APUSH 5.4 to 5.7 — APUSH Notes and Study Guides

In the last set of notes, we talked about the Mexican-American War and now we’re going to talk about the tension that was slowly ramping up between the North and the South all the way up until the Civil War itself.

Three Positions Regarding Slavery

After the Wilmot Proviso was shut down, which tried to ban slavery in the new territories obtained after the Mexican-American War, there were many disagreements over how slavery would be addressed in these new lands. Namely, three new positions emerged regarding this.

Southern Position: Many people in the South believed that slavery was a constitutional right. They believed that slavery did not need to be discussed, because the Missouri Compromise had already decided where it could and could not exist. They argued that the only thing that needed to be done would be to extend the Missouri Compromise’s line to the Pacific Ocean. This would make Texas, Florida, and New Mexico all slave states if New Mexico became a state in the future. To them, the Missouri Compromise was a guarantee that slavery would not be touched below the line and that their economies would be protected.
Free Soil Movement: This movement was mostly made up of Northern Democrats and Whigs. They wanted the new territories of the United States to be occupied by free laborers, rather than slaves. However, there were disagreements within the movement on whether or not black people should be allowed in these territories. Some Northern Democrats and Whigs wanted no black people there at all and wanted white people to live there without competition. On the other hand, abolitionists believed that slavery should not only be prohibited in new territories but also in every state of the U.S. Some of these people would later form a new political party known as the Free Soil Party.
Popular Sovereignty: These people wanted the people (”popular”) in each territory to have the power (”sovereignty”) to decide whether it should have slavery or not. But both members of the Southern Position and the Free Soil Movement hated this idea because while letting the people decide for themselves sounds like a good idea, they feared that the people would have the opposite opinion of them. For the Southerners, what if the territories chose to not have slavery? For the Free Soilers, what if the territories decided to have slavery instead?

Compromise of 1850

This led to Henry Clay proposing the Compromise of 1850, which proposed five things:

California would be admitted as a free state
The slave trade would end in Washington D.C.
The New Mexico territory would be divided into the Utah and New Mexico territory
The above two territories would decide slavery based on popular sovereignty
A Fugitive Slave Law would be passed to appease the Southerners, which required any escaping slaves to be returned to their owners, even if they had fled to a free state. This would also fine anybody caught helping a slave escape. And while this worked to calm tensions for a little bit, it would soon prove to be insufficient within the next few years.

Many people supported these three positions, and neither side was able to come to a compromise. When the Mexican-American War ended, California and New Mexico were admitted as free states. This led to there being more free states than slave states, causing several Southern states to threaten secession from the Union and further increasing tensions. The Southern states did not want there to be a majority of free states, because if slave states were a minority, that would mean the slave states would have no power in the Senate. With no power, the South feared that there would be nothing stopping the North from passing laws to prohibit slavery.

Immigration

In addition to slavery, the United States faced the challenge of immigration during the 19th century. During this period, a large number of German and Irish Catholics had immigrated to the U.S., forming communities and ethnic enclaves where they maintained their culture, language, and religious beliefs, such as the Five Points neighborhood in New York City for Irish immigrants. On the other hand, many German immigrants moved to the west to engage in farming. However, both groups faced horrible living conditions in cramped slums and densely populated buildings called tenements, leading to a lot of disease and joblessness. They also faced discrimination from anti-Catholic Nativists.

During the 1840s and 1850s, Nativists were people who believed that the U.S. needed to protect the interests of native-born people (non-immigrants). This hate led to the creation of the Know-Nothing Party, a political party opposed to immigration. A few decades later, this hatred of immigrants would then target the Mexicans and the Chinese arriving on the West Coast as well.

So now let’s return to slavery. The South feared the North would ban slavery because the North did not need slaves. The North's economy was mainly dependent on factory workers who were paid wages. On the other hand, the South's economy was dependent on slaves working on cotton plantations. Because of these factories, the North’s population and economy had been growing much faster than the South. Although the North did not openly oppose slavery, they were concerned that its spread would make it more difficult for free laborers to find jobs. Some people in the North were abolitionists, while others supported Popular Sovereignty, and some were part of the Free Soil Movement.

Abolitionists

The abolitionists wanted to ban slavery everywhere. Although there weren’t a lot of them during the 1840s and 1850s, their influence was significant. William Lloyd Garrison published The Liberator, a newspaper that argued for the abolition of slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book titled Uncle Tom's Cabin, a novel that depicted the horrors and brutality of slavery, leading it to be banned in some Southern states. Frederick Douglass, a former slave and an orator, gave many speeches supporting abolitionism. Hinton R. Helper used statistics to write a nonfiction book that argued that slavery was detrimental to the Southern economy. Many abolitionists used the Underground Railroad, a network of routes and safe houses from the South to the North, to help guide slaves to freedom and help them escape. Thousands of slaves fled through this passage. Some even traveled to Canada to be protected from the Fugitive Slave Law.

However, John Brown, another abolitionist, believed that the only way to end slavery was to start a slave uprising against the South. In 1859, he attempted to raid a federal arsenal in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, to give weapons to slaves and convince them to rebel. However, the plan failed and he was hanged. Violent events such as these led to the South becoming convinced that the North were all like John Brown and were all trying to destroy their way of life, leading to further increased tension.

And with this increasing tension, the Compromise of 1850 eventually failed and its success came to an end. And later compromises between the free North and the slaveholding South would continue to fail as well.

Kansas-Nebraska Act and Bleeding Kansas

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was another example of increasing tension. At the time, the unorganized territory left from the Louisiana Purchase had been divided into the Kansas and Nebraska territories. Although both territories were located above the 36' 30" line established by the Missouri Compromise, Senator Stephen Douglas from Illinois wanted popular sovereignty to be used to decide whether or not these territories would have slaves. This angered Northerners who saw it as breaking the compromise, leading to an event known as Bleeding Kansas. In Bleeding Kansas, supporters and opponents of slavery fought, leading to several deaths and violence. In 1855, pro-slavery Missourians were found to have been crossing the border into Kansas to vote illegally in favor of slavery. This led to two rival state legislatures being formed, one pro-slavery in Compton and one anti-slavery in Topeka. And then the 14th president, Franklin Pierce, decided to recognize the pro-slavery one as the legitimate one, over the anti-slavery government.

The violence in Kansas even had an effect on Congress and in May of 1856, Charles Sumner, an anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, was giving a speech against slavery when suddenly, a senator from South Carolina, Preston Brooks, beat him with a cane until he bled and was knocked unconscious.

Dred Scott Decision

Another example of a failed compromise was the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which Dred Scott, an enslaved man from Missouri, sued for his freedom after his master took him to live in Wisconsin. However, Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that because Scott was a slave, he had no right to sue. Even worse, it was ruled that because slaves were considered “property”, they could not be taken away and slave owners could move their slaves wherever they wanted. The North strongly disagreed with this decision because it broke the Missouri Compromise. Now, slaves could be moved to any state.

These conflicts essentially destroyed the two-party system. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Whig Party divided into the pro-slavery Cotton Whigs and anti-slavery Conscience Whigs. On the other hand, the Democratic Party began facing opposition from a new party, the Republicans. This was a coalition of smaller parties such as the Know Nothings, abolitionists, Northern Democrats, Free Soil Party, and Conscience Whigs. The Southern Democrats saw the Republicans as a threat to slavery's existence everywhere. After a surprisingly strong performance in the 1858 midterm elections, the Republicans were seen as seven more of a threat to the Southern way of life. As the 1860 Election drew near, both parties knew that a Republican president would mark the end of the South.

Election of 1860

So! The Election of 1860! How exciting. This is one of the last major events in our study of U.S. History just before the Civil War. So let’s get started.

Leading up to the election, the Democrats selected Stephen Douglas, the creator of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, as their nominee. The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, who campaigned on the platform of limiting slavery's expansion and supporting the Free Soil Movement. Although he did not openly advocate for abolition, the Democrats immediately labeled him as a radical. However, with the Democrats being divided between the Northern Democrats supporting popular sovereignty and the Southern Democrats supporting slavery and protecting it, Lincoln won the election with not a single electoral vote from the South. However, with zero Southern votes, this outcome revealed that no matter how unified the South was, they couldn’t beat the North anymore in elections. Additionally, with John' Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry having happened just a year prior, the South feared that the North was trying to abolish slavery and destroy them. They also resented the harsh taxes and tariffs from the North, leading to the beginning of a movement for secession.

Secession

Despite efforts to prevent it with the Crittenden Compromise, which proposed extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean again, secession could not be stopped. South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, and by February of the following year, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina joined them a few months later, forming the Confederate States of America. They wrote a new constitution that limited federal power and established that slavery could never be abolished. Soon after, Alexander Stephens, the first and only vice president of the Confederacy, gave his famous Cornerstone speech. In this speech, he argued that slavery was necessary and that the black race was inferior. This marked the start of the American Civil War.

To Unit 5

5.4, 5.5, 5.6, & 5.7: Issues Over Slavery