Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861. The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building.

Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861

The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi insisted that the liberty cap in the first design, a symbol of the emancipated slave in ancient Rome, be replaced. http://www.aoc.gov/blog/liberty-cap-art-us-capitol http://www.aoc.gov/blog/liberty-cap-art-us-capitol

Fruits of Manifest Destiny Continental Expansion Territorial Expansion resulted in the Expansion of Slavery; which raised the question of whether new lands should be free or slave. 1840’s – Nearly all land east of the Mississippi was in white hands Indian Removal Act *1830) – forced American Indians west http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Indian.html http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Indian.html The United States and Great Britain jointly administered Oregon and Utah was part of Mexico. National boundaries mattered little to Americans who settled these regions. 1840s- Americans settled the West due to: –1837 Depression - economic crisis pushed many settlers west –Manifest Destiny - The idea that Americans had a divine mission to settle the continent, known by the end of the 1840s as “manifest destiny,” intensified in these years. America’s acquisition of part of Mexico directly raised the issue of slavery. –When Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821, it was almost as large as the United States in territory and population. –Mexico’s northern provinces of California, New Mexico, and Texas were remote, sparsely populated, and bordered by Indian country –By the 1840s, California was linked to the United States by American ships that traded in the region.

Fruits of Manifest Destiny The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California 1821 Mexico became Independent from Spain Mexico’s Northern Provinces: California, Texas, New Mexico Santa Fe Trail: link Independence, MO with New Mexico created a commercial roadway –Santa Fe Trail (detailed) http://www.santafetrail.org/the-trail/history/history-of-the-sft/http://www.santafetrail.org/the-trail/history/history-of-the-sft/ –Santa Fe Trail (brief) http://www.nps.gov/safe/historyculture/index.htmhttp://www.nps.gov/safe/historyculture/index.htm California Californio background (detailed) http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/themed_collections/subtopic0a.html http://www.calisphere.universityofcalifornia.edu/themed_collections/subtopic0a.html American Indians dominate the population 1834, Mexico dissolved the missionaries & emancipated Indian slaves Californios – Mexican cattle ranchers who get land from the dissolved missions, freed Indians required to work here California's social hierarchy: Californios - new class of Mexican cattle ranchers, acquire land in California gente de razon (people capable of reason) Indios - Indians emancipated from friars end up working for Californios gente sin razon (people without reason)

Fruits of Manifest Destiny The Texas Revolt Americans move to Texas: 1820, Moses Austin (CT born farmer) received land grant for American colonization, but died so Stephen Austin assumed land - sold smaller plots to Americans (including Slaveholders) Mexico wants to stop Americans from colonizing Texas: 1830 - population of Americans (35,000) exceeds local Tejanos (7,000) --> Conflict: - MX government concerned about American dominance, annulled land contracts and ended further immigration to TX - Mexico abolished slavery, yet Americans bringing in slaves Battles: 1835 Siege of San Antonio - Texans won General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (Mexico's ruler) sent army to control Texans and Texans call for Independence from Mexico March 6, 1836 Santa Anna's army stormed Alamo (Catholic Mission in San Antonio) The Alamo - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/alamo/peopleevents/index.html http://www.history.com/topics/alamo http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/alamo/peopleevents/index.htmlhttp://www.history.com/topics/alamo "Remember the Alamo" - this Texan rally cry reflected the heroics of the rebels who held the Alamo for 13 days against a much bigger force, Texans lost Goliad - Texans lost Texas Independence: 1836 - Battle of San Jacinto won Texas Independence from Mexico - Texan General Sam Houston surprise attacked General Santa Anna - Santa Anna signs papers freeing Texas Republic of Texas: - Sam Houston is the President - Andrew Jackson denies statehood into Union due to slavery issue

Fruits of Manifest Destiny The Election of 1844 President John Tyler revived the annexation of Texas as a means of saving his failed administration and winning southern support for his renomination in 1844. When a letter from John C. Calhoun, then Tyler’s secretary of state, linked annexation to the strengthening of slavery, Henry Clay and Martin Van Buren, prospective presidential candidates for the Whig and Democratic parties, met and agreed to reject annexation, fearing it might spark war with Mexico. They were trying to keep slavery out of national politics. Clay received the Whig nomination, but at the Democratic convention southerners bent on annexation dumped Van Buren for James K. Polk, a former Tennessee governor and ardent annexationist. Polk was a slaveholder. T he Democrats’ platform called for the “reannexation” of Texas, which wrongly implied that Texas had been part of the Louisiana Purchase, and the reoccupation of Oregon. Polk narrowly defeated Clay in the election. If Liberty Party candidate James G. Birney had not received 16,000 votes in New York, Clay would have been elected. In March 1845, right after Polk’s inauguration, Congress annexed Texas.

Fruits of Manifest Destiny Polk had four goals: –reduce the tariff –reestablish the Independent Treasury –settle the Oregon dispute –bring California into the United States Congress enacted the first two goals The third was secured through an agreement with Britain dividing up Oregon. Polk offered to buy California from Mexico, but Mexico refused to negotiate. By early 1846, Polk planned for war. In April, U.S. soldiers sent into the disputed area between Texas and Mexico inevitably came to blows with Mexican troops. Polk claimed that Mexicans had shed blood on American soil, and he called for a declaration of war.

Fruits of Manifest Destiny The Mexican War Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/mexicanwar/http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/mexicanwar/ –the first American war fought largely on foreign soil, –most Americans supported the war. –But a large minority of northerners opposed it, believing that the Polk administration hoped to secure new lands for slavery and slave states. Henry David Thoreau jailed in Massachusetts for refusing to pay taxes wrote an essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” defending his actions later inspired Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Abraham Lincoln, a Whig representative from Illinois, also opposed the war. In June 1846, American rebels in California declared independence from Mexico, and American troops soon occupied that region. American forces secured New Mexico at the same time. Most of the fighting occurred in central Mexico. In early 1847, American forces marched to and captured the capital, Mexico City. I n February, 1848, the two governments agreed to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which confirmed the annexation of Texas and ceded California and present-day New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah to the United States. The United States paid Mexico $15 million for the land. This established the nation’s present territorial boundaries, except for the Gadsden Purchase, bought from Mexico in 1852, and Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/ghtreaty/http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/ghtreaty/

Fruits of Manifest Destiny America’s absorption of one-third of Mexico’s total territory split in two a region that had been united for centuries, and incorporated into the nation nearly 100,000 Spanish-speaking Mexicans and even more Indians. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed male citizens their liberty, property, and all the rights of American citizens, while regarding Indians only as “savage tribes.” Manifest destiny invigorated American notions of white racial supremacy. In the 1840s, territorial expansion began to be seen as showing the inherent superiority of the “Anglo-Saxon race,” a mythical identity defined by its opposites: blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and Catholics. Nineteenth- century concepts of race drew together ideas about color, culture, national origin, class, and religion. American writers linked American freedom and the allegedly natural freedom-loving characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. For many Americans, Texas’s annexation and the conquest of Mexico were victories of civilization, progress, and liberty over the Catholic Church’s tyranny and the natural incapacity of “mongrel races.” Some opposed expansion because they feared the nation could not assimilate the large non-white Catholic population, whom they believed unfit for citizenship in a republic. American racial relations harmed many in the new American territories. While Mexico had abolished slavery, Texas gave it constitutional protections and denied civil rights to Indians and blacks. In Texas, only whites could buy land, and free blacks were barred from entering the state. Residents of Indian and Mexican origin in New Mexico were held to be “too Mexican” to be allowed democratic self-government; the territory was not allowed to become a state until it had enough whites, in 1912.

Fruits of Manifest Destiny Gold-Rush California California had few non-Indians and Americans in the 1840s until 1848, when gold was discovered in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. A gold craze spread throughout the world, and tens of thousands of migrants swarmed to California by sea and land. By 1860, California’s non- Indian population had risen to 360,000. The gold-rush population was very diverse, with migrants coming from Mexico, South America, Europe, Australia, and Asia, including 25,000 Chinese who signed long-term labor contracts and were hired out to mining, railroad, and other employers. San Francisco became a boomtown and one of the world’s most racially and ethnically diverse cities. The transition from surface mining to underground mining required large capital investments and exacerbated conflicts between diverse California gold-hunting groups. Occasionally vigilantes seized San Francisco, established courts, and executed accused criminals. White miners organized extralegal groups that expelled “foreign miners,” such as Mexicans, Chileans Chinese, French, and American Indians. While California long symbolized opportunity, for many the state restricted freedoms. The state constitution limited rights to vote and testify in court to whites. The Indian population was devastated by the miners, ranchers, and vigilantes of the gold rush era, and the state government paid bounties to private militias to attack the natives. Although California was a free state, thousands of Indian children were bought and sold into slavery. The Other Gold Rush A simultaneous gold rush occurred in Australia in the 1850s, bringing many of the same dynamics, and Australian whites even modeled their racial policies on those of California.

Fruits of Manifest Destiny Opening Japan Through the Mexican War, the United States gained possession of San Diego and San Francisco harbors, excellent ports to facilitate trade with the Far East. In the 1850s, the United States initiated the opening of Japan, which for two centuries had closed itself to almost all foreign contact. In 1853 and 1854, American warships commanded by Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo harbor. Perry had been sent to negotiate a trade treaty, and he demanded that the Japanese deal with him. Alarmed by European intrusions into China and impressed by Perry’s armaments, they opened two ports to American shipping. American diplomats persuaded Japan to open more ports to U.S. ships and establish full diplomatic relations between the two nations. Thus, the United States acquired refueling stops on the way to China, seen as the most important trading partner in Asia. Japan soon launched a modernization process that made it Asia’s major military power.

A Dose of Arsenic The Wilmot Proviso The acquisition of the vast Mexico territory raised a fatal issue that would disrupt America’s political system and drive the nation to Civil War —whether slavery would expand into the West. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that if the United States took part of Mexico, “it will be as the man who swallows arsenic.... Mexico will poison us.” Events proved him right. Before 1846, the status of slavery throughout the United States had been settled by state law or the Missouri Compromise. But the conquest of Mexico reignited the question of slavery’s expansion. In 1846, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot introduced a bill prohibiting slavery from the territory acquired from Mexico. Party lines collapsed. Every northerner, Whig and Democrat, supported the Wilmot Proviso. Almost all southerners opposed it. The measure passed the House, which had a northern majority, but stalled in the Senate, which was evenly split between free and slave states. In 1848, opponents of slave expansion organized the Free Soil Party and nominated Martin Van Buren for president. Democrats that year nominated Lewis Cass, who suggested that settlers in new territories be allowed to vote on the slavery question (an idea later called “popular sovereignty”). Van Buren received 14 percent of the North’s total votes. Whig candidate and Mexican War hero Zachary Taylor won the presidential election. But the Free Soil Party made anti-slavery a political force to be reckoned with. Wilmot Proviso: (page 5) http://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/04_JacksonianAmerica/index.html

A Dose of Arsenic The Free Soil Appeal The Free Soil position was far more popular in the North than abolitionist demands for immediate emancipation and equal rights for blacks. While Congress had no constitutional power to abolish slavery within a state, precedents existed for keeping territories free of slavery, such as the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise. Many in the North long resented what they saw as southern domination of the federal government. Preventing the creation of new slave states appealed to those who wanted policies, such as the tariff and government aid to internal improvements, which most southern political leaders opposed. For many northerners, western territories promised economic advancement and prosperity. Economic crisis in the 1840s reinforced the old link between land ownership and economic freedom. Some in the labor movement saw access to western land as a means of fighting unemployment and low wages in the East. If slave plantations took up western lands, free northern migration would be blocked. “Free soil” had a double meaning. The Free Soil platform of 1848 called on the federal government to both bar slavery from western lands and offer free homesteads to settlers in the new territories. Unlike abolitionism, “free soil” did not challenge widespread northern racism. To many in the white south, barring slavery from the territories seemed a violation of the equal rights of southerners, some of whom had fought and died in the Mexican War. They complained that the federal government had no right to keep them from bringing one kind of property—their human property—into the territories. With older slave states suffering from soil exhaustion, southern leaders believed that slavery needed to expand to survive. They opposed the admission of new free states that would overturn the balance between sections in Congress and make free states a permanent majority.

A Dose of Arsenic Crisis and Compromise In world history, 1848 is remembered as the “springtime of nations,” a moment of democratic uprisings against Europe’s monarchies and demands by ethnic minorities for national independence. American principles of liberty and self-government seemed to triumph in Great Britain, France, Hungary, Italy, and Germany, where people rebelled against monarchy and clamored for national unification and republican rights and constitutions. But, in most places, these uprisings were defeated. Many Americans wondered if their republic would survive. The Great Debate Party leaders tried to resolve the sectional differences over slavery threatening to tear the nation apart. In 1850, California applied for statehood as a free state. Many southerners opposed it, fearing that its admission would upset the sectional balance in Congress. Henry Clay offered a plan with four provisions that came to be known as the Compromise of 1850: California would enter as a free state; the slave trade, but not slavery, would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; a new law would allow southerners to reclaim fugitive slaves; and slavery’s status in the rest of the territories taken from Mexico would be decided by local white inhabitants. Clay’s plan prompted one of the greatest debates in Congress’s history. While notable senators from both North and South denounced compromise, Milliard Fillmore, who became president when an ill President Taylor died, helped secure the Compromise of 1850 Compromise of 1850: (page 5) http://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/04_JacksonianAmerica/index.html

A Dose of Arsenic The Fugitive Slave Issue Though it seemed that national leaders had again succeeded in removing slavery from national politics, the new Fugitive Slave Act made further controversy inevitable. It allowed special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without jury trials or testimony from accused individuals. It prohibited local authorities from interfering with fugitive slaves’ capture and required individual citizens to assist in such capture when called on by federal agents. Thus southern leaders, usually committed to states’ rights and local autonomy, supported a law that brought federal agents into northern communities and allowed them to override local law enforcement and local judicial procedure. The fugitive slave issue affected all free states, not just states bordering the South. The issue drew into politics many who had been anti-slavery but now feared that the South was forcing them to act against their own consciences. In the 1850s, federal tribunals heard more than 300 cases and ordered the return of 157 fugitive slaves to the South. But the law exacerbated sectional enmity. In dramatic confrontations, fugitives, helped by abolitionists, violently resisted recapture, sometimes killing slaveowners and attacking federal authorities. Several thousand northern blacks, free and fugitive, fled to safety in Canada.

A Dose of Arsenic Douglas and Popular Sovereignty The Compromise of 1850 seemed to restore sectional peace and party unity. Democrat Franklin Pierce bested Whig Winfield Scott in the 1852 presidential race on a platform recognizing the Compromise as having settled the slavery question. But under Pierce the party system established in the era of Jackson collapsed. The Kansas-Nebraska Act In early 1854, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a bill to provide territorial governments for Kansas and Nebraska, part of the Louisiana Purchase. Douglas desired western economic development, and while he hoped a transcontinental railroad could be built through Kansas or Nebraska, he did not think this would happen unless formal governments existed in these territories. Southerners did not want these new territories to be free states, which might upset the sectional balance. Douglas tried to mollify them by proposing that slavery’s status would be settled by popular sovereignty—by local voters, not Congress. Yet, slavery was prohibited in the Kansas and Nebraska territories by the Missouri Compromise, which Douglas’s bill would repeal. Anti-slavery Democrats protested Douglas’s bill as a plot to convert free territory to slavery, and helped convince many in the North that southerners wanted to extend slavery throughout the entire West. Though Douglas secured the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the law shattered the Democratic Party. Many northern Democrats voted against the bill. In the bill’s aftermath, the Whig Party, unable to forge a response, dissolved. The South become almost entirely Democratic. Most northern Whigs, joined by many disaffected northern Democrats, joined a new organization dedicated to ending slavery’s expansion—the Republican Party. Kansas Nebraska Act – (page 9) http://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/05_CivilWar/index.html

The Rise of the Republican Party The Northern Economy Although slavery’s disruption of the political system was an immediate cause of the Republican Party’s creation, the party also reflected basic economic and social changes in American society, namely, the market revolution’s completion and the beginning of mass immigration from Europe. The American economy grew rapidly in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The expansion of a national railroad network did much to hasten economic growth. By 1860, railroads, and no longer water, carried most of the crops and goods in the nation. Rail helped integrate the old Northwest and the Northeast, laying the basis for political unity in the form of the Republican Party. By 1860, the North was a complex, integrated economy, with eastern industrialists marketing manufacturing goods to the West’s commercial farmers, while these farmers produced the food urban easterners consumed. The majority of the North’s population still lived in rural areas and small towns, in which the ideal of economic independence, of owning a farm or shop, was still possible. But the majority of northern workers no longer worked in agriculture. The industrial revolution had produced two great areas of industrial production, one on the Atlantic Coast from Boston to Baltimore, and one around the Great Lakes, from Chicago and Pittsburgh to Buffalo. New York became the nation’s preeminent financial, commercial, and manufacturing center. Although the southern economy grew and cotton’s expansion made great profits for the planters, the South did not develop a diverse and dynamic economy as did the North.

The Rise of the Republican Party The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothings Nativism found expression in national politics in the midst of the political system’s implosion over slavery in the mid-1850s. This was through the American Know-Nothing Party, a name deriving from its origins as a secret organization whose members, when asked about it existence, were supposed to reply, “I know nothing.” The Know-Nothings wanted to restrict political office to the native born and resist the Catholic Church’s influence in politics. In 1854 they gained many seats in Massachusetts state elections, electing the governor, all the state’s congressmen and most members of the state legislature. They also won mayoral races in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. In many places, nativist candidates were a major part of the “anti-Nebraska” coalition of voters opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the North, the Know-Nothings combined anti-Catholicism, anti-slavery, and a strong dose of temperance sentiment. Despite the strength of nativism in this period, relatively little was changed in public policy. All European immigrants benefited from their whiteness, compared to free blacks in the North, who faced worsening discrimination and job opportunities. White immigrants could in a few years become naturalized and voting citizens, while most American-born blacks could not.

The Rise of the Republican Party The Free Labor Ideology By 1856, the Republican Party, a coalition of anti-slavery Democrats, northern Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know-Nothings opposed to slavery’s expansion, was clearly the major alternative to the Democratic Party in the North. Republicans convinced most northerners that the Slave Power, as they called the South’s pro-slavery political leadership, was more dangerous to their liberties and hopes than Catholicism and immigrants. The Republican appeal rested on the idea of “free labor” which was at the core of a vision that celebrated the North as the basis of progress, opportunity, and freedom in America. The defining quality of the North, they argued, was the opportunity each laborer had to become a farmer or independent craftsman, thus gaining the economic independence essential to freedom. Slavery, by contrast, created a social order of degraded slaves, poor whites with no hope of social advance, and slaveholding aristocrats. They saw the struggle over the West as a struggle between two antagonistic labor systems, and believed that slavery, if dominating the West, would prevent northern free labor from emigrating and thus would diminish economic opportunity for northerners. They insisted slavery had to prohibited from the territories. They further argued that the federal government could end its complicity with slavery. But they were not abolitionists, since they only wanted to stop slavery’s expansion, not attack it where it already existed. Yet many party leaders viewed the nation’s split into incompatible free and slave societies as an “irrepressible conflict” that would have to be resolved.

The Rise of the Republican Party Bleeding Kansas and the Election of 1856 Dramatic events in 1855 and 1856 fueled the Republican Party’s growth. Although pro-slavery Missourians cast fraudulent ballots in Kansas elections in 1854 and 1855, President Pierce recognized the legitimacy of the resulting pro-slavery legislature and replaced the territorial governor, a northerner. Settlers from free states soon established their own rival government, and civil war erupted. Eventually, 200 people died in “Bleeding Kansas.” The conflict seemed to discredit Douglas’s policy of popular sovereignty on the slavery question. In 1856, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks beat anti-slavery senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts unconscious with a cane after Sumner denounced “The Crime against Kansas.” In the 1856 election, the Republican Party nominated John C. Fremont and wrote a platform that strongly opposed slavery’s further expansion. The Democrats chose James Buchanan, who had no association with any position on the slavery issue, and endorsed the principle of popular sovereignty. Fremont won more votes than Buchanan in the North, but Buchanan won all southern states and Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, ensuring victory over Fremont. The 1856 elections showed that parties had reorganized along sectional lines. The Whigs had disappeared, the Democrats were seriously weakened, and a new party had arrived that was devoted completely to northern interests.

The Emergence of Lincoln The Dred Scott Decision President James Buchanan, while a staunch defender of the Union, failed settle the growing sectional tensions. He hoped that a Supreme Court case would finally resolve the slavery controversy. During the 1830s, Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, had accompanied his owner to both Illinois, where slavery was prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance and state law, and Wisconsin, where it was barred by the Missouri Compromise. After returning to Missouri, Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that residence on free soil had freed him. The Dred Scott decision was announced in March,1857, shortly after Buchanan was inaugurated. The court essentially divided 6–3, with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney speaking for the majority. Taney declared that only white persons could be citizens of the United States, since the founders believed blacks “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. Blacks, having different ancestors and lacking a heritage of freedom, could never join the nation’s political family. Taney and the Court majority ruled that Scott remained a slave. They ruled that Illinois state law had no effect on Scott once he returned to Missouri, and that in regards to Wisconsin, Congress had no constitutional power to bar slavery from a territory. The Decision’s Aftermath This effectively made the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, as was any law that interfered with southerners’ right to bring slave property into the territories. The decision effectively made unconstitutional the Republican platform for restricting slavery and undermined the policy of popular sovereignty: if Congress could not prohibit slavery in a territory, how could a territorial legislature created by Congress do so? In the North, the Dred Scott decision sank the reputation of the Supreme Court, which many now regarded as beholden to the Slave Power. President Buchanan declared that slavery would from then on be legal and constitutional in all western territories. In 1858, Buchanan tried to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Leocompton Constitution, which had been drafted by a pro-southern convention and never ratified by popular vote. Douglas, outraged by this violation of popular sovereignty, blocked the attempt with Republicans, and Kansas remained a territory. Dred Scott Decision: (page 2) http://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/05_CivilWar/index.html

The Emergence of Lincoln Lincoln and Slavery Americans’ deepening divisions over slavery were captured in the Illinois senatorial election in 1858 between Stephen Douglas, the champion of popular sovereignty, and Abraham Lincoln, a lawyer of modest origins and Whig, who had served four terms in the state legislature and one term as a representative in Congress from 1847 to 1849. Lincoln reentered national politics in 1854 as a result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. While Lincoln hated slavery, unlike the abolitionists, Lincoln was willing to compromise with the South to preserve the Union. But he was adamant on halting the expansion of slavery. Lincoln’s critique of slavery and its expansion articulated the basic values of the Republican Party and the millions of Northerners who voted for it. His life embodied the free labor ideology and the promise northern society offered to working men. In 1850s Illinois, property-owning farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers vastly outnumbered wage earners. Lincoln believed blacks should own their own labor and have every opportunity to improve themselves through their labor as whites.

The Emergence of Lincoln The Lincoln-Douglas Campaign The 1858 campaign against Douglas made Lincoln nationally known. Lincoln insisted that the nation would not survive forever half-slave and half-free, and that Americans would have to make a choice as a nation and reject the idea of popular sovereignty Douglas advocated. The Lincoln- Douglas debates are classics of American political oratory. Conflicting definitions of freedom were at their center. Lincoln argued that freedom meant opposing slavery, and that the founding fathers had set the nation on the road to eventual abolition of slavery. Douglas argued that freedom resided in local self-government and self-determination, and that each locality had the right to determine its institutions. Douglas tried, in the debates, to portray Lincoln as a dangerous radical whose positions would degrade white Americans by reducing them to equality with blacks. Douglas argued that the United States had been created “by white men for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever.” Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of his day, opposed giving Illinois blacks the right to vote, and endorsed colonization. But Lincoln did not appeal to racism to gain votes, and he insisted that blacks were part of the human family, entitled to the same natural rights the Declaration of Independence offered to all men everywhere. Douglas was only narrowly re-elected to the U.S. Senate. Elsewhere in the North, many Republicans won elections.

The Emergence of Lincoln John Brown at Harpers Ferry The attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia led by John Brown also increased sectional tensions. Brown, a deeply religious man, had long been involved in anti-slavery activities. Highly influenced by the Old Testament of the Bible, Brown avenged an 1856 attack on Lawrence, Kansas, by pro-slavery southerners by murdering five pro-slavery settlers. In October, 1859, Brown led an interracial group of nearly two dozen men in the attack at Harpers Ferry. Brown and his men were soon surrounded and all of them killed or captured by federal soldiers commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown faced a trial for treason and behaved admirably, earning through his trial the admiration of millions of northerners, who nonetheless disapproved of his violent actions. Brown’s execution made him a martyr of northern abolitionists, while northern praise for Brown outraged and further alienated southerners. John Brown, Harpers Ferry: http://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/05_CivilWar/index.htmlhttp://cms.gavirtualschool.org/Shared/SocialStudies/USHistory/05_CivilWar/index.html The Rise of Southern Nationalism A growing number of southerners began to think their region’s future looked more favorable outside the Union than within it. Southerners had many complaints. The increasing price for slaves made it much harder for small farmers to become planters and thus economically independent. These secessionists argued that the North was benefiting from the cotton trade while southern planters fell deeper into debt. An independent South, they argued, could build a slave empire incorporating Cuba, other West Indian islands, Mexico, and parts of Central America. Some southern planters openly called on the United States to buy or conquer Cuba to expand slavery, while other southerners like William Walker led “filibuster” expeditions, in which they tried and failed to capture Nicaragua and other parts of Central America in hopes of securing more territory for American slaveowners. Some slaveowners called for the reopening of the foreign slave trade. By early 1860, seven Deep South states were demanding that the Democratic Platform promise to protect slavery in all territories not yet made states.

The Emergence of Lincoln The Democratic Split Even though Stephen Douglas and his supporters had a majority at the Democratic convention of 1860, they did not have the two-thirds needed for the presidential nomination, and Douglas’s position on Kansas alienated pro-slavery southerners, who wanted to make Kansas a slave state. Delegates from seven states walked out when the platform reaffirmed support for popular sovereignty, and the remaining Democrats nominated Douglas. Those who bolted nominated John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky, who insisted that slavery be protected in western territories. The Democratic Party had been shattered. Southern Democrats no longer trusted northern Democrats, and northern Democrats refused to accept a pro-slavery platform that would doom their party’s chances in the North. The Nomination of Lincoln The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln for president. Lincoln’s commitment to preserving the Union appealed to moderate Republicans, and his moral opposition to slavery appealed to abolitionists. He wasn’t associated with the nativist, Know-Nothing wing of the party, so he could win immigrant votes. And he could ensure Illinois’s votes. The Republicans’ platform declared Dred Scott decision invalid, reaffirmed their opposition to slavery’s expansion, and added economic plans to appeal to different northern voters—free homesteads in the West, a protective tariff, and government aid for a building a transcontinental railroad.

The Emergence of Lincoln The Election of 1860 In effect, two presidential campaigns occurred in 1860. In the North, Lincoln faced off against Douglas. In the South, the Republicans had no support, and three candidates ran against each other—Douglas, Breckenridge, and John Bell of Tennessee, the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party, made of Unionist former Whigs who pledged only to preserve a Constitution with existing protections for slavery and to prevent sectionalism. The election results were highly sectional. Lincoln won all the North except New Jersey, receiving 54 percent of the North’s total votes, 40 percent of the national vote, and 180 electoral college votes, a clear majority. Breckenridge won most of the slave states, although Bell carried three Upper South states and about 40 percent of the South’s total votes. Douglas was second in the popular vote, behind Lincoln, but he was the only candidate with votes in all parts of the nation. But his failure to carry either section showed that a devotion to a Union with slavery was no longer tenable politically. Lincoln was elected president without a majority of the national popular vote.

The Impending Crisis The Secession Movement For many white southerners, Lincoln’s triumph placed their future in the hands of a party hostile to their region’s values and interests. Those who wanted the South to secede did not believe Lincoln would interfere with slavery in the states, but worried that his election indicated that Republican administrations in the future might do so. Southerners in the Deep South, fearing they would become a permanent minority in a nation ruled by their political enemies, instead decided to secede from the Union to save slavery, the basis of their society.

The Impending Crisis The Secession Crisis In the months after Lincoln’s election, seven states stretching from South Carolina to Texas seceded from the United States. These were the states of the Cotton Kingdom, in which slaves were a much larger part of the population than in the Upper South. South Carolina, long extreme in its defense of slavery and states’ rights, seceded first, claiming it was necessary to defend slavery against Lincoln and the Republicans. Secessionists equated their actions with those of the American revolutionaries, as a blow for liberty against tyranny. President Buchanan did not confront the crisis. He denied that a state could secede, but he also declared that the federal government had no right to use force against states that seceded. Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky, a slave state, offered a widely supported compromise plan of constitutional amendments that would protect slavery in the states where it existed and extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. Seceding southern states rejected it, as did Lincoln. Lincoln insisted on no further expansion of slavery. Before Lincoln assumed office on March 4, 1861, seven seceding southern states formed the Confederate States of America (CSA), adopted a constitution, and chose as their president Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. The Confederate constitution followed the U.S. Constitution, with some exceptions. Unlike the U.S. Constitution, however, the CSA’s constitution explicitly guaranteed slave property in its own states and any new territories it might acquire. Davis’s vice president stated that the “cornerstone” of the Confederacy was the “great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man” and that slavery “is his natural and normal condition.”

The Impending Crisis And the War Came Lincoln did not think war was inevitable. When inaugurated, eight slave states of the Upper South, where slaves and slaveholders were fewer in number than in the Deep South and where fewer whites thought Lincoln’s election justified secession, were still in the Union. Southern whites were divided over secession. Lincoln believed secession might collapse from within. In his inaugural address, Lincoln tried to conciliate the South. He rejected the right of states to secede, but denied any plan to interfere with slavery in states where it existed. Although Confederate forces had already seized federal forts and arsenals in the South, Lincoln promised only to “hold” remaining federal property in the South. But he suggested that the southern states risked “civil war.” In his first month as president, Lincoln tried to avoid doing anything to encourage more states to secede, encouraged southern Unionists to combat secession within the South, and tried to quiet growing calls in the North for forceful action. Lincoln hoped to ensure that if war broke out, the South would initiate it. This happened when Confederate forces in South Carolina fired on Fort Sumner in Charleston harbor. Lincoln quickly proclaimed that an insurrection existed in the South and called for 75,000 troops to suppress it. Within weeks, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas seceded and joined the Confederacy. The Union created by the American Revolution was shattered, and the war to rebuild it would introduce a new birth of American freedom.

Norton Lecture Slides Independent and Employee-Owned Give Me Liberty! AN AMERICAN HISTORY THIRD EDITION This concludes the Norton Lecture Slides Slide Set for Chapter 13 by Eric Foner

Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861. The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building.

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861. The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building."— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback

Log in

Auth with social network:

Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861. The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building.

Similar presentations

Presentation on theme: "Chapter 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861. The original and final designs for (1855) Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom for the dome of the Capitol building."— Presentation transcript:

Similar presentations

About project

Feedback