SOCIAL STUDIES NOTES: GRADE 8 CHAPTER 14
THE NATION DIVIDED: 1846-1861
Section 1: Growing Tensions Over Slavery
I. Slavery and the Mexican-American War
-Between 1820 and 1848, four new slaveholding states and four new free states were admitted to the Union. This maintained the balance between free and slaveholding states, with 15 of each. However, territory gained by the Mexican-American War threatened to destroy the balance.
-The Missouri Compromise did not apply to the huge territory gained from Mexico in 1848. Fearing that the South would gain too much power, in 1846 Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed that Congress ban slavery in all territory that might become part of the United States as a result of the Mexican-American War.
-This proposal, called the Wilmot Proviso, passed in the House of Representatives, but it failed in the Senate. Although the Wilmot Proviso never became law, it aroused great concern in the South. Many supporters of slavery viewed it as an attack on slavery by the North.
-The controversy over the Wilmot Proviso also led to the rise of a new political party. Neither the Democrats nor the Whigs took a firm stand on slavery. Each hoped to win support in both the North and South in the election of 1848.
-The Democratic candidate for President in 1848, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, proposed letting the people in each new territory decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
-Many Whigs and Democrats wanted to take a stronger stand against the spread of slavery. In August 1848, Antislavery Whigs and Democrats joined forces to form a new party which they called the Free-Soil Party.
-It called for the territory gained in the Mexican-American War to be “free soil,” a place where slavery was banned.
-The party chose former Democratic President Martin Van Buren as its candidate. Van Buren did poorly in the election. However, he won enough votes from the Democrats to keep Cass from winning. General Zachary Taylor, a Whig and a hero of the Mexican-American War, was elected instead.
II. A Bitter Debate
-After the discovery of gold in California, thousands of people rushed west. California soon had enough people to become a state. Both sides realized that California’s admission to the Union as a free state would upset the balance between free and slave states in the Senate.
-Southern leaders began to threaten to secede from the nation if California was admitted to the Union as a free state.
-There were other issues dividing North and South. Northerners wanted the slave trade abolished in Washington, D.C. Southerners wanted northerners to catch people who had escaped from slavery.
-For months it looked as if there was no solution. Then, in January 1850, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky stepped forward with a plan to calm the crisis. He made a series of proposals that he hoped would forever resolve the issues that bitterly divided northerners and southerners.
-The Senate’s discussion of Clay’s proposals produced one of the greatest debates in American political history. South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun was against compromise. Calhoun was gravely ill and just four weeks from death. He was too weak to give his speech, but he struggled to sit upright as his final speech was read to the Senate.
-The admission of California as a free state, Calhoun wrote, would expose the South to continued attacks on slavery. There were only two ways to preserve the South’s way of life. One was a Constitutional amendment to protect states’ rights. The other was secession.
-Three days later, Massachusetts’ Senator Daniel Webster rose to support Clay’s proposal and called for an end to the bitter sectionalism that was dividing the Union.
Section 2: Compromises Fail
I. The Compromise
-In September 1850, Congress finally passed five bills based on Clay’s proposals. This series of laws became known as the Compromise of 1850.
-President Zachary Taylor had opposed the Compromise. However, Taylor died in 1850. The new President, Millard Fillmore, supported the Compromise and signed it into law.
-The Compromise of 1850 was designed to end the crisis by giving supporters and opponents of slavery part of what they wanted. To please the North, California was admitted to the Union as a free state. In addition, the Compromise banned the slave trade in the nation’s capital.
-The Fugitive Slave Act became the most controversial part of the Compromise of 1850. Many northerners swore that they would resist the hated new law.
-John C. Calhoun had hoped that the Fugitive Slave Law would force northerners to admit that slaveholders had rights to their property. Instead, every time the law was enforced, it convinced more northerners that slavery was evil.
II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-One northerner deeply affected by the Fugitive Slave Act was Harriet Beecher Stowe. The daughter of an abolitionist minister, Stowe met many people who had escaped from slavery. She decided to write “something that will make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”
-In 1852, Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about kindly Uncle Tom, an enslaved man who is abused by the cruel Simon Legree. Tom dies after a severe beating.
-Stowe’s book was a bestseller in the North. It shocked thousands of people who previously had been unconcerned about slavery. As a result, people began to view slavery as more than just a political conflict. It was a human, moral problem facing every American.
III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
-The nation moved closer to war after Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act was pushed through by Senator Stephen Douglas, who was eager to develop the lands west of his home state of Illinois.
-In 1853, Douglas suggested forming two new territories—the Kansas Territory and the Nebraska Territory. Southerners at once objected. Both territories lay in an area closed to slavery by the Missouri Compromise. This meant that the states eventually created from these territories would enter the Union as free states.
-To win southern support, Douglas proposed that slavery in the new territories be decided by popular sovereignty. Thus, in effect, the Kansas-Nebraska Act undid the Missouri Compromise.
-As Douglas hoped, southerners supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Northerners, however, were outraged by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. They believed that Douglas had betrayed them by reopening the issue of slavery.
-After months of debate, southern support enabled the Kansas-Nebraska Act to pass in both houses of Congress. President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat elected in 1852, then signed the bill into law.
IV. Bleeding Kansas
-The Kansas-Nebraska Act left it to the white citizens of the territory to decide whether Kansas would be free or slave territory. Both proslavery and antislavery settlers flooded into Kansas within weeks after Douglas’s bill became law. Each side was determined to hold the majority in the territory when it came time for the vote.
-Thousands of Missourians entered Kansas in March 1855 to illegally vote in the election to select a territorial legislature. Although Kansas had only 3,000 voters, nearly 8,000 votes were cast on election day! Of 39 legislators elected, all but three supported slavery.
-The antislavery settlers refused to accept these results and held a second election.
-Kansas now had two governments, each claiming the right to impose their government on the territory. Not surprisingly, violence soon broke out.
-In April, a proslavery sheriff was shot when he tried to arrest some antislavery settlers in the town of Lawrence. The next month, he returned with 800 men and attacked the town.
-Three days later, John Brown, an antislavery settler from Connecticut, led seven men to a proslavery settlement near Pottawatomie Creek. There they murdered five proslavery men and boys.
-These incidents set off widespread fighting in Kansas. Bands of proslavery and antislavery fighters roamed the countryside, terrorizing those who did not support their views. The violence was so bad that it earned Kansas the name Bleeding Kansas.
-The violence in Kansas spilled over into the United States Senate. In a fiery speech, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts Senator, denounced the proslavery legislature in Kansas. He then attacked his southern foes, singling out Andrew Butler, an elderly senator from South Carolina.
-Butler was not present the day Sumner made his speech. A few days later, however, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks marched into the Senate chamber.
-Using a heavy cane, Brooks beat Sumner until he fell to the floor, bloody and unconscious. Sumner never completely recovered from his injuries.
-Many southerners felt Sumner got what he deserved. To northerners, however, Brook’s violent act was just more evidence that slavery was brutal and inhumane.
Section 3: The Crisis Deepens
- I. A New Antislavery Party
-As the Whig Party split apart in 1854, many northern Whigs joined a new political party. It was called the Republican Party, and its main goal was to stop the spread of slavery into the western territories. The Republicans’ antislavery stand also attracted northern Democrats and Free-Soil Party members.
-The Republicans quickly became a powerful force in politics. The congressional elections of 1854 were held only months after the party was founded. Of the 245 candidates elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, 105 were Republicans.
-Two years later, in 1856, the Republican Party ran its first candidate for President. Although James Buchanan was elected, John C. Fremont, the Republican candidate, won 11 of the nation’s 16 free states.
II. The Dred Scott Decision
-In March 1857, only three days after Buchanan took office, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a shattering blow to antislavery forces. It decided the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford.
-Dred Scott was an enslaved person who had once been owned by a U.S. Army doctor. The doctor, and Scott, lived for a time in Illinois and in the Wisconsin Territory. Slavery was illegal in both places. After leaving the army, the doctor settled with Scott in Missouri.
-With the help of antislavery lawyers, Scott sued for his freedom. He argued that he was free because he had lived where slavery was illegal. In time, the case reached the Supreme Court.
-Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the decision for the Court. Scott was not a free man, he said, for two reasons. First, according to Taney, Scott had no right to sue in federal court because African Americans were not citizens.
-Second, Taney said, merely living in free territory did not make an enslaved person free. Slaves were property, Taney declared, and property rights were protected by the U.S. Constitution.
-But the ruling went even further. Taney wrote that Congress did not have the power to prohibit slavery in any territory. Thus, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
-Supporters of slavery rejoiced at the Dred Scott decision. The decision meant that slavery was legal in all territories.
-White northerners were shocked by the ruling. Many had hoped that slavery would eventually die out if it were restricted to the South. Now, however, slavery could spread throughout the West.
-One northerner who spoke out against the Dred Scott decision was an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln.
III. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates
-Lincoln had had only a brief career in politics. After serving in the Illinois state legislature, he was elected to Congress as Whig. After a single term, he returned to Illinois to practice law.
-Lincoln’s opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act brought him back into politics, this time embracing the Republican cause. He had long been a rival of Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, the author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
-In 1858, Illinois Republicans choose Lincoln to run for the Senate against Douglas.
-Lincoln then challenged Douglas to a series of public debates. Douglas strongly defended popular sovereignty. He also painted Lincoln as a dangerous abolitionist who wanted equality for African Americans.
-Lincoln took a stand against the spread of slavery. He predicted that slavery would die on its own. In the meantime, he said, it was the obligation of Americans to keep it out of the western territories.
-In the end, Douglas won the Senate election. However, the debates had made Lincoln known throughout the country. Two years later, the men would be rivals again—this time for the presidency.
IV. John Brown’s Raid
-The nation’s attention was soon captured by the actions of John Brown. Driven out of Kansas after the Pottawatomie Massacre, Brown had returned to New England. There he hatched a plot to raise an army and free people in the South who were enslaved.
-In 1859, Brown and a small band of supporters attacked the town of Harpers Ferry in Virginia. His goal was to seize guns the U.S. Army had stored there.
-Brown quickly gained control of the arms. But troops commanded by Robert E. Lee surrounded Brown’s force before it could escape. Ten of Brown’s followers were killed. Brown was wounded and captured.
-At his trial, Brown sat quietly as the court found him guilty of murder and treason. He showed no emotion as he was sentenced to death.
-When the state of Virginia hanged Brown for treason on December 2, 1859, church bells across the North tolled to mourn the man who many considered a hero. But southerners were shocked. People in the North were praising a man who had tried to lead a slave revolt. More than ever, many southerners were convinced that the North was out to destroy their way of life.
Section 4: The Coming of the Civil War
I. The Nation Divides
-As the election of 1860 drew near, Americans everywhere felt a sense of crisis. The long and bitter debate over slavery had left the nation seriously divided.
-The Republicans chose Abraham Lincoln as their presidential candidate. His criticisms of slavery during his debates with Douglas had made him popular in the North.
-Southern Democrats wanted the party to support slavery in the territories. But northerners refused to do so. In the end, the party split in two. Northern Democrats chose Stephen Douglas as their candidate. Southern Democrats picked Vice President John Breckinridge.
-Some southerners still hoped to heal the split between North and South. They formed the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell of Tennessee. Bell promised to protect slavery and keep the Union together.
-The election showed just how fragmented the nation had become. Lincoln won in every free state and Breckinridge in all the slaveholding states except four. Bell won Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Douglas carried only Missouri.
-Lincoln’s election sent shock waves through the South. To many southerners it seemed that the South no longer had a voice in the national government.
-On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first southern state to secede from the Union. Six more states followed South Carolina out of the Union.
-In early February, leaders from the seven seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form a new nation they called the Confederate States of America. By the time Lincoln took office in March, they had written a constitution and named former Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis as their president.
II. The Civil War Begins
-On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln became President of a nation facing the greatest crisis in its history. In his inaugural address, he assured the seceding states he meant them no harm. But his assurance of friendship was rejected.
-The seceding states took over post offices, forts, and other federal property within their borders. The new president had to decide how to respond.
-Lincoln’s most urgent problem was Fort Sumter, located on an island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. The fort’s commander would not surrender it. South Carolina decided to starve the fort’s 100 troops into surrender. They had been cut off from supplies since late December and could not hold out much longer.
-Lincoln did not want to give up the fort. But he feared that sending troops might cause other states to secede. Therefore, he announced that he would send food to the fort, but that the supply ships would carry no troops or guns.
-Confederate leaders decided to capture the fort while it was still isolated. On April 12, 1861, Confederate artillery opened fire on the fort. After 34 hours, with the fort on fire, the U.S. troops surrendered.
-The Confederate attack on Fort Sumter marked the beginning of a long civil war.
-In 1850, southerners might have been satisfied if they had been left alone. But by 1861, many Americans both in the North and South had come to accept the idea that war could not be avoided. At stake was the nation’s future.