Chapter 15 - Review

US:  A Narrative History Volume 1 – Chapter 15 Review

The Union Broken [1850-1861]

The Sacking of a Town in Kansas

Into town they rode, several hundred strong, their faces flushed with excitement. They were unshaven, rough-talking men, “armed … to the teeth with rifles and revolvers, cutlasses and bowie-knives.” At the head of the procession an American flag flapped softly in the warm May breeze. Alongside it was another with a crouching tiger emblazoned on black and white stripes, followed by banners proclaiming “Southern Rights” and “The Superiority of the White Race.” At the rear rolled five artillery pieces, which were quickly dragged into range of the town's main street. Watching intently from a window in his office, Josiah Miller, the editor of the Lawrence Kansas Free State, predicted, “Well, boys, we're in for it.” For the residents of Lawrence, Kansas, the worst seemed at hand. The town had been founded by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, a Yankee association that recruited settlers in an effort to keep Kansas Territory from becoming a slave state. Accepting Stephen Douglas's idea that the people should decide the status of slavery, the town's residents intended to see to it that under this doctrine of popular sovereignty Kansas entered the Union as a free state. Emigrants from the neighboring slave state of Missouri were equally determined that no “abolition tyrants” or “negro thieves” would control the territory. There had been conflict in Kansas almost immediately: land disputes, horse thievery, shootings on both sides. In the ensuing turmoil, the federal government seemed to back the proslavery forces. In the spring of 1856 a U.S. district court indicted several of Lawrence's leading citizens for treason, and federal marshal Israel Donaldson led a posse, swelled by volunteers from across the Missouri border, to Lawrence on May 20 to make the arrests. Meanwhile, Lawrence's “committee of safety” had agreed on a policy of nonresistance. Most of those indicted had fled, but Donaldson arrested two men without incident. Then he dismissed his posse. The posse, however, was not ready to go home. Already thoroughly liquored up, it marched into town cheering. Ignoring the pleas of some leaders, its members smashed the presses of two newspapers, the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State. Then the horde unleashed its wrath on the now-deserted Free State Hotel, which more closely resembled a fort. The invaders unsuccessfully attempted to batter it down with cannon fire and blow it up with gunpowder; finally they put a torch to the building. When the mob finally rode off, it left the residents of Lawrence unharmed but thoroughly terrified. Retaliation by free state partisans was not long in coming. Hurrying north along a different road to Lawrence, an older man with a grim face and steely eyes heard the news the next morning that the town had been attacked. “Old Man Brown,” as everyone called him, was on his way with several of his sons to provide reinforcements. A severe, God-fearing Calvinist, John Brown was also a staunch abolitionist who had once remarked to a friend that he believed “God had raised him up on purpose to break the jaws of the wicked.” Brooding over the failure of the free-staters to resist the “slave hounds” from Missouri, Brown headed toward Pottawatomie Creek on the night of May 24, 1856, with half a dozen others, including his sons. Announcing that they were “the Northern Army” come to serve justice, they burst into the cabin of James Doyle, a proslavery man from Tennessee, with cutlasses drawn. As Brown marched off Doyle and his three sons, Doyle's terrified wife, Mahala, begged him to spare her youngest, and the old man relented. The others were led no more than 100 yards down the road before Owen and Salmon Brown hacked them to death with broadswords. Old Man Brown then walked up to James Doyle's body and put a bullet through his forehead. Before the night was done, two more cabins had been visited and two more proslavery settlers brutally executed. Not one of the five murdered men owned a single slave or had any connection with the raid on Lawrence.

Brown's action precipitated a new wave of fighting in Kansas, and controversy throughout the nation. “Everybody here feels as if we are upon a volcano,” remarked one congressman in Washington. The country was indeed atop a smoldering volcano that would finally erupt in the spring of 1861, showering civil war, death and destruction across the land. Popular sovereignty, the last remaining moderate solution to the controversy over the expansion of slavery, had failed dismally in Kansas. The violence and disorder in the territory provided a stark reply to Stephen Douglas's proposition: What could be more peaceable, more fair than the notion of popular sovereignty?

Sectional Changes in American Society

The road to war was not a straight or short one. Six years elapsed between the Compromise of 1850 and the crisis in “Bleeding Kansas.” Another five years would pass before the first shot was fired. And the process of separation involved more than ineffective politicians and an unwillingness to compromise. As we have seen, Americans were bound together by a growing transportation network, by national markets, and by a national political system. These social and political ties—the “cords of Union,” Calhoun called them—could not be severed all at once. Increasingly, however, the changes occurring in American society heightened sectional tensions. As the North continued to industrialize, its society came into conflict with that of the South. The Old Northwest, which had long been a political ally of the South, became more closely linked to the East. The coming of civil war, in other words, involved social and economic changes as well as political ones.

The Growth of a Railroad Economy

By the time the Compromise of 1850 produced a lull in the tensions between North and South, the American economy had left behind the depression of the early 1840s and was roaring again. Its basic structure, however, was changing. Cotton remained the nation's major export, but it was no longer the driving force for American economic growth. After 1839 this role was taken over by the construction of a vast railroad network covering the eastern half of the continent. By 1850 the United States possessed more than 9,000 miles of track; 10 years later it had over 30,000 miles, more than the rest of the world combined. Much of the new construction during the 1850s occurred west of the Appalachian Mountains. Because western railroads ran through less settled areas, they were especially dependent on public aid. State and local governments made loans to rail companies and sometimes exempted them temporarily from taxes. About a quarter of the cost of railroad construction came from state and local governments, but federal land grants were crucial, too. By mortgaging or selling the land to farmers, the railroad raised construction capital and also stimulated settlement, which increased its business and profits. On a national map, the rail network in place by 1860 looked impressive, but these lines were not fully integrated. A few trunk-line roads such as the New York Central had combined a number of smaller lines to facilitate the shipment of freight. But roadbeds had not yet been standardized, so that no fewer than 12 different gauges, or track widths, were in use. Moreover, cities at the end of rail lines jealously strove to maintain their commercial advantages, not wanting to connect with competing port cities for fear that freight would pass through to the next city down the line. The effect of the new lines rippled outward through the economy. Farmers along the tracks began to specialize in cash crops and market them in distant locations. With their profits they purchased manufactured goods that earlier they might have made at home. Before the railroad reached Athens, Tennessee, the surrounding counties produced about 25,000 bushels of wheat, which sold for less than 50 cents a bushel. Once the railroad came, farmers in these same counties grew 400,000 bushels and sold their crop at a dollar a bushel. Railroads also stimulated other areas of the economy, notably the mining and iron industries.

The new rail networks shifted the direction of western trade. In 1840 most northwestern grain was shipped down the Mississippi River to the bustling port of New Orleans. But low water made steamboat travel risky in summer, and ice shut down traffic in winter. Products such as lard, tallow, and cheese quickly spoiled if stored in New Orleans's sweltering warehouses. Increasingly, traffic from the Midwest flowed west to east, over the new rail lines. Chicago became the region's hub, linking the farms of the upper Midwest to New York and other eastern cities by more than 2,000 miles of track in 1855. Thus, while the value of goods shipped by river to New Orleans continued to increase, the South's overall share of western trade dropped dramatically. These new patterns of commerce and agriculture weakened the traditional political alliance between the South and the West, which had been based on shared economic interests. “The power of cotton over the financial affairs of the Union has in the last few years rapidly diminished,” the Democratic Review remarked in 1849, “and bread stuffs will now become the governing power.”

Railroads and the Prairie Environment

As railroad lines fanned out from Chicago, farmers began to acquire open prairie land in Illinois and then Iowa, putting its deep black soil into production. Commercial agriculture transformed this remarkable treeless environment. To settlers accustomed to woodlands, the thousands of square miles of tall grass were an awesome sight. Indian grass, Canadian wild rye, and native big bluestem all grew higher than a person. In 1838 Edmund Flagg gazed upon “the tall grasstops waving in … billowy beauty in the breeze; the narrow pathway winding off like a serpent over the rolling surface, disappearing and reappearing till lost in the luxuriant herbage.” Long-grass prairies had their perils too: summer or winter storms sent travelers searching for the shelter of trees along river valleys. Dewitt Smith recalled the fierce green-headed flies awaiting the unsuspecting. “A journey across the big praries was, in the summer time, undertaken only at night,” he recalled, “because on a hot summer day horses would be literally stung and worried to death.” Because eastern plows could not penetrate the densely tangled roots of prairie grass, the earliest settlers erected farms along the boundary separating the forest from the prairie. In 1837, however, John Deere patented a sharp-cutting steel plow that sliced through the sod without soil sticking to the blade. In addition, Cyrus McCormick refined a mechanical reaper that harvested 14 times more wheat with the same amount of labor. By the 1850s McCormick was selling 1,000 reapers a year and could not keep up with demand, while Deere turned out 10,000 plows annually. The new commercial farming fundamentally altered the landscape and the environment. Indians had grown corn in the region for years, but never in such large fields as did white farmers, whose surpluses were shipped east. Prairie farmers also introduced new crops that were not part of the earlier ecological system, notably wheat, along with fruits and vegetables. Native grasses were replaced by a small number of plants cultivated as commodities. Western farmers also altered the landscape by reducing the annual fires, often set by Indians, that had kept the prairie free from trees. In the fires' absence, trees reappeared on land not in cultivation and, if undisturbed, eventually formed woodlots. The earlier unbroken landscape gave way to independent farms, each fenced in the precise checkerboard pattern established by the Northwest Ordinance. It was an artificial ecosystem of animals, woodlots, and crops whose large, uniform layout made western farms more efficient than the irregular farms in the East.

Railroads and the Urban Environment

Railroads transformed the urban environment as well. Communities soon recognized that their economic survival depended on creating adequate rail links to the countryside and to major urban markets. Large cities feared they would be left behind in the struggle to be the dominant city in the region. Smaller communities saw their very survival at stake in the battle for rail connections. When the new railroad line bypassed the prairie village of Auburn, Illinois, its fate was sealed, and residents quickly abandoned it for more promising locations.

Even communities that obtained rail links found the presence of this new technology difficult to adjust to. When a railroad began serving nearby Jacksonville, Illinois, merchants complained about the noise, dirt, and billowing smoke when locomotives hissed through the business district. “Many of the people were as much scared as the horses at the steaming monster,” recalled one resident. After a few years, the tracks were relocated on the outskirts of town. Jacksonville's experience became the norm: increasingly communities kept railroads away from fashionable neighborhoods and shopping areas. As the tracks became a physical manifestation of social and economic divisions, the notion of living “on the wrong side of the tracks” became crucial to defining the urban landscape.

Rising Industrialization

On the eve of the Civil War, 60 percent of American laborers worked on farms. In 1860, for the first time, that figure dropped below 50 percent in the North. The expansion of commercial agriculture spurred the growth of industry. Of the 10 leading American industries, 8 processed raw materials produced by agriculture, including flour milling and the manufacture of textiles, shoes, and woolens. (The only exceptions were iron and machinery.) Industrial growth also spurted during the 1850s as water power was increasingly replaced by steam, since there were only a fixed number of water-power sites. Most important, the factory system of organizing labor and the technology of interchangeable parts spread to other areas of the economy. Many industries during the 1850s adopted interchangeable parts. Isaac Singer began using them in 1851 to mass-produce sewing machines, which made possible the ready-made clothing industry, while workers who assembled farm implements performed a single step in the process over and over again. By 1860 the United States had nearly a billion dollars invested in manufacturing, almost twice as much as in 1849. And, for the first time, less than half the workers in the North were employed in agriculture.

Immigration

The surge of industry required a large factory labor force. Natural increase helped swell the population to more than 30 million by 1860, but only in part, since the birthrate had begun to decline. On the eve of the Civil War the average white mother bore five children, compared to seven at the turn of the century. It was the beginning of mass immigration to America during the mid-1840s that kept population growth soaring. In the 20 years from 1820 to 1840, about 700,000 newcomers had entered the United States. That figure jumped to 1.7 million in the 1840s, then to 2.6 million in the 1850s. Though even greater numbers arrived after the Civil War, as a percentage of the nation's total population, the wave from 1845 to 1854 was the largest influx of immigrants in American history. Most newcomers were young people in the prime of life: out of 224,000 arrivals in 1856, only 31,000 were under 10 and only 20,000 were over 40.

Certainly the booming economy and the lure of freedom drew immigrants, but they were also pushed by deteriorating conditions in Europe. In Ireland, a potato blight created an Gorta Mór—the “Great Famine,” leaving potatoes rotting in the fields. The blight may well have spread from the United States and Canada, and it also infected Europe generally. But Ireland suffered more, because nearly a third of its population depended almost entirely on the potato for food. “They are all gone—clean gone,” wrote a priest in the Irish town of Galway. “If travelling by night, you would know when a potato field was near by the smell.” In 1846 and for several years following, as many as a million Irish perished, while a million and a half more emigrated, two-thirds to the United States. The Irish tended to be poorer than other immigrant groups of the day. Although the Protestant Scots-Irish continued as before to emigrate, the decided majority of the Irish who came after 1845 were Catholic. The newcomers were generally mostly unmarried younger sons and daughters of hard-pressed rural families. Because they were poor and unskilled, the Irish congregated in the cities, where the women performed domestic service and took factory jobs and the men did manual labor.

Germans and Scandinavians also had economic reasons for leaving Europe. They included small farmers whose lands had become marginal or who had been displaced by landlords, and skilled workers thrown out of work by industrialization. Others fled religious persecution. Some, particularly among the Germans, left after the liberal revolutions of 1848 failed, in order to live under the free institutions of the United States. Since coming to America, wrote a Swede who settled in Iowa in 1850, “I have not been compelled to pay a penny for the privilege of living. Neither is my cap worn out from lifting it in the presence of gentlemen.” Unprecedented unrest and upheaval prevailed in Europe in 1848, the so-called year of revolutions. The famine that had driven so many Irish out of their country was part of a larger food shortage caused by a series of poor harvests. Mounting unemployment and overburdened relief programs increased suffering. In this situation middle-class reformers, who wanted civil liberty and a more representative government, joined forces with lower-class workers to overthrow several regimes, sometimes by also appealing to nationalist feelings. France, Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Prussia all witnessed major popular uprisings. Although these revolts succeeded at first, they were all crushed by the forces of the old order. Liberal hopes for a more open, democratic society suffered a severe setback. In the aftermath of this failure, a number of hard-pressed German workers and farmers, as well as disillusioned radicals and reformers, emigrated to the United States, the symbol of democratic liberalism in the world. They were joined by the first significant migration from Asia, as thousands of Chinese headed to the gold rush in California and other strikes (see page 372). This migration was simply part of a century-long phenomenon, as approximately 50 million Europeans, largely from rural areas, would migrate to the Western Hemisphere. Factories came more and more to depend on immigrant labor, including children, since newcomers would work for lower wages and were less prone to protest harsh working conditions. The shift to an immigrant workforce could be seen most clearly in the textile industry, where by 1860 more than half the workers in New England mills were foreign-born. Tensions between native- and foreign-born workers, as well as among immigrants of various nationalities, made it difficult for workers to unite. The sizable foreign-born population in many American cities severely strained urban resources. Immigrants who could barely make ends meet were forced to live in overcrowded, unheated tenement houses, damp cellars, and even shacks—“the hall was dark and reeking with the worst filth,” reported one New York journalist; the house was “filled with little narrow rooms, each one having five or six occupants; all very filthy.” Urban slums became notorious for crime and drinking, which took a heavy toll on families and the poor. In the eyes of many native-born Americans, immigrants were to blame for driving down factory wages and pushing American workers out of jobs. Overshadowing these complaints was a fear that America might not be able to assimilate the new groups, with their unfamiliar social customs, strange languages, and national pride. These fears sparked an outburst of political nativism in the mid-1850s.

Southern Complaints

With British and northern factories buying cotton in unprecedented quantities, southern planters prospered in the 1850s. Their operations, like those of northern commercial farmers, became more highly capitalized to keep up with the demand. But instead of machinery, white southerners invested in slaves. During the 1850s the price of prime field hands reached record levels. Nonetheless, a number of southern nationalists, who advocated that the South should become a separate nation, pressed for greater industrialization to make the region more independent. “At present, the North fattens and grows rich upon the South,” one Alabama newspaper complained in 1851, noting that “we purchase all our luxuries and necessities from the North,” including clothing, shoes, implements and machinery, saddles and carriages, and even books. But most southerners ignored such pleas. As long as investments in cotton and slaves absorbed most of the South's capital, efforts to promote southern industry made little headway. Despite southern prosperity, the section's leaders complained that the North used its power over banking and commerce to convert the South into a colony. In the absence of any significant southern shipping, northern intermediaries controlled the South's commodities through a complex series of transfers from planter to manufacturer. Storage and shipping charges, insurance, port fees, and commissions together added an estimated 20 percent to the cost of cotton and other commodities. These revenues went into the pockets of northern merchants, shippers, and bankers. The idea that the South was a colony of the North was inaccurate, but southern whites found it a convincing explanation of the North's growing wealth. More important, it reinforced their resistance to federal aid for economic development, which they were convinced would inevitably enrich the North at southern expense. This attitude further weakened the South's political alliance with the West, which needed federal aid for transportation. White southerners also feared that the new tide of immigration would shift the sectional balance of power. Some immigrants did settle in the South's few cities, but most shunned the region, because they did not want to compete with cheap slave labor. The lack of industry and the limited demand for skilled labor also shunted immigrants northward. As a result, the North surged even further ahead of the South in population, thereby strengthening its control of the House of Representatives and heightening southern concern that the North would rapidly settle the western territories.

The Political Realignment of the 1850s

When Franklin Pierce (he pronounced it “Purse”) assumed the presidency in 1853, he was only 48 years old, the youngest man yet to be elected president. He was also a supporter of the “Young America” movement of the Democratic party, which eagerly looked to spread democracy across the globe by annexing additional territory to the United States. The believers in Young America felt it idle to argue about slavery when the nation could be developing new resources. But they failed to appreciate how each new plan for expansion would stir up the slavery issue. In 1853 Pierce did manage to conclude the Gadsden Purchase, thereby gaining control of about 45,000 square miles of Mexican desert that contained the most practical southern route for a transcontinental railroad. Pierce had no success, however, with his major goal, the acquisition of Cuba. Spain rebuffed all efforts to purchase the rich sugar-producing region in which slavery had once been strong and still existed. Then, in 1854, the American ministers meeting at Ostend in Belgium confidentially recommended that if Spain would not sell Cuba, the island should be seized. The contents of the “Ostend Manifesto” soon leaked, and Pierce was forced to renounce any notion of acquiring Cuba by force. In any case the president soon had his hands full with the proposals of another Democrat of the Young America stamp, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

Known as the Little Giant, Douglas was ambitious, bursting with energy, and impatient to get things done. As chairman of the Senate's Committee on Territories, he was eager to organize federal lands west of Missouri as part of his program for economic development. And as a citizen of Illinois, he wanted Chicago selected as the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad to California. Chicago would never be chosen over St. Louis and New Orleans, however, unless the rest of the Louisiana Purchase was organized, for any northern rail route would have to run through that region. Under the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery was prohibited in this portion of the Louisiana Purchase. Douglas had already tried in 1853 to organize the area while keeping a ban on slavery—only to have his bill voted down by southern opposition in the Senate.

Bowing to southern pressure, the Illinois leader removed the prohibition on slavery that had been in effect for 34 years. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in May 1854. The new act created two territories: Kansas, directly west of Missouri, and a much larger Nebraska Territory, located west of Iowa and the Minnesota Territory. The Missouri Compromise was explicitly repealed. Instead, popular sovereignty was to determine the status of slavery in both territories, though it was left unclear whether residents of Kansas and Nebraska could prohibit slavery at any time or only at the time of statehood, as southerners insisted. Still, most members of Congress assumed that Douglas had split the region into two territories so that each section could claim another state: Kansas would be slave and Nebraska free. The Kansas-Nebraska Act outraged northern Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers alike. Critics rejected Douglas's contention that popular sovereignty would keep the territories free. As always, most northerners spoke little of the moral evils of slavery; it was the chance that the Slave Power might gain new territory that concerned them. So great was the northern outcry that Douglas joked he could “travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own burningeffigy.”

The Collapse of the Second American Party System

The furor over the Kansas-Nebraska Act laid bare the underlying social and economic tensions that had developed between the North and the South. These tensions put mounting pressure on the political parties, and in the 1850s the Jacksonian party system collapsed. Voters who had been loyal to one party for years, even decades, began switching allegiances, while new voters were mobilized. By the time the process of realignment was completed, a new party system had emerged, divided this time along clearly sectional lines. In part, the old party system decayed because new problems had replaced the traditional economic issues of both Whigs and Democrats. The Whigs alienated many of their traditional Protestant supporters by openly seeking the support of Catholics and recent immigrants. Then, too, the growing agitation by Protestant reformers for the prohibition of alcohol divided both parties, especially the Whigs. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act provided the final blow, dividing the two major parties along sectional lines. Northern congressional Whigs, who unanimously opposed the bill, found themselves deserted by virtually all their southern colleagues. And fully half the northern Democratic representatives in the House voted against Douglas's bill. In such an unstable atmosphere, independent parties flourished. The most dramatic challenge to the Whigs and Democrats came first from a movement worried about the recent flood of immigrants.

The Know- Nothings

New York City was the primary gateway for immigrants, and it was here that the American party, a secret nativist society, first organized. Its members were sworn to secrecy and instructed to answer inquiries by replying “I know nothing.” In 1853 the Know-Nothings, as they were quickly dubbed, began organizing in several other states; after only a year they had become the fastest-growing party in the nation. Significantly, 1854 also marked the peak of the new wave of immigration. Taking as its slogan “Americans should rule America,” the American party advocated that immigrants be forced to wait not 5 but 21 years before becoming naturalized citizens. It also called on voters to oust from office politicians who openly bid for foreign and Catholic votes. In the 1854 elections the Know-Nothings won a series of remarkable victories, as former Whigs flocked to the new party in droves. Fueled by its success the American party turned its attention south, and in a few months it had organized in every state of the Union. With perhaps a million voters enrolled in its lodges in 1855, Know-Nothing leaders confidently predicted that they would elect the next president. Yet only a year later the party had collapsed as quickly as it had risen. Many Know-Nothing officeholders proved woefully incompetent. Voters deserted them when the party failed to enact its program. But the death knell of the party was rising sectional tensions. In 1856 most northern delegates walked out of the American party's national convention when it adopted a proslavery platform.

Significantly, they deserted to the other new party, the Republicans. This party, unlike the Know-Nothings, had no base in the South. It intended to elect a president by sweeping the free states, which controlled a majority of the electoral votes.

The Republicans and Bleeding Kansas

Initially, the Republican Party made little headway in the North. Many moderate Whigs and Democrats viewed it as too radical. A Democratic newspaper expressed the prevailing view when it declared, “Nobody believes that this Republican movement can prove the basis of a permanent party.” Such predictions, however, did not reckon with the emotions stirred up by developments in Kansas. Most early settlers migrated to Kansas for the same reasons other white Americans headed west—the chance to prosper in a new land. But Douglas's idea of popular sovereignty transformed the process of settlement into a referendum on slavery in the territories. A race soon developed between northerners and southerners to settle Kansas first. To the proslavery residents of neighboring Missouri, free-state communities such as Lawrence seemed ominous threats. “We are playing for a mighty stake,” former senator David Rice Atchison insisted. “If we win, we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean; if we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas and Texas and all the territories; the game must be played boldly.” When the first Kansas elections were held in 1854 and 1855, Missourians poured over the border, seized the polls, and stuffed the ballot boxes. This massive fraud tarnished popular sovereignty at the outset and greatly aroused public opinion in the North. It also provided proslavery forces with a commanding majority in the Kansas legislature, where they promptly expelled the legally elected free-state members and enacted a strict legal code limiting such time-honored rights as freedom of speech, impartial juries, and fair elections. Mobilized into action, the free-staters in the fall of 1855 organized a separate government, drafted a state constitution prohibiting slavery, and asked Congress to admit Kansas as a free state. In such a polarized situation, violence quickly broke out between the two factions, leading to the proslavery attack on Lawrence and to John Brown's reprisals.

The Caning of Charles Sumner

In May 1856, only a few days before the proslavery attack on Lawrence, Republican Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a scathing speech, “The Crime against Kansas.” Sumner not only condemned slavery, but he also deliberately insulted the state of South Carolina and one of its senators, Andrew Butler. Preston S. Brooks, a South Carolina congressman who was related to Butler, was outraged that Sumner had insulted his relative and mocked his state.

Several days later, Brooks strode into the Senate after it had adjourned, went up to Sumner, who was seated at his desk, and proceeded to beat the Massachusetts leader over the head with his cane. The cane shattered from the violence of the attack, but Brooks, swept up in the emotion of the moment, and continued hitting Sumner until the senator collapsed to the floor, drenched in blood. Northerners were shocked to learn that a senator of the United States had been beaten unconscious in the Senate chamber. But what caused them even greater consternation was southern reaction to Sumner's caning—for in his own region, Preston Brooks was lionized as a hero. Instantly, the Sumner caning breathed life into the fledgling Republican party. Its claims about “Bleeding Kansas” and the Slave Power now seemed credible. Sumner, reelected in 1857 by the Massachusetts legislature, was unable to return to the Senate until 1860, his chair left vacant as a symbol of southern brutality.

The Election of 1856

Given the storm that had arisen over Kansas, Democrats concluded that no candidate associated with the repeal of the Missouri Compromise had a chance to win. So the Democrats turned to James Buchanan of Pennsylvania as their presidential nominee. Buchanan's supreme qualification was having the good fortune to have been out of the country when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed. The American party, split badly by the Kansas issue, nominated former president Millard Fillmore. The Republicans chose John C. Frémont, a western explorer who had helped liberate California during the Mexican War. The party's platform denounced slavery as a “relic of barbarism” and demanded that Kansas be admitted as a free state. Throughout the summer the party hammered away on Bleeding Sumner and Bleeding Kansas. A number of principles guided the Republican party, including the ideal of free labor. Slavery degraded labor, Republicans argued, and would inevitably drive free labor out of the territories. Condemning the South as stagnant, hierarchical, and economically backward, Republicans praised the North as a society of opportunity where enterprising individuals could rise through hard work and self-discipline. Stopping the expansion of slavery, they argued, would preserve this heritage of economic independence for white Americans. Republicans by and large remained blind to ways in which industrialization was closing off avenues of social mobility for poor workers. Also important was the moral opposition to slavery, which such works as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had strengthened. Republican speakers and editors stressed that slavery was a moral wrong, that it was incompatible with the ideals of the Republic and Christianity. “Never forget,” Republican leader Abraham Lincoln declared on one occasion, “that we have before us this whole matter of the right and wrong of slavery in this Union, though the immediate question is as to its spreading out into new Territories and States.” More negatively, Republicans gained support by shifting their attacks from slavery itself to the Slave Power, or the political influence of the planter class. Pointing to the Sumner assault and the incidents in Kansas, Republicans contended that the Slave Power had set out to destroy the liberties of northern whites. “The question has passed on from that of slavery for negro servants, to that of tyranny over free white men,” one Republican insisted in the 1856 campaign. All these fears played on a strong northern attachment to the heritage of the American Revolution. Just as the nation's founders had battled against slavery, tyranny, aristocracy, and minority rule, so the North faced the unrepublican Slave Power. “The liberties of our country are in tenfold the danger that they were at the commencement of the American Revolution,” warned one Republican paper. “We then had a distant foe to contend with. Now the enemy is within our borders.” In the election, Buchanan all but swept the South (losing only Maryland to Fillmore) and won enough free states to push him over the top, with 174 electoral votes to Frémont's 114 and Fillmore's 8. Still, the violence in Kansas and Sumner's caning nearly carried Frémont into the presidency. He ran ahead of both Buchanan and Fillmore in the North and won 11 free states out of 16. Had he carried Pennsylvania plus one more state, he would have been elected. For the first time in American history, an antislavery party based entirely in the North threatened to elect a president and snap the bonds of union.

The Worsening Crisis

James Buchanan had spent much of his life in public service: more than 20 years in the House and the Senate, secretary of state under polk, and minister to Russia and to Great Britain. A tall, heavyset man with flowing white hair, he struck White House visitors as exceptionally courteous: an eye defect caused him to tilt his head slightly forward and to one side, which reinforced the impression of deference and attentiveness. A dutiful party member, he had over the years carefully cultivated wide personal support, yet he was a cautious and uninspiring leader who had a strong stubborn streak and deeply resented opposition to his policies. Moderates in both sections hoped that the new president would thwart Republican radicals and secessionists of the Deep South, popularly known as “fire-eaters.” Throughout his career, however, Buchanan had taken the southern position on sectional matters. Moreover, on March 6, 1857, only two days after Buchanan's inauguration, the Supreme Court gave the new administration an unintended jolt with one of the most controversial decisions in its history.

The Dred Scott Decision

The owner of a Missouri slave named Dred Scott had taken him to live for several years in Illinois, a free state, and in the Wisconsin Territory, in what is now Minnesota, where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise. Scott had returned to Missouri with his owner, only to sue eventually for his freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state and a free territory had made him free. His case ultimately went to the Supreme Court. Two northern justices joined all five southern members of the Court in ruling 7 to 2 that Scott remained a slave. The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, who argued that under Missouri law, which took precedence, Scott was still a slave. Had the Court stopped there, the public outcry would have been minimal. But the Court majority believed that they had a responsibility to deal with the larger controversy between the two sections. In particular, Chief Justice Taney wanted to strengthen the judicial protection of slavery. Taney, a former Maryland slaveowner who had freed his slaves, ruled that African Americans could not be and never had been citizens of the United States. Instead, he insisted that at the time the Constitution was adopted, they were “regarded as beings of an inferior order, so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In addition, the Court ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Congress, it declared, had no power to ban slavery from any territory of the United States. While southerners rejoiced at this outcome, Republicans denounced the Court. Their platform declared, after all, that Congress ought to prohibit slavery in all territories. “We know the court … has often over-ruled its own decisions,” Abraham Lincoln observed, “and we shall do what we can to have it over-rule this.” But the decision was sobering. If all territories were now open to slavery, how long would it be before a move was made to reintroduce slavery in the free states? For Republicans, the Court's decision foreshadowed the spread of slavery throughout the West and even throughout the nation. But the decision also threatened Douglas's more moderate solution of popular sovereignty. If Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in a territory, how could it authorize a territorial legislature to do so? Although the Court did not rule on this point, the clear implication of the Dred Scott decision was that popular sovereignty was also unconstitutional. The Court, in effect, had endorsed John C. Calhoun's radical view that slavery was legal in all the territories. It had intended to settle the question of slavery in the territories once and for all. Instead the Court succeeded only in strengthening the forces of extremism in American politics. As the nation grappled with the Dred Scott decision, an economic depression aggravated sectional conflict. Once again, boom gave way to bust as falling wheat prices and contracted credit hurt commercial farmers and overextended railroad investors. The Panic of 1857 was nowhere near as severe as the depression of 1837–1843. But the psychological results were far-reaching, for the South remained relatively untouched. With the price of cotton and other southern commodities still high, southern secessionists hailed the panic as proof that an independent southern nation was economically workable. Insisting that cotton sustained the international economy, James Henry Hammond, a senator from South Carolina, boasted: “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war on it. Cotton is king.”

The Lecompton Constitution

Although the Dred Scott decision and economic depression weakened the bonds of the Union, Kansas remained at the center of the political stage. In June 1857, when the territory elected delegates to draft a state constitution, free-state voters boycotted the election, thereby giving proslavery forces control of the convention that met in Lecompton. The delegates drafted a constitution that made slavery legal. Even more boldly, they scheduled a referendum in which voters could choose only whether to admit additional slaves into the territory. They could not vote against the constitution, and they could not vote to get rid of slavery entirely. Once again, free-staters boycotted the election, and the Lecompton constitution was approved. As a supporter of popular sovereignty, President Buchanan had pledged a free and fair vote on the Lecompton constitution. But the outcome offered him the unexpected opportunity to satisfy his southern supporters by pushing the Lecompton constitution through Congress. This action was too much for Douglas, who broke party ranks and denounced the Lecompton constitution as a fraud. Nevertheless, the administration prevailed in the Senate. Buchanan now pulled out all the stops to gain the necessary votes in the House to admit Kansas as a slave state. But the House, where northern representation was much stronger, rejected the constitution. In a compromise, Congress, using indirect language, returned the constitution to Kansas for another vote. This time it was decisively defeated, 11,300 to 1,788. No doubt remained that as soon as Kansas had sufficient population, it would come into the Union as a free state. The attempt to force slavery on the people of Kansas drove many conservative northerners into the Republican Party. And Douglas, once the Democrats' strongest potential candidate in 1860, now found himself assailed by the southern wing of his party. On top of that, in the summer of 1858, Douglas faced a desperate fight in his race for reelection to the Senate against Republican Abraham Lincoln.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

“He is the strong man of his party … and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West,” Douglas commented when he learned of Lincoln's nomination to oppose him. “He is as honest as he is shrewd, and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.” Tall (6 feet, 4 inches) and gangly, Lincoln had a gaunt face, high cheekbones, deep-socketed gray eyes, and a shock of unruly hair. He appeared awkward as he spoke, never knowing quite what to do with his large, muscular hands. Yet his finely honed logic, his simple, eloquent language, and his sincerity carried the audience with him. His sentences, as spare as the man himself, had none of the oratorical flourishes common in that day. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it,” Lincoln began, in accepting his party's nomination for senator from Illinois in 1858. He quoted a proverb from the Bible:

A house divided against itself cannot stand.

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently halfslave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing, or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

The message echoed through the hall and across the pages of the national press. Born in the slave state of Kentucky, Lincoln had grown up mostly in southern Indiana and central Illinois. He could split rails with the best frontier farmer, loved telling stories, and was at home mixing with ordinary folk. Yet his intense ambition had lifted him above the backwoods from which he came.

He compensated for a lack of formal schooling through disciplined self-education, and he became a shrewd courtroom lawyer of respectable social standing. Known for his sense of humor, he was nonetheless subject to chronic depression, and his eyes often mirrored a deep melancholy. At the age of 25 Lincoln entered the state legislature and soon became an important Whig strategist. After the party's decline he joined the Republicans and became one of their key leaders in Illinois. In a series of seven joint debates Lincoln challenged Douglas to discuss the issues of slavery and the sectional controversy. Douglas joined the debate by portraying Lincoln as a radical whose “House Divided” speech preached sectional warfare. The nation could endure half slave and half free, Douglas declared, as long as states and territories were left alone to regulate their own affairs. Accusing Lincoln of believing that blacks were his equal, Douglas countered that the American government had been “made by the white man, for the white man, to be administered by the white man.” Superb debaters, Douglas and Lincoln nevertheless had very different speaking styles. The deep-voiced Douglas was constantly on the attack, drawing on his remarkable memory and showering points like buckshot in all directions. Employing sarcasm and ridicule rather than humor, he never tried to crack a joke. Lincoln, who had a high-pitched voice and a rather awkward platform manner, developed his arguments more carefully and methodically, and he relied on his sense of humor and unmatched ability as a storyteller to drive his points home to the audience. Lincoln responded by denying any intention to interfere with slavery in the South, but he insisted that the spread of slavery to the territories was a blight on the Republic. Douglas could not be counted on to oppose slavery's expansion, Lincoln warned, for he had already admitted that he didn't care whether slavery was voted “down or up.” For his part, Lincoln denied any “perfect equality between the negroes and white people” and opposed allowing blacks to vote, hold office, or intermarry with whites. But, he concluded, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…. I agree with Judge Douglas [that the negro] is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. At the debate held at Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln asked Douglas how under the Dred Scott decision the people of a territory could lawfully exclude slavery before statehood. Douglas answered, with what became known as the Freeport Doctrine, that slavery could exist only with the protection of law and that slaveowners would never bring their slaves into an area that did not have a slave code. Therefore, Douglas explained, if the people of a territory refused to pass a slave code, slavery would never be established there. In a close race, the legislature elected Douglas to another term in the Senate.*

But Democrats from the South angrily repudiated him and condemned the Freeport Doctrine. Although Lincoln lost, Republicans thought his performance marked him as a presidential contender for 1860.

The Beleaguered South

While northerners increasingly feared that the Slave Power was conspiring to extend slavery into the free states, southerners worried that the “Black Republicans” would hem them in and undermine their political power. The very factors that brought prosperity during the 1850s stimulated the South's sense of crisis. As the price of slaves rose sharply, the proportion of southerners who owned slaves had dropped almost a third since 1830. Land also was being consolidated into larger holdings, evidence of declining opportunity for ordinary white southerners. Furthermore, California and Kansas had been closed to southern slaveholders—unfairly, in their eyes. Finally, Douglas's clever claim that a territory could effectively outlaw slavery using the Freeport Doctrine seemed to negate the Dred Scott decision that slavery was legal in all the territories. The South's growing sense of moral and political isolation made this crisis more acute. By the 1850s slavery had been abolished throughout most of the Americas, and in the United States the South's political power was steadily shrinking. Only the expansion of slavery held out any promise of new slave states needed to preserve the South's political power and protect its way of life. “The truth is,” fumed one Alabama politician, “… the South is excluded from the common territories of the Union. The right of expansion claimed to be a necessity of her continued existence, is practically and effectively denied the South.”

The Road to War

In 1857 John Brown—the abolitionist firebrand—had returned to the east from kansas, consumed with the idea of attacking slavery in the South itself. With financing from a number of prominent northern reformers, brown gathered 21 followers, including 5 free blacks, in hope of fomenting a slave insurrection. On the night of October 16, 1859, the group seized the unguarded federal armory at harpers ferry in virginia. But no slaves rallied to brown's standard: few even lived in the area to begin with. Before long the raiders found themselves holed up in the armory's engine house with hostile townspeople taking potshots at them. Charging with bayonets fixed, federal troops commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee soon captured brown and his band. Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry was yet another blow weakening the forces of compromise and moderation at the nation's political center. The invasion itself was a dismal failure, as were most of the enterprises Brown undertook in his troubled life. But the old man knew how to bear himself with a martyr's dignity. “Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great,” he declared at his trial, “… it would have been all right … to have interfered as I have done in behalf of [God's] despised poor, is no wrong, but a right.” On December 2, 1859, the state of Virginia hanged Brown for treason. Republicans made haste to denounce Brown's raid, lest they be tarred as radicals, but other northerners were less cautious. Ralph Waldo Emerson described Brown as a “saint, whose martyrdom will make the gallows as glorious as the cross,” and on the day of his execution, church bells tolled in many northern cities. Only a minority of northerners endorsed Brown, but southerners were shocked by such public displays of sympathy. And they were firmly convinced that the Republican party was secretly connected to the raid.

A Sectional Election

When Congress convened in December, there were ominous signs everywhere of the growing sectional rift. Intent on destroying Douglas's Freeport Doctrine, southern radicals demanded a congressional slave code to protect slavery in the territories. To northern Democrats, such a platform spelled political death. As one Indiana Democrat put it, “We cannot carry a single congressional district on that doctrine in the state.” At the Democratic convention in April in Charleston, South Carolina, southern radicals boldly pressed their demand for a federal slave code. After a heated debate, however, the convention adopted the Douglas platform upholding popular sovereignty, whereupon the delegations from eight southern states walked out. Unable to agree on a candidate, the convention finally reassembled two months later in Baltimore and nominated Douglas. At this point most of the remaining southern Democrats left in disgust. Joining with the Charleston seceders, they nominated their own candidate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, on a platform supporting a federal slave code. The last major national party had shattered. In May the Republicans met in Chicago, where they turned to Abraham Lincoln, a moderate on the slavery issue who was strong in Illinois and the other northern states the party had lost in 1856. The election that followed was really two contests in one. In the North, which had a majority of the electoral votes, only Lincoln and Douglas had any chance of carrying a state. In the South the race pitted Breckinridge against John Bell of Tennessee, the candidate of the new conservative Constitutional Union party.

Although Lincoln received less than 40 percent of the popular vote and had virtually no support in the South, he won 180 electoral votes, 27 more than needed for election. For the first time, the nation had elected a president who headed a completely sectional party and who was committed to stopping the expansion of slavery.

Secession

Although the Republicans had not won control of either house of Congress, Lincoln's election struck many southerners as a blow of terrible finality. Lincoln had been lifted into office on the strength of the free states alone. With Republicans opposed to slavery's expansion, the South's power base could only shrink. It was not unrealistic, many fire-eaters argued, to believe that Lincoln would use federal aid to induce the border states to voluntarily free their slaves. Once slavery disappeared there, and new states were added, the necessary three-fourths majority would exist to approve a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Or perhaps Lincoln might send other John Browns into the South to stir up more slave insurrections. The Montgomery (Alabama) Mail accused Republicans of intending “to free the Negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” Secession seemed the only alternative left to protect southern equality and liberty. South Carolina, which had challenged federal authority in the nullification crisis, was determined to force the other southern states to act. On December 20, 1860, a popular convention unanimously passed a resolution seceding from the Union. The rest of the Deep South followed, and on February 7, 1861, the states stretching from South Carolina to Texas organized the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis president. But the Upper South and the border states declined to secede, hoping that once again Congress could patch together a settlement. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky proposed a constitutional amendment extending to California the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30'. Slavery would be prohibited north of this line and given federal protection south of it in all territories, including any acquired in the future. Furthermore, Crittenden proposed an “unamendable amendment” to the Constitution, forever preserving slavery in states where it already existed. But the Crittenden Compromise was doomed for the simple reason that the two groups who were required to make concessions—Republicans and secessionists—had no interest in doing so. “The argument is exhausted,” representatives from the Deep South announced, even before Crittenden had introduced his legislative package. “We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people,” Lincoln wrote in opposing compromise. “Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. If we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.” Only the unamendable amendment passed, but war ended any possibility that it would be ratified.

The Outbreak of War

As he prepared to take office Lincoln pondered what to do about secession. In his inaugural address on March 4, he sought to reassure southerners that he had no intention, “directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” But he maintained that “the Union of these states is perpetual,” echoing Andrew Jackson's Proclamation on Nullification, and that no state could leave the Union by its own action. He also announced that he intended to “hold, occupy and possess” federal property and collect customs duties under the tariff. He closed by calling for a restoration of the “bonds of affection” that united all Americans. The new president hoped for time to work out a solution, but on his first day in office he was handed a dispatch from Major Robert Anderson, commander of the federal garrison at Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor. Sumter was one of the few remaining federal outposts in the South. Anderson informed the government that he was almost out of food and that, unless resupplied, he would have to surrender in six weeks. For a month Lincoln looked for a way out, but he finally sent a relief expedition.

As a conciliatory gesture, he notified the governor of South Carolina that supplies were being sent and that if the fleet were allowed to pass, only food, and not men, arms, or ammunition, would be landed. The burden of decision now shifted to Jefferson Davis. From his point of view secession was a constitutional right and the Confederacy was a legitimate government. To allow the United States to hold property and maintain military forces within the Confederacy would destroy its claim of independence. Davis therefore instructed the Confederate commander at Charleston to demand the immediate surrender of Fort Sumter and, if refused, to open fire. When Anderson declined the ultimatum, Confederate batteries began shelling the fort on April 12 at 4:30 a.m. Some 33 hours later Anderson surrendered. When in response Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to put down the rebellion, four states in the Upper South, led by Virginia, also seceded. Matters had passed beyond compromise.

The Roots of a Divided Society

And so the Union was broken. After 70 years, the forces of sectionalism and separatism had finally outpulled the ties binding “these United States.” Why did affairs come to such a pass?

In some ways, as we have seen, the revolution in markets that transformed the nation during these years served to link together northerners and southerners. The cotton planter in Chapter 10 who rode the steamship Fashion along the Alabama River (“Time's money! Time's money!”) was wearing ready-made clothes manufactured in New York from southern cotton. Chauncey Jerome's clocks from Connecticut were keeping time not only for commercial planters but also for Lowell mill workers like Mary Paul, who learned to measure her lunch break in minutes. Farmers in both Tennessee and Iowa were interested in the price of wheat in New York, for it affected the profits that could be made shipping their grain by the new railroad lines. American society had become far more specialized, and therefore far more interdependent, since the days of Crèvecoeur's self-sufficient farmer of the 1780s. When news of secession spread, many southern white women wore decorative cockades made of woven palmetto leaves and silk. But a specialized economy had not brought unity. For the North, specialization meant more factories, a higher percentage of urban workers, and a greater number of cities and towns. Industry affected Midwestern farmers as well, for their steel plows and McCormick reapers allowed them to farm larger holdings and required greater capital investment in the new machinery. For its part, the South was transformed by the industrial revolution, too, as textile factories made cotton the booming mainstay of its economy. But for all its growth, the region remained largely a rural society. Its prosperity stemmed from expansion westward into new areas of cotton production, not new forms of production or technology. The dominant planter class reinforced its traditional concepts of honor, hierarchy, and deference. Above all, the intensive labor required to produce cotton, rice, and sugar made slavery an inseparable part of the southern way of life—“so intimately mingled with our social conditions,” as one Georgian admitted, “that it would be impossible to eradicate it.” An increasing number of northerners viewed slavery as evil, not so much out of high-minded sympathy toward slaves but as a labor system that threatened the republican ideals of white American society. It fell to the political system to try to resolve sectional conflict through a system of national parties that represented various interest groups and promoted democratic debate. But the political system had critical weaknesses. The American process of electing a president gave the winning candidate a state's entire electoral vote, regardless of the margin of victory. That procedure made a northern sectional party possible, since the Republicans could never have carried an election on the basis of a popular vote alone. In addition, the four-year fixed presidential term allowed Presidents Pierce and Buchanan to remain in office, pursuing disruptive policies on Kansas even after the voters had rejected those policies in the midterm congressional elections in 1854 and 1858. Finally, since 1844 the Democratic party had required a two-thirds vote to nominate its presidential candidate. Unintentionally, this requirement made it difficult to pick any truly forceful leader and gave the South a veto over the party's candidate. Yet the South, by itself, could not elect a president. The nation's republican heritage also contributed to the political system's vulnerability. Ever since the Revolution, when Americans accused the king and Parliament of deliberately plotting to deprive them of their liberties, Americans were on the watch for political conspiracies. Such an outlook often stimulated exaggerated fears, unreasonable conclusions, and excessive reactions. For their part, Republicans emphasized the existence of the Slave Power bent on eradicating northern rights. Southerners, on the other hand, accused the Black Republicans of conspiring to destroy southern equality. Each side viewed itself as defending the country's republican tradition from an internal threat. But in the end, the threat to the Union came not from within but from beyond its borders. As the nation expanded in the 1840s, it incorporated vast new territories, becoming a truly continental republic. And that forced the Union, in absorbing new lands, to define itself anew. If the American frontier had not swept so quickly toward the Pacific, the nation might have been able to postpone the day of reckoning on slavery until some form of gradual emancipation could be adopted. But the luxury of time was not available. The new territories became the battlegrounds for two contrasting ways of life, with slavery at the center of the debate. Elsewhere in the world the push toward abolition grew louder, whether of serfdom in Eastern Europe or of slavery across the globe. Americans who saw the issue in moral terms joined that chorus. They saw no reason why the abolition of slavery should be postponed. In 1850, supporters and opponents of slavery were still willing to compromise on how “the peculiar institution” could expand into the new territories. But a decade later, many Americans both North and South had come to accept the idea of an irrepressible conflict between two societies, one based on freedom, the other on slavery, in which only one side could ultimately prevail. At stake, it seemed, was control of the nation's future. Four years later, as a weary Abraham Lincoln looked back to the beginning of the conflict, he noted, “Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.”

Chapter Overview

This chapter examines the decade that preceded the Civil War. It begins with two dramatic sectional incidents: the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, by a proslavery band in May 1856; and John Brown's retaliatory Pottawatomie massacre. The narrative highlights both the symbolic importance of the struggle in Kansas to both sections and the escalating violence of the decade.

Sectional Changes in American Society

The coming of the war occurred against the backdrop of a fundamental economic transformation in the United States. The spread of railroads opened new lands to development and brought more regions into the wider market. Railroads and high grain prices in Europe stimulated the expansion of commercial agriculture in the North, making grain as crucial as an export commodity as cotton for the national economy. The railroad network also served to link the West economically to the East rather than the South. Previously, most agricultural shipments from the Northwest had gone down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans; in the 1850s, the bulk of this trade now shifted, moving east on railroad lines. At the same time, industry boomed in the North and an immense tide of immigration provided cheap labor for these factories and swelled northern population (and thus political power) at the expense of the South. The arrival of so many immigrants created a number of social problems, particularly in cities where many of the newcomers settled. With cotton prices relatively high, the South remained prosperous throughout the 1850s. Even so, southern leaders complained about their section's dependence on the North for manufactured goods, shipping, and marketing services. Efforts to promote industrialization in the South or diversify its economy failed. The rising cost of slaves also reduced planters' margin of profit.

The Political Realignment of the 1850s

Friction between native-born citizens and immigrants eventually disrupted the Whig party and helped destroy the Jacksonian party system. During the same period, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opening the remaining regions of the Louisiana Purchase to slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. In doing so, it again placed the slavery issue at the center of national politics. Given these strains, the party system crumbled. The first party to benefit from this political chaos was the nativist Know-Nothings, who called for restrictions on the political power of immigrants and Catholics. The party grew rapidly in 1854 and 1855, as thousands of voters enrolled in its lodges. So many Whigs joined the Know-Nothings that the Whig party could no longer remain competitive and disappeared. Yet sectional issues also split the Know-Nothing organization at the height of its power. A race ensued between northerners and southerners to settle Kansas; massive proslavery fraud marred the first elections in the territory. Before long, fighting broke out in Kansas between proslavery and antislavery partisans. The continuing turmoil in Kansas and the attack on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate Chamber in May 1856 greatly strengthened the new sectional Republican Party, largely at the expense of the Know-Nothings. Aided by the Kansas and Sumner issues, the Republicans emerged in the 1856 election as the strongest party in the North and the second strongest party in the nation, after the Democrats. The Republican Party opposed the expansion of slavery and argued that the aristocratic Slave Power threatened republican government and the rights of white northerners.

The Worsening Crisis

Despite the Republicans' strong and unexpected showing, the Democrats carried the 1856 election. James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, assumed office in 1857 intending to dampen sectionalism. However, the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court declared that Congress could not prohibit slavery from a territory, ruined the president’s hopes.

The Court’s decision outraged Republicans, for it nullified their principal demand. A depression in 1857, which hurt the North more than the South, further weakened Buchanan’s influence.

Buchanan's attempt to force the admission of Kansas through Congress under the proslavery Lecompton constitution split the Democratic Party along sectional lines. Stephen A. Douglas, the foremost supporter of popular sovereignty and the leading northern Democrat in the country, broke with the president on this issue and opposed the Lecompton constitution as the work of a small minority in Kansas. Congress rejected the Lecompton constitution, but Douglas now stood as the symbol of the deep sectional divisions within the Democratic Party. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln challenged Douglas in Illinois for his senate seat. Douglas narrowly won re-election, but Lincoln's strong race brought him national recognition and stature. Southerners of this period became increasingly fearful of the future. The growing concentration of wealth and land produced concerns that without new lands, slavery and the southern economy would stagnate. Various proposals to relieve the South's internal crisis failed, and more and more southern whites felt morally and politically isolated.

The Road to War

John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859 alarmed southerners, the support this "murderer" received from prominent northern intellectuals created an additional shock among the planter class. Disunion sentiment seemed stronger than ever. The Democratic Party split into two wings in 1860, each with its own presidential candidate. As a result, the presidential election of 1860 became a four-way contest, which Republican Abraham Lincoln won with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. For the first time in American history, a sectional antislavery party had elected a president. Following Lincoln's election, the seven Deep South states seceded and organized the Confederate States of America. Congress defeated proposals to resolve the crisis, including the most important one offered by Senator John Crittenden.The refusal of both Republicans and Deep South secessionist to make concessions doomed all compromise efforts. When Lincoln sent supplies to Fort Sumter's Union garrison, Confederate batteries opened fire and captured the fort. The North rallied to Lincoln's call for troops to restore the Union, and four more southern states–the upper South–seceded. The diverging economies of the two sections, the weaknesses of the nation's political system, the ideology of republicanism with its fears of conspiracies against liberty, and the unique problems posed by slavery had all proven crucial to this outcome. The Civil War had begun.

Review Questions

1. The chapter introduction tells the stories of Lawrence and Pottawatomie, Kansas, to make the point that:

A.    westward migration continued despite the distractions of sectional strife.

B.     it was deliberate, violent acts by an extremist minority that sucked Americans into the Civil War.

C.     the ability of settlers in Kansas to disagree yet still get along with each other shows that the Civil War was not necessarily inevitable.

D.    violence in Kansas discredited popular sovereignty, the only remaining compromise solution to the growing sectional split.

2. What weakened the natural economic and political ties of the South to the West?

A.    Railroads diverted trade from the Mississippi artery to an eastward direction.

B.     Southerners supported federal economic development programs.

C.     Northerners deliberately plotted to establish a colonial relationship over the cotton South.

D.    repeated economic depression in the south convinced northerners that their prosperity no longer depended upon the South.

3. By mid-century, the birth rate was declining, but population continued to grow. The explanation for this paradox is also the explanation for another development in those years:

A.    the rise of the medical and nursing professions in the United States.

B.     the rise of the short-lived American Party.

C.     the Gadsden Purchase.

D.    the Ostend Manifesto.

4. Each of the following groups were significant participants in the immigration to the United States during the 1840s and 1850s EXCEPT:

A.    Irish.

B.     Germans.

C.     Africans.

D.    Scandinavians.

5. Southern leaders did each of the following during the 1850s EXCEPT:

A.    invest their capital in slaves rather than in machinery.

B.     create an industrial base to prepare their region for secession.

C.     complain that northern banking and commercial power was turning the South into a colony.

D.    resisted federal aid for economic development.

  

6. What was the Gadsden Purchase?

A.    Acquisition of a strip of Mexican land as a railroad route

B.     Payment to Britain to clear the last jointly held area in the Oregon Country

C.     An offer to buy Cuba from Spain that was rejected by Congress

D.    An agreement with Russia to obtain Alaska

7. According to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, what would be the status of slavery in those western territories?

A.    Slavery was expressly prohibited.

B.     Slavery was expressly permitted.

C.     Slavery was permitted in Kansas but banned in Nebraska.

D.    The people would decide.

8. The Jacksonian party system collapsed in the 1850s for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A.    the rise of nativism.

B.     the rise of new issues to replace economic concerns.

C.     the rise of a third party that diminished the importance of the existing divisions.

D.    the public sentiment that both parties were merely corrupt engines of plunder.

9. The most important component of the ideology of the Republican Party at its founding was:

A.    a nationalist approach to economic development.

B.     free labor.

C.     immigration restriction.

D.    a repudiation of the Revolution and its acceptance of slavery.

10. The Dred Scott decision:

A.    struck down the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

B.     asserted that Congress could prohibit slavery in any territory.

C.     asserted that Congress could not ban slavery from any territory.

D.    freed Dred Scott.

11. Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that was quickly adapted into a play, had a significant impact on northern opinion because:

A.    it took advantage of the fact that influential middle-class Americans were regular playgoers.

B.     it introduced ordinary Americans to the literary classics.

C.     it conveyed a moral condemnation of slavery.

D.    it presented for the first time a factual account of the actual conditions of slavery in the South.

12. During the Lincoln-Douglas debates:

A.    Lincoln proclaimed the equality of whites and blacks.

B.     Douglas introduced the Freeport Doctrine, which argued that slavery could not be kept out of the territories.

C.     Douglas gained additional support from the southern branch of the Democratic Party.

D.    Lincoln marked himself as a potential presidential candidate in 1860.

13. John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry was significant for all of the following reasons EXCEPT:

A.    It provoked bloody retaliation against antislavery voters in Kansas.

B.     It intensified southern fears of slave insurrection.

C.     It intensified southern suspicions about the Republican Party.

D.    It added to the southerners' belief that their interests could not be protected within the Union.

14. Which of the following states seceded before the firing on Fort Sumter?

A.    Virginia

B.     North Carolina

C.     Alabama

D.    Tennessee

15. Ultimately, the text concludes, several historical trends caused the split between North and South, including all EXCEPT:

A.    the emerging market system created two economies, one of which was dependent on an enslaved labor force.

B.     a conservative, hierarchical southern society increasingly held to values that contrasted with those of the egalitarian, evangelical North.

C.     certain flaws in the political system prevented a national political solution.

D.    each side sought to defend America's heritage of republicanism against what was perceived as the other side's conspiracy against that heritage.

Practice Test

1. The Dred Scott decision:

A.    affirmed Missouri law.

B.     was a victory for the antislavery movement.

C.     declared Scott a free man.

D.    outlawed the interstate slave trade.

E.     affirmed the South's argument that the Constitution guaranteed the existence of slavery.

2. The question of statehood for Kansas and Nebraska became a critical issue because:

A.    of the rivalry between Chicago and St. Louis as the location of the eastern terminus.

B.     of southern fear that a transcontinental railroad would be built through them.

C.     of northern concern over new wheat states and depressed grain prices.

D.    many believed that they could never support a population sufficient to justify statehood.

E.     of the question of whether they would be slave or free states.

3. James Buchanan:

A.    weakly endorsed the Dred Scott decision.

B.     supported the admission of Kansas as a slave state.

C.     pressured Congress to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution.

D.    weakly endorsed the Dred Scott decision, supported the admission of Kansas as a slave state, and pressured Congress to admit Kansas under the Lecompton constitution.

E.     None of these answers is correct.

4. Northerners who accepted the concepts of "free soil" and "free labor" believed:

A.    slavery was dangerous not because of what it did to blacks but because of what it did to whites.

B.     slavery opened the door to economic opportunity for whites.

C.     slavery was what made the South a glorious civilization and one that should be admired.

D.    slave labor would work in northern factories and should be allowed to expand.

E.     slavery closed the door to economic opportunity for whites.

5. The first seven southern states that seceded were:

A.    in the lower South.

B.     the states where the largest concentration of slaves were located.

C.     the home of the most outspoken "fire eaters."

D.    not possessed of the military strength to fight a war.

E.     All these answers are correct.

6. In the mid-1850s, the struggle over Kansas saw:

A.    President Franklin Pierce oppose pro-slavery settlers in the territory.

B.     John Brown murder several pro-slavery settlers.

C.     the Missouri legislature ban its own citizens from entering Kansas.

D.    federal troops take military control of the region.

E.     a large antislavery posse sack the proslavery town of Lawrence, Kansas.

7. In the election of 1860,

A.    Abraham Lincoln was elected with much less than half of the popular vote.

B.     the Republican political platform called for an end to slavery.

C.     Abraham Lincoln's relative obscurity proved to be a drawback.

D.    Stephen Douglas narrowly lost in the electoral vote.

E.     disenchanted northern Democrats nominated John Bell for president.

8. The nativist movement wanted to:

A.    return all land to Native Americans.

B.     enact more restrictive naturalization laws.

C.     increase aid to education so voters would be literate.

D.    make immigrants feel this was their home.

E.     end all immigration.

9. The "Young America" movement:

A.    was a movement to garner support for abolition among the youth of America.

B.     was a movement to garner support for slavery among the youth of America.

C.     was intended to divert young Americans' interests toward nationalism and expansion and away from the "transitory" issue of slavery.

D.    was part of President Franklin Pierce's efforts to further expand the nation's territories to pacify the slavery interests.

E.     was an unsuccessful diplomatic attempt to acquire Cuba.

10. The 1856 beating of Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate:

A.    was in response to a pro-slavery speech he gave.

B.     was a vicious assault carried out by a member of Congress.

C.     was strongly condemned in the South.

D.    resulted in Sumner's death from his injuries weeks later.

E.     All these answers are correct.

11. The Crittenden Compromise was essentially acceptable to Lincoln and the Republicans.

A.    True

B.     False

12. Lincoln was elected in 1860 with less than a majority of the popular vote.

A.    True

B.     False

13. In the end, Kansas voters rejected the Lecompton constitution.

A.    True

B.     False

14. The Kansas-Nebraska Act helped create the Republican Party.

A.    True

B.     False

15. No additional states seceded from the Union once the war had begun.

A.    True

B.     False

16. By the mid-nineteenth century, the rail center of the West was ________.

Chicago

17. Senator Stephen Douglas sponsored the ________, the fateful piece of legislation that toppled the second party system and started the nation on its road to civil war.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

18. Abraham Lincoln first won national prominence in a series of senatorial campaign confrontations known as the Lincoln-________ debates.

Douglas

19. Elias Howe's invention of the ________ had an impact on both family life and the Civil War.

Sewing machine

20. The flood of new immigrants from ________ attracted nativist hostility not only because they were foreign but also because they were Catholic.

Ireland

21. The first shot of the Civil War was fired by South Carolinians on Union forces at ________.

Fort Sumter

22. Political parties disintegrated in the 1850s; the last one to shatter, in 1860, was the ________ party.

Democratic

23. The presidential election of 1860 was really two contests in one: Breckinridge versus Bell in the South; and Lincoln versus ________ in the North.

            Douglas

24. The last-ditch effort by a Kentucky senator to avoid the Civil War was called the ________ Compromise.

Crittenden

25. ________ led the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, attempting to seize control of the federal arsenal.

            John Brown

26. The automatic reaper was invented by ________, while the machine thresher was invented by Case.

McCormick

27. Known as the Know-Nothings, the American party was strongly anti-immigrant and, because of the church's "undemocratic" hierarchy, anti-________.

Catholic

28. The Missouri Compromise was declared unconstitutional in the ________ Supreme Court decision.

Dred Scott

29. The primary assistance from the federal government to railroad companies came in the form of ________.

Public land grants

30. After 1840, the most important stimulus to economic growth came from ________ construction.

            Railroad

Chapter Test

1. In The Pro-Slavery Argument (1837), John C. Calhoun stated that slavery was:

A.    likely to be adopted by non-slave states within fifty years.

B.     a "necessary evil."

C.     a "positive good."

D.    likely to end in the United States within fifty years.

E.     the "American way of life."

2. Abolitionism and "free soil" were essentially the same thing.

A.    True

B.     False

3. Southern defenders of slavery made all of the following arguments EXCEPT that:

A.    southern slaves enjoyed better conditions than northern industrial workers.

B.     blacks were inherently unfit to take care of themselves.

C.     slavery allowed whites and blacks to live together peacefully.

D.    black codes protected slaves from abuse.

E.     the southern way of life was superior to any other in the world.

4. At Fort Sumter,

A.    President Lincoln resupplied the federal troops in time to avoid an armed conflict.

B.     Major Anderson managed to withstand the bombardment of the Confederates and keep the Fort in Union hands.

C.     the Confederates fired the first shot of the Civil War.

D.    the Union Army fired the first shots of the war.

E.     Major Anderson surrendered right after the first shot.

5. The Dred Scott decision represented a stunning defeat for the pro-slavery movement.

A.    True

B.     False

6. The Supreme Court held in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857):

A.    that Scott must be freed under federal law.

B.     slaves were property unless they moved to a free state.

C.     states were not allowed to abolish slavery within their borders.

D.    the freedom of a slave could not be purchased by a black person.

E.     the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

7. The Lecompton constitution was a pro-slavery document.

A.    True

B.     False

8. Which of the following statements regarding the Kansas-Nebraska Act is FALSE?

A.    set that popular sovereignty would determine the status of slavery in both territories

B.     It led to the breakup of the Whig Party.

C.     It created two new territories.

D.    It explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise.

E.     It determined the Kansas would be slave and Nebraska would be free to maintain balance in the Senate

9. Stephen Douglas was a strong opponent of the transcontinental railroad.

A.    True

B.     False

10. Preston Brooks and Charles Sumner were on opposite sides in the battle over "bleeding Kansas."

A.    True

B.     False

11. Which of the following helped enlarge the urban population in this era?

A.    immigrants from Europe

B.     declining productivity of many eastern farms

C.     the growth of the population as a whole

D.    All of the above

12. The political party that came into being largely in response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act was:

A.    the Republican Party.

B.     the Know-Nothings.

C.     the Populist Party.

D.    the Abolitionist Party.

E.     the Jayhawk Party.

13. In the 1850s, the issue of slavery complicated the proposal to build a transcontinental railroad, as:

A.    it raised the question of whether or not slaves would be used as railroad labor.

B.     non-slave-owning northerners and slave-owning southerners could not agree on a route.

C.     British banks refused to help fund the project as long as slavery existed in the United States.

D.    it raised the question of whether or not slaves would be used as railroad labor, and British banks refused to help fund the projects as long as slavery existed in the U.S.

E.     None of these answers is correct.

14. The single event that did the most to convince white southerners they could not live safely in the Union was:

A.    the election of Lincoln.

B.     the Pottawatomie Massacre.

C.     John Brown's raid.

D.    the Dred Scott decision.

E.     the split of the Democratic Party at the 1860 convention.

15. In the 1850s, the "Young America" movement:

A.    called for a national resolution of the slave controversy.

B.     supported the expansion of American democracy throughout the world.

C.     was promoted by Whigs.

D.    called for a constitutional ban on slavery.

E.     believed America should avoid the slavery controversy by limiting future expansion.