Long before the April night when a Confederate artillerist in Charleston, South Carolina, jerked the lanyard of a heavy cannon and fired the opening shot of the Civil War, the seeds of the dispute that would send millions of Americans into battle against each other in what still stands as the republic’s deadliest war had already taken deep root in American culture. That dispute was about slavery. Slavery’s beginnings in America lay far back in colonial times long before the four score and some odd years the United States had been in existence on that April night in 1861 when the shooting finally started in earnest.
When the first Englishmen had come to the New World almost three centuries before, they had prided themselves that their laws, unlike those of already established colonial power Spain, knew no such thing as a slave. Over the next century, however, that was to change. Englishmen in their country’s first permanent settlement in what was to become the United States, Jamestown, found their economic fortune in the cultivation of the tobacco plant. Tobacco was a labor-intensive crop. With land abundant in colonial Virginia, the only practical limit on how much a man could grow and, therefore, how much money he could earn, was how much labor he could command. Hired labor was out of the question. Any potential hired man could readily obtain his own land and enjoy all the fruits of his own labor rather than only part of them as an employee. So the only way a large landowner could work his acres was with nonfree labor.
At first the solution Englishmen chose was that of indentured servitude. An indentured servant was a poor Englishman who could not afford passage to America but still wanted to take his shot at making his fortune in the New World. In order to do so, he would sign a contract, called an indenture, binding him to service for a certain specified period of years, usually seven, in exchange for the cost of his transportation to the colony. Indentured servants were the most common form of nonfree labor in Virginia during the colony’s first half century. They could be male or, relatively rarely, female; could be bought and sold; and were sometimes mistreated, and their terms of service could be legally extended for various infractions, such as, in the case of a female servant, giving birth to a child. However, the child in that case was free, not the property of the master, who, under English law, owned the indentured servant’s labor but not his or her person. As long as mortality remained extremely high in early colonial Virginia, reliance on indentured servants, rather than actual slaves, was not only familiar but also economically sensible since both the indentured servant and the more expensive lifetime slave were statistically likely to be dead before seven years were up.
The shift from indentured servitude to race-based slavery was gradual. Life spans slowly increased, making lifetime slaves a better investment. The Spanish in the Caribbean, Central America, and South America were already using slavery on a vast scale and had been doing so for over a century. A well-developed transatlantic slave trade, carried in Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships, served the constant demand of Latin American colonial economies for ever more bondsmen. It was easy enough for Englishmen in the North American colonies of Virginia and its junior partner on the Chesapeake Bay, Maryland, to begin importing slaves when the stream of indentured servants failed to meet demand or when a longer-term investment seemed appealing. It remains unclear what, if any, additional factors drove the shift toward slavery, and historians have long argued as to whether racism caused slavery or was caused by it. In any case, by the 1660s, the economies of both Virginia and Maryland had shifted overwhelmingly to the use of slaves rather than indentured servants, though a few of the latter continued to be present in the colonies for several decades more. By that time, the law codes of these two colonies fully recognized and protected the institution of slavery.
During that same decade, other Englishmen established the Carolinas as colonies just south of Virginia. South Carolina in particular quickly adopted a slave culture and economy, not, like those of its neighbors to the north, by developing it internally but rather by importing a complete and operating slave economy and culture from the British-owned sugarcane plantation island of Barbados, where indentured servitude had given way to slavery even more quickly than it had in the Chesapeake colonies amid the brutal, killing labor and conditions of sugar cultivation. Barbados planters seeking to expand or younger sons of such planters seeking establishments of their own migrated to the new colony of South Carolina and brought their slaves and the associated culture and laws with them. Though South Carolina planters came to grow rice and indigo rather than tobacco or sugar, their economy, like that of the Chesapeake colonies and Barbados, rested on the foundation of staple-crop agriculture, well suited for cultivation by large gangs of fairly unskilled and unmotivated workers. By about 1715 South Carolina had become the only one of the colonies in which slaves made up a majority of the population. North Carolina, though with a somewhat more diverse economy, followed the cultures of its neighbors to the north and south. Georgia’s founders, James Oglethorpe and his philanthropic fellow proprietors, never intended their experiment in enlightened reform to include slavery, but the colonists eventually managed to introduce the institution there as well.
While slavery thrived and became the mainstay of the economies of the southern colonies, the northern colonies developed along different lines. Slavery existed there as well but in far smaller numbers. Some of the colonies, such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, had originally been born out of religious motivations that were more or less hostile to slavery and at least initially hindered its growth. All the northern colonies developed economies that lent themselves less well to the use of slave labor than did the southern colonies’ virtually uniform dependence on staple-crop agriculture. Mixed small manufacturing, small farming, shipping, and fishing in New England; grain cultivation in Pennsylvania; and commerce in port cities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston all presented less temptation for the wholesale exploitation of slaves. Thus, conscience and economics combined to limit the total number of bondsmen in the northern colonies to a tiny fraction of those in the South.
The American Revolution turned the colonists’ attention to issues of liberty and the rights of man. If indeed “all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” then it would be impossible to justify slavery, as the Revolutionaries, including the slaveholders among them, were painfully aware. Patrick Henry, who rhetorically asked if even life itself was worth the price of “chains and slavery” and answered his own question in the negative with his famous demand for liberty or death, was nevertheless a slaveholder. “Would any one believe that I am Master of Slaves of my own purchase!” he asked in another, less well known, rhetorical question. Yet though he called slavery “this Abominable Practice,” he could only express the hope that some time, somehow, the opportunity would arrive to abolish it. He was not alone in his conflicted state of mind. The prevailing view in the South was that immediate emancipation would turn loose on society an unrestrained racial underclass and spark the onset of a race war. “We have the wolf by the ears,” Henry’s fellow Virginia slaveholder Thomas Jefferson would later remark, “and feel the danger of either holding or letting him loose.”1
In the northern states during the Revolutionary era, the situation was different. Minute slave populations there aroused little worry about the dangers of emancipation. Many northern slaveholders voluntarily freed their slaves, as did some in Virginia, and each of the northern legislatures adopted laws either abolishing or gradually phasing out slavery within the boundaries of its own state. The southern legislatures did not. In short, the Revolutionary era turned American minds to liberty and thereby etched the line between liberty and slavery deeper into the landscape of American culture. On the map that line now became the border where the southernmost original free state, Pennsylvania, met the northernmost original slave state, Maryland, a boundary that took its name from colonial surveyors Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Thus, the intellectual dichotomy over slavery birthed a tangible geographical division. The Mason-Dixon Line would be the demarcation between bondage and freedom.
The ambivalence of the founding generation toward the institution of slavery left its mark on the new republic’s early policies. When in 1787 Jefferson wrote and Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, that act banned slavery in all of what was to become the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Ohio River thus became the boundary between slave and free states west of the Appalachians as the Mason-Dixon Line was east of them.
That same year the Philadelphia Convention wrote the new Constitution. The framers carefully avoided using the painful word “slave” in the document, referring instead to “persons bound to servitude.” In concessions to the concerns of the slave states, especially South Carolina, the Constitution provided that when such persons escaped from a slave state to a free state, they were to be returned. Congress would have no power to abolish the slave trade until 1808. When slave state delegates proposed that slaves be counted as part of population for the apportionment of representatives in Congress but not for the purposes of direct taxation, northern members of the convention balked. The two sides finally settled on a compromise stipulating that for both purposes each slave should count as three-fifths of a free inhabitant. This was a clear gain for the South since Congress never levied a direct tax, and the three-fifths clause therefore served only to secure the overrepresentation of southern whites in Congress and the Electoral College. Although the founders recognized the contradiction between republican liberty and slavery, they incorrectly concluded that slavery would eventually wither and die. Unfortunately, slavery was not capable of self-correction. This clouded their policymaking and thrust the slave issue onto future generations.
What from a modern perspective may seem the founders’ inexplicable complacence about slavery’s existence as a blatant contradiction of their ideals within their system of ordered liberty rested partially on the belief that the institution was in fact in the process of dying out. That belief in turn stemmed in part from wishful thinking and in part from certain economic and agricultural developments of the mid-eighteenth century. As soil in Virginia lost its fertility for further profitable cultivation of tobacco, farmers and planters had shifted increasingly to wheat, a much less labor-intensive crop. A plantation that converted from tobacco to wheat would at once find itself with a large surplus of labor, and slaveholders could readily imagine strong economic motivations for eventual manumission (voluntary freeing) of their slaves, provided that the problem of free blacks within white society could be solved.
All of this changed when in 1793 Connecticut Yankee Eli Whitney, while serving as a tutor on a Georgia plantation, invented a practical cotton gin—a device that would separate the seeds of the cotton plant from its white fibers. The cotton gin revolutionized the southern economy, making possible the profitable cultivation of cotton throughout the Deep South. The favorable treaties made with southern Indian tribes at the close of the War of 1812 opened vast expanses of land that was ideal for cotton farming. Textile mills in Britain, built to process wool, provided a ready market for American cotton, which soon became one of the country’s most valuable exports. Cotton was a labor-intensive crop, requiring many pickers during the harvest season. The plantations and farms of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana became a market for the surplus slaves of Virginia and other Upper South states. The spread of cotton as a cash crop during the generation after the writing of the Constitution meant that whereas economic forces had previously pressured slaveholders to free their bondsmen, those same forces now encouraged the profit-minded planter to hang on to his slaves or sell them to the Deep South for substantial sums. Thus, cotton engrained slavery even more deeply into southern culture and economics.
The new economic conditions slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, fostered new attitudes in the South regarding slavery. With cordial southern support, Congress banned the slave trade in 1808 as soon as constitutionally permitted, but the support of southerners came in part from representatives and senators from the Upper South, a region whose chief crop for export to the other states, surplus slaves, would become much more valuable if the flow of imported slaves were cut off. Indeed, slave prices rose steadily decade after decade. Slaves became one of the favorite and most lucrative investments in the South.
Then in 1819 the Missouri Territory petitioned for admission to the Union as a slave state. This alarmed some northern congressmen. Louisiana, the first state to be formed from the territory acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, had entered the Union as a slave state in 1812, but geography had assuaged northern concerns about the spread of slavery. Louisiana lay farther south than any other American state at that time, and slavery had existed there under French and Spanish rule before America acquired the territory. It appeared only natural that the Pelican State would bring slavery along with statehood. Missouri was different. It lay directly west of Illinois, where Jefferson’s own Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery. If admitted, it would become the northernmost slave state. Worse, the land that made up the would-be state of Missouri had known no slavery under French or Spanish rule. The implication of admitting Missouri as a slave state was that slavery was the natural and normal arrangement in all future American territories— slavery followed the flag.
This was exactly the reverse of how some northern congressmen wished to view their flag and country, and so one of them, New York Representative James Tallmadge Jr., introduced an amendment to the Missouri statehood act, stipulating that slavery was to be phased out in the state over the next generation. Southern representatives and senators reacted with startling ferocity. Despite their vociferous opposition, the amendment passed in the House, where northern representatives outnumbered southern, but the Senate, where slave and free states were evenly balanced, rejected it.
Into this heated impasse stepped Henry Clay, with the first of several compromises he would sponsor during his long congressional career. Under the terms of his proposal, which Congress finally adopted after lengthy wrangling, Missouri would enter the Union as a slave state, and Maine, hitherto part of Massachusetts, would enter as a free state, thus preserving the balance in the Senate. The line that formed most of the southern boundary of Missouri, latitude thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes, would be extended all the way across the remainder of the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. All lands south of the line would be reserved for future slave states, while all lands north of it, with the exception of Missouri itself, would be forever closed to slavery. At the time, southerners thought it no bad bargain, for although the lands north of thirty-six thirty were far more extensive than those south of it, the prevailing belief at the time was that persons of African descent—and therefore the institution of slavery—could not thrive in those northerly regions.
Southern reaction to Tallmadge’s relatively mild proposal provided a stark revelation of the change in attitudes over the preceding generation. Even Jefferson, who had once favored the limitation of slavery’s spread and written that limitation into the Northwest Ordinance, now saw in any attempt to place a boundary on slavery the potential doom of the Union. “This momentous question,” he wrote,
like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. It is hushed indeed for the moment, but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence. A geographical line, coinciding with a marked principle, moral and political, once conceived and held up to the angry passions of men, will never be obliterated; and every new irritation will mark it deeper and deeper.2
The Missouri Compromise quieted the clamor over slavery in the national political arena, and it soon came to be viewed with a feeling akin to reverence by the American people. Yet the fundamental contradiction that slavery posed in the midst of a society dedicated to freedom remained a continued source of periodic irritation, much as Jefferson had predicted.
Throughout the 1820s and 1830s those irritations remained small but occurred with disturbing regularity. In 1822 South Carolina slaveholders purported to have uncovered an elaborate conspiracy of slaves bent on revolt and subsequent mayhem. They blamed the ferment on the widely publicized Missouri Compromise debates, which, they said, had introduced evil ideas of freedom into the minds of their otherwise contented slaves. Some modern scholars suspect the slaveholders may have fabricated the entire story in order to justify a more strident defense of slavery.
An 1831 Virginia slave revolt was real enough. In August of that year a slave preacher and mystic named Nat Turner led fellow slaves in a bloody uprising, killing almost every white man, woman, and child who came across their path, fifty-five in all, before finally being suppressed by the aroused Virginia militia in less than forty-eight hours. Captured several weeks later, Turner and fifty-five of his fellow slaves were executed. Other blacks may have died at the hands of mobs during the reaction to the uprising. It was the bloodiest slave revolt in U.S. history.
Some southerners saw the outbreak as the result of more evil Yankee ideas, this time emanating from a group known as abolitionists who presented the country with a new kind of opposition to slavery. Prior to this time, moral witness against slavery in America had mostly been expressed in genteel manner by members of an organization called the American Colonization Society. The society advocated persuading America’s free blacks to migrate to Africa as a first step toward persuading planters that it would be safe to manumit their slaves since the freedmen would no doubt quickly follow the other members of their race to their ancestral continent. As a means of bringing about the end of slavery in the United States, the American Colonization Society had been notable chiefly for its complete ineffectiveness, which won it the good opinion even of some slaveholders, including Henry Clay. The abolitionists were something else entirely. They called for the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of all slaves. Most of them were evangelical Christians, and they made it plain that they considered the ownership of slaves to be a sin.
The abolitionists’ loudest and most strident spokesman was in some ways not representative of the movement. William Lloyd Garrison was unorthodox in his religious views and more radical even than most other abolitionists, but he became one of the most recognized public voices and faces of the movement thanks to the weekly abolitionist newspaper he founded in 1831 in Boston. Garrison’s rhetoric was inflammatory. “I am in earnest,” he wrote in his first issue, “I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.” He certainly was. Though the paper, named The Liberator, had fewer than four hundred subscribers that first year and its circulation grew only very slowly, Garrison’s shocking statements made him and his message well known throughout the country. The state of Georgia offered a five-thousand-dollar reward for his arrest, and death threats were numerous.
Much as abolitionists like Garrison might fill the hearts of southern whites with fear and loathing, they posed almost as little practical threat to slavery as did the prim and stuffy gentlemen of the American Colonization Society. The abolitionists were earnest enough, but their numbers were few. Nowhere in the country were they in the majority, and even in the Northeast they could easily become the objects of popular outrage and mob violence. Abolitionist preachers were sometimes arrested out of their pulpits by the local sheriff as disturbers of the peace. Garrison once narrowly escaped a lynch mob in Boston. Outside of the Northeast and some strongly antislavery parts of the upper Midwest, abolitionism was an extremely dangerous creed to embrace. When Presbyterian minister Elijah P. Lovejoy began publishing an abolition newspaper in Alton, Illinois, near St. Louis, a proslavery mob destroyed his printing press. Supporters helped him purchase a replacement press, and the mob destroyed it too. His third press met a similar fate, and when in November 1837 Lovejoy attempted to prevent the destruction of a fourth press, the mob killed him.
Southern whites and their northern sympathizers reacted aggressively toward abolitionism in legal ways as well. One southern countereffort took the form of South Carolina “nullifying” the federal tariff. In November 1832 a special South Carolina state convention declared the tariff unconstitutional and therefore null and void within the state. The tariff was a foolish economic policy, highly unpopular in the South. Getting free of it would have been a welcome development, but establishing a state’s right to nullify federal laws would have been a much larger accomplishment. Southern states could then have nullified any federal act they might feel impinged on the rights of slaveholders without the tiresome and, to southern minds, dangerous debates that had surrounded the Missouri Compromise. President Andrew Jackson handled the situation with both firmness and finesse, putting the South Carolinians in a position in which they would have to become the aggressors in order to stop collection of the tariff. Knowing that Jackson would throw the whole armed might of the Union against them if they attacked and disappointed that no other southern states had joined them in their stand, the South Carolinians sullenly backed down.
Slavery advocates invented additional means to preserve the peculiar institution. Later during the 1830s southern congressmen persuaded the U.S. Post Office to ban the transmission of abolitionist literature through the mail. Throughout the decade abolitionists had sent petitions to Congress requesting the banning of slavery within the District of Columbia or at least of the slave trade there. So in 1836 proslavery members of Congress led the way in imposing, with the help of sympathetic northerners, the so-called Gag Rule stipulating that Congress would not receive any petition against slavery and implying that the petitioners had committed an offense, at least against good manners, by sending it. Slavery supporters did not intend to let perceived abolitionist radicalism infect the U.S. government.
Party politics helped suppress abolitionist agitation. By the mid-1830s the United States had an established two-party system, pitting Democrats against Whigs. Democrats favored strict adherence to the Constitution and very limited government. Whigs played fast and loose with the Constitution and advocated government intervention in the economy in hopes of boosting prosperity, at least for some people. Both parties were alike, however, in appealing to a nationwide constituency, and therefore both were committed to avoiding any national debate over slavery. Party leaders cracked the whip vigorously to keep their members of Congress in line on such issues as the banning of abolitionist literature from the mail or the maintenance of the odious congressional Gag Rule. Within the South, both parties billed themselves as the surest defenders of slavery, while in the North the Whigs, always more loosely organized, sometimes presented themselves as principled foes of slavery, and the Democrats maintained that the issue was none of any northerner’s business. So effective was the two-party system in muzzling all criticism of slavery at the national level that frustrated abolitionists in 1840 formed a party of their own, but in that year’s presidential election the ideologically pure Liberty Party garnered fewer than ten thousand votes and had no impact on the outcome of the election.
The momentous events of the 1840s fundamentally changed this situation and made it drastically more difficult for politicians to dodge the issue of slavery. Early in the decade President John Tyler made the friendly annexation of the Republic of Texas a goal of his administration. Beginning in the 1820s, Americans had settled in Tejas, Mexico’s northeastern province, first with the blessing of the government in far-off Mexico City, then with its suspicion and finally outright hostility. Mexican misrule had led in late 1835 to an uprising in Texas. The rebellious Texians, as they called themselves, won their independence the following April at the Battle of San Jacinto and established the Republic of Texas. Mexico sullenly maintained its claim to the province it could no longer rule. Tyler’s move to annex Texas, though warmly welcomed by the Texians, drew the ire of abolitionists and of more moderate antislavery Americans since the Texians, being mostly migrants from the American South, had legalized slavery in their new republic. Adding Texas to the United States would increase the number of slave states in the Union.
The potent crosscurrent of slavery, which some Americans opposed regardless of the consequences for national growth, and of territorial expansion, which many Americans favored regardless of their views on slavery, now generated a political maelstrom that grew in size and strength. As the election of 1844 approached, the Democrats dumped their antiannexation frontrunner in favor of dark-horse annexationist James K. Polk of Tennessee on a platform calling for annexation not only of Texas but also of the entire Oregon Territory, hitherto jointly occupied by the United States and Great Britain. The Whigs nominated their own antiannexation candidate, Mr. Whig himself, Henry Clay, but as election day approached, Clay, fearing his anti-Texas stand might cost him at the polls, began hedging. His efforts to straddle the issue served only to prompt slavery opponents to bolt his party in favor of the Liberty Party. Enough of them did so in key states to throw the election to the expansionist Polk. Reading Polk’s victory as a mandate for annexation, the lame-duck Tyler renewed his efforts and finally added Texas to the Union in March 1845, days before Polk’s accession to office.
On entering the presidency, Polk found that Britain would negotiate its differences with the United States, but Mexico would not. The result was an amicable division of the Oregon Territory but war with Mexico when the latter declined to remove its troops from territory claimed by Texas. To the astonishment of European military pundits, including the renowned Duke of Wellington, who had defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, the United States triumphed over Mexico. General Winfield Scott, a veteran of the War of 1812, captured Mexico City with a small but excellent American army whose junior officers included Captain Robert E. Lee and lieutenants Ulysses S. Grant, Pierre G. T. Beauregard, Thomas J. Jackson, and George B. McClellan, among others who were destined to become far better known a decade and a half later.
The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the war, granted the United States, in exchange for a fifteen-million-dollar payment to Mexico, the vast tract of territory that now comprises all or most of New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California. The value of this tract, known as the Mexican Cession, increased drastically when a few months later news reached the East that American settlers in California had discovered gold there. The California Gold Rush was on, and multitudes flocked to the Pacific slope of the Sierra Nevada, not only from the rest of the United States but also from nearly every other country of the globe.
The acquisition of the Mexican Cession, combined with the rush of gold seekers to California, changed the political situation in America so that the two-party system was no longer able to keep the issue of slavery out of national politics. The new territories would have to be organized sooner or later, and when they were organized they would have to be either open to slavery or closed to it. Congress would have to decide. It had not faced that type of decision since the 1820 Missouri controversy, Jefferson’s “fire bell in the night.” Now Congress would once again face the slavery issue, which had in the meantime become far more polarized and intense than it had been a generation before. The rush of settlers to California meant that the problem of organizing at least that particular portion of the Mexican Cession could not be postponed. In a state of virtual anarchy, California must have a government at once. The question of slavery there could not be delayed.
Some Americans did not wish to delay settlement of the slavery issue. Among them were northern Democrats who felt betrayed that Polk had passed up the kind of massive territorial acquisition in the Northwest that he had achieved in the Southwest, notwithstanding the 1844 Democratic platform’s promises of both. This laid northern Democratic officeholders open to the northern Whigs’ charge that their party was merely a front for the slaveholders’ quest to increase the extent and power of the slave system. One such disgruntled northern Democrat was freshman Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania. In order to demonstrate that his and other northern Democrats’ support of the war and expansion did not equal support of slavery, Wilmot introduced a proviso, or limitation, to one of the first major spending authorizations for the war.
The Wilmot Proviso specified that slavery would not exist in any lands acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Southerners of both parties were enraged, partially because they did indeed hope the war’s southwestern expansion would increase the power of the slave system and partially because they were insulted by the very suggestion that slavery was a morally questionable practice that needed limitation. The proviso passed the House, where northern numbers predominated, but failed in the Senate, where the South still possessed an equal number of states and at least a few northern senators could always be trusted to vote for the interests of slavery, whether to guard the interests of northern cotton mills that used the fiber grown largely by slaves or simply to keep southerners happy. Subsequently, northern representatives reintroduced the Wilmot Proviso on one spending bill after another. The result each time was the same, and southern rage grew.
Meanwhile, the leadership of each of the two parties did its best to dodge the issue of slavery completely. In the presidential election of 1848, the Democrats nominated Lewis Cass of Michigan on a platform featuring Cass’s own concept of popular sovereignty—the idea of allowing the settlers in any given territory to decide the status of slavery there. The Whigs countered by nominating successful Mexican War general Zachary Taylor, who was also the absentee owner of a plantation and many slaves in Louisiana. In the best Whig fashion, the party declined to adopt any platform at all. Taylor’s slave ownership, as well as his prominent role in a war that had been popular in the South, won him added support in that region, but some strongly antislavery northern Whigs were displeased enough to bolt the party, joining with some equally discontent antislavery Democrats as well as the old Liberty Party supporters to form the new Free Soil Party, a politically somewhat disparate group united in opposition to any further spread of slavery in the territories. The Free Soilers polled considerably more votes than had the old Liberty Party but this time not in such a way as to influence the outcome of the election. Instead, the Whigs, with their war hero and lack of any specifically defined policies to defend, took the White House.
Slaveholders felt complacent, abolitionists disgusted; both were stunned when, only a few months into his tenure, Taylor proposed admitting California directly to statehood, without passing through territorial status. This was de facto popular sovereignty, the policy of his defeated opponent, since California residents would draw up a state constitution either with or without legalized slavery, and since few slaveholders had chosen to bring their valuable human investments into turbulent and nearly lawless California, the vote of its residents was almost certain to make it a free state. That, as angry white southerners pointed out, amounted to de facto imposition of the Wilmot Proviso. To the compounded horror of slavery supporters, this would bring the total of free states to sixteen as against fifteen slave states, giving the free states a majority in the Senate as they had had in the House for many years, with little prospect of ever adding enough additional slave states to catch up again.
At the urging of aged proslavery extremist John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, delegates from several southern states met in October 1849 in Mississippi to denounce the Wilmot Proviso. There the delegates also called for a convention to represent all of the slave states the following June. The implication was clear that if slavery were not permitted to expand into the Mexican Cession, the Nashville Convention would become an opportunity for the slave states to declare themselves out of the Union.
With this tacit threat hanging over the country, Henry Clay in January 1850 presented a comprehensive compromise plan to Congress. Clay’s eight-part package aimed at settling all of the issues then threatening to divide the country, each of which had at its core the dispute over slavery. The public closely followed the extensive debates in Congress over the course of the next eight months. Passions ran high. Proslavery extremists opposed the compromise because they considered it too hostile to slavery, especially because it admitted California as a free state. Abolitionists and more moderate opponents of slavery were equally opposed to the compromise but for opposite reasons, chiefly because it provided for the imposition, nationwide, of a draconian new Fugitive Slave Law, much tougher than the one previously on the books.
A coterie of senators and congressmen, led by Clay and Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster, championed the cause of compromise. Those two, as well as Calhoun, who opposed the compromise, had dominated congressional politics for nearly half a century and were now obviously near the end of their careers. Calhoun actually died of tuberculosis in March 1850. All three men were considered to have given their most dramatic and moving speeches during the compromise debates. Yet despite Webster’s legendary eloquence and Clay’s unparalleled legislative skills, the compromise proposal stalled.
The Nashville Convention met in early June, but southern moderates prevailed and prevented any call for the slave states to leave the Union. The convention did, however, call for the extension of the Missouri Compromise boundary between slavery and freedom in the Louisiana Purchase, thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes latitude, all the way through the Mexican Cession to the Pacific, including the southern half of California. Such a step would provide land for several more slave states. The implication was that if the demand was not met, secession-minded southerners could schedule another convention.
The outlook for compromise began to change in midsummer. Anticom-promise President Zachary Taylor took ill on the Fourth of July and died five days later. Vice President Millard Fillmore, a proponent of compromise, succeeded to the office. The influence of the presidency was now pulling the other way. Clay had left Washington to escape the sweltering summer heat, but thirty-six-year-old Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois took up the compromise and began again the effort to put it through Congress. At five feet two inches tall, Douglas was four or five inches shorter than the average man and decidedly pudgy, but his reputation for legislative prowess, first in his adopted state of Illinois (he was a Vermont native) and then in the national capital, was already winning him the nickname “Little Giant.”
Douglas skillfully divided the compromise’s eight points into several separate packages. Then he used shifting coalitions to hustle them through Congress. Many—though by no means all—northern members resolutely opposed the Fugitive Slave Act whenever it came up, and nearly every southern member bitterly opposed acceptance of California as a free state each time that proposal reached the floor, but Douglas threaded his way through the legislative opposition, adding the votes of his relatively small band of dedicated compromisers to the votes in favor of each point of the compromise until all had passed and President Fillmore had signed each of them into law between September 9 and September 20, 1850, leaving large majorities in both houses of Congress in stunned dismay at the passage of a compromise they had bitterly opposed.
With that, the crisis was past, for the moment, and the problem of slavery contention in Washington seemed to have been permanently solved. The American public breathed a collective sigh of relief that secession and possible civil war had been averted. Yet the Compromise of 1850 was more illusion than reality. The majority of the members of Congress had opposed it, though for quite opposite reasons. Neither side in the dispute had been ready to accept any portion of the other side’s demands. The compromise had simply been forced on an unwilling Congress by a small segment of compromisers using skillful legislative maneuvering.
For once, the politicians, who interacted regularly with persons from the other section of the country, may have understood the problem better than their constituents, few of whom were acquainted with persons outside their section. Few white southerners could bring themselves to believe that “Yankees” really cared so much for the slaves. They must be after some mere political and mercantile advantage and would back down when they saw there was no profit to be made from their hypocritical cant about freedom. Most northerners could not imagine that white southerners were so committed not only to the survival but even to the extension of slavery that they would destroy the country and risk war in order to secure it. As was to be the case steadily until almost 1865, each side underestimated the other’s earnestness and determination. For now, large numbers on each side of the sectional divide imagined that the other side had backed down, at least to some degree, and they considered the compromise a godsend.
The Compromise of 1850 had not removed the underlying fundamental difference of values regarding slavery, and over the next several years, while sectional peace reigned in Washington, slavery conflict flared up in various places around the country. The largest cause of that strife was the new Fugitive Slave Act that had been part of the Compromise of 1850. The act was so draconian that it made it relatively easy for any white southerner to come north and kidnap any black person, whether a former slave of his or a free-born citizen of a northern state, and carry him or her off into slavery. Further, it mandated, under threat of severe criminal penalty in case of refusal, the use of northern state and local facilities, such as jails, and the active cooperation of northern state officials, sheriffs, and even common citizens. The latter might be drafted into a posse to hunt down alleged runaways. Thus, northerners, some of whom were opposed to slavery, were compelled not only to acquiesce but actively to participate in the enforcement of a law they held to be positively immoral. No amount of abolitionist speeches, sermons, or pamphlets could have created as many converts to abolitionism as did the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Fugitive Slave Act was a slap in the face of state rights. Nothing else the federal government had ever done or proposed doing throughout all of the nation’s history up to that time had so thoroughly trampled on the rights and sovereignty of the individual states. This was especially ironic in view of the fact that less than twenty years later some white southerners would already be claiming that their cause had been that of state rights. The history of the 1850s does not bear that out. Southern political leaders during that decade, as during the preceding decades, championed either the cause of state rights or that of federal authority according to whichever seemed most likely to protect the institution of slavery. Since southerners had generally controlled the federal government during that era, they had more often than not been the active enemies of state rights.
The Fugitive Slave Act soon sparked resistance. Some abolitionists already maintained a network of secret routes and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad, aimed at aiding runaway slaves in making their way through the northern states to ultimate freedom in Canada. Perhaps one hundred thousand slaves had already taken the route to freedom, most of them to Canada, and the Underground Railroad came to carry its peak traffic in the 1850s, as the Fugitive Slave Act drove more northerners to take the step of outright civil disobedience by aiding the slaves in their escape.
Animosity toward the Fugitive Slave Act and its high-handed enforcement in the North led in 1851 to violence in the town of Christiana, Pennsylvania. On September 11 of that year, a group of escaped slaves shot and killed a slaveholder who was leading a posse with the intent of apprehending one of them. A celebrated trial followed in which Pennsylvania authorities, compelled by law to cooperate in a process they hated, allowed two of the accused to escape and otherwise did their best to assure a just, if not a legal, outcome. Southerners took notice and angrily determined to see the Fugitive Slave Act enforced in the North.
They got their chance for a high-profile case two years later. In 1853 Virginia slave Anthony Burns escaped and managed to board a ship at Richmond and sail to Boston. His master got wind of his whereabouts and invoked the Fugitive Slave Act to secure his return. Boston contained more abolitionists than any other major city in America, though even there they were a minority. Some of them determined to free Burns and launched a mob assault on the jail where he was being held, killing a deputy U.S. marshal but failing in their purpose. President Franklin Pierce, who had been elected in 1852 as a “northern man of southern principles,” determined to make an example of this case and teach northerners a lesson about the supremacy of law and the return of fugitive slaves. Pierce sent in large numbers of federal troops to line the streets leading down to the docks. More soldiers formed a moving square around Burns as they marched him through Boston in chains and put him aboard a ship bound for Virginia. Bostonians watched in impotent rage, and thousands who had previously been apathetic turned overnight into what one of them called “stark, raving abolitionists.” The return of Burns had cost the federal government forty thousand dollars, or perhaps fifty times the price he would have brought at the slave market.
Meanwhile a growing war of words was raging over the subject of slavery. In June 1851 the magazine National Era began running a serialized fictional story by a Lane Seminary professor’s wife named Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had been inspired to write by her outrage at the Fugitive Slave Act. The story she wrote continued in installments through forty weeks and gained a large following. Published the next year as a book titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it became a runaway best-seller. Based on careful research, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was meant to show the evil not of southern whites but of the system of slavery. Some of its slaveholding characters were kindly, and its chief villain was Connecticut-born Simon Legree, who had moved to Louisiana and bought a plantation. Such refinements were lost on proslavery readers, however, who reacted with howls of rage and a flurry of books of their own purporting to show that slavery was a benevolent institution and that slaves were far better off than white northern factory workers. It remained unclear why no one sought the allegedly privileged status of slave. On the other hand, so many slaves were willing to attempt escape that southerners had felt the need of a ferocious new Fugitive Slave Act.
Despite the rival publications and the controversies stemming from the Fugitive Slave Act, the country could at least take comfort in the fact that slavery had not been an issue of dispute in Washington since the passage of the Compromise of 1850. That changed abruptly in 1854, and ironically the man who sparked the change was the chief architect of the final passage of the Compromise of 1850 and perhaps the politician who had the most to lose from a revival of the national political controversy over slavery. Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas had not intended to reignite the slavery debate in Washington in 1854. He had wanted to get a transcontinental railroad built across the plains and mountains to connect California with the rest of the country.
In the strange logic of politics, railroad building connected directly to slavery. Douglas shared the mistaken but widespread belief that building such a large railroad required federal subsidies. That in itself made the railroad’s construction a political prize to be fought over by the various sections of the country, each wanting the route to originate in its region. During the 1850s the only sort of federal subsidy that was considered feasible was some sort of land grant, along the right-of-way. The government could not grant land until it was properly surveyed, and the land could not be properly surveyed until it was within an organized territory. Thus, in order to build a transcontinental railroad where he wanted it, stretching westward from Iowa, Douglas had to organize a territorial government in the remaining unorganized lands of the Louisiana Purchase, lands that had been forever closed to slavery by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Southern congressmen and senators would therefore be hostile to Douglas’s bill for two reasons. First, they would wish to see the transcontinental railroad built on a southern route rather than across the central plains. Second, and more significant, organizing those lands into territories would be the first step toward turning them into states that, under the terms of the Missouri Compromise, must be free states.
To line up the southern votes he needed in order to get his bill through Congress, Douglas had to include language repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the new territories to slavery under popular sovereignty. His Kansas-Nebraska Act set up a large Nebraska Territory on the northern plains and a smaller Kansas Territory, directly west of slaveholding Missouri. The status of slavery in these territories was now to be determined by popular sovereignty, the vote of their inhabitants at some unspecified time in the future. The separation of the smaller Kansas Territory directly west of Missouri was clearly meant to invite proslavery settlers to claim the territory as a future slave state.
Douglas grimly predicted that the bill would create a political storm in the North but introduced it anyway. He was right about the storm. Indeed, he had no idea. The outrage in the North gave birth to the Republican Party. The country was ripe for a new party. The Whig Party, always a loose coalition of interest groups, had finally all but disintegrated in the first few years of the decade, largely as a result of the tensions placed on political unity by southern Whigs claiming to be the staunchest defenders of slavery while northern Whigs presented themselves to voters as the principled opponents of the South’s “Peculiar Institution.” With the Whig Party’s demise, almost half the American electorate was in search of a new political home.
The new Republican Party also incorporated diverse political elements. That portion of northern Whig voters who did indeed oppose slavery flocked to the new party, as did free-soil, or “Anti-Nebraska,” Democrats, as well as members of the old Free Soil Party. They were a disparate lot. Some favored high tariffs, others low. Some backed a national bank, others hard money. Some were abolitionists who believed in racial equality, others were racists who wanted to limit the spread of slavery only so that the territories would be exclusively a white man’s country. Yet there was an adhesive that bound the seemingly conflicting elements of the party: they all came together on a platform that called for no further spread of slavery. They could not prevent the passage of Douglas’s bill, but they now provided a major free-soil party that was strong enough to carry the North in elections and might, in a few years, be able to put together enough northern electoral votes to choose a president.
Implementation of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act proved even more problematic than its passage. Proslavery Missourians determined to see Kansas become another slave state by fair means or foul. Thousands of them, heavily armed and threatening, flocked across the Kansas line on the territory’s first election day, casting fraudulent ballots and intimidating antislavery and free-soil voters with threats of beatings, whippings, or worse. So effective were these Missouri “Border Ruffians” that the proslavery side won in a landslide that numbered several times more votes than there were eligible voters in the territory. The Pierce administration nevertheless certified the obviously fraudulent results and officially recognized the new proslavery government of Kansas, with its capital at Lecompton. Free-state settlers, along with the large majority of new Kansans who cared nothing for slavery one way or the other but disliked election fraud, held an unauthorized revote and elected a rival, antislavery government with a large majority of the territory’s legal voters. Pierce denounced the free-state government as illegitimate and threatened its adherents with dire punishment. It appeared as though slavery would triumph in Kansas.
In May 1856 proslavery militia destroyed the free-state Kansas capital at Lawrence. Several days later, a small band of antislavery militia, led by hardcore abolitionist John Brown, retaliated with a stealthy nocturnal raid on the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, where they killed several men in cold blood who had previously been threatening death to free-staters (i.e., settlers like Brown and his large family who favored turning the Kansas Territory into a free state). The details of the killings were disputed, but Americans were shocked by the news. Slavery advocates had previously murdered several abolitionists, both in Kansas and elsewhere in the country, but they were outraged that an abolitionist had finally reciprocated.
Almost simultaneously in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas,” tacitly likening the attempt to make Kansas a slave state to the crime of rape. Sumner named names, especially that of aged, proslavery South Carolina Senator Pierce Butler, who was absent that day because of illness. Two days later Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brookes of South Carolina, entered the Senate chamber and attacked Sumner with a loaded cane, leaving the Massachusetts senator lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Sumner barely survived and was unable to return to his Senate seat for several years, during which time his constituents reelected him, leaving his empty chair in the Senate as a silent witness against the brutality of the slave power.
Meanwhile the election campaign of 1856 was in full swing. The Democrats passed over their most prominent figure, Douglas, because of his notoriety in both sections of the country on the issue of slavery. Instead, they chose aged political cipher James Buchanan, a man whose nickname, “Old Public Functionary,” neatly summarized his career. His chief qualification for office, aside from the fact that having been out of the country the past four years as an ambassador in Europe he had had little chance to make controversial statements on slavery, was that he was, like Pierce, another “northern man of southern principles.” The Republicans chose Mexican War veteran John C. Freémont, political heir of the powerful Missouri Benton family. His qualifications to govern, in terms either of experience or of temperament, were highly questionable, but he was famous and had announced a free-soil position.
Some southern political leaders threatened to have their states secede from the Union on the election of Freémont or any “black Republican,” as they contemptuously called all members of the party. Their threats were not put to the test that year, as Buchanan edged out Freémont, but Republicans noted with hope and their opponents with apprehension that if Freémont could have carried Pennsylvania—a probable Republican state had not its native son been the Democratic candidate—and either Illinois or Indiana— both thoroughly winnable states for the Republicans—Freémont would have won the election after all. The outcome might be different in another four years.
Meanwhile, back in Kansas, violence escalated between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, with the Missouri Border Ruffians mixing in. Skirmishes took place between rival militias as the press began to refer to the territory as “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown won recognition among antislavery circles for leading his free-state militia in several of the skirmishes. Slave-state guerrillas killed one of Brown’s sons. A number of additional deaths occurred before the federal government finally restored a reasonable degree of order in the territory.
James Buchanan came into office in March 1857 devoutly wishing that all abolitionists would go away and stop making trouble. He saw what he thought was a chance to make that happen in a case then before the Supreme Court. Slave Dred Scott had sued for his freedom on the basis that his owner, an army doctor, had brought him to the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Rabidly proslavery chief justice Roger B. Taney had lined up a majority of justices to support a narrow decision dismissing Scott’s case on the grounds that, as a black man, he was not a citizen and therefore had no standing to sue. Buchanan secretly convinced Taney to broaden his decision into the nation’s first great piece of judicial legislation, a sweeping decree meant to establish once and for all the legality of slavery throughout the territories. Taney obliged, striking down as unconstitutional all restrictions on slavery, including the venerable Missouri Compromise. No one, Taney announced, had the right to prevent slaveholders from taking their slaves into any of the territories of the United States. Contrary to Buchanan’s hopes, however, the court’s decree did not end all debate of the issue of slavery.
The unabated virulence of the issue of slavery became immediately obvious when Buchanan tried to secure admittance of Kansas as a slave state on the basis of a constitution drawn up by the blatantly fraudulent proslavery territorial government headquartered in Lecompton. Douglas, though he cared nothing about slavery, denounced this action as a travesty on popular sovereignty and majority rule. A bitter division sprang up within the Democratic Party between the followers of Douglas and those of Buchanan.
Increasingly it seemed that almost no action in national politics could escape the slavery controversy. The House of Representatives went through a long deadlock unable to elect a speaker as the result of a book written by an obscure North Carolinian. Hinton Rowan Helper was no friend of African Americans, but he was a foe of slavery because he saw how it degraded non-slaveholding southern whites. In his 1857 book The Impending Crisis at the South, Helper attacked the system of slavery and exhorted his fellow non-slaveholding southern whites to vote it out of existence. Slaveholding southerners were furious—and seriously frightened. Nonslaveholders were the majority in the South, and if they ever gave up their commitment to maintaining slavery as the best way of maintaining white supremacy, the institution would be in serious trouble. Slaveholders’ rage multiplied when they learned that the Republican Party, eager to win a hearing among the common folk of the South, had printed and distributed a condensed version of Helper’s book and that a number of Republican politicians had signed a statement endorsing it. Among them was Ohio Republican John Sherman, the party’s candidate for Speaker of the House. Proslavery House members kept that body in turmoil for months and finally succeeded in blocking Sherman’s election. The House chose a compromise candidate instead.
In 1858, as for the past half dozen years since the deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas was the most prominent political figure in the United States. In political terms, “the Little Giant” towered over even the president of the United States, with whom he was now in the bitterest of political feuds because of his opposition to Buchanan’s cherished Lecompton constitution in Kansas. Douglas was up for reelection to the U.S. Senate that year, and Republican newspapers on the East Coast, notably Horace Greeley’s influential New York Tribune, began to call for the Illinois Republicans to give Douglas their nomination. Prairie State Republicans were appalled and none more so than Abraham Lincoln. A successful Springfield lawyer, Lincoln had come out of political retirement in 1854. No longer simply a Whig Party hack intent on bringing home the bacon for his district, Lincoln, though still ambitious, now had a cause to which to devote his political efforts, and that cause was fighting slavery. In eloquent speeches he made clear that Douglas’s policy of not caring whether the people voted slavery up or voted it down was not good enough for the Republican Party and not good enough for the United States.
Lincoln won the Illinois Republican nomination for the Senate. His acceptance speech, given in Springfield on June 16, 1858, set the tone for the campaign. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” Lincoln said, quoting the twelfth chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew:
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. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.3
Lincoln’s contest with Douglas was a David-and-Goliath battle that pitted the five-foot-four-inch Little Giant against the gangly six-foot-four-inch but politically relatively unknown Lincoln. Reluctantly Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates, to be held in venues throughout the state. The debates brought out more clearly than ever the issues that divided the country. Douglas race-baited Lincoln relentlessly, accusing him, in the coarsest of terms, of a belief in racial equality that would have been very unpopular in much of that state. He put Lincoln so badly on the defensive in one down-state venue that the lanky Republican actually did deny a belief in the social equality of the races but came back to assert that an African American had as much right to freedom as any man present, including himself or Douglas. Lincoln took the offensive reminding voters again and again that Douglas’s belief in democracy was not a sufficient moral absolute and that the same moral law that gave any men the right to govern themselves also gave black men and women the right to own themselves.
Despite a strong performance in the debates, Lincoln lost the election, largely because the state of Illinois had not been redistricted lately, leading to the underrepresentation of Republicans in the legislature. In those days before the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures still elected U.S. senators, thus guarding the sovereignty of the states. Since Republicans were underrepresented in the Illinois legislature, they were unable to elect Lincoln despite the slightly higher number of Republican ballots that Illinois voters had cast. Still, the lanky Springfield Republican had made a name and a national reputation for himself.