Download COLLAPSE OF COMPROMISE

COLLAPSE OF COMPROMISE
SECTIONAL STRUGGLE
OVER SLAVERY IN THE
TERRITORIES
• The greatest danger to the survival of American
liberty and Union was the sectional conflict
between North and South over the future of
slavery.
• Slavery was a national problem that affected both
sections of the country.
• Peoples’ perception of reality determined the
actions of people from North and South.
• Southerners and northerners believed that slave
society would have to expand or perish.
WILMOT PROVISO
• President Polk asked Congress for $2 million to
negotiate a peace with Mexico so that he could
acquire California.
• Representative David Wilmot (PA) proposed
adding an amendment to the appropriations bill
barring slavery in all lands acquired from Mexico.
– Passes in House twice
– Rejected by Senate
• Outraged southerners responded with threats of
disunion.
• Wilmot argued that “slavery has within itself the
seeds of its own destruction.”
THE EDGE
• Henry Clay pleaded with
his countrymen on
February 5, 1850: “I
implore gentlemen …
whether from the South or
the North … to pause at
the edge of the precipice,
before the fearful and
dangerous leap be taken
into the yawning abyss
below, from which none
who ever take it shall
return in safety.”
COMPROMISE OF 1850
• California admitted as a free state
• Slave trade in District of Columbia abolished
• Texas received $10 million in exchange for claim
to New Mexico territory
• New Mexico territory organized into two
territories—New Mexico and Utah—on the basis
of popular sovereignty
• Congress to pass a tougher fugitive slave law
• Pushed through by Stephen Douglas
MIDCENTURY
BREAKDOWN
• Further agitation of the slavery question in the territories led
to the breakdown of the Compromise of 1850.
• In 1850 Frederick Douglass wisely recognized that
compromise over slavery was virtually impossible. “The
fact is the more the question has been settled, the more it
has needed settling.”
• Under Constitution, federal government could do little to
appease deeply troubled southerners
– Slave states lagging behind free states in wealth and numbers
– South lost control over House; lost majority in Senate
– No southerner could realistically become president
• Northerners deeply troubled by moral, economic, and
political consequences of slavery realized the Constitution
gave the federal government no power over the “peculiar
institution” within the states.
FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT
• Made assistance of runaway
slaves a federal crime (aiding
and embedding $1000 fine, 6
months imprisonment)
• Authorized the arrest of escaped
slaves even in states where
slavery was illegal
• Most blacks in danger
• Bounty system used by slavecatchers
• Trial by jury ignored
• Judges given incentive to
convict
• Personal liberty laws
OPPOSING STEREOTYPES
• Federal government did possess the authority to restrict
slavery from the territories.
• Some northerners vowed to resist the further extension of
slavery into the territories
• When northerners criticized slavery, they were condemning
the Southern way of life
– Backward; “Slave Power”
– Slavery barrier to achievement of the American ideals of
democratic equality—the values of individualism, democracy,
equality of opportunity
• Free soil, free labor, and free men; slavery must collapse
• Southern stereotypes of northerners
– Fanatical abolitionists hell bent on destroying Southern society
– Imperial North; containment meant abolition
UNLIMITED EXTENSION
• Jefferson Davis: “We of the South are
an agricultural people, and we require
an extended territory. Slave labor is a
wasteful labor, and it therefore
requires a still more extended territory
than would the same pursuits if they
could be prosecuted by the more
economical labor of white men….
[Restriction of slave territory would]
crowd upon our soil an overgrown
black population, until there will not
be room in the country for whites and
blacks to subsist in, and in this way [it
would] destroy the institution [of
slavery] and reduce the whites to the
degraded position of the African
race.”
UNCLE TOM’S CABIN
• Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
novel aroused antislavery
sentiments in the North
more than any other
literary event
• “Tom on a cross”
• Upon meeting Stowe in
1862, Lincoln is said to
have remarked, “So you’re
the little woman who
wrote the book that made
this great war.”
PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY
• Historian David Herbert Donald contends: “These
rival sectional stereotypes, with their shared
conclusion about the importance of the expansion
of slavery, are what made the political
controversies of the 1850s such intense struggles
over what appears to be a very narrow issue. In
every instance the pattern was the same: a
powerful and growing majority based in the North
opposed an entrenched and increasingly unified
minority in the South. The consequence of the
successive clashes was to weaken, one after
another, the traditional bonds of Union.”
KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT
• Introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas, the Kansas-Nebraska Act
(1854) organized Kansas and Nebraska into territories on the basis of
popular sovereignty. The act proved to be a monumental fiasco that
reopened the divisive issue of slavery in the territories and inflamed
sectional tensions worse than ever. The measure nullified the
Missouri Compromise line. Despite the outrage felt by northerners,
southerners could freely extend slavery there until such time as the
residents voted to outlaw it.
• Southerners on Capitol Hill maneuvered Douglas into the repeal of the
Missouri Compromise line because they feared that slavery would die
out if it could not expand into new territory. Southern spokesmen.
• Kansas became a battleground for the sectional struggle over the
territories and future states as well as which section would control the
Union. Hostility between antislavery and proslavery forces escalated,
leading to a brutal civil war within the Kansas Territory, which
became known as “Bleeding Kansas.” When Americans began killing
Americans over the future of slavery, it developed into a dress
rehearsal for the Civil War.
THE RUB
• Abraham Lincoln, at the time a lawyer
and congressman from Illinois,
acknowledged the legal right to hold
slaves in existing slave states while
supporting the idea of gradual
emancipation and the containment of
slavery. He attacked the KansasNebraska Act as an enemy to democracy.
• Lincoln wrote to a southerner: “You
think slavery is right and ought to be
extended; while we think it is wrong and
ought to be restricted. That I suppose is
the rub.”
• Lincoln said: “I hate [slavery] because it
deprives our republican example of its
just influence in the world—enables the
enemies of free institutions to taunt us as
hypocrites.”
DISINTEGRATION
• The successive clashes set in
motion by the Kansas-Nebraska
Act eroded “the traditional
bonds of Union”—national
political parties, a faith in the
Constitution, and nationalistic
oratory—and sent the nation
hurtling toward civil war.
Expansion was no longer a
means of compromise.
• The Republican party organized
in 1854 to oppose the extension
of slavery.
• A fanatical abolitionist, John
Brown led bloody raids against
proslavery forces in Kansas.
ASSAULT IN THE SENATE
• Senator Charles Sumner (MA) delivered his famous oration “The
Crime Against Kansas,” claiming that Bleeding Kansas served as
evidence of the desperate attempt of southerners to rape that “virgin
territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery. Sumner
assailed Douglas and made personal references to the elderly Senator
Andrew Butler (SC). Sumner charged Butler with having “chosen a
mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to
others, is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the
world, is chaste in his sight … the harlot, Slavery.”
• On May 22, 1856 Representative Preston Brooks (SC) savagely
maimed Sumner with a cane in retaliation for the offensive speech.
• Southerners viewed Brooks as a hero who defended the honor of a
slaveholder against abolitionist slander. To abolitionists Sumner
became a martyr to the cause of freedom.
• Violence over the slavery issue was fast becoming all too
commonplace.
YANKEE BEATERS
1857: YEAR OF DECISION
• In the infamous Dred Scott decision, a pro-southern
Supreme Court held that neither Congress nor the territories
(as creatures of Congress) could outlaw slavery, on the
ground that this would violate the property rights clause of
the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. The decision also
ruled that blacks could not be United States citizens.
• Writing the majority opinion, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney
ruled that blacks possessed “no rights which the white man
was bound to respect.”
• President Buchanan and Chief Justice Taney miscalculated
in thinking the Court could resolve the slavery question
once and for all. The intrusion of the Supreme Court
created an unprecedented political dilemma—a ruling that
stated the Constitution sanctioned slavery.
FIASCO
• Northerners lost faith in the
Constitution and the Court’s
ability to render justice without
bias. A simple case was made
into a political, mostly
proslavery cause.
• Although the decision was
supposed to solve the slavery
issue, it actually unleashed
irreconcilable passions that
merged with those already
building toward Civil War.
• Lincoln attacked Taney’s claim
that the Declaration of
Independence and the
Constitution did not apply to
blacks.
LINCOLN-DOUGLAS
DEBATES
• Most famous nationally
publicized political debates
until the Kennedy-Nixon
debates (1960)
• In a senatorial race, Stephen
Douglas and Abraham Lincoln
debated the future of slavery
and freedom in America.
• Virtually every politician agreed
that slavery had to grow or
wither away. Douglas
championed popular
sovereignty, whereas Lincoln
defended the free soil and
containment arguments.
‘A HOUSE DIVIDED’
DECLINE OF
NATIONALISTIC ORATORY
• Douglas, as a “statesman of
compromise” sought to preserve
the coexistence of proslavery
and antislavery forces as well as
states.
• Douglas argued for popular
sovereignty, states’ rights, and
adherence to the Constitution.
• He blamed the sectional crisis
on blundering politicians and
irresponsible agitators: “I am
opposed to that whole system of
sectional agitation, which can
produce nothing but strife,
hostility, discord, and finally
disunion.”
RISING STAR OF
REPUBLICAN PARTY
• Lincoln argued for the preservation of the Union,
containment, and strong federal government to bolster the
economy.
• Lincoln contended that slavery threatened the ideals of the
nation and “free labor”: “I believe this government cannot
endure, permanently half slave and half free.”
• Douglas won reelection, but Lincoln emerged the real victor
in the sense that antislavery men of the North now
perceived the issues in terms of the stark contrasts Lincoln
presented in his campaign.
• Lincoln won national acclaim as a rising star in the
Republican party. When he won the presidential election of
1860, the states of the Deep South seceded from the Union.
DISUNION
• Historian David Herbert Donald argues that the slavery question
divided the nation: “The great forces that had once helped cement
unity—the Constitution, the political parties, the public oratory—now
served to divide the people. The United States, it now appeared, was
not, and never really had been, a nation; it was merely a loose
assemblage of diverse and conflicting groups, interests, and peoples.
By the late 1850s these had polarized into two groups, a majority in
the North, and a minority in the South. Neither majority nor minority
was willing to yield on what both regarded as the vital issue of the
expansion of slavery.”
• Historian Kenneth Stampp asserts that slavery was the most pervasive
sectional issue that caused civil war because it was involved in every
antebellum political crisis. He explains eloquently that those who
argue that the war was brought on deliberately and needlessly by
blundering politicians and irresponsible agitators make a flawed
assumption—that there were national issues of greater importance
than slavery. As much as men such as Douglas attempted to keep
slavery out of national politics they failed repeatedly and miserably.
“AND THE WAR CAME”
• Lincoln understood that slavery
somehow caused the Civil War.
In his Second Inaugural
Address, he stated: “One eighth
of the whole population were
colored slaves, not distributed
over the whole Union, but
localized in the Southern part of
it. These slaves constituted a
peculiar and powerful interest.
All knew this interest was,
somehow, the cause of the war.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abraham Lincoln, Slavery, and the Civil War: Selected Writings and
Speeches. Edited by Michael P. Johnson. Boston: Bedford/St.
Martin’s, 2001.
The Causes of the Civil War. Third Revised Edition. Edited by Kenneth
M. Stampp. New York: Touchstone, 1991.
Donald, David Herbert. Liberty and Union. Boston: D.C. Heath, 1978.
Ehrlich, Walter. They Have No Rights: Dred Scott’s Struggle for
Freedom. Wesport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the
Republican Party Before the Civil War. With a New Introduction by
the Author. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995 (1970).
McPherson, James M. Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and
Reconstruction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Stampp, Kenneth M. America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990.