| The controversy over slavery awakened the breakdown
of the major political parties and the formation of new ones, including
the party of future president Abraham Lincoln. Friction intensified
until the North and South became unable to compromise any further.
By the 1850s, feelings were running high among Northerners
and Southerners over
whether slavery should be allowed in new territories.
These strong feelings also tore old political parties apart and created
new ones. Soon after Lincoln was defeated in his race for senator
from Illinois, he wrote to a Springfield friend:
“I think I am a Whig; but others say there are not
Whigs, and that I am an abolitionist. ... I now do no more than oppose
the extension of slavery. I am not a Know-Nothing. ... How
could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes,
be in favor of degrading classes of white people? ... As a nation,
we began by declaring ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically
read it ‘all men are created equal except Negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings
get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except Negroes, and
foreigners, and Catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating
to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia
for instance. ...”
.
—quoted in Abraham Lincoln
.
Birth of the Republican Party
When the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise,
it enraged many people who opposed the extension of slavery. A few
of these people resorted to violence, but the effect was just as dramatic
on political parties—both the Whigs and the Democrats were split.
In the Whig Party, pro-slavery Southern Whigs and antislavery Northern
Whigs had long battled for control of their party. With passage of
the Kansas-Nebraska Act, disaster was complete. Every Northern Whig
in Congress had voted against the bill, while most Southern Whigs had supported
it. “We Whigs of the North,” wrote one member from Connecticut, “are
unalterably determined never to have even the slightest political correspondence
or connexion” with the Southern Whigs.
Anger over the Kansas-Nebraska Act convinced former Whigs,
members of the Free-Soil Party, and a few antislavery Democrats to work
together during the congressional elections of 1854. These coalitions
took many different names, including the Anti-Nebraska Party, the Fusion
Party, the People’s Party, and the Independent Party. The most popular
name for the new coalition was the Republican Party.
Republicans Organize
At a convention in Michigan in July 1854, the Republican
Party was officially organized. In choosing the same name as Jefferson’s
original party, the Republicans declared their intention to revive the
spirit of the American Revolution. Just as Jefferson had chosen the
name because he wanted to prevent the United States from becoming a monarchy,
the new Republicans chose their name because they feared that the Southern
planters were becoming an aristocracy that controlled the federal government.
Republicans did not agree on whether slavery should be
abolished in the Southern states, but they did agree that it had to be
kept out of the territories. A large majority of Northern voters
seemed to agree, enabling the Republicans and the other antislavery parties
to make great strides in the elections of 1854.
The Know-Nothings
At the same time, public anger against the Northern Democrats
also enabled the American Party—better known as the Know-Nothings—to make
great gains as well, particularly in the Northeast. The American
Party was an anti-Catholic and nativist party. It opposed immigration,
particularly Catholic immigration, into the United States. Prejudice
and fear that immigrants would take away jobs enabled the Know-Nothings
to win many seats in Congress and the state legislatures in 1854.
Soon after the election, the Know-Nothings suffered the
same fate as the Whigs. Many Know-Nothings had been elected from
the Upper South, particularly Maryland, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
They quickly split with Know-Nothings from the North over their support
for the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Furthermore, the violence in Kansas
and the beating of Charles Sumner made slavery a far more important issue
to most Americans than immigration. Eventually, the Republican Party
absorbed the Northern Know-Nothings.
Examining
What events led to the founding
of the Republican Party?
The Election of 1856
To gain the widest possible support in the 1856 campaign,
the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont, a famous Western
explorer nicknamed “The Pathfinder.” Frémont had spoken in favor
of Kansas becoming a free state. He had little political experience
but also no embarrassing record to defend.
The Democrats nominated James Buchanan. Buchanan
had served in Congress for 20 years and had been the American ambassador
to Russia and then to Great Britain. He had been in Great Britain
during the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and had not taken a stand
on the issue, but his record in Congress showed that he believed the best
way to save the Union was to make concessions to the South. The American
Party tried to reunite its Northern and Southern members at its convention,
but most of the Northern delegates walked out when the party refused to
call for the repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The rest of the convention
then chose former president Millard Fillmore to represent the American
Party, hoping to attract the vote of former Whigs.
The campaign was really two separate contests: Buchanan
against Frémont in the North, and Buchanan against Fillmore in the
South. Buchanan had solid support in the South and only needed his
home state of Pennsylvania and one other to win the presidency. Democrats
campaigned on the idea that only Buchanan could save the Union and that
the election of Frémont would cause the South to secede. When
the votes were counted, Buchanan had won.
Identifying
What political party and candidate
won the presidency in 1856?
Sectional Divisions Grow
Despite Buchanan’s determination to adopt policies
that would calm the growing sectional strife in the country, a series of
events helped drive Americans in the North and South even further apart.
The Dred Scott Decision
In his March 1857 inaugural address, James Buchanan suggested
that the nation let the Supreme Court decide the question of slavery in
the territories. Most people who listened to the address did not
know that Buchanan had contacted members of the Supreme Court and therefore
knew that a decision was imminent.
Many Southern members of Congress had quietly pressured
the Supreme Court justices to issue a ruling on slavery in the territories.
They expected the Southern majority on the court to rule in favor of the
South. They were not disappointed. Two days after the inauguration,
the Court released its opinion in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Dred Scott was an enslaved man whose Missouri slaveholder
had taken him to live in free territory before returning to Missouri.
Assisted by abolitionists, Scott sued to end his slavery, arguing that
the time he had spent in free territory meant he was free. The case
went all the way to the Supreme Court.
On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney delivered
the majority opinion in the case. Taney ruled against Scott because,
he claimed, African Americans were not citizens and therefore could not
sue in the courts. Taney then addressed the Missouri Compromise’s
ban on slavery in territory north of Missouri’s southern border:
“It is the opinion of the court that the Act
of Congress which prohibited a citizen from holding and owning [enslaved
persons] in the territory of the United States north of the line therein
mentioned is not warranted by the Constitution and is therefore void.”
—from Dred Scott v. Sandford
.
Instead of removing the issue of slavery in the territories
from politics, the Dred Scott decision itself became a political
issue that further intensified the sectional conflict. The Supreme
Court had said that the federal government could not prohibit slavery in
the territories. Free soil, one of the basic ideas uniting Republicans,
was unconstitutional.
Democrats cheered the decision, but Republicans condemned
it and claimed it was not binding. Instead they argued that it was
an obiter dictum, an incidental opinion not called for by the circumstances
of the case. Southerners, on the other hand, called on Northerners
to obey the decision if they wanted the South to remain in the Union.
Many African Americans, among them Philadelphia activist
Robert Purvis, publicly declared contempt for any government that could
produce such an edict:
“Mr. Chairman, look at the facts—here,
in a country with a sublimity of impudence that knows no parallel, setting
itself up before the world as a free country, a land of liberty!, ‘the
land of the free, and the home of the brave, ‘ the ‘freest country in all
the world’ ... and yet here are millions of men and women ... bought and
sold, whipped, manacled, killed all the day long.”
—quoted in Witness for Freedom
.
Kansas’s Lecompton Constitution
Frustration with the government also fueled the conflict
between antislavery and pro-slavery forces in “Bleeding Kansas.” Hoping
to end the troubles there, President Buchanan urged the territory to apply
for statehood. The pro-slavery legislature scheduled an election
for delegates to a constitutional convention, but anti-slavery Kansans
boycotted it, claiming it was rigged.
The resulting constitution, drafted in the town of Lecompton
in 1857, legalized slavery in the territory. Each side then held
its own referendum, or popular vote, on the constitution.
Antislavery forces voted down the constitution; pro-slavery forces approved
it.
Buchanan accepted the pro-slavery vote and asked Congress
to admit Kansas as a slave state. The Senate quickly voted to accept
the Lecompton constitution, but the House of Representatives
blocked it. Many members of Congress became so angry during the debates
that fist-fights broke out. Southern leaders were stunned when even
Stephen Douglas of Illinois refused to support them. Many had hoped
that Douglas, a Northern leader and possible future president, understood
the South’s concerns and would make the compromise necessary to keep the
South in the Union.
Finally, to get the votes they needed, President Buchanan
and Southern leaders in Congress agreed to allow another referendum in
Kansas on the constitution. Southern leaders expected to win this
referendum. If the settlers in Kansas rejected the Lecompton constitution,
they would delay statehood for Kansas for at least two more years.
Despite these conditions, the settlers in Kansas voted
overwhelmingly in 1858 to reject the Lecompton constitution. They
did not want slavery in their state. As a result, Kansas did not
become a state until 1861.
Summarizing
Why did Dred Scott sue the slaveholder
who held him?
Lincoln and Douglas
In 1858 Illinois Republicans chose a relative unknown
named Abraham Lincoln to run for the Senate against the Democratic
incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln launched his campaign in June
with a memorable speech, in which he declared:
“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.”
—quoted in The Civil War: An Illustrated
History
.
The nationally prominent Douglas, a short, stocky man
nicknamed “The Little Giant,” regularly drew large crowds on the campaign
trail. Seeking to overcome Douglas’s fame, Lincoln proposed a series
of debates between the candidates, which would expose him to larger audiences
than he could attract on his own. Douglas confidently accepted.
Born on the Kentucky frontier and raised in Indiana, Lincoln
had experienced little more than small-town life. A storekeeper,
mill hand, and rail-splitter during his youth, he went on to study and
practice law. Later he served in the Illinois state legislature and,
for a single term, in the U.S. House of Representatives as a member
of the Whig Party. Despite this modest background, Lincoln proved
himself a gifted debater.
Both witty and logical, he regularly illuminated his points
with quotations from scripture or appealing homespun stories from everyday
life.
Although not an abolitionist, Lincoln believed slavery
to be morally wrong and opposed its spread into western territories.
Douglas, by contrast, supported popular sovereignty. During a debate
in Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas if the people of a territory could legally
exclude slavery before achieving statehood? If Douglas said yes,
he would appear to be supporting popular sovereignty and opposing the Dred
Scott ruling, which would cost him Southern support. If he said
no, it would make it seem as if he had abandoned popular sovereignty, the
principle on which he had built his national following.
Douglas tried to avoid the dilemma, formulating an answer
that became known as the Freeport Doctrine.
He replied that he accepted the Dred Scott ruling, but
he argued that people could still keep slavery out by refusing to pass
the laws needed to regulate and enforce it. “Slavery cannot exist
... anywhere,” said Douglas, “unless it is supported by local police
regulations.” Douglas’s response pleased Illinois voters but angered Southerners.
Lincoln also attacked Douglas’s claim that he “cared not”
whether Kansans voted for or against slavery. Denouncing “the modern
Democratic idea that slavery is as good as freedom,” Lincoln called on
voters to elect Republicans, “whose hearts are in the work, who do care
for the result”:
“Has any thing ever threatened the existence
of this Union save and except this very institution of slavery? What
is it that we hold most dear amongst us? Our own liberty and prosperity.
What has ever threatened our liberty and prosperity save and except this
institution of slavery? If this is true, how do you propose to improve
the condition of things by enlarging slavery—by spreading it out and making
it bigger? You may have a wen [sore] or cancer upon your person and
not be able to cut it out lest you bleed to death; but surely it is no
way to cure it, to engraft it and spread it over your whole body.
That is no proper way of treating what you regard a wrong.”
—quoted in The Civil War: Opposing
Viewpoints
.
Douglas won the election, but Lincoln did not come away
empty-handed. He had seized the opportunity in the debates to make
clear the principles of the Republican Party. He had also established
a national reputation for himself as a man of clear, insightful thinking
who could argue with force and eloquence. Within a year, however,
national attention shifted to another figure, a man who opposed slavery
not with well-crafted phrases, but with a gun.
Examining
What were the positions of Stephen
Douglas and Abraham Lincoln on slavery?
John Brown’s Raid
John Brown was a fervent abolitionist who
believed, as one minister who knew him in Kansas said, “that God had raised
him up on purpose to break the jaws of the wicked.” In 1859, he developed
a plan to seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today in
West Virginia), free and arm the enslaved people of the neighborhood, and
begin an insurrection, or rebellion, against slaveholders.
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and 18 followers
seized the arsenal. To the terrified night watchman, he announced,
“I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the citizens
interfere with me I must only burn the town and have blood.”
Soon, however, Brown was facing a contingent of U.S.
Marines, rushed to Harpers Ferry from Washington, D.C., under the command
of Colonel Robert E. Lee. Just 36 hours after it had begun,
Brown’s attempt to start a slave insurrection ended with his capture.
A Virginia court tried and convicted him and sentenced him to death.
In his last words to the court, Brown, repenting nothing, declared:
“I believe that to have interfered as I have
done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of [God’s]
despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now if it is deemed necessary
that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice
and mingle my blood ... with the blood of millions in this slave country
whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I
say, let it be done!”
—quoted in John Brown, 1800–1859
.
On December 2, the day of his execution, Brown handed
one of his jailers a prophetic note: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain
that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with
Blood. I had as I now think vainly flattered myself that without
very much bloodshed it might be done.”
Many Northerners viewed Brown as a martyr in a noble cause.
The execution, Henry David Thoreau predicted, would strengthen abolitionist
feeling in the North. “He is not old Brown any longer,” Thoreau declared,
“he is an angel of light.”
For most Southerners, however, Brown’s raid offered all
the proof they needed that Northerners were actively plotting the murder
of slaveholders. “Defend yourselves!” cried Georgia senator Robert
Toombs. “The enemy is at your door!”
.
John Brown
1800–1859
John Brown, who believed he was acting with God’s approval,
helped to bring about the Civil War. A dedicated abolitionist, Brown
initially worked with the Underground Railroad in Pennsylvania.
When conflict between proslavery and free-soil settlers
in Kansas became violent, Brown moved to Kansas to help six of his sons
and other free-soil settlers in their struggle against slavery.
After pro-slavery forces from Missouri sacked the town
of Lawrence, Kansas, on May 21, 1856, Brown vowed revenge. The following
day, he learned of the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate and, in the
words of one witness, he “went crazy—crazy.” Two days later, he abducted
and murdered five pro-slavery settlers living near Pottawatomie Creek.
Later he said of the deaths, “I believe that I did God
service in having them killed.”
Brown was never arrested for the Pottawatomie Massacre,
and for some Northern abolitionists he became a hero for his willingness
to fight back. Three years later, he launched his raid on Harpers
Ferry.
Although the raid ended in disaster and Brown himself
was hanged, his desperate act terrified Southerners and brought the nation
another step closer to disunion and civil war. |
. |
Evaluate:
In what ways might a Northerner
and a Southerner view John Brown’s action differently?
|
