THE FIGHT OVER SLAVERY- AMERICAN CIVIL WAR

Up to 1860 only a few extremists in the South, called fire-eaters, wanted to apply the doctrine of secession to create a separate Southern country. Moderates of both North and South kept hoping to compromise their differences over slavery, tariffs, and the territories in the forum of the Congress of the United States. Compromise was possible as long as neither side controlled the Senate.

With the admission of Alabama in 1819, the Senate became perfectly balanced. However, vast territories in the West and Southwest, acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War, would soon be petitioning for statehood. North and South began a long and bitter struggle over whether the territories would enter the Union as free or slave states.

A

Missouri Compromise

Under the Constitution of the United States, the federal government had no authority to interfere with slavery within the states. Northern opponents of slavery could hope only to prevent it from spreading. They tried to do this in 1818, when Missouri sought admission to the Union with a constitution permitting slavery. After two years of bitter controversy a solution was found in the Missouri Compromise. This compromise admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state and admitted Maine as a free state to keep the balance in the Senate. It also provided that slavery would be excluded from the still unorganized part of the Louisiana Territory. A line was drawn from Missouri’s southern boundary, at the latitude of 36°30’, and slavery would not be allowed in the territory north of that line,with the exception of Missouri.

B

Compromise of 1850

Agitation against slavery continued in the North. The South reacted by defending it ever more strongly. The Mexican War, by which the United States made good its annexation of Texas and acquired New Mexico, Arizona, California, and several of the present Rocky Mountain states, led to a new crisis. Antislavery forces demanded that slavery be excluded from any lands ceded by Mexico. Slaveholders pressed for their share of the new territories and for other safeguards to protect slavery. For a time the country seemed to be headed for civil war. Again a solution was found in compromise.The settlement was the Compromise Measures of 1850. Among other things, this compromise admitted California as a free state and set up territorial governments in the remainder of the Mexican cession with authority to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery or not. Moderates in both North and South hoped that the slavery question was settled, at least for a while.

C

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

The year after the compromise a literary event shook the country. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that was published serially in a newspaper in 1851 and in book form the year after. It was widely read in the United States and abroad and moved many to join the cause of abolition. The South indignantly denied this indictment of slavery. Stowe’s book increased partisan feeling over slavery and intensified sectional differences.

D

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854 Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill to organize the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, thus opening these areas to white settlement. As finally passed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise and provided that settlers in the territories should decide “all questions pertaining to slavery.” This doctrine was known as popular sovereignty. Since Kansas and Nebraska were north of the line established in the Missouri Compromise, the act made possible the extension of the slave system into territory previously considered free soil. Soon, settlers in Kansas were engaged in a bloody battle to decide the slavery issue (see Border War).

The passage of the act caused a political explosion in the North. Abraham Lincoln, a longtime member of the Whig Party, represented the view of many thousands when he wrote, in the third person, that “the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused him as he had never been before.” Antislavery groups met to form a new party, which they named the Republican Party. By 1856 the party was broad enough and strong enough to put a national ticket, headed by John C. Frémont, into the presidential election. The Republicans lost by a relatively narrow margin.

E

Dred Scott Case

In 1857 the Supreme Court of the United States added to the mounting tension by its decision in the Dred Scott Case. In that case, Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom on the grounds that when his master had taken him to free territories, Scott was no longer a slave. In separate opinions a majority of the justices held that Scott did not have the right to file suit in state or federal courts because he was not a citizen of the United States. As a slave, he was considered property. The justices continued to write that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise and other legislation limiting slavery were unconstitutional.

F

Lincoln-Douglas Debates

In 1858 Douglas was running for reelection to the Senate. His opponent was Abraham Lincoln, then the leader of the Republican Party in Illinois. In a series of seven debates, Lincoln and Douglas argued, among other things, the question of the extension of slavery. Douglas stood on his doctrine of popular sovereignty, holding that the people of the territories could elect to have slavery. They could also elect not to have it. Lincoln, on the other hand, argued that slavery was “a moral, a social, and a political wrong” and that it was the duty of the federal government to prohibit its extension into the territories.

Although the Republicans carried the state ticket and outvoted the Democrats, the Illinois legislature reelected Douglas to the Senate. The campaign, widely reported in the newspapers, had an importance far beyond the fate of the two candidates. It demonstrated to the South that the Republican Party was steadily growing in strength and that it would oppose the extension of slavery by every possible means. The campaign also showed Douglas to be an unreliable ally of the South. He had said repeatedly in the debates that he did not care whether slavery was voted up or down. In addition, Lincoln, hitherto known only locally, gained a national reputation even in defeat.

G

John Brown’s Raid

As soon as the 1858 elections were over, political maneuvering began over the 1860 presidential election. Many states were in the process of choosing delegates to the national conventions when news of a raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), swept the nation. On October 16, 1859, the raiders had seized the federal armory and arsenal there. They surrendered two days later. Authorities found that the raid had been led by John Brown, whose raids and murders in Kansas and Missouri had already made him an outlaw. Brown and his followers had planned to march their army into the South to forcibly free slaves. Brown was arrested, tried, and convicted. When he was executed for his crime, thousands of Northerners hailed him as a martyr, while Southerners became increasingly fearful of armed intervention in their states by Northern abolitionists.

H

Election of 1860

The slavery question overshadowed all others in the presidential election year of 1860. At the Democratic National Convention, held in Charleston, South Carolina, on April 23, the delegates from the South refused to support Douglas, the leading contender, because of his position on slavery, and they prevented the naming of a candidate. The convention adjourned to meet on June 18 in Baltimore, Maryland. On May 16 the Republican National Convention met in Chicago, Illinois, and passed over the two most popular aspirants, William H. Seward and Salmon P. Chase. Instead they nominated the lesser known Abraham Lincoln. In Baltimore, at the reconvened Democratic convention after several days of wrangling, the Southern delegates walked out of the convention. Those who remained nominated Douglas. On June 28 the Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Democratic Party, long a unifying force in the nation, was thus split over sectional differences into two bitterly opposed factions. The Constitutional Union Party, a group of conservatives who condemned sectional parties, placed a fourth ticket, headed by John Bell of Tennessee, in the field.

Because of this division, Lincoln won easily, although he did not receive a majority of the popular vote. The popular vote was: Lincoln, 1,866,452; Douglas, 1,376,957; Breckinridge, 849,781; Bell, 588,879. Lincoln won in the electoral college, where he received 180 votes against 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and 12 for Douglas.

I

The South Secedes

During the campaign many Southerners had threatened that their states would secede from the Union if Lincoln was elected because they feared that a Lincoln administration would threaten slavery. Few people in the North believed them. A month before the election, however, Governor William Henry Gist of South Carolina wrote the governors of all the Cotton States except Texas that South Carolina would secede in the event of Lincoln’s election and asked what course the other states would follow.

As soon as it was certain that Lincoln had won, the South Carolina legislature summoned a special convention. It met on December 17, 1860, in Charleston. Three days later the convention unanimously passed an ordinance dissolving “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States.” Similar conventions were held by other Southern states, and similar ordinances were adopted, although not by unanimous votes. The first states to follow South Carolina’s course in 1861 were: Mississippi, January 9; Florida, January 10; Alabama, January 11; Georgia, January 19; Louisiana, January 26; and Texas, February 1. In April, Lincoln called for states to send militias for national service to suppress the rebellion. The upper South refused to send their militias to coerce the seceded states. Instead they joined the lower South in secession beginning with Virginia on April 17th; Arkansas, May 6; North Carolina, May 20; and Tennessee, June 8.

J

The Confederacy

On February 4, delegates from the first six states to secede met in Montgomery, Alabama, to set up a provisional government for the Confederate States of America. Four days later they adopted a constitution modeled to a large extent on the Constitution of the United States. On February 9 the provisional Confederate Congress elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi provisional president and Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia provisional vice president. Both men were to hold office until February 22, 1862. On that date, after an uncontested election in November 1861, Davis and Stephens were given permanent status.

K

Lincoln’s Inauguration

When Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, seven states had seceded and organized a working government. Southern leaders believed that their action was lawful, but Lincoln and a majority of Northerners refused to accept the right of Southern states to secede.

The new president announced in his inaugural address that he would “hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government.” He promised that the government would not “assail” the states of the South, and he pleaded with the Southern people not to act hastily but to give the new administration a chance to prove that it was not hostile. Lincoln seems to have believed that with time, and without an act of provocation, the states in secession might return to the Union, but time ran out.