Impending Crisis

Slavery and the Territories •  The Wilmot Proviso

•  Proposed no new slave states would be admitted from Mexican Cession

• Competing Plans •  Extend Missouri Compromise? •  Popular Sovereignty? •  Free-Soilers

California Gold Rush •  Traces of gold found in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas •  “Forty-niners” flocked to California • Non-Indian population increases twenty-fold in four years

Rising Sectional Tensions • California drafted constitution barring slavery • Controversies

•  Slavery in the District of Columbia •  Personal liberty laws •  Upsetting the balance

Compromise of 1850 • Henry Clay

•  California admitted as a free state

•  Formation of territorial governments in rest of Mexican Cession, without slavery restrictions

•  Abolition of slave trade in D.C.

•  New and more effective fugitive slave law

• Congress defeated Clay’s proposal

Compromise of 1850 • Stephen A. Douglas

•  Broke up Clay’s bill •  Passed as separate components

•  Temporary compromise

Election of 1852 • Democrats: Franklin Pierce • Whigs: Winfield Scott

Franklin Pierce •  Franklin Pierce will try to avoid divisive issues –

impossible task •  Northerners refused to follow fugitive slave laws

•  Tried to distract from the problem •  Attempts to buy Cuba from Spain

•  Ostend Manifesto •  Enraged anti-slave Northerners

Slavery, Railroads, and the West • Nation expands westward

•  Problem of communication

• Support for a transcontinental railroad •  Northerners – Chicago •  Southerners – St. Louis, Memphis, New Orleans

•  Gadsden Purchase

Kansas-Nebraska Controversy • Stephen A. Douglas proposed bill to open Nebraska

territory •  Status of slavery would be determined by popular sovereignty •  Repealed Missouri Compromise •  Divided into two territories: Kansas and Nebraska

• Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) • Spurred the creation of the Republican Party - 1854

•  Formed by Anti-Nebraska Democrats and Anti-Nebraska Whigs

“Bleeding Kansas” • Northerners and Southerners poured into Kansas

•  Hoped to influence “popular sovereignty”

•  Two governments formed – pro-slavery and free-state •  Violence erupted between both sides •  Pro-slavery mob sacked Lawrence, burned “governor’s” house,

destroyed printing presses

• Guerilla warfare

Free-Soil Ideology •  “free labor” • Existence of slavery was a threat to whites • South was seen as antithesis of democracy – closed

static society • Republican Party

Pro-Slavery Argument • Slavery was a positive good

•  Slaves supposedly enjoyed better conditions than Northern industrial workers

• Slavery was only way two races could coexist • Southern economy was key to prosperity • Basis for the Southern way of life • Biological inferiority of African Americans

Election of 1856 • Democrats: James Buchanon • Republicans: John C. Fremont • Know Nothings: Millard Fillmore

Dred Scott Decision (1857) • Dred Scott v. Sandford • Slaves were property, not citizens, even when taken into

free states • U.S. government could not prohibit spread of slavery into

the territories

Lincoln • Senate election of Illinois •  Lincoln-Douglas Debates • Believed slavery was morally wrong – wasn’t an

abolitionist •  Couldn’t envision alternative

•  Lost Senate election – became national figure

John Brown • Pottawatomie Massacre – Kansas

• Planned to seize arsenal at Harper’s Ferry – lead slave rebellion

•  Insurrection never formed – captured

• Convinced many southerners they could not live safely in the Union

Election of 1860 • Democrats: Stephen Douglas, John C. Breckinridge • Republicans: Abraham Lincoln

•  Lincoln won majority of electoral votes, only 2/5 of popular vote

• Election led directly to secession crisis