American History Assignment

Chapter 15

The Union Broken

1850-1861

Southern Complaints

With British and northern factories buying cotton in unprecedented quantities, southern planters prospered in the 1850s. Their operations, like those of northern commercial farmers, became more highly capitalized to keep up with the demand. But instead of machinery, white southerners invested in slaves. During the 1850s the price of prime field hands reached record levels.

Kansas

Free or slave state

The Dred Scott Decision

The owner of a Missouri slave named Dred Scott had taken him to live for several years in Illinois, a free state, and in the Wisconsin Territory, in what is now Minnesota, where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise. Scott had returned to Missouri with his owner, only to sue eventually for his freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state and a free territory had made him free. His case ultimately went to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled 7 to 2 that Scott remain a slave.

The Chief Justice ruled that African Americans could not be and never had been citizens of the United States. Instead he insisted at the time the Constitution was adopted they were regarded as beings of an inferior order.

Congress it declared had no power to ban slavery from any territory of the United States.

White southerners rejoiced at the outcome. Republicans denounced the Court. The Republicans platform declared that Congress should prohibit slavery in all territories.

Before being elected President, when accepting his party’s nomination for senator from Illinois in 1958, Abraham Lincoln was quoted a proverb from the Bible:

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.

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 lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

Lincoln opposed allowing blacks to vote or hold political office. But he concluded there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. … The negro is not my equal in many respects… certainly not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns…

Lincoln lost the senate race in Illinois but Republicans believed his performance during a series of debates marked his as a presidential contender for 1860.

Northerners feared that the Slave Power was conspiring to extend slavery into the free states.

As the price of slaves rose sharply, the proportion of southerners who owned slaves had dropped almost a third since 1830. There were declining opportunities for ordinary white southerners.

By the 1850s slavery had been abolished in most of the Americas and in the United States the South’s political power was steadily shrinking. Only the expansion of slavery held out any promise of new slave states needed to preserve the South’s political power and protect its way of life.

The Road to War

John Brown’s Raid

John Brown an abolitionist gathered 21 followers, including 5 free blacks in hopes of forming a slave insurrection.

On October 16, 1859 the group seized the unguarded federal armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia. Colonel Robert E. Lee captured Brown and his followers.

On December 2, 1859 the state of Virginia hanged Brown for treason.

Quote pg 393 last paragraph

When Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States it was the first time the nation elected a president who was committed to stopping the expansion of slavery.

Southern Fears

Lincoln’s election struck many southerners as a blow. Lincoln was elected into office on the strength of the free states alone.

Secession seemed the only alternative left to protect southern equality and liberty.

Confederate States of America

South Carolina was determined to force the other southern states to act. On December 20, 1860 a popular convention unanimously passed a resolution seceding from the Union. The rest of the Deep South followed.

On February 7, 1861 the states stretching from South Carolina to Texas organized the Confederate States of America and elected Jefferson Davis as president.