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Essay Exam/Journal IV Part I

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Essay Exam/Journal IV Part I. Civil War Era. Using Montoya Chapters 12-13, write an essay of about five paragraphs on the history you see in the chapters. Develop a theme discussing ideas or events you would like for Americans to understand about this era. Include at least two pictures. Also, use at least one primary source document related to the era from either Connecting California or Cengage. Part II. Two Theme Essays (relate to the whole course). Write essays of about five paragraphs each on two of the themes below. Use examples from various parts of the course to develop your main points. Include at least two pictures in each essay. In each essay, also use a document from Cengage or Connecting California that you have not used before. Please put titles of documents in bold. 1. Economy. Why has the economy been such a hot topic throughout our history? How has trade and commerce helped develop the country? How have economic issues divided Americans? 2. Diversity. In what ways does the early history of our country reflect a richness of cultures, values and lifestyles? How has diversity shaped our nation? 3. Women. Describe the roles of women in various times. What major changes do you see? What events or changes in society had the most impact on women? 4. Politics. Describe how Americans have debated political issues in various periods. Which era do you think had the liveliest political discourse? How are we similar today? 5. Values. What values do you see as particularly important in early America? How do values relate to political, economic, or cultural change? Give examples of how Americans have pursued an idealistic vision in various eras. Keys to Success • Explain your points simply, as you would to another student. • Write in short to medium-sized paragraphs. • Use specific examples from our readings and class discussion. For citations, put the lead author and page or section numbers in parentheses. Example: (Montoya, 4.2) • Relate your answers to major concepts and trends we have covered. • Tell how the pictures reinforce key points you are making in your essays. • Use the essays as an opportunity to show how you have grown as a historical thinker. ****** Chapter 12 in content Chapter Introduction Boston Athenaeum; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZC4—10802] In the spring of 1855, William Walker and John Brown, two Americans of opposing sectional backgrounds and views, set out to resolve the status of slavery in new lands open to settlers. Walker sailed to Central America, whose tropical climate and fragile governments tempted U.S. adventurers, especially Southerners eager to extend U.S. rule and slave-labor plantations. Brown headed to the Kansas territory, where Congress had recently set off a small-scale civil war by declaring that the settlers themselves should decide whether to allow or ban slavery. Consumed by visions of fame and righteousness, both men believed themselves agents of destiny. A mildly successful lawyer from Tennessee, Walker had caught the fever for U.S. expansionism in Latin America. In May 1855, he sailed from San Francisco to Nicaragua with a small volunteer army that gained local allies in Central America, defeated the Nicaraguan army, and installed a puppet regime there. Following a sham election, Walker declared himself president of Nicaragua and legalized slavery. Describing Nicaragua as better suited to plantation agriculture than Kansas, he offered land grants to Southerners who would bring their slaves to grow cotton, sugar, and coffee. John Brown was a restless tanner, sheep farmer, and land speculator who moved among several northern states seeking to support his large family. Although he was white, Brown settled for a few years in a rural New York black community on land donated by the wealthy abolitionist Gerrit Smith. Before long, Brown became convinced that he was divinely appointed to destroy slavery. In 1855, he followed his sons to Kansas territory to spearhead the fight against slaveholding settlers. There Brown led a raid on a proslavery settlement that killed five residents. For months afterward, guerrilla warfare raged in Kansas between Brown’s antislavery bands and armed proslavery militias, some sent from neighboring Missouri. Walker and Brown failed in their missions. A Central American army led by Costa Rica forced Walker out of Nicaragua, while Brown, his men badly outnumbered by proslavery guerrillas, fled Kansas to safety in New England. Yet these self-styled freedom fighters remained undeterred. Walker launched several more expeditions to Nicaragua, the last an attempt in 1860 to penetrate the country through neighboring Honduras. Meanwhile, in October 1859, Brown electrified Americans by leading an unsuccessful raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in hope of stirring a rebellion among local slaves. Captured by U.S. marines, he was convicted of treason and executed by hanging. Less than a year later, Walker was taken into custody and killed by a Honduran firing squad. Not all proslavery and antislavery enthusiasts were as fanatical or as prepared as Walker and Brown to die for their cause. During the 1850s, however, Americans became increasingly divided into opposing camps. As the nation’s borders expanded in the Southwest and settlers filled in the Great Plains, the contest between proslavery and antislavery advocates intensified. Each expansionist move—the purchase of California and New Mexico as prizes of the U.S.–Mexican War, the opening of Kansas and other western prairie lands, and the prospect of annexing Cuba and other Caribbean territories—led to a showdown between impassioned citizens of the northern and southern states over the issue of extending the South’s slave society into the nation’s territories. Despite a temporary congressional compromise in 1850, sectional tensions mounted in the following years during a series of crises based in one way or another on differences over slavery. The confrontation culminated when the majority of slave states seceded from the Union and war broke out between the United States and the rebellious Confederacy. Viewed in global context, the American sectional struggle over slavery in the territories was part of a transatlantic upsurge in nationalist feeling in the 1840s and 1850s. Nationalist and republican revolutions swept through Europe in 1848 while wars of national unification or expansion raged in Mexico and South America. Almost everywhere, competing visions of national futures led to conflicts over territorial boundaries, forms of representative government, central versus local control, and degrees of personal freedom. Many Americans sympathized with overseas struggles against kings and tyrants, but when their own nation’s expansion became intertwined with fierce sectional divisions over slavery versus freedom, its political leaders inched step-by-step toward a homegrown nationalist war. ain content 12-1 Continental Expansion, Conflict, and Compromise This 1852 engraving by Henry S. Sadd after a painting by Tomkins Harrison Matteson, entitled Union, commemorates the Compromise of 1850, an agreement forged in Congress to resolve the dispute over the status of slavery in territories acquired after the U.S.–Mexican War. Most of the key individuals who debated the compromise are posed formally, including General Winfield Scott, Lewis Cass, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Daniel Webster. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-DIG-pga-02601] Analyze the symbolism of the print. Why are Webster, who approved the compromise, and Calhoun, who opposed it, both depicted next to a bust of George Washington? Why do they rest their hands on the U.S. Constitution? Why is Clay seated at the center? Why does an eagle help to part the curtain in the background, revealing a gleaming classical temple? What is meant by the engraving’s title? Many Americans took pride in their nation’s expansion across the continent, but some wondered whether the growing “empire of liberty” should extend the institution of slavery. Victory in the U.S.–Mexican War aroused northern fears that southern politicians would turn the new territories thus gained into slave states. Some claimed to detect a conspiracy to expand the South’s “peculiar institution” and use slave-state votes to control national politics. At stake in the struggle over the West were the competing political fortunes of the North and South and the future of the nation. Out of this volatile mix of ambitions and fears emerged a proposal to outlaw slavery in the new territories that opened a fierce debate in Congress and sparked talk of southern states’ quitting the Union. Tensions were neutralized only when Congress approved a shaky sectional compromise. As you read, consider the opposing positions Americans took on the issue of slavery in the territories. How did the Compromise of 1850 attempt to reconcile them? ain content 12-1a Debate over Slavery in the Territories Partisans of free soil, states’ rights, and popular sovereignty vie for control over western lands. A few months into the U.S.–Mexican War, David Wilmot, a Pennsylvania Democrat, offered an amendment to a funding bill pledging that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” would be permitted in any lands acquired from Mexico. The Wilmot Proviso echoed the wording of the Northwest Ordinance to emphasize that Congress was empowered by the framers of the Constitution to prohibit slavery in federal territories. Although it never passed both houses, for the next few years, the proviso focused and escalated the national controversy over the expansion of slavery. In the debates of 1846–1848, three main positions emerged, two aggressively sectional and one aimed at compromise. Wilmot’s idea that the federal government could and should prohibit slavery in the territories was labeled “free soil”. A diverse coalition of Northerners rallied under its banner. Political abolitionists supported the free-soil position as a key step toward ending slavery. Yet one could oppose slavery’s extension without being an abolitionist. Wilmot, for example, declared that “the negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent.” He and many white Northerners believed that slave plantations in the West would shut out the North’s aspiring white farmers. Promotion of white economic opportunity in the West was often tinged with prejudice against blacks, free as well as slave. In 1848, Illinois voters approved a law forbidding free blacks from entering the state, and Indiana soon followed suit. Alarmed by Northerners’ support for free soil, prominent Southerners sought a secure future for their slave society. John C. Calhoun argued that the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793 defined slaves as property and that protection of owners’ rights meant that they could take their slaves into territories. This position extended Calhoun’s states’ rights doctrine beyond state borders. It reflected not only slave owners’ ambitions to expand their realm but also the hopes of nonslave-owning Southerners who looked to western territories for the chance to raise their social and economic standing. A potentially attractive compromise beckoned in the idea of “popular sovereignty,” which was formulated by Lewis Cass of Michigan and later championed by his fellow Democrat, Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Why not let the territorial settlers decide for themselves the status of slavery? This formula took the controversy out of Congress and invoked U.S. traditions of self-government and local control. It fudged crucial questions with ambiguous language by not specifying how and at what stage slavery could be banned. Both proslavery and free-soil settlers warmed to “popular sovereignty” because each saw how it might bring victory. ain content 12-1b Election of 1848 Party divisions over slavery give the presidency to the Whigs’ Zachary Taylor. The question of slavery in the territories remained unresolved during the election of 1848. Polk declined a second term, so the Democrats turned to Cass, a party veteran who ran on the platform of popular sovereignty. The Whigs again sought victory by running a war hero; this time it was General Zachary Taylor of U.S.–Mexican War fame. Because Taylor was a southern slaveholder and the Whigs refused to endorse the free-soil position, many southern Democrats crossed party lines to vote for the general. Meanwhile, Northerners opposed to extending slavery, who were snubbed by the two parties, formed a new organization. The Free-Soil Party appealed to Democrats who favored the Wilmot Proviso, antislavery Whigs, and former Liberty Party men. It nominated former president Martin Van Buren. Van Buren attracted one in seven northern voters, not enough to win any northern state but sufficient to play “spoiler” by dividing these states along East-West lines between Taylor and Cass. As a result, the soldier-planter Taylor, who was stronger than Cass in the South, won a narrow victory. The Free-Soil Party won ten seats in Congress, another sign that the major parties were beginning to crack under the strain of the slavery question. It was left to the aged General Taylor, who had no political experience and had never even voted, to resolve the conflicted legacy of the war he had helped the United States to win. ain content 12-1c The Compromise of 1850 After much maneuvering, Congress adopts measures to settle the sectional dispute over slavery. By the time Taylor took office in March 1849, the slavery issue had become pressing because the Gold Rush had populated California so quickly with new settlers that it skipped territorial status and qualified for statehood. A strong proponent of Manifest Destiny, Taylor believed that the slavery controversy should not block the path to continental empire. Encouraged by the new president, California voters drew up a state constitution that prohibited slavery. Southerners closed ranks to oppose the state’s admission. Because the ratio of free to slave states was fifteen to fifteen, admitting California would give the North a critical edge in the Senate and add to its majority in the House. With Congress deadlocked, Henry Clay, the venerable Whig leader who had helped forge compromises over Missouri in 1820 and the tariff in 1833, constructed a compromise “omnibus bill” that addressed several contentious issues, including California statehood and the status of slavery in other lands acquired from Mexico. Clay’s bill touched off a six-month debate in which the Senate’s aging giants, John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster, mustered their best arguments and oratory. Calhoun warned that the Union was doomed unless Northerners ceased attacking slavery and Southerners were given a permanent veto over laws related to it. Webster rose, speaking “not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American,” to support sectional compromise. In July, hopes for compromise were shattered when Congress defeated Clay’s proposal. Calhoun was dead, the exhausted Clay left Washington, and Webster, bitterly attacked in Massachusetts for his concessions, resigned to become secretary of state. Just when all appeared lost, two events allowed a deal to be struck. First, President Taylor, who had opposed Clay’s bill, died suddenly of an intestinal ailment. His successor, Millard Fillmore of New York, was a milder man and a political veteran who persuaded other Whigs to join the compromise. Second, Clay’s younger ally, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, took charge of the bill, and the “Little Giant,” a five-feet, four-inch dynamo, brought new energy to the fight. Douglas shrewdly broke up Clay’s package and introduced the measures separately, building a different coalition to pass bills that admitted California as a free state, placed the New Mexico and Utah Territories under popular sovereignty, adjusted the Texas state boundary, strengthened federal sanctions against fugitive slaves, and banned slave trading in the nation’s capital. Few senators voted for all these measures, but taken together, they became known as the Compromise of 1850 (see Table 12.1). Table 12.1 The Compromise of 1850 Because only a handful of senators voted for all of its measures, the Compromise of 1850 did not represent an agreement forged by concessions on both sides. In hindsight, it may be more accurate to label it an uneasy truce than a genuine compromise. Pro-North Provisions Pro-South Provisions California admitted as a free state Slavery permitted in New Mexico and Utah territories under “popular sovereignty” Texas boundary dispute settled by Texas given $10 million by U.S. granting lands east of Rio Grande to government to pay state debts and New Mexico Territory drop its claim to New Mexico lands Slave trade prohibited in Tough new Fugitive Slave Law Washington, D.C. adopted A Capital under Slavery’s Shadow This abolitionist engraving dramatizes a national embarrassment: a line of shackled African Americans being marched past the U.S. Capitol on their way to slave markets. This blatant juxtaposition of white liberty and black slavery stunned many foreign visitors and appalled Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, who introduced a bill in 1849 to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. The Compromise of 1850 outlawed slave trading, but not slaveholding, in the nation’s capital. Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division[LC-USZ62—40900] President Fillmore hailed the deal as the “final and irrevocable” settlement of the sectional dispute over slavery. For all its shortcomings, the Compromise of 1850 had two big advantages. First, massive victory rallies in Washington and other cities seemed to indicate that the majority of voters was relieved to end the crisis. Second, the status of slavery in all U.S. territories was now confirmed. Although there was still the potential for overseas expansion, within the nation’s boundaries there were no new lands to fight over. In the presidential campaign of 1852, both major parties endorsed the sectional compromise, but the Democrats were the more united party. Torn between “Conscience” Whigs who opposed Fillmore and “Cotton” Whigs who appeased the South, the Whigs nominated another U.S.–Mexican War hero, the Virginian Winfield Scott. Some antislavery northern Whigs bolted to support John P. Hale of the Free-Soil Party. The Democrats chose Franklin Pierce, a New Hampshire politician whose enthusiasm for expansion and silence on slavery satisfied the party’s southern wing. Pierce won easily with 254 electoral votes to Scott’s 42. Pierce interpreted the results as popular approval of the 1850 congressional deal. His inaugural address contrasted Europe convulsed by revolutions and the United States, which was blessed with prosperity and calmed by sectional compromise. Proclaiming the United States exempt from “their wars, their tumults, and anxieties,” Pierce called “unfounded” the fear that “extended territory [and] multiplied States” posed dangers to the republic. Events at home and abroad soon challenged such confidence. ain content 12-2 The United States Overseas On July 8, 1853, U.S. naval commodore Matthew Perry led a flotilla of steamships under a cloud of black smoke into Tokyo Bay to force the long-secluded country to open its doors. Ocean-going steamships were unfamiliar to Japanese artists, and this colorful woodblock print dramatically portrays Perry’s vessel. Glenn Asakawa/The Denver Post/Getty Images What kind of human features did the Japanese artist give Perry’s ship, and why? Does the image convey fear of Western technology, fascination with it, or both? Once the United States spanned the continent, the nation’s leaders looked beyond its borders to project American power. President Pierce held visions of U.S. global influence that reflected agreement among business and political elites from both parties that American ideals, trade, and territory should spread wherever possible. Many hoped that European nations would adopt the U.S. republican model, especially after nationalist and democratic revolutions broke out in 1848. Some sought new U.S. territories in Mexico and Central America. Others, eager to follow up on overland expansion to California, pushed American commerce to the Pacific and predicted fabulous profits from the China trade. As an added benefit, Pierce hoped that initiatives abroad would divert Americans’ energies from festering domestic divisions. Yet Europe’s revolutions and U.S. initiatives in Latin America quickly became entangled in controversies at home over the slavery question. As you read, consider the various locales, goals, and methods of U.S. expansionism after 1848. Where did U.S. expansionists look to project the nation’s power, and how? How successful were they? How did the slavery issue intrude? ain content 12-2a Americans and the Revolutions of 1848 Support for European revolutions reflects Americans’ international ambitions and their internal divisions. President Pierce was part of Young America, a cohort of emerging journalists and politicians who rose to prominence as Clay, Webster, and Calhoun faded with age. The group’s label replaced United States with America, a term that absorbed the entire hemisphere and referred to national ideals as well as a particular place. The label also reflected transatlantic crosscurrents. “Young Italy” and “Young Germany” were nationalist movements of the 1840s whose members, inspired by the U.S. example, sought to unify their nations under republican governments. The Young Americans were energized by this European ferment and by pride in their nation’s prosperity and territorial gains. They became a vocal faction in the Democratic Party, promoting an aggressive, male-dominated literary and political nationalism. Their leading magazine, the Democratic Review, championed a unique national identity for American literature, publishing works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman. In politics, Young Americans updated the Democrats’ agrarian stance by accommodating banks and promoting railroads. They advocated aggressive expansion into western territories and support for republican movements abroad. Young America’s hopes for the spread of democratic institutions seemed to be confirmed by the Revolutions of 1848 that swept through Europe. Popular demands for reform first erupted into revolution in Paris, where a crowd invaded the royal palace and proclaimed the Second French Republic. This was followed by nationalist uprisings in the German states, Italy, and the Austrian empire. In Germany and Italy, revolutionary leaders aimed to unify a patchwork of small states under a national republic. In the Austrian empire, the Hungarians and other ethnic groups sought independence. Whether they promoted breakaway or consolidating nationalism, most European revolutionaries fought to create republican governments. Americans welcomed news of the uprisings against kings with massive rallies in several American cities. The United States was the first nation to recognize the new French republic. Beyond this, what form American assistance to European revolutionaries should take proved controversial. To aid an insurrection against Britain planned by the “Young Ireland” movement, a band of Irish Americans sailed across the Atlantic, but they were arrested and detained until U.S. diplomats apologized to the British government. Despite public pressures, Polk and later U.S. presidents adhered to the policy of noninterference in European affairs, and Congress sent no military aid to Europe’s freedom fighters. Global Americans Library of Congress The Young America movement not only inspired writers and politicians; it also spawned ambitious entrepreneurs who promoted U.S. business ventures abroad and coupled them with republican values. William Wheelwright built railroads in Chile; Freeman Cobb set up stagecoach lines in Australia; and Perry Collins proposed constructing a telegraph line across Russia. None of these men was more colorful than George Francis Train, a publicity-seeking Massachusetts merchant who became a shipping magnate, railroad organizer, travel writer, and confidant of European revolutionaries. In 1853, Train sailed to Melbourne, Australia, to set up a shipping business connected to England and California. He described his return journey in Young America Abroad and An American Merchant in Europe, Asia and Australia, books published in 1857. A zealous believer in the United States as a model for the world, Train urged the Australians and Irish to declare independence from Britain, rejoiced to find Crimean War soldiers swigging New England rum, and promoted democratic ideas wherever he went. “He would have every place Americanized, including Jerusalem and Athens,” an English critic complained. In the 1850s, Train built London’s first horse-drawn street railway and then returned to promote a U.S. transcontinental railroad. Two decades later, he circled the globe in record time, a feat that inspired Frenchman Jules Verne’s adventure novel, Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Increasingly eccentric, Train died a forgotten man in 1904. Fifty years earlier, however, his colorful promotion of American technology and ideals abroad made him a famous “Young American” on three foreign continents. After 1848, the forces of European reaction regrouped to suppress the nationalist revolts. French conservatives rallied around Louis Napoleon, nephew of the former emperor, who declared himself Emperor Napoleon III in 1852. In Austria, the Hapsburg monarchy accepted the revolutionaries’ decree ending serfdom but ruthlessly put down uprisings in Vienna, Prague, and Budapest, the last with aid from Russia. Americans’ reactions to the failures of 1848 reflected their stance toward growing sectional divisions at home. Some Northerners blamed Europe’s aristocratic classes for squelching reforms and vowed to fight against undemocratic “despots” at home and abroad. To anxious onlookers in the South, the revolutions showed that popular agitation could easily slide toward radicalism. In 1848, France’s revolutionary government abolished slavery in overseas colonies, and legislators influenced by socialist ideas set up National Workshops that guaranteed workers employment. That same year, a pair of exiled German revolutionaries, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published the Communist Manifesto, which predicted that class struggles would soon topple capitalism and inaugurate rule by the working class (“proletariat”) for the equal benefit of all. In practical terms, the suppression of European revolutions strengthened the free-soil movement by sending a vocal group of German “Forty-Eighters” into exile. Deeply influenced by democratic ideas, these immigrants settled chiefly in free midwestern states and often voted against proslavery interests. In the 1850s, leading Forty-Eighters such as Carl Schurz of Missouri and Friedrich Hecker of Illinois rallied support among German Americans for the newly formed Republican Party and its free-soil platform. Kossuth in America In 1851, exiled Hungarian patriot Louis Kossuth arrived for a U.S. fund-raising tour. A Kossuth mania overtook Americans as they renamed towns for him and beards like his became fashionable, replacing the clean-shaven look of the Founders. But Kossuth alienated many Americans with his noncommittal stance on slavery. This Hungarian Fund certificate shows Kossuth in the center and promises the donor repayment one year after Hungary wins independence. Kossuth departed with meager donations and no pledge of U.S. government aid. Facsimile of a fifty dollar note of the Hungarian Fund, signed by Kossuth (engraving), English School, (19th century)/Private Collection/© Look and Learn/Illustrated Papers Collection/Bridgeman Images Despite their failure, the European revolutions heightened popular zeal to have the U.S. republican experiment succeed and its institutions imitated elsewhere. Whether such institutions should include slavery and whether American influence should be spread by example or intervention remained divisive questions. ain content 12-2b American Commerce and Markets in Asia U.S. commercial influence extends with pressure on China, Japan, and Hawai’i. In the 1850s, Asia was another focal point for Americans’ overseas ambitions, with trade the primary objective. Since Jefferson, U.S. presidents and diplomats had pursued a strategy of finding markets abroad for the nation’s goods and of keeping sea-lanes open for commerce. As the nation reached the Pacific, this strategy stretched to Asia. Senator William H. Seward, later secretary of state, urged U.S. businessmen to “multiply your ships, and send them forth to the East,” declaring that the nation that dominated Pacific trade would become “the great power on earth.” Like Seward, many Americans viewed the plunge into the Pacific as the culminating phase of frontier expansion. Protestant missionaries eyed the West Coast as a staging ground for evangelizing in Asia. Congressional orators predicted that the United States would carry Western science and republican institutions to China and Japan while American farms became Asia’s granary. The reality fell short of the rhetoric. Americans’ desire to trade with Asia ran up against the desire of China and Japan to fend off Western pressures. U.S. shippers traded ginseng, furs, and (in some cases) opium to obtain tea, textiles, and porcelains from Chinese merchants, but Western rivals outpaced them. The British, French, and Russian empires vied for colonies as well as spheres of influence, concessions that included control over certain territories, ports open to foreign ships, access for missionaries, and even “extraterritoriality,” the right to enforce European rather than indigenous laws. In the 1850s, U.S. policy makers’ most realistic goals in Asia were treaties that granted the same trade privileges given to other Western nations. In China’s second opium war, called the Arrow War (1856–1860), the United States offered modest naval support when the British and French invaded Beijing. At the war’s end, the United States obtained access to treaty ports that Europeans forced China to open. This conflict occurred in the middle of the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864), the century’s bloodiest civil war, in which more than 20 million Chinese people perished, mainly from starvation and disease. Britain, France, and Russia took advantage of the crisis to grab territory on China’s coast and borders, and some Americans proposed seizing Formosa (now Taiwan). But U.S. leaders’ vision of empire did not yet include annexing land in Asia. The China trade failed to meet Westerners’ inflated expectations, and the United States lagged behind Britain in gaining a share. American relations with Japan were a different story because the United States took the lead in prying open the Japanese market. The Shogun, Japan’s military ruler, had prohibited all but a few contacts with Westerners after European missionaries and traders were expelled in the 1630s. That isolation ended suddenly. Ordered by President Fillmore to survey the Asian coast and to negotiate a trade treaty with Japan, U.S. naval commodore Matthew C. Perry cruised up Tokyo Bay in July 1853 with a squadron of steam-powered warships. The Americans believed that a show of strength would win concessions that the British and Russians had failed to get. After much hesitation, Japanese officials, aware of China’s recent military defeats against Western powers, relented. By agreeing to the Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), modeled on the unequal treaties that China had signed, Japan opened two ports to American ships, offered protection for shipwrecked crews, and allowed American vessels to buy provisions. A second treaty in 1858 opened full diplomatic relations between the United States and Japan and placed a low tariff on imported American goods. Such treaties set the unequal, and to the Japanese, humiliating, terms of Japan’s commercial relations with Western powers for the rest of the century. Increasing trade with Japan amplified Hawai’i’s importance as a stopover where steamships could refuel. Already significant as a whaling port and the site of sugar plantations owned by Americans, Hawai’i allowed U.S. businessmen and missionaries to exercise growing influence on its government. In the 1840s, rival U.S., French, and British officials pledged to respect Hawai’i’s independence under King Kamehameha III, but their truce was uneasy. Americans who held key ministerial posts in the Hawaiian government pushed for closer ties. In 1854, an envoy of President Pierce negotiated a treaty of annexation, but it was never signed because of foreign protests and disputes over whether slavery would be permitted. U.S. policy makers remained determined to dominate the Hawaiian economy and to prevent other nations from taking over the islands. ain content 12-2c U.S. Expansionism in Latin America American moves to purchase or seize Caribbean lands heighten the domestic dispute over slavery. When Hawaiian annexation failed, southern politicians’ hopes for slave plantations in the Pacific turned to the Caribbean, whose nearby location, tropical climate, and colonial history appeared hospitable to slavery. Sugar plantations worked by half a million slaves still thrived in Spanish Cuba and Puerto Rico, and unstable governments in Spain’s former Central American lands seemed to invite intervention. Potential U.S. possessions in the Caribbean and Latin America might become slave states that could, one proslavery politician claimed, give the South “more power & influence than … a dozen wild deserts” of the Southwest. Such lands (see Map 12.1) might be purchased or seized by filibusterers. Southern expansionists had found important allies in Presidents Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan, who were strong supporters of slavery, Manifest Destiny, and expanded overseas trade. Map 12.1 Filibustering Expeditions in Latin America, 1850–1860 Throughout the 1850s, U.S. adventurers mounted illegal private expeditions to grab land from northern Mexico, independent Central American republics, and the Spanish colony of Cuba. Filibusterers sought fame and fortune as well as expanding U.S. territory, including areas where slavery could take root. The defensive part of Southerners’ strategy involved quarantining Haiti. For decades after Haiti’s blacks had abolished slavery and won independence from France, the United States withheld diplomatic recognition of the country. Trade in sugar and grains flourished between the two nations, and many U.S. merchants and abolitionists supported formal relations, but southern politicians stood in the way. A free black republic was too dangerous to befriend for American slaveholders, who feared the influence of Haiti’s example and its refugees among their slaves. In contrast, Cuba, just ninety miles off the Florida coast, struck white Southerners as a candidate for annexation. Before the 1840s, U.S. officials backed Spanish rule in Cuba to preserve regional stability and to avoid a “second Haiti.” When wealthy Cuban exiles began agitating for Americans to assist Cuban independence, southern politicians saw a chance for the Democrats to acquire it “for the planting and spreading of slavery,” as a Mississippi senator admitted. In 1848, President Polk authorized $100 million to purchase Cuba, but Spain’s foreign minister ruled out selling the island, which he considered a jewel in the Spanish empire’s crown. One response to Spain’s refusal came from Narciso López, a Venezuela-born Cuban who recruited a private invading force in the U.S. South. In 1850 and 1851, he sailed from New Orleans to Cuba with a small army. The first time, López failed to win local support in Cuba and retreated in defeat to Florida. The second time, Spanish soldiers killed two hundred of his men and executed fifty, including López himself. Another response to Spain’s defense of Cuba was to escalate U.S. pressure to purchase the island. The U.S. minister to Spain, Pierre Soulé of Louisiana, tried to use an incident involving the illegal seizure of an American ship to threaten Spain with war. In October 1854, Soulé and the U.S. ministers to England and France met in Belgium and drafted a memorandum to Pierce declaring that the United States should seize Cuba if Spain refused to sell it. But this Ostend Manifesto Ostend Manifesto Letter from U.S. ministers in Europe to President Pierce in 1854 recommending purchase or seizure of Cuba from Spain. was leaked to the public, and an outcry among Northerners forced the Pierce administration to disavow it. The dream of a Cuban slave state died hard, however, and purchasing Cuba remained on the Democratic Party’s platform until the Civil War. Another target for expansion southward was Mexico. The All-Mexico movement had faltered after the U.S.–Mexican War (see Chapter 11), but the cession of California and New Mexico whetted some expansionists’ appetite for additional chunks of Mexican land. Southern-born filibusterers launched unsuccessful private invasions of Mexican border provinces from California in the 1850s. In 1853, President Pierce sent an envoy to offer Mexican ruler Santa Anna up to $50 million for several areas, including Baja California. In the Gadsden Purchase, Pierce settled for a much smaller addition to southern New Mexico to ease construction of a transcontinental railroad (see The Kansas-Nebraska Act). As it turned out, Americans built the first transcontinental railroad outside, not within, their nation’s borders. U.S. interest in Central America intensified after the Gold Rush showed the importance of a shorter passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans than sailing around Cape Horn. In 1855, after New Granada (present-day Colombia) ceded the right of transit across Panama, a U.S. company completed the forty-eight-mile Panama Railway connecting Colón on the Atlantic coast to Panama City on the Pacific. Westward expansion across the continent came to depend heavily on the steamship route to and from the isthmus and the railroad route across it, which transported more gold seekers than the Overland Trail. In the next decade, the Panama route carried the bulk of U.S. mail as well as gold and silver shipments from California to eastern banks. In Nicaragua, where a large interior lake aided the crossing between oceans, the United States confronted Great Britain’s prior claim to coastal lands. The two nations agreed in the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 not to exclude others from any waterway they built. Although high costs and engineering difficulties prevented construction of a canal, U.S. business tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt established a road and steamship route through Nicaragua that carried two thousand Americans between the oceans each month. Into this strategic and contested terrain came William Walker, seeking fame, fortune, and territory for slavery. In May 1855, he sailed from San Francisco to Nicaragua with a band of fifty-six men that was later reinforced by local opponents of the Nicaraguan government. Aided by repeating rifles, Walker’s men defeated the Nicaraguan army and installed a puppet government. In 1856, Walker declared himself president of Nicaragua, legalized slavery, and announced plans to reopen the African slave trade. Despite bitter opposition from antislavery politicians, the Pierce administration immediately recognized Walker’s government. Nicaragua’s tropical farms could “never be developed without slave labor,” the U.S. minister to Nicaragua explained. But Walker’s triumph was short lived. Troops from Costa Rica, inspired by nationalist hero Juan Santamaria and subsidized by Walker’s rival Vanderbilt as well as Great Britain, invaded and helped the Nicaraguans defeat Walker’s army. Southerners’ dream of a proslavery empire in the Caribbean did not become reality, but it scarred U.S. politics throughout the 1850s. Pierce and other Young America supporters had hoped that overseas expansion might quell the domestic debate over slavery, but filibustering and overtures to buy territory only sharpened the sectional conflict. ain content 12-3 Reemergence of the Slavery Controversy In the climax to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s bestselling novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the runaway slave Eliza crosses the half-frozen Ohio River to freedom with her child. This poster for a British-American theatrical coproduction shows Eliza making the treacherous nighttime crossing while fending off hounds sent by slave catchers visible on the far shore. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division[LC-USZC4–1298] How would this scene, taken from Stowe’s novel, evoke the northern public’s sympathies for slaves and suggest slavery’s relevance to their lives? Plans for expansion beyond existing U.S. borders escalated sectional divisions over slavery. Closer to home, the controversy over fugitive slaves showed how the Compromise of 1850 had heightened Northerners’ awareness of their entanglement with slavery and its impact on their daily lives. African American and white abolitionists’ challenges to the strengthened Fugitive Slave Law combined with a best-selling novel dramatizing the plight of the South’s slaves captured the public’s attention. Tensions reached the boiling point, but only after the question of slavery in the territories reemerged unexpectedly in 1854. That year, a law that opened the Kansas territory to slave owners shattered the sectional truce. As you read, consider the events that reignited controversy over slavery in the United States in the early 1850s. How did black and white abolitionists revive the debate over slavery after the Compromise of 1850? How did the question of slavery in the territories resurface? Main content 12-3a Abolitionists and Fugitive Slaves Abolitionist agitation and the new fugitive slave law bring slavery home to Northerners. Abolitionists played a major role in keeping the moral issue of slavery in public view after the Compromise of 1850. Fearing recapture after his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass left the United States in 1845 to lecture in England and Ireland, where abolitionist sympathizers purchased his freedom. When he returned, Douglass resolved to take an independent stand against all forms of white racism. Breaking with his antipolitical mentor, William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass supported the Free Soil Party’s campaign against slavery in the territories. His newspaper, the North Star, supplemented news of the antislavery movement with exposés of segregationist practices in northern schools, streetcars, and railroads. In an 1852 Independence Day speech, Douglass asked pointedly “What to the slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer: “A day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Global Americans A photo of Harriet Tubman, in a full-sleeve, full-length dress. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division The most famous of the Underground Railroad’s “conductors,” Harriet Tubman exemplifies the transnational dimension of U.S. slaves’ journey to freedom. Born into slavery on a Maryland plantation, Araminta “Minty” Ross became a muscular laborer and a habitual rebel who married freeman John Tubman in 1844. Emboldened by stories of successful runaways he told and by fears that her family would soon be sold, she fled to Philadelphia in 1849, where she adopted her mother’s name, Harriet. Determined to lead others to freedom, Tubman returned to Maryland and, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 raised the risk of capture, began to guide escaped slaves on a long and dangerous route through Pennsylvania and western New York to Canada, where Britain had outlawed slavery in 1833. Carrying a revolver and using the North Star as a guide, Tubman traveled with her “passengers” at night and relied on local free blacks and white abolitionists for assistance. Slaveholders posted rewards for her capture, but she was never apprehended. After Tubman established her home in St. Catharines, Canada West (present-day Ontario), she made it a haven for fugitive slaves, including many friends and family members. In the 1850s, she returned to the South more than a dozen times to conduct runaways to Canada. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison called her “Moses” for leading hundreds of escapees to the “Promised Land”—which before the Civil War meant Canada for those seeking legal protection from recapture. Douglass hoped to change attitudes and practices—North and South—with appeals to conscience, but not all black leaders were as optimistic as he was. In the wake of the Compromise of 1850, Martin Delany promoted plans to leave the United States. Delany, who had been dismissed from Harvard Medical School after white students objected to a black man’s presence, suggested in The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) that free blacks and slave runaways build a black homeland in Central America or West Africa. In 1859, he negotiated a treaty with Yoruba leaders to settle free African Americans on land that is now part of Nigeria. However, the vast majority of northern blacks remained in the free states, determined to fight for civil rights and an end to slavery. Even male and female delegates to the 1854 National Emigration Convention in Cleveland approved a resolution demanding “every political right, privilege and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States.” Some northern blacks organized campaigns to end discrimination in employment and education. After five-year-old Sarah Roberts was refused admission to a nearby white school and assigned to a distant and poorly funded all-black school in Boston, her father took the case to court. Robert Morris, the first black lawyer to argue a jury case in the United States, cocounseled with Charles Sumner to challenge Boston’s segregated school system. They lost their case in an 1850 state court decision that was later cited to justify segregation laws. But through protests, boycotts, and alliances with white abolitionists, Boston’s free blacks eventually won over the state’s lawmakers. In 1855, Massachusetts became the first state to legally desegregate its public schools. African American abolitionists and white allies also formed associations to protect runaway slaves against capture and re-enslavement. More than a thousand southern slaves managed to escape north to freedom each year, often with assistance. The loose network of abolitionist agents and safe houses that became known as the Underground Railroad helped many escaped slaves reach the relative safety of the North’s cities or a more certain refuge in Canada (see Map 12.2). Map 12.2 Escape from Slavery A few thousand slaves successfully escaped each year from slavery in the South. Although some fled south to Mexico and the Caribbean, most headed north by roads, trains, or boats and were often assisted by Vigilance Committees on the Underground Railroad. Many runaways followed routes to Great Lakes ports or other border crossings to seek a safe haven from slave catchers in British Canada. The slave states from east to west, north to south were as follows: Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, and the Indian Territory. All other states were free states or territories, which were north of Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and the Indian Territory. General movement of slaves headed from every slave state to the border states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Iowa Territory; up the eastern coast to New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Maine; south through Florida to the Bahamas which were owned by Great Britain; and southwest from the Republic of Texas across the Rio Grande to Mexico. The underground railroad was a web-like network that stretched from Maine in the northeast to the southeast corner of the Iowa Territory in the west, with the most elaborate paths in Ohio, Indiana, and western Illinois. Enlarge Image The new Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850, was intended to stem this northern flow, but its effects were broader. It tightened enforcement of the federal law of 1793 by adding restrictions on runaways and their sympathizers. Captured suspects were denied a trial by jury or the right to present evidence to federal commissioners who heard their case, and local governments were prevented from intervening. The law threatened free blacks with potential enslavement, decreed that citizens could be compelled to join the hunt for fugitives, and made it a felony for anyone to harbor them. A string of dramatic rescues and court cases intensified opposition to the new law. In 1851, a group of black resistance fighters in Christiana, Pennsylvania, led by escaped slave William Parker killed a Maryland slave owner who was attempting to recapture fugitives. Parker fled to Canada, assisted by Frederick Douglass. Three years later, an interracial crowd of abolitionists stormed a Boston courthouse to free the captured runaway Anthony Burns, and a prison guard was killed in the failed attempt. President Pierce sent federal troops to Boston to escort Burns south. Each episode attracted new sympathizers. Enraged by the Burns case, Massachusetts businessman Amos Lawrence declared that he and his friends “went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” ain content 12-3b Uncle Tom’s Cabin An influential antislavery novel dramatizes the evils of slavery. The plight of fugitives and the horrific fate of relatives they left behind were the subject of a best-selling novel published in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A white abolitionist, Stowe had never seen a slave plantation, but her family had harbored runaways at their home in Cincinnati. Her book absorbed their stories into a fictional saga that brought the cruel realities of the slave quarters and the whipping post into tranquil northern parlors. Unabashedly sentimental, Stowe’s novel traced the fate of several slaves, including Eliza, who flees northward carrying her child across ice floes on the Ohio River; Lucy, who commits suicide when her infant is sold away; and the saintly Uncle Tom, who forgives a cruel master even as he is beaten to death. All suffer the evil effects of the slave system. Stowe drew on ideas of womanhood that transcended racial and class differences by highlighting the agony of enslaved mothers. Convinced that slavery also corrupted the master class, she avoided blaming southern slaveholders, portraying most as good Christians trapped in their roles and making the cruelest master a New England-born overseer. Her intent was to stir readers’ consciences and awaken them to their complicity with slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin tugged at the heartstrings of the quarter of a million Americans who read it in its first year as well as those who attended theatrical adaptations. Many Northerners accepted Stowe’s portrait of slavery as accurate whereas white Southerners condemned it as misleading propaganda. Translated into many languages, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the world’s best-selling novel in the nineteenth century. It was a huge hit in Europe, where Romantic literature prevailed, the South provided an exotic setting, and the recent abolition of slavery in British and French colonies allowed readers to pity Americans. At the end of the novel, Stowe linked the antislavery movement to the European revolutions of 1848. Both gave voice to the hunger for freedom among the oppressed, she declared, and every nation that failed to heed this call would face God’s wrath on the Day of Judgment. ain content 12-3c The Kansas-Nebraska Act Stephen Douglas reopens the political fight over slavery in western territories. Despite controversies over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, fugitive slaves, and Central American filibusterers, the most explosive issue in the struggle over slavery in the 1850s remained the question that the U.S.–Mexican War had raised: the status of slavery in the western territories. The man who shattered the sectional truce of 1850 was the same one who had steered it through Congress. When Stephen Douglas proposed in 1854 to organize the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands west of the Missouri River into territories where slavery might take hold, he created a furor that convulsed American politics. The dispute grew out of two manias that nineteenth-century Americans shared with settler societies such as Canada and Argentina: land hunger and railroads. Midwestern farmers had long coveted fertile lands in the vast prairies between the Mississippi River and the Rockies. Attempts to open them for sale and settlement were held back because the federal government had set aside some tracts in 1830 as a permanent Indian reserve. Meanwhile, plans for a transcontinental railroad anchored the dreams of many U.S. expansionists. Enormous profits could be made by linking existing lines east of the Mississippi with the Pacific. For the eastern terminus, Northerners’ hopes focused on Chicago, the booming Great Lakes port and commercial hub. Southerners pushed for New Orleans, Memphis, or St. Louis, all located in slave states. As sectional rivalry for the transcontinental railroad heated up, it inevitably became entangled with slavery. Prodded by expansionists, federal officials opened new western lands to settlers and railroads. In 1853, the Pierce administration purchased from Mexico thirty thousand square miles of desert land south of the Gila River in present-day Arizona and New Mexico. Costing $10 million, the Gadsden Purchase skirted the southern end of the Rocky Mountains to create a level railroad route from the South to the West Coast. The path was less smooth than expected. This borderland had long been contested between the Apache people and Mexican frontiersmen, and the U.S. government joined the violent struggle as a third party. Farther north, the Pierce administration pressured tribal leaders in Nebraska to give up their lands for railroads and white settlement. In treaties signed early in 1854, the Delawares, Shawnees, Iowas, and Kickapoos ceded all but a few small reservations. Most Indians were eventually forced to move to Oklahoma territory, where they were squeezed onto small grants bordering the Native Americans who had been sent there earlier by the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s. Early in 1854, Douglas, eager to promote a transcontinental railroad that would benefit his state of Illinois, introduced a bill to organize the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. To attract Southerners’ support, Douglas’s bill raised the possibility that slavery could be established in these territories by leaving the issue to local voters, his trademark formula of popular sovereignty. This time the Little Giant had miscalculated. Douglas was indifferent to slavery and believed it had little chance to take root on the Great Plains. By 1854, however, many Northerners and Southerners were ready to argue vehemently over that possibility. Free-soil advocates saw popular sovereignty as a proslavery formula, especially after the Utah Territory had used it to legalize slavery in 1852. Besides that, the Kansas and Nebraska Territories lay above the line where slavery had been forbidden in the Louisiana Purchase lands by Congress in 1820. After a heated debate, the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress in May 1854 (see Map 12.3). Map 12.3 The Kansas-Nebraska Act and Slavery in the Territories, 1854 Stephen Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act reopened the slavery controversy by applying the formula of popular sovereignty from the Compromise of 1850 to new territories in remaining lands from the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery from those lands, but the new law repealed it, causing a political firestorm. Douglas’s victory reopened sectional divides and strained existing political parties to the breaking point. Southern Democrats strongly backed the Kansas-Nebraska Act while Democrats in the North, wary of a popular backlash, split their votes. Their fears proved well founded in the 1854 elections, when northern Democrats lost most of their seats in Congress and were left in control of only two free-state legislatures. As the Democratic Party became more southern dominated, dissatisfied northern members began to seek alternatives. Meanwhile, the Whig coalition shattered entirely. Northern Whigs voted unanimously against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, southern Whigs decisively for it. The national Whig Party, already weakened by divisions over the Compromise of 1850, simply dissolved. The stage was set for a dramatic realignment of the American political system. ain content 12-4b Republicans and the Sectional Debate A new northern party polarizes the political dispute over slavery. Another new coalition, the Republican Party, got off to a later start than the Know-Nothings but proved more durable. The party sprang up in 1854 in midwestern states out of spontaneous protests over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and then spread eastward. Its coalition of antislavery Whigs, dissenting northern Democrats, and Free Soilers began with divergent views on such issues as immigration and tariffs, but they agreed on one powerful cause: opposition to slavery’s extension westward. Its clout was demonstrated in the 1854 elections when the fledgling party won a surprising victory, capturing a majority of northern states’ seats in the House of Representatives. The Republicans’ motto, “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men,” summarized their appeal. Free-soil antagonism to slavery in the territories reflected varied concerns, ranging from prejudice against blacks in the North to the search for economic opportunity in the West unhindered by competition with slave labor. Only a small minority of prominent Republicans held abolitionist views; others, like northern bankers and manufacturers of clothing, profited directly from the trade in slave goods. Most were willing to leave southern slavery alone and did little to improve the condition of the North’s free blacks. The ideology of free labor highlighted Northerners’ confidence in their prosperous system of competitive capitalism. Northern farms and factories had created a high standard of living compared to that of the “backward” South. A free-labor society, Republicans believed, dignified work and rewarded initiative. Prominent Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln and other Republicans tied free labor to U.S. nationalism, asserting that the North’s thriving economy and open frontier exempted the United States from class antagonisms that divided Europeans. Preserving western lands as a safety valve that offered an escape for discontented eastern wage workers would guarantee America’s fortunate difference into the future. For the great majority of Republicans, free men meant free white men unpressured by the “Slave Power,” a conspiracy of influential planters that threatened majority rule and compromised the nation’s global posture. The South’s promotion of slavery, Lincoln and other Republicans believed, tarnished the image of the United States abroad and prevented foreign liberals from adopting its republican institutions. Despite the emphasis on free men, Republicans celebrated middle-class women’s moral influence and encouraged their participation in political events in contrast to the Democratic Party’s emphasis on male mastery of households and plantations. The Republican Party was the first major sectional party in U.S. politics. In their heyday, the Whigs and Democrats, with substantial membership in the North and South, often put aside sectional views to promote compromise. Without southern members to appease, Republicans appended a northern-flavored economic program to their platform. They updated the old Whig American system of federal support for internal improvements with calls for federal subsidies for a Pacific railroad and free homesteads of one hundred sixty acres for western settlers. This economic package and, after party leaders denounced nativist views, a friendlier attitude toward immigrants attracted additional northern voters. The Democratic Party remained a cross-sectional coalition but became increasingly dominated by southern leaders. Franklin Pierce and other “northern men of southern principles,” called “doughfaces” for their pliable views, rose in the party at the expense of neutral nationalists such as Stephen Douglas. The core strategy of the Democrats’ vocal Deep South “fire eaters” was an aggressive defense of slaveholders’ rights. Their growing influence among Democrats pushed aside the Upper South tradition of sectional compromise. Without a viable opposition party to replace the Whigs, Southern politics became a one-party system dedicated to sectional loyalty and defense. Southern Democrats’ growing militancy derived from other sources besides party reshuffling. The cotton boom required expansion, and access to western lands promised social mobility for poor whites who aspired to own slaves—a southern white version of the free-labor safety valve. In the eyes of southern Democrats, Republicans looked no different from abolitionists, for both threatened to strangle the slave system. Also at stake was the shifting balance of sectional power in Congress. Additional free states remained to be carved out of the Oregon, Louisiana Purchase, and Northwest Ordinance territories whereas slaveholders could count only on dry and distant New Mexico. Unless slavery could be extended, the Democrats’ control of Congress and the presidency appeared doomed. Finally, Deep South politicians worried about the loyalty of Upper South farmers, who were less tied to the cotton boom and might compromise slaveholders’ interests. The fire eaters believed that confrontations over slavery would ensure a united southern front. Global Americans Architect of the Capitol Born in Germany, Emanuel Leutze was brought to the United States as a child by his immigrant parents. He took painting lessons in Philadelphia and returned to Germany for advanced training. At first practicing his craft abroad, Leutze specialized in historical subjects painted dramatically and in painstaking detail, many of them illustrating the virtues of America. A strong supporter of the Revolutions of 1848, Leutze painted his iconic Washington Crossing the Delaware (1850) to inspire European liberals with the example of the American Revolution. In 1859, he returned permanently to the United States. As the sectional struggle over slavery in the territories heated up, Congress commissioned Leutze to produce a stairway mural for the U.S. Capitol Building. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way portrayed Manifest Destiny on an epic scale. It features a procession of pioneer men and women, including recent Irish and German immigrants, who pilgrimaged from the Valley of Darkness toward the golden light of San Francisco Bay. Like many German immigrants, Leutze warmed to the Republicans’ free-labor ideology. For the mural’s final version, Leutze linked westward expansion with antislavery sentiment by inserting a freed black boy guiding a mule near its center. During the intensified sectional debate of the 1850s, proslavery advocates extended the religious, racial, historical, and economic arguments they had developed earlier to defend their views and attack opponents (see Chapter 10). Josiah Nott, an Alabama physician, claimed in Types of Mankind (1854) that black Africans and their descendants constituted a separate, unchanging racial type unable to rise from “barbarism.” International perspectives also informed the controversy. South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond, in his famous “mud-sill” speech, used Roman history to argue that a servile laboring class was necessary to support “civilized” free men. To discredit the North’s free-labor system, proslavery spokesmen borrowed heavily from British and French critics of industrialism. Northern workers toiling in factories and living in squalid new industrial slums were “wage slaves” whose plight was far worse than that of southern blacks, the Virginia proslavery apologist George Fitzhugh charged in Sociology for the South; or The Failure of Free Society (1854). At the same time, proslavery politicians’ aggressive stance fed on their discomfort that slavery and other forms of bound labor were in obvious decline throughout the western world. The revolutionary upheavals of 1848 outlawed slavery in French colonies and ended serfdom in the Austrian empire and German states. To antislavery Northerners, these developments showed that the tide of history was rising with them. Both sides were Main content 12-4c Violence in Kansas, Congress, and California Conflict over territorial slavery produces bloodshed in western lands and the U.S. Senate. Far from resolving growing tensions over slavery, the Kansas-Nebraska Act simply shifted animosities from Congress to Kansas. Goaded by the popular sovereignty provision, a race began between proslavery and antislavery forces to recruit settlers and build a majority among Kansas voters, and their animosity degenerated into a mini-civil war. Southerners initially gained the upper hand because Kansas lay west of slave-state Missouri. In 1855, thousands of Missouri “border ruffians” crossed over and voted fraudulently to give proslavery candidates a large majority in the territorial legislature, which established Lecompton as its capital. Northern abolitionists and religious societies responded by sponsoring free-soil settlers, in some cases providing them with guns. Abolitionists such as Angelina Grimké and Lydia Maria Child who had previously embraced pacifism now declared that violence was necessary to defend Kansas free soilers. Republican politicians declared that Americans in Kansas faced a homegrown Revolution of 1848 between the forces of freedom and despotism. When the Lecompton legislature legalized slavery, the free soilers convened in Topeka and established their own territorial government and constitution. By early 1856, guerrilla warfare had erupted between partisans of the two Kansas governments, and President Pierce pledged armed federal support for the proslavery regime. In May, a posse organized by a federal marshal sacked the free-state town of Lawrence. In retaliation, abolitionist agitator John Brown led four of his sons and a few followers in a raid on a proslavery settlement on Pottawatomie Creek. Wielding broadswords, they hacked five men to death. After that, armed bands of guerrillas roamed through eastern Kansas, clashing over slavery and rival claims to turf. What the eastern press called “Bleeding Kansas” became a living symbol of sectional polarities. Meanwhile, violence reached the floor of Congress when Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner gave a stinging speech condemning “The Crime Against Kansas.” An abolitionist and florid orator, Sumner portrayed proslavery voter fraud as “the rape of a virgin territory” and singled out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina as one who had taken “the harlot, slavery” as his mistress. Sumner’s abusive personal references provoked an attack by South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler, who beat Sumner unconscious with his cane. The injured Sumner became a hero to Republicans, his vacant senate chair a symbol of slaveholder violence. Brooks was censured by Congress but reelected by South Carolina voters and received dozens of congratulatory canes as replacements for the one he broke in the attack. The presidential contest of 1856 provided a snapshot of the political divisions and realignments that followed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Passing over Pierce and Stephen Douglas as too controversial, the Democrats turned to Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, a reliable doughface who had been an overseas diplomat during the sectional debate. For their first national election, the Republicans chose John C. Frémont, a military hero and western adventurer who relied on his youthful good looks—and his politically savvy wife, Jessie Benton, the daughter of a powerful Missouri senator—to unify the new party’s ranks. The Know-Nothings, now split by slavery into northern and southern wings, fretted as the first organization endorsed Frémont while the second nominated former president Millard Fillmore. With the support of southern voters, who preferred Buchanan to Fillmore in every slave state but Maryland, the Democratic candidate won the three-way election. Frémont, however, ran remarkably well, carrying eleven of the sixteen free states. If the Republicans had taken Pennsylvania and one other heavily populated free state, Frémont would have entered the White House; by this time, a northern sectional party could win the presidency without even campaigning in the South. That lesson was not lost on James Buchanan. Perhaps seeking to appease Republicans, who had campaigned against the “twin relics of barbarism,” polygamy and slavery in the West, the new president sent U.S. forces to the Utah territory to replace Mormon leader Brigham Young as governor. The expedition led to a prolonged standoff known as the Utah War (1857–1858) whose worst casualties were not armed men from either side but a band of one hundred twenty California-bound emigrants ambushed in a remote area by local Mormon militiamen. Eventually, the two sides negotiated an agreement whereby Young stepped down, federal troops remained as peacekeepers, and those who took part in the “Mormon Rebellion” were pardoned. Buchanan also took steps to resolve the Kansas question but only made things worse. The new president announced that he supported Kansas’s admission to the Union as a slave state. A proslavery constitution was drafted at Lecompton in 1857 and eventually submitted to Kansas voters, who rejected it. Nevertheless, Buchanan insisted that the Lecompton constitution was legitimate and pressured northern Democrats in Congress to join southern colleagues and admit Kansas to statehood under it. Stephen Douglas broke with the administration. Angered by Buchanan’s violation of popular sovereignty, Douglas believed that midwestern Democrats like him could not cave in to proslavery politicians without endangering their own reelection. Douglas’s independent stand infuriated southern Democrats and ended his dream of winning the South’s support for his presidential ambitions. The Lecompton controversy revealed a growing sectional fissure in the Democratic ranks. In California, where the Democrats were divided between migrants from the free and slave states, the Lecompton rift sparked intraparty violence. Newly elected U.S. Senator David Broderick was a second-generation Irish American and a Democratic political boss who sided with Douglas. His bitter rival, Kentucky-born David Terry, had been chief justice of the California Supreme Court and led the state’s proslavery Democratic faction. The two men exchanged insults and then fought a duel south of San Francisco, where Terry shot Broderick in the chest. “I die because I was opposed to a corrupt administration and the extension of slavery,” the senator reportedly proclaimed on his deathbed. In 1854, the Whig Party had shattered over slavery; a few years later, the nation’s Democrats headed toward their own breakup. Roger Taney and Dred Scott These photographs suggest the gravity of the Dred Scott case and the dignity of both principals. Roger Taney was a Maryland attorney and Jackson appointee who had freed his own slaves but who championed white man’s democracy and condemned antislavery agitation as “northern aggression.” Dred Scott’s master had allowed him to marry and promised that he could earn his freedom, but when the master died, his widow reneged, prompting Scott’s suit against her and her brother, John Sandford. Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision, the sons of Scott’s first owner purchased him and his family and freed them. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62–107588); Missouri History Museum, St. Louis to make a stand in Kansas. ain content 12-4d The Dred Scott Case and Lincoln-Douglas Debates A Supreme Court decision opens the territories to slavery and deepens sectional divisions. In his inaugural address, President Buchanan referred to a pending Supreme Court decision that he hoped would settle the slavery controversy once and for all. Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, had been taken by his owner, an army surgeon, to various posts in Illinois and Wisconsin, the latter a territory where slavery had been banned by the Missouri Compromise. In Wisconsin, Scott met and married another slave, Harriet Robinson. When their owner took them back to St. Louis, Harriet Scott, who attended an abolitionist church, convinced her husband to sue for freedom. Arguing that residence in a free territory had made him and his family free, Scott’s lawyers pursued his appeal to the Supreme Court. At stake were two key issues. First, did Scott have the right of U.S. citizens to sue in federal court? Second, did Congress, or a federally sanctioned territorial legislature, have the power to prohibit slavery in a territory? In March 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney delivered the majority opinion of a court that tilted toward the South. Scott, Taney declared, could not be a citizen. Ignoring African Americans’ citizenship in several northern states since the 1780s, Taney asserted that the founding generation had agreed that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” with “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Moving on to the question of slavery in the territories, Taney declared that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The Constitution did not give Congress authority over territory acquired after 1787. More important, said Taney, the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution forbade taking a person’s property, including slaves, without their consent or “due process of law.” Instead of settling the controversy over slavery, the Dred Scott decision of 1857 deepened it. Southern whites, whose constitutional arguments had won crucial support, rejoiced whereas Republicans, whose free-soil views the Court dismissed, were outraged. African American conventions held in northern cities denounced the decision. For northern Democrats such as Stephen Douglas, the Court’s decision posed a fatal obstacle. Because territorial legislatures were then prohibited from interfering with slave owners’ property rights, Douglas’s formula of popular sovereignty became meaningless: Kansas could not prohibit slavery even if its citizens wished. Polarized reactions to the decision indicated that by 1857, the Supreme Court could not keep together a union of states that slavery was pulling apart. The biblical adage that “A house divided against itself cannot stand” struck Abraham Lincoln as an apt metaphor for the situation in the United States. Either the opponents of slavery would blockade it into extinction, as Republicans proposed, or its advocates would press until the nation legalized slavery everywhere inside its borders. During the Illinois senatorial campaign of 1858, Lincoln, the Republican challenger, engaged the incumbent Douglas in a series of debates. Lincoln charged that the Dred Scott decision prefigured the spread of slavery to free states. Declaring slavery a “vast moral evil,” Lincoln asked Douglas whether popular sovereignty remained a viable way to curb it. In reply, Douglas asserted that despite the Dred Scott decision, citizens in territories could exclude slavery by denying it legal protection—a response that appeased Illinois voters but further damaged the Little Giant’s standing in the South. When Douglas labeled Lincoln a “Black Republican” who favored racial equality, Lincoln responded that he was not in favor of “bringing about the social and political equality of the white and black race.” Lincoln’s racial views stood at the moderate Republican center, positioned between the abolitionists and antiblack free soilers, and his debate performance enhanced his reputation among Republicans nationally. Douglas hung onto his seat, but other northern Democrats felt the backlash from the Dred Scott decision in the 1858 elections. Propped up by the solid South, the party kept control of the Senate but it lost its majority in the House, which only tightened the political deadlock in Washington. ain content 12-5 Road to Disunion This political cartoon produced by New York printmakers Currier & Ives depicts the movement among southern states to leave the Union in the winter of 1860–1861. It shows Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana as men riding donkeys, following South Carolina’s man riding a pig toward a dangerous cliff. South Carolina’s rider shouts that “Old Hickory [Andrew Jackson] is dead, and now we’ll have it,” while Alabama declares that “Cotton is King!” The Georgia rider detours down a hill, expressing “doubts about ‘the end’ of that road.” Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62–32995) What does this northern cartoon suggest about the motives of the seceding southern states? How does the cartoonist view their prospects? With the status of Kansas unresolved, an unpopular Supreme Court decision under debate, and Congress locked in stalemate, the issue of slavery in the territories seemed to paralyze the U.S. political system. Some white Southerners, surveying the gains that opponents of slavery had made at home and abroad, preached disunion as the only solution. By withdrawing from the Union, southern whites could transform themselves instantly from a minority to a majority and build a new nation founded on slavery and states’ rights. Disunion remained a distinctly minority view among white Southerners, however, until an attempted slave insurrection in 1859 and the Republicans’ presidential victory the following year seemed to confirm the fire eaters’ dire prophecies. When South Carolina renounced the federal union after Lincoln was elected president, it set off a chain reaction that led to civil war. As it turned out, Americans disagreed just as fiercely over the meaning and permanence of the Union as they had over the extension of slavery within it. As you read, examine key events along the road to the Civil War. What did the response to John Brown’s raid reveal? Why did several slave states secede from the Union following Lincoln’s election? Why did Republicans reject political compromise and Northerners refuse to let the secessionists depart? How did the Civil War break out? ain content 12-5a John Brown’s Raid An abolitionist attempt to provoke a slave insurrection electrifies the nation. As political positions on slavery polarized, John Brown again pushed the conflict over the line into violence, as he had in Kansas. On October 16, 1859, Brown led an interracial band of eighteen followers in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. His intent was to steal firearms and establish a fortress in a mountain hideaway in Virginia, inspiring slaves to rebel and take refuge there. Brown knew about successful Latin American maroons—colonies of runaway slaves—and he absorbed tactics of guerrilla warfare from writings of the Italian revolutionary of 1848, Giuseppe Mazzini. But his raid failed badly, and his men were besieged in the arsenal’s engine house by the local militia and then U.S. troops commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee. After surrendering, Brown and six of his followers were convicted of treason against Virginia and executed. John Brown Confers with Frederick Douglass Brown sought the support of abolitionist Douglass shortly before leading the raid at Harpers Ferry. Douglass disapproved, warning that attacking federal property was suicidal and would provoke a violent backlash. After the raid, Douglass fled for a time to Canada, fearing arrest as a coconspirator. To the South’s whites, the web of guilt by association spread beyond abolitionists like Douglass to include mainstream Republicans. In this 1941 painting by black artist Jacob Lawrence, Brown makes his appeal and Douglass resists. A cross on the wall suggests their shared religious inspiration. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration John Brown’s Raid electrified the nation, and his death stirred strong emotions at home and abroad. Impressed by Brown’s courage, transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau praised him as a martyr who “would make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” In an impassioned plea to stay Brown’s execution, the French romantic novelist Victor Hugo published a letter calling Brown a “liberator” and “the champion of Christ.” Southern planters’ reactions formed a stark contrast, for the raid revived their worst nightmare: a violent insurrection by their own supposedly loyal slaves. Once it became known that Brown had received financial support from a circle of New England abolitionists, Southerners saw proof that northern abolitionists aimed to incite a slave rebellion. Proslavery leaders had threatened to desert the Union for a decade, but Brown’s raid convinced many rank-and-file white Southerners that they were no longer secure in confederation with free states. ain content 12-5b Election of 1860 A four-party contest gives the presidency to Republican candidate Lincoln, elected by a sharply sectional vote. When Congress reconvened after John Brown’s raid, tensions ran so high that according to one senator, many members carried concealed revolvers and knives on the floor of Congress. In February 1860, Democratic Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi demanded congressional action against states harboring fugitive slaves and federal guarantees that slavery would be protected in the western territories. For the South’s fire eaters, the Davis resolutions were the minimum price the North had to pay to keep southern states in the Union. That price was too high even for northern Democrats. Fearing rejection by voters in their own states, Stephen Douglas and other free-state champions of popular sovereignty refused to switch to Davis’s position. In April 1860, the Democrats met to nominate a presidential candidate, and when Douglas secured the majority, the Deep South delegates walked out. The same drama was repeated at a later convention. Hopelessly divided, the Democrats offered two candidates to the public: Douglas for the northern wing of the Party, and Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky for the southern. Republicans, sensing victory, sought a moderate candidate and a broad platform. Lincoln appealed as a Midwesterner who could win interior states. He was untainted by Know-Nothing views and less militant on slavery than the early favorite, Senator William Seward of New York. The Republican platform condemned John Brown’s raid and pledged noninterference with southern slavery but held the line against its extension. Republicans also widened their appeal by advocating immigration, homestead laws, and a transcontinental railroad. None of these candidates pleased political veterans in the Upper South. Desperate to preserve the Union, they hastily formed the Constitutional Union Party. Their nominee, John Bell of Tennessee, conjured the spirit of Henry Clay but had no specific compromise to offer. The election of 1860 became a four-way race that was sharply sectional in character. Lincoln took every northern state except New Jersey, which he split with Douglas. Breckinridge carried nine states in the Deep South. The Upper South was divided among Bell, Breckinridge, and Douglas, who won only Missouri. Lincoln won just under 40 percent of the popular vote, but his margin in the Electoral College was decisive. The Republicans had learned the lesson of 1856: A presidential candidate no longer needed Southerners’ votes to win. South Carolina’s proslavery leaders understood this, too. ain content 12-5c The Secession Crisis Deep South states bolt from the Union, and the Republican Party rejects compromise. In December 1860, not long after the election results were official, South Carolina passed an ordinance of secession, withdrawing the state from the Union. Proslavery politicians in that state were emboldened by lame-duck president Buchanan, who denied the right of secession but said the federal government could do nothing to stop it. South Carolina leaders argued that the incoming “Black Republican” Lincoln would do all he could to abolish slavery. The Republicans’ victory signaled that the Democrats’ control over the presidency and Congress was ending, and their dominance of the Supreme Court would soon follow. Because the Union was no more than a compact among sovereign states, proslavery leaders contended, state conventions or legislatures could vote to withdraw from it. Secessionists portrayed their cause as the true heir to the American Revolution’s revolt against tyranny and the proper response to Republicans’ abandonment of the Framers’ constitutional guarantees to slave owners. The only course left was to form a new nation dedicated to slavery and states’ rights. South Carolina’s secessionists hoped to force other southern states to declare their slave-state loyalties and forswear sectional reconciliation. The response was mixed. State conventions in the Deep South passed secession ordinances, and by February 1861, six states—Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—had joined South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America (see Map 12.4). Convened in Montgomery, Alabama, the delegates drafted a constitution little different from that of the United States with a few telling exceptions: It declared the Confederacy a union of sovereign states (not of “the people”), prohibited tariffs, and protected slavery in Confederate states and territories. The delegates chose Jefferson Davis as their president, organized the Confederate legislative and executive branches to function as an independent government, and began seizing federal forts and installations in the South. Map 12.4 The Course of Secession, 1860–1861 Secession from the Union occurred in two waves that reflected white Southerners’ response to events and the regional importance of slavery to states’ economies. After Lincoln’s election, South Carolina passed an ordinance of secession and was soon joined by six Deep South states. Four Upper South slave states waited and seceded only after fighting began in April 1861. Four border slave states remained loyal to the Union. This show of southern unity was deceptive. Four states of the Upper South—Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas—rejected secession, at least for the time being. Slaves constituted less than one-third of these states’ population. Many Upper South voters were “conditional Unionists” who advocated waiting to assess the new Republican administration’s policies on slavery and secession. Others were nonslaveholders who had always been wary of planter domination. As the South’s poor whites weighed their class interests against their sectional loyalties, many hesitated or even opposed secession. Whites in Kentucky and Missouri had additional reasons to waver, for if a sectional war followed secession, it would divide their families and almost surely be fought on their soil. Before Lincoln took office in March 1861, secession was a half-successful revolution but a determined one. History without Borders Secession Secessionist Movements in the Americas, 1830–1861 The U.S. South’s secession in 1860–1861 climaxed a wave of separatist revolts in the Americas as dissenting regions broke away from federated republics and empires. Virtually all secession movements triggered nationalist wars. Garibaldi in Two Worlds Italian nationalist hero Giuseppe Garibaldi fought for republican self-government on both sides of the Atlantic. Committed to national self-determination, Garibaldi veered between supporting secession movements in Brazil (1835) and the Papal States (1848) and fighting wars of national consolidation in Uruguay (1842) and, most famously, Italy. By conquering Sicily in 1860, Garibaldi and his Redshirt army helped create a consolidated Kingdom of Italy free from foreign control. When the U.S. Civil War broke out, President Lincoln unsuccessfully offered Garibaldi a generalship in the Union army. Alfredo Dagli Orti/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY The slaveholding South’s strategy of secession was not unique. The mid-nineteenth century was a global age of nationalism in which popular fervor was mobilized not only to incite democratic revolutions or unify small states into national governments but also to carve new nations out of centralized republics or monarchies through acts of secession. In the latter category, the European revolutions of 1848 featured revolts intended to establish Hungary and Poland as independent nations throwing off Austrian and Russian imperial rule. But the closest parallels to the U.S. secession crisis were the separatist movements that threatened new nations in Latin America. After winning their independence from Spain and Portugal by the 1820s, many Latin American nations adopted federal-style governments, often modeled on the United States, to forge national unity out of local differences. Like the young United States of America, these countries were “unions” that had not yet become tightly knit nations. Some, like the United Mexican States and the United States of Colombia, copied the name of their northern neighbor, and they experienced many of the same sectional tensions. Disputes over tariffs, political representation at the capital, church-state relations, and powers of national versus local government provoked regional secession movements and wars to suppress such revolts in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, and other new Latin American republics. The Confederate Flag Abroad Despite its removal from South Carolina’s capitol building in 2015, the Confederate battle flag remains embroiled in controversy at home and abroad. It flies around the world, sometimes expressing white supremacist ideology (as with neo-Nazi groups in Germany) and other times symbolizing defiance by ethnic or regional minorities. In this photo, a Polish far-right activist holds a Confederate flag and a “White Pride” banner during a July 2015 demonstration against accepting over two thousand Middle Eastern immigrants to Poland. In recent years, Confederate flags have also been displayed by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/Getty Images Next door to the United States, the republic of Mexico faced a series of regional revolts in the antebellum decades. The struggle for Texan independence was, from the viewpoint of the Mexican government, one of several linked secession movements. In the mid-1830s, after President Santa Anna suspended the federal constitution, enlarged his powers, and decreed new local taxes, the Mexican states of Yucatan, Zacatecas, and the section of the state of Coahuila known as Tejas declared themselves in revolt. The Texans’ secession movement, which was led by transplanted white Southerners, set a precedent that South Carolinians followed twenty-five years later. The Yucatan Republic maintained its fragile independence for more than a decade before internal divisions and lack of foreign support caused its demise. To suppress a revolt by native Mayan peoples, Yucatan’s leaders sought an alliance with the United States during the U.S.–Mexican War, but Congress declined to take on another war. In desperation, Yucatan secessionists agreed in 1848 to rejoin Mexico in exchange for military assistance against the Mayans. Mexico’s violent divisions persisted to the late 1850s, when a revolt by conservatives who were outraged by a new republican constitution of 1857 that separated church and state ousted Mexico’s reform administration and forced its leader, Benito Juárez, into internal exile. The resulting civil war (the Reform War of 1857–1861) overlapped the U.S. secession struggle. North of the border, president-elect Lincoln supported Juárez and likened seceding Southern slaveholders to the Mexican usurpers. Both groups, he declared, were attempting to destroy legitimate republican constitutions through illegal means, substituting bullets for ballots. Critical Thinking Questions ? How was the secession of the U.S. South in 1860–1861 similar or different from other secessionist movements in the age of nationalism? ? Why did nineteenth-century secession movements nearly always result in civil wars? At first, Lincoln considered secession a bluff staged by the South’s proslavery minority to gain concessions from the national government. As the breakaway movement gathered momentum, Lincoln marshaled arguments against it. The Union, he asserted, was not a revocable agreement among the states but a perpetual trust inherited from the Founders’ generation. Secession violated the nation’s fundamental right to ensure its survival, a task that was especially critical, Lincoln believed, because the failure of the U.S. experiment in self-government would set back the global spread of democracy for a century. In the midst of the secession crisis, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed a compromise intended to prevent further defections and perhaps lure back the seceded states. Its main provision extended the old Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific and declared all present or future territories above the line free and those below it open to slavery. Lincoln, not yet sworn in as president, urged Republicans to oppose the Crittenden Compromise of 1861. To accept it would be to renounce the antiextension platform on which he had just been elected. Lincoln was willing to concede defeat in New Mexico, whose territorial legislature had approved black and Indian bondage, but he stood adamantly against proslavery expansionism in the Caribbean. Recalling William Walker, he warned that Crittenden’s proposal would encourage “filibustering for all South of us,” including Nicaragua and Cuba, and “making slave states of it.” The prospect of slavery expanding outside U.S. borders, not its extension within, became the final obstacle to negotiating a halt to secession. Lacking the Republicans’ support, Crittenden’s proposal died in Congress. Whether proslavery extremists would have accepted it is debatable, but its failure guaranteed that the nation would be divided into contending governments when Lincoln assumed office. ain content 12-5d “And the War Came” Confederates fire the first shot when the Union tries to provision Fort Sumter. After the lower-South states seceded, two questions remained: Would the remaining slave states leave the Union? Would secession lead to war? The second was answered first. In his inaugural address of March 1861, Lincoln appealed to Southerners’ unionist sentiments and pledged not to touch slavery in states where it existed. While committed to maintaining federal authority over the South, Lincoln sought to avoid war by adopting a cautious strategy. No federal troops were sent to punish secessionists or to collect tariffs. Instead, Lincoln resolved to hold onto key forts off the coast of the rebellious states. At Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, the decisive collision occurred. When federal soldiers stationed there ran low on supplies, Lincoln notified South Carolina authorities that he would dispatch a relief ship to off-load food but no guns or ammunition. Faced with the choice of accepting this show of federal authority or attacking the fort, the Confederates chose war. On April 12, the Confederate government ordered local commanders to compel the surrender of Fort Sumter. Lincoln had maneuvered Confederates into firing the first shot, which signaled to Unionists that the South’s action was a rebellion against legitimate national authority. “Both parties deprecated war,” he later wrote, “but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.” After two days of relentless bombardment, the federal garrison surrendered Fort Sumter. Miraculously, no soldiers were killed in the battle that began the bloodiest war in American history. In response to the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand Union militiamen and began mobilizing the North for war. Political leaders in the Upper South, who had been waiting to see whether Lincoln would force secessionists to return, now cast their lots. During the next two months, four more slave states seceded to join the Confederacy: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. In recognition of Virginia’s importance, the Confederate capital was moved to Richmond. Four border states—Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky, and Missouri—remained in the Union, held there by intense political pressure and, in the case of Missouri and Maryland, the firm presence of federal troops. By the summer of 1861, the two sides were formed to settle the issues of slavery and secession on the battlefield. ain content 12-5e Slavery, Nationalism, and Civil War in Global Perspective The South’s commitment to slavery prevents peaceful emancipation, and the cotton boom feeds Southern nationalism. Focusing on the raging domestic conflict over slavery in the territories helps explain the nation’s descent into civil war, but seen from a global perspective, this outcome was highly unusual. Popular opposition to slavery mounted throughout the nineteenth-century Western world, but it led to civil war almost uniquely in the United States. Besides Haiti, where the abolition of slavery had merged into a war for colonial independence, all other slave societies in the Americas abolished slavery peaceably through national laws or imperial decrees in the 1800s. In an age of intense nationalist feeling, slavery’s entanglement with rival definitions of nationhood dramatically raised the stakes of the U.S. conflict. L...