Download Bleeding Kansas essay

It mattered very little what area of the United States you lived in during the mid19th century, for the country was in turmoil everywhere as event after event pushed the
young American nation closer to war. It was a raging conflict of ideas between North
and South that resulted in major political debacles, pure hatred developing between
brothers, and constant instances of violence throughout the country. The ideologies that
each side clashed over were questions of how much authority a state had in relation to the
federal government, the problem of slavery, issues that related to the settling of new
territories in the West, and the tacit fight for power and control over the country.
Intertwined with it all were diverging interpretations of the Constitution, a document held
sacred by members of each side of the conflict. As a result, each side defended its
interpretation with great vigor and conviction. While these issues and disagreements
played out in a number of ways in different places, one of the most striking events that
contributed to it all was the institution of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and its
subsequent ramifications. It was an act that made an already volatile situation into an
explosive quandary that was unable to be resolved by any means except war. The
Kansas-Nebraska Act officially repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which
ignited a string of violence in the territory of Kansas, conditioned by the substantial
disparity of ideologies between North and South.
Precursory Events
After acquiring the Western territory from the French, it was being settled rather
quickly. With the number of settlers pouring in, a lot of questions needed to be addressed
and answered, especially questions of political and ideological significance. The
1
settlement of the West had originally begun soon after Thomas Jefferson negotiated the
Louisiana Purchase with French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1803. The United
States needed access to the Mississippi River and the city of New Orleans for the purpose
of commerce, but Spain was intending to hand that part of the continent over to France.
This caused Jefferson a lot of concern about losing the important piece of land, so he
began to set things in motion to purchase certain parts of the territory that they needed for
commerce.1 However, Napoleon was struggling terribly to maintain hold on France’s
territories in the New World, and his advisor told him not to bother with the territory in
the Americas, because it was not worth it. Presented with the opportunity to sell all of
Louisiana, Napoleon agreed. At that point, Jefferson’s ministers in Paris, “Monroe and
Livingston, immediately entered into negotiations and on April 30 reached an agreement
that exceeded their authority—the purchase of the Louisiana territory, including New
Orleans, for $15 million. The acquisition of approximately 827,000 square miles would
double the size of the United States.”2 Jefferson had his reservations about the
constitutionality of the deal that had been made, but the Senate overwhelmingly ratified
it, the American people seemed to be in agreement with it, and “though it caused
complete surprise and astonishment in the United States…soon the Westerners were
smacking their lips over the grand opportunities for trading, land speculation, and
government patronage that the new territory could offer.”3 It coincided precisely with the
growing American mindset that would soon become known as Manifest Destiny.
Gaye Wilson, “The Louisiana Purchase,” Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson, March 2003
<http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/lewisandclark/louisiana.html> (24 March 2006).
2
Ibid.
3
Kent Ladd Steckmesser, The Westward Movement: A Short History (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, Inc.,
1969), 117.
1
2
Manifest Destiny was a doctrine developed by expansionists in the 1840s to build
up the imperialist spirit in the citizens. The idea was that “it was the destiny or fate of the
American people to advance into and to take possession of certain regions…the United
States was preordained to control all of North America.”4 This principle continued to
grow in the American way of thinking without reservation. Settlers carried the spirit with
them as they kept moving West, firmly believing that it was their duty to settle the new
territory. It was both North and South who eagerly sought expansion into the West.
Some coined the idea that “Americans were a superpeople, whose great fecundity made
further territorial acquisitions necessary.”5 Those living in the United States felt that they
were a part of this mission, although sectional divisions already existed at this time and
were set to cause significant problems as each side attempted to play their own role in
settling the new territory.
The most difficult question that had to be faced as settlers moved into new
Western territories was whether or not the institution of slavery would be permitted to
exist in these new territories being carved out. This, of course, was the most divisive
issue between North and South when it came to Western settlement policy. One of the
most noteworthy events that preceded the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the introduction of
the Missouri Compromise of 1820, an agreement that attempted to calm the slavery issue
for a while. It has been said that compromise “is the time-honored tradition of American
politics, each side [getting] half a loaf.”6 This was just another example of the
particularly pragmatic nature of American politics, and it seemed like more of an escapist
4
T. Harry Williams, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel, A History of the United States to 1876 (New
York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 434.
5
Steckmesser, Westward Movement, 261.
6
Ibid., 298.
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approach to dealing with the looming crisis of the nation. Nevertheless, it succeeded in
its aims. The Missouri Compromise established a number of provisions to answer the
slavery question, the most essential being that of “admitting Missouri as a slave state and
dividing the rest of the Louisiana Purchase along latitude 36º 30’, with slavery prohibited
north of that line…despite the limitation of this settlement to the Louisiana Purchase, the
Compromise had brought peace, and consequently the line 36º 30’ later took on a certain
aura of sanctity.”7 It was a bold move on the part of the American Congress, but for the
time being, it had all the appearance of being a suitable solution. What was particularly
striking about it, however, was that it was “the first precedent for the congressional
exclusion of slavery from public territory acquired since the adoption of the Constitution,
and also as a clear recognition that Congress [had] no right to impose upon a state asking
for admission into the Union conditions which [did] not apply to those states already in
the Union.”8 There had been boundaries to congressional power that had been set in
place, and the Missouri Compromise was certainly a testing of the flexibility of those
boundaries. Although it seemed to appease both sides, there were those who looked at
the decision with feelings of dread, such as Thomas Jefferson. In response to the passing
of the Compromise, “Jefferson had likened the debate over the expansion of slavery to a
fire bell in the night: the compromise had stilled the alarm; the fire, however, continued
to smolder.”9 Jefferson saw the deeper implications of the problem in establishing a line
like that which the Missouri Compromise set up. He commented that a geographical line
7
David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York, NY: Harper &
Row, 1976), 56.
8
Wikipedia, “Missouri Compromise,” Wikipedia, 28 March 2006.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_compromise> (28 March 2006).
9
Richard White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West
(Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 157.
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that was entirely intertwined with a marked difference of principles would almost
certainly never be obliterated.10 Of course, Jefferson was correct. America, already
divided along ideological lines, was now also divided geographically. Two lines of
division would not allow the nation to continue to exist the way it did. As Abraham
Lincoln famously stated in June of 1858 in a speech at Springfield, Illinois, “A house
divided against itself cannot stand.”11 His assessment could not have been more accurate,
and would be realized by all in short order.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
By 1854, the crisis of division had reached new heights, as the newly formed
territories of Kansas and Nebraska were opened to settlers. Senator Stephen A. Douglas
of Illinois introduced the bill in 1854, initially for the purpose of securing the land on
which to build a transcontinental railroad. To do that, the area needed to be settled
quickly. However, forming this territory was going to be a very difficult issue to work
through Congress, because it proposed the establishment of another new territory north of
the Missouri Compromise line that would eventually become a free state. Douglas
proposed dividing the territory into two, and that “all questions pertaining to slavery in
these territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and in the new states to be formed from them,
[should be decided by] the local dwellers…through their proper representatives.”12
Douglas anticipated that the introduction of popular sovereignty as a means of deciding
the slavery question was the perfect method. However, his anticipations were only a
Wikipedia, “Missouri Compromise.”
Abraham Lincoln, “House Divided Speech,” The History Place, 2005
<http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/divided.htm> (28 March 2006).
12
James Schouler, History of the United States of America Under the Constitution, Vol. V: 1847-1861
(New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company Publishers, 1894), 281.
10
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reflection of his own thoughts, and anything but representative of what the rest of the
population thought. Douglas “could not understand that other people did not view
slavery and popular sovereignty in the same pragmatic light he did…he could not
comprehend that others…might be intensely angered at what they deemed an aggressive
advance by an institution they considered immoral.”13 In looking out for his own
interests before that of the rest of the country, Douglas ignited a fuse on a mountain of
dynamite that would eventually explode into the most destructive war America had yet
seen.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively quashed the Missouri Compromise. The
36º 30’ proviso that Douglas himself had been instrumental in forming was thrown out
the window. He had anticipated that Kansas would be settled by proslavery Southerners
and Missourians, while Nebraska would be settled by antislavery Northerners and
Midwesterners, thereby maintaining the important balance of free and slave state
representation in Congress. Douglas played a remarkable political game, and “waged a
battle such as the oldest members [of Congress] had never seen. A natural fighter, he
performed best when under attack…[and] cornered his adversaries and forced them to
admit flaws in their arguments.”14 The Kansas-Nebraska Act ended up passing by a vote
of 37 to 14 in the Senate, and 113 to 100 in the House of Representatives. President
Franklin Pierce signed the bill at on May 30, 1854. Its consequences and ramifications
were numerous, however, and the country felt the repercussions of it almost immediately.
At this time, Senator William H. Seward of New York addressed Southern senators
saying, “Since there is no escaping your challenge…I accept it in behalf of the cause of
13
14
Williams, et. al., History of the United States, 536.
Potter, The Impending Crisis, 165.
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freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas.”15 With this threat
began the outbreak of violence in reaction to the bill.
Bleeding Kansas
“Bleeding Kansas” was the name bestowed upon the period immediately
following the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Congress, and for good reason.
Historians have suggested that the small war that occurred in Kansas could well be seen
as the beginning of the Civil War,16 or at least a practice run at it. Settlers with both proand antislavery sentiments hurried into Kansas in an attempt to have enough votes there
to sway the slavery decision in their favor. From the North, “New England abolitionists
formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company to finance the movement of abolitionist
settlers to the West.”17 In all, around 4200 settlers came from New England, but only a
small amount with the support of the Company. Most free soil settlers came from the
Midwestern states that neighbored Kansas and Nebraska. From the South, a band of men
called border ruffians were led in for the sole purpose of voting illegally in the elections.
It was later discovered by a congressional investigation that roughly 4900 of the 6300
votes cast in the legislative elections in Kansas were fraudulent.18 Naturally, antislavery
settlers refused to accept the authority of this government due to its complete
illegitimacy. Incidents of violence became widespread, including the infamous
Pottawatomie Massacre, in which abolitionist John Brown, along with a band of men,
brutally murdered five proslavery settlers in Kansas.
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 160.
Steckmesser, The Westward Movement, 300.
17
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 160.
18
Ibid., 161.
15
16
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The government wanted to respond to the events in a proper manner that would
settle the issue and quell the continually escalating violence. The illicit proslavery
government, despite the fraudulent election, attempted to make peace and legitimize their
authority by drafting a constitution at the town of Lecompton, and sending it to
Washington for ratification by the federal government. President James Buchanan was in
full support of the measure, and “was determined to admit Kansas under the proslavery
Lecompton constitution of 1857, but the territory’s free-state majority rejected this
document in a referendum.”19 Senator Douglas saw this as an infringement of his idea of
popular sovereignty, and also refused to accept the constitution. The fighting continued
for several more years until Kansas was finally admitted as a free state in 1861, following
the secession of the South.
Discordant Ideologies
Conflict such as what occurred as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was, for
the most part, inevitable in mid-19th century America. The country was completely split
over differing ideas and values, a rift that drove them to war against each other. Both
North and South were fighting for a way of life, and Kansas had the misfortune of being
one of the places where that struggle was played out in real time. This conflict of
interests was played out in the context of the slavery question. However, “the quarrel
between North and South, it must be stressed, was over the expansion of slavery, not its
existence.”20 Most people in the North were not particularly antislavery; they merely
wanted to keep it restricted to the South. They perceived a dangerous threat to their
19
20
Steckmesser, The Westward Movement, 163.
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 158.
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power if slavery were allowed to expand to the West. They deeply feared the agricultural
monopoly of the South, especially in the cotton market. After all, “the yield of raw
cotton in the South had doubled every decade after 1800; no Northern commodity
matched that record.”21 The South’s ability to produce the quantity of cotton they did to
enable such yields was purely a result of cheap and plentiful slave labor. To allow the
expansion of the institution into the West, giving the South more opportunity for even
greater dominance in the agricultural field, was a notion that the North refused to
entertain.
Though reductionist, it is not entirely unfair to say that the South was merely
trying to protect their way of life against Northern aggression. It was the North that
perceived a far greater problem than the South did, anxious about the extension of
Southern power at their expense. The idea of Southern occupation of the West meant that
the North would not be able to further “a society based on equality, enterprise, and
constant competition…such a prospect was intolerable to the free white farmers, who
[regarded] these lands as reserved for themselves.”22 Northerners believed that they
needed the land in the West to further propagate their societal ideals, and they knew that
they “would be unable to compete with slaveholders who commanded the unpaid labor of
blacks. Without access to the West, opportunity in the North would decline, and the
North, too, would begin to evolve into a class society with great extremes of wealth and
poverty.”23 This is why the Kansas question became such an arduous one. The North
understood it as an act against them. They thought that “if slavery could be foisted on
Kansas, it could be foisted on all the North, and they were determined to stop its
21
Ibid., 159.
Steckmesser, The Westward Movement, 297-298.
23
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 159.
22
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expansion.”24 The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act created a huge controversy in the
North entirely because of this point, and “the despicableness of this new scheme was
two-fold; it made freedom and slavery coequal from the national point of view, and it
abrogated a solemn compact.”25 The infuriation in the North over an apparent trouncing
of their ideals meant that a fracas of considerable proportions was destined to ensue.
This all begs two questions: namely, why Senator Douglas would have pushed for
introducing such an act in the first place, and why the South would have accepted these
measures. Historians have speculated about his motives in introducing the KansasNebraska Act, and, to be sure, one of his motives was that he “naturally wanted the
transcontinental railroad for his own city [of Chicago].”26 The settlement of this area was
necessary for that because it was believed by Northerners to be the most logical route for
a railroad to take. At that point it was largely uninhabited Indian territory in need of
settlement. However, while this appeased Northerners, it was a far from favorable option
for those in the South, who wanted the line to run closer to them for obvious reasons. To
address this issue and “placate Southern congressmen, he made two damaging
concessions…Douglas agreed to an explicit repeal of [the 36º 30’] prohibition, opening
the territory to slavery. He also agreed to split the region into two territories, Kansas and
Nebraska,”27 assuming that Northern sentiments would abide in Nebraska, while
Southern interests be protected in Kansas. This concession to the South resulted in
accusations of him “sacrificing the tranquility of the nation to satisfy his presidential
Louis Filler, “Slavery and Antislavery,” in Main Problems in American History, Vol. 1, eds. Howard H.
Quint, Dean Albertson, Milton Cantor (Homewood, IL: The Dorsey Press, 1964) , 291.
25
Schouler, History of the United States, 289.
26
Williams, et. al., A History of the United States, 536.
27
R.D. Monroe, “The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Rise of the Republican Party, 1854-1856”, Abraham
Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, Northern Illinois University Library, 2000
<http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/biography6text.html> (28 March 2006).
24
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ambitions,”28 for which he needed Southern support. Indeed, at this time, the Democrats
were divided along the same lines as the country itself, and trying to appease both sides
in a matter such as this was Douglas’s way of gaining support from them.
The question of why the South would have been satisfied with Douglas’s
propositions is another difficult question. In all reality, Southerners did not have the
resources or manpower to settle even one of the territories, and so it has been suggested
that “the South accepted Douglas’s bill largely to gain a theoretical victory: for the
satisfaction of having Congress declare open to slavery a region from which previously it
had been excluded.”29 The South was well aware of the benefits that could be had by
extending the areas into which slavery was present. Douglas also succeeded in appeasing
them with putting forward the suggestion that “the question of slavery, which had
seemingly been answered, was to be decided by ‘popular sovereignty’—allowing the
territorial legislatures to decide.”30 Douglas’s idea of popular sovereignty meant that
slavery could be excluded from a territory by a vote as well as permitted, “though many
Southerners who voted for the measure did not understand it that way. They took popular
sovereignty to mean the same thing as [John C.] Calhoun’s doctrine of noninterference by
the federal government:”31 that the authority for such decisions properly lay in the hands
of the state. In essence, the South was working for exactly the same goal as the North—
protecting their own interests while seeking to contain those on the other side of the
sectional divide. It meant protection of a way of life and of an ideology in the face of
28
Potter, The Impending Crisis, 163.
Williams, et. al., A History of the United States, 537.
30
“Kansas-Nebraska Act,” U.S. History.com, 2000-2005 <http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h83.html> (28
March 2006).
31
Williams, et. al., A History of the United States, 537.
29
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opposition and oppression from a power that, in one way or another, threatened to destroy
those very things.
Concluding Observations
The centrality of the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the conflict of national sectionalism
cannot be disputed. The implications of the introduction of the bill “created a political
upheaval that would culminate in the Civil War.”32 Residents of North and South clearly
saw the issue as a struggle between freedom and slavery, the clash of belief systems that
were foundational to their respective worldviews. While Southerners were, to some
degree, satisfied with the bill, Northerners were utterly outraged, and viewed Douglas’s
move of repealing the Missouri Compromise as “not just a political maneuver…[but] the
result of an atrocious plot…he was a Judas, a Benedict Arnold, selling Nebraska into
slavery. What he did was not a mistake; it was a criminal betrayal.”33 Indeed, Douglas
himself remarked that he could travel from Boston to Chicago solely by the light of his
burning effigies.34 It was a problem not simply confined to Congress, but one which
every person in the United States at that time was concerned about. Senator Charles
Sumner of Massachusetts termed the whole situation the “Crime against Kansas”, stating
that the fundamental result of the bill was “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to
the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved desire for a
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 160.
Potter, The Impending Crisis, 164.
34
White, It’s Your Misfortune, 160.
32
33
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new Slave State, hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of
Slavery in the National Government.”35
Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the newly organized territories were to
decide for themselves by a vote of popular sovereignty whether or not they would be
slave or free. This direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 incited a
violent reaction in the escalating struggle between North and South that would eventually
culminate in the Civil War. The bill, the work of Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, did
nothing more than fuel a blazing fire, which, at that point, was already out of control. It
erupted into a physical conflict that embodied the ideological struggle of that time, and
drove an immense wedge deeper into an already divided country. With this outcome, it is
hard to believe that the initial discussion merely pertained to the location of a railroad.
Charles Sumner, “The Crime Against Kansas,” in American History: A Concise Documents Collection –
Vol. 1: to 1877, ed. Douglas Bukowski (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 230.
35
13
Works Cited
Filler, Louis. “Slavery and Antislavery,” in Main Problems in American History, Vol. 1.
eds. Howard H. Quint, Dean Albertson, and Milton Cantor. Homewood, IL: The
Dorsey Press, 1964.
“Kansas-Nebraska Act.” U.S. History.com, 2000-2005 <http://www.u-shistory.com/pages/h83.html> (28 March 2006).
Lincoln, Abraham. “House Divided Speech,” The History Place, 2005
<http://www.historyplace.com/lincoln/divided.htm> (28 March 2006).
Monroe, R.D. “The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Rise of the Republican Party, 18541856”, Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project, Northern Illinois
University Library, 2000 <http://lincoln.lib.niu.edu/biography6text.html> (28
March 2006).
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher. New
York, NY: Harper & Row Publishers, 1976.
Schouler, James. History of the United States of America Under the Constitution, Vol.
V:1847-1861. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead & Company Publishers, 1894.
Steckmesser, Kent Ladd. The Westward Movement: A Short History. New York, NY:
McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1969.
Sumner, Charles. “The Crime against Kansas,” in American History: A Concise
Documents Collection—Vol. 1: to 1877, ed. Donald Bukowski. Boston, MA:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999.
White, Richard. It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the
American West. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991.
Wikipedia. “Missouri Compromise,” Wikipedia. 28 March 2006.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_compromise> (28 March 2006).
Williams, T. Harry, Richard N. Current, and Frank Freidel. A History of the United
States to 1876. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.
14
Wilson, Gaye. “The Louisiana Purchase,” Monticello: The Home of Thomas Jefferson,
March 2003 <http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/lewisandclark/louisiana.html>
(24 March 2006).
15