Chapter 19 Student Guide Mr. Driscoll’s Class
CHAPTER 19
Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861
AP Focus

In their attempt to take the White House, the Republicans are defeated when John Frémont loses to Democrat
James Buchanan. Nativists, concerned by German and Irish immigration, organize the American, or KnowNothing, Party, which probably takes votes from the Republicans.

In March 1857, the Supreme Court rules that Dred Scott is not a citizen because of his race. The decision goes
even further, stating that Congress has no authority to exclude slavery from any part of the nation or its
territories. The Missouri Compromise is therefore ruled unconstitutional.

The financial crash of 1857 primarily affects the North and West. The South is essentially unaffected because
of high cotton prices. Southerners cite this as an example of the superiority of their economic system over the
North’s, which exploits the “wage-slaves.”

Abraham Lincoln returns to politics in 1858 by running against Senator Stephen A. Douglas, an Illinois
Democrat. In a series of debates, Lincoln challenges Douglas to reconcile support for popular sovereignty
with the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (which Douglas does in his Freeport Doctrine). Lincoln loses
the election, but not before becoming a national figure.

Senator James Henry Crittenden offers a plan to convince southerners to return to the Union. It is, however,
condemned by the North for giving too many concessions to the South. For a southern perspective on the
Crittenden Compromise, see The American Pageant (13th ed., p. 430/14th ed., p. 457).
Take note of the following:
1.
Senator Stephen A. Douglas’s repudiation of the Lecompton Constitution lost him the support of the South
and whatever hope he had of becoming president.
2.
That sectional fury in the late 1850s is shown by the near-fatal attack on Senator Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts by Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. Sumner had given a harsh speech in which
he excoriated slave-owners in general and insulted Brooks’s uncle, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina.
Southerners did not generally condemn Brooks’s attack. Note the differing opinions of the attack in the North
and the South, highlighted in the textbook (13th ed., p. 415/14th ed., p. 443).
Chapter Themes
Theme: A series of major North-South crises in the late 1850s culminated in the election of the antislavery
Republican Lincoln to the presidency in 1860. His election caused seven southern states to secede from the union
and form the Confederate States of America.
CHAPTER SUMMARY
The 1850s were punctuated by successive confrontations that deepened sectional hostility, until it broke out in the
Civil War.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin fanned northern antislavery feeling. In Kansas, proslavery and
antislavery forces fought a bloody little preview of the Civil War. Buchanan’s support of the proslavery Lecompton
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Chapter 19 Student Guide Mr. Driscoll’s Class
Constitution alienated moderate northern Democrats such as Douglas. Congressman Brooks’s beating of Senator
Sumner aroused passions in both sections.
The 1856 election signaled the rise of the sectionally based Republican Party. The Dred Scott case delighted the
South, while northern Republicans pledged defiance. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 deepened the national
controversy over slavery. John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry made him a heroic martyr in the North but caused
outraged southerners to fear a slave uprising.
The Democratic Party split along sectional lines, allowing Lincoln to win the four-way 1860 election. Seven
southern states quickly seceded and organized the Confederate States of America.
As southerners optimistically cast off their ties to the hated North, lame-duck President Buchanan proved unable to
act. The last-minute Crittenden Compromise effort failed because of Lincoln’s opposition.
A. Checklist of Learning Objectives
After mastering this chapter, you should be able to:
1.
Enumerate the sequence of major crises, beginning with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, that led up to secession,
and explain the significance of each event.
2.
Explain how and why the territory of bleeding Kansas became the scene of a dress rehearsal for the Civil War.
3.
Trace the growing power of the Republican party in the 1850s and the increasing domination of the
Democratic party by its militantly proslavery wing.
4.
Explain how the Dred Scott decision and John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid deepened sectional antagonism.
5.
Trace the rise of Lincoln as a Republican spokesman, and explain why his senatorial campaign debates with
Stephen Douglas made him a major national figure despite losing the election.
6.
Analyze the election of 1860, including the split in the Democratic party, the four-way campaign, the sharp
sectional divisions, and Lincoln’s northern-based minority victory.
7.
Describe the secession of seven southern states following Lincoln’s victory, the formation of the Confederacy,
and the failure of the last compromise effort.
B. Glossary
To build your social science vocabulary, familiarize yourself with the following terms.
1.
puppet government A weak government created or controlled by more powerful outside forces. “The
slavery supporters triumphed and then set up their own puppet government at Shawnee Mission.”
2.
bigoted Blindly or narrowly intolerant. “. . . the allegation . . . alienated many bigoted Know-Nothings. . . .”
3.
public domain Land or other property belonging to the whole nation, controlled by the federal government.
“Financial distress . . . gave a new vigor to the demand for free farms of 160 acres from the public domain.”
4.
bandwagon In politics, a movement or candidacy that gains rapid momentum because of people’s purported
desire to join a successful cause. “After mounting the Republican bandwagon, he emerged as one of the
foremost politicians and orators of the Northwest.”
5.
apportionment The allotment or distribution of legislative representatives in districts according to
population. (Reapportionment occurs after each census according to growth or loss of population.) “Yet
thanks to inequitable apportionment, the districts carried by Douglas supporters represented a smaller
population. . . .”
6.
splintering Concerning the small political groups that result when a larger organization has divided or
broken apart. “But Douglas . . . hurt his own chances . . . while further splitting his splintering party.”
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Chapter 19 Student Guide Mr. Driscoll’s Class
7.
affidavit A sworn, written testimony, usually attested to by a notary public or legal officer, that may be
admitted as evidence in court. “His presumed insanity was supported by affidavits from seventeen friends and
relatives. . . .”
8.
martyr One who is tortured or killed for adherence to a belief. “. . . Ralph Waldo Emerson compared the new
martyr-hero with Jesus.”
9.
border state The northernmost slave states contested by North and South; during the Civil War the four
border states (Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri) remained within the Union, though they
contained many Confederate sympathizers and volunteers. “ . . . a man of moderate views from the border
state of Kentucky.”
10. vassalage The service and homage given by a feudal subordinate to an overlord; by extension, any similar
arrangement between political figures or entities. “. . . secession [w]as a golden opportunity to cast aside their
generations of ‘vassalage’ to the North.”
character sketches
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)
A member of the famous Beecher family, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the book that more than anything else
deepened northern hostility to slavery.
Stowe was closer to her brother Henry, later a famous preacher, than to her father or her older sister Catharine. She
was very fond of her parents’ free black servants, particularly one kind woman who may have been a model for
characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Although she had published a few stories before marrying Calvin Stowe, a professor at her father’s seminary, she
then gave up writing. For eighteen years, she was a housewife who struggled to raise her seven children on a very
limited income. She visited slaveholding areas of Kentucky during that time and knew abolitionists at her father’s
seminary but at first was not very sympathetic to them.
Her brother urged her to write against slavery, and she submitted Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form to a magazine.
Although the magazine paid her only $300, the book sold 10,000 copies the first week, 300,000 the first year, and
eventually millions in the United States and abroad.
Quote: “As long as the baby sleeps with me nights I can’t do much of anything—but I shall do it at last. I shall
write it if I live.…” (Letter to Calvin Stowe, 1850)
REFERENCE: Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (1994).
John Brown (1800–1859)
Brown was the militant abolitionist whose violent attacks at Osawatomie, Kansas, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia,
helped to bring on the Civil War.
An unsuccessful tanner, cattle driver, and sheep raiser, Brown was frequently in financial difficulty. He had twenty
children—seven by his first wife and thirteen by his second.
For a time, he lived in a black community in New York on land donated by abolitionist Gerrit Smith. After five of
his sons migrated to Kansas in 1855, he joined them with a wagonload of guns and ammunition and then hacked
five proslavery settlers to death in the Osawatomie massacre.
After Osawatomie, he solicited money and supplies from some New England intellectuals and began planning to
lead a slave uprising. He rented a farm near Harpers Ferry in the summer of 1859 and gradually accumulated
weapons and his little army of twenty-one men. He could have escaped after raiding the armory, but his plans were
too confused. Two of his sons died in the fighting.
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Chapter 19 Student Guide Mr. Driscoll’s Class
Quote: “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.”
(Statement before hanging, 1859)
REFERENCE: Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (1970).
Dred Scott (1795–1858)
Scott was the slave whose attempt to secure his freedom was denied by the Supreme Court, which declared that
blacks “have no rights that white men are bound to respect.”
Born a slave in Virginia, Scott was later purchased by a U.S. Army doctor, who took him for three years to Illinois
(a free state) and two years to Wisconsin (a free territory).
After the doctor died, Scott passed into other hands, but his former owner’s sons sympathized with him and helped
carry his case through the state and federal courts.
After he lost the case, the doctor’s sons bought Scott and freed him. Although unskilled and illiterate, he was
intelligent and proud of his notoriety. Scott was married, had several children, and ended his days as a janitor in a
St. Louis hotel.
Quote: “I have no money to pay anybody at Washington to speak for me.… Will nobody speak for me at
Washington, even without hope of other reward than the blessings of a poor black man and his family?… I can only
pray that some good heart will be moved by pity to do that for me which I cannot do for myself; and that if the right
is on my side it may be so declared by the high court to which I have appealed.” (Pamphlet containing Scott’s
appeal for aid, 1854)
REFERENCE: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (1978).
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