The new Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, had gone into effect, Isabella reported, and slave-catchers prowled the streets.  They pounced on African Americans without warning, breaking into their houses, destroying their shops, and carrying them off.

Isabella described daily attacks.  She also told of outraged Bostonians, white and African American alike, who rallied to resist the kidnappers.

Stowe listened with growing despair.  She had lived for many years in Cincinnati, across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky.  There she had met many runaways from slavery and heard their tragic tales.  She had also visited Kentucky and witnessed slavery firsthand.

As the reading of her sister’s letter continued, Stowe, who was an accomplished author, received a challenge.  “Now Hattie,” Isabella wrote, “if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”

Stowe suddenly rose from her chair and announced, “I will write something.  I will if I live.”

That year, she began writing sketches for a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
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Uncle Tom’s Cabin

After running as a serial in an antislavery newspaper, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came out in book form in 1852 and sold 300,000 copies in its first year—astounding numbers for the time.  Today the writing may seem overly sentimental, but to Stowe’s original readers, mostly Northerners, it was powerful.  Her depiction of the enslaved hero, Tom, and the villainous overseer, Simon Legree, changed Northern perceptions of African Americans and slavery.

Stowe presented African Americans as real people imprisoned in dreadful circumstances.  Because she saw herself as a painter of slavery’s horrors rather than an abstract debater, Stowe was able to evoke pity and outrage even in readers who were unmoved by rational arguments.

Southerners tried unsuccessfully to have the novel banned and strongly attacked its portrayal of slavery, accusing Stowe of writing “distortions” and “falsehoods.” One Southern editor told a writer he wanted a review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be “as hot as hellfire, blasting and searing the reputation of the vile wretch in petticoats.”

Despite Southern outrage, the book eventually sold millions of copies.  It had such a dramatic impact on public opinion that many historians consider it one of the causes of the Civil War.
 

. Harriet Beecher Stowe c. 1811–1896 Daughter of reformer-minister Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe was born into a family of high achievers.  Unlike many young women of the time, Harriet received a good education, including teacher training in Hartford, Connecticut.  In 1832, Harriet moved to Cincinatti, Ohio.  There, the 21 year-old began writing and teaching.  In 1836 she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, a respected scholar and theologian.  Harriet Beecher Stowe spent 18 years in Ohio—right across the river from the slave-state of Kentucky.  During this period she met fugitive slaves, employed a former enslaved woman, and learned about slavery from Southern friends. In 1850, Mrs. Stowe moved with her husband to Maine.  There, in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law, she began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, based on what she had learned while in Ohio and anti-slavery materials she had read.  The novel, which humanized the plight of the enslaved, was an instant sensation and further hardened the positions of both abolitionists and slaveholders.  When President Lincoln met Stowe, so the story goes, he exclaimed, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started the Great War!” Stowe went on to write many more novels, stories, and articles, but is today best known for the novel that so fanned the sectional flames over slavery that it contributed to the start of the Civil War. .

Evaluating
Why was Uncle Tom’s Cabin so controversial?
 

The Fugitive Slave Act

Motivating Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not the only unintended consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act.

Although Henry Clay had conceived the law as a benefit to slaveholders, it actually hurt the Southern cause by creating active hostility toward slavery among Northerners who had previously seemed indifferent.

The Act’s Inflammatory Effects

Under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a person claiming that an African American had escaped from slavery had only to point out that person as a runaway to take him or her into custody.  The accused then would be brought before a federal commissioner.  A sworn statement asserting that the captive had escaped from a slaveholder or testimony by white witnesses was all a court needed to order the person sent south.  African Americans accused of being fugitives had no right to a trial and were not allowed to testify in court.

The law also included a financial incentive for the federal commissioners to find in favor of the slaveholder.  The commissioner received $10 if he decided for the slaveholder but only $5 if the decision went the other way.  The law also required federal marshals to help slaveholders capture African American fugitives and authorized marshals to deputize citizens on the spot to help them capture a fugitive.  Any Northerner could be compelled to help catch African Americans.  A person who refused to cooperate could be jailed.

Newspaper accounts of the seizure of African Americans and descriptions of the law’s injustice fueled Northern indignation.  In New York, Henry Long was waiting tables at the Pacific Hotel when kidnappers seized him.  Although Long had been living in New York several months before his supposed escape from a Virginia plantation, he was forced to return to the South and into slavery.  The New York Independent publicized Long’s kidnapping, noting that “almost no colored man is safe in our streets.”

Northern Resistance Grows

As outraged as Northerners were over such incidents, the law’s requirement that ordinary citizens help capture runaways was what drove many into active defiance.  Frederick Douglass emphasized this part of the law over and over again in his speeches.  A powerful orator, Douglass would paint an emotional picture of an African American fleeing kidnappers.  Then he would ask his audience whether they would give the runaway over to the “pursuing bloodhounds.” “No!” the crowd would roar.

Antislavery activists often used the words of writer Henry David Thoreau to justify defying the Fugitive Slave Act.  In his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau advocated disobeying laws on moral grounds.  “Unjust laws exist,” he wrote.  “Shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?” For many Northerners the answer was to disobey them without delay.

Northern resistance became frequent, public, and sometimes violent.  The violence was justified, some believed, by the violence and cruelty of the slaveholders and their hirelings.  In a pamphlet, Douglass proposed “The True Remedy for the Fugitive Slave Law—A good revolver, a steady hand, and a determination to shoot down any man attempting to kidnap.”

The Underground Railroad

Although the Fugitive Slave Act included heavy fines and prison terms for helping a runaway, whites and free African Americans continued their work with the Underground Railroad.  This informal but well-organized system that was legendary during the 1830s helped thousands of enslaved persons escape.  Members, called “conductors,” transported runaways north in secret, gave them shelter and food along the way, and saw them to freedom in the Northern states or Canada with some money for a fresh start.

Dedicated people, many of them African Americans, made dangerous trips into the South to guide enslaved persons along the Underground Railroad to freedom.  The most famous of these conductors was Harriet Tubman, herself a runaway.  She risked many trips to the South.

In Des Moines, Iowa, Isaac Brandt used secret signals to communicate with conductors on the Underground Railroad—a hand lifted palm outwards, for example, or a certain kind of tug at the ear.  “I do not know how these signs or signals originated,” he later remembered, “but they had become well understood.  Without them the operation of the system of running slaves into free territory would not have been possible.”

Levi Coffin, a Quaker born in North Carolina, allowed escaped African Americans to stay at his home in Indiana, where three Underground Railroad routes from the South converged.
 

“We knew not what night or what hour of the night we would be roused from slumber by a gentle rap at the door. ...  Outside in the cold or rain, there would be a two-horse wagon loaded with fugitives, perhaps the greater part of them women and children.  I would invite them, in a low tone, to come in, and they would follow me into the darkened house without a word, for we knew not who might be watching and listening.”

An estimated 2,000 African Americans stopped at Coffin’s red brick house on their way to freedom.  Coffin later moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he assisted another 1,300 African Americans who had crossed the river from Kentucky to freedom.  A thorn in the side to slaveholders, the Underground Railroad deepened Southern mistrust of Northern intentions.
 

. Harriet Tubman c. 1820–1913 Known as “Moses” for her courage in leading enslaved persons to freedom, Harriet Tubman was a heroine of the antislavery movement.  Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland and struggled early against the system’s brutality.  At age 13, when she tried to save another enslaved person from punishment, an overseer struck her savagely and fractured her skull.  Miraculously, she recovered from the injury, but she suffered from occasional blackouts for the rest of her life. Tubman escaped to freedom in 1849 when she was 29 years old.  Upon crossing into Pennsylvania, she later wrote, “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person.  There was such a glory over everything.  The sun came up like gold through the trees, and I felt like I was in Heaven.” Her joy inspired her to help others.  After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, Tubman returned to the South 19 times to guide enslaved persons along the Underground Railroad to freedom. Tubman became notorious in the eyes of slaveholders, but despite a large reward offered for her capture, no one ever betrayed her whereabouts.  Furthermore, in all her rescues on the Underground Railroad, she never lost a single “passenger.” Tubman’s bravery and determination made her one of the most important figures in the anti-slavery movement. .

Examining
What was an unintended consequence of the Fugitive Slave Act?
 

The Transcontinental Railroad

Sectional disagreements did not fade away when settlers left their old homes and headed west into new territories.  The settlers firmly retained their identities as Northerners or Southerners.  By the early 1850s, many settlers and land speculators had become interested in the fertile lands west of Missouri and Iowa.

Unfortunately for the settlers, the territory was unorganized.  Until the federal government organized it as a territory, it could not be surveyed and settled.

At the same time, the opening of Oregon and the admission of California to the Union had convinced Americans that a transcontinental railroad should be built to connect the West Coast to the rest of the country.

In the 1850s, getting to the West Coast of the United States required many grueling weeks of travel overland or a long sea voyage around the tip of South America.  A transcontinental railroad would reduce the journey to four relatively easy days while promoting further settlement and growth in the territories along the route.

Debating the Route of the Transcontinental Railroad

The transcontinental railroad had broad appeal, but the choice of its eastern starting point became a new element in the sectional conflict.  Many Southerners preferred a southern route from New Orleans, but the geography of the Southwest required the railroad to pass through northern Mexico.  Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a strong supporter of the South’s interests, sent James Gadsden, a South Carolina politician and railroad promoter, to buy land from Mexico.  The Mexican leader, Santa Anna, agreed to sell a 30,000-square-mile strip of land that today is part of southern Arizona and New Mexico and includes the city of Tucson.  In 1853 Mexico accepted $10 million for the territory, known as the Gadsden Purchase.

Meanwhile in Congress, the head of the Senate committee on territories, Democratic Senator Stephen A.  Douglas, had his own ideas for a transcontinental railroad.  Douglas was from Illinois.  He wanted the eastern terminus to be in Chicago, but he knew that any route from the north required Congress to organize the territory west of Missouri and Iowa.

In 1853 Douglas prepared a bill to organize the region into a new territory to be called Nebraska.  Although the House of Representatives passed the bill quickly, Southern senators who controlled key committees refused to go along, and they prevented the bill from coming to a vote.  These senators made it clear to Douglas that if he wanted Nebraska organized, he needed to repeal the Missouri Compromise and allow slavery in the new territory.

Summarizing
Why did the United States make the Gadsden Purchase?
 

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

Stephen Douglas knew that any attempt to repeal the Missouri Compromise would divide the country.  Nevertheless, he wanted to open the northern Great Plains to settlement.  Douglas also believed that if he skillfully maneuvered his bill through Congress, he could split the Whig Party and quiet the slavery issue.  Unfortunately, Douglas had badly misjudged the depth of antislavery feelings in the North.  By persisting, he inadvertently set the country on the road to war.

Repealing the Missouri Compromise

At first, Douglas tried to dodge the issue and gain Southern support for his bill by saying that any states organized in the new Nebraska territory would be allowed to exercise popular sovereignty on slavery.

Southern leaders in the Senate were not fooled.  If the Missouri Compromise remained in place while the region was settled, slaveholders would not move there.  As a result, the states formed in the region would naturally become free states.  Determined to get the territory organized, Douglas went a fateful step further.  In his next version of the bill, he proposed to undo the Missouri Compromise and allow slavery in the region.  He also proposed dividing the region into two territories.  Nebraska would be on the north, adjacent to the free state of Iowa, and Kansas would be on the south, west of the slave state of Missouri.  This looked like Nebraska was intended to be free territory, while Kansas was intended for slavery.

Douglas’s bill outraged Northern Democrats and Whigs.  Free-Soilers and antislavery Democrats called the act an “atrocious plot.” They charged that abandoning the Missouri Compromise broke a solemn promise to limit the spread of slavery.  Despite this opposition, the leaders of the Democrats in Congress won enough support to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854.

“Bleeding Kansas”

Kansas became the first battleground between those favoring the extension of slavery and those opposing it.  Since eastern Kansas offered the same climate and rich soil as the slave state of Missouri, settlers moving there from Missouri were likely to bring enslaved persons with them and claim Kansas for the South.  Northerners responded by hurrying into the territory themselves, intent on creating an antislavery majority.  Northern settlers could count on the support of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, an abolitionist group founded to recruit and outfit antislavery settlers bound for Kansas.  Carrying supplies and rifles, hordes of Northerners headed for the new territory. 

Pro-slavery senator David Atchison of Missouri responded by calling on men from his state to storm into Kansas.  In the spring of 1855, thousands of armed Missourians—called “border ruffians” in the press—voted illegally in Kansas, helping elect a pro-slavery legislature.  Furious antislavery settlers countered by holding a convention in Topeka and drafting their own constitution that excluded slavery.  By March 1856, Kansas had two governments.

On May 21, 1856, border ruffians, worked up by the arrival of more Northerners, attacked the town of Lawrence, a stronghold of antislavery settlers.  The attackers wrecked newspaper presses, plundered shops and homes, and burned a hotel and the home of the elected free-state governor. 

“Bleeding Kansas,” as newspapers dubbed the territory, became the scene of a territorial civil war between pro-slavery and antislavery settlers.  By the end of 1856, 200 people had died in the fighting and two million dollars’ worth of property had been destroyed.

The Caning of Charles Sumner

While bullets flew and blood ran in Kansas, the Senate hotly debated the future of the Western territories.  In mid-May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a fiery abolitionist, delivered a speech accusing pro-slavery senators of forcing Kansas into the ranks of slave states.  He singled out Senator Andrew P.  Butler of South Carolina, saying Butler had “chosen a mistress ...the harlot, Slavery.”

Several days later, on May 22, Butler’s second cousin, Representative Preston Brooks, approached Sumner at his desk in the Senate chamber.  Brooks shouted that Sumner’s speech had been “a libel on South Carolina, and Mr.  Butler, who is a relative of mine.” Before Sumner could respond, Brooks raised a gold-handled cane and beat him savagely, leaving the senator severely injured and bleeding on the floor.  The growing violence over slavery had come to the very center of government.

Many Southerners considered Brooks to be a hero.  Some Southerners even sent him canes inscribed “Hit Him Again.” Shocked by the attack and outraged by the flood of Southern support for Brooks, Northerners strengthened their determination to resist the “barbarism of slavery.” One New York clergyman confided in his journal that “no way is left for the North, but to strike back, or be slaves.”

Describe:
Why did Stephen Douglas propose repealing the Missouri Compromise?