Chapter 14
The Gathering Tempet, 1853–1860
Chapter Introduction
14-1 KansasandtheRiseoftheRepublicanParty
14-1a TheKansas-NebraskaAct
14-1b DeathoftheWhigParty 14-2 ImmigrationandNativism
14-2a ImmigrantsinPolitics
14-2b TheRiseoftheKnow-Nothings 14-2c TheDeclineofNativism
14-3 BleedingKansas
14-3a TheCaningofSumner
14-4 TheElectionof1856
14-4a TheDredScottCase
14-4b TheLecomptonConstitution 14-5 TheEconomyinthe1850s
14-5a “TheAmericanSystemofManufactures” 14-5b TheSouthernEconomy
14-5c TheSovereigntyofKingCotton
14-5d LaborConditionsintheNorth
14-5e ThePanicof1857
14-5f SectionalismandthePanic 14-5g TheFree-LaborIdeology 14-5h TheImpendingCrisis 14-5i SouthernNonslaveholders
14-6 TheLincoln-DouglasDebates 14-6a TheFreeportDoctrine
                         
14-6b JohnBrownatHarpersFerry 14-7 Conclusion
14-8 ChapterReview 14-8a Review
14-8b Critical Thinking 14-8c Identifications 14-8d Suggested Readings



Chapter Introduction Stump Speaking
George Caleb Bingham’s 1853–1854 genre painting Stump Speaking captures the cultural importance of politics in American life in the pre–Civil War era. Here a diverse rural audience listens to an open-air speaker. We can see plainly dressed men and women sitting on the ground and listening intently; a bored child; and well- fed and well-dressed gentlemen seated on chairs. The standing man in the foreground, wearing hat and coat, seems about to interrupt the speaker—or perhaps is just listening especially closely. This portrait of political engagement reminds us that oratory was a central part of the practice of politics in mid-19th-century America.  
THE WOUNDS caused by the 1850 battle over slavery in the territories had barely healed when they were reopened. This time the strife concerned the question of slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory, an issue presumably settled 34 years earlier by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The Compromise of 1820 had admitted Missouri as a slave state but had banned slavery from the rest of the Purchase north of . To obtain southern support for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska as territories, Senator Stephen Douglas consented to the repeal of this provision. Northern outrage at this repudiation of a “sacred contract” killed the Whig Party and gave birth to the antislavery Republican Party. In 1857, the Supreme Court added insult to injury with the Dred Scott (Missouri slave who sued for freedom on grounds of prolonged residence in a free state and free territory; in 1857, the Supreme Court found against his case, declaring theMissouri Compromise unconstitutional.) decision, which denied Congress the power to restrict slavery from the territories. The ominous reorientation of national politics along sectional lines was accompanied by a bloody civil war in Kansas and a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry (Site of John Brown’s 1859 raid on a U.S. armory and arsenal for the manufacture and storage of military rifles.) , Virginia, by John Brown (Prominent abolitionist who fought for the antislavery cause in Kansas (1856) and led a raid to seize the Harpers Ferry arsenal in 1859.) and his followers.

14-1 Kana and the Rie of the Repulican Part
By 1853, land-hungry settlers had
pushed up the Missouri River to its
confluence with the Kansas and Platte
rivers, and entrepreneurs were talking
about a railroad across the continent to
San Francisco. But settlement west of
Missouri and land surveys for a
railroad required the organization of
this region as a territory. Accordingly,
in 1853 the House passed a bill creating the Nebraska Territory, embracing the area north of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) up to the Canadian border. But the House bill ran into trouble in the Senate. Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery would be excluded from the new territory. Having lost California, the pro-slavery forces were determined to salvage something from Nebraska. Missourians were particularly adamant, because a free Nebraska would leave them almost surrounded on three sides by free soil.
The sponsor of the Senate bill was Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories. Only 5 feet 4 inches tall, Douglas had earned the nickname Little Giant for his parliamentary skill, which he had demonstrated most dramatically in helping pass the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. In Douglas’s opinion, the application of popular sovereignty to the slavery question in New Mexico and Utah had been the centerpiece of the compromise. The initial draft of his Nebraska bill merely repeated the language used for those territories, specifying that when any portion of the Nebraska Territory came in as a state, it could do so “with or without slavery, as its constitution may provide.”
This was not good enough for southern congressmen, who insisted on an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Sighing that this would “raise a hell of a storm,” Douglas nevertheless agreed. He further agreed to divide the area in question into two territories: Kansas west of Missouri and Nebraska west of Iowa and Minnesota. To many northerners this looked suspiciously like a scheme to mark Kansas out for slavery and Nebraska for freedom.

14-1a The Kana-Neraka Act
The Kansas-Nebraska Act (Law enacted in 1854 to organize the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska that effectively repealed the provision of the 1820 Missouri Compromise by leaving the question of slavery to the territories’ settlers.) did “raise a hell of a storm.” Contemporaries and historians have speculated endlessly on Douglas’s motives. Some thought he wanted to win southern support for the presidential nomination in 1856. Perhaps, but he risked losing northern support. Others point out that Douglas’s real estate holdings in Illinois would have increased in value if a transcontinental railroad were to traverse the Nebraska Territory and that southern opposition could block this route. The most likely reason, however, was Douglas’s passionate belief in Manifest Destiny, in filling up the continent with American settlers and institutions. For this, he was willing to pay the South’s price for support of his Kansas-Nebraska bill. But he failed to recognize the depth of northern opposition to the “slave power” and to the expansion of slavery. Douglas had no firm moral convictions about slavery. He said that he cared not whether the settlers voted slavery up or down; the important thing was to give them a chance to vote.

Araham Lincoln
Nominated to oppose Stephen A. Douglas’s reelection to the Senate from Illinois in 1858, Abraham Lincoln was not yet a national figure. But his status would change dramatically with the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, which focused on the issue of slavery. Lincoln’s eloquence in this series of debates propelled him into national prominence.

But many Americans did care. They regarded the expansion of slavery as a national question, and one that was too important to be left to territorial voters. One of them was an old acquaintance of Douglas, Abraham Lincoln (Illinois Whig who became the Republican Party’s first successful presidential candidate in 1860 and who led the Union during the Civil War.) . An antislavery Whig who had served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term in Congress, Lincoln was propelled back into politics by the shock of the Kansas- Nebraska bill. He acknowledged the constitutional right to hold slave property in the states where it already existed, but he believed slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and to the state.... There can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Lincoln admitted he did not know how to bring this deeply
                                         
entrenched institution to an end. He understood that race prejudice was a powerful obstacle to emancipation. Still, he believed that the country must face up to the problem. It must stop any further expansion of slavery as the first step on the long road to its “ultimate extinction.”
Lincoln excoriated Douglas’s “care not” attitude toward whether slavery was voted up or down. He branded Douglas’s assertion that slavery would never be imported into Kansas because of the region’s supposedly unsuitable climate a “LULLABY argument.” The climate of eastern Kansas was similar to that of the Missouri River valley in Missouri, where slaves were busily raising hemp and tobacco. Missouri slaveholders were already poised to take their slaves into the Kansas River valley. “Climate will not ... keep slavery out of these territories,” said Lincoln. “Nothing in nature will.” Many of the Founding Fathers had looked forward to the day when slavery would no longer exist in republican America. Instead, the United States had become the world’s largest slaveholding society, and Douglas’s bill would permit slavery to expand even further. In a political speech at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, Lincoln insisted:
Stephen A. Dougla
The Little Giant began his meteoric rise to leadership of the Democratic Party with his successful effort to have the Compromise of 1850 enacted by Congress. Having forestalled sectional schism in 1850, he drove a wedge more deeply than ever between North and South with the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854. Six years later, Douglas became a victim of sectional schism when the Democratic Party split into northern and southern factions and thereby ruined his chance of winning the presidency.

The monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.... Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.... If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.
 
 With these eloquent words, Lincoln gave voice to the feelings rising up against the Kansas- Nebraska bill. Abolitionists, Free-Soilers, northern Whigs, and even many northern Democrats held impassioned meetings to form anti-Nebraska coalitions, but they could not stop passage of the bill. It cleared the Senate easily, supported by a solid South and 15 of the 20 northern Democrats. In the House, it passed by a vote of 113 to 100.
irth of the Repulican Part
The Kansas-Nebraska Act galvanized antislavery northerners of all parties into new anti-Nebraska organizations opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise’s ban on slavery in Louisiana Purchase territories north of . Appealing to the “spirit of ’76,” these organizations coalesced into the Republican Party, which held its first convention at Pittsburgh on Washington’s birthday in 1856 to organize a national party in preparation for the presidential nominating convention later that year.

14-1 Death of the Whig Part
These proceedings completed the destruction of the Whigs as a national party. Southern Whigs had been disappearing ever since Zachary Taylor had “betrayed” them on the issue of a free California. After the presidential election of 1852, few Whigs remained in the cotton South. In that year, the Whig Party nominated General Winfield Scott for president. Although he was a Virginian, Scott, like Taylor, took a national rather than a southern view. He was the candidate of the northern Whigs in the national convention, which nominated him on the 53rd ballot after a bitter contest between the northern and southern wings of the party. A mass exodus of southern Whigs into the Democratic Party enabled Franklin Pierce to carry all but two slave states in the election. The unanimous vote of northern Whigs in Congress against the Kansas-Nebraska bill was the final straw. The Whig Party never recovered its influence in the South.
Whig strength seemed to be on its last legs in the North as well. Antislavery Whig leaders, such as William H. Seward and Lincoln, hoped to channel the flood of anti-Nebraska sentiment through the Whig Party, an effort akin to containing Niagara Falls. Free-Soilers and antislavery Democrats spurned the Whig label. Political coalitions arose spontaneously in the North under various names: anti-Nebraska, Fusion, People’s, Independent. The name that caught on evoked memories of America’s first fight for freedom in 1776: Republican. The first use of this name seems to have occurred at an anti-Nebraska rally in a Congregational church at Ripon, Wisconsin, in May 1854. Soon, most of the congressional candidates fielded by anti-Nebraska coalitions ran their campaigns under the Republican banner.
The 1854 elections were disastrous for northern Democrats. One-fourth of Democratic voters deserted the party. The Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives when 66 of 91 incumbent free-state Democratic congressmen went down to defeat. Combined with the increase in the number of Democratic congressmen from the South, where the party had picked up the pieces of the shattered Whig organization, this rout brought the party under southern domination more than ever.
But who would pick up the pieces of old parties in the North? The new Republican Party hoped to do so, but it suffered a shock in urban areas of the Northeast. Hostility toward immigrants created a tidal wave of nativism (Hostility of native-born Americans toward immigrants.) that threatened to swamp the anti-Nebraska movement. “Nearly everybody appears to have gone deranged on Nativism,” reported a Pennsylvania Democrat, while a Whig in upstate New York warned that his district was “very badly infected with Know- nothingism.” Described as a “tornado,” a “hurricane,” a “freak of political insanity,” the Know-Nothings (Adherents of nativist organizations and of the American party who wanted to restrict the political rights of immigrants.) won landslide victories in Massachusetts and Delaware, polled an estimated 40 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and did well elsewhere in the Northeast and border states. Who were these mysterious Know-Nothings? What did they stand for?

14-2 Immigration and Nativim
During the early 19th century,
immigration was less pronounced than
in most other periods of U.S. history.
The volume of immigration (the
number of new immigrants in
proportion to the whole population)
was little more than 1 percent in the
1820s, increasing to 4 percent in the
1830s. Three-quarters of the newcomers were Protestants, mainly from Britain. Most of them were skilled workers, farmers, or members of white-collar occupations.
Immigration to the United State
Revolution in Germany and potato famine in Ireland were significant factors behind the dramatic rise in immigration to the United States between 1845 and 1850. Another surge in immigration occurred after the Civil War ended in 1865.

In the 1840s, a combination of factors abruptly quadrupled the volume of immigration and changed its ethnic and occupational makeup. The pressure of expanding population on limited land in Germany and successive failures of the potato crop in Ireland impelled millions of German and Irish peasants to emigrate. A majority came to the United States, where recovery from the depression of the early 1840s brought an economic boom and an insatiable demand for labor. During the decade after 1845, 3 million immigrants entered the United States—15 percent of the total American population in 1845, the highest proportional volume of immigration in American history. Many of them, especially the Irish, joined the unskilled and semiskilled labor force in the rapidly growing eastern cities.
Most of the new arrivals were Roman Catholics. Anti-Catholicism had centuries-deep roots in Anglo-American Protestantism. Fear of the pope and of the Roman Church as autocratic and antirepublican was never far below the surface of American political culture, and scurrilous anti-Catholic literature circulated during the 1830s. Several ethnic riots between Protestant and Catholic workers over the years culminated in pitched battles and numerous deaths in Philadelphia in 1844. In several eastern cities nativist political parties sprang up in the early 1840s with the intent of curbing the political rights of immigrants.
Nativism appeared to subside with the revival of prosperity after 1844, but the decline was temporary. Established Americans perceived more recent arrivals as responsible for an increase of crime and poverty in the cities. They also viewed immigrant customs with suspicion. The social and political life of both the Irish and the Germans revolved around taverns and beer parlors at a time when the temperance crusade had sharply curtailed drinking among native-born Protestants (see Chapter 12).

14-2a Immigrant in Politic
The growing political power of immigrants became a bone of contention. Most of the immigrants became Democrats, because that party welcomed or at least tolerated them and many Whigs did not. Foreign-born voters leaned toward the pro-slavery wing of the Democratic Party, even though seven-eighths of them settled in free states. Mostly working- class and poor, they rubbed shoulders against the small northern black population; Irish American mobs sometimes attacked black neighborhoods and rioted against black workers. They supported the Democratic Party as the best means of keeping blacks in slavery and out of the North. These attitudes sparked hostility toward immigrants among many antislavery people.
Attitudes toward immigrants had political repercussions. Two of the hottest issues in state and local politics during the early 1850s were temperance and schools. The temperance crusaders had grown confident and aggressive enough to go into politics. The drunkenness and rowdiness they associated with Irish immigrants became one of their particular targets. Beginning with Maine in 1851, 12 states had enacted prohibition laws by 1855. Although several of the laws were soon weakened by the courts or repealed by legislatures, they exacerbated ethnic tensions.
So too did battles over public schools versus parochial schools. Catholics resented the Protestant domination of public education and the reading of the King James Bible in schools. The Catholic Church began to build parochial schools for the faithful, and in 1852, the first Plenary Council of American bishops decided to seek tax support for these schools or tax relief for Catholic parents who sent their children to them. This effort set off heated election contests in numerous northern cities and states. Anti-Catholic “free school” tickets won most of these elections on a platform of defending public schools against the “bold effort” of this “despotic faith” to “uproot the tree of Liberty.”

14-2 The Rie of the Know-Nothing
It was in this context that the Know-Nothings (their formal name was the American Party) burst onto the political scene. This party was the result of the merger in 1852 of two secret fraternal societies that limited their membership to native-born Protestants: the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Order of United Americans. Recruiting mainly young men in skilled blue-collar and lower white-collar occupations, the merged order had a membership of 1 million or more by 1854. The order supported temperance and opposed tax support for parochial schools. Members wanted public office restricted to native-born men and sought to lengthen the naturalization period before immigrants could become citizens. Members were also pledged to secrecy; if asked about the order, they were to reply, “I know nothing.”
This was the tornado that swept through the Northeast in the 1854 elections. Although the American Party drew voters from both major parties, it cut more heavily into the Whig constituency. Northern Whigs who had not already gone over to the Republicans flocked to the Know-Nothings.
Know-Nothing Sheet Muic
Composers of popular music produced songs for political parties and movements of every stripe, and the Know-Nothing movement was no exception. Note the symbolism of the eagle and the flags for this anti-immigrant party. The pumpkins, chicken, and corn seem to symbolize rural America, threatened by cities with a growing foreign-born population.

When the dust of the 1854 elections settled, it was clear that those who opposed the Democrats would control the next House of Representatives. But who would control the opposition—antislavery Republicans or nativist Americans?
Some northern voters adhered to both political faiths. But many Republicans warned against flirting with religious bigotry. In a letter to a friend, Abraham Lincoln asked:
How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? ... As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except
 
 negroes.” When the Know Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

14-2c The Decline of Nativim
In 1855, Republican leaders maneuvered skillfully to divert the energies of northern Know- Nothings from their crusade against the pope to a crusade against the slave power. Two developments helped them. The first was turmoil in Kansas, which convinced many northerners that the slave power was a greater threat than the pope. The second was an increase of nativist sentiment in the South. The American Party won elections in Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee and polled at least 45 percent of the votes in five other southern states. Violence in several southern cities with large immigrant populations revealed a significant streak of nativism in the South.
These developments had important implications at the national level. Southern Know- Nothings were pro-slavery, whereas many of their Yankee counterparts were antislavery. Just as the national Whig Party had floundered on the slavery issue, so did the American Party during 1855 and 1856. At the party’s first national council in June 1855, most of the northern delegates walked out when southerners and northern conservatives joined forces to pass a resolution endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A similar scene occurred at an American Party convention in 1856. By that time, most northern members of the party had, in effect, become Republicans.
Nativism faded. The volume of immigration suddenly dropped by more than half in 1855 and stayed low for the next several years. Ethnic tensions eased, and cultural issues such as temperance and schools receded. But there was no easing of the conflict between North and South over the extension of slavery. That conflict led to civil war—and the war seemed already to have begun in the territory of Kansas.

14-3 leeding Kana
When it became clear that southerners had enough votes to pass the Kansas- Nebraska Act, the stage was set for conflict. At first, Missouri settlers in
Kansas posted the stronger numbers. As
the year 1854 progressed, however,
settlers from the North came pouring
in. Alarmed by this influx, bands of
Missourians, labeled “border ruffians” (Term used to describe proslavery Missourians who streamed into Kansas in 1854, determined to vote as many times as necessary to install a proslavery government there.) by the Republican press, rode into Kansas prepared to vote as many times as necessary to install a pro-slavery government. In fall 1854, they cast at least 1,700 illegal ballots and sent a pro-slavery territorial delegate to Congress.
Free-State Men Read to Defend Lawrence, Kana, in 1856
After pro-slavery forces sacked the free-state capital of Lawrence in 1856, northern settlers decided they needed more firepower to defend themselves. Somehow they got hold of a six-pound howitzer. This cannon did not fire a shot in anger during the Kansas troubles, but its existence may have deterred the “border ruffians.”

When the time came for the election of a territorial legislature the following spring, David Rice Atchison led a contingent of border ruffians to Kansas for the election. “There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote,” he told his followers, “and if that ain’t enough, we can send five thousand—enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.”
    His count was accurate. Nearly 5,000 came and voted illegally to elect a pro-slavery
How was violence in Kansas related to the issue of slavery?
territorial legislature. The territorial governor pleaded with President Pierce to nullify the election, but Pierce listened to Atchison and removed the governor. Meanwhile, the new territorial legislature legalized slavery and adopted a slave code that even authorized the death penalty for helping a slave to escape.
Members of the so-called Free State Party, outraged by these proceedings, had no intention of obeying laws enacted by this “bogus legislature.” By fall 1855, they constituted a majority of bona fide settlers in Kansas. They called a convention, adopted a free-state constitution, and elected their own legislature and governor. By January 1856, two territorial governments in Kansas stood with their hands at each other’s throats.
Kansas now became the leading issue in national politics. The Democratic Senate and President Pierce recognized the pro-slavery legislature meeting in the town of Lecompton, while the Republican House of Representatives recognized the antislav-ery legislature in the town of Lawrence. Southerners saw the struggle as crucial to their future. “The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor,” wrote Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. “The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue.” On the other side, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a well- publicized speech in the Senate on May 19 and 20 entitled “The Crime against Kansas.” “Murderous robbers from Missouri,” charged Sumner, “from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization” had committed the “rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” Among the southern senators Sumner singled out for special condemnation and ridicule was a cousin of Congressman Brooks, Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler was a “Don Quixote,” said Sumner, “who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows ... the harlot, Slavery.”
Map 14.1
Kana-Neraka and the Slaver Iue
On the main map, note how much territory was opened to slavery on the principle of popular sovereignty by the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The enlarged inset map shows how close together were the centers of Free Soil and pro- slavery forces in Lawrence and Lecompton, respectively.

14-3a The Caning of Sumner
Sumner’s speech incensed southerners, none more than Preston Brooks, who decided to avenge his cousin. Two days after the speech, Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and began beating Sumner with a heavy cane. His legs trapped beneath the desk that was bolted to the floor, Sumner wrenched the desk loose as he stood up to try to defend himself, whereupon Brooks clubbed him so ferociously that Sumner slumped forward, bloody and unconscious.
News of the incident sent a thrill of pride through the South and a rush of rage through the North. Charleston newspapers praised Brooks for “standing forth so nobly in defense of... the honor of South Carolinians.” Brooks resigned from Congress after censure by the House and was unanimously reelected. From all over the South came gifts of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again” and “Use Knock-Down Arguments.” But in the North, the Republicans gained thousands of voters as a result of the affair. It seemed to prove their contentions about “the barbarism of slavery.” “Has it come to this,” asked the poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? ... Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves?” A veteran New York politician reported that he had “never before
seen anything at all like the present state of deep, determined, & desperate feelings of hatred, & hostility to the further extension of slavery, & its political power.”

