Module 7 This discussion addresses the following outcomes: Interpret the reactions to the Dred Scott v. Sanford court case from several historical perspectives and consider the case’s role in the sect

Introduction

As Module 6 showed, the Mexican-American War exposed a deep national divide over the role and future of slavery in the United States. The controversies that had been engendered by the war—Texas’ annexation, the Wilmot Proviso, and the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo—only quickened during the 1850s. The cascade of events in the 1850s (by which we also include the election of 1860) led to the secession of the Lower Southern states and the start of the Civil War itself. During the first few months of war, both sides struggled to find strategies to force the other side to terms. This chapter addresses the events of the 1850s, the election of 1860 and its aftermath, secession, and the first few months of the Civil War.

1. The Compromise of 1850

While some may have felt that victory over Mexico cemented an American national identity, the impact of sectionalism was the decade’s constant refrain. Without committing overly to a sense of inevitability about the Civil War, it is easy to see how the Mexican-American War set in motion a series of events that resulted in war just barely a decade later.

As we discussed in the last module, the Wilmot Proviso, which failed to pass during several attempts, had stirred Southern paranoia that the North could not be trusted to maintain the free-slave state equilibrium. Likewise, Northerners may have celebrated American victory in the recent war, but criticized the strength of the Southern “slave power” in politics. One primary fear was that the “slave power” would open the western territories to slavery, thereby undercutting the “free labor” ideology and shutting out free-state settlers.

The issue of slavery in the new territories might have remained a backburner issue had it not been for the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill, California, in 1848. That event opened the way for a mass American migration west. The sheer number of migrants required the northwestern territories be organized and/or be put on the path to statehood. Likewise, Southerners wanted the southwest territories organized so slavery would be legally recognized. Southerners were aware that California would like come into the Union as a free state, so slave interests needed to be protected elsewhere.

The territorial issue, combined with other pressing section-related issues, convinced Congressional leaders to consider some “grand bargain” to resolve them. If compromises had been made in 1789 and 1820, why not in 1850? A package of bills was assembled and finally passed after furious debates over the first part of the year.

The final bills provided for:

• California to be admitted as a free state

• Texas to cede its New Mexico claims to the US and, in exchange, the US would assume much of its pre-admission debt

• The remaining territory from Mexico to be organized without specific mention of slave or free status

• The slave trade (but not slave ownership) to be abolished in the District of Columbia

• A strengthened law regarding the return of escaped slaves, i.e. the Fugitive Slave Act (Links to an external site.)

The Compromise of 1850 may have had something for everyone to like but it also had something for everyone to hate. Northerners were particularly outraged by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, a beefed up version of earlier measures. Law enforcement officers were required to participate in the recovery of accused escaped slaves—even though many Northern states had laws banning such collaboration. Slaveowners faced an easier time claiming persons as escaped slaves and the law authorized special commissions to decide the fate of accused runaways without calling witnesses nor enacting normal procedural safeguards. Those who refused or harbored runaways were subject to arrest and fines. To Northerners, the Fugitive Slave Act represented the stark reality of the “slave power.” In many ways, it helped heighten Northern white sentiments for enslaved blacks and free blacks who might be maliciously abducted and sent south.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her famed novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Links to an external site.) in 1852, for example, her last chapter attacked the Fugitive Slave Act specifically:

For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down. But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens,—when she heard, on all hands, from kind, compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberations and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on this head,—she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality. She has endeavored to show it fairly, in its best and its worst phases. In its best aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side?

The Fugitive Slave Act motivated many black Northerners to move north into Canada to avoid potential kidnapping. Northerners also believed that the Fugitive Slave Act eroded states’ rights by requiring states disregard their own legal procedures regarding accused runaway slaves.

2. Party Implosion, Party Fragmentation, Party Reorganization

The Compromise of 1850 fragmented the Whig Party even more as Southern Whigs found Northern Whigs unreliable. The Democrats handily won the 1852 election by nominating pro-Southern/slavery New Hampshire Senator Franklin Pierce (Links to an external site.). The Democrats’ unity was illusory, however, and only by comparison with the disintegrating Whigs could they claim to be a “national party.The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act (Links to an external site.) in 1854 dealt a death blow to the Whig party while behind the scenes fostering Democratic disunity. Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas (Links to an external site.), an ambitious Democrat with aspirations to national office, thought he had figured out a way to organize the territory of Kansas-Nebraska, keep Northern and Southern partisans happy, and sidestep the disaffection with the Compromise of 1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed for voters in the proposed new Kansas Territory (which bordered Missouri, a slave state) to decide for themselves whether or not they would have slavery. This attempt at “popular sovereignty” appealed to the idea of local control over the process of becoming a state because the national legislature would leave the issue to local voters, who presumably understood the issues better.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act had several results. First, it led to the official breakup of the Whigs. New parties filled the void. The first was the American Party, an anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic movement that operated initially as a secret society. They were nicknamed the “Know-Nothings (Links to an external site.)” from their pledge to say “I know nothing” if asked about the movement. The Know-Nothings surged in popularity by organizing disaffected Northern Whigs and some disaffected Democrats, particularly in the Northeast where there was a higher concentration of immigrants. Anti-slavery was not their main focus, but as the former Whigs took up that cause, the Know Nothings lost some of their influence to another, new party.

The other new party was comprised of Northern Whigs and anti-slavery elements from other parties. Hearkening back to the early national era, they called themselves Republicans. The slavery controversy, in particular the fallout from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, rallied the Republicans from 1854 to 1856. Their 1856 presidential candidate, John C. Frémont (Links to an external site.), made a respectable showing in the North (he did not appear on Southern ballots, for reasons which will be discussed below) and showed that Northern voters would coalesce around an anti-slavery, anti-Southern platform if the message was pitched correctly.

3. “Bleeding Kansas”

Senator Douglas’s handiwork soon turned into a monstrosity. Douglas and other advocates of popular sovereignty predicted a smooth implementation. Instead, “Bleeding Kansas” provided a window onto the impending Civil War. Pro- and anti-slave settlers came into the state, hoping to bring enough voters to implement a territorial government that they would control. Violence and electoral fraud was rife, and both sides begged arms and money from supporters to carry on the fight. The initial territorial elections had more votes than voters, but that did not bother Southern politicians who celebrated the popular decision. Kansas’ pro-slave delegates met in Lecompton to begin organizing a territorial government with slavery; free-staters in Topeka and did the same for their interests. Both sides organized local militia and engaged in periodic skirmishing that had to be suppressed by the US Army.

President Buchanan was so vocally pro-Southern (despite being from Pennsylvania) that even his appointed territorial governor protested Buchanan’s support of the slave-staters. Republicans rallied Northern voters about the influence of the “slave power” in Kansas and, by extension, in other future territories. The Lecompton Constitution (Links to an external site.), the proposed state constitution written by slave state supporters, was so odious to Senator Douglas that he broke with and alienated himself from Southern Democrats over the document. Kansas was now openly fragmenting the Democrats into Northern and Southern factions. When Congress voted to admit Kansas in 1861, after the Southern states had seceded, it was as a free state.

The mid-1850s witnessed Democrats and the slave states pushing back against Republican efforts, to some success. The Republican vulnerability was that any anti-slavery efforts could be twisted into accusations that they were pro-black and abolitionist. Democrats made the chargeharges of “Black Republicanism” with repetition. In response, Republicans attempted to fine tune their message to audiences that were still very much racist, if not in full support of slavery, by claiming that they were about defending the interests of whites and wished to limit slavery to where it already existed.

The Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v Sandford (Links to an external site.) (1857), which you will be discussing this week, altered the political calculus even more. Dred Scott was an enslaved black man, officially the property of a US Army surgeon from Missouri. During his master’s military service, Scott resided in Illinois and the (free) Wisconsin Territory. Scott married Harriet Robinson, an enslaved woman of another Army officer. Scott’s ownership passed to his master’s wife after the master’s death. Scott attempted to purchase his freedom, was refused, and then sued his owner’s widow.

Scott’s 1847 lawsuit was less hopeless than it appeared at first sight. Missouri had once recognized that residence in (but not escape to) a free state meant freedom for an enslaved person. But by the 1850s, Missouri courts were taking a harder line that slavery was not affected by residency nor a potential change in slave/free status. Scott’s claim was rejected by the Missouri courts so he took his case to the federal court system in 1853, claiming his freedom. In early 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its decision.

The Buchanan administration hoped to use the Scott decision to salvage its reputation and to settle the sectional controversy decisively. Buchanan personally lobbied the Northern justices, hoping to secure a unanimous decision.

Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote the 7-2 decision, announced in March 1857. Part of the case hinged upon whether Scott was by definition a citizen of either Missouri or the United States, thus possessing legal standing to sue. The Court ruled that he was not a citizen and so could not sue, but that the overall issue was a federal matter worthy of decision. Taney then wrote that the US Constitution and federal law did not provide for citizenship nor equal rights to blacks. He argued,  “[blacks were] altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect….”

Taney expanded his legal reasoning to new heights in the rest of his decision. He may have believed that he was providing exhaustive treatment of the subject, but in the end he stoked the sectional flames to new heights, too. Taney ruled that federal legislative acts could not dictate where slavery could be forbidden when it involved federal property. In other words, the Court decided that the Missouri Compromise was nullified and slaves were absolute property, their owners vested with Constitutional rights to their use and possession.

The response by both sides was swift. Southerners were heartened that the nation’s highest court agreed with them on the issue of slave property. As the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in March 1857 (though a Northern city, Cincinnati had many Southern and Democratic sympathies): “Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery…is now the supreme law of the land” and “the decision crushes the life out of that miserable Black Republican organization.” For their part, Republicans challenged Taney’s legal logic, arguing that Congress always had the power to legislate slavery in the territories. Other Republicans argued that taken to its logical conclusion, the Court could overrule bans on slavery everywhere in the United States. Northern Democrats may have hoped that the Scott v. Sandford decision would become political reality, but others like Senator Douglas were dismayed at the sweep of the Court’s decision. These same politicians were also concerned that Northern voters would turn against them at the polls.

Douglas had to defend himself against the Scott v. Sandford case in the 1858 campaign season. If Democrats won the Illinois state legislature, Douglas would retain his seat (since Senators were appointed rather than elected). If Republicans won, then the Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln would become the new senator. Both men traveled the state, engaging in a series of debates (Links to an external site.). Douglas attempted to paint the Republicans as abolitionist; Lincoln attempted to portray Douglas as beholden to the “slave power.”

At Freeport, Illinois, Douglas confronted a question about the Scott vs. Sandford decision: did the Court’s decision require that slavery be allowed in the territories? Douglas answered no, and in what has become known as the Freeport Doctrine (Links to an external site.) argued that popular sovereignty still ruled, that a people could exclude slavery by not enacting legislation to protect it. Such logic may have worked for Douglas in the debates, but it further diminished his reputation among his remaining Southern allies. Their take on the Freeport Doctrine was that voters could defy the Scott v. Sandford decision and deny slaveowners their guaranteed property rights.

By 1859 it was patently clear that the free versus slave state balance was a thing of the past—both Oregon and Minnesota were admitted as free states without any counterbalancing slave states admitted or planned. Southerners still controlled the House, dominated the Supreme Court, and had recently elected two pro-slavery Northern presidents in Pierce and Buchanan. But Southern fears about the fate of slavery remained strong.

Southern fears about slavery’s future hardened further by an event at the end of 1859. John Brown (Links to an external site.) was an obscure Northern farmer, failed businessmen, and self-made and self-directed abolitionist. Brown’s life turned around when he adopted the anti-slavery cause and followed five of his sons to Kansas to participate in the free state movement there. Brown found purpose in Kansas, rallying free state forces and engaging in battles against slave state forces. But in 1856 Brown went from militant abolitionism to murder. One night in May, he and his supporters responded to a pro-slavery attack by rounding up and killing five pro-slave militants. Brown then went on the run, and in the process became a sort of folk hero to Northern abolitionists who had grown frustrated with the movement’s innate pacifism and lack of results. To them, Brown was decisive and dedicated.

Brown then took his plans even further in 1859. With subsidies from several abolitionists, Brown developed a scheme to launch a slave insurrection in the South. He and a group of armed supporters, including several of his sons, planned to raid the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry (Links to an external site.), Virginia (now in West Virginia) in October 1859. Undermanned and acting against the warnings of many, including noted black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the raid commenced on the night of October 16. It failed almost from its start. After a brief siege, a detachment of US Marines under the command of Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee battered down the last of Brown’s defenses and captured him.

Within two weeks Brown was put on trial by the state of Virginia for treason, not by the federal government. Rejecting his attorney’s pleas that he was insane, Brown defended his actions in court. His trial was a media spectacle and reporters from both North and South poured in to town. Brown gave interviews to reporters who came in from both North and South and wrote letters justifying his actions and predicting war over slavery. He was ultimately sentenced to death by hanging.

Brown’s posthumous success was magnitudes greater than it had been in life. On the day of his hanging, Brown wrote, “"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

While the South was happy to have executed an insurrectionist, feelings in the North were mixed. Perhaps only a minority approved of Brown’s tactics, but more sympathized with his cause. Church bells in the North tolled for his death and famous abolitionists memorialized his passing or justified his passion for abolitionism. Southern relief at the raid’s failure was soon taken over by paranoia about Northern collaboration; Republicans were implicitly blamed for inspiring Brown’s activities. Whether stemming from an insane extremist or a misguided zealot, Brown’s Raid prefigured the Civil War and fittingly capped off the end of a tumultuous decade.

The 1850s began with a compromise that promised to settle the nation’s divisive sectional disputes. But new crises flared up and further worsened sectional relations. Just over a decade later, the “irrepressible conflict” had begun. North and South both predicted victory and went to war expecting the other to yield. After the first year of fighting, both sides had to reconsider their strategies. For the South, survival was the foremost strategy. For the North, the destruction of slavery became a war aim and increasingly a moral one.