Troubled Times: The Sectional Crisis, 1850–1861

This is Unit Fourteen, part one, on the sectional crisis, running from the Compromise of eighteen fifty to the reaction against it. Unit Thirteen closed by saying this unit makes all of it a national crisis. It does, and it starts in a deadlocked Senate. Two things to carry. The first is about how the Compromise of eighteen fifty passed, because it was never approved by a majority that supported it, and knowing the mechanism explains why it lasted four years. The second is a test you will use for the rest of the unit. When either side invokes a constitutional principle here, ask what outcome the principle delivers, and watch the doctrine change sides whenever the outcome does. In eighteen fifty the South wants federal power and the North claims states' rights. By the end you will be able to explain how the Compromise actually passed. To explain what made the Fugitive Slave Act radicalising. To say how many people it was chasing. To state what Stowe's novel argued. And to apply that constitutional test yourself.

Three entries on the questions facing Congress, and one of the four was much harder than the rest.

The four questions.

USH1 1951 What Was in Dispute

Four interlocking questions faced Congress in eighteen fifty: the slave trade in Washington, fugitive slave law, the Texas and New Mexico border, and California — which was drawing thousands after the gold discovery, with Mexico's ban on slavery still in force. The anchor says California therefore appeared destined for free status, which is what made its admission the hardest of the four.

The election that had avoided it.

USH1 1952 The 1848 Election

Democrats ran Lewis Cass on popular sovereignty, Whigs ran Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder and war hero who stayed silent on slavery, and Free-Soilers ran Van Buren, with northern campaigns promising free territories across all parties in the same year. Southern campaigns in that same election promised protection for slavery, which is how a national party ran two contradictory campaigns at once.

What Taylor did in office.

USH1 1953 Taylor Enrages the South

Taylor wanted to preserve the Union without promoting expansion, believing that slavery could not flourish in the arid land taken from Mexico, and Californians adopted a constitution prohibiting slavery in eighteen forty-nine. He then urged Congress to admit California and New Mexico as free states, which enraged southern slaveholders and deadlocked the session.

Four entries, four speeches, and the last of them refuses the ground the other three stand on.

The compromise proposed.

USH1 1954 Clay's Resolutions

Henry Clay proposed admitting California free, rejecting the Wilmot Proviso for the rest of the Cession, and fixing the New Mexico and Texas boundary — a single omnibus package meant to be voted on all at once. He also proposed paying Texas's republic-era debts and ending the slave trade, though not slavery, in the national capital.

The southern answer.

USH1 1955 Calhoun's Dual Presidency

Calhoun, aged and ill, had Senator James Mason of Virginia read his statement, which blamed the North for obstructing southern prosperity, and demanded vigorous federal return of escaped people — a demand made by a states' rights theorist. He proposed a constitutional amendment creating a dual presidency, one for the South and one for the North, and hinted at disunion.

The northern answer.

USH1 1956 Webster's Seventh of March

Daniel Webster answered days later, saying that he spoke not as a Massachusetts man, not as a Northern man, but as an American, telling the South to stop threatening disunion and the North to stop pressing the Wilmot Proviso. Like Calhoun, he called for new federal fugitive slave laws, and abolitionists denounced him as a traitor for it.

The senator who refused the framing.

USH1 1957 Seward's Higher Law

William H. Seward declared slavery incompatible with the proposition that all men are created equal, and destined for extinction, appealing to a higher moral law than the Constitution. That phrase put him outside the terms of the debate, since a settlement can only be argued within the document both sides accept.

Two entries on the deadlock, and what actually ended it was not an argument.

The argument breaking down.

USH1 1958 A Pistol on the Senate Floor

In April eighteen fifty Missouri's Thomas Hart Benton, an enslaver who had grown critical of slavery, quarrelled with Mississippi's Henry S. Foote, and Foote drew a pistol on the Senate floor as Benton advanced on him. A print of that year has Benton saying: get out of the way, and let the assassin fire, let the scoundrel use his weapon.

How the deadlock broke.

USH1 1959 The Deadlock Broken by Death

Taylor and Clay despised each other and neither would give way, until Taylor fell gravely ill on the fourth of July and died five days later, and Millard Fillmore, his successor, worked for compromise instead. Clay withdrew from leadership, and Stephen Douglas of Illinois took over the package. Taylor reportedly fell ill after eating excessive fruit with milk.

Two entries on the settlement, and the first is the one to learn properly.

What Douglas did with it.

USH1 1960 Five Bills, Five Majorities

Henry Clay proposed a single omnibus resolving four interlocking questions: admit California free, reject the Wilmot Proviso for the rest of the Mexican Cession, fix the New Mexico and Texas boundary so Texas could not expand, pay Texas's republic-era debts, and end the slave trade but not slavery in the capital while strengthening federal fugitive slave law. The omnibus failed. After eight months of deadlock Stephen Douglas of Illinois took the package apart and pushed through five separate bills. The first was a Fugitive Slave Act offering federal bounties to slave-catchers. The second admitted California as a free state. The third settled the boundary in New Mexico's favour and paid the Texas debts. The fourth banned the slave trade in Washington while slavery itself continued there. The fifth applied popular sovereignty to territorial slavery, which meant Congress declining to decide. Most Americans believed the Union had been saved. But the compromise was assembled from five different majorities, so that no member of Congress ever had to vote for the whole of it, and none did. Picture a grand bargain argued out and then accepted by a majority persuaded of it, and you have the wrong object in mind. The Compromise of eighteen fifty was never passed by a majority that supported it. Douglas found that a package nobody would swallow whole could be swallowed in pieces, because a northerner could vote for California and against the Fugitive Slave Act while a southerner did the reverse. That is a procedural achievement rather than a political settlement, and it explains why the agreement held for four years and then failed the moment anyone reopened it.

What the settlement was.

USH1 1961 A Truce, Not a Settlement

Southerners held conventions on protective measures after the bills passed, and secessionists remained a minority within them for the time being, with most southerners committed to the Union on two stated conditions. Those conditions were that slavery persist in existing states and that popular sovereignty apply in territories wanting it. A conditional commitment is a truce.

Three entries on the first of those five bills, and it did more damage than the other four together.

The Act in operation.

USH1 1962 The Fugitive Slave Act in Operation

The Act imposed heavy penalties and imprisonment on northerners who aided escapees, and on those who refused to join a slave-catcher's posse, so many northerners felt coerced into slave-catching against their own values. That second penalty is the one to remember. The law did not ask northerners to stand aside; it conscripted them.

How each case was decided.

USH1 1963 The Commissioner's Fee

The Fugitive Slave Act put each case before a federal commissioner rather than a court. There was no jury. The alleged runaway was not permitted to testify. The commissioner received ten dollars for sending a person south into slavery and five dollars for a finding of freedom. So the decision-maker was paid twice as much to reach one of the two available findings, with no jury to check him and the defendant kept silent. The fee schedule is the entry. Remember the Act as a harsh law and you have missed what made it radicalising. That asymmetry did more to persuade ordinary northerners that a Slave Power existed than any abolitionist tract had managed, because it was visible on the face of the statute itself.

The phrase northerners began using.

USH1 1964 The Slave Power

Slaveholders claimed states' rights as their principle, yet the anchor says they used federal power bending other states' residents to their purposes — federal power rejected when it restricted slavery and embraced when it protected slavery. Slave Power was the northern name for that pattern. It describes a consistency of interest rather than a consistency of principle.

Four entries on escape, and the first number will surprise you.

How many escaped.

USH1 1965 How Many Escaped

Perhaps one thousand freedom-seekers a year evaded capture, and most of them stayed in the South among free Black urban populations, so escape most often meant a move within the South rather than a journey north. The number matters politically. A law that convulsed the nation was chasing about a thousand people a year out of four million.

The network.

USH1 1966 The Underground Railroad

Between fifty thousand and one hundred thousand enslaved people appear to have used the Underground Railroad, in which Quakers were especially active, with many thousands continuing to southern Ontario after eighteen fifty. The Act is what pushed the destination out of the country. Free soil in the North no longer meant safety from federal commissioners.

Its most famous conductor.

USH1 1967 Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was born enslaved in Maryland around eighteen twenty-two, escaped in the late eighteen forties, and returned to the South thirteen times, leading about three hundred people out of slavery. She was returning to a state where the Act now gave slave-catchers federal backing, which is what the number thirteen actually measures.

How her story was first told.

USH1 1968 Bradford's Life of Tubman

Sarah H. Bradford published Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman in eighteen sixty-nine, revised in eighteen eighty-six as Harriet, the Moses of Her People, comparing her to Joan of Arc, Grace Darling and Florence Nightingale. Bradford wrote that she had shown an amount of heroism in her character rarely possessed by those of any station in life.

Four entries on how the North answered, in a courthouse, in print, and in eight statehouses.

The first reaction.

USH1 1969 Anthony Burns

Anthony Burns escaped Virginia in eighteen fifty-three and was arrested in Boston in eighteen fifty-four, and abolitionists staged mass demonstrations and courthouse confrontations, with President Franklin Pierce enforcing the Act with federal troops. Burns went back to Virginia, and Boston abolitionists later purchased his freedom. Frederick Douglass was among those who concluded violence was necessary.

The second reaction.

USH1 1970 Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe was born in Connecticut and gathered accounts from enslaved people after moving to Ohio, where she heard them directly, and her novel was serialised in the Free-Soil National Era in eighteen fifty-one. It appeared as a book in eighteen fifty-two. She was the daughter of Lyman Beecher and the sister of Catharine Beecher, both taught in Unit Thirteen.

What the novel argued.

USH1 1971 Uncle Tom's Cabin

The novel's argument runs in two parts. Slavery is sinful because it destroys families, separating children from parents and spouses from one another. And slavery corrupts the White citizens who practise it, shown through slaveholders who believed enslaved people lacked White people's feelings, and through the dealer Simon Legree, who beat enslaved people and sexually exploited an enslaved woman. The book became the nineteenth century's bestseller, spawned theatre and music, was translated into sixty languages, and remains in print today. It made the case against slavery as a case about families, addressed to readers who had families and no direct knowledge of the institution. The novel demonstrated women's power shaping public opinion, and Stowe and others held themselves morally obligated to mould the nation's conscience despite lacking voting rights. Set that beside Unit Thirteen. The same argument that sent women into abolition sent them into print, and print was the one public instrument the law did not deny them.

The third reaction.

USH1 1972 Personal Liberty Laws

Eight northern state legislatures passed personal liberty laws giving arrested freedom-seekers state legal protections, including the jury trial the federal Act denied them — state law placed deliberately across the path of a federal statute. Southerners read them as further evidence that the North disrespected the Act and slaveholders' property rights, which is exactly what they were.

One entry to close, and it hands you the test for everything that follows.

The pattern in all three.

USH1 1973 Whose States' Rights

Slaveholders claimed states' rights as their governing constitutional principle, and the Fugitive Slave Act used federal power to bend other states' residents to their purposes. They rejected federal power that restricted slavery and embraced federal power that protected it. The North answered in kind. Eight northern legislatures passed personal liberty laws giving arrested freedom-seekers state protections including jury trial, which the anchor describes as northern states' rights opposition to federal power. So in eighteen fifty the South wants federal power and the North claims states' rights, which is the reverse of what a student expects. This symmetry is the teachable structure of the whole decade. Both sides' constitutional principles follow their interest in slavery rather than the reverse. Carry the test through every remaining entry in this unit. When a party invokes a constitutional doctrine, ask first what outcome the doctrine delivers, and you will find the doctrine changes sides whenever the outcome does.

Look at what you can now do. You can explain how the Compromise of eighteen fifty actually passed — the omnibus failed, Douglas broke it into five bills, and five different majorities carried them, so nobody ever voted for the whole thing. You can explain what made the Fugitive Slave Act radicalising rather than merely harsh: no jury, no testimony from the accused, and a commissioner paid ten dollars to send a person into slavery against five for a finding of freedom. You can say how many people it was chasing, which was about a thousand a year out of four million, and why that disproportion is itself the political point. You can state what Stowe's novel argued — that slavery destroys families and corrupts the people who practise it — and that print was the public instrument the law did not deny women. And you can apply the test: ask what outcome a constitutional doctrine delivers, and watch it change sides when the outcome does.