A DIVIDING NATION

The maps on these two pages show the United States in mid-1850, the
year tensions over slavery reached a breaking point. In this unit, you
will learn why this crisis developed and how Congress handled it. You
will also learn about events after 1850 that further divided the North
and South and turned the dispute over slavery into war.

As the map on the opposite page shows, some states allowed slavery.
Notice, however, that the same number of states banned it. This
balance gave the slave states and the free states an equal number of
votes in the U.S. Senate. However, as the map on this page shows, that
equality did not exist in the House of Representatives, where each
state's votes are based on its population.

The Constitution requires that the House and Senate agree on new
laws. Southerners believed that as long as the Senate remained
balanced, Congress could not pass laws to affect slavery. Then, in 1849,
California asked to become a state. California's new constitution,
however, banned slavery. Admitting California as a free state, many
Southerners warned, would upset the equal balance between slave
states and free states—making the slave states a minority.

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The 1850s were one of the most troubled decades in U.S. history. Yet,
they were mild compared to the 1860s, a time of war, bitterness, and
the repair of a broken nation. As you explore the topics in this unit,
picture what it must have been like to live during such difficult times.
The era's events drew the American people into a deadly struggle over
slavery, freedom, and the very survival of the nation.

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In 1860, after one of the strangest elections in the nation's history, a

tall, plainspoken Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was elected
president. On learning of his victory, Lincoln said to the reporters
covering the campaign, “Well, boys, your troubles are over; mine have
just begun.”

Within a few weeks, it became clear just how heavy those troubles
would be. By the time Lincoln took office, the nation had split apart over
the issue of states' rights regarding slavery and was preparing for civil
war. The survival of the United States of America, and the fate of 4
million slaves, rested in Lincoln's hands.

The troubles Lincoln faced were not new. The issues dividing the nation
could be traced back to 1619, when the first slave ship arrived in
Virginia. Since that time, slavery had ended in half of the United States.
The question was, could the nation continue half-slave and half-free?

For decades, Americans tried to avoid that question. Many hoped

slavery would simply die out on its own. Instead, slavery began to
expand into new territories, and the question could no longer be

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ignored.

Between 1820 and 1860, Americans tried to fashion several

compromises on the issue of slavery. Each compromise, however,
created new problems and new divisions.

Lincoln understood why. Slavery was not simply a political issue to be

worked out through compromise. It was a deeply moral issue. As
Lincoln wrote in a letter to a friend, “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is
wrong.”

In this chapter, you will learn how Americans tried to keep the United
States united despite their deep divisions over slavery. Some events
during this period kept the nation together, while others pulled it apart.
You will also find out how Americans finally answered the question of
whether a nation founded on the idea of freedom could endure half-
slave and half-free.

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A traveler heading west across the Appalachians after the War of 1812
wrote, “Old America seems to be breaking up and moving westward.” It
was true. By 1819, settlers had formed seven new states west of the
Appalachians.

In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress had established a

process for forming new states. Besides outlining the steps leading to
statehood, this law also banned slavery north of the Ohio River. As a
result, the three western states that were formed north of the river—
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois—were free states. The four states that were
formed south of the Ohio River—Kentucky, Tennessee, Louisiana, and
Mississippi—permitted slavery.

In 1819, Alabama and Missouri applied to Congress for statehood as

slave states. No one in Congress questioned admitting Alabama as a
slave state. Alabama was located far south of the Ohio River and was
surrounded by other slave states.

Congress had another reason for admitting Alabama with no debate.

For years, there had been an unspoken agreement in Congress to keep

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the number of slave states and free states equal. The admission of
Illinois as a free state in 1818 had upset this balance. By accepting
Alabama with slavery, Congress was able to restore the balance
between slave and free states. Missouri, however, was another matter.

Questions About Missouri Some Northerners in Congress questioned

whether Missouri should be admitted as a slave state. Most of Missouri,
they observed, lay north of the point where the Ohio River flows into the
Mississippi. On the eastern side of the Mississippi, slavery was banned
north of that point. Should this ban not also be applied west of the
Mississippi?

This question led to another one. If Missouri were allowed to enter the
Union as a slave state, some asked, what would keep slavery from
spreading across all of the Louisiana Territory? The vision of a block of
new slave states stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains
was enough to give some Northerners nightmares.

The Tallmadge Amendment When the bill to make Missouri a state

came before Congress, Representative James Tallmadge of New York
proposed an amendment to the bill. The amendment said that Missouri
could join the Union, but only as a free state.

Southerners in Congress protested Tallmadge's amendment. What

right, they asked, did Congress have to decide whether a new state
should be slave or free? According to the theory of states' rights favored
by many Southerners, Congress had no power to impose its will on a
state, old or new. Instead, the people of each state should decide
whether to permit slavery. The fight over slavery thus involved a basic
question about the powers of the federal and state governments under
the Constitution.

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A Deadlocked Congress Southerners' protests were based on their

view that if Congress were allowed to end slavery in Missouri, it might
try to end slavery elsewhere. The North already had more votes in the
House of Representatives than the South. Only in the Senate did the
two sections have equal voting power. As long as the number of free
states and slave states remained equal, Southern senators could defeat
any attempt to interfere with slavery. But if Missouri entered the Union
as a free state, the South would lose its power to block antislavery bills
in the Senate. If that happened, Southerners warned, it would mean
disaster for the South.

In the North, the Tallmadge Amendment awakened strong feelings

against slavery. Many towns sent petitions to Congress, condemning
slavery as immoral and unconstitutional. Arguing in favor of the
amendment, New Hampshire representative Arthur Livermore spoke for
many Northerners when he said,

An opportunity is now presented . . . to prevent the growth

of a
sin which sits heavy on the soul of every one of us. By
embracing
this opportunity, we may retrieve the national character,
and, in
some degree, our own.

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The House voted to approve the Tallmadge Amendment. In the Senate,
however, Southerners were able to defeat it. The two houses were now
deadlocked over the issue of slavery in Missouri. They would remain so
as the 1819 session of Congress drew to a close.

When Congress returned to Washington in 1820, it took up the question

of Missouri statehood once again. By then, the situation had changed,
for Maine was now asking to enter the Union as a free state.

For weeks, Congress struggled to find a way out of its deadlock over
Missouri. As the debate dragged on and tempers wore thin, Southerners
began using such dreaded words as secession and civil war.

“If you persist,” Thomas Cobb of Georgia warned supporters of the

Tallmadge Amendment, “the Union will be dissolved. You have kindled
a fire which a sea of blood can only extinguish.”

“If disunion must take place, let it be so!” thundered Tallmadge in

reply. “If civil war must come, I can only say, let it come!”

A Compromise Is Reached Rather than risk the breakup of the Union,

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Congress finally agreed to a compromise crafted by Representative
Henry Clay of Kentucky. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted
Missouri to the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state. In this
way, it maintained the balance of power between slave and free states.

At the same time, Congress drew an imaginary line across the Louisiana
Purchase at latitude 36°30ʹ. North of this line, slavery was to be banned
forever, except in Missouri. South of the line, slaveholding was
permitted.

Reactions to the Compromise The Missouri Compromise kept the

Union together, but it pleased few people. In the North, congressmen
who voted to accept Missouri as a slave state were called traitors. In
the South, slaveholders deeply resented the ban on slavery in
territories that might later become states.

Meanwhile, as Secretary of State John Quincy Adams recognized, the

compromise had not settled the future of slavery in the United States
as a whole. “I have favored this Missouri compromise, believing it to be
all that could be effected [accomplished] under the present
Constitution, and from extreme unwillingness to put the Union at
hazard [risk],” wrote Adams in his diary. “If the Union must be
dissolved, slavery is precisely the question on which it ought to break.
For the present, however, the contest is laid asleep.”

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As John Quincy Adams predicted, for a time the “contest” over slavery
was settled. But a powerful force was building that soon pushed the
issue into the open again: the Second Great Awakening. Leaders of the
religious revival of the 1820s and 1830s promised that God would bless
those who did the Lord's work. For some Americans, the Lord's work
was the abolition of slavery.

The “Gag Rule” During the 1830s, abolitionists flooded Congress with
antislavery petitions. Congress, they were told, had no power to
interfere with slavery in the states. Then what about the District of
Columbia? asked the abolitionists. Surely Congress had the power to
ban slavery in the nation's capital.

Rather than confront that question, Congress voted in 1836 to table—

or set aside indefinitely—all antislavery petitions. Outraged abolitionists
called this action the “gag rule,” because it gagged, or silenced, all
congressional debate over slavery.

In 1839, the gag rule prevented consideration of an antislavery

proposal by John Quincy Adams, who was now a member of Congress.

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Knowing that the country would not agree on abolishing slavery
altogether, Adams proposed a constitutional amendment saying that
no one could be born into slavery after 1845. Congress, however,
refused to consider his proposal.

Southern Fears Abolitionists were far from silenced by the refusal of

Congress to debate slavery. They continued to attack slavery in books,
in newspapers, and at public meetings.

White Southerners deeply resented the abolitionists' attacks as an

assault on their way of life. After Nat Turner's slave rebellion in 1831,
resentment turned to fear. Southern states adopted strict new laws to
control the movement of slaves. Many states tried to keep abolitionist
writings from reaching slaves. Mississippi even offered a reward of
$5,000 for the arrest and conviction of any person “who shall utter,
publish, or circulate” abolitionist ideas.

Fugitive Slaves Nat Turner's rebellion was the last large-scale slave
revolt. But individual slaves continued to rebel by running away to
freedom in the North. These fugitives from slavery were often helped
in their escape by sympathetic people in the North.

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To slaveholders, these Northerners were no better than bank robbers.
They saw a slave as a valuable piece of property. Every time a slave
escaped, it was like seeing their land vanish into thin air. Slaveholders
demanded that Congress pass a fugitive slave law to help them
recapture their property.

Slavery in the Territories The gag rule kept the slavery issue out of
Congress for ten years. Then, in 1846, President James Polk sent a bill
to Congress asking for funds for the war with Mexico. Pennsylvania
representative David Wilmot added an amendment to the bill known as
the Wilmot Proviso. (A proviso is a condition added to an agreement.)
The Wilmot Proviso stated that “neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall ever exist” in any part of the territory that might be
acquired from Mexico as a result of the Mexican-American War.

Southerners in Congress strongly opposed Wilmot's amendment. They

maintained that Congress had no right to decide where slaveholders
could take their property. The Wilmot Proviso passed the House, but it
was rejected by the Senate.

Statehood for California For the next three years, Congress debated
what to do about slavery in the territory gained from Mexico.
Southerners wanted all of the Mexican Cession open to slavery.
Northerners wanted all of it closed.

As a compromise, Southerners proposed a bill that would extend the

Missouri Compromise line all the way to the Pacific. Slavery would be
banned north of that line and allowed south of it. Northerners in
Congress rejected this proposal.

Then, late in 1849, California applied for admission to the Union as a

free state. Northerners in Congress welcomed California with open
arms. Southerners, however, rejected California's request. Making
California a free state, they warned, would upset the balance between
slave and free states. The result would be unequal representation of
slave states and free states in Congress.

The year ended with Congress deadlocked over California's request for
statehood. Once again, Southerners spoke openly of withdrawing from
the Union. And once again, angry Northerners denounced slavery as a
crime against humanity.

On January 21, 1850, Henry Clay, now a senator from Kentucky,

trudged through a Washington snowstorm to pay an unexpected call on
Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Clay, the creator of the

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Missouri Compromise, had come up with a plan to end the deadlock
over California. But to get his plan through Congress, he needed
Webster's support.

Something for Everyone Clay's new compromise had something to

please just about everyone. It began by admitting California to the
Union as a free state. That would please the North. Meanwhile, it
allowed the New Mexico and Utah territories to decide whether to allow
slavery, which would please the South.

In addition, Clay's plan ended the slave trade in Washington, D.C.

Although slaveholders in Washington would be able to keep their
slaves, human beings would no longer be bought and sold in the
nation's capital. Clay and Webster agreed that this compromise would
win support from abolitionists without threatening the rights of
slaveholders.

Finally, Clay's plan called for passage of a strong fugitive slave law.
Slaveholders had long wanted such a law, which would make it easier
to find and reclaim runaway slaves.

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The Compromise Is Accepted Hoping that Clay's compromise would
end the crisis, Webster agreed to help it get passed in Congress. But
despite Webster's support, Congress debated the Compromise of
1850 for nine frustrating months. As tempers frayed, Southerners
talked of simply leaving the Union peacefully.

Webster dismissed such talk as foolish. “Peaceable secession!” he

exclaimed. “Your eyes and mine are never destined to see that miracle
. . . I see it as plainly as I see the sun in heaven—I see that [secession]
must produce such a war as I will not describe.”

A war over slavery was something few Americans wanted to face. In

September 1850, Congress finally adopted Clay's plan. Most Americans
were happy to see the crisis end. Some Southerners, however,
remained wary of the compromise.

Henry Clay and Daniel Webster hoped the Compromise of 1850 would
quiet the slavery controversy for years to come. In fact, it satisfied
almost no one—and the debate grew louder each year.

The Fugitive Slave Act People in the North and the South were
unhappy with the Fugitive Slave Act, though for different reasons.
Northerners did not want to enforce the act. Southerners felt the act did
not do enough to ensure the return of their escaped property.

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Under the Fugitive Slave Act, a person arrested as a runaway slave had
almost no legal rights. Many runaways fled all the way to Canada rather
than risk being caught and sent back to their owners. Others decided to
stand and fight. Reverend Jarmain Loguen, a former slave living in New
York, said boldly, “I don't respect this law—I don't fear it—I won't obey
it . . . I will not live as a slave, and if force is employed to re-enslave
me, I shall make preparations to meet the crisis as becomes a man.”

The Fugitive Slave Act also said that any person who helped a slave
escape, or even refused to aid slave catchers, could be jailed. This
provision, complained New England poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, made
“slave catchers of us all.”

Opposition to the act was widespread in the North. When slave catchers
came to Boston, they were hounded by crowds of angry citizens
shouting, “Slave hunters—there go the slave hunters.” After a few days
of this treatment, most slave catchers decided to leave.

Northerners' refusal to support the act infuriated slaveholders. It also

made enforcement of the act almost impossible. Of the tens of

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thousands of fugitives living in the North during the 1850s, only 299
were captured and returned to their owners during this time.

Uncle Tom's Cabin Nothing brought the horrors of slavery home to

Northerners more than Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher
Stowe. The novel grew out of a vision Stowe had while sitting in church
on a wintry Sunday morning in 1851. The vision began with a saintly
slave, known as Uncle Tom, and his cruel master. In a furious rage, the
master, Simon Legree, had the old slave whipped to death. Just before
Uncle Tom's soul slipped out of his body, he opened his eyes and
whispered to Legree, “Ye poor miserable critter! There ain't no more ye
can do. I forgive ye, with all my soul!”

Racing home, Stowe scribbled down what she had imagined. Her vision
of Uncle Tom's death became part of a much longer story that was first
published in installments in an abolitionist newspaper. In one issue,
readers held their breath as the slave Eliza chose to risk death rather
than be sold away from her young son. Chased by slave hunters and
their dogs, Eliza dashed to freedom across the ice-choked Ohio River,
clutching her child in her arms. In a later issue, Stowe's readers wept as
they read her account of how the character of Uncle Tom died at the
hands of Simon Legree.

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In 1852, Uncle Tom's Cabin was published as a novel. Plays based on

the book toured the country, thrilling audiences with Eliza's dramatic
escape to freedom. No other work had ever aroused such powerful
emotions about slavery. In the South, the novel and its author were
scorned and cursed. In the North, Uncle Tom's Cabin made millions of
people even more angry about the cruelties of slavery.

The Ostend Manifesto and the Kansas- Nebraska Act Northerners

who were already horrified by slavery were roused to fury by two
events in 1854: the publication of the so-called Ostend Manifesto and
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The document known as the Ostend Manifesto was a message sent to

the secretary of state by three American diplomats who were meeting
in Ostend, Belgium. President Franklin Pierce, who had taken office in
1853, had been trying to purchase the island of Cuba from Spain, but
Spain had refused the offer. The message from the diplomats urged the
U.S. government to seize Cuba by force if Spain continued to refuse to
sell the island. When the message was leaked to the public, angry
Northerners charged that Pierce's administration wanted to buy Cuba in

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order to add another slave state to the Union.

Early that same year, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced

a bill in Congress that aroused an uproar. Douglas wanted to get a
railroad built to California. He thought the project was more likely to
happen if Congress organized the Great Plains into the Nebraska
Territory and opened the region to settlers. This territory lay north of
the Missouri Compromise, and Douglas's bill said nothing about slavery.
But Southerners in Congress agreed to support the bill only if Douglas
made a few changes—and those changes had far-reaching
consequences.

Douglas's final version of the bill, known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act,

created two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska. It also abolished the
Missouri Compromise by leaving it up to the settlers themselves to vote
on whether to permit slavery in the two territories. Douglas called this
policy popular sovereignty, or rule by the people. The Kansas-Nebraska
Act was passed in 1854.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act hit the North like a thunderbolt. Once again,

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Northerners were haunted by visions of slavery marching across the
plains. Douglas tried to calm their fears by saying that the climates of
Kansas and Nebraska were not suited to slave labor. But when
Northerners studied maps, they were not so sure. Newspaper editor
Horace Greeley charged in the New York Tribune,

The pretense of Douglas & Co. that not even Kansas is to

be
made a slave state by his bill is a gag [joke]. Ask any
Missourian
what he thinks about it. The Kansas Territory . . . is
bounded in
its entire length by Missouri, with a whole tier of slave
counties
leaning against it. Won't be a slave state! . . . Gentlemen!
Don't
lie any more!

Bloodshed in Kansas After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed in

1854, settlers poured into Kansas. Most were peaceful farmers looking
for good farmland. Some settlers, however, moved to Kansas either to
support or to oppose slavery. In the South, towns took up collections to
send their young men to Kansas. In the North, abolitionists raised
money to send weapons to antislavery settlers. Before long, Kansas had
two competing governments in the territory, one for slavery and one
against it.

The struggle over slavery soon turned violent. On May 21, 1856,
proslavery settlers and so-called “border ruffians” from Missouri
invaded Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the antislavery government.
Armed invaders burned a hotel, looted several homes, and tossed the
printing presses of two abolitionist newspapers into the Kaw River. As
the invaders left Lawrence, one of them boasted, “Gentlemen, this is
the happiest day of my life.”

The raid on Lawrence provoked a wave of outrage in the North. People

raised money to replace the destroyed presses. And more “Free-
Soilers,” as antislavery settlers were called, prepared to move to
Kansas.

Meanwhile, a fiery abolitionist named John Brown plotted his own

revenge. Two days after the Lawrence raid, Brown and seven followers,
including four of Brown's sons and his son-in-law, invaded the
proslavery town of Pottawatomie, Kansas. There, they dragged five
men they suspected of supporting slavery from their homes and

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hacked them to death with swords.

Violence in Congress The violence in Kansas greatly disturbed

Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. To Sumner, it was proof of
what he had long suspected—that Senator Stephen Douglas had
plotted with Southerners to make Kansas a slave state.

In 1856, Sumner voiced his suspicions in a passionate speech called

“The Crime Against Kansas.” In harsh, shocking language, Sumner
described the “crime against Kansas” as a violent assault on an
innocent territory, “compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” He
dismissed Douglas as “a noisome [offensive], squat, and nameless
animal.” Sumner also heaped abuse on many Southerners, including
Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina.

Just what Sumner hoped to accomplish was not clear. However, copies
of his speech were quickly printed up for distribution in the North. After
reading it, New England poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
congratulated Sumner on the “brave and noble speech you made,
never to die out in the memories of men.”

Certainly, it was not about to die out in the memories of enraged

Southerners. Two days after the speech, Senator Butler's nephew,
South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner in the
Senate, beating him with his metal-tipped cane until it broke in half. By
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the time other senators could pull Brooks away, Sumner had collapsed,
bloody and unconscious.

Reactions to the attack on Sumner showed how divided the country had
become. Many Southerners applauded Brooks for defending the honor
of his family and the South. From across the South, supporters sent
Brooks new canes to replace the one he had broken on Sumner's head.

Most Northerners viewed the beating as another example of Southern

brutality. In their eyes, Brooks was no better than the proslavery bullies
who had attacked the people of Lawrence. One Connecticut student
was so upset that she wrote to Sumner about going to war. “I don't
think it is of very much use to stay any longer in the high school,” she
wrote. “The boys would be better learning to hold muskets, and the
girls to make bullets.”

In 1857, the slavery controversy shifted from Congress to the Supreme

Court. The Court was about to decide a case concerning a Missouri
slave named Dred Scott. Years earlier, Scott had traveled with his
owner to Wisconsin, where slavery was banned by the Missouri

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Compromise. When he returned to Missouri, Scott went to court to win
his freedom. He argued that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free
man.

Questions of the Case There were nine justices on the Supreme Court
in 1857. Five, including Chief Justice Roger Taney, were from the South.
Four were from the North. The justices had two key questions to decide.
First, as a slave, was Dred Scott a citizen who had the right to bring a
case before a federal court? Second, did his time in Wisconsin make
him a free man?

Chief Justice Taney hoped to use the Scott case to settle the slavery
controversy once and for all. So he asked the Court to consider two
more questions: Did Congress have the power to make any laws at all
concerning slavery in the territories? And, if so, was the Missouri
Compromise a constitutional use of that power?

Nearly 80 years old, Taney had long been opposed to slavery. As a

young Maryland lawyer, he had publicly declared that “slavery is a blot
upon our national character and every lover of freedom confidently
hopes that it will be . . . wiped away.” Taney had gone on to free his
own slaves. Many observers wondered whether he and his fellow
justices would now free Dred Scott as well.

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Two Judicial Bombshells On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney

delivered the Dred Scott decision. The chief justice began by
reviewing the facts of Dred Scott's case. Then he dropped the first of
two judicial bombshells. By a vote of five to four, the Court had decided
that Scott could not sue for his freedom in a federal court because he
was not a citizen. Nor, said Taney, could Scott become a citizen. No
African American, whether slave or free, was an American citizen—or
could ever become one.

Second, Taney declared that the Court had rejected Scott's argument
that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free man. The reason was
simple. The Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

Taney's argument went something like this. Slaves are property. The
Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that property cannot be
taken from people without due process of law—that is, a proper court
hearing. Taney reasoned that banning slavery in a territory is the same
as taking property from slaveholders who would like to bring their
slaves into that territory. And that is unconstitutional. Rather than
banning slavery, he said, Congress has a constitutional responsibility to
protect the property rights of slaveholders in a territory.

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The Dred Scott decision delighted slaveholders. They hoped that, at
long last, the issue of slavery in the territories had been settled—and in
their favor.

Many Northerners, however, were stunned and enraged by the Court's

ruling. The New York Tribune called the decision a “wicked and false
judgment.” The New York Independent expressed outrage in a bold
headline:

The Decision of the Supreme Court

Is the Moral Assassination of a Race and Cannot be
Obeyed!

During the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, antislavery

activists formed a new political organization, the Republican Party. The
Republicans were united by their beliefs that “no man can own another
man . . . That slavery must be prohibited in the territories . . . That all
new States must be Free States . . . That the rights of our colored
citizen . . . must be protected.”

In 1858, Republicans in Illinois nominated Abraham Lincoln to run for

the Senate. In his acceptance speech, Lincoln pointed out that all
attempts to reach compromise on the slavery issue had failed. Quoting
from the Bible, he warned, “A house divided against itself cannot
stand.” Lincoln went on: “I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently half-slave 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.”

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates Lincoln's opponent in the Senate race

was Senator Stephen Douglas. The Illinois senator saw no reason why
the nation could not go on half-slave and half-free. When Lincoln
challenged him to debate the slavery issue, Douglas agreed.

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During the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Douglas argued that the Dred

Scott decision had put the slavery issue to rest. Lincoln disagreed. In
his eyes, slavery was a moral, not a legal, issue. He declared, “The real
issue in this controversy . . . is the sentiment of one class [group] that
looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class
that does not look upon it as a wrong.”

Lincoln lost the election. But the debates were widely reported, and
they helped make him a national figure. His argument with Douglas
also brought the moral issue of slavery into sharp focus. Compromises
over slavery were becoming impossible.

John Brown's Raid While Lincoln fought to stop the spread of slavery
through politics, abolitionist John Brown adopted a more extreme
approach. Rather than wait for Congress to act, Brown planned to seize
the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. An arsenal is a place
where weapons and ammunition are stored. Brown wanted to use the
weapons to arm slaves for a rebellion that would end slavery.

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Brown launched his raid in 1859. It was an insane scheme. All of

Brown's men were killed or captured during the raid. Brown himself was
convicted of treason and sentenced to die. On the day of his hanging,
he left a note that read, “I John Brown am now quite certain that the
crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.”

Such words filled white Southerners with fear. If a slave rebellion did
begin, it was Southern blood that would be spilled. The fact that many
Northerners viewed Brown as a hero also left white Southerners
uneasy.

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The 1860 presidential race showed just how divided the nation had
become. The Republicans were united behind Lincoln. The Democrats,
however, had split between Northern and Southern factions. Northern
Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas for president. Southern
Democrats supported John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The election
became even more confusing when a group called the Constitutional
Union Party nominated John Bell of Tennessee.

Abraham Lincoln Is Elected President With his opposition divided

three ways, Lincoln sailed to victory. But it was an odd victory. Lincoln
won the presidential election with just 40 percent of the votes, all of
them cast in the North. In ten Southern states, he was not even on the
ballot.

For white Southerners, the election of 1860 delivered an unmistakable

message. The South was now in the minority. It no longer had the
power to shape national events or policies. Sooner or later, Southerners
feared, Congress would try to abolish slavery. And that, wrote a South
Carolina newspaper, would mean “the loss of liberty, property, home,
country—everything that makes life worth living.”

The South Secedes from the Union In the weeks following the
election, talk of secession filled the air. Alarmed senators formed a
committee to search for yet another compromise that might hold the
nation together. They knew that finding one would not be easy. Still,
they had to do something to stop the rush toward disunion and

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disaster.

The Senate committee held its first meeting on December 20, 1860.
Just as the senators began their work, events in two distant cities
dashed their hopes for a settlement.

In Springfield, Illinois, a reporter called on President-Elect Abraham

Lincoln. When asked whether he could support a compromise on
slavery, Lincoln's answer was clear. He would not interfere with slavery
in the South. And he would support enforcement of the Fugitive Slave
Act. But Lincoln drew the line at letting slavery extend into the
territories. On this question, he declared, “Let there be no
compromise.”

Meanwhile, in Charleston, South Carolina, delegates attending a state

convention voted that same day—December 20, 1860—to leave the
Union. The city went wild. Church bells rang. Crowds filled the streets,
roaring their approval. A South Carolina newspaper boldly proclaimed,
“The Union Is Dissolved!” Six more states soon followed South
Carolina's lead. In February 1861, those states joined together as the

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Confederate States of America.

The Civil War Begins On March 4, 1861, Lincoln became president of

the not-so-united United States. In his inaugural address, Lincoln stated
his belief that secession was both wrong and unconstitutional. He then
appealed to the rebellious states to return in peace. “In your hands, my
dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine,” he said, “is the
momentous issue of civil war.”

A month later, Confederates in Charleston, South Carolina, forced the

issue. On April 12, 1861, they opened fire on Fort Sumter, a federal fort
in Charleston Harbor. After 33 hours of heavy shelling, the defenders of
the fort hauled down the Stars and Stripes and replaced it with the
white flag of surrender.

The news that the Confederates had fired on the American flag
unleashed a wave of patriotic fury in the North. All the doubts that
people had about using force to save the Union vanished. A New York
newspaper reported excitedly, “There is no more thought of bribing or
coaxing the traitors who have dared to aim their cannon balls at the
flag of the Union . . . Fort Sumter is temporarily lost, but the country is
saved.”

The time for compromise was over. The issues that had divided the
nation for so many years would now be decided by a civil war.

In this chapter, you learned how a series of compromises failed

to keep the United States from splitting in two over the issue
of slavery.

Confronting the Issue of Slavery The issue of granting Missouri

statehood threatened to upset the balance of free and slave states.
Northerners were concerned that if Missouri entered the Union as a
slave state, other territories would also be admitted as slave states.
Southerners worried that if Congress banned slavery in Missouri, it
would try to end slavery elsewhere.

The Missouri Compromise In 1820, the Missouri Compromise

resolved the issue by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as
a free state. It also drew a line across the Louisiana Territory. In the
future, slavery would be permitted only south of that line.

The Compromise of 1850 The furor over slavery in new territories

erupted again after the Mexican-American War. The Compromise of
1850 admitted California as a free state and allowed the New Mexico
and Utah territories to decide whether to allow slavery. It also ended
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the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and included a stronger fugitive
slave law. Attitudes on both sides were hardened by Harriet Beecher
Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

The Dred Scott Decision In 1857, the Supreme Court issued a

decision in the Dred Scott case: African Americans were not citizens
and the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.

From Compromise to Crisis Antislavery activists formed a new

political party: the Republican Party. The party nominated Abraham
Lincoln for the Illinois Senate. Slavery was the focus of debates between
Lincoln and opponent Stephen Douglas. Lincoln lost the election, but
the debates brought slavery into sharp focus. A raid launched by
abolitionist John Brown raised fears of a slave rebellion.

The Election of 1860 and Secession Lincoln won the presidency in

1860. Soon afterward, South Carolina and six other Southern states
seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America.
In early 1861, Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston,
South Carolina, marking the beginning of the Civil War.

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 A DIVIDING NATION
Boston was a magnet for people who opposed slavery. The
American Anti-Slavery Society was based in Boston, as was the
abolitionist newspaper The Liberator . But the issue of slavery
divided even the people of Boston. Tensions in Boston
increased, as they did in other places. Boston, like the nation,
was splitting apart.

On June 2, 1854, about 50,000 people lined the streets of Boston.

Hundreds more gathered on rooftops. Businesses closed. People looked
out of the windows and doorways of the buildings where they usually
worked.

Women dangled black shawls out of second- and third-story windows.

By the city's harbor, black fabric covered the Commonwealth Building.
From its upper windows hung six American flags, all draped in black.
Samuel May, who was born during the American Revolution, hung two
U.S. flags upside down from his hardware store as a protest. At ground
level, a black coffin displayed the word Liberty.

Then, Anthony Burns emerged from the courthouse. Surrounded by

federal marshals, he was walking to the docks where he would board a
ship to Virginia. Burns, an escaped slave, was being returned to his
owner.

Burns had escaped from slavery in Virginia by hiding in the cargo hold
of a ship. He had settled in Boston just a few months earlier, believing
that people in the free state of Massachusetts would welcome him.
They did.

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Now, many Bostonians were outraged that Burns was being forced back
into slavery. Massachusetts had outlawed the institution decades
earlier. Many escaped slaves lived as free people in the state.

Burns's three-block walk to the pier was dramatic. Boston's mayor had
called on the military to keep order, fearing that angry crowds would
use force to free Burns. Each guard who walked with Burns held a pistol
in one hand and a sword in the other.

One woman described watching the procession from an upstairs office

along the route from the courthouse to the pier. She reported that she
and her companions “called out, Shame and Shame . . . in our most
expressive and scornful voices” at the men who escorted Burns.

What was going on in Boston? Why was Anthony Burns being sent back
to slavery?

The Fugitive Slave Act

According to Massachusetts law, Anthony Burns had been a free man

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for the months he lived in Boston. Nonetheless, because of the federal
Fugitive Slave Act, he was still a fugitive from slavery. Passed by the
U.S. Congress in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act said that slave owners
could retrieve their runaway slaves. Burns's master had come to Boston
to reclaim his “property.” He did so with the full power of the law
behind him. The outrage that greeted him in Boston was a symptom of
the divisions tearing apart the country.

Burns was not the only one affected. Many slaves had fled to Northern
states, where they lived in freedom. The new law meant that they were
no longer safe in their Northern homes. They could be captured and
returned to their owners at any time.

With the new law in place, many former slaves saw that their only
chance for real safety was to get out of the country entirely. William
and Ellen Craft escaped slavery in Macon, Georgia, in 1848. They went
first to Philadelphia, and then farther north to Boston. Even there, they
weren't safe. Under the Fugitive Slave Act, slave catchers pursued
them. William locked himself in his clothing store, while abolitionist
friends hid Ellen somewhere else. When the immediate danger had

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passed, Boston's activists arranged for the couple to go to Liverpool,
England. There, they could live in freedom, unthreatened by slave
catchers or their status as fugitive slaves.

The Fugitive Slave Act affected Northern abolitionists as well as

escaped slaves. The law now involved Northerners in the slave system
that many of them hated. No matter how much the people of Boston
opposed slavery, federal law overruled them. Meant to ease tensions
between North and South, the Fugitive Slave Act only heightened them.

And so crowds of sad and angry Bostonians watched helplessly as

Anthony Burns left their haven in the North. Outraged by the injustice
they watched unfolding before them, they vowed to keep up the fight to
end slavery.

The Cradle of Liberty Meets the Evil of Slavery

Boston had long been a symbol of freedom, sometimes called “the

cradle of liberty.” It was in Boston, after all, that the colonists first
rebelled against British rule. And Massachusetts was one of the first
states to outlaw slavery. Bostonians in particular had a long
commitment to abolition. How had that commitment led to the terrible
day in 1854 when Anthony Burns boarded the boat to return to Virginia
and become, once again, a slave?

No one could have foreseen that day back in 1829 when David Walker,

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an African American living in Boston, published a pamphlet called
Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the pamphlet,
Walker urged black Americans to resist slavery. He even suggested
that violence might be necessary. Walker also warned white Americans
that God would punish them for the crime of slavery.

Many others spoke out against the evils of slavery. William Lloyd
Garrison was one of them. In his newspaper, The Liberator, he made
some radical claims. He said that slaves must be freed immediately.
Many abolitionists at the time said it would be best to end slavery
gradually. He said that African Americans should not start colonies in
Africa, as some reformers believed. Instead, they should live as free
people in the United States. And perhaps most radical of all, he said
that blacks should not only be free, but that they should have all the
same rights as whites.

Of course, Bostonians who opposed abolition disliked Garrison and his

ideas. In 1835, a mob nearly killed him.

Garrison later described how a few men carried him to safety. He hated
the hypocrisy of accepting slavery in the land of the free.

I was thus conducted [carried] . . . over the ground that was

stained with the blood of the first martyrs in the cause of
LIBERTY
and INDEPENDENCE . . . What a scandalous and revolting
contrast! My offence was in pleading for LIBERTY—liberty
for
my enslaved countrymen.

Like Garrison, others in Boston suffered for their efforts to end slavery.
One of them described what she and others had gone through.

It has occasioned our brothers to be dismissed from [their

jobs as
ministers]—our sons to be expelled from colleges and
theological
seminaries—our friends from professorships—ourselves
from
literary and social privileges.

—Maria Weston Warren, Boston Female Anti-Slavery

Society

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It took courage to oppose slavery. Some sources estimate that only

about 1 percent of Northerners were active abolitionists.

Their numbers may have been small, but Boston abolitionists fought on.
They took strong steps to protect the free blacks who lived in the city.
In 1842, a fugitive slave named George Lattimer went to jail in Boston.
He had to wait there while his owner traveled to Virginia to get the
papers that would prove that Lattimer was a slave. Angry abolitionists
filed legal claims on Lattimer's behalf. Their efforts failed. Lattimer did
not become free until black Bostonians paid his owner $400.

Free blacks realized how shaky their freedom was. Slave catchers could
return them south. So they took the lead in distributing a petition
calling for a state law to protect Massachusetts citizens. Those who
signed the petition did so “desiring to free this commonwealth and
themselves from all connection with domestic slavery and to secure the
citizens of this state from the danger of enslavement.”

As a result of their efforts, the state passed the Personal Liberty Law in
1843. The law said that state officials and facilities could not be used to

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capture and return fugitive slaves.

But the Fugitive Slave Act overruled the state's Personal Liberty Law. It
put federal, not state, officials in charge of returning fugitive slaves.

And so, Anthony Burns had to return to Virginia as a slave. Eventually,

Boston's activists bought his freedom. But the experience highlighted
the fact that the North and South were bound to clash again until
slavery was abolished.

2019 Teachers' Curriculum Institute Level: A