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STORM CLOUDS GATHERANTEBELLUM COMPROMISE

& CONFLICT

CRISIS IN THE TERRITORIES• NW Ordinance, 1787

• No slavery in federal territory above the Ohio River

• Louisiana, 1803• Slavery allowed to

expand even in North

• MO Compromise, 1820• MO slave/ME free;

est’d “Balance Rule”

• 1840s, Texas & Mexican Territory?• Wilmot Proviso (1846)• CA Gold Rush (1849) &

CA/OR Trails• Abolitionists stronger in

the 1840s & 50s

COMPROMISE OF 1850 • Compromise, not a solution• No one fully satisfied…• Only brought time…

• CA = free state (+N)• NM & UT territories =

popular sovereignty (+/-)• TX, 1845

• Admitted as slave state (+S)• TX lost territory to NM & US

had to pay Mex $$$ (+N)• End of Slave Trade in DC

(+N?) • Stricter Fugitive Slave Law

(+S)…

Henry Clay on the Floor of the old Senate Chamber

FROM: BOUND FOR CANAAN: THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD AND THE WAR FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA BY FERGUS M. BORDEWICH (PP.318-19)On August 26, the new Fugitive Slave Act was voted into law. It was comprehensive and draconian. Anyone who hindered a slave catcher, attempted the rescue of a recaptured fugitive, “directly or indirectly” assisted a fugitive to escape, or harbored a fugitive, was liable to a fine of up to one thousand dollars and six months’ imprisonment, plus damages of one thousand dollars to the owner of each slave that was lost. Commissioners were to be appointed by the federal circuit courts specifically to act on fugitive slave cases, and provided with financial incentives--“bribes,” abolitionists charged—to facilitate the recovery of runaways: the commissioner would receive a fee of ten dollars each time he remanded a fugitive slave. Commissioners could be fined one thousand dollars for refusing to issue a writ when requested, and they were personally liable for the value of any slave who escaped from their custody. Contravening new liberty laws in some Northern states, testimony by an accused slave was disallowed, and there was no right to trial by jury. The provision that outraged most Northerners, and not only abolitionists, gave commissioners the authority to compel any bystander, no matter what his beliefs, to help them seize any alleged fugitive. The Columbus, Ohio, Standard announced with disgust, “Now we are all slave catchers.”

THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD • Name refers to clandestine routes of travel

• Supposedly a network of safe houses owned by

white abolitionists who helped slaves escape

to the North or to Canada

• Really, a diverse, flexible and interlocking system of thousands of activists

• Repeated trips back to the South to help slaves escape• Free blacks often played a big role

• The most famous “conductor” was Harriet Tubman

• Some whites in border states did help, but more often slaves found their own ways to freedom

• Many others were involved

UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, 1852• Most influential fiction in U.S.

history?• Portrayed slaves as human

beings: • Showed the evils of slavery

• Lincoln: “So you’re the little lady who wrote the book that started this big war.”

KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT, 1854

• Stephen Douglas & Popular Sovereignty• Douglas’s rationale

• Repealed MO Compromise → uproar in N & S

• "Bleeding Kansas" • Flood of settlers → 1855 Civil War

• “Jayhawkers” with “Beecher’s Bibles” vs. “Border Ruffians”

• VIOLENCE!

• Sack of Lawrence

• Pottawatomie Massacre

• Battle of Osawatomie

• “The Crimes Against Kansas”

• Election fraud

• Lecompton Constitution

• Counter-constitution drawn up in Topeka, 1855

• All this in a state with very few slaves…

1860 POPULATION OF THE U.S. MIDDLE WEST

• There are no statistics available for 1850

• The debate wasn’t over slaves, but over the rights and freedom of whites to own slaves

REPUBLICAN PARTY, 1854

• GOP = Grand Old Party

• Platform• Free-soil

• High protective tariffs

• Homestead Act

• Trans-con RR & Internal Improvements

• Later to overturn Dred Scott…

• Constituents• Immigrants

• Westerners

• Eastern industrialists

• Anyone not willing to compromise on slavery issue

DRED SCOTT,1857

• He first sued in 1846…• It went to the USSC in 1857…

• Did Scott have the right to sue in federal court (where a citizen of one state can sue a citizen of another state)?

• No. Slaves were not citizens & were never meant to be.

• Did he become free when he was in a free state?

• If he did, then he became a slave again when he returned to MO

• No state or precedent obligated MO to enforce IL law (think the issue of gay marriage today)

• Did he become free when he was in a free territory? (Q of fed power over the states)

• No. The MO Compromise (federal Law) was unconstitutional because the territories belonged to all citizens who can’t be deprived of their property without due process (5th Amendment)

• Results: strengthened No. slavery opposition, sectionally divided Dems, encouraged So. secessionists to make bolder demands, & strengthened the GOP

• Side note: Scott did get his freedom…

Scott travelled with his master to IL & the WI Territory in the 1830s.

HARPER’S FERRY, 1859• John Brown + men vs. military arsenal• Failure

• R.E. Lee put it down

• “Widespread” support from North?• Letters • Days of mourning• Howe’s song

• Brown martyred• Fear of slave revolts → lynching, hysteria,

talk of secession…

John Brown

Paranoid rumors of more insurrections raced through the South. Gun sellers made fortunes: in the four weeks after the raid, Baltimore dealers were reported to have sold ten thousand pistols to terrified Virginians…. Real and apocryphal stories of persecution fed Northern rage. A planter was said to have forced his slaves to execute a Yankee evangelist who was found preaching to them. A peddler was said to have been strung up by the neck six times (but let down before he expired) on suspicion of being an abolitionist. In South Carolina, an Irish stone cutter was allegedly flogged, tarred, and feathered for daring to say that slave labor was degrading to white labor…. But if any American was seriously detached from reality in these waning years of peace, it was President Buchanan…. In his annual message to Congress, delivered barely two weeks after Brown’s execution, Buchanan sounded a note of delusory optimism. Barely mentioning…Harpers Ferry, he implored Americans…to allow agitation over slavery to “give place to other and less threatening controversies.” He went on…smugly reiterating his belief in the inalienable right of any American citizen to own slaves, and to carry them into any territory of the US, rights which he praised as “so manifestly just in themselves and so well calculated to promote peace and harmony among the states.” Buchanan’s words were, in their spineless way, a fitting epitaph for the age of slavery, for the long acquiescence of Northern political interests to the South. They were the last gasp of the “doughfaces,” of the temporizers, hypocrites, and opportunists who had for generations helped to protect and preserve American slavery. What followed was Abraham Lincoln, secession, and war.

pp.426-427

ELECTION OF 1860• Democrats split at Convention

• Two Democratic candidates

• Republican Convention

• Lincoln: broad appeal, moderate image

• Election Results

• Lincoln won 59% of EC votes; swept North + CA

• Lincoln won 39% of pop vote; no votes in South

• Impact of Election…

SOUTHERN SECESSION, 1861• Out the door…

• SC led the way…

• Lower South joined (AL, MS, FL, GA, LA, TX) by Feb 1, 1861

• CSA formed Feb 4, 1861

• Upper South? (VA, NC, TN, AK)

• Border States? (MO, KY, MD, DE)

• Why secession?• Protect slavery from GOP limits

• Protect South from GOP econ program

• Constitutional & Legal justifications

• Easy & Profitable?

REFLECTION QS

1. What was the importance of the Compromise of 1850?

2. Why was Kansas so important in leading to the Civil War?

3. Detail two things that you learned that were interesting &/or that you will remember easily a month from now.

• The next slide addresses Southerners reactions after Nat Turner’s rebellion. The point is that Southerners freaked out with harsher and harsher reactions, in addition to stricter slave codes

• I had this slide originally to emphasize the reaction of Southerners after such an event and to make the point that similar reaction took place after Harpers Ferry. However, the new slide #12 (pp.426-427) does the job well.

In the summer of 1831 a seismic shift took place beneath the racial landscape of the US. That August a charismatic Virginia slave named Nat Turner, believing that he was guided by a divine hand, led a band of followers in the nation’s bloodiest slave revolt ever. Before it was suppressed, less than three days after it had begun, at least sixty white men, women, and children had been killed, many of them brutally hacked to death in their beds or while they begged for mercy…. Between one hundred and two hundred African Americans would also be executed in retribution, most of them guilty of no wrongdoing. Near Southampton, an innocent black traveler was shot to death and decapitated, and his head stuck on a pole at the county crossroads. In Dupin County, North Carolina, more than ten blacks were summarily executed because of an alleged conspiracy, and in nearby Murfreesboro, a black man was beheaded for having predicted that there would someday be a war between the black and white peoples. Harriet Jacobs, a slave in Edenton, North Carolina, hid in terror from an orgy of white-on-black rape and savagery in which men, women, and children were randomly whipped “til the blood stood in puddles at their feet,” and “no two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be seen walking together.” Another woman who was enslaved near the Virginia-North Carolina border recalled that in the months after Turner’s rebellion “the brightest and best men were killed.”

pp.105-106