difference between slave states and free states

With the disestablishment of American state churches, the power of evangelical religion and reform organizations only increased in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s. This fact can be seen with the second Great Awakening, often said to have begun with the mesmerizing preaching of Charles Grandison Finney. The Awakening was a broad and diffuse movement of Protestants attempting to revive in other Americans a sense of a new divine purpose for their lives.

Perhaps the best known “reform” movement in this period was the temperance movement, which forever changed the drinking habits of many Americans. By establishing numerous associations where members pledged never again to drink alcohol, this movement hoped to gain support from the public to pressure lawmakers to ban alcohol. By 1851, temperance reformers managed to convince the state of Maine to ban alcohol, and by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the movement would gain even more steam. For historians, temperance advocates played an important role in speaking out against domestic violence, in addition to bringing attention to all of the new slums or communities of people left behind or otherwise taken advantage of by the new market economy. Along with the temperance movement, the other famous reform undertaken in the free states after 1820 was public schooling. Again, reformers believed that literacy should be universal, and that the survival of the republic depended upon new immigrants or other poor people being educated so that they would not contribute to the future degradation of American social and political life. Horace Mann, as the superintendent of schools for Massachusetts believed in free, tax supported education to end “misery and crime” not only in his state, but really throughout the country. And as with temperance within a couple of decades several states did have mandatory education statutes on the books. Of course, these reformers also ran afoul of Catholic immigrants, and since these “public” schools used the Protestant, King James Bible (in addition to using textbooks which were often critical of Catholicism and Catholic countries), there would be riots as well as other fights over the application of local tax funds away from Catholic schooling and toward what immigrants essentially saw as Protestant schools.

The most radical of the reforms undertaken by members of this evangelical culture included abolition and woman’s rights. In 1833 abolitionists formed the American Anti-Slavery Society. Abolitionists disliked the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820 and were further troubled by the ability of pro-slavery Americans in Texas to detach that province from Mexico. It looked to this new cadre of abolitionists that just as Great Britain and other powers were ending slavery, that the United States was becoming more attached to the institution. The Anti-Slavery society therefore demanded that slavery be abolished immediately (though they offered no program for doing so), and the organization sent thousands of petitions to Congress demanding slavery be abolished in the nation’s capital, and that no new slave territories be added to the nation. More than the petition drives, though, these abolitionists broke into churches and demanded white worshippers treat blacks as equals; abolitionists also publicly called Southern whites sinners, and personally helped escaped slaves find freedom with the “Underground Railroad.” Given the sensitivity of Southerners to the prospect of “race war” after the Nat Turner uprising and the David Walker pamphlet many abolitionists found their livelihoods or lives threatened by conservatives in both regions. But they were not deterred. In fact, abolitionists were so angered regarding the conventional prejudices of American society that many of them soon embraced another radical idea: that of a woman’s right to vote. Emboldened by the lack of respect many women received from male politicians over the vexing moral problem of slavery, by 1848 abolitionists such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a woman’s declaration of independence (called the Declaration of Sentiments) which outlined all of the numerous ways that women were treated unequally in American society.

Although fervent anti-slavery sentiment was marginalized before 1848, after the victory of American expansionists over Mexico a chain reaction of events was set in motion that radicalized Northerners toward the anti-slavery cause (while radicalizing Southerners towards secession.) For those who opposed slavery, the Mexican cession represented a poison pill. This is because by the late 1840s, the free states and the slave states had grown even further apart than where they were during the so-called Missouri Compromise of 1820. (Recall how that compromise, over the status of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase, had even in its own time revealed the sensitivity of both sections to one or the other gaining a majority in Congress.) On the one hand, a growing anti-slavery movement in the North, emboldened by the abolition of slavery in Great Britain and most parts of Latin America, felt that the spirit of the age demanded no compromise be made with slavery. On the other hand, southern cotton planters were more attached, not less, to a cotton crop whose price continued to skyrocket in value in the years after 1840. Such southerners, such as James Henry Hammond, referred to “King Cotton” as the key to continued prosperity and upward mobility for millions of whites- such men were not going to sit back and watch politicians legislate away their right to take their human beings wherever they pleased. In this way, the opening up of such a vast new territory to discussions regarding slavery’s future forced slavery to the top of the agenda in national politics, even though every major politician had sought to suppress, or ignore the issue for decades. In many ways, the propensity of Americans to push open new land for settlement, and not to be content with the land they already had, foreordained some sort of violent conflict because slavery cannot be maintained without force, and too many Northerners- in the end- balked at Southern demands to use government, police, or military power to sustain slavery in new territories.

Sectional trouble emerged during the Mexican War itself, when an anti-slavery Democrat, David Wilmot, introduced his “proviso” that no territory gained from Mexico should allow slavery. This proviso outraged Southerners, even though no such prohibition went into effect. But when California voted to come into the Union as a free state in 1850, the resulting imbalance in Congress in favor of free states led to renewed sectional strife. If California and Oregon came in as free states (which they eventually did), there would be a solid non-slaveholding majority in Congress when it came time for Presidential elections (this would prove decisive in electing Lincoln in 1860). Many southern whites revealed how sensitive they were over losing power in the government by protesting the entire state of California being admitted as a free state. These Southerners instead wanted the old Missouri Compromise line extended to include southern California as a pro-slave region, and threatened to secede if their rights weren’t respected. Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Henry Clay cobbled together a series of bills designed to paper over the controversy caused by California’s admission as a free state- the so-called “Compromise of 1850.” But this compromise was nothing of the sort: using a legislative technique where five separate majorities were found to pass five separate bills, Clay gained enough votes for his “compromise.” However, if all aspects of the Compromise had been voted on together the bill would have failed. And the “compromise” did nothing to assuage the growing numbers of hardliners on each side: for example, many Southerners wanted some slavery in California and New Mexico, but did not get it, whereas many Northerners were angered that the fugitive slave law would be strengthened, thus potentially allowing for the enslavement of thousands of Northern freed blacks. Indeed, given that there had been more Northerners (usually in the Democratic party) willing to compromise with Southerners than vice-versa, the emerging story of the 1850s was one of increasing numbers of whites in the free states becoming unwilling to vote with Southerners on compromise bills- soon enough the free state majority would decide that the territories would be free of slavery.

The growing furor in the North over the fugitive slave law arose because, under the terms of this new fugitive slave law passed with the Compromise of 1850, southern courts simply adjudicated the identity of the supposed “runaway” slave in question described by the owner, and this document was binding on the rest of the country. Northerners who defended these slaves from attempts to take them back into slavery would go to jail, and any white asked by authorities was forced to help in the efforts at re-enslavement. Resistance to the bill was, understandably, enormous in the free states. The most famous example of civil disobedience against the fugitive slave bill surrounded a former slave in Boston, Anthony Burns, who, when he was forcibly re-enslaved by federal marshals, ignited a firestorm of protest that included rioters killing two of Burns’ prison guards. In response, Democratic President Franklin Pierce decided to spend 100,000 dollars and send in a marine regiment simply to escort Burns out of Boston. Along the way, protesters hung American flags upside down out of a sense of disgust with their nation. The forced re-enslavement of blacks was a central theme in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which popularized the horrors of slave life through the trials and selfless suffering of the Christ-like slave, Uncle Tom. In conjunction with the publication of numerous slave narratives- such as the one written by Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, Northern abolitionists slowly “abolitionized” public opinion among whites who might otherwise have remained unfamiliar with slave life or black people.

Into this already testy situation by 1854 came Senator Stephen A. Douglas’ proposal to build a transcontinental railroad and his resulting proposition that slavery could be made legal in what remained of the old Louisiana Purchase. The need for the railroad was real, since the United States now stretched to the Pacific (Douglas of course wanted the railroad to go through his state of Illinois), and the railroad could not be built in unorganized territory. But Southerners saw little need to support an internal improvement which would aid free states, in addition to their customary suspicion of both increased federal authority and federal spending projects overall. In order to get southerners to sign onto his railroad bill, therefore, Douglas offered the possibility that the new states to be formed in anticipation of the railroad might vote for themselves to accept slavery. Douglas referred to this as “popular sovereignty.” This was in direct violation of the terms of the Missouri Compromise, however, which had forbidden slavery in most of the Louisiana Purchase. It now looked to concerned northerners that slavery might spread north into areas where it had been previously blocked. Douglas’ Kansas Nebraska bill was the first sign of large-scale Northern revolt against giving in to the demands of Southerners, though enough Northerners voted with the Southerners (who as always presented a far more unified front than their free state counterparts) that the bill passed. But, the damage was done. Within six months of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, numerous meetings throughout the free states- especially in areas sympathetic to evangelical Protestant reform- coalesced behind a new party, the Republican Party, dedicated to stopping the extension of slavery in any territory. Although there had been two very minor abolitionist parties before the Republicans (the Liberty Party and Free Soil Party), this new anti-slavery party threatened to attain broad appeal. By 1856, the Republican Party had more or less supplanted the defunct Whig Party, though there was still lingering competition from the anti-immigrant American Party for the support of Northern Protestants. But the furor over the Kansas Nebraska Bill created one of the quickest transitions to a new major political party in American history. If a breakup of the Union were to be avoided, politicians would have to find some way to convince Americans that slavery did not matter- that Southerners should not be afraid of losing out in the drive to spread slavery west, or that Northerners should not be concerned about national support for aspects of the slave system, such as the fugitive slave act. This proved to be impossible.

The increased sectional animosity of the mid-1850s in fact led to a miniature civil war in the Kansas territory by 1855. Most historians blame the “border ruffians” as the instigators of the conflict. These people were proslavery Missourians who simply crossed their state’s western border and used violence to suppress the anti-slavery vote in Kansas. But the result of such anti-slavery voter suppression simply led to the existence of two separate capitals in Kansas: Lecompton for the pro-slavery forces, Lawrence for anti-slavery ones, since neither side would accept the legitimacy of elections they felt were fraudulent. With time, the violence continued to escalate during this standoff, both in Kansas and on the floor of the U.S. Senate where an outraged Southern congressman, Preston Brooks, attacked and nearly killed anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner for insulting the honor of his relative, Senator Andrew Butler (Sumner said Butler had “chosen” the “harlot” slavery when defending proslavery actions in Kansas.) Soon enough many members of Congress came armed with knives, guns, and more canes expecting the violence in Kansas to overtake the nation’s capital. By 1859, Southerners openly threatened a mass shootout on the floor of the House, coupled with reinforcements of troops to the Capitol from South Carolina if John Sherman, a northern anti-slavery Republican, was chosen as a “compromise” candidate for the Speaker of the House position (no one party had a majority of the seats after the 1858 elections.)

Other events further pushed the country toward warfare over the slavery issue. One, the pro-slavery Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case, epitomized the Southern attitude that slave owners should be able to take their human property wherever they pleased, and that the federal government should protect them when so doing. Besides the Dred Scott case, the Buchanan administration also decided to back the fraudulent “Lecompton Constitution” in Kansas, a document drafted without the support of the anti-slavery majority, but one which Southerners wanted to latch onto as proof that Kansas was theirs for slavery. Buchanan caved in and sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress for approval. But Northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, would not go along and Kansas came in to the Union as a free states. With this vote, it was becoming clear that fewer Northerners were willing to side with Southern slaveowners.

And so the pendulum swung decisively toward anti-slavery Northerners, with the rejection of the Lecompton constitution and the impending breakup of the Democratic Party. And then, as it has been said, a meteor hit the United States in the person of John Brown. The former Kansas settler had now turned his sights on bigger battles, having organized a group of men to take over the federal arsenal of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia with the intention of leading an armed uprising of slaves throughout the south. He failed miserably in the execution of his plan, in October of 1859, but during his trial the damning news came out that perhaps as many as several hundred Northern abolitionists had been behind this attempted slave revolt. Although Southerners were able to execute Brown, they now lived in constant fear of slave uprisings, and began organizing militias in preparation for war. And Southerners had had enough with Northerners whom they believed were basically hostile to their “way of life”- meaning the Southern economic system based squarely on chattel slavery. It is not an exaggeration to say that John Brown’s attempted slave revolt was to the Civil War what the Coercive Acts were to the American Revolution- it really represented a point of no return for two sides possessing irreconcilable differences.