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February 26 - April 23, 2020
The 1850s were boom years for cotton and for other southern staples.
American attention in the early 1850s focused on the Central American isthmus as a land bridge between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
“A barbarous people can never become civilized without the salutary apprenticeship which slavery secured,” declared a New Orleans newspaper that urged southern emigration to Walker’s Nicaragua. “It is the duty and decreed prerogative of the wise to guide and govern the ignorant . . . through slavery, and the sooner civilized men learn their duty and their right the sooner will the real progress of civilization be rescued.”
Having begun the decade of the 1850s with a drive to defend southern rights by economic diversification, many southerners ended it with a different vision of southern enterprise—the expansion of slavery into a tropical empire controlled by the South.
But the furor over this effort to plant the southern version of liberty as slavery along the Gulf of Mexico took a back seat to the controversy sparked by the effort to plant it in Kansas.
The transmigration of southern Whigs into Democrats was made easier by the increasing friendliness of northern Democrats toward the South.
Pierce fulfilled southern expectations. Although his efforts to acquire Cuba failed, the administration enforced the fugitive slave law vigorously and opened the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30’ to slavery. But it did so at great cost to domestic tranquility, to the structure of the Democratic party, and ultimately to the Union itself.
Even more important than the fugitive slave issue in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.
Northern Democrats and Whigs were stunned by Douglas’s bill. But Free Soilers were not surprised. It was just what they had expected from the “Slave Power.”
Popular sovereignty was false in principle and pernicious in practice, said Lincoln. Its assumption that the question of slavery in a territory concerned only the people who lived there was wrong. It affected the future of the whole nation.
Lincoln’s affirmation of moral opposition to slavery, his belief that the national government had a right and duty to exclude it from the territories, and his conviction that this “cancer” must eventually be cut out, became hallmarks of the Republican party.
The nativist parties that had flared up in the early 1840s died back to embers after the elections of 1844. Recovery from the depression mitigated the tensions between native and foreign-born workers which had sparked the riots of that year.
The Puritan war against popery had gone on for two and one-half centuries and was not over yet.
The larger significance of the prohibition movement in the 1850s was not the laws it enacted but the impetus it gave to nativism.
Buffeted by the winds of anti-Nebraska, anti-liquor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant, the two-party system in the North was ready for collapse by 1854.
They did not propose limits on immigration per se, though some Know Nothings probably hoped that by making citizenship and political rights more difficult to obtain they might discourage immigrants from coming to the United States.
Competing with free blacks at the bottom of the social order, Irish Americans were intensely anti-Negro and frequently rioted against black people in northern cities. In 1846 a solid Irish vote had helped defeat a referendum to grant equal voting rights to blacks in New York state.
In 1854 a Massachusetts free soiler summarized the issues in the forthcoming elections as “freedom, temperance, and Protestantism against slavery, rum, and Romanism.”
Since “we are against Black Slavery, because the slaves are deprived of human rights,” declared other Republicans, “we are also against . . . [ this] system of Northern Slavery to be created by disfranchising the Irish and Germans.”
Republicans and Know-Nothings had succeeded in breaking down the Whigs and weakening the Democrats in most parts of the North. But in 1855 it remained uncertain which of these two new parties would emerge as the principal alternative to the Democrats.
Ethnic political riots killed four people in New Orleans, ten in St. Louis, seventeen in Baltimore, and at least twenty-two in Louisville during the mid-1850s.
Lincoln voiced the Republican dilemma in this matter. “Of their principles,” Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, “I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. 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 pretence
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This shading toward anti-Romanism but away from a generalized nativism became a way for Republicans to absorb some Know Nothings without feeling that they were “sacrificing principle.”
Though they could not have won without Know-Nothing support, Republicans came to power in Ohio committed to an antislavery platform and not bound by promises to nativists.
What made possible this remarkable eclipse of Know Nothings and surge of Republicans to become the North’s majority party within less than two years? Part of the answer lay in a dramatic decline of immigration, which during the years after 1854 fell to less than half of the level it had attained in the first half of the decade. But the main reason could be expressed in two words: Bleeding Kansas. Events in that far-off territory convinced most northerners that the slave power was after all a much greater threat to republican liberty than the Pope was.
Derided as “Pukes” by northern-born settlers, many of these lank, unshaven, unwashed, hard-drinking Missourians had little material interest in slavery but even less love for “those long-faced, sanctimonious Yankees” devoted to “sickly sycophantic love for the nigger.”
Example of non-slaveholding southerners' interest in perpetuating and expanding slavery
Blessed with an able corps of young antislavery reporters on the scene in Kansas, whose zeal sometimes exceeded their accuracy, the burgeoning galaxy of Republican newspapers exploited Bleeding Kansas for all it was worth. Southerners continued to give them plenty to exploit.
“Bleeding Sumner” joined Bleeding Kansas as a symbol of the slave power’s iniquities. The South, declared one newspaper, “cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder.”
But the salient issues were slavery, race, and above all Union. On these matters northern Democrats could take their stand not necessarily as defenders of slavery but as protectors of the Union and the white race against the disunionist Black Republicans.
Southerners helped along the cause by threatening to secede if the Republicans won. “The election of Frémont,” declared Robert Toombs, “would be the end of the Union, and ought to be.” When the September state elections in Maine went overwhelmingly Republican, Governor Henry Wise of Virginia put his militia on alert and wrote privately: “If Frémont is elected there will be a revolution.”
Free-state Kansans organized a Republican party and elected two-thirds of the delegates to a new constitutional convention in 1859. Kansas finally came in as a free state in January 1861, joining California, Minnesota, and Oregon, whose entry since the Mexican War had given the North a four-state edge over the South.
With enemies like the Democrats, Republicans scarcely needed friends. As if Kansas were not enough, the Buchanan administration, the Supreme Court, and southern Democrats ventured several other actions seemingly designed to assure Republican victory in the presidential election of 1860.
Thus instead of crippling the Republican party as Taney had hoped, the Dred Scott decision strengthened it by widening the sectional schism among Democrats. Republicans moved quickly to exploit their advantage by depicting the decision as the consequence of a slave-power conspiracy.
Most northern states had earlier granted slaveowners the right of transit or temporary sojourn with their slaves. But by the 1850s all except New Jersey and Illinois had laws on the books offering freedom to any slave brought by a master within their borders. The Dred Scott decision challenged the principle of these laws.
Was there any lawful way, Lincoln asked at Freeport, that the people of a territory could exclude slavery if they wished to do so? The point of the question, of course, was to nail the contradiction between Dred Scott and popular sovereignty. Folklore history has portrayed this question as the stone that slew Goliath.
For Lincoln the election was a victory in defeat. He had battled the famous Douglas on at least even terms, clarified the issues between Republicans and northern Democrats more sharply than ever, and emerged as a Republican spokesman of national stature.
Lecompton and Dred Scott accounted for much of this Republican gain. Once again, victories by the “slave power” had produced a backlash that strengthened its deadliest enemies in the North.
Financial markets in most parts of the country were now connected by telegraph; the novelty of instant communication charged these markets with a volatility that caused a rumor in one region to become a crisis somewhere else.
One of the most striking consequences of the depression was a religious revival that brought people of all occupations together in prayer meetings at which they contemplated God’s punishment for the sins of greed and high living that had caused the crash.
The tariff issue provides an illustration of how political fallout from the depression exacerbated sectional tensions.
Sectional alignments were even more clear on three land-grant measures of the 1850s: a homestead act, a Pacific railroad act, and grants to states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges.
The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860.
Southerners were superior because they lived in a slave society. Yankees were perhaps fit only to be slaves. To explain this, southerners invented a genealogy that portrayed Yankees as descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons and southerners as descendants of their Norman conquerors.
No doubt some of the soldiers who marched through Georgia and South Carolina with Sherman a few years later had read these descriptions of themselves as greasy mechanics and servile farmers.
Having organized the Senate with sixteen of the twenty-two committees headed by southern chairmen, they were quite ready to keep the House unorganized until they got their way. “Better the wheels of government should stop [and the Union] demonstrate itself to be a failure and find an end,” wrote southerners privately to each other, “than our principles, our honor be infringed upon.”
Reaction in the South to Brown’s raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage.
John Brown’s ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened. Several historians have compared the region’s mood to the “Great Fear” that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the “King’s brigands are coming” to slaughter them.
Every Yankee in the South became persona non grata.
Some lower-South Democrats even preferred a Republican president to Douglas in order to make the alternatives facing the South starkly clear: submission or secession. And they ensured this result by proceeding to cleave the Democratic party in two.
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Appeal of Lincoln as a candidate
