600-750 word Essay--Follow the directions!!!!

The Gathering Storm Overview

During the 1850s sectional interests and identities battered national ones. There was a

contentiousness that threatened to tear the country apart, so many American politicians,

reflecting the concerns of their constituents, proposed compromises to divert, if not stop, the

conflicts. Unfortunately for the nation, however, compromise did not work as it had in the past: it

now acted as a catalyst to crisis. Compromise worked when the parties involved were each

willing to relinquish some demands to gain others, and when there was an underlying agreement

on what issues were most important. Such a consensus had earlier existed when the majority of

all the states' citizens held that maintaining the union took precedence over regional interests, but

when that consensus crumbled there was but a weak foundation for a common, long-lasting

solution.

The crisis had been building for some time. A few contemporaries traced its origins to the

constitutional compromises, while others thought the first true signs of danger appeared in the

nullification controversy of the 1830s. Certainly many acknowledged that tempers had been

roiling for quite a while as people argued over individuals' and states' rights, issues raised by the

institution of slavery. Americans contested a person's right to property versus an individual's

right to him—or herself. They debated whether the federal government could limit people's

choices in the territories—as in the expansion of slavery—in ways it could not in the states. The

Missouri Compromise had been an early effort to cap this volcano of public sentiment, the gag

rule in Congress another, but as these measures were rescinded and new ones failed, Americans

grappled with the possibility that there would be an eruption that could destroy the union.

Secession was not a new concept created in the 1850s, but receptivity to the idea had grown over

the previous decades. In December 1844, for example, James Henry Hammond, a South Carolina

planter and politician, wrote in his diary about his state's resolutions that denounced the repeal of

the gag rule "as a flagrant outrage infringing on the Fed[eral] Compact" and which declared that

congressional legislation restricting slavery would amount to a dissolution of the Union.

Hammond believed the resolutions more openly threatened separation than any ever passed—

harking back to the nullification controversy—before. He went on to pen, "Nothing in my

opinion but Dis-union now or very shortly can [save us]. Those who are for delaying this event

for the sake of peace are taking the surest steps to render war inevitable. If passions are excited

and the thing is done in extreme heat, it will be done in blood." Almost six years later, in May

1850, he criticized Clay's compromise as presupposing "a desire on both sides to be at peace,

when such is not the fact and, if it were, no compromise would be necessary." He thought the

compromise would weaken the South while only temporarily suspending abolition agitation. He

wanted the South to unite in its resistance to any and all limits on its rights and be ready for

action. It took the South ten years.

Over that decade politicians tried various measures to stop the fissures that had appeared from

becoming so wide and so deep that they split the nation apart. The first of these was the

Compromise of 1850. Questions about the establishment of states and the expansion of slavery in

the country's vast territories rocked the nation. While a few old masters, such as John C.

Calhoun, and their accolytes, one being Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, argued that the only way

to halt the widening schism was through an acknowledgement of southern rights, others, such as

Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, sought to mend the rift through concessions to both sides of the

divide. When Clay's package deal was defeated, a rising young leader in the Democratic Party,

Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, took on the task of getting the resolutions passed. He broke down

Clay's program into five measures so that the lack of consensus on the sum of these issues would

not prevent majorities from voting for each of them. Douglas's strategy worked: Congress

admitted California as a free state, set the Texas state boundary and established the New Mexico

territory, set up the Utah territory with (as in the New Mexico case) the issue of slavery left to

the territorial legislatures, passed a new Fugitive Slave Act, and abolished the slave trade in the

District of Columbia.

Most Americans accepted the compromise with relief if not joy. That relief was short-lived, for

the question of slavery in the territories—and by extension, in the states—came up again when

Douglas sought to organize the Nebraska territory and build a transcontinental railroad through

it. To get southerners to vote for his bill, Douglas accommodated them on the slavery issue. He

made "popular sovereignty," which enabled the people of the territories and new states to decide

for themselves whether to include slavery, a part of his bill, and then supported the repeal of the

Missouri Compromise's exclusion of slavery north of 36º30'. He also agreed to organize two

territories: Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas got what he wanted, but at great personal and national

expense. He ruined his chances for the presidency and further undermined the union.

The controversy over Kansas became the conflict in Kansas, as settlers and their supporters

battled one another over the inclusion or exclusion of slavery in their territory. As Kansans bled,

other Americans continued to exchange verbal punches over the nation's great problem. They

fought it out within and between the political parties. They argued over it within the judiciary.

And they kept electing different presidents in their search for strong executive guidance. One

thing followed another so rapidly that the union could not recover its equilibrium between blows.

It reeled and staggered into war.