Study material generated by AI from this openly licensed book (CC BY-SA 4.0). Not affiliated with or endorsed by the publisher.
The American Yawp, Volume 1, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 13 · pp. 418–449
This chapter follows how disputes over slavery pulled the United States toward civil war. It begins with westward and overseas expansion and the Gold Rush, then turns to the cotton economy, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act, immigration, and the Kansas-Nebraska fight. It ends with the rise of the Republican Party, the Dred Scott decision, John Brown's raid, Lincoln's election in 1860, secession, and the war that followed.
"Manifest destiny" was a phrase coined around 1839 by supporters of national growth. By the mid-1840s it stood for the belief that Providence, or divine will, meant for the United States to spread across the whole North American continent. (pp. 418–419)
The phrase began as a broad statement of imperial ambition. Over time it became tied to the interests of slaveholders who wanted more land for slavery. That link explains why every new territorial gain raised the same question: would the land be slave or free? (p. 419)
The Mexican War made the question urgent. Instead of settling the matter, the war made it sharper. Representative David Wilmot proposed a rule, the Wilmot Proviso, that would ban slavery in any land taken from Mexico. Southerners reacted with fury, because the rule would close newly won territory to slavery. (p. 419)
By 1850 some expansionists looked beyond the continent. Many Northern businessmen and Southern enslavers liked the idea of pushing slavery into the Caribbean, where it already existed. Some critics saw these plans as proof of a "slave-power conspiracy." (p. 419)
Filibustering meant privately paid military expeditions that tried to seize and hold foreign territory without the approval of the US government. The missions broke US law. Even so, wealthy Americans often paid for them, and poorer adventurers were eager to join. (pp. 419–420)
Cuba was the favorite target in the early 1850s. Several things pushed Americans toward it:
Backers imagined that Cubans would welcome American businessmen as guides. Cuba would have been the first manifest-destiny territory lying off the continent. Despite its popularity and several military attempts led by Narciso López, a Cuban dissident, annexation never succeeded. (p. 419)
William Walker, a Tennessean and former soldier, led two other filibusters. In 1853 he seized part of Mexico's Baja Peninsula. He later took power in Nicaragua and set up a regime that allowed slavery. He was finally executed in Honduras. (pp. 419–420)
Filibustering stayed fairly popular until the late 1850s. Then slavery and the threat of secession took over public attention. By the start of the Civil War, most Americans had changed their minds and called these expeditions plain territorial theft. (p. 420)
Oregon and California were far away. In 1849 the trip from Missouri, the nearest major American settlements, took at least three hard months overland. (p. 420)
The journey was difficult for several reasons:
Still, by the late 1840s about twenty thousand white Americans lived west of the Rocky Mountains. About three-fourths of them were in Oregon, whose fertile Willamette Valley attracted more settlers than California did at first. Some of the people in the West had not come by choice. Enslaved African Americans were there too, so Oregon's state constitution again raised the slave-or-free question. (pp. 420–421)
On January 24, 1848, James W. Marshall found gold on land that belonged to John Sutter's sawmill in California's Sacramento Valley. Marshall was a contractor working for Sutter. When news spread, people from around the world rushed in, beginning in 1849. (p. 421)
The prospect of fast riches drew many young single men, along with some women, to new gold towns. These fortune seekers drew others, from China, Mexico, Chile, and Hawai'i, who often ended up doing service work for the mining economy. Enslaved African Americans also did essential labor in the mines. San Francisco grew from about 500 people in 1848 to nearly 50,000 by 1853. (p. 421)
California's status as slave or free carried unusually high stakes, for several reasons:
Language, culture, economics, and race all caused conflict in the state's growing towns and countryside. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexican immigrants made up about one-fifth of California's miners. Many Americans wondered whether these groups could ever be part of the nation. (p. 421)
By the 1850s, defenders of slavery spoke more boldly than before. In 1858 South Carolina senator and planter James Henry Hammond told the Senate that no sensible nation would go to war against cotton, because 'Cotton is king.' This was a common boast. It also covered up how unstable the slave system was (p. 422).
That instability was a double problem for Southern whites. The first was fear of rebellion. In 1860 nearly four million people were enslaved, and about 2.5 million of them lived in the Cotton Belt. Enslavers knew that enslaved people shared news, resisted, and might use violence (p. 422). The second was the question of what to do if slavery ended. Thomas Jefferson had argued that freed people should be colonized in another country. He believed white prejudice and Black memories of mistreatment would make shared life impossible (pp. 422–423). By the 1850s many enslavers rejected colonization. They claimed slavery brought order and security, and that without it Black Southerners would become violent and uncontrollable. Some reformers still argued for government-led mass deportation (pp. 423–424).
The internal slave trade was the legal buying and selling of enslaved people within the country. It began after the Revolution, moving people between states and along rivers and coasts. By the 1850s it was a continent-wide network. It sped up as slaveholding interests moved into places like Arizona and New Mexico (p. 424).
Productivity rose, but at a human cost. Planters demanded longer hours, heavier workloads, and harsher punishment. Cotton picked per worker in Mississippi rose by 600 percent from 1820 to 1860. The account book of Buena Vista Plantation in Louisiana records 300 to 500 pounds per hand each day, or 1,700 to 2,100 pounds per week (p. 424).
Enslaved women suffered especially. Racist pseudoscience claimed they were biologically inferior. Laws in several states barred them from testifying in court. Because slavery profited from natural reproduction, sexual violence was central to how the system worked. Women who fought back were often treated as criminals. Few enslavers wrote about these abuses, but Hammond did, in letters to his sons (pp. 424–425).
The case of Celia shows how extreme this could become. Robert Newsom, her enslaver in Missouri, raped her for years, starting when she was a teenager. In 1855 she was nineteen. When he tried again that summer, she hit him twice with a club and killed him. The community called for her execution rather than looking at what she had endured. After a ten-day trial, she was hanged on November 16, 1855 (p. 425).
Slavery was not only a rural Southern matter. US cotton exports jumped from 150,000 bales in 1815 to 4,541,000 bales in 1859. Northern financiers, insurers, and exporters helped ship and sell the crop and profited from it. So the economy of the whole nation, including 'free' states, was tied to slavery (pp. 425–426).
The Mexican War left the nation with a hard question: would slavery spread into the new land? California wanted to join as a free state, Utah's Mormons claimed a state called Deseret, and New Mexico also needed a status. President Zachary Taylor died in 1850 and was replaced by Millard Fillmore (p. 427). Henry Clay left Washington discouraged, so young Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois pushed a group of bills through Congress. Together they are called the Compromise of 1850 (pp. 427–428).
The package tried to give each side something:
Popular sovereignty means letting the settlers of a territory vote on whether to allow slavery. Douglas later applied this idea to Kansas. There it caused a rush of armed migrants who hoped to sway the vote (pp. 427, 433).
The deal pleased almost no one, and the sense of crisis grew instead of fading (p. 428).
After 1850, antislavery critics grew more convinced that a small group of Southern enslavers secretly controlled the federal government. They called this the 'Slave Power' and believed it wanted to make slavery a national institution. The idea was old, going back to the first Federalist Party, and antislavery Democrats had revived it in the 1830s (pp. 422, 428).
Critics also pointed to the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. Because enslaved people counted toward representation, Southern states got more seats in Congress. Critics said this let Washington serve enslavers while ignoring white working men (pp. 428–429).
The idea shaped worries about the West too. Northerners feared that if the Slave Power won California, it would look like Louisiana or South Carolina. White landowners and managers would dominate, while poorer whites and minorities were pushed into mining and other hard labor. In reality, California's frontier towns were struggling to balance economic growth with civil rights, and Native Americans and older Mexican communities suffered abuse (p. 422).
Returning escaped enslaved people had been a legal duty since the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The 1850 law greatly expanded federal power to enforce it (p. 429). Its key features:
This expanded federal police power and overrode state and local protections, which seriously disrupted American federalism (p. 429).
The law also built in corruption. A commissioner earned 5 for ruling that the person was free. Kidnappers also worked with local officials to seize free Black Northerners and enslave them again. Public distrust of the federal government grew (p. 429).
Free Black communities answered with legal and physical resistance. Many people fled to Canada, and others organized to defend their neighbors, sometimes by force. Clashes between residents and federal officers became common across the North, and the law inflamed antislavery feeling rather than calming it (p. 429).
Anger over the compromise hurt the Whig Party in the 1852 election. The Whigs won only 42 electoral votes and effectively disappeared as a national party, leaving the two-party system in disarray. Democrats returned to majorities, though they were themselves divided along sectional lines (pp. 429–430).
That same year Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin. Only the Bible has outsold it in American history. Its violent scenes moved many Northerners against slavery, although the book also repeated racist stereotypes (p. 430).
In 1853 the Nebraska Territory was the last unorganized part of the Louisiana Purchase. It stretched from northern Texas to the Canadian border and covered what is now Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, and Montana. When Douglas tried to organize it in 1854, the effort split the Democratic Party and helped tear the country apart (pp. 430–431).
Democrats relied on immigrant voters. More than five million immigrants arrived between 1820 and 1860, and by the Civil War about one in eight Americans had been born abroad. Irish, German, and Jewish newcomers were prominent. Push factors such as famine and the failed 1848 revolutions drove people out of Europe, and pull factors such as the booming American economy drew them in (pp. 431–433).
Between 1820 and 1860, millions of newcomers arrived in the United States. By the Civil War, about one in eight Americans had been born abroad. Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants each settled in different places and worked in different jobs. These differences shaped the politics of the 1850s. (p. 432)
Irish immigrants and chain migration. Most Irish arrivals had neither the money nor the skills to buy and run a farm. They stayed in Northeastern cities and took unskilled, often dirty and dangerous jobs. Irish men usually came alone and used chain migration. A man who had found work sent part of his wages home. That money either supported his family or paid for a ticket so a relative could follow. The pattern grew during the famine years, when about 1.7 million Irish left between 1840 and 1860. (p. 432)
German immigrants. Over 1.5 million Germans came before the war. Many traveled as families, and they often brought skills and some money. That let them enter middle-class trades or buy farmland, which the typical Irish immigrant could not do. Many moved to the Old Northwest. Others settled in St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, the "German Triangle." (p. 432)
Jewish immigrants. Many Jewish newcomers came from southwestern Germany and from parts of Poland under foreign rule. They also used chain migration and family groups. Unlike most Germans, they stayed in cities and worked in shops, commerce, and crafts such as tailoring. New York's Jewish population jumped from about 500 in 1825 to about 40,000 in 1860. Just as Irish Catholics built churches and schools, Jewish communities built synagogues. (p. 433)
In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas proposed splitting the southern part of Nebraska off as Kansas Territory. Settlers there would decide the slavery question by local elections. Douglas also had an economic goal. An organized territory would make it easier to build a national railroad running through Chicago. (p. 433)
Antislavery leaders saw a different result. Salmon P. Chase argued in Northern newspapers that the bill would wipe out the Missouri Compromise and open western land to slavery. Protest meetings followed across the North, in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Maine. Because the vote would decide the territory's status, both sides sent settlers to Kansas to win it. Many of them arrived carrying weapons. (p. 433)
The Fugitive Slave Law pushed Northern opinion further. In May 1854, Anthony Burns, a 20-year-old preacher who had escaped slavery in Virginia, was seized in Boston. A crowd tried to free him, stormed the courthouse, and a deputy US marshal was killed. The government sent troops, placed Boston under martial law, and sent Burns back to Virginia. The effort cost over $40,000. Amos Lawrence said that conservative, compromise-minded Whigs had gone to bed one night and woken up as "stark mad Abolitionists." The case shows how enforcing the law turned moderate Northerners against it. (p. 434)
In 1854 and 1855, immigration set off a backlash among native-born Protestants. The Know-Nothings, formally the American Party, were a nativist party aimed mainly at Catholic Irish and Germans. Members got the nickname because they often claimed to know nothing about the group when asked. The party did well in 1854 and 1855, especially in New England and the Mid-Atlantic. It did poorly in the immigrant-heavy West, where antislavery politics mattered more to voters. (p. 434)
The Republican Party also formed in 1854, built from antislavery movements. Its name recalled the nation's founders. It beat the Know-Nothings as the main rival to the Democrats because slavery stayed a more explosive issue than immigration. Violent events kept it at the center of national politics. (p. 436)
In May 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech that insulted Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler's cousin, Representative Preston Brooks, then beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor. The House did not expel Brooks. He resigned, won reelection, and received new canes from supporters. This showed how deep the hatred between North and South had grown. (p. 436)
Kansas was worse. Proslavery raiders attacked the town of Lawrence, and the abolitionist John Brown answered by killing several proslavery settlers. Missourians crossed the border to tamper with elections, and critics said the Pierce administration did not protect fair voting. Hundreds of armed militants from across the country went to Kansas. Historians use "Bleeding Kansas" to show the sectional crisis becoming a national one. (pp. 436, 438)
In 1856, the Republicans nominated John C. Frémont. He lost to Democrat James Buchanan but carried eleven of the sixteen free states, a strong result for a first national campaign. Some Northern Democrats, including Ulysses S. Grant, voted for Buchanan because they feared a Republican win would split the Union. (p. 437)
Lincoln helped give the Republicans their message about labor. In a speech at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1856, he said Northern workers were not trapped in a permanent class. A man who worked for wages one year could work for himself the next and hire others after that. Enslaved people had no such path. This belief in free labor supported the Northern commitment to the Republican free-soil position. (pp. 437–438)
In 1857, the Supreme Court decided Scott v. Sandford, the Dred Scott case. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote that Black Americans could not be US citizens, so Scott, an enslaved man from Missouri, had no right to sue in federal court. The ruling treated enslaved people as property that could be moved from state to state whatever state law said. That struck down the Missouri Compromise's limits on slavery in the territories. It looked like a Southern victory, but it did not calm the crisis. It deepened Northern fears that the federal government supported spreading slavery. (pp. 438–440)
The 1858 Illinois Senate race showed how deep the sectional split had become. Democrat Stephen Douglas faced Republican Abraham Lincoln. Douglas appealed to white supremacy and called the Republicans a "Black Republican" party that wanted racial equality. Republicans, Lincoln included, did not accept that label. They said they were not an abolitionist party and shouted "white Republicans!" whenever Democrats used the attack. At the same time, they said all Americans deserved equality of opportunity. (p. 440)
Douglas won the Senate seat. But Republicans won the House of Representatives in the same elections and gained Senate seats. Lincoln lost, yet the contest made him a leading national Republican. After 1858, many expected 1860 might produce the first antislavery president. (p. 440)
John Brown was a radical abolitionist who had worked against slavery for decades. In 1859 he came east from Kansas with a plan to raise the stakes. He assembled a team that included Black radicals from Oberlin, Ohio, and from communities in western Canada. The plan had three steps:
Brown also asked Frederick Douglass to join, but Douglass said no. (pp. 440–441)
The raid began on October 16, 1859. By October 18, troops under Robert E. Lee had crushed it. Several of Brown's men, including his sons, died. Brown survived, was imprisoned, and was hanged in December 1859. Many Northerners showed deep sympathy on the day of his execution. Southerners read that sympathy as a warning and decided the 1860 election would be, in effect, a vote on secession and disunion. (p. 441)
Brown's memory stayed split. Abolitionists saw a martyr. Many Southerners saw a traitor. In the North, where many soldiers later died to end slavery, his name came to be admired. (p. 442)
A broken Democratic Party. At the party's convention in Charleston, Southern delegates walked out and later backed their own candidate, Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The party met again in Baltimore and nominated Stephen Douglas, hoping he could unite its factions. With two Democratic candidates, the party's vote was divided. (p. 441)
The Republicans. The party met in Chicago. Its platform was clearly antislavery. It also promised things white voters, especially Westerners, wanted: new land, transcontinental railroads, and wide support for public schools. Few people outside Illinois expected Lincoln to win the nomination, but he was less polarizing than the other choices. He won it, and with the Democrats in disarray, Republicans saw a good chance of victory. (p. 441)
The role of abolitionists. Radical immediatists were always a minority. Still, abolitionist groups, in which African Americans played prominent roles, built public opinion against slavery's spread. They also offered a model of interracial cooperation, though an imperfect one. Their radicalism made Lincoln look moderate by comparison. Lincoln's rise is hard to imagine without them. The moral energy of revivalist Protestantism also drove many of these abolitionists. (pp. 441, 443)
The result. Lincoln won on November 6, 1860, with only about 40 percent of the popular vote and no electoral votes from the South. A divided opposition helped him. (p. 443)
The Crittenden compromise. Within days of the election, Southern states began organizing secession conventions. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky offered a compromise. It would have renewed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and protected slavery in the nation's capital. It clearly favored the South. Republicans knew their voters did not want them to give way on these points, so they rejected it. (p. 443)
A common misconception: "states' rights." After the war, many Southerners said secession was mainly about states' rights. The record points elsewhere. South Carolina voted to secede on December 20, 1860, and issued its "Declaration of the Immediate Causes." It complained that the federal government failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against Northern personal liberty laws. That complaint demanded stronger federal power to protect slavery, not weaker federal power. The very first secession ordinance made the same complaint. The aim was to protect slavery. (pp. 443–444)
The Confederacy forms. Six more states followed South Carolina, in this order:
Not every slaveholding state agreed. Delaware rejected secession in January. In February, the seceded states drafted a constitution that protected slavery and chose Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president. Weeks after Lincoln's inauguration, Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers, and the Civil War began. (p. 444)
Mainstream antislavery leaders, including most Republicans, wanted to confine slavery to where it already existed. They believed that this would lead to its "ultimate extinction" over time, by peaceful means. The South could not accept a federal government that worked against slavery's expansion, so it gambled on war. Secession therefore opened the door to emancipation through war. Most Republicans had always known that was possible, but they had hoped it would never be needed. By 1861, the fate of slavery and of the nation depended on the war. (pp. 444–445)
The Civil War killed about 698,000 Americans, making it the bloodiest conflict in US history. Most Northern soldiers first fought to save the Union. The war became a fight against slavery, largely because enslaved and free African Americans pushed emancipation to the front. Women also took on critical wartime roles while many men of military age were away. (p. 449)
