In a book entitled The Adder's Den or Secrets of the Great Conspiracy to Overthrow Liberty in America, he described a deliberate, systematic plan to expand slavery into the western territories expand the South's slave empire. An arrogant and aggressive "Slave Power" had:
* entrenched slavery in the Constitution;
* caused financial panics to sabotage the Northern economy;
* dispossessed Indians from their native lands; and
* fomented revolution in Texas and war with Mexico in order to expand the South's slave empire.
Most important of all, he insisted, the Southern slaveocracy had secretly assassinated two presidents by poison and unsuccessfully attempted to murder three others.
In support of this conspiracy, Dye made the following sensational charges:
* He alleged
that in 1835, former Vice President John C. Calhoun, outraged by Andrew
Jackson's opposition to states' rights and nullification, encouraged a
deranged man to kill the president. The plot failed when the man's
pistols misfired.
* He maintained that in 1841 agents of the Slave Power poisoned President William Henry Harrison with arsenic just 30 days after he took office, because he refused to cooperate with a southern scheme to annex Texas. This left John Tyler, a defender of slavery as a positive good, in the White House.
* In 1850, President Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana slave owner who had commanded American troops in the Mexican war, alienated the Slave Power by opposing the extension of slavery into California. Just 16 months after taking office, according to Dye, the Slave Power used arsenic to murder the president. He was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore, who was more sympathetic to the Southern cause.
* In 1853, Dye claimed, agents of the Slave Power derailed Franklin Pierce's railroad car while the president-elect was on the way to the presidential inauguration. The New Hampshire Democrat and his wife escaped injury, but their 12-year-old son was killed. In the future, Pierce toed the Southern line.
* On February 23, 1857, President-elect James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and leading politicians dined at Washington's National Hotel. Dye charged that southern agents sprinkled arsenic on the lump sugar used by Northerners to sweeten their tea. Because Southerners drank coffee and used granulated sugar, no Southerners were injured. But, according to Dye, 60 Northerners were poisoned, including the president, and 38 died.
* He maintained that in 1841 agents of the Slave Power poisoned President William Henry Harrison with arsenic just 30 days after he took office, because he refused to cooperate with a southern scheme to annex Texas. This left John Tyler, a defender of slavery as a positive good, in the White House.
* In 1850, President Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana slave owner who had commanded American troops in the Mexican war, alienated the Slave Power by opposing the extension of slavery into California. Just 16 months after taking office, according to Dye, the Slave Power used arsenic to murder the president. He was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore, who was more sympathetic to the Southern cause.
* In 1853, Dye claimed, agents of the Slave Power derailed Franklin Pierce's railroad car while the president-elect was on the way to the presidential inauguration. The New Hampshire Democrat and his wife escaped injury, but their 12-year-old son was killed. In the future, Pierce toed the Southern line.
* On February 23, 1857, President-elect James Buchanan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, and leading politicians dined at Washington's National Hotel. Dye charged that southern agents sprinkled arsenic on the lump sugar used by Northerners to sweeten their tea. Because Southerners drank coffee and used granulated sugar, no Southerners were injured. But, according to Dye, 60 Northerners were poisoned, including the president, and 38 died.
In fact, no credible evidence supports any of John Smith Dye's sensational allegations. Historians have uncovered no connection between John C. Calhoun and the assassination attempt on Andrew Jackson. Nor have researchers found any proof that Harrison's and Taylor's deaths resulted from poison. A 1991 postmortem examination of Taylor's remains found no evidence of arsenic.
There is no evidence that Southern agents derailed Pierce's train; nor is there any evidence that 60 Northerners were poisoned at the dinner for President-elect Buchanan.
Yet even if his charges were baseless, Dye was not alone in interpreting events in conspiratorial terms. His book was only one of the most extreme examples of conspiratorial charges that had been made by abolitionists since the late 1830s.
By the 1850s, a growing number of Northerners had come to believe that an aggressive Southern slave power had seized control of the federal government and threatened to subvert republican ideals of liberty, equality, and self-rule. At the same time, an increasing number of Southerners had begun to believe that antislavery radicals dominated Northern politics and would "rejoice" in the ultimate consequences of abolition-race war.
During the 1850s, the American political system became incapable of containing the sectional disputes between the North and South that had smoldered for more than half a century. One major political party--the Whigs--collapsed. Another--the Democrats--split into Northern and Southern factions. With the breakdown of the party system, the issues raised by slavery exploded. The bonds that had bound the country for more than seven decades began to unravel.
Three days later, the white miners elected a delegate to a convention that had been called to frame a state constitution for California. At the convention, the miners' delegate proposed that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" should ever "be tolerated" in California. The convention adopted his proposal unanimously.
California's application for admission to the Union as a free state in September of 1849 raised the question that would dominate American politics during the 1850s: Would slavery be allowed to expand into the West or would the West remain free soil?
It was the issue of slave expansion--and not the morality of slavery--that would make antislavery a respectable political position in the North, polarize public opinion, and initiate the chain of events that led the United States to civil war.
In 1849, the free states held a commanding majority in the House of Representatives. Therefore the political power of proslavery Southerners depended on maintaining a balance of power in the Senate. If California was admitted as a free state, there would be 16 free states and only 15 slave states. The sectional balance of power in the Senate would be disrupted, and the white South feared that it would lose its ability to influence political events.
Southern politicians talked openly of secession. Robert Toombs of Georgia declared that if the North deprived the South of the right to take slaves into California and New Mexico, "I am for disunion."
During the first half of the nineteenth century, slave labor was becoming an exception in the world. During the early years of the 19th century, Spain's newly independent New World colonies abolished slavery. Then in 1833, Britain emancipated its slaves in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guiana, Saint Vincent, Saint Lucia, Tobago, Grenada, Montserrat, and other possessions in the Caribbean. A decade and a half later, France abolished slavery in its Caribbean colonies. By 1850, New World slavery was confined to Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, a small number of Dutch colonies, and the American South.
British slave emancipation in the Caribbean was followed by an intensified campaign to eradicate the international slave trade. In areas like Brazil and Cuba, slavery could not long survive once the slave trade was cut off because the slave populations of these countries had a skewed sex ratio and were unable to naturally reproduce their numbers. Only in the American South could slavery survive without the Atlantic slave trade.
Exacerbating Southern fears about slavery's future was a sharp decline in slavery in the upper South. Between 1830 and 1860, the proportion of slaves in Missouri's population fell from 18 to 10 percent; in Kentucky from 24 to 19 percent; in Maryland from 23 to 13 percent. The South's leaders feared that in the future the upper South would soon become a region of free labor.
Within the region itself, slave ownership was increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Abolitionists were stigmatizing the South as out of step with the times. Many of the South's leading politicians feared that these criticisms of slavery would weaken lower-class white support for slavery.
Some white Southerners called for the reopening the African slave trade. These people believed that nonslaveholding Southerners would only support slavery if they believed they had a chance of owning slaves themselves. But for most Southern leaders, the best way to demonstrate slavery's viability was through westward expansion.
 President Millard Fillmore |
 Stephen A. Douglas
|
For four years Congress had bitterly and futilely debated the question of the expansion of slavery. Ever since David Wilmot had proposed that slavery be prohibited from any territory acquired from Mexico, opponents of slavery had argued that Congress possessed the power to regulate slavery in all of the territories. Ardent proslavery Southerners vigorously disagreed.
Politicians had repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to work out a compromise. One simple proposal had been to extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. Thus, slavery would have been forbidden north of 36° 30' north latitude but permitted south of that line. This proposal attracted the support of moderate Southerners but generated little support outside the region. Another proposal, supported by two key Democratic senators, Lewis Cass of Michigan and Stephen Douglas of Illinois, was known as "popular sovereignty." It declared that the people actually living in a territory should decide whether or not to allow slavery.
But neither suggestion offered a solution to the whole range of issues dividing the North and South. It was up to Henry Clay, who had just returned to Congress after a seven-year absence, to work out a formula that balanced competing sectional concerns.
For an hour, Clay outlined to Webster a complex plan to save the Union. A compromise could only be effective, he stated, if it addressed all the issues dividing North and South. He proposed that:
* California
be admitted as a free state;
* there be no restriction on slavery in New Mexico and Utah;
* Texas relinquish its claim to land in New Mexico in exchange for federal assumption of Texas's unpaid debts;
* Congress enact a stringent and enforceable fugitive slave law; and
* the slave trade - but not slavery - be abolished in the District of Columbia.
* there be no restriction on slavery in New Mexico and Utah;
* Texas relinquish its claim to land in New Mexico in exchange for federal assumption of Texas's unpaid debts;
* Congress enact a stringent and enforceable fugitive slave law; and
* the slave trade - but not slavery - be abolished in the District of Columbia.
A week later, Clay presented his proposal to the Senate. The aging statesman was known as the "Great Compromiser" for his efforts on behalf of the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise Tariff of 1832 (which resolved the nullification crisis). Once again, he appealed to Northerners and Southerners to place national patriotism ahead of sectional loyalties.
Clay's proposal ignited an eight-month debate in Congress and led John C. Calhoun to threaten Southern secession. Daniel Webster, the North's most spellbinding orator, threw his support behind Clay's compromise. "Mr. President," he began, "I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as Northern man, but as an American ... I speak today for the preservation of the Union. Hear me for my cause." He concluded by warning his listeners that "there can be no such thing as a peaceable secession."
Webster's speech provoked outrage from Northern opponents of compromise. Senator William H. Seward of New York called Webster a "traitor to the cause of freedom." But Webster's speech reassured moderate Southerners that powerful interests in the North were committed to compromise.
Still, opposition to compromise was fierce. Whig President Zachary Taylor argued that California, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Minnesota should all be admitted to statehood before the question of slavery was addressed, a proposal that would have given the North a ten-vote majority in the Senate. William H. Seward denounced the compromise as conceding too much to the South and declared that there was a "higher law" than the Constitution, a law that demanded an end to slavery.
In July, Northern and Southern senators opposed to the very idea of compromise joined ranks to defeat a bill that would have admitted California to the Union and organized New Mexico and Utah without reference to slavery.
Compromise appeared to be dead. A bitterly disappointed and exhausted Henry Clay dejectedly left the Capitol, his efforts apparently for naught. Then with unexpected suddenness the outlook abruptly changed. On the evening of July 9, 1850, President Taylor died of gastroenteritis, five days after taking part in a Fourth of July celebration dedicated to the building of the still unfinished Washington Monument. Taylor's successor was Millard Fillmore, a 50-year-old New Yorker, who was an ardent supporter of compromise.
In Congress, leadership in the fight for a compromise passed to Stephen Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois. An arrogant and dynamic leader, 5 foot 4 inches in height, with stubby legs, a massive head, bushy eyebrows, and a booming voice, Douglas was known as the "Little Giant." Douglas abandoned Clay's strategy of gathering all issues dividing the sections into a single bill. Instead, he introduced Clay's proposals one at a time. In this way, he was able to gather support from varying coalitions of Whigs and Democrats and Northerners and Southerners on each issue.
At the same time, banking and business interests as well as speculators in Texas bonds lobbied and even bribed congressmen to support compromise. Despite these manipulations, the compromise proposals never succeeded in gathering solid congressional support. In the end, only 4 senators and 28 representatives voted for every one of the measures. Nevertheless, they all passed.
As finally approved, the Compromise:
* admitted
California as a free state;
* allowed the territorial legislatures of New Mexico and Utah to settle the question of slavery in those areas;
* set up a stringent federal law for the return of runaway slaves;
* abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia; and
* gave Texas $10 million to abandon its claims to territory in New Mexico east of the Rio Grande.
* allowed the territorial legislatures of New Mexico and Utah to settle the question of slavery in those areas;
* set up a stringent federal law for the return of runaway slaves;
* abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia; and
* gave Texas $10 million to abandon its claims to territory in New Mexico east of the Rio Grande.
The compromise created the illusion that the territorial issue had been resolved once and for all. "There is rejoicing over the land," wrote one Northerner, "the bone of contention is removed; disunion, fanaticism, violence, insurrection are defeated." Sectional hostility had been defused; calm had returned. But, as one Southern editor correctly noted, it was "the calm of preparation, and not of peace."
However, the agreement insured only temporary peace. The admission of California as a free state upset the balance of power between slave and free states in favor of the latter. Now in the minority, the South's paranoia regarding the North only increased. Many Southerners insisted that if the nation elected a president whose majority depended solely on northern votes, they would secede from the Union. In the short term, the Compromise dealt a mortal blow to the Whig Party, which could only exist as a national party so long as slavery remained off the table of national issues. Ironically, even as the Compromise had been introduced by a Whig (Clay), the success of the Compromise signalled the beginning of the end of the 2nd Party System.
Under the Fugitive Slave Law, an accused runaway was to stand trial in front of a special commissioner, not a judge or a jury, and that the commissioner was to be paid $10 if a fugitive was returned to slavery but only $5 if the fugitive was freed. Many Northerners regarded this provision that many Northerners as a bribe to ensure that any black accused of being a runaway would be found guilty. Finally, the law required all U.S. citizens and U.S. marshals to assist in the capture of escapees. Anyone who refused to aid in the capture of a fugitive, interfered with the arrest of a slave, or tried to free a slave already in custody was subject to a heavy fine and imprisonment.
The Fugitive Slave Law produced widespread outrage in the North and convinced thousands of Northerners that slavery should be barred from the western territories.
Attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law provoked wholesale opposition. Eight northern states enacted "personal liberty" laws that prohibited state officials from assisting in the return of runaways and extended the right of jury trial to fugitives. Southerners regarded these attempts to obstruct the return of runaways as a violation of the Constitution and federal law.
The free black communities of the North responded defiantly to the 1850 law. They provided fugitive slaves with sanctuary and established vigilance committees to protect blacks from hired kidnappers who were searching the North for runaways. Some 15,000 free blacks emigrated to Canada, Haiti, the British Caribbean, and Africa after the adoption of the 1850 federal law.
The South's demand for an effective fugitive slave law was a major source of sectional tension. In Christiana, Pennsylvania, in 1851, a gun battle broke out between abolitionists and slave catchers, and in Wisconsin, abolitionists freed a fugitive named Joshua Glover from a local jail. In Boston, federal marshals and 22 companies of state troops were needed to prevent a crowd from storming a court house to free a fugitive named Anthony Burns.
Between 1846 and 1855, more than three million foreigners arrived in America. In cities such as Chicago, Milwaukee, New York, and St. Louis immigrants actually outnumbered native-born citizens. Opponents of immigration capitalized on working-class fear of economic competition from cheaper immigrant labor, and resentment against the growing political power of foreigners.
In 1849 a New Yorker named Charles Allen responded to this anti-Catholic hostility by forming a secret fraternal society made up of native-born Protestant working men. Allen called this secret society "The Order of the Star Spangled Banner," and it soon formed the nucleus of a new political party known as the Know-Nothing or the American party. The party received its name from the fact that when members were asked about the workings of the party, they were supposed to reply, "I know nothing."
By 1855 the Know-Nothings had captured control of the legislatures in parts of New England and were the dominant opposition party to the Democrats in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In the presidential election of 1856, the party supported Millard Fillmore and won more than 21 percent of the popular vote and 8 electoral votes. In Congress, the party had 5 senators and 43 representatives. Between 1853 and 1855, the Know Nothings replaced the Whigs as the nation's second largest party.
In 1855 Abraham Lincoln denounced the Know-Nothings in eloquent terms:
I am not a
Know-Nothing. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression
of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to
me pretty rapid, as a nation we began by declaring "all men are created
equal." We now practically read it, "all men are created equal, except
Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are
created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics." When it
comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they
make no pretense of loving liberty-to Russia, for example, where
despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
By 1856, the Know-Nothing party was in decline. Many Know-Nothing officeholders were relatively unknown men with little political experience. In the states where they gained control, the Know Nothings proved unable to enact their legislative program, which called for:
* a 21-year residency period before immigrants could become citizens and vote;
* a limitation on political office holding to native-born Americans, and
* restrictions on liquor sales.
The Know-Nothing party was supplanted in the North by a new and explosive sectional party, the Republicans. By 1856 Northern workers felt more threatened by the Southern slave power than by the Pope and Catholic immigrants. At the same time, fewer Southerners were willing to support a party that ignored the question of the expansion of slavery. As a result, the Know-Nothing party rapidly dissolved.
Nevertheless, the Know-Nothings left an indelible mark on American politics. The movement eroded loyalty to the national political parties, helped destroy the Whig party, and made the political system less capable of containing the divisive issue of slavery.
 Click on the above
for a map of the US on the eve of Civil War
|
As chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Douglas proposed that the area west of Iowa and Missouri--which had been set aside as a permanent Indian reservation--be opened to white settlement. Southern members of Congress demanded that Douglas add a clause specifically repealing the Missouri Compromise, which would have barred slavery from the region. Instead, the status of slavery in the region would be decided by a vote of the region's settlers. In its final form, Douglas's bill created two territories, Kansas and Nebraska, and declared that the Missouri Compromise was "inoperative and void." With solid support from Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats and the votes of half of the Northern Democratic members of Congress, the measure passed.
Why did Douglas risk reviving the slavery question? His critics charged that the Illinois Senator's chief interest was to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960 and secure a right of way for a transcontinental railroad that would make Chicago the country's transportation hub.
Douglas's supporters pictured him as a proponent of western development and a sincere believer in popular sovereignty as a solution to the problem of slavery in the western territories. Douglas had long insisted that the democratic solution to the slavery issue was to allow the people who actually settled a territory to decide whether slavery would be permitted or forbidden. Popular sovereignty, he believed, would allow the nation to "avoid the slavery agitation for all time to come."
In fact, by 1854 the political and economic pressure to organize Kansas and Nebraska had become overwhelming. Midwestern farmers agitated for new land. A southern transcontinental rail route had been completed through the Gadsden Purchase in December 1853, and promoters of a northern railroad route for a viewed territorial organization as essential. Missouri slaveholders, already bordered on two sides by free states, believed that slavery in their state was doomed if they were surrounded by a free territory.
The chief beneficiary of these defections was a new political organization, the Republican party. A combination of antislavery radicals, old-line Whigs, former Jacksonian Democrats, and antislavery immigrants, the Republican party was committed to barring slavery from the western territories. It included a number of people, like William H. Seward of New York, who believed that blacks should receive civil rights including the right to vote. But the new party also attracted many individuals, like Salmon P. Chase and Abraham Lincoln, who favored colonization as the only workable solution to slavery. Despite their differences, however, all of these groups shared a conviction that the western territories should be saved for free labor. "Free labor, free soil, free men," was the Republican slogan.
 President Franklin
Pierce
|
 Sen. Charles Sumner
|
 |
Even before the 1854 act had been passed, Eli Thayer, a businessman and educator from Worcester, Massachusetts, had organized the New England Emigrant Aid Company to promote the emigration of antislavery New Englanders to Kansas to "vote to make it free." By the summer of 1855, more than 9000 pioneers had settled in Kansas.
Slaveholders from Missouri feared that the New England Emigrant Aid Company wanted to convert Kansas into a haven for runaway slaves. One Missouri lawyer told a cheering crowd that he would hang any "free soil" emigrant who came into Kansas.
Competition between proslavery and antislavery factions reached a climax on May 30, 1855, when Kansas held territorial elections. Although only 1500 men were registered to vote, 6000 ballots were cast, many of them by proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri. As a result, a proslavery legislature was elected, which passed laws stipulating that only proslavery men could hold office or serve on juries. One statute imposed five years imprisonment for anyone questioning the legality of slavery in Kansas.
Free Soilers held their own "Free State" convention in Topeka in the fall of 1855, and drew up a constitution that prohibited slavery in Kansas, and also barred free blacks from the territory. Like the Free Soilers who settled California and Oregon, most Northerners in Kansas wanted the territory to be free and white. They submitted the Topeka constitution to the territory's voters, who approved it by an overwhelming majority. The Topeka government then asked Congress to admit Kansas as a free state.
Kansas now had two legislatures--one pro-slavery, the other against. President Franklin Pierce threw his support behind the proslavery legislature and asked Congress to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state.
Popular sovereignty degenerated into violence. On May 21, 1856, 800 proslavery men, many from Missouri, marched into Lawrence, Kansas, to arrest the leaders of the antislavery government. The posse burned the local hotel, looted a number of houses, destroyed two antislavery printing presses, and killed one man. One member of the posse declared: "Gentlemen, this is the happiest day of my life. I determined to make the fanatics bow before me in the dust and kiss the territorial laws. I have done it, by God."
Two days before the "sack of Lawrence," Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts began a two-day speech in which he denounced "The Crime Against Kansas." "It is the rape of a virgin territory," he declared, "compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.'"
The Massachusetts senator proceeded to denounce a number of Southern senators, including Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Sumner accused Senator Butler of taking "the harlot, Slavery," for his "mistress" and proceeded to make fun of a medical disorder from which Senator Butler suffered. At the rear of the Senate chamber, Stephen Douglas muttered: "That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damned fool."
Two days later, Senator Butler's nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, entered a nearly empty Senate chamber. Sighting Sumner at his desk, Brooks charged at him and began striking the Massachusetts senator over the head with a cane. He swung so hard that the cane broke into pieces. Brooks caned Sumner, rather than challenging him to a duel, because he regarded the Senator as his social inferior. Thus, he wanted to use the same method slaveholders used to chastize slaves.
Brooks then quietly left the Senate chamber, leaving Sumner "as senseless as a corpse for several minutes, his head bleeding copiously from the frightful wounds, and the blood saturating his clothes." It took Sumner three years to recover from his injuries and return to his Senate seat.
Brooks became a hero in the South. Merchants in Charleston, South Carolina, bought Brooks a new cane, inscribed, "Hit him again." A vote to expel Brooks from the House of Representatives failed because every Southern representative but one voted against expulsion. Instead, Brooks was censured. He promptly resigned his seat and was immediately reelected to Congress.
In the North, Sumner became a martyr to the cause of freedom. A million copies of Sumner's "Crime Against Kansas" speech were distributed. A young Massachusetts woman summed up popular feeling in the North, condemning Brooks's assault with these words: "If I had been there I would have torn his eyes out and so I would now if I could."
In strife-torn Kansas, John Brown, a devote Bible-quoting Calvinist who believed he had a personal duty to overthrow slavery, announced that the time had come "to fight fire with fire" and "strike terror in the hearts of proslavery men. The next day, in reprisal for the "sack of Lawrence" and the assault on Sumner, Brown and six companions dragged five proslavery men and boys from their beds at Pottawatomie Creek, split open their skulls with a sword and cut off their hands.
A war of revenge erupted in Kansas. Columns of proslavery Southerners ransacked free farms and took "horses and cattle and everything else they can lay hold of" while they searched for Brown and the other "Pottawatomie killers." Armed bands looted enemy stores and farms. At Osawatomie, proslavery forces attacked John Brown's headquarters, leaving a dozen men dead. John Brown's men killed four Missourians, and proslavery forces retaliated by blockading the free towns of Topeka and Lawrence. Before it was over, guerilla warfare in eastern Kansas left 200 dead.
 James Buchanan |
 Johnn C. Fremont |
The Republican party held its first national convention in Philadelphia and adopted a platform denying the authority of Congress and of territorial legislatures "to give legal existence to slavery" in the territories. The convention nominated the dashing young explorer and soldier John C. Fremont for president as young Republicans chanted, "Free Speech, Free Soil and Fremont." Fremont was a romantic figure who had led more than a dozen major explorations of the Rocky Mountains and Far West.
The election was one of the most bitter in American history and the first in which voting divided along rigid sectional lines. The Democratic strategy was to picture the Republican party as a hotbed of radicalism. Democrats called the Republicans the party of disunion and described Fremont as a Catholic, a drunkard, a bastard, and a quot;black abolitionistquot; who would destroy the union.
A Republican Representative from Ohio responded by calling for slave insurrection: "I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South; when the black man ... shall assert his freedom and wage a war of extermination against his master."
Buchanan won 174 electoral college votes to 114 for Fremont. Fremont did not receive a single vote in the south of the Mason-Dixon line, but he carried eleven free states. If only two more states had voted in his favor, the Republicans would have won the election.
 Dred Scott
|
 Roger B. Taney |
In 1846, a Missouri slave, Dred Scott, sued for his freedom. Scott argued that while he had been the slave of an army surgeon, he had lived for four years in Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory, and that his residence on free soil had erased his slave status. In 1850 a Missouri court gave Scott his freedom, but two years later, the Missouri supreme court reversed this decision and returned Scott to slavery. Scott then appealed to the federal courts.
For five years, the case proceeded through the federal courts. For more than a year, the Court withheld its decision. Many thought that the Court delayed its ruling to ensure a Democratic victory in the 1856 elections. Then, in March 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced the Court's decision. By a 7-2 margin, the Court ruled that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court, that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the territories.
All nine justices rendered separate opinions, but Chief Justice Taney delivered the opinion that expressed the position of the Court's majority. His opinion represented a judicial defense of the most extreme proslavery position.
The chief justice made two sweeping rulings. The first was that Dred Scott had no right to sue in federal court because neither slaves nor free blacks were citizens of the United States. At the time the Constitution was adopted, the chief justice wrote, blacks had been "regarded as beings of an inferior order" with "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Second, Taney declared that Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the federal territories since any law excluding slavery property from the territories was a violation of the Fifth Amendment prohibition against the seizure of property without due process of law. For the first time since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, the Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional.
Newspaper headlines summarized the Court's rulings:
SLAVERY ALONE NATIONAL--THE MISSOURI COMPROMISE UNCONSTITUTIONAL - NEGROES CANNOT BE CITIZENS--THE TRIUMPH OF SLAVERY COMPLETE.
In a single decision, the Court sought to resolve all the major constitutional questions raised by slavery. It declared that the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were not intended to apply to black Americans. It stated that the Republican party platform - barring slavery from the western territories--was unconstitutional. And it ruled that Stephen Douglas's doctrine of "popular sovereignty"--which stated that territorial governments had the power to prohibit slavery--was also unconstitutional.
Republicans reacted with scorn. The decision, said the New York Tribune, carried as much moral weight as "the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington barroom." Many Republicans--including an Illinois politician named Abraham Lincoln--regarded the decision as part of a slave power conspiracy to legalize slavery throughout the United States.
The Dred Scott decision was a major political miscalculation. In its ruling, the Supreme Court sought to solve the slavery controversy once and for all. Instead the Court intensified sectional strife, undercut possible compromise solutions to the divisive issue of the expansion of slavery, and weakened the moral authority of the judiciary.
 William Seward
|
By 1858, a growing number of Northerners were convinced that two fundamentally antagonistic societies had evolved in the nation, one dedicated to freedom, the other opposed. They had come to believe that their society was locked in a life and death struggle with a Southern society dominated by an aggressive slave power, which had seized control of the federal government and imperiled the liberties of free people. Declared the New York Tribune:
We are not one
people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people
for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.
 |
The public knew little about the man the Republicans selected to run against Douglas. Lincoln had been born on February 12, 1809, in a log cabin near Hodgenville, Kentucky, and he grew up on the wild Kentucky and Indiana frontier. At the age of 21, he moved to Illinois, where he worked as a clerk in a country store, volunteered to fight Indians in the Black Hawk War, became a local postmaster and a lawyer, and served four terms in the lower house of the Illinois General Assembly.
A Whig in politics, Lincoln was elected in 1846 to the U.S. House of Representatives, but his stand against the Mexican War had made him too unpopular to win reelection. After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, Lincoln reentered politics, and in 1858 the Republican party nominated him to run against Douglas for the Senate.
Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination with the famous words: "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this Government cannot endure permanently half-slave and half-free." He did not believe the Union would fall, but he did predict that it would cease to be divided. Lincoln proceeded to argue that Stephen Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision were part of a conspiracy to make slavery lawful "in all the States, old as well as new--North as well as South."
For four months Lincoln and Douglas crisscrossed Illinois, traveling nearly 10,000 miles and participating in seven face-to-face debates before crowds of up to 15,000.
Douglas's strategy in the debates was to picture Lincoln as a fanatical "Black Republican" whose goal was to incite civil war, emancipate the slaves, and make blacks the social and political equals of whites.
Lincoln denied that he was a radical. He said that he supported the Fugitive Slave Law and opposed any interference with slavery in the states where it already existed.
During the course of the debates, Lincoln and Douglas presented two sharply contrasting views of the problem of slavery. Douglas argued that slavery was a dying institution that had reached its natural limits and could not thrive where climate and soil were inhospitable. He asserted that the problem of slavery could best be resolved if it were treated as essentially a local problem.
Lincoln, on the other hand, regarded slavery as a dynamic, expansionistic institution, hungry for new territory. He argued that if Northerners allowed slavery to spread unchecked, slave owners would make slavery a national institution and would reduce all laborers, white as well as black, to a state of virtual slavery.
The sharpest difference between the two candidates involved the issue of black Americans' legal rights. Douglas was unable to conceive of blacks as anything but inferior to whites, and he was unalterably opposed to Negro citizenship. "I want citizenship for whites only," he declared. Lincoln said that he, too, was opposed to "bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races." But he insisted that black Americans were equal to Douglas and "every living man" in their right to life, liberty, and the fruits of their own labor.
The debates reached a climax on a damp chilly August 27. At Freeport, Illinois, Lincoln asked Douglas to reconcile the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which denied Congress the power to exclude slavery from a territory, with popular sovereignty. Could the residents of a territory "in any lawful way" exclude slavery prior to statehood?
Douglas replied by stating that the residents of a territory could exclude slavery by refusing to pass laws protecting slaveholders' property rights. "Slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere," he declared, "unless it is supported by local police regulations."
Lincoln had maneuvered Douglas into a trap. Any way he answered, Douglas was certain to alienate Northern Free Soilers or proslavery Southerners. The Dred Scott decision had given slave owners the right to take their slavery into any western territories. Now Douglas said that territorial settlers could exclude slavery, despite what the Court had ruled. Douglas won reelection, but his cautious statements antagonized Southerners and Northern Free Soilers alike.
In the fall election of 1858, the general public in Illinois did not have an opportunity to vote for either Lincoln or Douglas because the state legislature, and not individual voters, actually elected the Illinois senator. In the final balloting, the Republicans outpolled the Democrats. But the Democrats had gerrymandered the voting districts so skillfully that they kept control of the state legislature.
Although Lincoln failed to win a Senate seat, his battle with Stephen Douglas had catapulted him into the national spotlight and made him a serious presidential possibility in 1860. As Lincoln himself noted, his defeat was "a slip and not a fall."
 The Raid on
Harper's Ferry
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 John Brown's fort today |
 "The Last
Impression of John Brown," by Thomas Hovenden
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The Kansas guerrilla leader asked Douglass if he would join a band of raiders who would seize a federal arsenal and spark a mass uprising of slaves. "When I strike," Brown said, "the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall need you to help hive them."
"No," Douglass replied. Brown's plan, he knew, was suicidal. Brown had earlier proposed a somewhat more realistic plan. According to that scheme, Brown would have launched guerrilla activity in the Virginia mountains, providing a haven for slaves and an escape route into the North. That scheme had a chance of working, but Brown's new plan was hopeless.
Up until the Kansas-Nebraska Act, abolitionists were averse to the use of violence. Opponents of slavery hoped to use moral suasion and other peaceful means to eliminate slavery. But by the mid-1850s, the abolitionists' aversion to violence had begun to fade. On the night of October 16, 1859, violence came, and John Brown was its instrument.
As early as 1857, John Brown had begun to raise money and recruit men for an invasion of the South. Brown told his backers that only through insurrection could this "slave-cursed Republic be restored to the principles of the Declaration of Independence."
Brown's plan was to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and arm slaves from the surrounding countryside. His long-range goal was to drive southward into Tennessee and Alabama, raiding federal arsenals and inciting slave insurrections. Failing that, he hoped to ignite a sectional crisis that would destroy slavery.
At 8 o'clock Sunday evening, October 16, John Brown led a raiding party of approximately 21 men toward Harpers Ferry, where they captured the lone night watchman and cut the town's telegraph lines. Encountering no resistance, Brown's raiders seized the federal arsenal, an armory, and a rifle works along with several million dollars worth of arms and munitions. Brown then sent out several detachments to round up hostages and liberate slaves.
But Brown's play soon went awry. During the night, a church bell began to toll, warning neighboring farmers and militiamen from the surrounding countryside that a slave insurrection was under way. Local townspeople arose from their beds and gathered in the streets, armed with axes, knives, and squirrel rifles. Within hours, militia companies from villages within a 30-mile radius of Harpers Ferry cut off Brown's escape routes and trapped Brown's men in the armory.
Twice, Brown sent men carrying flags of truce to negotiate. On both occasions, drunken mobs, yelling "Kill them, Kill them!" gunned the men down.
John Brown's assault against slavery lasted less than two days. Early Tuesday morning, October 18, U.S. Marines, commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart, arrived in Harpers Ferry. Brown and his men took refuge in a fire engine house and battered holes through the building's brick wall to shoot through. A hostage later described the climactic scene:
With one son dead by his side and
another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand
and held his rifle with the other and commanded his men… encouraging
them to fire and sell their lives as dearly as they could.
Later that morning, Colonel Lee's Marines stormed the engine house and rammed down its doors. Brown and his men continued firing until the leader of the storming party cornered Brown and knocked him unconscious with a sword. Five of Brown's party escaped, ten were killed, and seven, including Brown himself, were taken prisoner.
A week later, John Brown was put on trial in a Virginia court, even though his attack had occurred on federal property. During the six-day proceedings, Brown refused to plead insanity as a defense. He was found guilty of treason, conspiracy, and murder, and was sentenced to die on the gallows.
The trial's high point came at the very end when Brown was allowed to make a five-minute speech. His words helped convince thousands of Northerners that this grizzled man of 59, with his "piercing eyes" and "resolute countenance," was a martyr to the cause of freedom. Brown denied that he had come to Virginia to commit violence. His only goal, he said, was to liberate the slaves:
If it is deemed necessary that I
should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and
mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose
rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say
let it be done.
Brown's execution was set for December 2. Before he went to the gallows, Brown wrote one last message: "I...am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood." At 11 A.M., he was led to the execution site, a halter was placed around his neck, and a sheriff led him over a trapdoor. The sheriff cut the rope and the trapdoor opened. As the old man's body convulsed on the gallows, a Virginia officer cried out: "So perish all enemies of Virginia!"
Across the North, church bells tolled, flags flew at half-mast, and buildings were draped in black bunting. Ralph Waldo Emerson compared Brown to Jesus Christ and declared that his death had made "the gallows as glorious as the cross." William Lloyd Garrison, previously the strongest exponent of nonviolent opposition to slavery, announced that Brown's death had convinced him of "the need for violence" to destroy slavery. He told a Boston meeting that "every slave holder has forfeited his right to live," if he opposed immediate emancipation.
Prominent Northern Democrats and Republicans, including Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, spoke out forcefully against Brown's raid and his tactics. Lincoln expressed the views of the Republican leadership, when he denounced Brown's raid as an act of "violence, bloodshed, and treason" that deserved to be punished by death. But Southern whites refused to believe that politicians like Lincoln and Douglas represented the true opinion of most Northerners. These men condemned Brown's "invasion," observed a Virginia senator, "only because it failed."
The Northern reaction to John Brown's raid convinced many white Southerners that a majority of Northerners wished to free the slaves and incite a race war. Southern extremists, known as "fire-eaters," told large crowds that John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry was "the first act in the grand tragedy of emancipation, and the subjugation of the South in bloody treason."
After Harpers Ferry, Southerners increasingly believed that secession and creation of a slaveholding confederacy were now the South's only options. A Virginia newspaper noted that there were "thousands of men in our midst who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union as a madman's dream, but who now hold the opinion that its days are numbered."
Fearing further actions by radical abolitionists, the southern militia abanonded its usual laxity began drilling in earnest. When and if a break came, the South would have the military means to defend itself.
The seizure of vast new territories from Mexico reignited the issue of expansion. The Compromise of 1850 attempted to settle the problem by admitting California as a free state, but allowing slavery in the rest of the Mexican cession. Enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law as part of the compromise exacerbated sectional tensions.
The question of slavery in the territories exploded once again in 1854 when Senator Stephen A. Douglas proposed that the Kansas and Nebraska territories be opened to white settlement and that the status of slavery be decided according to the principle of popular sovereignty. The Kansas-Nebraska Act convinced many Northerners that the South wanted to open all federal territories to slavery and brought into existence a new sectional party, the Republicans, committed to excluding slavery from the territories.
Sectional conflict was intensified by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which declared that Congress could not exclude slavery from the western territories, and by John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. The final bonds that had held the Union together had come unraveled.