Issues Over Slavery

• The Wilmot Proviso proposed that any lands gained from the Mexican-American War be off-limits to the expansion of slavery
• The Wilmot Proviso highlighted growing tensions over the slavery question
• There was growing tension caused by slavery from 1844 till the Civil War, and various proposals attempted to solve the problem, including the Compromise of 1850
• The Wilmot Proviso was narrowly defeated in Congress, which would have prohibited slavery in any territory won in the Mexican-American War
• Major positions held by those in power with respect to the expansion of slavery into the territories

  • Southern Position
  • Free Soil Movement
  • Popular Sovereignty
• Southern Position


  Argued that slavery was a constitutional right, and the question about where slavery could and could not exist had already been decided in the Missouri Compromise
• Free Soil Movement


  Wanted any new territories acquired to be the dominion of free laborers, not enslaved ones
• Popular Sovereignty


  Argued that the people living in each territory should decide the slavery question for themselves
• The three positions were fundamentally incompatible with one another and compromise between them proved impossible
• The admission of California and New Mexico as free states tipped the balance in the Senate towards the free states, which was a contentious issue for the South
• Compromise of 1850


  • Divided the Mexican Cession into the Utah and New Mexico territories, with each deciding the slavery question by popular sovereignty
  • Admitted California as a free state
  • Banned the slave trade in Washington D.C.
  • Passed a stricter Fugitive Slave Law
• The Fugitive Slave Law ended up breaking apart any calm that the Compromise of 1850 accomplished, as it required the North to arrest and return escaped enslaved people
• In the years prior to the Civil War, a huge number of immigrants, mostly Irish and German, arrived on the American shores seeking a new home
• Many northerners didn't object to the expansion of slavery on moral grounds, but rather on economic grounds
• If a new territory entered the Union as a slave state then that would make it near impossible for free wage laborers to compete for jobs
• The Free Soil Movement and later the Free Soil Party aimed to keep the lands gained by the Mexican Cession free of slavery
• Abolitionists in the north were actually a minority in that region, but what they lacked in numbers, they made up for in volume
• Abolitionists used words, assisted fugitive slaves escape, and used violence to make their message heard
• William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper The Liberator was extremely influential in the abolitionist community
• Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin depicted the dehumanization and brutality of slavery in graphic detail and sold like crazy
• Frederick Douglass was able to weave together an abolitionist pathos, logos, and ethos like few others could in his speeches
• The Underground Railroad was a series of trails and safehouses by which people enslaved in the South could find safe passage to the North
• John Brown was a fierce abolitionist who believed that the only way for America to be freed of the scourge of slavery was by means of a slave uprising against the slaveholding South
• John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, in 1859 was utterly unsuccessful and he was hanged for his crime
• John Brown had connections to many of the leading northern abolitionists of the day, including Frederick Douglass
• To the southern mind, the raid made all the sense in the world that the northern plot against them was not merely to abolish slavery and thus destroy their way of life and their economy, what abolitionists wanted was incite a race war in which the whites in the South would surely suffer terribly
• Every attempt at compromise regarding slavery failed to solve the problem
• America couldn't stop gathering up new lands in the west, and every time that happened, the question of whether slavery could exist in those new territories erupted all over again
• Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854

  1. Divided the northern section of the Louisiana Purchase into two parts: the Kansas territory and the Nebraska Territory

  2. Each territory could decide by popular sovereignty whether to allow slavery or not
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively overturned the Compromise of 1820
• The popular sovereignty decision in the Kansas-Nebraska Act

  Caused violence to erupt in Kansas between pro-slavery and anti-slavery folks
• In the 1855 election for the Kansas territorial legislature, there were 1500 eligible voters but 6000 votes were counted, indicating voter fraud by pro-slavery Missourians
• Two rival state legislatures were established in Kansas, one pro-slavery and one anti-slavery
• President Franklin Pierce recognized the pro-slavery government in Kansas as legitimate and the anti-slavery government as fraudulent
• Dred Scott

  An enslaved man who sued his master for his freedom after living in free territory
• Dred Scott Decision of 1857

  1. Dred Scott was ruled to not be a citizen and therefore had no right to sue in federal court

  2. Slave owners could take their "property" (slaves) anywhere they wanted without fear of being deprived of their property
• The Dred Scott Decision effectively opened any territory or state in the Union to slavery
• The increasing division over slavery weakened the two party system significantly
• Whig Party

  • Became bitterly divided between a proslavery faction (Cotton Whigs) and antislavery faction (Conscience Whigs)
  • Ultimately went the way of the dodo
• Democratic Party

  • Gained strength as a regional, proslavery party