Slavery Expansion Hn Reading

Izu Onyejekwe

12/5/16

Mr.Spicer                                                                                                                                             History

Slavery Expansion HN Reading

What led to the breakdown of the compromise of 1850 was the further hysteria of the question of slavery in the national territories. This had been a central issue of 1849-1850. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, the rise of the Republican party, the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the split between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic party, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and the secession of the Southern states- all directly came from the renewed dispute over the state of slavery in the territories. Under the Constitution there was nothing that the federal government could do about matters that profoundly troubled Southerners. The House of Representatives in the 1840s; with the concession of Wisconsin (1848) and California as a free state, the south no longer had a majority in the senate; and after the death of Zachary Taylor, no southern man could realistically wish to become President. When Northern spokesmen vowed to resist at all costs the further extension of slavery into the national territories, they were voicing a condemnation of the whole southern way of life as being essentially un-American. Northerners were sturdy, equal, free men; Southern whites belonged either to a so-called aristocracy or they were “poor, shiftless, lazy, uninstructed, cowed non-slaveholders.” In the Northerners view, slavery was responsible for the backwardness of the South. Concurrently, Southerners were developing a set of stereotypes concerning the North. They found it hard to distinguish between abolitionists and free soilers and viewed all Northerners, except for a few political allies, as enemies of the South. In the Southerners minds it was the free, not slave, states that were losing sight of the basic, cherished American values. With the existence of these obverse stereotypes with the North and the South, ironically, both sides shared one crucial belief: that slave society had to expand or perish. By the 1850s any proposal to organize a new territory immediately raised the question of the status of slavery in that territory. In 1854, hoping to create a territorial government in Kansas, Douglas sponsored a bill that discreetly failed to mention either slavery or the Missouri compromise. Douglas was willing to add to his bill almost any amendments concerning slavery because he thought them to be irrelevant. Three things had gone wrong with Douglas’s calculations. First, the congressional debates on the K.N bill were so intricate, demanding his time, his railroad proposal died. Second, by permitting Southerners to maneuver him into outright repeal of the Missouri Comp, Douglas came close to tampering with the Constitution. Third, the maneuvering on the K.N bill suggested to Northerners that the national political parties, could be exploited to ensure minority rule over majority. On the night of May 24-25, 1856, John Brown, opened hostilities. He led a small party, consisting of two of his son, in an attack on the cabins of two Southern families on Pottawatomie creek. Due to those events the supreme court moved forward in action to resolve the slavery issue. After many years of cases and conflicts arising due to slavery, the outcome was only a matter of time. The forces that had once helped cement American unity- the constitution, political parties, the public oratory- now served to divide the people. By the late 1850s, everyone’s ideals and beliefs had polarized into two groups, the North and the South. Neither side was willing to yield on what both regarded as the vital issue of the expansion of slavery. And so, the war came. Of all the causes of the Civil War, I think the most important are Kansas-Nebraska Act which angered the Whigs who were anti-slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin which changed the view of African Americans and slavery, John Brown’s raid which only fueled the fire between the south and north and intensified the debates over slavery, Lincoln’s election in 1860 which was viewed as a victory for abolitionists and a sign that the time for secession had arrived. The least important were: the underground railroad because it did not warrant much attention from Washington, D.C., and the caning of Charles Sumner because it was mainly just a laugh.  

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