Troubled Times: The Sectional Crisis, 1850–1861

This is Unit Fourteen, part two, from the quiet election of eighteen fifty-two to the election of eighteen fifty-six. Part one closed by handing you a test: when a party invokes a constitutional doctrine, ask what outcome it delivers. Keep it. You will see a territorial constitution in this lecture that puts property above the constitution guaranteeing it, which makes the guarantee unamendable, and that is the test working. Carry one more idea. Opposition to slavery in this decade was three different things, and only one of them resembles what a modern student assumes. Knowing that is what explains how a party two years old took a third of the vote, and it also explains something uncomfortable about what that party absorbed. By the end you will be able to name those three positions. To state what the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed and by what margin. To say what actually happened at Lawrence and at Pottawatomie. To explain why Brooks used a cane. And to explain what the Republicans took in.

Three entries on why a four-year truce ended, and one reason has nothing to do with slavery.

The quiet election.

USH1 1974 The Lull of 1852

Winfield Scott, the Whig candidate known as Old Fuss and Feathers, campaigned on his War of Eighteen Twelve battles and on the weather, describing a New York thunderstorm that had never happened. In Ohio a cannon fired to announce his arrival killed a spectator. Franklin Pierce backed Young America, avoided slavery positions, and won.

The northern pressure.

USH1 1975 Northern Pressure

Northerners pressed to organise the territory west of Missouri and Iowa, which had been admitted as a free state in eighteen forty-six, with farmers wanting federal land surveys and sales in the region. Transcontinental railroad promoters wanted the West opened, and that second interest had nothing to do with slavery and decided everything.

The southern demand.

USH1 1976 Southern Resentment

Southerners resented the Missouri Compromise line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes and demanded that popular sovereignty apply to all territories instead, arguing that property rights let an owner take enslaved people anywhere. Unit Eleven covered the line itself. Note that the demand is framed as a property right, which is the frame Taney would later adopt.

One entry now, and getting it wrong will misteach you the whole decade.

Who opposed slavery, and why.

USH1 1977 Three Kinds of Antislavery

The anchor maps antislavery opinion into three positions, and a course that flattens them will misteach the decade. Some antislavery northerners wanted the West reserved for poor White people, opposing slave-labour competition as demeaning to White work. Radical abolitionists wanted complete elimination of slavery and equality between Black and White Americans. Others opposed slavery on principle but favoured colonization, meaning the removal of Black Americans from the country. Only the second of the three is antislavery in the sense a modern student assumes. Three groups could vote together against the extension of slavery while agreeing on almost nothing else about Black Americans. This is why the Republican Party could be built so fast and why it held together. A coalition does not need agreement on ends, only agreement on the next vote. Unit Eleven taught the same point about free soil, and Unit Thirteen taught colonization. Both come back here as factions of a single party.

Three entries on the act itself, and hold the number in the last one.

The act.

USH1 1978 The Kansas-Nebraska Act

Stephen Douglas introduced the bill in January eighteen fifty-four, creating Kansas west of Missouri and Nebraska west of Iowa, and applying popular sovereignty to both, and the act repealed the thirty-six degrees thirty minutes line outright. Congress repealing its own settlement of eighteen twenty is the fact to hold. The line had stood for thirty-four years and was treated as permanent.

Why Douglas wanted it.

USH1 1979 Douglas's Own Motives

Douglas aimed to hold the Democratic Party together after patronage disputes and to satisfy southerners who hated the thirty-six degrees thirty minutes line, in a bill designed to raise his standing and advance his presidential ambitions. He also wanted the transcontinental railroad's eastern terminus at Chicago rather than St. Louis or New Orleans, which is a local interest with national consequences.

How narrowly it passed.

USH1 1980 Three Votes

The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the House of Representatives by three votes, one hundred and thirteen to one hundred and ten — a margin of three deciding the shape of the next six years. Keep the number. Much of what follows in this unit was set in motion by a vote that a handful of members could have reversed.

Two entries on what the act did to the party system, which is more than it did to Kansas.

The parties break.

USH1 1981 The Parties Break

The Democrats split along sectional lines over the act, and the Whig Party collapsed entirely and never contested another presidential election successfully — a national two-party system ceasing to be national in a single session. The anchor's summary is that as never before, the political system was polarized along sectional fault lines. Unit Ten covered the system that ended.

What replaced it.

USH1 1982 The Republican Party

The act created the Republican Party out of northern Whigs, anti-Nebraska Democrats, Free-Soilers and abolitionists, and the Free-Soil Party ceased to exist — a party committed to stopping slavery's expansion and opposing the Slave Power. It was solidly northern from the start, and that is a description of its electoral base rather than a criticism of its principles.

Five entries on what popular sovereignty produced on the ground, and the fourth is where the test pays off.

Who voted.

USH1 1983 Border Ruffians

Activists on both sides flooded into Kansas in eighteen fifty-five and fifty-six, and proslavery Missourians crossing the border to vote were called border ruffians, with estimates suggesting up to sixty percent of the votes cast in Kansas were fraudulent. Popular sovereignty depends on knowing who the people are. Kansas showed that the question can be settled by whoever arrives on election day.

What the fraud produced.

USH1 1984 Four Constitutions

Kansas produced four constitutions in its early years as a territory, each written by a different faction claiming to speak for its people, among them the Topeka Constitution, which would have made Kansas free-soil. Four constitutions is the measure of the failure. A procedure meant to settle the question generated four incompatible answers to it.

The one that reached Congress.

USH1 1985 The Lecompton Constitution

The proslavery legislature produced the Lecompton Constitution in eighteen fifty-seven, which enshrined slavery in the territory and was sent to Washington for approval, with President Buchanan supporting it while Stephen Douglas opposed it. In January eighteen fifty-eight Kansas voters rejected it by ten thousand two hundred and twenty-six to one hundred and thirty-eight.

What it said.

USH1 1986 Lecompton, Article VII

Article Seven held that the right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and that a slaveholder's right was as inviolable as any other owner's, with the legislature forbidden to emancipate without owner consent or full payment in money. Read the first clause again. It places property above the constitution that guarantees it, which makes the guarantee unamendable by design.

Who the free-soil settlers were.

USH1 1987 The Emigrant Aid Society

The free-soil majority in Kansas resented the subversion of democracy, and many of them came from New England, funded by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, with settlement organised and paid for as a political instrument. Both sides were importing voters. The difference was that one side crossed a state line on election day and the other moved in and stayed.

Four entries on two events three days apart, and the fourth insists you keep both.

The sacking of Lawrence.

USH1 1988 The Sacking of Lawrence

On May twenty-first, eighteen fifty-six, Sheriff Samuel Jones falsely claimed court authority and led an armed posse into the town of Lawrence, under banners reading Southern rights and the Superiority of the White Race, with five artillery pieces. They destroyed the presses of the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State and burned the deserted Free State Hotel. No resident was harmed.

Three days later.

USH1 1989 The Pottawatomie Massacre

John Brown and his sons were moving to reinforce Lawrence when they learned of the attack, and were disappointed the town had not resisted. Brown, a strict Calvinist, said God had raised him up to break the jaws of the wicked. He led seven people, four of them his sons, to settlers near Pottawatomie Creek, announcing themselves as the Northern Army.

Who they killed.

USH1 1990 Who Brown Killed

At James Doyle's cabin they marched Doyle and two of his sons out, sparing the youngest at his wife Mahala's plea, and Owen and Salmon Brown killed the captives with broadswords while John Brown shot Doyle in the forehead. Two more proslavery settlers were killed that night. None of the five had enslaved anybody or taken any part in the raid on Lawrence.

How the two are usually paired.

USH1 1991 Lawrence and Pottawatomie

The two events are usually paired and the pairing conceals what happened. At Lawrence a posse destroyed two newspaper presses and burned a deserted hotel, and no resident was harmed. Three days later John Brown led seven men to proslavery settlers near Pottawatomie Creek and killed five of them, two by broadsword and one shot in the forehead. None of those killed had enslaved anybody or taken part in the raid on Lawrence. Hold both facts at once, because each side's account keeps only one. Lawrence was lawless, carried out under a false claim of court authority behind banners about southern rights and White superiority. Pottawatomie was murder of men who had done nothing. The guerrilla war that followed produced over a hundred and fifty deaths.

Three entries as the violence spreads, and the last decodes a gesture you would otherwise miss.

What the territory was called.

USH1 1992 Bleeding Kansas

The guerrilla war that followed produced over one hundred and fifty deaths and significant property loss, and the territory became known as Bleeding Kansas, with antislavery advocates embracing force as a method. They distanced themselves from pacifists like Garrison in doing so, which ends the moral suasion strategy Unit Thirteen described.

The caning.

USH1 1993 The Caning of Charles Sumner

In his Crime against Kansas speech Charles Sumner attacked Andrew Butler of South Carolina with sexual allusions, comparing slavery to prostitution and naming the harlot Slavery as the mistress Butler had chosen and made his vows to. Butler was Preston Brooks's uncle. Brooks beat Sumner with a cane on the Senate floor, and Sumner was incapacitated physically and mentally for years.

Why a cane, and not a duel.

USH1 1994 Why a Cane and Not a Duel

Given Butler's age, Brooks sought satisfaction on his behalf, and the choice of weapon carried a meaning that a modern reader will miss. A duel was offered only between gentlemen, and a caning was administered to an inferior. By choosing a caning, Brooks signalled that Sumner was not a gentleman. Southerners sent hundreds of replacement canes, and Massachusetts re-elected Sumner.

Three entries to close, and the last is uncomfortable and belongs in the record anyway.

The other party.

USH1 1995 The Know-Nothings

The American Party, formerly secret, was called the Know-Nothings because members denied knowing anything about it, and by eighteen fifty-six it was a national force, opposing further immigration, especially by Irish Catholics held to have divided papal loyalty. It also opposed Chinese labourers, considered too foreign for White American assimilation. The anchor gives this movement qualitatively and offers no figures.

The election.

USH1 1996 The Election of 1856

Republicans nominated John C. Frémont and Democrats nominated James Buchanan, who avoided positions and whose qualification many believed was being abroad during Kansas-Nebraska — a candidate whose chief asset was having been out of the country. That is a real description of what the parties needed in eighteen fifty-six, since any stated position would have cost one section or the other.

The result, and what it rearranged.

USH1 1997 The Republicans and the Know-Nothings

Buchanan won the election of eighteen fifty-six and Frémont took more than thirty-three percent of the popular vote, which was remarkable for a party two years old. No southern delegate voted for Frémont. The Whigs ceased to exist. Know-Nothings then shifted to the Republicans, and the anchor says this happened partly due to the new party's anti-immigrant stance, while Democrats courted Catholic immigrants instead. So the antislavery party absorbed the anti-immigrant party, while the party of slaveholders recruited the Catholic immigrants those Know-Nothings had opposed. Record that honestly. The early Republican Party absorbed the Know-Nothings partly on anti-immigrant grounds, which means the antislavery party was not therefore a pro-immigrant party. Assume that a party right about one question is right about the others and you will misread the eighteen fifties from beginning to end.

Look at what you can now do. You can name the three kinds of antislavery opinion — the West reserved for poor White people, radical abolition with racial equality, and principled opposition coupled with colonization — and explain that a coalition needs agreement on the next vote and nothing more. You can state what the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed, which was the thirty-six thirty line after thirty-four years, and that it passed the House one hundred and thirteen to one hundred and ten. You can say what happened at Lawrence, where presses were destroyed and nobody was harmed, and at Pottawatomie three days later, where five men who had done neither thing were killed. You can explain why Brooks used a cane, because a duel was for gentlemen and a caning was for an inferior, and the weapon was the statement. And you can explain what the Republicans absorbed in eighteen fifty-six, and why being right about slavery's expansion did not make them right about immigration.