history
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American Portraits: Anthony Burns
“A change has taken place in this community within three weeks such as the 30 preceding years had not produced.”
Edward Everett on the Burns Affair
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“We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”
Amos Lawrence on the Burns Affair
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HIST 180 Survey of American History
Benjamin Cawthra, Ph.D.
California State University, Fullerton
A House Divided: The 1850s
Timeline: A House Divided: The 1850s
Battles at the Boundaries: Women’s Rights and Antislavery
3. Political Portraits: The Sectional Crisis
Luminism, Landscape, and the Sectional Crisis
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- Timeline: A House Divided: The 1850s
1846 Wilmot Proviso fuses slavery’s expansion with end of war.
California statehood question leads to Compromise of 1850.
Fugitive Slave Law requires federal agents to recover escapees.
Zachary Taylor dies; Millard Fillmore becomes president.
1851 Herman Melville writes Moby-Dick.
1852 Democrat Franklin Pierce elected president.
Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Kansas-Nebraska Act rekindles sectional controversy over slavery.
Collapse of Whigs; rise of new Republican Party
Bleeding Kansas; John Brown’s raid at Pottawatomie Creek;
Dem. James Buchanan elected president.
Dred Scott decision.
In Kansas, proslavery Lecompton Constitution ratified.
Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois.
John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.
2. Battles at the Boundaries:
Women’s Rights and Antislavery
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“You have seen a man become a slave. You shall see a slave become a man.”
Frederick Douglass, 1845
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Nathaniel Jocelyn, Cinque, 1839.
Oil on canvas. New Haven Colony Historical Society, Connecticut.
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Former President, now Mass. Congressman John Quincy Adams, perennial enemy of the “Gag Order.”
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Contemporary wood engraving depicting the mob attack on Elijah P. Lovejoy and his press.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (title page), 1852.
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Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853.
Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts.
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Baker and Smith after Hammatt Billings, Little Eva (1852)
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Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853.
Oil on canvas. Detroit Institute of Arts.
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Mathew Brady, Zachary Taylor 1848. Mathew Brady, Henry Clay, c. 1850.
3. Political Portraits: The Sectional Crisis
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Mathew Brady, Daniel Webster, c. 1850. Mathew Brady, John C. Calhoun, c. 1848.
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The Compromise of 1850
1. California admitted as free state
2. New Mexico becomes a territory
3. Texas debt paid
4. Utah becomes territory
5. New Fugitive Slave Law
6. DC slave trade abolished
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Mathew Brady, Franklin Pierce, c. 1852. Mathew Brady, Stephen Douglas, c. 1854.
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The Missouri Compromise, 1820
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Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854: “Popular Sovereignty”
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“We will before six months roll around have the Devil to play in Kansas and this State [Missouri], we are organizing to meet their organization, we will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to ‘Mormanise’ the abolitionists.”
Sen. David R. Atchison of Missouri, 1854
Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854: “Popular Sovereignty”
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Unknown, John Brown, 1846. Mathew Brady, Charles Sumner, c. 1855
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J.L. Magee, Southern Chivalry, 1856. Cartoon.
Mathew Brady, James Buchanan, 1856. Mathew Brady, Roger B. Taney, 1850.
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Abraham Lincoln, 1858
“’A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ 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.
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Abraham Lincoln, 1858
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 the 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.”
Abraham Lincoln
June 16, 1858
Springfield, Illinois
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Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown, 1882-84.
Oil on canvas.
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."
John Brown, Dec. 2, 1859
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Fitz Henry Lane, Lumber Schooners at Evening on Penobscot Bay, 1860.
Oil on canvas.
4. Luminism, Landscape, and the Sectional Crisis
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Fitz Henry Lane, Approaching Storm, Owl’s Head, 1860.
Oil on canvas.
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Frederic Edwin Church, Twilight in the Wilderness,1860.
Oil on canvas.
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Martin Johnson Heade, Approaching Thunder Storm,1859.
Oil on canvas. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Martin Johnson Heade, Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay,1868.
Oil on canvas. Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.
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