The question of slavery in the West

Territorial acquisitions

For further details see Webster-Ashburton Treaty and Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

In the 1850s sectional tensions were revived by the same issue that had produced it dating back to the Missouri Compromise of 1820: slavery in the territories. Northerners and Southerners, in effect, were coming to define "Manifest Destiny" in different ways, undermining nationalism as a unifying force.

By the 1850s, the line of frontier settlement had extended beyond the western boundaries of Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri to encompass the Great Plains. Known as "the Great American Desert" just a generation earlier, most Americans were unaware of arable land beyond the great bend of the Missouri River. In the states of the Old Northwest, therefore, pressure began to build for efforts to extend settlement westward once again. Moreover, on February 2, 1848, Mexico was forced sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ceding vast huge tracts of land to the US. Free Northern farmers did not want to compete compete against slave labor, thus bringing up debates on whether slavery should be permitted in the newly gained Western territories.

Not only did the territorial acquisitions garnered in the Webster-Ashburton Treaty and the Mexican Cession bring up the old issue of upsetting the balance between slave states and free states in the Senate, it also placed the federal government at the center of sectional conflict. After all, settlers expected a great deal from the federal government: providing territorial governments, reneging on promises treaties concerning Indian reservations, and dislocating the indigenous population (so as to make room for whites). In addition, the problems of communication and transportation between the older states and areas west of the Mississippi naturally became salient. The interest in further settlement was thus among many factors serving to strengthen the federal government. Washington was no longer the remote, unthreatening power that it once was. It was a power needed to resolve the status of territories, and deal directly with sectional disputes.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

For details see the main articles Kansas-Nebraska Act, Stephen Douglas, and Transcontinental Railroad.

The rise of railroads in the 1840s gave added support for those advocating government subsidies to promote transportation. Stephen A. Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill with the intention of building a railroad hub in his home state. Douglas - along with many throughout the Mississippi valley - naturally wanted the railroad for his own region, which could allow Chicago to emerge as a great terminal for vast traffic with the Pacific coast. To garner Southern support, the Kansas-Nebraska Act provided that popular sovereignty, through the territorial legislatures, should decide "all questions pertaining to slavery, thus effectively repealing the Missouri Compromise. While the idea of a transcontinental railroad gained favor in Congress, it quickly became embedded in sectionalism.

Of greater importance than the opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in Congress was the reaction against it in the Northern states. Perhaps no other piece of legislation in congressional history produced so many immediate, sweeping, and ominous changes, since it was seen as an effort to repeal the Missouri Compromise—a measure that many Northerners believed had a special sanctity, almost as if it were a part of the Constitution. But in reality, for the first month after Douglas introduced his bill, radicals were worried by the lack of popular response. At first, most Northern papers ignored the issue. Eventually, however, the popular reaction did come, but the radicals had to take the lead.

The founding of the Republican Party

Charles Sumner

Convinced that Northern society was superior to that of the South, and increasingly persuaded of the South's ambitions to extend slave power beyond its existing borders, Northerners were embracing a viewpoint that made conflict likely; but conflict required the agency of the Republican Party. The Republican Party — harkening on the popular, emotional issue of "free soil" in the frontier - would capture the White House after just six years of existence, cultivating a coherent ideological message playing into sectional discontent in the rapidly developing North with Democratic leaders.

The Republican Party was an outgrowth to the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska legislation. Once the Northern reaction against the Kansas-Nebraska Act took place, the radicals swung into action to attempt another political reorganization. Henry Wilson declared the Whig party dead, and vowed to oppose any efforts to resurrect it. Horace Greeley's Tribune called for the formation of a new Northern party, and Wade, Chase, Sumner, and other radicals spoke out for the union of all opponents of the Nebraska act. Chase's "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" did much to arouse popular opinion. In New York William Seward finally took it upon himself to organize a rally against the Nebraska bill, since none had arisen spontaneously. The radical press, such as the National Era and the New York Tribune, and the local free-soil journals, condemned the bill right away. Its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, was involved in calling a caucus of anti-slavery Whig and Democratic Party Congressmen in May. Meeting in a Ripon Wisconsin Congregational Church on February 28, 1854, some thirty opponents of the Nebraska act called for the organization of a new political party and suggested that Republican would be the most appropriate name (to link their cause with the Declaration of Independence). The radicals also took a leading role in the creation of the Republican Party in many northern states during the summer of 1854. While conservatives and many moderates were content merely to call for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise or a prohibition of slavery extension, the radicals insisted that no further political compromise with slavery was possible.

But without the benefit of hindsight, the 1854 elections would seem to indicate the possible triumph of Know-Nothingism rather than anti-slavery, with the Catholic/immigrant question replacing slavery as a issue capable of mobilizing mass appeal. Know-Nothings, for instance, captured the mayoralty of Philadelphia with a majority of over 8,000 votes in 1854. Even after opening up immense discord with his Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas began speaking of the Know-Nothings, rather than the Republicans, as the principal danger to the Democratic Party.

After the establishment of the party, when Republicans spoke of themselves as a party of "free labor," they appealed to a rapidly growing, primarily middle class base of support, not permanent wage earners or the unemployed. When they extolled the virtues of free labor, they were merely reflecting the experiences of millions of men who had "made it" and millions of others who had a realistic hope of doing so. Like the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States would emerge as the nationalists, homogenizers, imperialists, and cosmopolitans. Intolerant of any social diversity within their societies, they attempted to impose their values on dissident groups—temperance legislation on the Irish immigrants, anti-slavery on the South—while the party of the regional and ethnic minorities (Democrats in America, Liberals in Britain), called for cultural pluralism and local autonomy.

At the moment, those who had not yet "made it" included Irish immigrants, a large, growing share of Northern factory workers. Republicans often saw the Catholic working class as lacking the qualities of self-discipline, temperance, and sobriety essential for their vision of ordered liberty. In this sense, Republicans also insisted that there was a high correlation between education, religion, and hard work - the values of the "Protestant ethic" - and Republican votes. Ethnoreligious, socio-economic, and cultural fault lines ran throughout American society, but were becoming increasingly sectional, pitting Yankee Protestants with a stake in the emerging industrial capitalism and American nationalism increasingly against those tied to Southern slaveholding interests.

For example, acclaimed historian Don E. Fehrenbacher, in his Prelude to Greatness, Lincoln in the 1850s, noticed how Illinois was a striking microcosm of the national political scene, pointing out voting patterns that bore striking correlations to regional patterns of settlement. Those areas settled from the South were staunchly Democratic, while those by New Englanders were staunchly Republican. In addition, a belt of border counties were known for their political moderation, and traditionally held the balance of power. Intertwined with religious, ethnic, regional, and class identities, the issues of free labor and free soil were thus easy to demagogue.

Events during the next two years in "Bleeding Kansas" sustained the popular fervor aroused among some elements in the North by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Those from the North were encouraged by press and pulpit and the powerful organs of abolitionist propaganda. Often they received financial help from such organizations as the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Those from the South often received financial contributions from the communities they left. Southerners sought to uphold their constitutional rights in the territories and to maintain sufficient political strength to repulse 'hostile and ruinous legislation.'

While the Great Plains were largely unfit for the cultivation of cotton, informed Southerners demanded that the West be open to slavery, often - perhaps most often - with minerals in mind. Brazil, for instance, was an example of the successful use of slave labor in mining. In the middle of the eighteenth century, diamond mining supplemented gold mining in Minas Gerais and accounted for a massive transfer of masters and slaves from Brazil's Northeastern sugar region. Southern leaders knew a good deal about this experience. It was even promoted in pro-slavery DeBow's Review as far back as 1848.

"Bleeding Kansas" and the elections of 1856

For further details please see the main articles on the 1856 elections and "Bleeding Kansas".

John Brown

In Kansas the slavery issue reached a condition of intolerable tension and violence for the first time. But this was in an area where an overwhelming proportion of settlers were merely land-hungry Westerners indifferent to the great public issues looming large in the 1850s. The majority of the inhabitants actually were not concerned with sectional tensions or the issue of slavery. Instead, the tension in Kansas began as a contention between rival claimants. During the first wave of settlement, no one held titles to the land he was squatting, and settlers rushed to occupy newly open land fit for cultivation. While the tension and violence did emerge as a pattern pitting Yankees and Missourians against each other, there is little evidence of any lofty ideological divides on the questions of slavery. Instead, the Missouri claimants, thinking of Kansas as their own domain, regarded the Yankee squatters as invaders, while the Yankees hated the Missourians for grabbing the best land without honestly settling on it, and stigmatized them as half-savage "pukes."

However, the 1855-56 violence in "Bleeding Kansas" did reach an ideological climax after John Brown — regarded by followers as the instrument of God's will to destroy slavery — entered the melee. His assassination of five proslavery settlers (the so-called "Pottawatomie Massacre"), resulted in some irregular, guerrilla-style strife. While John Brown's heroism and courage have been a source of inspiration to fighters for justice and equality since, the strife in Kansas often just involved armed bands more interested in land claims or loot.

But of greater importance than the civil strife in Kansas, however, was the reaction against it nationwide and in Congress. In both North and South, the belief was widespread that the aggressive designs of the other sections were epitomized by (and responsible for) what was happening in Kansas. Whether or not such beliefs were entirely correct is less important than that they became passionately held articles of faith in both sections. Consequently, "Bleeding Kansas" would emerge as a symbol of this sectional controversy.

Even before news of the Kansas skirmishes reached the East coast did a related violent escapade occur in Washington on May 19 and 20. Charles Sumner's speech before the Senate entitled "The Crime Against Kansas," which condemned the Pierce administration and the institution of slavery, singled out in particular Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, a strident defender of slavery. Its markedly sexual innuendo cast the South Carolinian as the "Don Quixote" of slavery, who has "chosen a mistress [the harlot slavery]...who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him, though polluted in the sight of the world is chaste in his sight." Several days later, Summer fell victim to the Southern gentleman's code, which instructs retaliation for the impugning the honor of an elderly kinsman. Bleeding and unconsciousness after a nearly fatal assault with a heavy cane fell by Butler's nephew, U.S. Representative Preston Brooks - and unable to return to the Senate for four years - the Massachusetts Senator emerged as another symbol of sectional tensions. For many in the North, he illustrated the barbarism of slave society.

Indignant over the developments in Kansas, the Republicans - the first entirely sectional major party in U.S. history - entered their first presidential campaign with confidence. Their nominee, John C. Frémont, was a generally safe candidate for the new party. Although his nomination upset some of their nativist supporters (his mother was a Catholic), the nomination of the famed explorer of the Far West with no political record was an attempt to woo ex-Democrats. The other two contenders, William Seward and Salmon P. Chase, were seen as too radical.

Nevertheless, the campaign of 1856 was waged almost exclusively on the slavery issue—pitted as a struggle between democracy and aristocracy—focusing on the question of Kansas. They condemned the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery, but advanced a program of internal improvements combing the idealism of anti-slavery with the economic aspirations of the North. The new party rapidly developed a powerful partisan culture, and energetically cultivated armies of party activists surging voters to the polls in unprecedented numbers. Constituents reacted with fervor. Young Republicans organized the "Wide Awake" clubs and chanted the catchphrase "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, Frémont!" With Southern fire-eaters and even some moderates uttering threats of secession if Frémont won, Buchanan benefited from apprehensions about the future of the Union.