Help in 2 history discussion board 160 word each
Ch 13
THE IMPENDING CRISIS
LOOKING AHEAD
1. How did the annexation of western territories intensify the conflict over slavery and lead to deeper divisions between the North and the South?
2. What compromises attempted to resolve the conflicts over the expansion of slavery into new territories? To what degree were these compromises successful? Why did they eventually fail to resolve the differences between the North and the South?
3. What were the major arguments for and against slavery and its expansion into new territories?
UNTIL THE 1840s, POLITICAL TENSIONS between the North and the South remained relatively contained and, other than African American writers and clerics, few predicted that sectional tensions could ever lead the country into a civil war.
But midcentury brought a rash of explosive issues that politicians struggled—and ultimately failed—to resolve peacefully. In the North the abolitionist movement picked up steam and inspired legions of supporters, the most aggressive of whom sought to fight slavery with the sword as well as the pen. The South birthed a generation of militant pro-slavery spokesmen who brooked no compromise over a state’s right to embrace slavery and the society based on it. From the West emerged raging controversies over the political fate of the territories and whether they would enter the Union as either slave or free states. Partisans recruited sympathizers from across the nation and even took up arms to win their point.
LOOKING WESTWARD
More than a million square miles of new territory came under the control of the United States during the 1840s. By the end of the decade, the nation possessed all the territory of the present-day United States except Alaska, Hawaii, and a few relatively small areas acquired later through border adjustments. Many factors accounted for this great new wave of expansion, but one of the most important was an ideology known as Manifest Destiny .
Manifest Destiny
Manifest Destiny reflected both the growing pride that characterized American nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century and the idealistic vision of social perfection that fueled so much of the reform energy of the time. It rested on the idea that America was destined—by God and by history—to expand its boundaries over a vast area.
By the 1840s, publicized by the rise of inexpensive newspapers dubbed “penny press,” the idea of Manifest Destiny had spread throughout the nation. Some advocates of Manifest Destiny envisioned a vast new “empire of liberty” that would include Canada, Mexico, Caribbean and Pacific islands, and ultimately (for the most ardent believers) much of the rest of the world. Countering such bombast were politicians such as Henry Clay and others, who warned that territorial expansion would reopen the painful controversy over slavery. Their voices, however, could not compete with the enthusiasm over expansion in the 1840s, which began with the issues of Texas and Oregon.
Americans in Texas
Twice in the 1820s, the United States had offered to purchase Texas from the Republic of Mexico, and twice Mexico refused. But Mexican officials were desperate to populate this frontier region because they believed it Page 299to be threatened by nomadic indigenous groups like the Comanche Indians and possibly Spain. As a result, they enacted what would be viewed in hindsight as a curious policy—namely, a colonization law that offered cheap land and a four-year exemption from taxes to any American willing to move into Texas. Thousands of Americans flocked into the region, the great majority of them white southerners and their slaves, intent on establishing cotton plantations. By 1830, there were about 7,000 Americans living in Texas, more than twice the number of Mexicans there.
Most of the settlers came to Texas through the efforts of American intermediaries, who received sizable land grants from Mexico in return for bringing new residents into the region. The most successful was Stephen F. Austin , a young immigrant from Missouri who established the first legal American settlement in Texas in 1822. Austin and others created centers of power in the region that competed with the Mexican government. Not surprisingly, in 1830 the Mexican government barred any further American immigration into the region. But Americans kept flowing into Texas anyway.
Friction between the American settlers and the Mexican government was already growing in the mid-1830s when instability in Mexico itself drove General Antonio López de Santa Anna to seize power as a dictator. He increased the powers of the Mexican government at the expense of the state governments, a measure that Texans from the United States assumed was aimed specifically at them. Sporadic fighting between Americans and Mexicans in Texas erupted in 1835. The next year, the American settlers defiantly proclaimed their independence from Mexico.
Santa Anna led a large army into Texas, where the American settlers were divided into several squabbling factions. Mexican forces annihilated an American garrison at the Alamo mission in San Antonio after a famous, if futile, defense by a group of Texas “patriots” that included, among others, the renowned frontiersman and former Tennessee congressman Davy Crockett. Another garrison at Goliad suffered substantially the same fate. By the end of 1836, the rebellion appeared to have collapsed.
But General Sam Houston managed to keep a small force together. And on April 21, 1836, at the Battle of San Jacinto, he defeated the Mexican army and took Santa Anna prisoner. Santa Anna, under pressure from his captors, signed a treaty giving Texas independence.
Page 300A number of Mexican residents of Texas ( Tejanos ) had fought with the Americans in the revolution. But soon after Texas won its independence, their positions grew difficult. The Americans did not trust them, feared that they were agents of the Mexican government, and in effect drove many of them out of the new republic. Most of those who stayed had to settle for a politically and economically subordinate status.
One of the first acts of the new president of Texas, Sam Houston, was to send a delegation to Washington with an offer to join the Union. But President Jackson, fearing that adding a large new slave state to the Union would increase sectional tensions, blocked annexation and even delayed recognizing the new republic until 1837.
Spurned by the United States, Texas cast out on its own. England and France, concerned about the surging power of the United States, saw Texas as a possible check on its growth and began forging ties with the new republic. At that point, President Tyler persuaded Texas to apply for statehood again in 1844. But northern senators, fearing the admission of a new slave state, defeated it. Statehood would have to wait until after the election of President Polk.
THE LONE STAR FLAG Texas was an independent republic for nine years. The tattered banner pictured here was one of the republic’s original flags.
(©Kathie Rees/EyeEm/Getty Images)
Oregon
Control of what was known as “Oregon country,” in the Pacific Northwest, was also a major political issue in the 1840s. Both Britain and the United States claimed sovereignty in the region. Unable to resolve their conflicting claims diplomatically, they agreed in an 1818 treaty to allow citizens of each country equal access to the territory. This “joint occupation” continued for twenty years.
At the time of the treaty neither Britain nor the United States had established much of a presence in Oregon country. White settlement in the region consisted largely of scattered American and Canadian fur trading posts. But American interest in Oregon grew substantially in the 1820s and 1830s.
By the mid-1840s, white Americans substantially outnumbered the British in Oregon. They had also devastated much of the Indian population, in part through a measles epidemic that spread through the Cayuse Indians. American settlements were sprouting up along the Pacific Coast, and the new settlers were urging the U.S. government to take possession of the disputed Oregon country.
The Westward Migration
The migrations into Texas and Oregon were part of a larger movement that took hundreds of thousands of white and black Americans into the far western regions of the continent between 1840 and 1860. The largest number of migrants were from the Old Northwest. Most were relatively young people who had traveled in family groups. Few were wealthy, but many were relatively prosperous. Poor people who could not afford the trip on their own usually had to join other families or groups as laborers—men as farm or ranch hands; women as domestic servants, teachers, or, in some cases, prostitutes. Groups heading for areas where mining or lumbering was the principal economic activity consisted mostly of men. Those heading for farming regions traveled mainly as families.
Migrants generally gathered in one of several major depots in Iowa and Missouri (Independence, St. Joseph, or Council Bluffs), joined a wagon train led by hired guides, and set off with their belongings piled in covered wagons, livestock trailing behind. The major route west was the 2,000-mile Oregon Trail , which stretched from Independence across the Great Plains and through the South Pass of the Rocky Mountains. From there, migrants moved Page 301north into Oregon or south (along the California Trail) to the northern California coast. Other migrations moved along the Santa Fe Trail, southwest from Independence into New Mexico.
WESTERN TRAILS IN 1860 As settlers began the long process of exploring and establishing farms and businesses in the West, major trails began to develop to facilitate travel and trade between the region and the more thickly settled areas to the east. Note how many of the trails led to California and how few of them led into any of the far northern regions of U.S. territory. Note, too, the important towns and cities that grew up along these trails.
What forms of transportation later performed the functions that these trails performed prior to the Civil War?
However they traveled, overland migrants faced an arduous journey. Most lasted five or six months (from May to November), and travelers always felt the pressure to get through the Rockies before the snows began, often not an easy task given the very slow pace of most wagon trains. To save their horses for pulling the wagons, they walked most of the way. Diseases, including cholera, decimated and slowed many groups traveling west. The women, who did the cooking and washing at the end of the day, generally worked harder than the men, who usually rested when the caravan halted.
Despite the traditional image of westward migrants as rugged individualists, most travelers found the journey to be a communal experience. That was partly because many expeditions consisted of groups of friends, neighbors, or relatives who had decided to pull up stakes Page 302and move west together. And it was also because of the intensity of the journey. It was a rare expedition in which there were not some internal conflicts before the trip was over; but those who made the journey successfully generally learned the value of cooperation.
Only a few expeditions experienced Indian attacks. In the twenty years before the Civil War, fewer than 400 migrants (slightly more than one-tenth of 1 percent) died in conflicts with tribes. In fact, Indians were usually more helpful than dangerous to the white migrants. They often served as guides and traded horses, clothing, and fresh food with the travelers.
EXPANSION AND WAR
The growing number of white Americans in the lands west of the Mississippi put great pressure on the government in Washington to annex Texas, Oregon, and other territory. And in the 1840s, these expansionist pressures helped push the slavery question to the forefront of political debate and move the United States ever closer to war.
The Democrats and Expansion
In preparing for the election of 1844, the two leading candidates—Henry Clay of the Whig Party and Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party—both tried to avoid taking a stand on the controversial annexation of Texas. Sentiment for expansion was mild within the Whig Party, and Clay had no difficulty securing the nomination despite his noncommittal position. But many southern Democrats strongly supported annexation, and the party passed over Van Buren to nominate James K. Polk , who shared their enthusiasm.
Polk had represented Tennessee in the House of Representatives for fourteen years, four of them as Speaker, and had subsequently served as governor. But by 1844, he had been out of public office for three years. What made his victory possible was his support for the position, expressed in the Democratic platform, “that the re-occupation of Oregon and the re-annexation of Texas at the earliest practicable period are great American measures.” By combining the Oregon and Texas questions, the Democrats hoped to appeal to both northern and southern expansionists—and they did. Polk carried the election, 170 electoral votes to 105.
Polk entered office with a clear set of goals and with plans for attaining them. John Tyler accomplished the first of Polk’s ambitions for him in the last days of his own presidency. Interpreting the election returns as a mandate for the annexation of Texas, the outgoing president won congressional approval for it in February 1845. That December, Texas became a state.
Polk himself resolved the Oregon question. The British minister in Washington brusquely rejected a compromise that would establish the U.S.–Canadian border at the 49th parallel. Incensed, Polk again asserted the American claim to all of Oregon. There was loose talk of war on both sides of the Atlantic—talk that in the United States often took the form of the bellicose slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” (a reference to where the Americans hoped to draw the northern boundary of their part of Oregon). But neither country really wanted war. Finally, the British government accepted Polk’s original proposal to divide the territory at the 49th parallel. On June 15, 1846, the Senate approved a treaty that fixed the boundary there.
THE OREGON BOUNDARY, 1846 One of the last major boundary disputes between the United States and Great Britain involved the territory known as Oregon—the large region on the Pacific Coast north of California (which in 1846 was still part of Mexico). For years, America and Britain had overlapping claims on the territory. The British claimed land as far south as the present state of Oregon, while the Americans claimed land extending well into what is now Canada. Tensions over the Oregon border at times rose to the point that many Americans were demanding war, some using the slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight!” referring to the latitude of the northernmost point of the American claim.
How did President James K. Polk defuse the crisis?
The Southwest and California
One of the reasons the Senate and the president had agreed so readily to the British offer to settle the Oregon question was that their attention was turning to new tensions emerging Page 303in the Southwest. As soon as the United States admitted Texas to statehood in 1845, the Mexican government broke off diplomatic relations with Washington. Mexican–American relations grew still worse when a dispute developed over the boundary between Texas and Mexico. Texans claimed the Rio Grande as their western and southern border. Mexico, although still not conceding the loss of Texas, argued nevertheless that the border had always been the Nueces River, to the north of the Rio Grande. Polk accepted the Texas claim, and in the summer of 1845 he sent a small army under General Zachary Taylor to Texas to protect the new state against a possible Mexican invasion.
Part of the area in dispute was New Mexico, whose Spanish and Indian residents lived in a multiracial society that by the 1840s had endured for nearly a century and a half. In the 1820s, the Mexican government had invited American traders into the region, hoping to speed development of the province. But New Mexico, like Texas, soon became more Page 304American than Mexican, particularly after a flourishing commerce developed between Santa Fe and Independence, Missouri.
Americans were also increasing their interest in California. In this vast region lived members of several western Indian tribes and perhaps 7,000 Mexicans. Gradually, however, white Americans began to arrive: first maritime traders and captains of Pacific whaling ships, who stopped to barter goods or buy supplies; then merchants, who established stores, imported goods, and developed a profitable trade with the Mexicans and Indians; and finally pioneering farmers, who entered California from the east and settled in the Sacramento Valley. Some of these new settlers began to dream of bringing California into the United States.
President Polk soon came to share their dream and committed himself to acquiring both New Mexico and California for the United States. At the same time that he dispatched the troops under Taylor to Texas, he sent secret instructions to the commander of the Pacific naval squadron to seize the California ports if Mexico declared war. Representatives of the president quietly informed Americans in California that the United States would respond sympathetically to a revolt against Mexican authority there.
The Mexican War
Having appeared to prepare for war, Polk turned to diplomacy by dispatching a special minister to try to buy off the Mexicans. But Mexican leaders rejected the American offer to purchase the disputed territories. On January 13, 1846, as soon as he heard the news, Polk ordered Taylor’s army in Texas to move across the Nueces River, where it had been stationed, to the Rio Grande. For months, the Mexicans refused to fight. But finally, according to disputed American accounts, some Mexican troops crossed the Rio Grande and attacked a unit of American soldiers. On May 13, 1846, Congress declared war by votes of 40 to 2 in the Senate and 174 to 14 in the House.
Whig critics charged that Polk had deliberately maneuvered the country into the conflict and had staged the border incident that had precipitated the declaration. Many opponents also claimed that Polk had settled for less than he should have because he was preoccupied with Mexico. Opposition intensified as the war continued and as the public became aware of the rising casualties and expense.
Victory did not come as quickly as Polk had hoped. The president ordered Taylor to cross the Rio Grande, seize parts of northeastern Mexico, beginning with the city of Monterrey, and then march on to Mexico City itself. Taylor captured Monterrey in September 1846, but he let the Mexican garrison evacuate without pursuit. Polk now began to fear that Taylor lacked the tactical skill for the planned advance against Mexico City. He also feared that, if successful, Taylor would become a powerful political rival (as, in fact, he did).
In the meantime, Polk ordered other offensives against New Mexico and California. In the summer of 1846, a small army under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny captured Santa Fe with no opposition. He then proceeded to California, where he joined a conflict already in progress that was being staged jointly by American settlers, a well-armed exploring party led by John C. Frémont, and the American navy: the so-called Bear Flag Revolt. Kearny brought the disparate American forces together under his command, and by the autumn of 1846 he had completed the conquest of California.
But Mexico still refused to concede defeat. At this point, Polk and General Winfield Scott, the commanding general of the army and its finest soldier, launched a bold new campaign. Scott assembled an army at Tampico, which the navy transported down the Mexican coast to Veracruz. With an army that never numbered more than 14,000, Scott Page 305advanced 260 miles along the Mexican National Highway toward Mexico City, kept American casualties low, and never lost a battle before finally seizing the Mexican capital. A new Mexican government took power and announced its willingness to negotiate a peace treaty.
THE MEXICAN WAR, 1846–1848 Shortly after the settlement of the Oregon border dispute with Britain, the United States entered a war with Mexico over another contested border. This map shows the movement of Mexican and American troops during the fighting, which extended from the area around Santa Fe south to Mexico City and west to the coast of California. Note the American use of its naval forces to facilitate a successful assault on Mexico City, and others on the coast of California. Note, too, how unsuccessful the Mexican forces were in their battles with the United States. Mexico won only one battle—a relatively minor one at San Pasqual near San Diego—in the war.
How did President Polk deal with the popular clamor for the United States to annex much of present-day Mexico?
President Polk continued to encourage those who demanded that the United States annex much of Mexico itself. At the same time, he was growing anxious to get the war finished quickly. Polk sent a special presidential envoy, Nicholas Trist, to negotiate a settlement. On February 2, 1848, he reached agreement with the new Mexican government on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo , by which Mexico agreed to cede California and New Mexico to the United States and acknowledge the Rio Grande as the boundary of Texas. In return, the United States promised to assume any financial claims its new citizens had against Mexico and to pay the Mexicans $15 million. Trist had obtained most of Polk’s original demands, but he had not satisfied the new, more expansive dreams of acquiring additional territory in Mexico itself. Polk angrily claimed that Trist had violated his instructions, but he soon realized that he had no choice but to accept the treaty to silence a bitter battle growing between ardent expansionists demanding the annexation of “All Mexico!” and antislavery leaders charging that the expansionists were conspiring to extend slavery to new realms. The president submitted the Trist treaty to the Senate, which approved it by a vote of 38 to 14.Page 306
SOUTHWESTERN EXPANSION, 1845–1853 The annexation of much of what is now Texas in 1845, the much larger territorial gains won in the Mexican War in 1848, and the purchase of additional land from Mexico in 1853 completed the present continental border of the United States.
What great event shortly after the Mexican War contributed to a rapid settlement of California by migrants from the eastern United States?
THE SECTIONAL DEBATE
James Polk tried to be a president whose policies transcended sectional divisions. But conciliating the sections was becoming an ever more difficult task, and Polk gradually earned the enmity of northerners and westerners alike, who believed his policies favored the South at their expense.
Slavery and the Territories
In August 1846, while the Mexican War had been still in progress, Polk had asked Congress to appropriate $2 million for purchasing peace with Mexico. Immediately arising was the question of whether slavery would be allowed in any newly acquired territory. Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, an antislavery Democrat, introduced an amendment to the appropriation bill prohibiting slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico. The so-called Wilmot Proviso passed the House but failed in the Senate. (See “ Consider the Source: Wilmot Proviso .”) Southern militants contended that all Americans had equal rights in the new territories, including the right to move their slaves (which they considered property) into them.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
WILMOT PROVISO (1846)
To counter rising tensions over the question of whether territory acquired from Mexico would be slave or free, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania spearheaded an effort to ban slavery from that territory forever. His amendment passed the House twice but failed in the Senate, because of heated opposition from northern pro-slavery politicians.
Provided, that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. What condition did the proviso impose on future territory?
2. Why did this simple provision prove so controversial? What were its consequences?
3. Do you recognize the last two lines of the provision? Where do they later reappear?
As the sectional debate intensified, President Polk supported a proposal to extend the Missouri Compromise line through the new territories to the Pacific Coast, banning slavery north of the line and permitting it south of the line. Others supported a plan, originally known as “squatter sovereignty” and later by the more dignified phrase “ popular sovereignty ,”Page 307 that would allow the people of each territory to decide the status of slavery there. The debate over these various proposals dragged on for many months.
The presidential campaign of 1848 dampened the controversy for a time as both Democrats and Whigs tried to avoid the slavery question. When Polk, in poor health, declined to run again, the Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan, a dull, aging party regular. The Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor of Louisiana, hero of the Mexican War but a man with no political experience. Opponents of slavery found the choice of candidates unsatisfying, and out of their discontent emerged the new Free-Soil Party , whose candidate was former president Martin Van Buren.
Taylor won a narrow victory. But while Van Buren failed to carry a single state, he polled an impressive 291,000 votes (10 percent of the total), and the Free-Soilers elected ten members to Congress. The emergence of the Free-Soil Party as an important political force signaled the inability of the existing parties to contain the political passions slavery was creating. It was also an early sign of the coming collapse of the second party system in the 1850s.
The California Gold Rush
By the time Taylor took office, the pressure to resolve the question of slavery in the far western territories had become more urgent as a result of dramatic events in California. In January 1848, a foreman working in a sawmill owned by John Sutter (one of California’s leading ranchers) found traces of gold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Within months, news of the discovery had spread throughout the nation and much of the world. Almost immediately, hundreds of thousands of people began flocking to California in a frantic search for gold.
The atmosphere in California at the peak of the gold rush was one of almost crazed excitement and greed. Most migrants to the Far West prepared carefully before making the journey. But the California migrants (known as “ Forty-niners ”) threw caution to the winds, abandoning farms, jobs, homes, and families, piling onto ships and flooding the overland trails. The overwhelming majority of the Forty-niners (perhaps 95 percent) were white men, and the society they created in California was unusually fluid and volatile because of the almost total absence of white women, children, or families.
LOOKING FOR GOLD In this 1850s lithograph, the unnamed artist presents the West as a world of abundance and great wealth available to all with just a little bit of pluck and luck. Gold is there for the taking, and happiness befalls all who pan for riches. Absent is any sense of failure, hard work, and suffering.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-32195])
The gold rush also attracted some of the first Chinese migrants to the western United States. News of the discoveries created great excitement in China, particularly in impoverished areas. It was, of course, extremely difficult for a poor Chinese peasant to get to America; but many young, adventurous people (mostly men) decided to go anyway—in the belief that they could quickly become rich and then return to China. Emigration brokers loaned many migrants money for passage to California, which the migrants were to pay off out of their earnings there.
The gold rush produced a serious labor shortage in California, as many male workers left their jobs and flocked to the gold fields. That created opportunities for many people who needed work (including Chinese immigrants). It also led to a frenzied exploitation of Indians that resembled slavery in all but name. A new state law permitted the arrest of “loitering” or orphaned Indians and their assignment to a term of “indentured” labor.
The gold rush was of critical importance to the growth of California, but not for the reasons most of the migrants hoped. There was substantial gold in the hills of the Sierra Nevada, and many people got rich from it. But only a tiny fraction of the Forty-niners ever found gold. Some disappointed migrants returned home after a while; however, many stayed in California and swelled both the agricultural and urban populations of the territory. By 1856, for example, San Francisco—whose population had been 1,000 before the gold rush—was the home of over 50,000 people. By the early 1850s, California, which had always had Page 309a diverse population, had become even more heterogeneous. The gold rush had attracted not just white Americans but also Europeans, Chinese, South Americans, Mexicans, free blacks, and slaves who accompanied southern migrants. Conflicts over gold intersected with racial and ethnic tensions to make the territory an unusually turbulent place.
Rising Sectional Tensions
Zachary Taylor believed statehood could become the solution to the issue of slavery in the territories. As long as the new lands remained territories, the federal government was responsible for deciding the fate of slavery within them. But once they became states, he thought, their own governments would be able to settle the slavery question. At Taylor’s urging, California quickly adopted a constitution that prohibited slavery, and in December 1849 Taylor asked Congress to admit California as a free state.
Congress balked, in part because of several other controversies concerning slavery that were complicating the debate. One was the effort of antislavery forces to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. Another was the emergence of personal liberty laws in northern states, which barred courts and police officers from returning runaway slaves to their owners in defiance of the Constitution’s Fugitive Slave Clause. But the biggest obstacle to the president’s program was the white South’s fear that new free states would be added to the northern majority. The number of free and slave states was equal in 1849—fifteen each. The admission of California would upset the balance; and New Mexico, Oregon, and Utah—all candidates for statehood—might upset it further.
Page 310Even many otherwise moderate southern leaders now began to talk about secession from the Union. In the North, every state legislature but one adopted a resolution demanding the prohibition of slavery in the territories.
STIRRING THE POT OF SECTIONAL TENSIONS James Baillie's 1850 lithograph, The Hurly-Burly Pot , warns of sharpening antagonisms between the North and the South and the rising threat of disunion. He targets the most vocal partisans: from the North, abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Free-Soil promoter David Wilmot, and journalist Horace Greeley; and from the South, states‘ rights promoter Senator John C. Calhoun. Like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth , the first three dance around a bubbling cauldron, adding to it sacks branded “Free Soil,” “Abolition,” and “Fourierism” (tossed in by Greeley, a supporter of utopian socialist Charles Fourier). Behind them looms John Calhoun, who crows about this act of treason: “For success to the whole mixture, we invoke our great patron Saint Benedict Arnold.”
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-11138])
The Compromise of 1850
Faced with this mounting crisis, moderates and unionists spent the winter of 1849–1850 trying to frame a great compromise. The aging Henry Clay, who was spearheading the effort, believed that no compromise could last unless it settled all the issues in dispute. As a result, he took several measures that had been proposed separately, combined them into a single piece of legislation, and presented it to the Senate on January 29, 1850. Among the bill’s provisions were the admission of California as a free state; the formation of territorial governments in the rest of the lands acquired from Mexico, without restrictions on slavery; the abolition of the slave trade, but not slavery itself, in the District of Columbia; and a new and more effective fugitive slave law. These resolutions launched a debate that raged for seven months.
Finally in midyear, the climate for compromise improved. President Taylor suddenly died, and Vice President Millard Fillmore of New York took his place. Fillmore, who understood the important of flexibility, supported the compromise and persuaded northern Whigs to do so as well. Where the Old Guard’s omnibus bill had failed, Stephen A. Douglas , a Democratic senator from Illinois, proposed breaking up the bill. Thus representatives of different sections could support those elements of the compromise they liked and oppose those they did not. Douglas also gained support with complicated backroom deals linking Page 311the compromise to such nonideological matters as the sale of government bonds and the construction of railroads. As a result of his efforts, by mid-September Congress had enacted all the components of the compromise.
SLAVE AND FREE TERRITORIES UNDER THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 The acquisition of vast new western lands raised the question of the status of slavery in new territories organized for statehood by the United States. Tension between the North and the South on this question led in 1850 to a great compromise, forged in Congress, to settle this dispute. The compromise allowed California to join the Union as a free state and introduced the concept of “popular sovereignty” for other new territories.
How well did the Compromise of 1850 work?
The Compromise of 1850 was a victory of individual self-interest. Still, members of Congress hailed the measure as a triumph of statesmanship; and Millard Fillmore, signing it, called it a just settlement of the sectional problem, “in its character final and irrevocable.”
THE CRISES OF THE 1850S
For a few years after its passage, the Compromise of 1850 seemed to work. Sectional conflict appeared to fade amid booming prosperity and growth. But the tensions between the North and the South never really disappeared.
The Uneasy Truce
With the run-up to the presidential election of 1852, both major parties endorsed the Compromise of 1850 and nominated candidates unidentified with sectional passions. The Democrats chose the obscure New Hampshire politician Franklin Pierce, and the Whigs chose the military hero General Winfield Scott. But the sectional question quickly became a divisive influence in the election and the Whigs were the principal victims. They suffered massive defections from antislavery members who were angered by the party’s evasiveness on the issue. Many of them flocked to the Free-Soil Party, whose antislavery presidential candidate, John P. Hale, repudiated the Compromise of 1850. The divisions among the Whigs helped produce a victory for the Democrats in 1852.
Franklin Pierce attempted to maintain harmony by avoiding divisive issues, particularly slavery. But it was an impossible task. Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act intensified quickly after 1850. Mobs formed in some northern cities to prevent enforcement of the fugitive slave law, and several northern states also passed their own laws barring the deportation of fugitive slaves. White southerners watched with growing anger and alarm as the one element of the Compromise of 1850 that they had considered a victory seemed to become meaningless in the face of northern defiance.
“Young America”
One of the ways Franklin Pierce hoped to dampen sectional controversy was through his support of a movement in the Democratic Party known as “Young America.” Its adherents saw the expansion of American democracy throughout the world as a way to divert attention from the controversies over slavery. The great liberal and nationalist revolutions of 1848 in Europe stirred them to dream of a republican Europe with governments based on the model of the United States. They dreamed as well of acquiring new territories in the Western Hemisphere.
But efforts to extend the nation’s domain could not avoid becoming entangled with the sectional crisis. Pierce had been pursuing diplomatic attempts to buy Cuba from Spain (efforts begun in 1848 by Polk). In 1854, however, a group of Pierce’s envoys sent him a private document from Ostend, Belgium, making a case for seizing Cuba by force. When the Ostend Manifesto, as it became known, was leaked to the public, antislavery northerners charged the administration with conspiring to bring a new slave state into the Union.Page 312
The South, for its part, opposed all efforts to acquire new territory that would not support a slave system. The kingdom of Hawaii agreed to join the United States in 1854, but the treaty died in the Senate because it contained a clause prohibiting slavery in the islands. A powerful movement to annex Canada to the United States similarly foundered, at least in part because of slavery.
Slavery, Railroads, and the West
What fully revived the sectional crisis, however, was the same issue that had produced it in the first place: slavery in the territories. By the 1850s, the line of substantial white settlement had moved beyond the boundaries of Missouri, Iowa, and what is now Minnesota into a great expanse of plains, which many white Americans had once believed was unfit for cultivation. Now it was becoming apparent that large sections of this region were, in fact, suitable for farming. In the states of the Old Northwest, prospective settlers urged the government to open the area to them, provide territorial governments, and dislodge local Indians to make room for white settlers. There was relatively little opposition from any segment of white society to this proposed violation of Indian rights. But the interest in further settlement raised two issues that did prove highly controversial and that gradually became entwined with each other: railroads and slavery.
As the nation expanded westward, broad support began to emerge for building a transcontinental railroad. The problem was where to place it—and in particular, where to locate the railroad’s eastern terminus, where the line could connect with the existing rail network east of the Mississippi. Northerners favored Chicago, while southerners supported St. Louis, Memphis, or New Orleans. The transcontinental railroad had also become part of the struggle between the North and the South.
Pierce’s secretary of war, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, removed one obstacle to a southern route. Surveys indicated that a railroad with a southern terminus would have to pass through an area in Mexican territory. But in 1853, Davis sent James Gadsden, a southern railroad builder, to Mexico, where he persuaded the Mexican government to accept $10 million in exchange for a strip of land that today comprises parts of Arizona and New Mexico. The so-called Gadsden Purchase only accentuated the sectional rivalry as it added more slave territory.
The Kansas–Nebraska Controversy
The momentum for an intercontinental railroad continued to build, but the first great barrier was the debate over where to put it. The acknowledged leader of northwestern Democrats and senator from Illinois, Stephen A. Douglas, wanted the transcontinental railroad to run north through his state, but he also recognized, as many did, that a northern route through the territories would run mostly through Indian populations. As a result, he introduced a bill in January 1854 to organize (and thus open to white settlement and railroads) a huge new territory, known as Nebraska, west of Iowa and Missouri from the still unorganized territory of the Louisiana Purchase.
Douglas knew the South would oppose his bill because organized territories over time become states, and the proposed territory was north of the Missouri Compromise line (36°3ʹ) and hence closed to slavery since 1820. Initially, Douglas attempted to appease southerners by including a provision that territorial legislatures would decide the status of slavery. In theory, the region could choose to open itself to slavery, effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise. When southern Democrats demanded more, Douglas also agreed to divide the Page 313area into two territories—Nebraska and Kansas—instead of one. The new, second territory (Kansas) was thought more likely to become a slave state. In its final form, the measure was known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act . President Pierce supported the bill, and after a strenuous debate, it became law in May 1854 with the unanimous support of the South and the partial support of northern Democrats.
No piece of legislation in American history produced so many immediate, sweeping, and ominous political consequences. It split and destroyed the Whig Party. It divided the northern Democrats (many of whom were appalled at the repeal of the Missouri Compromise) and drove many of them from the party. Most important, it spurred the creation of a new party that was frankly sectional in composition and creed. People in both major parties who opposed Douglas’s bill began to call themselves Anti-Nebraska Democrats and Anti-Nebraska Whigs. In 1854, they formed a new organization and named it the Republican Party, and it instantly became a major force in American politics. In the elections of that year, the Republicans won enough seats in Congress to permit them, in combination with allies among the Know-Nothings, to organize the House of Representatives.
“Bleeding Kansas”
White settlers began moving into Kansas almost immediately after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the spring of 1855, elections were held for a territorial legislature. There were only about 1,500 legal voters in Kansas by then, but thousands of Missourians, some traveling in armed bands into Kansas, swelled the vote to over 6,000. As a result, pro-slavery forces elected a majority to the legislature, which immediately legalized slavery. Outraged free-staters elected their own delegates to an independent constitutional convention, which met at Topeka and adopted a constitution excluding slavery. They then chose their own governor and legislature and petitioned Congress for statehood. But President Pierce denounced them as traitors and threw the full support of the federal government behind the pro-slavery territorial legislature. A few months later, a pro-slavery federal marshal assembled a large posse, consisting mostly of Missourians, to arrest the free-state leaders, who had set up their headquarters in Lawrence. The posse sacked the town, burned the “governor’s” house, and destroyed several printing presses. Retribution came quickly.
Among the most fervent abolitionists in Kansas was John Brown , a grim, fiercely committed zealot who had moved to Kansas to fight to make it a free state. After the events in Lawrence, he gathered six followers (including four of his sons) and in one night murdered five pro-slavery settlers. This terrible episode, known as the Pottawatomie Massacre, led to more civil strife in Kansas including more armed bands engaged in guerrilla warfare with some more interested in land claims or loot than slavery. Northerners and southerners alike came to believe that the events in Kansas illustrated (and were caused by) the aggressive designs of the rival section. “Bleeding Kansas” became a powerful symbol of the sectional controversy.
JOHN BROWN Even in this formal photographic portrait (taken in 1859, the last year of his life), John Brown conveys the fierce sense of righteousness that fueled his extraordinary activities in the fight against slavery.
(Source: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-USZ62-2472])
Another symbol soon appeared, in the U.S. Senate. In May 1856, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a strong antislavery leader, rose to give a speech titled “The Crime Against Kansas.” In it he gave particular attention to Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, an outspoken defender of slavery. The South Carolinian was, Sumner claimed, the “Don Quixote” of slavery, having “chosen a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight . . . the harlot slavery.”
The pointedly sexual references and the general viciousness of the speech enraged Butler’s nephew, Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina. Page 314Several days after the speech, Brooks approached Sumner at his desk in the Senate chamber during a recess, raised a heavy cane, and began beating him repeatedly on the head and shoulders. Sumner, trapped in his chair, rose in agony with such strength that he tore the desk from the bolts holding it to the floor. Then he collapsed, bleeding and unconscious. So severe were his injuries that he was unable to return to the Senate for four years. Throughout the North, he became a hero—a martyr to the barbarism of the South. In the South, Preston Brooks became a hero, too. Censured by the House, he resigned his seat, returned to South Carolina, and stood successfully for reelection.
The Free-Soil Ideology
What had happened to produce such deep hostility between the two sections? In part, the tensions were reflections of the two sections’ differing economic and territorial interests. But they were also reflections of a hardening of ideas in both the North and the South.
In the North, assumptions about the proper structure of society came to center on the belief in “free soil” and “free labor.” Most white northerners came to believe that the existence of slavery was dangerous not only because of what it did to blacks but because of what it threatened to do to whites. At the heart of American democracy, they argued, was the right of all citizens to own property, to control their own labor, and to have access to opportunities for advancement. Slavery, as a system of coerced labor, make a mockery of this belief. At the same time, many, but not all, northern whites shared a conviction that slavery was morally wrong. Northern blacks also embraced free labor ideology but fused to it a staunch antislavery conviction.
According to this vision, the South was the antithesis of democracy—a closed, static society, in which slavery preserved an entrenched aristocracy. While the North was growing Page 315and prospering, the South was stagnating, rejecting the values of individualism and progress. The South, northern free-laborites further maintained, was engaged in a conspiracy to extend slavery throughout the nation and thus to destroy the openness of northern capitalism and replace it with the closed, aristocratic system of the South. The only solution to this “slave power conspiracy” was to fight the spread of slavery and extend the nation’s democratic (i.e., free-labor) ideals to all sections of the country.
This ideology, which lay at the heart of the new Republican Party, also strengthened the commitment of Republicans to the Union. Since the idea of continued growth and progress was central to the free-labor vision, the prospect of dismemberment of the nation was to the Republicans unthinkable.
The Pro-Slavery Argument
In the meantime, in the South a very different ideology was emerging. It was a result of many things: the Nat Turner uprising in 1831, which terrified southern whites; the expansion of the cotton economy into the Deep South, which made slavery unprecedentedly lucrative; and the growth of the Garrisonian abolitionist movement, with its strident attacks on southern society. The popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was perhaps the most glaring evidence of the power of those attacks, but other abolitionist writings had been antagonizing white southerners for years.
In response to these pressures, a number of white southerners produced a new intellectual defense of slavery. Professor Thomas R. Dew of the College of William and Mary helped begin that effort in 1832. Twenty years later, apologists for slavery summarized their views in an anthology that gave their ideology its name: The Pro-Slavery Argument. John C. Calhoun stated the essence of the case in 1837: Slavery was “a good—a positive good.” It was good for the slaves because they enjoyed better conditions than industrial workers in the North, good for southern society because it was the only way the two races could live together in peace, and good for the entire country because the southern economy, based on slavery, was the key to the prosperity of the nation.
Above all, southern apologists argued, slavery was good because it served as the basis for the southern way of life—a way of life superior to any other in the United States, perhaps in the world. White southerners looking at the North saw a spirit of greed, debauchery, and destructiveness. “The masses of the North are venal, corrupt, covetous, mean and selfish,” wrote one southerner. Others wrote with horror of the factory system and the crowded, pestilential cities filled with unruly immigrants. But the South, they believed, was a stable, orderly society, free from the feuds between capital and labor plaguing the North. It protected the welfare of its workers. And it allowed the aristocracy to enjoy a refined and accomplished cultural life. It was, in short, an ideal social order in which all elements of the population were secure and content.
The defense of slavery rested, too, on increasingly elaborate arguments about the biological inferiority of African Americans, who were, white southerners claimed, inherently unfit to take care of themselves, let alone exercise the rights of citizenship.
Buchanan and Depression
In this unpromising climate, the presidential campaign of 1856 began. Democratic Party leaders wanted a candidate who, unlike President Pierce, was not closely associated with the explosive question of “Bleeding Kansas.” They chose James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, Page 316who as minister to England had been safely out of the country during the recent controversies. The Republicans, participating in their first presidential contest, endorsed a Whiggish program of internal improvements, thus combining the idealism of antislavery with the economic aspirations of the North. The Republicans nominated John C. Frémont, who had made a national reputation as an explorer of the Far West and who had no political record. The Native American, or Know-Nothing, Party was beginning to break apart, but it nominated former president Millard Fillmore, who also received the endorsement of a small remnant of the Whig Party.
After a heated, even frenzied campaign, Buchanan won a narrow victory over Frémont and Fillmore. Whether because of age and physical infirmities or because of a more fundamental weakness of character, he became a painfully timid and indecisive president at a critical moment in history. In the year Buchanan took office, a financial panic struck the country, followed by a depression that lasted several years. In the North, the depression strengthened the Republican Party because distressed manufacturers, workers, and farmers came to believe that the hard times were the result of the unsound policies of southern-controlled, pro-slavery Democratic administrations. They expressed their frustrations by moving into an alliance with antislavery elements and thus into the Republican Party.
The Dred Scott Decision
On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court projected itself into the sectional controversy with one of the most controversial and notorious decisions in its history—Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a Missouri slave, once owned by an army surgeon who had taken Scott with him into Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery was forbidden. In 1846, after the surgeon died, Scott sued his master’s widow for freedom on the grounds that his residence in free territory had liberated him from slavery. The claim was well grounded in Missouri law, and in 1850 the circuit court in which Scott filed the suit declared him free. By now, John Sanford, the brother of the surgeon’s widow, was claiming ownership of Scott, and he appealed the circuit court ruling to the state supreme court, which reversed the earlier decision. When Scott appealed to the federal courts, Sanford’s attorneys claimed that Scott had no standing to sue because he was not a citizen.
The Supreme Court (which misspelled Sanford’s name in its decision) was so divided that it was unable to issue a single ruling on the case. The thrust of the various rulings, however, was a stunning defeat for the antislavery movement. Chief Justice Roger Taney, who wrote one of the majority opinions, declared that Scott could not bring a suit in the federal courts because he was not a citizen. Blacks had no claim to citizenship, Taney argued. Slaves were property, and the Fifth Amendment prohibited Congress from taking property without “due process of law.” Consequently, Taney concluded, Congress possessed no authority to pass a law depriving persons of their slave property in the territories. The Missouri Compromise, therefore, had always been unconstitutional.
The Dred Scott decision decision did nothing to challenge the right of an individual state to prohibit slavery within its borders, but the statement that the federal government was powerless to act on the issue was a drastic and startling one. Southern whites were elated: the highest tribunal in the land had sanctioned parts of the most extreme southern argument. In the North, the ruling produced widespread dismay. The decision, the New York Tribune wrote, “is entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” Republicans threatened that when they won control of the national government, they would reverse the decision—by “packing” the Court with new members.Page 317
Deadlock over Kansas
President Buchanan timidly endorsed the Dred Scott decision. At the same time, he tried to resolve the controversy over Kansas by supporting its admission to the Union as a slave state. In response, the pro-slavery territorial legislature called an election for delegates to a constitutional convention. The free-state residents refused to participate, claiming that the legislature had discriminated against them in drawing district lines. As a result, the pro-slavery forces won control of the convention, which met in 1857 at Lecompton, framed a constitution legalizing slavery, and refused to give voters a chance to reject it. When an election for a new territorial legislature was called, the antislavery groups turned out in force and won a majority. The new antislavery legislature promptly submitted the Lecompton constitution to the voters, who rejected it by more than 10,000 votes.
Both sides had resorted to fraud and violence, but it was clear nevertheless that a majority of the people of Kansas opposed slavery. Buchanan, however, pressured Congress to admit Kansas under the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution. Stephen A. Douglas and other northern and western Democrats refused to support the president’s proposal, which died in the House of Representatives. Finally, in April 1858, Congress approved a compromise: The Lecompton constitution would be submitted to the voters of Kansas again. If it was approved, Kansas would be admitted to the Union; if it was rejected, statehood would be postponed. Again, Kansas voters decisively rejected the Lecompton constitution. Not until the closing months of Buchanan’s administration in 1861 did Kansas enter the Union—as a free state.
The Emergence of Lincoln
Given the gravity of the sectional crisis, the congressional elections of 1858 took on a special importance. Of particular note was the U.S. Senate contest in Illinois, which pitted Stephen A. Douglas, the most prominent northern Democrat, against Abraham Lincoln , who was largely unknown outside Illinois.
Lincoln was a successful lawyer who had long been involved in state politics. He had served several terms in the Illinois legislature and one undistinguished term in Congress. But he was not a national figure like Douglas, and so he tried to increase his visibility by engaging Douglas in a series of debates. The Lincoln–Douglas debates attracted enormous crowds and received wide attention.
At the heart of the debates was a basic difference on the issue of slavery. Douglas appeared to have no moral position on the issue, Lincoln claimed. He stated that Douglas did not care whether slavery was “voted up, or voted down.” Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was more fundamental. If the nation could accept that blacks were not entitled to basic human rights, he argued, then it could accept that other groups—immigrant laborers, for example—could be deprived of rights, too. And if slavery were to extend into the western territories, he argued, opportunities for poor white laborers to better their lots there would be lost. The nation’s future, Lincoln argued (reflecting the central idea of the Republican Party), rested on the spread of free labor.
Lincoln believed slavery was morally wrong, but he was not an abolitionist. That was in part because he could not envision an easy alternative to slavery in the areas where it already existed. He shared the prevailing view among northern whites that the black race was not prepared to live on equal terms with whites. But even while Lincoln accepted the inferiority of black people, he continued to believe that they were entitled to basic rights. “I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. . . . But I hold that . . . there is no reason in the world why the negro is not Page 318entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man.” Lincoln and his party would “arrest the further spread” of slavery. They would not directly challenge it where it already existed but would trust that the institution would gradually die out there of its own accord.
Douglas’s popular sovereignty position satisfied his followers sufficiently to produce a Democratic majority in the state legislature, which returned him to the Senate but aroused little enthusiasm. Lincoln, by contrast, lost the election but emerged with a growing following both in and beyond the state. And outside Illinois, the elections went heavily against the Democrats. The party retained control of the Senate but lost its majority in the House, with the result that the congressional sessions of 1858 and 1859 were bitterly deadlocked.
John Brown’s Raid
The battles in Congress, however, were almost entirely overshadowed by an event that enraged and horrified the South. In the fall of 1859, John Brown, the antislavery radical whose bloody actions in Kansas had inflamed the crisis there, staged an even more dramatic episode, this time in the South itself. With private encouragement and financial aid from some prominent abolitionists, he made elaborate plans to seize a mountain fortress in Virginia from which, he believed, he could foment a slave insurrection in the South. On October 16, he and a group of eighteen followers attacked and seized control of a U.S. arsenal in Harpers Ferry , Virginia. But the slave uprising Brown hoped to inspire did not occur, and he quickly found himself besieged in the arsenal by citizens, local militia companies, and, before long, U.S. troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. After ten of his men were killed, Brown surrendered. He was promptly tried in a Virginia court for treason and sentenced to death. He and six of his followers were hanged.
No other single event did more than the Harpers Ferry raid to convince white southerners that they could not live safely in the Union. Many southerners believed (incorrectly) that John Brown’s raid had the support of the Republican Party, and it suggested to them that the North was now committed to producing a slave insurrection.
The Election of Lincoln
As the presidential election of 1860 approached, the Democratic Party was torn apart by a battle between southerners, who demanded a strong endorsement of slavery, and westerners, who supported the idea of popular sovereignty. When the party convention met in April in Charleston, South Carolina, and endorsed popular sovereignty, delegates from eight states in the lower South walked out. The remaining delegates could not agree on a presidential candidate and finally adjourned after agreeing to meet again in Baltimore. The decimated convention at Baltimore nominated Stephen Douglas for president. In the meantime, disenchanted southern Democrats met in Richmond and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky.
The Republican leaders, in the meantime, were trying to broaden their appeal in the North. The platform endorsed such traditional Whig measures as a high tariff, internal improvements, a homestead bill, and a Pacific railroad to be built with federal financial assistance. It supported the right of each state to decide the status of slavery within its borders. But it also insisted that neither Congress nor territorial legislatures could legalize slavery in the territories. The Republican convention chose Abraham Lincoln as the party’s presidential nominee. Lincoln was appealing because of his growing reputation for eloquence, because of his firm but moderate Page 319position on slavery, and because his relative obscurity ensured that he would have none of the drawbacks of other, more prominent (and therefore more controversial) Republicans.
In the November election, Lincoln won the presidency with a majority of the electoral votes but only about two-fifths of the fragmented popular vote. Therefore, his victory was far from decisive. And his party, moreover, failed to win a majority in Congress. Even so, many white southerners interpreted the election of Lincoln as the death knell to their power and influence in the Union. And within a few weeks of Lincoln’s victory, the process of disunion began—a process that would quickly lead to a prolonged and bloody war.
CONCLUSION
In the decades following the War of 1812, a vigorous nationalism pervaded much of American life, helping smooth over the growing differences among the very distinct societies emerging in the United States. During the 1850s, however, the forces that had worked to hold the nation together in the past fell victim to new and much more divisive pressures.Page 320
Driving the sectional tensions of the 1850s was a battle over national policy toward the place of slavery within the western territories. Should slavery be permitted in the new states? And who should decide? There were strenuous efforts to craft compromises and solutions to this dilemma: the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, and others. But despite these efforts, positions on slavery continued to harden in both the North and the South. Bitter battles in the territory of Kansas over whether to permit slavery there; growing agitation by abolitionists in the North and pro-slavery advocates in the South; the Supreme Court’s controversial Dred Scott decision in 1857; the popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin throughout the decade; and the emergence of a new political party—the Republican Party—openly and centrally opposed to slavery: all worked to destroy the hopes for compromise and push the South toward secession.
In 1860, all pretense of common sentiment collapsed when no political party presented a presidential candidate capable of attracting national support. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a little-known politician recognized for his eloquent condemnations of slavery in a Senate race two years earlier. The Democratic Party split apart, with its northern and southern wings each nominating different candidates. Lincoln won the election easily, but with less than 40 percent of the popular vote. And almost immediately after his victory, the states of the South began preparing to secede from the Union.