A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 2: Westward Expansion and Civil WarPart 15: The Path to Civil War (II)

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT (1854)

• Designed by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois.

• Created the states of Kansas and Nebraska and opened new lands for settlement.

• Repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing the people of Kansas and Nebraska to vote on whether or not slavery should be allowed in their states.

• Recognized this vote as an act of ‘popular sovereignty,’ ideally to make slavery in new states no longer a national issue.

BLEEDING KANSAS

• Douglas’ theory was that an impending civil war between the free states in the North and the slave states in the South could be avoided if all of the states did not have to agree on whether new states should allow slavery or prohibit it.

• In practice, however, advocates of slavery and abolitionists from all across the country migrated to Kansas to skew the vote.

• What resulted was a minor civil war as both sides took up arms.

JOHN BROWN

A militant abolitionist who believed he had received a vision from God that commanded him to eradicate slavery by force, John Brown left his native Ohio to fight in Kansas in 1855. He took his sons with him.

JOHN BROWN

On May 24, at Pottawatomie Creek, Brown and his sons seized five slavery advocates and took them from their homes and hacked them to death with swords. A year later, they fought four hundred pro-slavery soldiers at Osawatomie. They fought on for two months, but were driven out of Kansas.

BLEEDING KANSAS

• The Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed by President Franklin Pierce in 1854.

• In 1855, an organization of new settlers to Kansas wrote the state’s first Constitution to give it an abolitionist government.

• In 1857, advocates of slavery wrote a new and different Constitution, making slavery a permanent feature of Kansas.

• Both sides of the war claimed that their Constitution was the only legally valid one in Kansas.

DRED SCOTT V. SANDFORD

• In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled on a landmark case known as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

• Dred Scott, a slave, sued his master for his freedom on the basis that his master had taken him from the South into Northern states where slavery was illegal.

• The Supreme Court ruled against Scott, denying that African Americans had any rights to citizenship in America.

• In effect, the ruling extended southern laws regarding slavery into states that had abolished it.

BLEEDING KANSAS

• In 1857 and 1858, abolitionists voted down the pro-slavery Constitution of Kansas, and wrote and passed a third Constitution which also abolished slavery in Kansas.

• In 1859, a fourth Constitution made Kansas a free state, although it was not admitted into the Union until 1861.

• Between 1854 and 1859, about fifty people died and hundreds were injured in the conflict that consumed ‘Bleeding Kansas.’

JAMES BUCHANAN

• One of the authors of the Ostend Manifesto.

• Succeeded Franklin Pierce as President in 1857.

• A Democrat who entered into open disagreement with his fellow Democrat, Stephen Douglas, over the chaos of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

• Widely regarded as the worst American President for his inability to prevent the country from drifting into a civil war.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

• Abolitionist lawyer and former Whig from Illinois.

• Ran against Stephen Douglas for election to the United States Senate in 1858.

• Ran for election on behalf of the Republican Party, which was founded in 1854 in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

• Openly criticized Douglas and Buchanan as well as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Roger B. Taney, for their policies towards slavery as an institution and slaves as human beings.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

• Commenced his candidacy with the famous declaration of his ‘House Divided’ speech…

• “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.”

THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES

• Throughout 1858, Lincoln and Douglas appeared together in public to engage in a series of seven long, complex debates on the issue of slavery.

• The debates captured the attention of the nation and were reprinted, word for word, in newspapers across the country.

• Lincoln won the election, forcing Douglas out of the Senate. Meanwhile, Douglas’ disputes with Buchanan split the Democratic Party, leaving the Presidency vulnerable…

JOHN BROWN’S RAID ON HARPERS FERRY

• In 1859, John Brown and a band of about twenty followers attacked the national armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

• Brown’s plan was to seize weapons and then issue them to slaves in Virginia in the hope of provoking a slave uprising.

• Brown and his men were attacked by federal troops. The raid was put down. Brown was arrested, charged with treason, and sentenced to death.

JOHN BROWN’S RAID ON HARPERS FERRY

• On December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged.

• Brown immediately became a celebrated martyr for the cause of the abolition of slavery.

• A number of America’s most prominent abolitionists spoke out in favor of Brown, praising his use of violence in order to abolish slavery and arguing that the moral urgency of abolition required taking up arms.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

• In 1860, just two years after winning his election to the Senate, Abraham Lincoln ran for election as the Republican candidate for the Presidency.

• With the Democrats split on the issue of slavery, split between the Douglas faction and the Buchanan faction of the party, Lincoln won a landslide victory.

• Despite Lincoln’s protests to the contrary, the Southern states feared that an abolitionist President would attempt to abolish slavery nationwide.

SECESSION BEGINS

On December 20, 1860, before Lincoln had even been sworn in, South Carolina declared that it would secede (withdraw) from the Union and no longer be a part of the United States of America.

A SURVEY OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Unit 2: Westward Expansion and Civil WarPart 15: The Path to Civil War (II)