AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Drifting Toward Disunion: 1854 – 1861
Before studying Chapter 19, read over this “Theme”:
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.
After studying Chapter 19 in your textbook, you should be able to:
1. Relate the sequence of major crises that led from the Kansas-Nebraska Act to secession.
2. Explain how and why “bleeding Kansas” became a dress rehearsal for the Civil War.
3. Trace the growing power of the Republican Party in the 1850’s and the increasing divisions and
helplessness of the Democrats.
4. Explain how the Dred Scott decision and Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid deepened sectional antagonism.
5. Trace the rise of Lincoln as the leading exponent of the Republican doctrine of no expansion of slavery.
6. Analyze the complex election of 1860 in relation to the sectional crisis.
7. Describe the movement toward secession, the formation of the Confederacy, and the failure of the last
compromise.
Know the following people and terms. Consider the historical significance of each term or person.
Also note the dates of the event if that is pertinent.
A. People
+Harriet Beecher Stowe
Hinton R. Helper (see pages 3-4)
+John Brown
James Buchanan
Charles Sumner
John C. Fremont
Dred Scott
Roger Taney
John C. Breckenridge
John Bell
+Abraham Lincoln
Jefferson Davis
John Crittenden (the textbook incorrectly identifies him as “James Henry Crittenden”)
B. Terms:
“third party system” (see page 4)
antebellum
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
“Tom-mania”
self-determination
Southern nationalism
The Impending Crisis of the South (see pages 3-4)
New England Emigrant Aid Company
Pottawatomie Creek massacre
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Lecompton Constitution
“Bleeding Kansas”
American (Know-Nothing) Party
*Scott v. Sandford (Dred Scott decision)
Panic of 1857
Lincoln-Douglas debates
Freeport Doctrine
Harpers Ferry, Virginia
Constitutional Union party
Crittenden Compromise
border states
+=One of the 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time, as ranked by The Atlantic. Go to Webpage to see all 100.
*=A 100 Milestone Document from the National Archive. Go to Webpage to link to these documents.
C. Sample Essays: Using what you have previously learned and what you learned in Chapter 19, you
should be able to answer an essay such as this one:
Why was compromise successful in 1820 and 1850 but not in 1860? How was 1860 so different from the
other times?
D. Voices from the past:
"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality
of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of
qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a
physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together
on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must
be the position of superior and inferior and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position
assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior
position the negro should be denied everything."
Abraham Lincoln, fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas, Charleston, Ill., Sept. 18, 1858
If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it. We
are now far into the fifty year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an
end to slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly
augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crises shall have been reached and passed. "A house divided against
itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the
Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all
one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the
public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it
shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.
Abraham Lincoln, speaking at Springfield, Ill., June 17, 1858, paraphrasing the New Testament.
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood
Written on the day of his execution, Dec. 2, 1859.
SONG: John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
Chorus: Glory, glory hallelujah!
But his soul is marching on.
Glory, glory hallelujah!
Chorus
Glory, glory hallelujah!
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord;
His soul is marching on.
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord;
He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord;
But his soul is marching on.
Chorus
(Civil War Song [sung to the tune of The Battle Hymn of the Republic])
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Eyewitness to War: Hinton Rowan Helper and The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It.
By Joseph Gustaitis for America’s Civil War magazine, January 1998
The myth probably began with Abraham Lincoln. When he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, in 1862, Lincoln supposedly said, "So you are the little lady who wrote the book that started this great war."
Ever since that meeting, Uncle Tom's Cabin has been considered the most important anti-slavery tract ever published in
the United States and the key text in inflaming the passions that brought on the Civil War. No doubt it was a very
important book. It sold 300,000 copies in its first year of publication and was translated into at least 23 languages.
And yet, another book caused a far greater sensation than Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). It was The Impending
Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Even more surprising, the strident anti-slavery treatise was not written by some stern
New England Yankee. The author was a son of the Old South, Hinton Rowan Helper. Although he has been largely
forgotten, for several years after his work was published in 1857, Helper was one of the most famous men in America.
Uncle Tom's Cabin, although detested in Dixie, could be dismissed by many Southerners as sentimental rubbish
from a Yankee preacher's wife who knew little about the South's "peculiar institution." Helper, however, was born in
Rowan County, N.C., on December 27, 1829, and his father, who died a year after Hinton's birth, worked a small farm
and owned a few slaves. Nor could The Impending Crisis be in any way considered a mawkish romance. This was a
book that hammered the reader with statistic after statistic, remorselessly piling up evidence that slavery was the only
reason the South had fallen behind the North in almost every area of achievement--wealth, productivity, population,
literacy, culture--and had descended to what Helper called "a state of comparative imbecility and obscurity." Slavery, he
said, "was the most hateful and horrible word that was ever incorporated into the vocabulary of human economy." To
Southerners, Helper was not just a gadfly, he was a traitor.
Helper graduated from Mocksville Academy, near his home, in 1848 and then worked in a store in Salisbury,
N.C. He went to New York in 1850 and from there sailed by way of Cape Horn to San Francisco at the height of the
California Gold Rush. He spent three years fruitlessly trying to wrest gold from the hills and then returned to the East to
publish The Land of Gold (1855), a bitter account written, he said, to warn other would-be gold hunters of the perils and
disappointment that awaited them.
The same year Helper sailed for the West was the year of the seventh U.S. census. The 1850 census set off alarm
bells throughout Dixie. Nearly every statistic showed that in the decade from 1840 to 1850 the North had leapfrogged
over the South. In 1840, for example, 44 percent of the total U.S. railway mileage was in the South; by 1850 its share
had declined to 26 percent. In 1840 the South possessed 20 percent of the nation's manufacturing capacity; in 1850 it had
18 percent. These figures only confirmed what many Southerners already suspected--they were becoming economic
underlings. As one Southern analyst put it, "The North grows rich and powerful whilst we at best are stationary."
Historians are still debating the reasons for the failure of industrialization in the South, but Helper, who waved the 1850
census like a red flag, echoed the views of the Scottish political economist Adam Smith, who argued that free labor was
intrinsically superior to slave labor. Unlike a free worker, Smith said, a slave "can have no other interest but to eat as
much, and to labour as little as possible."
The Impending Crisis drew heavily on the 1850 census to show that slavery was the ruination of the South. It
began with a long chapter in which Helper presented a host of tables illustrating the contrast between the two regions of
the United States. He cleverly began with statistics showing the difference in agricultural output because, he said, many
Southerners liked to flatter themselves that, if in nothing else, the South was superior to the North in agriculture. Not so,
Helper pointed out, adding, "Such rampant ignorance should be knocked in the head!" After parading his tables across
his pages, he arrived at the conclusion that in 1850 the North produced some $352 million worth of farm products; the
South, about $307 million. "So much," he snorted, "for the boasted agricultural superiority of the South!"
The second chapter was the most threatening in a menacing book. Titled "How Slavery Can Be Abolished," it
scoffed at the notion that any system of emancipation required compensating slaveholders for the loss of their property.
"The idea," he said, "is preposterous." Helper blamed the slaveholders for the wide discrepancy in the value of land
between the North and the South. Again using 1850 figures, he reckoned that the average value of an acre of land in the
Northern states was $28.07; in the South it was $5.34. "We conclude, therefore," he wrote, "that you, the slaveholders,
are indebted to us, the non-slaveholders, in the sum of $22.73, which is the difference between $28.07 and $5.34, on
every acre of Southern soil in our possession." The grand total that the "chevaliers of the lash" had gypped the nonslaveholders, according to Helper's calculations, was slightly over $7.5 billion. "And now, Sirs," he demanded, "we are
ready to receive the money."
Having thus dismissed the idea of compensation, Helper laid out an 11-point plan for abolishing slavery by July
4, 1876. The agenda included organizing nonslaveholding whites into a political force, denying slaveholders the vote,
boycotting slaveholders' services, banning the hiring of slaves by non-slaveholders, and instituting a tax of $60 on every
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
slaveholder for every slave in his possession. Although there was virtually no chance that such a plan would be adopted,
it nevertheless was strong stuff for Southern readers.
The book cited numerous authors from both North and South--as well as from other countries--who concurred
with Helper's abolitionism. He marshaled quotations from, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James
Monroe, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, along with economists, French philosophers and Biblical prophets. Helper
returned to statistics to contrast North and South in areas such as manufacturing, exports, canals, railroads, bank capital,
public schools, libraries, newspapers and literacy. He ruefully concluded that "our indignation is struck almost dumb at
this astounding and revolting display of the awful wreck that slavery is leaving behind it in the South."
The most notable aspect of The Impending Crisis was its fierce language. Helper railed that "five millions of
'poor white trash'" suffered under a "second degree of slavery" and that "every white man who is under the necessity of
earning his bread, by the sweat of his brow...is treated as if he was a loathsome beast." "There is not," he charged, "a
grain of patriotism in the South, except among the non-slaveholders." And since slavery is a "sin" and a "crime," he
could not recognize the slaveholders "as gentlemen." "Slaveholders," he thundered, "are more criminal than common
murderers." Helper did not even shun the threat of violence. "Do you aspire," he asked the slaveholders of the South, "to
become the victims of white non-slaveholding vengeance by day, and of barbarous massacre by the negroes at night?"
Helper first intended to publish his book in Baltimore, but was prevented from doing so by a law that made it a
crime to "excite discontent amongst the people of color of this state." He therefore went to New York in 1857, partly, he
says, because he feared that he might be "subjected to physical violence" if he stayed in the South. In New York, the
influential newspaperman Horace Greeley offered his support.
In the year after The Impending Crisis was published, it sold some 13,000 copies--a respectable figure--and was
well-received in several Northern newspapers. But in the spring of 1859 the Republican Party, then gearing up for the
election of 1860, realized--with Helper's prodding--that the volume could be an asset to their campaign. The
Republicans followed Greeley's advice that championing the book would prove that they did not seek the "ruin" of the
South, but rather its "renovation." Accordingly, they distributed at least 100,000 copies of an abridged (and slightly
toned down) version, called The Compendium, and Helper was suddenly the talk of the nation. Abraham Lincoln had a
copy and said he was very interested to know that there was a potential schism between slaveholders and nonslaveholders in the South. By contrast, in many places in the South it was a crime to possess Helper's book.
Things got hotter during the election of the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1859. The
Republicans put forth John Sherman of Ohio (brother of the soon-to-be-famous William Tecumseh Sherman), but he
was assailed by John B. Clark of Missouri for having committed the dastardly deed of reading The Impending Crisis.
Another congressman charged that "one who consciously, deliberately, and of purpose lent his name and influence to the
propagation of such writings is not only not fit to be speaker, but is not fit to live." The two-month debate grew so
intense that the representatives took to showing up in the Capitol armed with pistols and bowie knives.
By the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, Helper was famous. But the publication of The Compendium
had been basically a nonprofit enterprise, and Helper needed to find regular work. Accordingly, he applied to the
Lincoln administration, and in November 1861 he was appointed U.S. consul to Buenos Aires.
Helper performed his duties competently in Buenos Aires, where he married a local woman named Maria Luisa
Rodriguez. In 1866 he returned to the United States and again took up his pen to address the problems of the South. This
time he found a new enemy. The threat to the white working class was no longer the indolent, supercilious slaveholder,
but the black freeman. He dashed off three books--Nojoque: A Question for a Continent (1867), Negroes in Negroland
(1868) and Noonday Exigencies (1871)--that revealed him to be a virulent racist.
Many reviewers were shocked by Helper's call that by 1876 "No Negro nor Mulatto, No Chinaman nor unnative
Indian, No Black or Bi-colored Individual of whatever Name or Nationality" would "find Domicile anywhere within the
Boundaries of the United States." For Helper, the black man was "An Inferior Fellow Done For," and the color black
was "A Thing of Ugliness, Disease, and Death . . . a most hateable thing." Helper had become an embarrassment to the
Republican Party. Even readers in the South were taken aback by what one reviewer called his "wild ravings."
No longer a thinker to be taken seriously, Helper eked out a career as an agent for U.S. commercial interests that
had claims against various South American governments. He became interested in the construction of a railroad that
would run through the Americas from Hudson's Bay to Cape Horn, and the notion, which he claimed would make him
"the new Christopher Columbus," eventually grew into an obsession. A collection of his writings appeared as The Three
Americas Railway in 1881.
In his final years, Helper was a bitter and impoverished man. His wife went blind and returned to Buenos Aires
with their son in 1899, leaving him alone in Washington. All his funds had gone into promoting his railway dream, and
although a commission was appointed to study the idea, he was not named a member of it.
On March 8, 1909, Hinton Helper closed the door to his room and turned on the gas. The maid found him dead
the next morning.
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
Union or Confederacy? ↓
E. Reading a chart
The 1860 Census - State
ALABAMA
ARKANSAS
CALIFORNIA
CONNECTICUT
DELAWARE
FLORIDA
GEORGIA
ILLINOIS
INDIANA
IOWA
KANSAS (territory)
KENTUCKY
LOUISIANA
MAINE
MARYLAND
MASSACHUSETTS
MICHIGAN
MINNESOTA
MISSISSIPPI
MISSOURI
NEBRASKA (territory)
NEVADA (territory)
NEW HAMPSHIRE
NEW JERSEY
NEW YORK
NORTH CAROLINA
OHIO
TOTAL
AGGR. SLAVES TOTAL SLAVEHOLDERS
964,201
435,080
33,730
435,450
111,115
11,481
379,994
N/A
N/A
460,147
N/A
N/A
112,216
1,798
587
140,424
61,745
5,152
1,057,286
462,198
41,084
1,711,951
N/A
N/A
1,350,428
N/A
N/A
674,913
N/A
N/A
107,206
2
2
1,155,684
225,483
38,645
708,002
331,726
22,033
628,279
N/A
N/A
687,049
87,189
13,783
1,231,066
N/A
N/A
749,113
N/A
N/A
172,023
N/A
N/A
791,305
436,631
30,943
1,182,012
114,931
24,320
28,841
15
6
6,857
N/A
N/A
326,073
N/A
N/A
672,035
18
N/A
3,880,735
N/A
N/A
992,622
331,059
34,658
2,339,511
N/A
N/A
U or C
AP United States History - Terms and People – Unit 6, Chapter 19 (12th Ed.)
HONOR PLEDGE: I strive to uphold the vision of the North Penn School District, which is to inspire each student to reach his or her highest potential
and become a responsible citizen. Therefore, on my honor, I pledge that I have neither given nor received unauthorized assistance on this work.
OREGON
PENNSYLVANIA
RHODE ISLAND
SOUTH CAROLINA
TENNESSEE
TEXAS
VERMONT
VIRGINIA
WISCONSIN
52,465
N/A
N/A
2,906,215
N/A
N/A
174,620
N/A
N/A
703,708
402,406
26,701
1,109,801
275,719
36,844
604,215
182,566
21,878
315,098
N/A
N/A
1,596,318
490,865
52,128
775,881
N/A
N/A
F. Historians have divided American political history into five “Party Systems”
First Party System: The Founding (1789 - 1824)
 Two Party System
 First Two Parties
o Federalists (Hamilton)
o Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson & Madison)
 Local Influence
 End of the Federalist Party
Second Party System: Jacksonians (1828 - 1854)
 Rise of the Democratic Party
 Party Organization
o Organized the party at local levels
 Rise of the Whig Party
Third Party System: Civil War, Reconstruction, Sectionalism, Race, and Money (1856 - 1896)
 Rise of the Republican Party
o Made up of old Whigs and Democrats who opposed slavery
o Dominated politics for next 2 decades
 Party Machinery
o Gave favors in exchange for votes