RCWR - 1850s (Lesson)

1850s

A Closer Look: Kansas-Nebraska Act

Image Credit: Map Courtesy of PBS.

 

In 1854, Congress again took up the issue of slavery in new U.S. states and territories. This time, the territories were Kansas and Nebraska, and Congress approved the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and gave the settlers in all new territories the right to decide for themselves whether theirs would be a free or a slave state. This made a proslavery doctrine, popular sovereignty (rule by the people), the law of the United States.

Pro and antislavery groups hurried into Kansas in attempts to create voting majorities there. Antislavery abolitionists came from Eastern states; proslavery settlers came mainly from neighboring Missouri. Some of these Missourians settled in Kansas, but many more stayed there only long enough to vote for slavery and then return to Missouri.

Proslavery voters elected a legislature ready to make Kansas a slave state. Abolitionists then elected a rival Kansas government with an antislavery constitution, established a different capital city, and raised an army. Proslavery Kansans reacted by raising their own army.

The U.S. House of Representatives supported the abolitionist Kansans; the U.S. Senate and President Franklin Pierce supported the proslavery Kansans. Violence between the two sides created warlike conditions. Popular sovereignty had failed.

 

Dred Scott v. Sandford

In 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, settling a lawsuit in which an African American slave named Dred Scott claimed he should be a free man because he had lived with his master in slave states and in free states. The Court rejected Scott's claim, ruling that no African American - even if free - could ever be a U.S. citizen. Further, the Court said Congress could not prohibit slavery in federal territories. Thus, the Court found that popular sovereignty and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 were unconstitutional.

The Dred Scott decision gave slavery the protection of the U.S. Constitution. Proslavery Americans welcomed the Court's ruling as proof they had been right during the previous few decades of struggles against abolitionists. In contrast, abolitionists convinced many state legislatures to declare the Dred Scott decision not binding within their state borders. The new Republican Party said that if their candidate were elected president in 1860 he would appoint a new Supreme Court that would reverse Dred Scott.

 

 

Nativism in the Mid-19th Century

Regional differences between the North and the South increased in the 1850s. The divisions stemmed from philosophical debates over slavery, and economic and demographic changes. The larger disagreements over slavery brought the other differences to the surface.

Immigration was a catalyst for sectional conflicts as large numbers of immigrants (mostly from Germany and Ireland) came to the United States in the decade preceding the Civil War. Many groups brought their religions, languages, and customs with them.

These immigrants transformed the cities of the North in the antebellum period and fueled anti-immigration sentiment and a strong Nativist movement.

Immigration was of particular concern to Northern cities because immigrants in many instances arrived in poverty and were willing to work for meager wages which then depressed wages for native-born American workers who competed with immigrants for jobs in factories in the North. Additionally, most immigrants stayed in the North because they were unable to compete with African American enslaved people in the South since the slaveholders would not pay wages when they had unfree workers.

Immigrants who arrived in the United States with enough money moved west into the upper Midwest to farm rather than stay in densely populated cities on the Eastern Seaboard.

Irish immigrants were met with particularly harsh treatment because of the anti-Catholic, anti-Irish attitudes. These sentiments snowballed into a nativist, anti-Catholic movement and the goal of the movement was to limit their rights and their political and cultural influence.

Many Americans believed that the new immigrants (who were mostly non-Protestant), lacked the “self-control” that the “proper” middle-class American Protestants possessed. The nativists’ attitudes originated with the “evidence” of a lack of self-control exhibited in the drinking (alcohol) habits of the immigrants. Nativists tried to alleviate the “drinking” culture of immigrants that showed itself in Irish pubs and German beer halls.

The Nativist movement also resulted in the establishment of the “Know-Nothing” political party---the anti-immigration, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish movement of the 1840s and 1850s. The “formal” name of the party was the American Party, but it was commonly known as the “Know-Nothing” Party. By the 1850s the party had gained elected offices in several states in the Northeast particularly.

 

Rising Sectional Tensions in the 1850s

John Brown

One famous abolitionist, John Brown, decided to fight slavery with violence and killing. In 1856, believing he was chosen by God to end slavery, Brown commanded family members and other abolitionists to attack proslavery settlers in Kansas, killing five men. In 1859, he led a group of white and black men in a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (in modern-day West Virginia after they seceded from Virginia when Virginia seceded from the Union.) They seized federal weapons and ammunition and killed seven people. Brown's plan was to deliver the weapons and ammunition to enslaved people, who would then use them in an uprising against slaveholders and proslavery government officials, but the raid failed.  

Brown was captured by U.S. Marines led by U.S. Army Colonel Robert E. Lee in October 1859. Brown was quickly convicted of treason against the state of Virginia and executed in early December 1859 by hanging along with several of his followers. Many Americans thought Brown was a terrorist killer. Others thought he was an abolitionist martyr. (Trivia:  John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Lincoln in 1865, was present at Harpers Ferry and witnessed the event.)

 

 

Preserving the Union

Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860 even after being removed from the election ballots in several Southern states to prevent people from voting for him.

South Carolina leaders convened in mid-December 1860 and voted to secede (to separate from) the United States, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and then Texas in early 1861.

The states that seceded formed a new country called the Confederate States of America (also known as the "Confederacy"). When they attacked the U.S. Army base at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, in April 1861, the long-feared Civil War had begun.

President Lincoln believed the preservation of the United States (also known as the "Union") was the most important task for any U.S. president. He did not believe the southern states had the right to secede from the Union and thought they were merely rebelling against the government. He never considered the Confederacy a separate country. (The Confederate states believed that they had entered the Union voluntarily and they had a “right” to leave the Union voluntarily.)

When Lincoln called for a large volunteer army to preserve the Union, more states - Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee - seceded and joined the Confederacy. Although Lincoln had often stated he only wished to restrict the spread of slavery rather than abolish it, over time he did embrace the idea of ending slavery in the United States once and for all.

 

The War Started for a Reason

The Civil War started because Northerners and Southerners had serious differences of opinion about states' rights, slavery, and economics. Northern leaders were more likely to believe in the supremacy of the national government and be against the expansion of slavery. Southern leaders were more likely to believe in states’ rights and often thought of themselves as citizens of their state first and their country second. (General Robert E. Lee was a good example of this “state first” attitude. President Lincoln asked Lee to serve as the commander of the Union Army at the outset of the war and Lee refused and cited his allegiance to his state (Virginia) first. It has been said by historians that, had Lee commanded the Union Army, the war would have been much shorter since his military, tactical, and leadership skills were superior and prolonged the war.)

Most Southern leaders supported the continuation of slavery. Also, differences in how each section of the nation had developed created opposing viewpoints about economic policies such as tariffs and a pervasive dependence on unfree labor to support the overwhelmingly agricultural, singular cotton economy of the South. When trying to remember the values and beliefs of the important leaders of the Civil War era, remember which side each was on and the basic beliefs that separated the two sides. We have to try to understand the perspectives on both sides in order to understand why men on both sides would lay down their lives for a cause.

 

 

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