not be brought into the District of Columbia to be bought or sold. On the surface, this appeared to be a clear moral victory for antislavery activists. The fine print, however, revealed that slaves already within the District of Columbia could continue to be bought and sold.
What did the compromise do?
The compromise gave each section what appeared to be a temporary advantage, and provided the nation with a politically acceptable, if temporary, solution to the dangerously divisive issue of slavery in the new territories of the West. In the long run, however, the Compromise of 1850 really accomplished very little, except to frustrate everyone and whet appetites for another confrontation — with the intention to settle old political scores and win a decisive victory to settle the question of the future of the United States once and for all.
Chapter 2
The Five Steps to War: 1850–1860
IN THIS CHAPTER
Throughout the 1850s, the North and South continued to diverge along economic, political, and social lines. They knew less and less about each other, and each came to believe the worst about the other side. In fact, by this time, many Northerners and Southerners viewed each other as a separate people. National consensus and compromise became impossible to achieve.
The differences between the North and South became more pronounced in this decade because neither the Congress, nor the Supreme Court, nor the president could deal effectively with the divisive issue of slavery. Events pulled both the sections, the North and South, closer to the belief that only drastic action would resolve the nation’s problems.
Setting the Stage: Five Events Leading to War
When you examine the nature of the political struggle between 1850 and 1860, you can identify five separate events, each having a distinct effect on the nation. When viewed separately, they don’t seem to amount to much, but in the climate of the times, each event had a cumulative effect on the other, building a sense of nearly unbearable crisis and tension within the population that could not find release. The threat of open conflict, unthinkable in the country in 1850, became almost a predetermined conclusion by 1860.
One of the good and useful things about history is that it grants people the ability to look at events in the past, separated by time from the passions and confusion of the day-to-day events, and see how events connect in the long term. In doing this, certain events serve as guideposts to understanding how such a dramatic event as a civil war occurred. For your enjoyment and edification, the decade from 1850 to 1860 can be evaluated in terms of five steps that led to war:
The struggle for Kansas
The rise of the Republican Party
The Dred Scott decision
John Brown’s raid
The election of Abraham Lincoln
This chapter examines each one of these points in detail, then puts them all together to provide a backdrop for the growing sense of crisis that finally led to war.
Struggling for Kansas
As settlers continued to move into new territory, Congress was forced to deal with maintaining a balance of power between the Northern and Southern states. One approach had worked fairly well since 1820 — drawing a geographical boundary line (no slaves north of 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude — basically the border between Missouri and Arkansas) that extended to the Pacific. This was known as the Missouri Compromise line. It worked because states could enter the Union in pairs: one above and one below the line (Maine-Missouri; Arkansas-Michigan; Florida and Texas-Iowa and Wisconsin). Most of these new Northern states (except Iowa) came from territory that had outlawed slavery in 1787. Because the rich lands of the new Southern states were ideal for growing cotton and other profitable crops, slavery followed the opening of these new states, allowing for an acceptable balance of power in the Congress.
Slavery, as an issue, did not move to the forefront of the national consciousness until after the Mexican-American War. By 1850, everything had changed (see Chapter 1). Faced now with a major crisis over the balance of power, Congress made an exception to the 1820 geographical boundary by admitting California as a free state, but remained faithful to the boundary line with the disposition of New Mexico territory as a way to mollify Southern fears. Yet shortly thereafter, the future of the Kansas-Nebraska territory posed another threat. All of that territory was above the 1820 geographical boundary, and therefore, technically, non-slave territory. The South couldn’t allow that to happen unless two new slave states could also be added to balance power, which didn’t look likely to happen in the near future. The territory north of the Missouri Compromise line was attractive farmland; in contrast, the arid high desert territory south and west of Texas below the compromise line reserved for slavery had little attraction for farmers, whether they owned slaves or not. Another crisis over the political control of the future of America, far more serious than the one in 1850, was brewing.
THE “LITTLE GIANT”
Stephen A. Douglas (1813–1861), a Democrat, came to Washington as congressman from Illinois in 1843 and was elected to the Senate in 1847. He became chairman of the Committee on Territories, a position that was highly influential in dealing with the increasingly rancorous debate over the expansion of slavery into the new territories. Douglas gained influence by engineering the portion of the legislation that made up the Compromise of 1850 allowing New Mexico and Utah territories to determine their futures as slave or free states. Seeing an opportunity to solve the slavery question once and for all and unite the Democratic Party under his leadership (which would assure his reelection to the Senate in 1858 and open the door to the presidency in 1860), Douglas enunciated his doctrine of popular sovereignty. The deceptively simple formula of letting the people decide became the basis of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. In the turmoil that followed in Kansas, Douglas had to defend his policy in his campaign for the Senate against challenger Abraham Lincoln. Douglas, who stood at five feet four inches, was known as the “Little Giant.” He was a formidable orator and astute politician who carefully avoided the traps Lincoln set for him in the debates and won reelection. He would find himself the leader of a fractured Democratic Party in 1860, one presidential candidate among three others, including Lincoln. Garnering only 12 electoral votes in defeat, Douglas fully supported the new Republican president, but died of typhoid fever a month before the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act
Senator
