Why did the Whigs and Democrats fail to find a lasting political compromise on the issue of slavery?
What caused the end of the Second American Party
System and the rise of the Republican Party?
Why did the secession of the southern states follow the Republican Party victory in the election of
1860?

This poster advertises Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, the bestselling novel by
Harriet Beecher Stowe. This poignant story of long-suffering
African American slaves had an immense impact on Northern popular opinion, swaying it decisively against slavery. In that respect, the poster’s boast, “the greatest book of the age” was correct.
SOURCE:©Bettmann/CORBIS (BE001033).

Illinois voters gathered in 1858 Lincoln and Douglas.
Douglas accused Lincoln of favoring social equality of whites and blacks.
Lincoln denied this and accused Douglas of supporting the spread of slavery.
Douglas won the senatorial election
Debates established both Lincoln and the Republican Party.
Slavery question had divided American communities
Americans strongly valued their democratic institutions.

Map: U. S. Population and Settlement, 1850
America grew rapidly in the first half of the
19th century.
Nation experienced great growth of:
Wealth
Industry
Urbanization. Equally important, southern economic influence was waning.

MAP 15.1 U.S. Population and Settlement, 1850 By 1850, the United States was a continental nation. Its people, whom Thomas Jefferson had once thought would not reach the Mississippi River for forty generations, had not only passed the river, but leapfrogged to the west coast. In comparison to the America of 1800 (see Map 9.1 on p. 238), the growth was astounding.

Southern economic influence was waning.

Pride in democracy was one unifying theme
New middle-class values supported by institutions and culture.

An American Renaissance produced writers:
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson who experimented with poetic form
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville who wrote about the darker side of human nature
Frederick Douglass’s autobiography and Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin condemn slavery

MAP 15.2 The Compromise of 1850 The Compromise of 1850, messier and more awkward than the Missouri Compromise of 1820, reflected heightened sectional tensions. California was admitted as a free state, the borders of Texas were settled, and the status of the rest of the former Mexican territory was left to be decided later by popular sovereignty. No consistent majority voted for the five separate bills that made up the compromise.

In 1850, the three men who had long represented America’s three major regions attempted to resolve the political crisis brought on by the applications of California and Utah for statehood.
Henry Clay is speaking; John C. Calhoun stands third from right; and Daniel Webster is seated at the left, with his head in his hand. Both Clay and Webster were ill, and Calhoun died before the Compromise of 1850 was arranged by a younger group of politicians led by
Stephen A. Douglas.
SOURCE:Library of Congress.

Prior to the 1840s, compromises had eased the divisions.
Whigs and Democrats forged inter-sectional coalitions.
By 1848 sectional interests were eroding these coalitions.
Sectional divisions in religious and other organizations divided the country.

John C. Calhoun laid out the states’ rights defense:
Territories were the common property of each of the states
Congress could not discriminate against slave owners.
Northerners grew increasingly concerned over “slave power.”
Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—attempted to resolve the issues of 1850.

Both North and South: were committed to expansion shared a commitment to basic rights and liberties saw the other as infringing on them.

Two communities with two perspectives had emerged.
Northerners viewed their region as a dynamic society offered opportunity to the common man
Contrast to the stagnant slave owning aristocracy of the
South.
Southerners viewed their section as promoting equality for whites by keeping blacks in a perpetual state of bondage.

The chances for national reconciliation were slim.

Map: The Compromise of 1850
The Compromise of 1850 was actually five separate bills
California came in as a free state.
Other southwest territories were to be settled by popular sovereignty.
A stronger fugitive slave law was enacted.
The slave trade was outlawed in Washington, D.C.
The Texas–New Mexico border dispute was settled.

This handbill warning free African
Americans of danger circulated in Boston following the first of the in famous recaptures under the Fugitive Slave Law, that of Thomas Sims in 1851.
SOURCE:Library of Congress.

Runaway slave issue further divided the nation.
Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 federal government behind slave catchers.
States previously passed acts against aiding catchers.
Northerners unsuccessfully tried to prevent the law.
Black fugitives’ experiences raised Northerners’ consciousness .

Escaped slave Anthony Burns, shown here surrounded by scenes of his capture in
1854, was the cause of Boston’s greatest protest against the Fugitive Slave Law. The injustice of his trial and shipment back to the
South converted many Bostonians to the antislavery cause.
SOURCE:Getty Images,Inc.

Polarization of opinion strained the party system.
Democrats won election of 1852 by avoiding sectional issues.
President Franklin Pierce supported independent efforts to seize territory.

Between 1845 and 1848, the United States became a continental nation.
Swift victory over Mexico reinforced
American pride.
Europe revolts reinforced Americans’ ideals of democracy and manifest destiny.
Expansionist Democrats pushed for further expansion in Mexico, Cuba.

The Japanese painting shows Commodore Matthew Perry landing in Japan in 1853. The commercial treaty Perry signed with the Japanese government, which opened a formerly closed country to American trade, was viewed in the United States as another fruit of manifest destiny.
SOURCE: The Landing of Commodore Perry in Japan in 1853.Perry ’s ship and procession (Ukiyo-e School).Bigelow Collection,The Museum of Fine Arts Boston (11.6054).

Maps: The Kansas-Nebraska Act
In 1854, Stephen Douglas pushed bill to open Kansas territory.
Bill declared territory would be organized on popular sovereignty principle.
Slavery had been banned under the Missouri Compromise.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act proved to: destroy the Whig Party nearly destroy the northern wing of the Democratic Party negate Indian treaties removed to Kansas in the 1830s.

MAP 15.3 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854 The Kansas-Nebraska Act, proposed by Steven A.
Douglas in 1854, opened the central and northern Great Plains to settlement. The act had two major faults: it robbed Indian peoples of half the territory guaranteed to them by treaty, and, because it repealed the Missouri Compromise line, it opened up the lands to warring proslavery and antislavery factions.

The territory became a battleground of sectional politics.
Proslavery Missourians crossed border and took control of territorial legislature.
Northerners quickly responded by founding freesoil communities.
By the summer of 1856 open warfare erupted.

This lithograph shows the Battle of Hickory Point, 1856 one of the many battles between proslavery fighters and free-soilers that gave the territory its dreadful nickname, Bleeding
Kansas.
SOURCE:W.Breyman, Battle of Hickory Point ,Courtesy of Anne S.K.Brown Military Collection,Brown University.

Concurrent with sectional pressures came an outburst of anti-immigrant feeling.
Reformers were appalled by influx of Irish.
Former Whigs formed the “Know-Nothing” or American Party.
Know-Nothings succumbed to sectional divisions.

This night-time meeting of supporters of the Know-Nothing Party in New York City was dramatically spotlighted by a new device borrowed from the theater, an incandescent calcium light, popularly called a limelight.

The Republican Party and the
Election of 1856
Map: The Election of 1856
Republican Party linked northern nativists and former Whigs.

MAP 15.4 The Election of 1856 Because three parties contested the 1856 election,
Democrat James Buchanan was a minority president. Although Buchanan alone had national support, Republican John Frémont won most of the free states, and Millard Fillmore of the
American Party gained 40 percent of the vote in most of the slave states.

The Republican Party and the
Election of 1856
In 1856, Democrats nominated James Buchanan as a compromise candidate.
Southern Know-Nothings ran Millard Fillmore.
Northern Republicans ran John C. Fremont who defeated Buchanan in the North. Buchanan carried nearly the entire South and won.

The Republican Party and the
Election of 1856
The election signaled the rise of
Republican Party
Northerners more concerned about slavery than immigration.

The Dred Scott decision worsened sectional divisions.
The Supreme Court ruled that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories
Southerners applauded the decision,
Northerners denounced it.

These sympathetic portraits of Harriet and
Dred Scott and their daughters in 1857 helped to shape the northern reaction to the Supreme
Court’s decision that denied the Scotts’ claim to freedom. The infamous Dred Scott decision was intended to resolve the issue of slavery expansion, but instead heightened angry feelings in both North and South.
SOURCE: Frank Leslie ’s Illustrated Newspaper ,June 27,1857. Library of Congress.

Conflict continued in Kansas as freesoilers: organized their own territorial government boycotted the proslavery government’s elections for a constitutional convention

Proslavery “Lecompton constitution” was submitted to Congress.
Douglas fought against it, alienating his southern supporters.
Kansas rejected the constitution, entered
Union as free state.
Congress continued to divide along sectional lines.

Financial panic and sharp depression in 1857 and 1858.
The Panic affected northern more than southern exports.
Southerners believed the Panic showed the superiority of their system.

This painting by Charles C.
Rosenberg and James H. Cafferty shows a worried crowd exchanging the latest news on Wall Street during the Panic of 1857. This was the first economic depression in which the telegraph played a part by carrying bad financial news in the West to New York much more rapidly than in the past.
SOURCE:Photograph by J.Cafferty &C.Rosenberg.Courtesy of the Museum of the
City of New York (40.54).

John Brown raided the federal arsenal at
Harper’s Ferry.
Raised sectional differences.
Southern opinion shocked by attempts to make Brown a martyr.

The execution by hanging of John Brown, December 2, 1859 is depicted in this popular image in a northern newspaper as a solemn military occasion. Southerners were angered and alarmed by popular northern opinion that regarded Brown as a martyr rather than as a terrorist.
SOURCE: Frank Leslie ’s Illustrated
Newspaper ,December 10,1859.Library of Congress.

Map: The Election of 1860
In the election of 1860, four candidates ran for president.
Bell, Breckenridge, Douglas, Lincoln

MAP 15.6 The South Secedes The southern states that would constitute the Confederacy seceded in two stages. The states of the Lower South seceded before Lincoln took office. Arkansas and three states of the Upper South —Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—waited until after the South fired on Fort
Sumter. And four border slave states —Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—chose not to secede.
Every Southern state (except South Carolina) was divided on the issue of secession, generally along upcountry
–low-country lines. In Virginia, this division was so extreme, that West Virginia split off to become a separate nonslave state and was admitted to the Union in 1863.

The Democrats split over proposed slave code for territories.
Stephen Douglas won the nomination but
Southerners nominated Breckinridge.
Southern and border state Whigs created Constitutional
Union Party and nominated John Bell.
Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, a moderate.

MAP 15.5 The Election of 1860 The election of 1860 was a sectional election. Lincoln won no votes in the South, Breckinridge none in the North. The contest in the North was between
Lincoln and Douglas, and although Lincoln swept the electoral vote, Douglas’s popular vote was uncomfortably close. The large number of northern Democratic voters opposed to
Lincoln was a source of political trouble for him during the Civil War.

Breckinridge and Lincoln represented the extreme positions on slavery.
Douglas and Bell tried to find a middle ground.
Lincoln won the election with 38 percent of vote, virtually sweeping the North.

Map: The South Secedes
Southerners initiated secession movements.
The Lower South seceded, but Upper South remained in Union.

The beating of Senator Charles Sumner by Congressman Preston Brooks on the floor of the U.S.
Senate attracted the horrified attention of northerners but won the approval of southerners.

Various Northerners unsuccessfully tried to find compromise.
Some Northerners were willing to let South to go in peace.
Lincoln believed free government would be threatened if the South left.

Southerners established the Confederate
States of America.
Jefferson Davis, a moderate, was chosen as its president.
Davis tried to portray secession as a legal, peaceful step.
Lincoln resolved to keep the nation together.

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
- Abraham Lincoln
Inaugural Address,
March 4, 1861