1. Chapter Fifteen The Coming Crisis, the 1850s

2. Chapter Focus Questions 1.Why did the Whigs and Democrats fail to find a lasting political compromise on the issue of slavery? 2.What caused the end of the Second American Party System and the rise of the Republican Party? 3.Why did the secession of the southern states follow the Republican Party victory in the election of 1860?

3. Part Two: Illinois Communities Debate Slavery

4. Illinois voters gathered in 1858 to hear Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln debate slavery and the future of the Union. Douglas accused Lincoln of favoring social equality of whites and blacks. Lincoln denied this and accused Douglas of supporting the spread of slavery. Although Douglas won the senatorial election, the debates established both Lincoln and the Republican Party as contenders for national power. The debates demonstrated that the slavery question had divided American communities, but that Americans strongly valued their democratic institutions.

5. Section 15.1: America in 1850

6. A. Expansion and Growth 1. America had grown rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century. 2. The nation had experienced great growth of wealth, industry, and urbanization. Equally important, southern economic influence was waning.

7. MAP 15.1 U.S. Population and Settlement, 1850 By 1850, the United States was a continental nation. Its people, whom Thomas Jefferson had once thought would not reach the Mississippi River for forty generations, had not only passed the river, but leapfrogged to the west coast. In comparison to the America of 1800 (see Map 9.1 on p. 238), the growth was astounding.

8. B. Politics, Culture, and National Identity 1.Pride in democracy was one unifying theme in a growing sense of national identity and new middle-class values, institutions, and culture that supported it. 2.An American Renaissance produced writers who focused on social criticism, including: a.Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson who experimented with poetic form b.Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville who wrote about the darker side of human nature c.Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin condemn slavery