US History Due 5.3.2020

Discussion Board Question:

Describe the “politics of slavery” as it applied to westward expansion (e.g.,

Texas, Mexican territories acquired by war, Kansas-Nebraska Act issues,

etc.). How could this be characterized as a cause of the Civil War? Why? Use

specific examples to make your argument and be clear on which you are

discussing and, as always, be sure to include citations for everything.

Background:

Modern scholarship has thoroughly documented the central role of slavery in the sectional

controversy and the outbreak of the Civil War. As Pulitzer Prize winning Historian James

McPherson states in Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, "the greatest danger to

American survival at midcentury...was sectional conflict between North and South over the

future of slavery." Indeed, from the 1840s on, every major sectional conflict involved the

complex slavery problem, especially the expansion of slavery into the western territories and any

future territories the United States might acquire. By 1848, in the words of Richard H. Sewell,

slavery had become, "the issue in American politics."

As you see in this block of material, Henry Clay saves the Union from dissolving a decade

earlier over the status of slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico. The Compromise of

1850 averted disaster at that juncture, and many Americans regarded it as "a final settlement" of

all sectional hostilities, particularly over slavery in the national lands. That divisive issue did

indeed appear to be settled. The new southwestern territories, Utah and New Mexico, had been

organized without congressional conditions on slavery, which meant that the two territories

could decide the issue as they wished. Utah went on to legalize the institution in 1852, and New

Mexico did likewise seven years later (in 1860, however, Utah had only 29 slaves and New

Mexico had none). Oregon Territory, on the other hand, had outlawed slavery, and it remained

prohibited by the Missouri Compromise line in the vast northern section of the old Louisiana

Purchase territory, which included the Minnesota Territory and an immense unorganized section.

In 1854, Congress organized that section by creating new the territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

Had the Missouri Compromise line remained in effect, slavery would have been prohibited in

both territories. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act overturned the Missouri Compromise and decreed

that the people of each territory would decide whether to legalize or outlaw slavery. This

formula was called popular sovereignty. Until the settlers of the two territories voted on the

issue, southerners were free to take their slaves into the vast domain once preserved for freedom.

What had caused Congress to enact such a disastrous measure? Historian David Donald argues

that southerners on Capitol Hill maneuvered Stephen A. Douglas, chief architect of the measure,

into the explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise line, because they believed that slavery

would die out if it could not expand into new territory.

As it turned out, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a monumental fiasco that reopened the divisive

issue of slavery in the territories and inflamed sectional hostilities worse than ever. The measure

led to the disintegration of the Whig Party, to the emergence of the new all-northern Republican

party, dedicated to stopping the spread of slavery, and to civil war on the Kansas prairie.

Because slavery was a national problem that affected both sections of the country, armed

pioneers from North and South alike poured into the nation's heartland, Kansas became the

battleground for the sectional struggle the territories and future states, a struggle that would

determine whether the free states or the slave states would control the Union. Abraham Lincoln

captured the sectional polarization perfect when he wrote a southerner: "You think slavery is

right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and out to be restricted. That I

supposed it the rub." It was the rub indeed. And no event better illustrates the rub than the

struggle over Bleeding Kansas. When Americans started killing Americans there over the future

of slavery, it was a dress rehearsal for the national cataclysm to come a few years later.