Failure of Compromise in two minutes
- Stephen Douglas wanted a Chicago-to-Pacific railroad and, to win Southern votes, organized Kansas and Nebraska under popular sovereignty. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 voided the Missouri Compromise line.
- The act reshaped the parties: the Whigs collapsed, Northern Democrats lost most free-state seats, and the Republican Party formed in 1854; in 1856 its candidate Frémont carried 11 of 16 free states.
- In Bleeding Kansas, Missourians crossed the border to vote in 1855, a proslavery legislature passed a slave code, and free-staters formed a rival government at Topeka.
- In May 1856 proslavery forces sacked Lawrence, Preston Brooks beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane in the Senate chamber, and John Brown's band killed five men at Pottawatomie Creek.
- Dred Scott v. Sandford (March 1857) held that Black Americans could not be citizens, that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
- Buchanan backed the proslavery Lecompton Constitution, and Kansans rejected it in 1858. In the Lincoln–Douglas debates, Douglas's Freeport Doctrine, that settlers could exclude slavery, cost him Southern support while Lincoln gained fame.
- On the exam: this topic tests causation, since each compromise increased conflict. Link popular sovereignty, the debates and Dred Scott to the Republican Party's rise and the election of 1860.
Topic 5.6 key terms
- Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
Part of the Compromise of 1850. It let slaveholders claim people who had escaped, even in free states. Federal commissioners decided each case with no jury, and the accused could not testify.
- Compromise of 1850
Five laws meant to settle the fight over slavery in land won from Mexico. California entered free, Utah and New Mexico could decide later, and the Fugitive Slave Act got tougher.
- Abolitionist
Someone who wanted slavery ended everywhere, not just kept out of the territories. Before 1854 abolitionists were a small minority in the North.
- Organized territory
Land Congress has given a governor, a legislature and courts. It's the step before statehood.
- Missouri Compromise line (36°30′)
Congress's 1820 line: no slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of it, except Missouri.
- Popular sovereignty
The idea that the settlers of a territory decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
- Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854)
The law that created Kansas and Nebraska territories and repealed the Missouri Compromise line.
- New England Emigrant Aid Company
Formed in Massachusetts to help antislavery settlers move to Kansas. It founded Lawrence, but most Kansas settlers came without its help.
- Border ruffians
Antislavery settlers' name for the proslavery Missourians who crossed into Kansas to vote in its elections and to fight for slavery.
- Bogus legislature
The free-staters' name for the proslavery territorial legislature elected in March 1855, which met at Shawnee Mission and wrote Kansas's first laws.
- Topeka government
The free-staters' rival government: a constitution written at Topeka in 1855 and a governor and legislature chosen under it. Congress never recognized it.
- Beecher's Bibles
The name people gave the rifles shipped to free-state settlers in Kansas, after a newspaper reported a remark by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher.
- Second Party System
The Democrat–Whig contest, from the 1830s to 1854. Both parties had voters in every section, so each had to compromise to win.
- Know-Nothing Party
The American Party, an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic party of the 1850s. It drew voters from the collapsing Whigs, then split over slavery.
- Republican Party (1854)
A party founded in 1854 by Northerners opposed to the spread of slavery into the territories. It aimed to stop slavery's growth, not to end it where it already existed.
- Sectional party
A party whose voters come from one region. The Republicans were the first major one.
- Sack of Lawrence
May 21, 1856: a proslavery posse burned the Free State Hotel in Lawrence and wrecked its presses. Northern papers said it proved proslavery men would use force to win Kansas.
- Sumner–Brooks incident
May 22, 1856: Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat Senator Charles Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. Northerners saw proof of Southern violence; many Southerners praised Brooks.
- Pottawatomie Creek
Where John Brown’s band killed five proslavery settlers on the night of May 24, 1856, three days after the sack of Lawrence.
- Bleeding Kansas
The name Northern papers gave to the violence in Kansas Territory, 1854–1861, over whether Kansas would be slave or free.
- Missouri Compromise (1820)
Law that barred slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30′, except in Missouri. Kansas-Nebraska repealed it in 1854.
- Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens, that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories, and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional.
- Fifth Amendment
Says no one may be deprived of 'life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.' The Court treated enslaved people as property under it.
- Republican platform, 1856
The new party's 1856 program: Congress must bar slavery from the territories. Dred Scott ruled that power unconstitutional.
- Lecompton Constitution
A proslavery constitution written at Lecompton in 1857. Voters could not reject it outright, and even its 'no slavery' version protected slavery where it already existed. President Buchanan backed it.
- English bill
Congress's 1858 deal for Kansas. Accept Lecompton and become a state at once, or wait until Kansas had about 93,000 people. Kansans chose to wait.
- House Divided speech
Lincoln's June 16, 1858 speech accepting the Illinois Republicans' nomination for the Senate. He said the country could not stay half slave and half free, and that it would become all one thing or all the other.
- Slave Power
The Northern charge that slaveholders and their allies controlled the federal government and were working to spread slavery. Lincoln's speech accused four leaders of building toward it.
- Lincoln–Douglas debates
Seven debates in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, from Ottawa on August 21 to Alton on October 15. Reporters took them down and newspapers across the country printed them.
- Freeport Doctrine
Douglas's answer at Freeport, 1858: settlers could keep slavery out of a territory, whatever the Dred Scott decision said, by refusing to pass the local laws that protect it. It helped him win Illinois and cost him the South.
- Election of senators
Until the 17th Amendment (1913), state legislatures chose U.S. senators, not voters. That is how a party could win more votes statewide and still lose the Senate seat.
- Sectionalism
Loyalty to your own region's interests over the nation's. By the late 1850s, North and South judged every compromise by what it did for their side.
- Wyandotte Constitution
Kansas's fourth and last constitution, written in 1859. It banned slavery, and Kansas entered the Union under it on January 29, 1861.
- Secession
A state's formal withdrawal from the Union. South Carolina went first, on December 20, 1860, and five more followed by January 26, 1861.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Black Crepe
May 24 – June 2, 1854
Key terms: Fugitive Slave Act (1850), Compromise of 1850, Abolitionist
Boston · June 2, 1854
About fifty thousand people lined Boston's streets to watch one man walk to the harbor.
His name was Anthony Burns. About twenty, he had escaped slavery in Virginia. The federal government sent soldiers, marines and a cannon to take him back.
A week earlier, abolitionists had stormed the Court House to free him.
A guard, James Batchelder, was stabbed to death. He had been sworn in that day.
That same week, the House passed the Kansas–Nebraska bill. At Faneuil Hall, Boston heard the two stories as one.
Amos Lawrence, a Boston cloth merchant, wrote to his uncle:
Amos A. Lawrence
We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.
Within months, a town in Kansas was named for him.
Congress, the settlers, a new party and the Supreme Court each tried to settle slavery in the West. Every try made things worse. Why?
Inoperative and Void
January–May 1854
Key terms: Organized territory, Missouri Compromise line (36°30′), Popular sovereignty, Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854)
Stephen Douglas of Illinois stood about five foot four. People called him the Little Giant.
He wanted a railroad from Chicago to the Pacific. The land in between had no government yet.
Southerners wanted a southern route. Washington had just agreed to buy a strip of Mexico for it.
Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery was banned in all of it. Southern senators wouldn't vote to organize it unless that changed.
Douglas had an answer that sounded like pure democracy.
Stephen A. Douglas
…will you allow the people to legislate for themselves upon the subject of slavery? Why should you not?
Section 14 of the Kansas–Nebraska Act declared the Missouri line 'inoperative and void.' Settlers would be 'perfectly free' to decide about slavery for themselves.
It split the land into Kansas and Nebraska. The old line went out.
The land wasn't empty. Starting in the 1820s, the government had moved the Shawnee, Delaware and others there.
That spring, officials in Washington signed nine treaties with the nations there and took most of their land.
The House passed it in May, 113 to 100. President Franklin Pierce signed it on May 30.
Northern towns burned him in effigy.
Stephen A. Douglas
I could then travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigies…
The Race for Kansas
1854–1856
Key terms: New England Emigrant Aid Company, Border ruffians, Bogus legislature, Topeka government, Beecher's Bibles
Amos Lawrence helped pay for the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which sent antislavery settlers west. Its first town in Kansas took his name.
Lawrence began as a camp of tents thatched with prairie hay. But most Kansas settlers came from Missouri and the Midwest. They wanted land more than a cause.
Across the line, western Missouri grew hemp and tobacco with enslaved labor. Missourians feared a free Kansas next door, and Eastern money shipping in voters. Many decided to vote there themselves.
Sara T. D. Robinson
The Missourians, for some days, have been passing into the territory… They go armed and provisioned.
On March 30, 1855, Kansas elected its first legislature.
Across Kansas, the census had counted 2,905 voters. The polls took 6,307 ballots. Proslavery candidates won almost every seat.
Governor Andrew Reeder threw out several districts and held new elections. The legislature seated the first winners anyway. Free-staters called it the bogus legislature.
Its slave code made it a felony even to say slavery wasn't legal in Kansas. In a territory where the people were supposed to decide, one side of the argument was now a crime.
Free-staters wrote their own constitution at Topeka and chose their own governor. Kansas now had two governments.
The same voters, 1,287 to 453, told their legislature to keep free Black people out of Kansas. Most free-staters wanted Kansas free, and white.
Rifles went west in crates marked “Books.” A paper reported that the preacher Henry Ward Beecher said one rifle had more moral power than a hundred Bibles. People called them Beecher's Bibles.
Last of the Whigs
1854–1856
Key terms: Second Party System, Know-Nothing Party, Republican Party (1854), Sectional party
For twenty years, Whigs and Democrats held the country together. Each party needed voters in both North and South.
Every Northern Whig in the House voted no. Southern Whigs voted yes, 12 to 7. The party never recovered.
Northern voters punished Northern Democrats. Democrats won 91 free-state House seats in 1852. After the 1854 and 1855 elections, they held 25.
Fear of immigrants drew many voters to the Know-Nothings. By 1856, slavery had split that party too.
A new party formed to stop slavery's spread. Ripon, Wisconsin, says it began in a schoolhouse. Jackson, Michigan, says under the oaks. Both still do.
The House needed two months and 133 ballots to choose a Speaker. Nathaniel Banks, a Know-Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican, finally won.
In 1856, Republicans promised to keep slavery out of the territories. They did not promise to end it in the South.
The new party had almost no voters in the South. Southerners called them “Black Republicans.”
Six Days in May
May–November 1856
Key terms: Sack of Lawrence, Sumner–Brooks incident, Pottawatomie Creek, Bleeding Kansas, Sectional party
On May 19 and 20, Senator Charles Sumner spoke on “The Crime Against Kansas.” He aimed it at Andrew Butler of South Carolina, who wasn’t there.
He even mocked the way Butler spoke.
Charles Sumner
Of course he has chosen a mistress … I mean the harlot, Slavery.
On May 21, a proslavery posse of about 800 rode into Lawrence. It shelled and burned the new hotel and wrecked the presses.
On May 22, after the Senate adjourned, Sumner stayed at his desk. Congressman Preston Brooks, Butler’s cousin, beat him with a cane until the cane broke.
Sumner tore his desk from the floor trying to stand. He wouldn’t return to the Senate full-time for three and a half years.
Northern printers sold this picture of it. The title sets Sumner’s argument against Brooks’s club.
Preston S. Brooks
I wore my cane out completely but saved the Head which is gold. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts.
Admirers sent him new canes. One was engraved “Hit him again.” The House fell short of the two-thirds it needed to expel him.
On the night of May 24, the abolitionist John Brown led a small band to Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas.
They took five proslavery men from their cabins and killed them.
Northern papers called it Bleeding Kansas. A historian who counted found fifty-six political killings by 1861.
In November, Democrats ran James Buchanan, who’d spent most of the Kansas fight in London. The Republican, John C. Frémont, carried eleven of the sixteen free states, with almost no Southern votes.
Add Pennsylvania and Illinois, and he’d have been president.
Speedily and Finally
March 1857
Key terms: Missouri Compromise (1820), Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Fifth Amendment, Republican platform, 1856
At his inauguration, James Buchanan made a promise about the Supreme Court.
James Buchanan
…will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision… I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be…
He already knew where the Court was headed. He'd been trading letters with two of the justices.
Two days later, the Court ruled in a low, vaulted room right under the Senate floor.
Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott were enslaved in St. Louis.
An army surgeon had taken Dred to free Illinois, then to Fort Snelling, where Congress had banned slavery. In 1846, each of them sued for freedom.
Chief Justice Roger Taney, seventy-nine, read for about two hours. First: Black Americans, enslaved or free, could not be citizens. So Scott could not sue in federal court.
Roger B. Taney
…so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…
Taney claimed the founders saw Black Americans that way. His Court made it the law.
Justice Benjamin Curtis dissented, and checked the history.
Benjamin R. Curtis
…in five of the thirteen original States, colored persons then possessed the elective franchise…
Second: Congress could not ban slavery in any territory. The Court called enslaved people property, protected by the Fifth Amendment. Third: the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along.
Southern Democrats cheered. Republicans saw their whole program ruled unconstitutional.
Frederick Douglass
…no thanks to the slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.
If Congress couldn't keep slavery out of a territory, could the settlers?
Voted Down or Voted Up
1857–1858
Key terms: Lecompton Constitution, Popular sovereignty, English bill
Free-staters boycotted the vote for delegates, so a proslavery convention wrote Kansas a constitution.
The ballot offered two choices: “Constitution with Slavery,” or “Constitution with no Slavery.” Either way, the people already enslaved in Kansas stayed enslaved.
Free-staters stayed home again, and “with slavery” won. Two weeks later, in a vote they ran, 10,226 people voted against the whole thing.
Buchanan asked Congress to admit Kansas under it anyway. His own governor there, Robert Walker, had resigned rather than back it.
Douglas had already broken with him.
Stephen A. Douglas
It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.
He wanted a fair vote. Southern Democrats saw a traitor who was blocking a slave state.
Congress offered a deal: take Lecompton and join now, or wait. Kansans voted it down again in August 1858. Kansas wrote four constitutions in five years.
A House Divided
June 1858 – January 1859
Key terms: House Divided speech, Slave Power, Lincoln–Douglas debates, Freeport Doctrine, Election of senators
In June 1858, Illinois Republicans chose a Springfield lawyer to challenge Senator Douglas.
Abraham Lincoln
"A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Abraham Lincoln
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
He said four men had framed one house, piece by piece:
Abraham Lincoln
…Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance…
Douglas, Pierce, Taney and Buchanan. Nobody has found a master plan. But Buchanan really had written to two justices.
The two men held seven debates. At Freeport, about fifteen thousand people stood in a cold, damp grove. Republicans brought Lincoln in an old farm wagon behind six horses. Douglas's friends dropped their white-horse carriage, and Douglas walked.
Lincoln answered the seven questions Douglas had asked at Ottawa. Then he asked four of his own.
On September 17, 1858, Dred Scott died in St. Louis. He had been free for sixteen months. The next day, at Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln told the crowd:
Abraham Lincoln
…I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…
Stephen A. Douglas
I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever…
Neither man called for social and political equality. But Lincoln called slavery a wrong. Douglas left it to each territory.
Abraham Lincoln
The real issue in this controversy is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong,
Abraham Lincoln
and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.
Republicans won more votes statewide. But legislatures chose senators then, and Illinois's kept Douglas, 54 to 46. Lincoln lost. But Northern newspapers had reprinted the debates, and his name now reached far beyond Illinois.
Cannot Stand
January 1859 → January 1861
Key terms: Sectionalism, Wyandotte Constitution, Secession
On January 4, 1859, the Senate left its old chamber for good.
John C. Breckinridge
The Senate is assembled for the last time in this Chamber.
Sumner's seat was still empty. He was in Europe, still recovering from Brooks's cane.
Every fix caused the next fight. Underneath them all sat the same question: was slavery wrong?
Leonard Grimes, a Black minister in Boston, raised $1,300 and bought Burns's freedom in 1855. His old church in Virginia expelled him for running away.
Anthony Burns
God made me a man—not a slave; and gave me the same right to myself that he gave the man who stole me to himself.
He studied at Oberlin, became a minister in Canada, and died there in 1862. He was about twenty-eight.
Kansas joined the Union as a free state in January 1861. By then, six states had already left the Union.
Two years earlier, John Brown had left Kansas, raising money for something bigger.
Abraham Lincoln
It will become all one thing, or all the other.