in 1846, aimed to ban slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, highlighting the contentious issue of slavery in new territories. **The Road to Civil War** **Political Developments and Elections** - The Election of 1844 featured candidates Henry Clay and James Polk, with Polk advocating for expansion and winning by a narrow margin due to the split in the Whig vote. - The Election of 1848 saw Zachary Taylor win as a Whig candidate, while the Free Soil Party emerged, emphasizing the opposition to the expansion of slavery into new territories. - The Election of 1856 was marked by the rise of the Republican Party, which formed from anti-slavery factions, and the Know-Nothings, who focused on nativism. **Key Legislation and Compromises** - The Compromise of 1850 aimed to address the status of territories acquired from Mexico, admitting California as a free state and allowing popular sovereignty in Utah and New Mexico. - The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, allowing settlers to determine the status of slavery, leading to violent conflicts known as \'Bleeding Kansas.\' - The Dred Scott Decision (1857) ruled that African Americans could not be citizens and that Congress had no authority to regulate slavery in the territories, further inflaming tensions. **Key Figures and Events Leading to the Civil War** **Influential Individuals** - **Abraham Lincoln**: Emerged as a prominent Republican figure during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, opposing the spread of slavery into the territories. - **John Brown**: A radical abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry aimed to incite a slave rebellion, ultimately leading to his execution and martyrdom in the North. - **Stephen Douglas**: Advocated for popular sovereignty and was a key figure in the debates over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. **The Secession Crisis** - The Election of 1860 resulted in Lincoln\'s victory, prompting several Southern states to secede from the Union, forming the Confederate States of America. - The Crittenden Compromise was an unsuccessful attempt to prevent secession by proposing constitutional amendments to protect slavery in the South. - The attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 marked the beginning of the Civil War, as Confederate forces fired on Union troops stationed there. Chapter 13 Outline 2 Continental Expansion In the 1840s, slavery moved to the center stage of American politics. oTerritorial expansion Oregon and California The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. oThe northern frontier of Mexico was California, New Mexico, and Texas. California's non-Indian population in 1821 were vastly outnumbered by Indians. oCalifornios verses Indios The Texas Revolt The first part of Mexico to be settled by significant numbers of Americans was Texas. oMoses Austin Alarmed that its grip on the area was weakening, the Mexican government in 1830 annulled existing land contracts and barred future emigration from the United States. oStephen Austin led the call from American settlers demanding greater autonomy within Mexico. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna sent an army in 1835 to impose central authority. Rebels formed a provisional government that soon called for Texan independence. oThe Alamo oSam Houston Texas desired annexation into the United States, but neither Jackson nor Van Buren acted on that. The Election of 1844 The issue of Texas annexation was linked to slavery and affected the nominations of presidential candidates. oClay and Van Buren James Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder and friend of Jackson, received the Democratic nomination. oSupported Texas annexation oSupported "reoccupation" of all of Oregon The Road to War Polk had four clearly defined goals: oReduce the tariff oReestablish the Independent Treasury system oSettle the Oregon dispute Chapter 13 Outline 4 oMartin Van Buren The Free Soil Appeal The free soil position had a popular appeal in the North because it would limit southern power in the federal government. Wage-earners of the north also favored the free soil movement. The Free Soil platform of 1848 called both for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government providing homesteads to settlers without cost. 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. The admission of new free states would overturn the delicate political balance between the sections and make the South a permanent minority. Crisis and Compromise 1848 was a year of revolution in Europe, only to be suppressed by counterrevolution. With the slavery issue appearing more and more ominous, established party leaders moved to resolve differences between the sections. oThe Compromise of 1850 The Great Debate Powerful leaders spoke for and against compromise: oDaniel Webster oJohn Calhoun oWilliam Seward President Taylor died in office and Millard Fillmore secured the adoption of the compromise. The Fugitive Slave Issue The Fugitive Slave Act allowed special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even testimony by the accused individual. In a series of dramatic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resisted capture. The fugitive slave law also led several thousand northern blacks to flee to safety in Canada. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty Franklin Pierce won the 1852 presidential election. Stephen Douglas saw himself as the new leader of the Senate after the deaths of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster. Douglas introduced a bill for statehood for Nebraska and Kansas so that a transcontinental railroad could be constructed Slavery would be settled by popular sovereignty. The Kansas-Nebraska Act The Appeal of the Independent Democrats was issued by antislavery congressmen. The Kansas-Nebraska bill became law, but shattered the Democratic Party's unity. oWhigs collapsed. oSouth was solidly Democratic. oRepublican Party emerged to prevent the further expansion of slavery. The Rise of the Republican Party The Northern Economy The rise of the Republican Party reflected underlying economic and social changes. oRailroad network By 1860, the North had become a complex, integrated economy. Two great areas of industrial production had arisen: oNortheastern seaboard oGreat Lakes region The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothings In 1854 the American, or Know-Nothing, Party emerged as a political party appealing to anti-Catholic, antislavery sentiments. The Free Labor Ideology Republicans managed to convince most northerners that the "slave power" posed a more immediate threat to their liberties and aspirations than property and immigration. oThis appeal rested on the idea of free labor. Free labor could not compete with slave labor, and so slavery's expansion had to be halted to ensure freedom for the white laborer. Republicans cried "freedom national," meaning not abolition but ending the federal government's support of slavery. oRepublicans were not abolitionists. Bleeding Kansas and the Election of 1856 Bleeding Kansas seemed to discredit Douglas' policy of leaving the decision of slavery up to the local population, thus aiding the Republicans. oCivil war within Kansas oCharles Sumner The election of 1856 demonstrated that parties had reoriented themselves The Rise of Southern Nationalism More and more southerners were speaking openly of southward expansion. oOstend Manifesto oWilliam Walker and filibustering By the late 1850s, southern leaders were bending every effort to strengthen the bonds of slavery. The Democratic Split The Democratic Party was split with its nomination of Douglas in 1860 and the southern Democrats nomination of John Breckinridge. The Nomination of Lincoln Republicans nominated Lincoln over William Seward. Lincoln appealed to many voters. The party platform: oDenied the validity of the Dred Scott decision oOpposed slavery's expansion oAdded economic initiatives The Election of 1860 In effect, two presidential campaigns took place in 1860. The most striking thing about the election returns was their sectional character. Without a single vote in ten southern states, Lincoln was elected the nation's sixteenth president. The Impending Crisis The Secession Movement Rather than accept permanent minority status in a nation governed by their opponents, Deep South political leaders boldly struck for their region's independence. In the months that followed Lincoln's election, seven states, stretching from South Carolina to Texas, seceded from the Union. The Secession Crisis President Buchanan denied that a state could secede, but also insisted that the federal government had no right to use force against it. The Crittenden plan was rejected by Lincoln. The Confederate States of America was formed on March 4, 1861. oJefferson Davis as President And the War Came In time, Lincoln believed, secession might collapse from within. Lincoln also issued a veiled warning: "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow Chapter 13 Outline 8 countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war." After the South's firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to suppress the insurrection CHAPTER 13 A HOUSE DIVIDED 1840-1861 FOCUS QUESTIONS What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? Why did the expansion of slavery become the most divisive political issue in the 1840s and 1850s? What combination of issues and events fueled the creation of the Republican Party in the 1850s? What enabled Lincoln to emerge as president from the divisive party politics of the 1850s? What were the final steps on the road to secession? In 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 War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, one of the country\'s largest slaveholders, objected to Crawford\'s plan. A familiar symbol in the colonial era, the liberty cap had fallen into disfavor among some Americans after becoming closely identified with the French Revolution. Davis\'s disapproval, however, rested on other grounds. Ancient Romans, he noted, regarded the cap as \"the badge of the freed slave.\" Its use, he feared, might suggest that there was a connection between the slaves\' longing for freedom and the liberty of freeborn Americans. Davis ordered the liberty cap replaced with a less controversial military symbol, a feathered helmet. Crawford died in Italy, where he had spent most of his career, in 1857. Two years later, the colossal Statue of Freedom, which weighed 15,000 pounds, was transported to the United States in several pieces and assembled at a Maryland foundry under the direction of Philip Reed, a slave craftsman. In 1863, it was installed atop the Capitol, where it can still be 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 Confederate States of America. The dispute over the Statue of Freedom offers a small illustration of how, by the mid- 1850s, nearly every public question was being swept up into the gathering storm over slavery. CHRONOLOGY. 1820 Moses Austin receives Mexican land grant 1836 Texas independence from Mexico 1845 Inauguration of James Polk, United States annexes Texas 1846 Wilmot Proviso 1846-1848 Mexican War 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Gold discovered in California, Free Soil Party organized 1849 Inauguration of Zachary Taylo 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, Inauguration of James Buchanan 1857 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 What were the major factors contributing to U.S. territorial expansion in the 1840s? 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 abolitionism, 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 farther 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 braved disease, starvation, 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.\" The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California Settlement of Oregon did not directly raise the issue of slavery, although the prospect of new states in a region that did not seem hospitable to slavery alarmed some southerners. But the nation\'s acquisition of part of Mexico did. When Mexico achieved its independence 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 neighbor. Mexico\'s northern provinces -California, New Mexico, and Texas-however, were isolated and sparsel 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 nomadic Indians-bands of Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes. With the opening in 1821 of the Santa Fe Trail linking that city with Independence, Missouri, the northern periphery of the new Mexican nation was quickly incorporated into the sphere of influence of the rapidly expanding western United States. 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 Native Americans 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 reducing 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 surrounding Indian population. Californios referred to themselves as gente de razón (people capable of reason) as opposed to the indios, whom they called gente sin razón (people without reason). For the \"common good,\" Indians were required to continue to work for the new landholders. By 1840, California was already linked commercially with the United States. New England ships were trading with the region. In 1846, Alfred Robinson, who had moved from Boston, published Life in California. \"In this age of annexation,\" he wondered, \"why not extend the \'area of freedom\' by the annexation of California?\" VISIONS OF FREEDOM American Progress The Texas Revolt 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 Spanish government had 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 Stephen continued the plan, now in independent Mexico, reselling land in smaller plots to American settlers at twelve cents per acre. Settlers were required to become Mexican citizens. By 1830, the population of American origin had reached around 7,000, considerably exceeding the number of Tejanos. Alarmed that its grip on the area was weakening, the Mexican government in 1830 annulled existing land contracts and barred future emigration 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 economic alliances with American traders. The issue of slavery further exacerbated 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 the chaotic Texas revolt. The rebels formed a provisional government that soon called for Texan independence. On March 6, 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, President Martin Van 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 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 candidates 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 traditional manner-by trying to keep it out of national politics. Clay went on to receive the Whig nomination, but for Van Buren the letters 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 frequently ran away. To soothe injured feelings among northern Democrats over the rejection of Van Buren, the party platform called for not only the \"reannexation\" of Texas (implying that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase and therefore already belonged to the United States) but also the \"reoccupation\" of all of Oregon. \"Fifty-four forty or fight\"-American control of Oregon all the way to its northern boundary at north latitude 54°40 -became a popular campaign slogan.′ But the bitterness of the northern 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 antislavery 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 ames K. Polk may have been virtually unknown, but he assumed the presidency 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 Polk\'s campaign promise not to give up any part of Oregon without a fight. But the president secured his main objectives, the Willamette Valley and the magnificent harbor of Puget Sound. Acquiring California proved more difficult. Polk dispatched an emissary to Mexico offering to purchase the region, but the Mexican government refused to negotiate. By the spring of 1846, Polk was planning for military action. In April, American soldiers 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 conflict with Mexican forces inevitable. When fighting broke out, Polk claimed that the Mexicans had \"shed blood upon American soil\" and called for a declaration 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 destiny, a majority of Americans supported the war. 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.\" 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. 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. 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 American volunteers enlisted and did most of the fighting. Combat took place on three fronts. In June 1846, a band of American insurrectionists 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. Kearny occupied Sante Fe without resistance and then set out for southern California, where they helped to put down a Mexican uprising against American rule. he 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 Veracruz toward Mexico City. Scott\'s forces routed Mexican defenders and in September occupied the country\'s capital. In February 1848, the two governments agreed to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which confirmed the annexation of Texas and ceded California and present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah to the United States. In exchange, the United States paid Mexico \$15 million. The Mexican Cession, as the land annexed from Mexico was called, established the present territorial boundaries on the North American continent except for the Gadsden Purchase, a parcel of 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 memory. Unlike other wars, few public monuments celebrate the conflict. Mexicans, however, regard the war (or "the dismemberment," as it is called) as a central event of their national history and a source of resentment over a century and a half after it was fought. As the Mexican negotiators of 1848 complained, it was unprecedented to launch a war because a country refused to sell part of its territory to a neighbor. With the end of the Mexican War, the United States absorbed half a million square miles of Mexico\'s territory, one-third of that nation\'s total area. A region that for centuries had been united was suddenly split in two, dividing families and severing trade routes. An estimated 75,000 to 100,000 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. Thus, in the first half of the nineteenth century, some residents of the area went from being Spaniards to Mexicans to Americans. Although mot newcomers, they had to adjust to a new identity as if they were immigrants. 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 prevent from launching incursions into Mexico across the new border. Decades of Indian raids and warfare in northern Mexico in which Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and others attacked Mexican towns and ranches, and to which Mexico responded in kind, had led to the death of thousands of people and had undermined Mexico\'s economy. American leaders claimed that because of Mexico\'s inability to control its northern territories, annexation to the United States was an act of salvation for the region\'s population. The Texas Borderland After achieving independence in 1836, Texas became a prime example of a western borderland. Anglos (white settlers from the East) and Tejanos had fought together to achieve independence, but soon relations between them soured. Anglos in search of land and resources expelled some Mexicans, including former allies, now suspected of loyalty to Mexico. Juan Seguín, a Tejano, had played an active role in the revolt and served for a time as mayor of San Antonio. In 1842, still mayor, he was driven from the town by vigilantes. He had become, he lamented, \"a foreigner in my native land.\" Facing pressures to Americanize, some Tejano families sent their children to English-language schools established by Protestant missionaries from the East. But most refused to convert from Catholicism, despite the declining power of the church after Texas became part of the United States. Increasingly, Tejanos were confined to unskilled agricultural or urban labor. Some Tejanos used their ambiguous dentities to their own advantage. During the Civil War, some Tejano men avoided the Confederate draft by claiming to be citizens of Mexico. Meanwhile, in southern Texas, the disputed territory between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande, claimed by both Texas and Mexico but actually controlled by Comanche Indians, became a site of continual conflict. Authority in the area remained contested until Texas became part of the much more powerful United States and even then, Comanche power would not be broken until the 1860s and 1870s. Race and Manifest Destiny 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 construct 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.\" \"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 incapacity of \"mongrel races.\" Indeed, calls by some expansionists 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 population, supposedly unfit for citizenship in a republic. The imposition of the American system of race relations proved detrimental 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 Constitution 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 free man is taken away,\" one free Black resident of Texas complained. Local circumstances affected racial definitions in the former Mexican territories. Texas defined \"Spanish\" Mexicans, especially those who occupied important social positions, as white. But the residents of New Mexico of both Mexican and Indian origin were long deemed \"too Mexican\" for democratic self- government. With white migration lagging, Congress did not allow New Mexico to become a state until 1912. Gold-Rush California California had a non-Indian population of fewer than 15,000 when the Mexican War ended. For most of the 1840s, five times as many Americans emigrated to Oregon as to California. But this changed dramatically after January 1848, when gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains at a sawmill owned by the Swiss immigrant Johann A. Sutter. A mania for gold spread throughout the world, fanned by newspaper accounts of instant wealth acquired by early migrants. By ship and land, newcomers poured into California, in what came to be called the gold rush. The non- Indian population rose to 200,000 by 1852 and more than 360,000 eight years later. C 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. Between 1848 and 1860 American trade with China tripled. In the 1850s, the United States took the lead in opening Japan, a country 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 merchant from New York City, arrived as the first American consul (and, according to some accounts, the inspiration for Puccini\'s great opera, Madama Butterfly, about an American who marries and then abandons a Japanese woman). Harris persuaded the Japanese to allow American ships into additional ports and to establish full diplomatic relations between the two countries. 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 system 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.\" Already, the bonds of union were fraying. In 1844 and 1845, the Methodists and Baptists, the two largest evangelical churches, divided into northern and southern branches. But it was the entrance of the slavery issue into the heart of American politics as the result of the Mexican War that eventually dissolved perhaps the strongest force for national unity-the two-party system. 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 determined 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 one 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 slavery 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 government. 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 leaders 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 landownership 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 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 aimed 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. A majority of slaves in 1848 lived in states that had not even existed when the Constitution was adopted. Just as northerners believed westward expansion essential to their economic well-being, southern leaders became convinced that slavery must expand or die. 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 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 unification. 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 disputes were of long standing, but the immediate source of controversy arose from the acquisition of new lands after the Mexican War. In 1850, California asked to be admitted to the Union as a free state. Many southerners opposed the measure, fearing that it would upset the sectional balance in Congress. Senator Henry Clay offered a plan with four main provisions that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850. California would enter the Union as a free state. The slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be abolished in the nation\'s capital. A stringent new law would help southerners reclaim runaway slaves. And the status of slavery in the remaining territories acquired from Mexico would be left to the decision of the local white inhabitants. The United States would also agree to pay off the massive debt Texas had accumulated while independent. The Great Debate In the Senate debate on the Compromise, powerful leaders spoke for and against compromise. 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 York also opposed compromise. To southerners\' talk of their constitutional rights, Seward responded that a \"higher law\" than the Constitution condemned 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 successor, 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 question from congressional debate. The new Fugitive Slave Act, however, made further controversy inevitable. The law allowed special federal commissioners 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 th 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, supported a measure that brought federal agents into communities throughout the North, armed with the power to override local law enforcement and judicial procedures to secure the return of runaway slaves. The security of slavery was more important to them than states\'-rights consistency. The law further widened sectional divisions and reinvigorated the Underground Railroad. In a series of dramatic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resisted 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 had escaped with her family to Ohio, killed her own young daughter rather than see her returned to slavery by federal marshals. (At the end of the twentieth century, this incident would become the basis for Toni Morrison\'s celebrated novel Beloved.) Less dramatically, the men and women involved in the Underground Railroad redoubled their efforts to assist fugitives. Thanks to the consolidation of the railroad network in the North, it was now possible for escaping slaves who reached the free states to be placed on trains that would take them to safety in Canada in a day or two. In 1855 and 1856, Sydney Howard Gay, an abolitionist editor in New York City and a key Underground Railroad operative, recorded in a notebook the arrival of over 200 fugitives-men, women, and children-a majority of whom had been sent by train from Philadelphia. Gay dispatched them to upstate New York and Canada. Overall, several thousand fugitives and freeborn Blacks, worried 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 directions 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 restore sectional 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 slavery 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. In 1854, the party system 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 formal governments had been established in these territories. Southerners in Congress, however, seemed adamant against allowing the organization of new free territories that might further upset the sectional balance. Douglas hoped to satisfy them by applying the principle of popular 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 ineffectual 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 would repeal. In response, a group of antislavery 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 plot\" to convert free territory into a \"dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.\" It helped to convince millions of northerners that southern leaders aimed at nothing less than extending their peculiar institution throughout the West. 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. It is difficult to think of a piece of legislation in American history that had a more profound impact on national life. During the next two years, the Whig Party, unable to develop a unified response to the political crisis, collapsed. 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. THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY The Northern Economy The disruptive impact of slavery on the traditional parties was the immediate 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 beginning of mass immigration from Europe. The period from 1843, when prosperity 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 occurring in Ohio, Illinois, and other states of the Old Northwest. Four great trunk railroads now linked eastern cities with western farming and commercial 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. The economic integration of the Northwest and Northeast created the groundwork for their political unification in the Republican Party. By 1860, the North had become a complex, integrated economy, with eastern industrialists marketing manufactured goods to the commercial farmers of the West, while residents of the region\'s growing cities consumed the food westerners produced. Northern society stood poised between old and new ways. The majority of the population still lived not in large cities but in mall 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 agriculture, and the industrial revolution was spreading rapidly. Two great areas of industrial production had arisen. One, along the Atlantic coast, stretched from Boston to Philadelphia and Baltimore. A second was centered on or near the Great Lakes, in inland cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Driven by railroad expansion, coal mining and iron manufacturing were growing rapidly. Chicago, the Old Northwest\'s major rail center and the jumping-off place for settlers heading for the Great Plains, had become a complex manufacturing center, producing 5,000 reapers each year, along with barbed wire, windmills, and prefabricated \"balloon frame\" houses, all of which facilitated further western settlement. New York City by 1860 had become the nation\'s preeminent financial, commercial, and manufacturing center. Although the southern economy was also growing and the continuing expansion of cotton production brought wealth to slaveholders, the South did not share in these broad economic changes. The Rise and Fall of the Know- Nothings As noted in Chapter 9, nativism-hostility to immigrants, especially Catholics-emerged as a local political movement in the 1840s. But in 1854, with the party system in crisis, it burst on the national political scene with the sudden appearance of the American, or Know-Nothing, Party (so called because it began as a secret organization whose members, when asked about its existence, were supposed to respond, \"I know nothing\"). The Know-Nothing Party trumpeted its dedication to reserving political office for native- born Americans and to resisting the \"aggressions\" of the Catholic Church, such as its supposed efforts to undermine public school systems. The Know- Nothings swept the 1854 state elections in Massachusetts, electing the governor, all of the state\'s congressmen, and nearly every member of the state legislature. They captured the mayor\'s office in cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco as well. In many states, nativists emerged as a major component of victorious \"anti-Nebraska\" coalitions of voters opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the North, the Know-Nothings\' appeal combined anti- Catholic and antislavery sentiment, with opposition to the sale of liquor often added to the equation. After all, most Catholics, as noted in the previous chapter, vigorously opposed the reform movements inspired by evangelical Protestantism, especially antislavery and temperance. The 1854 elections, said one observer, revealed \"a deep seated feeling in favor of human freedom and also a fine determination that hereafter none but Americans shall rule America.\" Despite severe anti-Irish discrimination in jobs, housing, and education, however, it is remarkable how little came of demands that immigrants be barred from the political nation. All European immigrants benefited from being white. During the 1850s, free Blacks found immigrants pushing them out of the jobs as servants and common laborers previously available to them. The newcomers had the good fortune to arrive after white male suffrage had become the norm and automatically received the right to vote. Even as New England states sought to reduce immigrant political power (Massachusetts and Connecticut made literacy a voting requirement, and Massachusetts mandated a two-year waiting period between becoming a naturalized citizen and voting), western states desperate for labor allowed immigrants to vote well before they became citizens. In a country where the suffrage had become essential to understandings of freedom, it is significant that white male immigrants could vote almost from the moment they landed in America, while Blacks and Native Americans, whose ancestors had lived in the country for centuries, could not he Free Labor Ideology By 1856, it was clear that the Republican Party-a coalition of antislavery Democrats, northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know-Nothings opposed to the further expansion of slavery-would become the major alternative to the Democratic Party in the North. Republicans managed to convince most northerners that the Slave Power, as they called the South\'s proslavery political leadership, posed a more immediate threat to their liberties and aspirations than \"popery\" and immigration. The party\'s appeal rested on the idea of \"free labor.\" In Republican hands, the antithesis between \"free society\" and \"slave society\" coalesced into a comprehensive worldview that glorified the North as the home of progress, opportunity, and freedom. The defining quality of northern society, Republicans declared, was the opportunity it offered each laborer to move up to the status of landowning farmer or independent craftsman, thus achieving the economic independence essential to freedom. Slavery, by contrast, spawned a social order consisting of degraded slaves, poor whites with no hope of advancement, and idle aristocrats. The struggle over the territories was a contest about which of two antagonistic labor systems would dominate the West and, by implication, the nation\'s future. If slavery were to spread into the West, northern free laborers would be barred and their chances for social advancement severely diminished. Slavery, Republicans insisted, must be kept out of the territories so that free labor could flourish. To southern claims that slavery was the foundation of liberty, Republicans responded with the rallying cry \"freedom national\"-meaning not abolition, but ending the federal government\'s support of slavery. Under the banner of free labor, northerners of diverse backgrounds and interests rallied in defense of the superiority of their own society. Republicans were not abolitionists-they focused on preventing the spread of slavery, not attacking it where it existed. Nonetheless, many party leaders viewed the nation\'s division into free and slave societies as an \"irrepressible conflict,\" as Senator William H. Seward of New York put it in 1858, that eventually would have to be resolved. These \"two systems\" of society, Seward insisted, were \"incompatible\" within a single nation. The market revolution, Seward argued, by drawing the entire nation closer together in a web of transportation and commerce, heightened the tension between freedom and slavery. The United States, he predicted, \"must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.\" Bleeding Kansas and the Election of 1856 Their free labor outlook, which resonated so effectively with deeply held northern values, helps to explain the Republicans\' rapid rise to prominence. But dramatic events also fueled the party\'s growth. When Kansas held elections in 1854 and 1855, hundreds of proslavery Missourians crossed the border to cast fraudulent ballots. President Franklin Pierce recognized the legitimacy of the resulting proslavery legislature. Settlers from free states soon established a rival government, and a sporadic civil war broke out in Kansas in which some 200 persons eventually lost their lives. In one incident, in May 1856, a proslavery mob attacked the free-soil stronghold of Lawrence, burning public buildings and pillaging private homes. \"Bleeding Kansas\" seemed to discredit Douglas\'s policy of leaving the decision on slavery up to the local population, thus aiding the Republicans. The party also drew strength from an unprecedented incident in he halls of Congress. South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, wielding a gold-tipped cane, beat the antislavery senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts unconscious after Sumner delivered a denunciation of \"The Crime against Kansas.\" Many southerners applauded Brooks, sending him canes emblazoned with the words \"Hit him again!\" In the election of 1856, the Republican Party chose as its candidate John C. Frémont and drafted a platform that strongly opposed the further expansion of slavery. Stung by the northern reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Democrats nominated James Buchanan, who had been minister to Great Britain in 1854 and thus had no direct connection with that divisive measure. The Democratic platform endorsed the principle of popular sovereignty as the only viable solution to the slavery controversy. Meanwhile, the Know-Nothings presented ex-president Millard Fillmore as their candidate. Frémont outpolled Buchanan in the North, carrying eleven of sixteen free states-a remarkable achievement for an organization that had existed for only two years. But Buchanan won the entire South and the key northern states of Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, enough to ensure his victory. Fillmore carried only Maryland. The 1856 election returns made starkly clear that parties had reoriented themselves along sectional lines. One major party had been destroyed, another had been seriously weakened, and a new one had arisen, devoted entirely to the interests of the North. THE EMERGENCE OF LINCOLN The final collapse of the party system took place during the administration of a president who epitomized the old political order. Born during George Washington\'s presidency, James Buchanan had served in Pennsylvania\'s legislature, in both houses of Congress, and as secretary of state under James K. Polk. A staunch believer in the Union, he committed himself to pacifying inflamed sectional emotions. Few presidents have failed more disastrously in what they set out to accomplish. The Dred Scott Decision Even before his inauguration, Buchanan became aware of an impending Supreme Court decision that held out the hope of settling the slavery controversy once and for all. This was the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. During the 1830s, Scott had accompanied his owner, Dr. John Emerson of Missouri, to Illinois, where slavery had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and by state law, and to Wisconsin Territory, where it was barred by the Missouri Compromise. After returning to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that residence on free soil had made him free. The Dred Scott decision, one of the most famous- or infamous-rulings in the long history of the Supreme Court, was announced in March 1857, two days after Buchanan\'s inauguration. The justices addressed three questions. Could a Black person be a citizen and therefore sue in federal court? Did residence in a free state make Scott free? Did Congress possess the power to prohibit slavery in a territory? All nine justices issued individual opinions. But essentially, the Court divided 6-3 (with Justice Robert C. Grier of Pennsylvania, at Buchanan\'s behind-the- scenes urging, joining a southern majority). Seventeen years earlier, in the little-known case United States v. Dow, which involved a person from the Philippines, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had made clear his conviction that only white persons were eligible to be part of the American body politic. Whites, he wrote, were the \"master race,\" protected by the Constitution, while the rights of non-whites could be limited by state legislatures, even to the extent of being nslaved. Now, Taney declared that only white persons could be citizens of the United States. The nation\'s founders, Taney insisted, believed that Blacks \"had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.\" Ironically, one reason for Taney\'s ruling was his robust understanding of what citizenship entailed. Being a citizen, he declared, meant freedom from legal discrimination and full enjoyment of the rights specified in the Constitution, among them the ability to travel anywhere in the country and the right \"to keep and carry arms wherever they went.\" These were not rights he thought Black people, free or slave, should enjoy. The case could have ended there, since Scott had no right to sue, but inspired by the idea of resolving the slavery issue, Taney pressed on. Scott, he declared, remained a slave. Illinois law had no effect on him after his return to Missouri. As for his residence in Wisconsin, Congress possessed no power under the Constitution to bar slavery from a territory. The Missouri Compromise, recently repealed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had been unconstitutional, and so was any measure interfering with southerners\' right to bring slaves into the western territories. The decision in effect declared unconstitutional the Republican platform of restricting slavery\'s expansion. It also seemed to undermine Douglas\'s doctrine of popular sovereignty. For if Congress lacked the power to prohibit slavery in a territory, how could a territorial legislature created by Congress do so? The Court, a Georgia newspaper exulted, \"covers every question regarding slavery and settles it in favor of the South.\" WHO IS AN AMERICAN? From OPINION OF THE COURT, CHIEF JUSTICE ROGER B. TANEY, THE DRED SCOTT DECISION (1857) In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court attempted to resolve a divisive question: Were free African Americans citizens of the United States? The Court answered no. For the majority, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney insisted that American citizenship was for white persons alone. The words \"people of the United States\" and \"citizens" are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the political body who, according to our republican institutions, form the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the government through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call the \"sovereign people,\" and every citizen is one of this people and a constituent member of this sovereignty. The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea\... compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word \"citizens\" in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect\.... The general words \[of the Declaration of Independence\] would seem to embrace the whole human family,\... but it is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included. \[The authors\] perfectly understood the meaning of the language they used, and they knew that it would not in any part of the civilized world be supposed to embrace the Negro race. QUESTIONS 1\. What evidence does Taney present that Blacks were not considered citizens by the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? 2\. Why do you think he bases his argument on what he says were the intentions of the founders rather than the situation of free Blacks in the 1850s? The Decision\'s Aftermath Perhaps the person least directly affected by the Dred Scott decision was the plaintiff himself, for a new owner immediately emancipated Scott and his family. Scott died in 1858, having enjoyed his freedom for less than two years. Harriet Scott lived until 1876, long enough to see Taney\'s ruling invalidated by the laws and constitutional amendments of Reconstruction. Their youngest daughter, Lizzie, survived to the age of 99. She died in 1954, having experienced the long era of segregation and the birth of the modern civil rights movement. Among the decision\'s casualties was the reputation of the Court itself, which, in the North, sank to the lowest level in all of American history. The Dred Scott decision caused a furor in the North and put the question of Black citizenship on the national political agenda. James McCune Smith, a Black physician, author, and antislavery activist, carefully dissected Taney\'s reasoning, citing legal precedents going back to \"the annals of lofty Rome\" to demonstrate that all free persons born in the United States, Black as well as white, "must be citizens.\" Many Republicans also rejected Taney\'s reasoning. In a stinging dissent, Justice John McLean of Ohio insisted that regardless of race, \"birth on the soil of a country both creates the duties and confers the rights of citizenship.\" Slavery, announced President Buchanan, henceforth existed in all the territories, \"by virtue of the Constitution.\" In 1858, his administration attempted to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution, which had been drafted by a pro-southern convention and never submitted to a popular vote. Outraged by this violation of popular sovereignty, Douglas formed an unlikely alliance with congressional Republicans to block the attempt. Kansas remained a territory; it would join the Union as a free state on the eve of the Civil War. The Lecompton battle convinced southern Democrats that they could not trust their party\'s most popular northern leader. Lincoln and Slavery The depth of Americans\' divisions over slavery was brought into sharp focus in 1858 in one of the most storied election campaigns in the nation\'s history. Seeking reelection to the Senate as both a champion of popular sovereignty and the man who had prevented the administration from forcing slavery on the people of Kansas, Douglas faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from Abraham Lincoln, then little known outside of Illinois. Born into a modest farm family in Kentucky in 1809, Lincoln had moved as a youth to frontier Indiana and then Illinois. Although he began running for public office at the age of twenty-one, until the mid-1850s his career hardly seemed destined for greatness. He had served four terms as a Whig in the state legislature and one in Congress from 1847 to 1849 incoln reentered politics in 1854 as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He once said that he \"hated slavery as much as any abolitionist.\" Unlike abolitionists, however, Lincoln was willing to compromise with the South to preserve the Union. \"I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down,\" he once wrote of fugitive slaves, \"but I bite my lip and keep silent.\" But on one question he was inflexible- stopping the expansion of slavery. Lincoln developed a critique of slavery and its expansion that gave voice to the central values of the emerging Republican Party and the millions of northerners whose loyalty it commanded. His speeches combined the moral fervor of the abolitionists with the respect for order and the Constitution of more conservative northerners. \"I hate it,\" he said in 1854 of the prospect of slavery\'s expansion, \"because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world- enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites-causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity.\" In a sense, Lincoln\'s own life personified the free labor ideology and the opportunities northern society offered to laboring men. \"I want every man to have the chance,\" said Lincoln, \"and I believe a black man is entitled to it, in which he can better his condition.\" Blacks might not be the equal of whites in all respects, but in their \"natural right\" to the fruits of their labor, they were \"my equal and the equal of all others.\" The Lincoln-Douglas Campaign The campaign against Douglas, the North\'s preeminent political leader, created Lincoln\'s national reputation. Accepting his party\'s nomination for the Senate in June 1858, Lincoln etched sharply the differences between them. \"A house divided against itself,\" he announced, \"cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.\" Lincoln\'s point was not that civil war was imminent, but that Americans must choose between favoring and opposing slavery. There could be no middle ground. Douglas\'s policy of popular sovereignty, he insisted, reflected a moral indifference that could only result in the institution\'s spread throughout the entire country. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, held in seven Illinois towns and attended by tens of thousands of listeners, remain classics of American political oratory. Clashing definitions of freedom lay at their heart. To Lincoln, freedom meant opposition to slavery. The nation needed to rekindle the spirit of the founding fathers, who, he claimed, had tried to place slavery on the path to \"ultimate extinction.\" Douglas argued that the essence of freedom lay in local self-government and individual self-determination. A large and diverse nation could only survive by respecting the right of each locality to determine its own institutions. In response to a question posed by Lincoln during the Freeport debate, Douglas insisted that popular sovereignty was not incompatible with the Dred Scott decision. Although territorial legislatures could no longer exclude slavery directly, he argued, if the people wished to keep slaveholders out, all they needed to do was refrain from giving the institution legal protection. Douglas insisted that politicians had no right to impose their own moral standards on society as a whole. \"I deny the right of Congress,\" he declared, \"to force a good thing upon a people who are unwilling to receive it.\" If a community wished to own slaves, it had a right to do so. Of course, when Douglas spoke of the \"people,\" he meant whites alone. He spent much of his time in the debates attempting to portray Lincoln as a dangerous radical whose positions threatened to degrade white Americans by reducing them to equality with Blacks. The United States government, Douglas proclaimed, had been created \"by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever.\" Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of his day. He opposed giving Illinois Blacks the right to vote or serve on juries and spoke frequently of colonizing Blacks overseas as the best solution to the problems of slavery and race. Yet, unlike Douglas, Lincoln did not use appeals to racism to garner votes. And he refused to exclude Blacks from the human family. No less than whites, they were entitled to the inalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence, which applied to \"all men, in all lands, everywhere,\" not merely to Europeans and their descendants. The Illinois election returns revealed a state sharply divided, like the nation itself. Southern Illinois, settled from the South, voted strongly Democratic, while the rapidly growing northern part of the state was firmly in the Republican column. Douglas was reelected. His victory was all the more remarkable because elsewhere in the North Republicans swept to victory in 1858. John Brown at Harpers Ferry On October 16, 1859, an armed assault by twenty-two abolitionists, five of them Black, on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, further heightened sectional tensions. Militarily, the plan made little sense. The band was soon surrounded and its men killed or captured by a detachment of federal soldiers headed by Colonel Robert E. Lee. The leader of the raid, the white abolitionist John Brown, was inspired, in part, by the tradition of violent resistance to slavery, including the Haitian Revolution and Nat Turner\'s Rebellion. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, despite constantly being in debt, he financed antislavery publications and befriended fugitive slaves and radical Black activists including David Walker, Martin Delany, and Henry Highland Garnet, who believed that abolitionists who advocated moral suasion alone were naïve. No oppressed people, Garnet declared in 1843, had ever secured their liberty without violence. Like other abolitionists, Brown was a deeply religious man. His God, however, was not the forgiving Jesus of the revivals, who encouraged men and women to save themselves through conversion, but the vengeful Father of the Old Testament. During the civil war in Kansas, Brown traveled to the territory. In May 1856, after the attack on Lawrence, he and a few followers murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. For the next two years, he traveled through the North and Canada, raising funds and enlisting followers for a war against slavery. He sought military and financial support from radical abolitionists including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. A group of white abolitionists known as the Secret Six and a Black activist, Mary Ellen Pleasant, became key financiers of the raid at Harpers Ferry. When Virginia\'s governor, Henry A. Wise, spurned pleas for clemency and ordered Brown executed, he turned Brown into a martyr in much of the North. Henry David Thoreau pronounced him \"a crucified hero.\" To the South, the failure of the assault on Harpers Ferry seemed less significant than the adulation it aroused from much of the northern public. The raid and Brown\'s execution further widened the breach between the sections. Since Brown\'s death, radicals of both the left and right have revered him as a man willing to take direct action against an institution he considered immoral. Black leaders have long hailed him as a rare white person willing to sacrifice himself for the cause of racial justice. Brown\'s last letter was a brief, prophetic statement: \"I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.\" The Rise of Southern Nationalism With the Republicans continuing to gain strength in the North, Democrats might have been expected to put a premium on party unity as the election of 1860 approached. By this time, however, a sizable group of southerners viewed their region\'s prospects as more favorable outside the Union than within it. Throughout the 1850s, influential writers and political leaders kept up a drumbeat of complaints about the South\'s problems. The sky-high price of slaves made it impossible for many planters\' sons and upwardly mobile small farmers to become planters in their own right. Many white southerners felt that the opportunity was eroding for economic independence through ownership of land and slaves-liberty as they understood it. The North, secessionists charged, reaped the benefits of the cotton trade, while southerners fell deeper and deeper into debt. To remain in the Union meant to accept \"bondage\" to the North. But an independent South could become the foundation of a slave empire ringing the Caribbean and embracing Cuba, other West Indian islands, Mexico, and parts of Central America. More and more southerners were speaking openly of southward expansion. In 1854, Pierre Soulé of Louisiana, the American ambassador to Spain, persuaded the ministers to Britain and France to join him in signing the Ostend Manifesto, which called on the United States to purchase or seize Cuba, where slavery was still legal, from Spain. Meanwhile, the military adventurer William Walker led a series of \"filibustering\" expeditions (the term derived from the Spanish word for pirate, filibustero) in Central America. Born in Tennessee, Walker had headed to California to join the gold rush. Failing to strike it rich, he somehow decided to try to become the leader of a Latin American country. Walker moved to establish himself as ruler of Nicaragua in Central America and to open that country to slavery. Nicaragua at the time was engaged in a civil war, and one faction invited Walker to assist it by bringing 300 armed men. In 1855, Walker captured the city of Granada and in the following year proclaimed himself president. The administration of Franklin Pierce recognized Walker\'s government, but neighboring countries sent in troops, who forced Walker to flee. His activities represented clear violations of American neutrality laws. But Walker won acclaim in the South, and when federal authorities placed him on trial in New Orleans in 1858, the jury acquitted him. By the late 1850s, southern leaders were bending every effort to strengthen the bonds of slavery. \"Slavery is our king,\" declared a South Carolina politician in 1860. \"Slavery is our truth, slavery is our divine right.\" New state laws further restricted access to freedom. One in Louisiana stated simply: \"After the passage of this act, no slave shall be emancipated in this state.\" Some southerners called for the reopening of the African slave trade, hoping that an influx of new slaves would lower the price, thereby increasing the number of whites with a vested interest in the peculiar institution. By early 1860, seven states of the Lower South had gone on record demanding that the Democratic platform pledge to protect slavery in all the territories that had not yet been admitted to the Union as states. Virtually no northern politician could accept this position. For southern leaders to insist on it would guarantee the destruction of the Democratic Party as a national institution. But southern nationalists, known as \"fire- eaters,\" hoped to split the party and the country and form an independent southern Confederacy. The Democratic Split When the Democratic convention met in April 1860, Douglas\'s supporters commanded a majority but not the two-thirds required for a presidential nomination. Because of his fight against Kansas\'s Lecompton Constitution and his refusal to support congressional laws imposing slavery on all the territories, Douglas had become unacceptable to political leaders of the Lower South. When the convention adopted a platform reaffirming the doctrine of popular sovereignty, delegates from seven slave states walked out and the gathering recessed in confusion. Six weeks later, it reconvened, replaced the bolters with Douglas supporters, and nominated him for president. In response, southern Democrats placed their own ticket in the field, headed by John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. Breckinridge insisted that slavery must be protected in the western territories. The Democratic Party, the last great bond of national unity, had been shattered. National conventions had traditionally been places where party managers, mindful of the need for unity in the fall campaign, reconciled their differences. But in 1860, neithe