chapter 15 the coming crisis the 1850s chapter 15 the coming crisis the 1850s out of many a history...

Chapter 15The Coming Crisis

the 1850s

OUT OF MANYA HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN

PEOPLE

© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Part One:

Introduction

2© 2009 Pearson Education, Inc.

Chapter Focus Questions Why did people in the North and the South tend to see the issue of slavery so differently?Why were the politicians of the 1850s unable to find a lasting political compromise on the issue of slavery?What was the intent of the Compromise of 1850?What explains the end of the Second American Party System and the rise of the Republican Party?Why did the South secede following the Republican Party victory in the election of 1860?


Part Two:

American Communities: Illinois Communities Debate

Slavery


American Communities: Illinois Communities Debate Slavery

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.


Part Three:

America in 1850


Expansion and Growth

Map: U. S. Population and Settlement, 1850America had grown rapidly in the first half of the nineteenth century. The nation had experienced great growth of wealth, industry, and urbanization. Equally important, southern economic influence was waning.


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, the growth was astounding.


Politics, Culture, and National Identity

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.An American Renaissance produced writers who focused on social criticism, including:

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson who experimented with poetic formNathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville who wrote about the darker side of human natureFrederick Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin condemn slavery


This poster advertises Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bestselling novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. This poignant story of long-suffering African American slaves had an immense impact on northern popular opinion, swaying it decisively against slavery. In that respect, the poster’s boast, “The Greatest Book of the Age,” was correct.


Part Four

Cracks in National Unity


Political Parties and Slavery

The national party system had forced Whigs and Democrats to forge inter-sectional coalitions. By 1848 sectional interests were eroding these coalitions. Sectional divisions in religious and other organizations had begun to divide the country.


Congressional Debate

John C. Calhoun had laid out the states’ rights defense by claiming that:

the territories were the common property of each of the statesCongress could not discriminate against slave owners.

Northerners grew increasingly concerned over what they saw as a southern conspiracy to control the government: the “slave power.”


In 1850, the three men who had long represented America’s three major regions attempted to resolve the political crisis brought on by the applications of California for statehood. Henry Clay is speaking; John C. Calhoun stands second from right; and Daniel Webster is seated at the left, with his head in his hand. Both Clay and Webster were ill, and Calhoun died before the Compromise of 1850 was arranged by a younger group of politicians led by Stephen A. Douglas.


Two Communities, Two Perspectives

Both North and South:were committed to expansion, but each viewed manifest destiny in its own terms; andshared a commitment to basic rights and liberties but saw the other as infringing on them.

Two communities with two perspectives had emerged. Northerners viewed their region as a dynamic society that offered opportunity to the common man, in contrast to the stagnant slave owning aristocracy of the South. Southerners viewed their section as promoting equality for whites by keeping blacks in a perpetual state of bondage.

The chances for national reconciliation were slim.


Compromises

Map: The Compromise of 1850The Compromise of 1850 was actually five separate bills

California came in as a free state.Other southwest territories were to be settled by popular sovereignty.A stronger fugitive slave law was enacted.The slave trade was outlawed in Washington, D.C.The Texas–New Mexico border dispute was settled.


MAP 15.2 The Compromise of 1850 The Compromise of 1850, messier and more awkward than the Missouri Compromise of 1820, reflected heightened sectional tensions. California was admitted as a free state, the borders of Texas were settled, and the status of the rest of the former Mexican territory was left to be decided later by popular sovereignty. No consistent majority voted for the five separate bills that made up the compromise.


The Fugitive Slave Act

The issue of runaway slaves further divided the nation. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 put the full force of the federal government behind slave catchers. Mobs of northerners unsuccessfully tried to prevent the law from being carried out. Black fugitives described their experiences as slaves, helping to raise Northerners’ consciousness.


Escaped slave Anthony Burns, shown here surrounded by scenes of his capture in 1854, was the cause of Boston’s greatest protest against the Fugitive Slave Law. The injustice of his trial and shipment back to the South converted many Bostonians to the antislavery cause.


This handbill warning free African Americans of danger circulated in Boston following the first of the infamous recaptures under the Fugitive Slave Law, that of Thomas Sims in 1851.


The Election of 1852

The growing polarization of opinion strained the party system. General apathy characterized the election.Franklin Pierce easily won, mainly due to strong immigrant vote.


“Young America”: The Politics of Expansion

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States became a continental nation. A series of revolutions in Europe reinforced Americans’ sense that their ideals of democracy and manifest destiny were to be achieved. The Compromise of 1850 showed the dangers of introducing new territories during the sectional crisis.


The Japanese painting shows Commodore Matthew Perry landing in Japan in 1853. The commercial treaty Perry signed with the Japanese government, which opened a formerly closed country to American trade, was viewed in the United States as another fruit of manifest destiny. SOURCE: “The Landing of Commodore Perry in Japan in 1853.” (Detail) Japanese, Edo period, 19th century. Handscroll; ink and color on paper, 10 7/8 x 211 1/8 in. (27.6 x 536.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, RES. 11.6054. Photograph © 2006 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.


Part Five:

The Crisis of the National Party System


The Kansas-Nebraska ActMaps: The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854Stephen Douglas pushed through a bill to open the Kansas territory. To win southern support Douglas’ bill declared that the territory would be organized on the principle of popular sovereignty, even though slavery in that territory had been banned under the Missouri Compromise. The Kansas-Nebraska Act proved to:

destroy the Whig Partynearly destroy the northern wing of the Democratic Partynegate treaties with Indians removed to Kansas in the 1830s.


MAP 15.3 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, proposed by Steven A. Douglas in 1854, opened the central and northern Great Plains to settlement. The act had two major faults: it robbed Indian peoples of half the territory guaranteed to them by treaty and, because it repealed the Missouri Compromise line, it opened up the lands to warring proslavery and antislavery factions.


“Bleeding Kansas”The territory became a battleground of sectional politics. On election day, proslavery Missourians crossed over the border and took control of the territorial legislature.Northerners quickly responded by founding free-soil communities. By the summer of 1856 open warfare erupted.



This engraving shows “Border Ruffians” from Missouri lining up to vote for slavery in the Kickapoo, Kansas Territory, election of 1855. The widespread practice of illegal voting and open violence earned Kansas the dreadful nickname of “Bleeding Kansas.”

The Politics of Nativism

Concurrent with sectional pressures came an outburst of anti-immigrant feeling. Reformers were appalled by the influx of Irish into American cities. Former Whigs formed the “Know-Nothing” or American Party to prevent what they saw as a takeover by the immigrants. But the Know-Nothings succumbed to sectional divisions.


This nighttime meeting of supporters of the Know-Nothing Party in New York City was dramatically spotlighted by a new device borrowed from the theater, an incandescent calcium light, popularly called a limelight.


The Republican Party and the Election of 1856

Map: The Election of 1856

The Republican Party linked many Free-Soil supporters and former Whigs.

In 1856, Democrats nominated James Buchanan as a compromise candidate.

Southern Know-Nothings ran Millard Fillmore.

Northern Republicans ran John C. Fremont who defeated Buchanan in the North. Buchanan carried nearly the entire South and won.

The election signaled the rise of the Republican Party.


MAP 15.4 The Election of 1856 Because three parties contested the 1856 election, Democrat James Buchanan was a minority president. Although Buchanan alone had national support, Republican John Frémont won most of the free states, and Millard Fillmore of the American Party gained 40 percent of the vote in most of the slave states.



Seeing History Brooks Beats Sumner.

Part Six:

The Differences Deepen


The Dred Scott Decision

The Dred Scott decision worsened sectional divisions. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories and that black people did not have the right to bring suits before federal court because they were not citizens.While Southerners applauded the decision, Northerners denounced it.


These sympathetic portraits of Harriet and Dred Scott and their daughters in 1857 helped to shape the northern reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision that denied the Scotts’ claim to freedom. The infamous Dred Scott decision was intended to resolve the issue of slavery expansion but instead heightened angry feelings in both North and South.


The Lecompton ConstitutionConflict continued in Kansas as free-soilers:

organized their own territorial governmentboycotted the proslavery government’s elections for a constitutional convention

The proslavery “Lecompton constitution” was submitted to Congress. Stephen Douglas fought against it, alienating his southern supporters.Kansas rejected the constitution and came into the Union as a free state. The defeat of Lecompton came as Congress continued to divide along sectional lines.


The Panic of 1857

Adding to the conflict was a financial panic and sharp depression in 1857 and 1858.The Panic affected northern more than southern exports.Southerners believed the Panic showed the superiority of their system.


This painting by Charles C. Rosenberg and James H. Cafferty shows a worried crowd exchanging the latest news on Wall Street during the Panic of 1857. This was the first economic depression in which the telegraph played a part by carrying bad financial news in the West to New York much more rapidly than in the past.


John Brown’s Raid

Sectional tensions intensified when John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in an unsuccessful effort to instigate a slave revolt. Brown was hanged but southern opinion was shocked by northerner’s attempts to make Brown a martyr and northern support for slave revolts.



In a contemporary engraving, John Brown and his followers are shown trapped inside the armory at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Captured, tried, and executed, Brown was regarded as a martyr in the North and a terrorist in the South.

Part Seven:

The South Secedes


The Election of 1860Map: The Election of 1860In the election of 1860, four candidates ran for president.

The Democrats split over a proposed slave code for the territories. • Stephen Douglas won the nomination but Southerners nominated John

C. Breckinridge. Southern and border state Whigs created the Constitutional Union Party and nominated John Bell. Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate.

Breckinridge and Lincoln represented the extreme positions on slavery in the territories. Douglas and Bell tried to find a middle ground. Lincoln won the election with 180 electoral votes by virtually sweeping the North.


MAP 15.5 The Election of 1860 The election of 1860 was a sectional election. Lincoln won no votes in the South, Breckinridge none in the North. The contest in the North was between Lincoln and Douglas, and although Lincoln swept the electoral vote, Douglas’s popular vote was uncomfortably close. The large number of northern Democratic voters opposed to Lincoln was a source of political trouble for him during the Civil War.


The South Leaves the Union

Map: The South SecedesSoutherners responded to the election of 1860 by initiating secession movements.

The Lower South seceded, eight slave states did not act.


MAP 15.6 The South Secedes The southern states that would constitute the Confederacy seceded in two stages. The states of the Lower South seceded before Lincoln took office. Arkansas and three states of the Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—waited until after the South fired on Fort Sumter. And four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—chose not to secede. Every Southern state (except South Carolina) was divided on the issue of secession, generally along up-country–low-country lines. In Virginia, this division was so extreme that West Virginia split off to become a separate nonslave state and was admitted to the Union in 1863.



This special edition of the Charleston Mercury was issued on December 20, 1860, the day South Carolina voted to secede from the Union.

The North’s Political Options

Various Northerners unsuccessfully tried to find some compromise that would satisfy all sides. Some Northerners were willing to allow the South to go in peace. Lincoln believed that the idea of free government would be threatened if the South was permitted to leave.


Establishment of the Confederacy

Southerners established the Confederate States of America.Jefferson Davis, a moderate, was chosen as its president.Davis tried to portray secession as a legal, peaceful step.


Lincoln’s Inauguration

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

- Abraham Lincoln Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861


Part Eight:

Conclusion


chapter 15 the coming crisis the 1850s chapter 15 the coming crisis the 1850s out of many a history...

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