Whigs and Northern Democrats supported Wilmot Proviso
• Proposed bill to forbid slavery in any new territories taken from Mexico
• Passed House twice
• Twice defeated in Senate
Prelude to Civil War?
• Increased tension between N&S over new territories acquired in war
• Renewed sectional debate over extension of slavery
• Many Northerners saw war as “Southern plot” to extend slave power
Whigs and Northern Dems also supported idea that all African Americans
-free and slave- should be excluded from any lands gained in Mexican Cession
Southern Position:
• Saw attempts to restrict slavery as violation of constitutional right to take and use their property as they wished
• More moderate Southerners favored extension of Miss. Compromise line to Pacific

• Proposed by Michigan senator Lewis Cass
• Instead of Congress deciding issue in new territories and states, people who settled the territory would decide based on popular vote
Election of 1848
• Democrats adopted platform of popular sovereignty nominated Cass
• Whigs took no position on slavery, nominated Mexican War hero Zach Taylor
• Free-Soil nominated former president Van Buren
• Two factions
1. “conscience” Whigs: opposed slavery
2. anti-slavery Democrats: aka “barnburners” b/c their defection to Free-Soil Party threatened to destroy the
Democratic Party
Zachary Taylor wins, in part due to split in Democratic Party. Dies soon after,
Millard Fillmore becomes president.

Clay's Resolutions
• Senator from Kentucky
• The Compromise of 1850 began in
1849 with the newly acquired
California wishing to be admitted as a free state.
• This admittance, much like the earlier application of Missouri, would upset the balance of slave and free state representatives in Congress.
• To resolve the issue, Clay created a series of resolutions he wished to be adopted by Congress.
• After seven months of debate in the
Senate, his legislative package was voted down.

• Senator from South Carolina
• John C. Calhoun was too ill to deliver his speech on Clay’s Compromise himself, so it was read by another senator with
Calhoun present in the Senate Chamber.
• Calhoun, so ill he had to be helped out of the Chamber after the speech by two of his friends, died on March 31, 1850.
• Calhoun warns the Senate that it must take measures to ensure the Southerners can remain in the union "with their honor and their safety" intact.

• Senator from Massachusetts
• Webster viewed slavery as a matter of historical reality rather than moral principle.
• He argued that the issue of its existence in the territories had been settled long ago when Congress prohibited slavery in the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787 and divided regions into slave and free in the 1820
Missouri Compromise.
• He believed that slavery where it existed could not be eradicated but also that it could not take root in the newly acquired agriculturally barren lands of the southwest.

• Senator from New York
• William Henry Seward delivered a speech that he called "Freedom in the New
Territories.“
• Southern extremists argued that the
Constitution alone provided sufficient authority for the extension of slavery to the territories.
• Seward acknowledged that the
Constitution's framers had recognized the existence of slavery and protected it where it existed, but the new territory was governed by a "higher law than the
Constitution" -- a moral law established by
"the Creator of the universe."
• He warned the South that slavery was doomed and that secession from the Union would be futile.

• The Compromise of 1850, a series of five statues shepherded to passage by Illinois Senator Stephen A.
Douglas, was approved in
September.
• This Compromise:
– called for the admittance of
California as a free state,
– set the present boundaries for Texas,
– allowed the territories of New
Mexico and Utah to be organized on the basis of popular sovereignty,
– strengthened the fugitive slave law,
– abolished the slave trade in
Washington D.C.
• Contradicted certain tenets of the
Missouri Compromise, resulting in discontent among many northerners.

• This map shows how the United States had become a nation containing two, rival social and economic systems by 1850.
• In 1850 the Congress, led by Stephen Douglas of Illinois, hammered out a convoluted compromise legislation that promised to ease the mounting political tensions between the two sections.
• But Douglas' drive to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories west of Iowa and Missouri for statehood only reopened the sections' competition for political primacy.
• The question remained: Would the new states of Kansas and Nebraska allow slavery, or ban it? This issue brought Abraham Lincoln from political retirement and helped to organize the new Republican Party.

Fugitive Slave Law
• Southerners saw as consolation for losing California
• Fugitive slave cases now under jurisdiction of federal gov’t
• Warrants for arrest
• Free African Americans captured and denied the right of trial by jury
Underground Railroad
• Loose network of Northern, free blacks, ex-slaves, some white abolitionists
• Harriet Tubman escaped slave who made at least 19 trips south to help more than 300 slaves escape
Books on Slavery
Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
Impending Crisis of the South – Hinton R. Helper
Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! – George Fitzhugh

• Compromise of 1850 many believed to be the end of the slave issue and expansion.
• Optimism in the Election of 1852.
Franklin Pierce (NH)
Democrat
Winfield Scott (VA)
Whig
John P. Hale
Free-Soil
Why did the Whigs not re-nominate Milliard Fillmore? In an attempt to ignore slavery issue.

Franklin Pierce and Election of 1852
• Democrat from New Hampshire
• Democrats saw him as a “safe” compromise candidate
• Although a Northerner, Southern Democrats supported him because he supported the
Fugitive Slave Law
• Whig Party split, anti-slavery northern and southern factions
• Democrats win in landslide
(Party’s days were numbered)

• The Compromise of 1850 dealt with lands that were part of the Mexican Cession, but not with the lands of the
Louisiana Purchase.
• Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)- Stephen Douglas proposed that the Nebraska Territory be split into two territories,
Kansas and Nebraska.
– The settlers living in each territory would be able to decide the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty.

• Southern leaders supported it because they assumed
Missouri farmers with slaves would move across the border.
– President Franklin Pierce supported the bill and pushed it through Congress.
• Northerners were unhappy with the decision.
– Said Missouri Compromise had already banned slavery in the area and that this repealed that act.
– Some protested by openly challenging the Fugitive Slave Act

•
– Antislavery settlers moved from New England
– Proslavery groups also came in
• Border Ruffians – gangs that battled anti-slavery forces
•
– Border Ruffians came in and voted illegally and elected a proslavery legislature
– Antislavery settlers refused to accept the proslavery laws.
– Because of these issues, gangs roamed the territory.

•
•
– He and his sons murdered five proslavery settlers.
– Both sides engaged in guerilla warfare.
– More than 200 people were killed.

• Charles Sumner of MA spoke against slavery and criticized
Southern senators, particularly
Andrew Butler of South Carolina.
• A few days later, Butler’s nephew, congressman Preston Brooks, marched into Congress with a cane and beat Sumner unconscious.
• Northerners outraged,
Southerners applauded him

• Founded in Wisconsin in 1854 in direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act
• Coalition of Free-Soilers, anti-slavery
Whigs, and Democrats
• Goal: not to end slavery itself, but to oppose the spread of slavery into the territories
• Called for the repeal of the Fugitive
Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska
Act
• Violence in Kansas led more and more people to join, soon became the second largest party in the country

1856
Electio n
Result s

• Buchanan’s first major challenge as president
• Accept or reject pro-slavery state constitution for Kansas submitted by southern legislature at Lecompton
• Buchanan knew it didn’t have the support of the majority of the settlers
• Asked Congress to accept the document and admit Kansas as a slave state
• Congress rejected the Lecompton constitution
• The next year it was rejected by Kansas settlers, most of whom were antislavery Republicans

• Dred Scott Case (1857) – Scott was a slave who moved with his owner to Illinois and the Wisconsin
Territory, which did not allow slavery.
• After they returned to Missouri,
Scott’s owner died.
• Antislavery lawyers helped his bring a lawsuit stating that because Scott lived in a free state, he had become a free man.

•
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
– Court ruled that Scott could not file a lawsuit because as an enslaved person, he was not a citizen.
– Congress didn’t have the power to deprive any person of property without due process of law; if slaves were a form of property, then Congress could not exclude slavery from any territory.
– Made Missouri Compromise unconstitutional because it excluded slavery from Wisconsin and other Northern territories
Reactions:
•
White Southerners were thrilled with the decision because it allowed slavery everywhere.
•
Northerners and African Americans were outraged.