two page essay

US HISTORY ESSAY ASSIGNMENT, FEBRUARY 2013 SECTIONALSIM, 1800-1860

Write an essay in which you discuss sectionalism in American history in the first half of the nineteenth century (roughly 1800-1860). It is OK if you reach back into the eighteenth century to support your main points, but the bulk of your essay should focus on the sixty years leading up to the Civil War. Choose specific events or topics as your evidence and explain how they highlight sectional issues.

Your essay should be AT LEAST 2 typed pages, double-spaced, 12-point font. You MUST have a thesis, or some central arguments which you support throughout your essay. Do not ramble on and on, but be organized and concise as you write. Limit yourself to what we have discussed in class, but also feel free to consult outside sources. If you do, you must give credit where credit is due. This is very important.

 

(text  book  chapter15-19

( Focus on economy.)

320

15

The Ferment of
Reform and Culture

���

1790–1860

We [Americans] will walk on our own feet; we will work
with our own hands; we will speak our own minds

.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR,” 1837

A third revolution accompanied the reformationof American politics and the transformation of
the American economy in the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury. This was a diffuse yet deeply felt commitment
to improve the character of ordinary Americans, to
make them more upstanding, God-fearing, and lit-
erate. Some high-minded souls were disillusioned
by the rough-and-tumble realities of democratic
politics. Others, notably women, were excluded
from the political game altogether. As the young
Republic grew, increasing numbers of Americans
poured their considerable energies into religious
revivals and reform movements.

Reform campaigns of all types flourished in
sometimes bewildering abundance. There was not
“a reading man” who was without some scheme for
a new utopia in his “waistcoat pocket,” claimed
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reformers promoted better
public schools and rights for women, as well as
miracle medicines, polygamy, celibacy, rule by

prophets, and guidance by spirits. Societies were
formed against alcohol, tobacco, profanity, and the
transit of mail on the Sabbath. Eventually overshad-
owing all other reforms was the great crusade
against slavery (see pp. 362–368).

Many reformers drew their crusading zeal from
religion. Beginning in the late 1790s and boiling
over into the early nineteenth century, the Second
Great Awakening swept through America’s Protes-
tant churches, transforming the place of religion in
American life and sending a generation of believers
out on their missions to perfect the world.

Reviving Religion

Church attendance was still a regular ritual for
about three-fourths of the 23 million Americans in
1850. Alexis de Tocqueville declared that there was

“no country in the world where the Christian reli-
gion retains a greater influence over the souls of
men than in America.’’ Yet the religion of these years
was not the old-time religion of colonial days. The
austere Calvinist rigor had long been seeping out of
the American churches. The rationalist ideas of the
French Revolutionary era had done much to soften
the older orthodoxy. Thomas Paine’s widely circu-
lated book The Age of Reason (1794) had shockingly
declared that all churches were “set up to terrify
and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and
profit.’’ American anticlericalism was seldom that
virulent, but many of the Founding Fathers, includ-
ing Jefferson and Franklin, embraced the liberal
doctrines of Deism that Paine promoted. Deists
relied on reason rather than revelation, on science
rather than the Bible. They rejected the concept of
original sin and denied Christ’s divinity. Yet Deists
believed in a Supreme Being who had created a
knowable universe and endowed human beings
with a capacity for moral behavior.

Deism helped to inspire an important spin-off
from the severe Puritanism of the past—the Unitar-
ian faith, which began to gather momentum in New
England at the end of the eighteenth century. Unitar-
ians held that God existed in only one person (hence
unitarian), and not in the orthodox Trinity (God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit).
Although denying the deity of Jesus, Unitarians

stressed the essential goodness of human nature
rather than its vileness; they proclaimed their belief
in free will and the possibility of salvation through
good works; they pictured God not as a stern Creator
but as a loving Father. Embraced by many leading
thinkers (including Ralph Waldo Emerson), the Uni-
tarian movement appealed mostly to intellectuals
whose rationalism and optimism contrasted sharply
with the hellfire doctrines of Calvinism, especially
predestination and human depravity.

A boiling reaction against the growing liberal-
ism in religion set in about 1800. A fresh wave of
roaring revivals, beginning on the southern frontier
but soon rolling even into the cities of the North-
east, sent the Second Great Awakening surging
across the land. Sweeping up even more people
than the First Great Awakening (see p. 96) almost a
century earlier, the Second Awakening was one of
the most momentous episodes in the history of
American religion. This tidal wave of spiritual fervor
left in its wake countless converted souls, many
shattered and reorganized churches, and numerous
new sects. It also encouraged an effervescent evan-
gelicalism that bubbled up into innumerable areas
of American life—including prison reform, the tem-
perance cause, the women’s movement, and the
crusade to abolish slavery.

The Second Great Awakening was spread to the
masses on the frontier by huge “camp meetings.’’ As

Religious Revivalism 321

many as twenty-five thousand people would gather
for an encampment of several days to drink the hell-
fire gospel as served up by an itinerant preacher.
Thousands of spiritually starved souls “got religion’’
at these gatherings and in their ecstasy engaged in
frenzies of rolling, dancing, barking, and jerking.
Many of the “saved’’ soon backslid into their former
sinful ways, but the revivals boosted church mem-
bership and stimulated a variety of humanitarian
reforms. Responsive easterners were moved to do
missionary work in the West with Indians, in Hawaii,
and in Asia.

Methodists and Baptists reaped the most abun-
dant harvest of souls from the fields fertilized by
revivalism. Both sects stressed personal conversion
(contrary to predestination), a relatively democratic
control of church affairs, and a rousing emotional-
ism. As a frontier jingle ran,

The devil hates the Methodist
Because they sing and shout the best.

Powerful Peter Cartwright (1785–1872) was the
best known of the Methodist “circuit riders,’’ or trav-
eling frontier preachers. This ill-educated but
sinewy servant of the Lord ranged for a half-century
from Tennessee to Illinois, calling upon sinners to
repent. With bellowing voice and flailing arms, he
converted thousands of souls to the Lord. Not only
did he lash the Devil with his tongue, but with his
fists he knocked out rowdies who tried to break
up his meetings. His Christianity was definitely
muscular.

Bell-voiced Charles Grandison Finney was the
greatest of the revival preachers. Trained as a lawyer,
Finney abandoned the bar to become an evangelist
after a deeply moving conversion experience as a
young man. Tall and athletically built, Finney held
huge crowds spellbound with the power of his ora-
tory and the pungency of his message. He led mas-
sive revivals in Rochester and New York City in 1830
and 1831. Finney preached a version of the old-time
religion, but he was also an innovator. He devised
the “anxious bench,’’ where repentant sinners could
sit in full view of the congregation, and he encour-
aged women to pray aloud in public. Holding out
the promise of a perfect Christian kingdom on
earth, Finney denounced both alcohol and slavery.
He eventually served as president of Oberlin College
in Ohio, which he helped to make a hotbed of
revivalist activity and abolitionism.

A key feature of the Second Great Awakening was
the feminization of religion, both in terms of church
membership and theology. Middle-class women, the
wives and daughters of businessmen, were the first
and most fervent enthusiasts of religious revivalism.
They made up the majority of new church members,
and they were most likely to stay within the fold
when the tents were packed up and the traveling
evangelists left town. Perhaps women’s greater
ambivalence than men about the changes wrought
by the expanding market economy made them such
eager converts to piety. It helped as well that evan-
gelicals preached a gospel of female spiritual worth
and offered women an active role in bringing their
husbands and families back to God. That accom-
plished, many women turned to saving the rest of
society. They formed a host of benevolent and chari-
table organizations and spearheaded crusades for
most, if not all, of the era’s ambitious reforms.

Denominational Diversity

Revivals also furthered the fragmentation of reli-
gious faiths. Western New York, where many descen-
dants of New England Puritans had settled, was
so blistered by sermonizers preaching “hellfire and
damnation’’ that it came to be known as the
“Burned-Over District.’’

Millerites, or Adventists, who mustered several
hundred thousand adherents, rose from the super-
heated soil of the Burned-Over region in the 1830s.
Named after the eloquent and commanding
William Miller, they interpreted the Bible to mean
that Christ would return to earth on October 22,
1844. Donning their go-to-meeting clothes, they
gathered in prayerful assemblies to greet their
Redeemer. The failure of Jesus to descend on sched-
ule dampened but did not destroy the movement.

Like the First Great Awakening, the Second
Great Awakening tended to widen the lines between
classes and regions. The more prosperous and con-
servative denominations in the East were little
touched by revivalism, and Episcopalians, Presbyte-
rians, Congregationalists, and Unitarians continued
to rise mostly from the wealthier, better-educated
levels of society. Methodists, Baptists, and the mem-
bers of the other new sects spawned by the swelling
evangelistic fervor tended to come from less pros-

322 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

perous, less “learned’’ communities in the rural
South and West.

Religious diversity further reflected social cleav-
ages when the churches faced up to the slavery
issue. By 1844–1845 both the southern Baptists and
the southern Methodists had split with their north-
ern brethren over human bondage. The Methodists
came to grief over the case of a slaveowning bishop
in Georgia, whose second wife added several house-
hold slaves to his estate. In 1857 the Presbyterians,
North and South, parted company. The secession of
the southern churches foreshadowed the secession
of the southern states. First the churches split, then
the political parties split, and then the Union split.

A Desert Zion in Utah

The smoldering spiritual embers of the Burned-
Over District kindled one especially ardent flame in
1830. In that year Joseph Smith—a rugged visionary,
proud of his prowess at wrestling—reported that he
had received some golden plates from an angel.
When deciphered, they constituted the Book of
Mormon, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
Day Saints (Mormons) was launched. It was a native

American product, a new religion, destined to
spread its influence worldwide.

After establishing a religious oligarchy, Smith
ran into serious opposition from his non-Mormon
neighbors, first in Ohio and then in Missouri and
Illinois. His cooperative sect rasped rank-and-file
Americans, who were individualistic and dedicated
to free enterprise. The Mormons aroused further
antagonism by voting as a unit and by openly but
understandably drilling their militia for defensive
purposes. Accusations of polygamy likewise arose
and increased in intensity, for Joseph Smith was
reputed to have several wives.

Continuing hostility finally drove the Mormons
to desperate measures. In 1844 Joseph Smith and
his brother were murdered and mangled by a mob
in Carthage, Illinois, and the movement seemed
near collapse. The falling torch was seized by a
remarkable Mormon Moses named Brigham Young.
Stern and austere in contrast to Smith’s charm and
affability, the barrel-chested Brigham Young had
received only eleven days of formal schooling. But
he quickly proved to be an aggressive leader, an
eloquent preacher, and a gifted administrator.
Determined to escape further persecution, Young
in 1846–1847 led his oppressed and despoiled

The Birth of the Mormons 323

In his lecture “Hindrances to Revivals,’’
delivered in the 1830s, Charles Grandison
Finney (1792–1875) proposed the excom-
munication of drinkers and slaveholders:

“Let the churches of all denominations speak
out on the subject of temperance, let them
close their doors against all who have
anything to do with the death-dealing
abomination, and the cause of temperance is
triumphant. A few years would annihilate the
traffic. Just so with slavery. . . . It is a great
national sin. It is a sin of the church. The
churches by their silence, and by permitting
slaveholders to belong to their communion,
have been consenting to it. . . . The church
cannot turn away from this question. It is a
question for the church and for the nation to
decide, and God will push it to a decision.’’

Latter-Day Saints over vast rolling plains to Utah as
they sang “Come, Come, Ye Saints.’’

Overcoming pioneer hardships, the Mormons
soon made the desert bloom like a new Eden by
means of ingenious and cooperative methods of irri-
gation. The crops of 1848, threatened by hordes of
crickets, were saved when flocks of gulls appeared,
as if by a miracle, to gulp down the invaders. (A
monument to the sea gulls stands in

Salt Lake City

today.)

Semiarid Utah grew remarkably. By the end of
1848, some five thousand settlers had arrived, and
other large bands were to follow them. Many dedi-
cated Mormons in the 1850s actually made the thir-
teen-hundred-mile trek across the plains pulling
two-wheeled carts.

Under the rigidly disciplined management of
Brigham Young, the community became a prosper-
ous frontier theocracy and a cooperative common-
wealth. Young married as many as twenty-seven
women—some of them wives in name only—and
begot fifty-six children. The population was further
swelled by thousands of immigrants from Europe,
where the Mormons had established a flourishing
missionary movement.

A crisis developed when the Washington gov-
ernment was unable to control the hierarchy of
Brigham Young, who had been made territorial gov-
ernor in 1850. A federal army marched in 1857
against the Mormons, who harassed its lines of sup-
ply and rallied to die in their last dusty ditch. Fortu-
nately, the quarrel was finally adjusted without
serious bloodshed. The Mormons later ran afoul of
the antipolygamy laws passed by Congress in 1862
and 1882, and their unique marital customs delayed
statehood for Utah until 1896.

Free Schools for a Free People

Tax-supported primary schools were scarce in the
early years of the Republic. They had the odor of
pauperism about them, since they existed chiefly
to educate the children of the poor—the so-called
ragged schools. Advocates of “free’’ public education

324 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

Polygamy was an issue of such consequence
that it was bracketed with slavery in the
Republican national platform of 1856:

“It is both the right and the imperative duty
of Congress to prohibit in the Territories
those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy
and Slavery.’’

met stiff opposition. A midwestern legislator cried
that he wanted only this simple epitaph when he
died: “Here lies an enemy of public education.’’

Well-to-do, conservative Americans gradually
saw the light. If they did not pay to educate “other
folkses brats,’’ the “brats’’ might grow up into a dan-
gerous, ignorant rabble—armed with the vote. Taxa-
tion for education was an insurance premium that
the wealthy paid for stability and democracy.

Tax-supported public education, though miser-
ably lagging in the slavery-cursed South, triumphed
between 1825 and 1850. Grimy-handed laborers
wielded increased influence and demanded instruc-
tion for their children. Most important was the gain-

ing of manhood suffrage for whites in Jackson’s day.
A free vote cried aloud for free education. A civilized
nation that was both ignorant and free, declared
Thomas Jefferson, “never was and never will be.’’

The famed little red schoolhouse—with one
room, one stove, one teacher, and often eight
grades—became the shrine of American democracy.
Regrettably, it was an imperfect shrine. Early free
schools stayed open only a few months of the year.
Schoolteachers, most of them men in this era,
were too often ill trained, ill tempered, and ill paid.
They frequently put more stress on “lickin’” (with
a hickory stick) than on “larnin’.’’ These knights of
the blackboard often “boarded around’’ in the

Problems of Public Education 325

Nauvoo
CarthageCouncil

Bluffs

(Fort Laramie)

Fort Bridger

Fort Hall

Salt Lake City

Moab
Beaver

Parowan
Cedar CityMountain MeadowSt. George

Lee’s Ferry
LittlefieldLas Vegas

Tuba City

Holbrook

LunaTempe

Thatcher

Mesa

Pomerene
St. David

Barstow

San Bernardino

Mormon Station

Winter Quarters

Col
orad

o R.

Red R.

P l a tte R
.

M
issou

ri
R

.

M
is

si
ss

ip
pi

R
.Arkansas R.

R
io

G
ra

nd
e

North Platte R .

Columbia R.

Mormon trek, 1846–1847
California Trail
Mormon Corridor
Proposed state of Deseret
Current state boundaries

Mormon settlements
Non-Mormon settlement
Fort

( )

The Mormon World After Joseph Smith’s murder at Carthage in 1844, the Mormons abandoned their
thriving settlement at Nauvoo, Illinois (which had about twenty thousand inhabitants in 1845), and set
out for the valley of the Great Salt Lake, then still part of Mexico. When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo
(see p. 384) in 1848 brought the vast Utah Territory into the United States, the Mormons rapidly
expanded their desert colony, which they called Deseret, especially along the “Mormon Corridor’’ that
stretched from Salt Lake to southern California.

community, and some knew scarcely more than
their older pupils. They usually taught only the
“three Rs’’—“readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic.’’ To many
rugged Americans, suspicious of “book larnin’,’’ this
was enough.

Reform was urgently needed. Into the breach
stepped Horace Mann (1796–1859), a brilliant and
idealistic graduate of Brown University. As secretary
of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he cam-
paigned effectively for more and better school-
houses, longer school terms, higher pay for
teachers, and an expanded curriculum. His influ-
ence radiated out to other states, and impressive
improvements were chalked up. Yet education
remained an expensive luxury for many communi-
ties. As late as 1860, the nation counted only about a
hundred public secondary schools—and nearly a
million white adult illiterates. Black slaves in the
South were legally forbidden to receive instruction
in reading or writing, and even free blacks, in the
North as well as the South, were usually excluded
from the schools.

Educational advances were aided by improved
textbooks, notably those of Noah Webster (1758–
1843), a Yale-educated Connecticut Yankee who was

known as the “Schoolmaster of the Republic.’’ His
“reading lessons,’’ used by millions of children in
the nineteenth century, were partly designed to pro-

326 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) wrote of his
education (1859),

“There were some schools so-called [in
Indiana], but no qualification was ever
required of a teacher beyond ‘readin’, writin’
and cipherin’ to the rule of three. . . . There
was absolutely nothing to excite ambition for
education. Of course, when I came of age I
did not know much. Still, somehow, I could
read, write and cipher to the rule of three,
but that was all. I have not been to school
since. The little advance I now have upon this
store of education, I have picked up from
time to time under the pressure of necessity.
I was raised to work, which I continued till I
was twenty-two.’’

mote patriotism. Webster devoted twenty years to
his famous dictionary, published in 1828, which
helped to standardize the American language.

Equally influential was Ohioan William H.
McGuffey (1800–1873), a teacher-preacher of rare
power. His grade-school readers, first published in
the 1830s, sold 122 million copies in the following
decades. McGuffey’s Readers hammered home last-
ing lessons in morality, patriotism, and idealism.

Higher Goals for Higher Learning

Higher education was likewise stirring. The religious
zeal of the Second Great Awakening led to the plant-
ing of many small, denominational, liberal arts col-
leges, chiefly in the South and West. Too often they
were academically anemic, established more to sat-
isfy local pride than genuinely to advance the cause
of learning. Like their more venerable, ivy-draped
brethren, the new colleges offered a narrow,
tradition-bound curriculum of Latin, Greek, mathe-
matics, and moral philosophy. On new and old cam-
puses alike, there was little intellectual vitality and
much boredom.

The first state-supported universities sprang up
in the South, beginning with North Carolina in 1795.
Federal land grants nourished the growth of state
institutions of higher learning. Conspicuous among
the early group was the University of Virginia,
founded in 1819. It was largely the brainchild of
Thomas Jefferson, who designed its beautiful archi-
tecture and who at times watched its construction
through a telescope from his hilltop home. He dedi-
cated the university to freedom from religious or
political shackles, and modern languages and the
sciences received unusual emphasis.

Women’s higher education was frowned upon
in the early decades of the nineteenth century. A
woman’s place was believed to be in the home, and
training in needlecraft seemed more important than
training in algebra. In an era when the clinging-vine
bride was the ideal, coeducation was regarded as friv-
olous. Prejudices also prevailed that too much learn-
ing injured the feminine brain, undermined health,
and rendered a young lady unfit for marriage. The
teachers of Susan B. Anthony, the future feminist,
refused to instruct her in long division.

Women’s schools at the secondary level began to
attain some respectability in the 1820s, thanks in

part to the dedicated work of Emma Willard
(1787–1870). In 1821 she established the Troy (New
York) Female Seminary. Oberlin College, in Ohio,
jolted traditionalists in 1837 when it opened its
doors to women as well as men. (Oberlin had already
created shock waves by admitting black students.) In
the same year, Mary Lyon established an outstand-
ing women’s school, Mount Holyoke Seminary (later
College), in South Hadley, Massachusetts. Mossback
critics scoffed that “they’ll be educatin’ cows next.’’

Adults who craved more learning satisfied their
thirst for knowledge at private subscription libraries
or, increasingly, at tax-supported libraries. House-
to-house peddlers also did a lush business in feed-
ing the public appetite for culture. Traveling
lecturers helped to carry learning to the masses
through the lyceum lecture associations, which
numbered about three thousand by 1835. The
lyceums provided platforms for speakers in such
areas as science, literature, and moral philosophy.
Talented talkers like Ralph Waldo Emerson jour-
neyed thousands of miles on the lyceum circuits,
casting their pearls of civilization before apprecia-
tive audiences.

The Growth of Higher Education 327

An editorial in the popular women’s
magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1845,
probably written by editor Sarah Josepha
Hare (1788–1879), argued for better
education for women as a benefit to all of
society:

“The mass of mankind are very ignorant and
wicked. Wherefore is this? Because the
mother, whom God constituted the first
teacher of every human being, has been
degraded by men from her high office; or,
what is the same thing, been denied those
privileges of education which only can enable
her to discharge her duty to her children
with discretion and effect. . . . If half the
effort and expense had been directed to
enlighten and improve the minds of females
which have been lavished on the other sex,
we should now have a very different state of
society.’’

Magazines flourished in the pre–Civil War years,
but most of them withered after a short life. The
North American Review, founded in 1815, was the
long-lived leader of the intellectuals. Godey’s Lady’s
Book, founded in 1830, survived until 1898 and
attained the enormous circulation (for those days)
of 150,000. It was devoured devotedly by millions of
women, many of whom read the dog-eared copies
of their relatives and friends.

An Age of Reform

As the young Republic grew, reform campaigns of all
types flourished in sometimes bewildering abun-
dance. Some reformers were simply crackbrained

cranks. But most were intelligent, inspired idealists,
usually touched by the fire of evangelical religion
then licking through the pews and pulpits of Ameri-
can churches. The optimistic promises of the Sec-
ond Great Awakening inspired countless souls to do
battle against earthly evils. These modern idealists
dreamed anew the old Puritan vision of a perfected
society: free from cruelty, war, intoxicating drink,
discrimination, and—ultimately—slavery. Women
were particularly prominent in these reform cru-
sades, especially in their own struggle for suffrage.
For many middle-class women, the reform cam-
paigns provided a unique opportunity to escape the
confines of the home and enter the arena of public
affairs.

In part the practical, activist Christianity of
these reformers resulted from their desire to reaf-
firm traditional values as they plunged ever further
into a world disrupted and transformed by the tur-
bulent forces of a market economy. Mainly middle-
class descendants of pioneer farmers, they were
often blissfully unaware that they were witnessing
the dawn of the industrial era, which posed
unprecedented problems and called for novel ideas.
They either ignored the factory workers, for exam-
ple, or blamed their problems on bad habits. With
naive single-mindedness, reformers sometimes
applied conventional virtue to refurbishing an older
order—while events hurtled them headlong into
the new.

Imprisonment for debt continued to be a night-
mare, though its extent has been exaggerated. As
late as 1830, hundreds of penniless people were lan-
guishing in filthy holes, sometimes for owing less
than one dollar. The poorer working classes were
especially hard hit by this merciless practice. But as
the embattled laborer won the ballot and asserted
himself, state legislatures gradually abolished
debtors’ prisons.

Criminal codes in the states were likewise being
softened, in accord with more enlightened Euro-
pean practices. The number of capital offenses was
being reduced, and brutal punishments, such as
whipping and branding, were being slowly elimi-
nated. A refreshing idea was taking hold that prisons
should reform as well as punish—hence “reformato-
ries,’’ “houses of correction,’’ and “penitentiaries’’
(for penance).

Sufferers from so-called insanity were still being
treated with incredible cruelty. The medieval con-
cept had been that the mentally deranged were

328 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

cursed with unclean spirits; the nineteenth-century
idea was that they were willfully perverse and
depraved—to be treated only as beasts. Many
crazed persons were chained in jails or poor-houses
with sane people.

Into this dismal picture stepped a formidable
New England teacher-author, Dorothea Dix
(1802–1887). A physically frail woman afflicted with
persistent lung trouble, she possessed infinite com-
passion and willpower. She traveled some sixty
thousand miles in eight years and assembled her
damning reports on insanity and asylums from first-
hand observations. Though she never raised her
voice, Dix’s message was loud and clear. Her classic
petition of 1843 to the Massachusetts legislature,
describing cells so foul that visitors were driven
back by the stench, turned legislative stomachs
and hearts. Her persistent prodding resulted in
improved conditions and in a gain for the concept
that the demented were not willfully perverse but
mentally ill.

Agitation for peace also gained momentum in
the pre–Civil War years. In 1828 the American Peace
Society was formed, with a ringing declaration of
war on war. A leading spirit was William Ladd, who
orated when his legs were so badly ulcerated that he
had to sit on a stool. His ideas were finally to bear
some fruit in the international organizations for
collective security of the twentieth century. The
American peace crusade, linked with a European
counterpart, was making promising progress by
midcentury, but it was set back by the bloodshed of
the Crimean War in Europe and the Civil War in
America.

Demon Rum—The “Old Deluder’’

The ever-present drink problem attracted dedicated
reformers. Custom, combined with a hard and
monotonous life, led to the excessive drinking of
hard liquor, even among women, clergymen, and
members of Congress. Weddings and funerals all too
often became disgraceful brawls, and occasionally a
drunken mourner would fall into the open grave
with the corpse. Heavy drinking decreased the
efficiency of labor, and poorly safeguarded machin-
ery operated under the influence of alcohol
increased the danger of accidents occurring at work.
Drunkenness also fouled the sanctity of the family,

Social Reform 329

In presenting her case to the Massachusetts
legislature for more humane treatment for
the mentally ill, Dorothea Dix (1802–1887)
quoted from the notebook she carried with
her as she traveled around the state:

“Lincoln. A woman in a cage. Medford. One
idiotic subject chained, and one in a close
stall for seventeen years. Pepperell. One often
doubly chained, hand and foot; another vio-
lent; several peaceable now. . . . Dedham. The
insane disadvantageously placed in the jail. In
the almshouse, two females in stalls . . . ; lie
in wooden bunks filled with straw; always
shut up. One of these subjects is supposed
curable. The overseers of the poor have
declined giving her a trial at the hospital, as
I was informed, on account of expense.”

330 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

threatening the spiritual welfare—and physical
safety—of women and children.

After earlier and feebler efforts, the American
Temperance Society was formed at Boston in 1826.
Within a few years, about a thousand local groups
sprang into existence. They implored drinkers to
sign the temperance pledge and organized chil-
dren’s clubs, known as the “Cold Water Army.’’
Temperance crusaders also made effective use of
pictures, pamphlets, and lurid lecturers, some of
whom were reformed drunkards. A popular temper-
ance song ran,

We’ve done with our days of carousing,
Our nights, too, of frolicsome glee;
For now with our sober minds choosing,
We’ve pledged ourselves never to spree.

The most popular anti-alcohol tract of the era
was T. S. Arthur’s melodramatic novel, Ten Nights
in a Barroom and What I Saw There (1854). It
described in shocking detail how a once-happy vil-
lage was ruined by Sam Slade’s tavern. The book was
second only to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a best-
seller in the 1850s, and it enjoyed a highly successful
run on the stage. Its touching theme song began
with the words of a little girl:

Father, dear father, come home with me now,
The clock in the belfry strikes one.

Early foes of Demon Drink adopted two major
lines of attack. One was to stiffen the individual’s
will to resist the wiles of the little brown jug. The
moderate reformers thus stressed “temperance’’
rather than “teetotalism,’’ or the total elimination of
intoxicants. But less patient zealots came to believe
that temptation should be removed by legislation.
Prominent among this group was Neal S. Dow of
Maine, a blue-nosed reformer who, as a mayor of
Portland and an employer of labor, had often wit-
nessed the debauching effect of alcohol—to say
nothing of the cost to his pocketbook of work time
lost because of drunken employees.

Dow—the “Father of Prohibition’’—sponsored
the so-called Maine Law of 1851. This drastic new
statute, hailed as “the law of Heaven Americanized,’’
prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating
liquor. Other states in the North followed Maine’s
example, and by 1857 about a dozen had passed
various prohibitory laws. But these figures are
deceptive, for within a decade some of the statutes
were repealed or declared unconstitutional, if not
openly flouted.

It was clearly impossible to legislate thirst for
alcohol out of existence, especially in localities
where public sentiment was hostile. Yet on the eve
of the Civil War, the prohibitionists had registered
inspiring gains. There was much less drinking
among women than earlier in the century and prob-
ably much less per capita consumption of hard
liquor.

Women in Revolt

When the nineteenth century opened, it was still a
man’s world, both in America and in Europe. A wife
was supposed to immerse herself in her home and
subordinate herself to her lord and master (her hus-

band). Like black slaves, she could not vote; like
black slaves, she could be legally beaten by her over-
lord “with a reasonable instrument.’’ When she mar-
ried, she could not retain title to her property; it
passed to her husband.

Yet American women, though legally regarded
as perpetual minors, fared better than their Euro-
pean cousins. French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville
noted that in his native France, rape was punished
only lightly, whereas in America it was one of the
few crimes punishable by death.

Despite these relative advantages, women were
still “the submerged sex’’ in America in the early
part of the century. But as the decades unfolded,
women increasingly surfaced to breathe the air
of freedom and self-determination. In contrast to
women in colonial times, many women now
avoided marriage altogether—about 10 percent of
adult women remained “spinsters’’ at the time of
the Civil War.

Gender differences were strongly emphasized
in nineteenth-century America—largely because
the burgeoning market economy was increasingly
separating women and men into sharply distinct
economic roles. Women were thought to be physi-
cally and emotionally weak, but also artistic and
refined. Endowed with finely tuned moral sensibili-
ties, they were the keepers of society’s conscience,
with special responsibility to teach the young how
to be good and productive citizens of the Republic.
Men were considered strong but crude, always in
danger of slipping into some savage or beastly way
of life if not guided by the gentle hands of their lov-
ing ladies.

The home was a woman’s special sphere, the
centerpiece of the “cult of domesticity.” Even
reformers like Catharine Beecher, who urged her
sisters to seek employment as teachers, endlessly
celebrated the role of the good homemaker. But
some women increasingly felt that the glorified
sanctuary of the home was in fact a gilded cage.
They yearned to tear down the bars that separated
the private world of women from the public world
of men.

Clamorous female reformers—most of them
white and well-to-do—began to gather strength as
the century neared its halfway point. Most were
broad-gauge battlers; while demanding rights for
women, they joined in the general reform movement
of the age, fighting for temperance and the abolition
of slavery. Like men, they had been touched by the
evangelical spirit that offered the promise of earthly

reward for human endeavor. Neither foul eggs nor
foul words, when hurled by disapproving men, could
halt women heartened by these doctrines.

The women’s rights movement was mothered by
some arresting characters. Prominent among them
was Lucretia Mott, a sprightly Quaker whose ire had
been aroused when she and her fellow female dele-
gates to the London antislavery convention of 1840
were not recognized. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a
mother of seven who had insisted on leaving “obey’’
out of her marriage ceremony, shocked fellow femi-
nists by going so far as to advocate suffrage for
women. Quaker-reared Susan B. Anthony, a militant
lecturer for women’s rights, fearlessly exposed herself
to rotten garbage and vulgar epithets. She became
such a conspicuous advocate of female rights that
progressive women everywhere were called “Suzy Bs.’’

Other feminists challenged the man’s world. Dr.
Elizabeth Blackwell, a pioneer in a previously forbid-
den profession for women, was the first female grad-
uate of a medical college. Precocious Margaret Fuller
edited a transcendentalist journal, The Dial, and

The Feminist Movement Takes Form 331

332 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

took part in the struggle to bring unity and republi-
can government to Italy. She died in a shipwreck off
New York’s Fire Island while returning to the United
States in 1850. The talented Grimké sisters, Sarah
and Angelina, championed antislavery. Lucy Stone
retained her maiden name after marriage—hence
the latter-day “Lucy Stoners,’’ who follow her exam-
ple. Amelia Bloomer revolted against the current

“street sweeping’’ female attire by donning a semi-
masculine short skirt with Turkish trousers—
“bloomers,’’ they were called—amid much bawdy
ridicule about “Bloomerism’’ and “loose habits.’’ A
jeering male rhyme of the times jabbed,

Gibbey, gibbey gab
The women had a confab
And demanded the rights
To wear the tights
Gibbey, gibbey gab.

Fighting feminists met at Seneca Falls, New
York, in a memorable Woman’s Rights Convention
(1848). The defiant Stanton read a “Declaration of
Sentiments,’’ which in the spirit of the Declaration
of Independence declared that “all men and women
are created equal.’’ One resolution formally
demanded the ballot for females. Amid scorn and
denunciation from press and pulpit, the Seneca
Falls meeting launched the modern women’s rights
movement.

The crusade for women’s rights was eclipsed by
the campaign against slavery in the decade before
the Civil War. Still, any white male, even an idiot,
over the age of twenty-one could vote, while no
woman could. Yet women were gradually being
admitted to colleges, and some states, beginning
with Mississippi in 1839, were even permitting
wives to own property after marriage.

When early feminist Lucy Stone (1818–1893)
married fellow abolitionist Henry B. Black-
well (1825–1909) in West Brookfield,
Massachusetts, in 1855, they added the
following vow to their nuptial ceremony:

“While acknowledging our mutual affection by
publicly assuming the relation of husband
and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a
great principle, we deem it a duty to declare
that this act on our part implies no . . .
promise of voluntary obedience to such of the
present laws of marriage, as refuse to recog-
nize the wife as an independent, rational
being, while they confer upon the husband
an injurious and unnatural superiority.”

Wilderness Utopias

Bolstered by the utopian spirit of the age, various
reformers, ranging from the high-minded to the
“lunatic fringe,’’ set up more than forty commu-
nities of a cooperative, communistic, or “commu-
nitarian’’ nature. Seeking human betterment, a
wealthy and idealistic Scottish textile manufacturer,
Robert Owen, founded in 1825 a communal society
of about a thousand people at New Harmony, Indi-
ana. Little harmony prevailed in the colony, which,
in addition to hard-working visionaries, attracted a
sprinkling of radicals, work-shy theorists, and out-
right scoundrels. The colony sank in a morass of
contradiction and confusion.

Brook Farm in Massachusetts, comprising two
hundred acres of grudging soil, was started in 1841
with the brotherly and sisterly cooperation of about
twenty intellectuals committed to the philosophy of
transcendentalism (see p. 340). They prospered rea-
sonably well until 1846, when they lost by fire a large
new communal building shortly before its comple-
tion. The whole venture in “plain living and high
thinking’’ then collapsed in debt. The Brook Farm
experiment inspired Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic
novel The Blithedale Romance (1852), whose main
character was modeled on the feminist writer Mar-
garet Fuller.

A more radical experiment was the Oneida
Community, founded in New York in 1848. It prac-

ticed free love (“complex marriage’’), birth control
(through “male continence,” or coitus reservatus),
and the eugenic selection of parents to produce
superior offspring. This curious enterprise flour-
ished for more than thirty years, largely because its
artisans made superior steel traps and Oneida Com-
munity (silver) Plate (see “Makers of America: The
Oneida Community,” pp.

336

–

337

).

Various communistic experiments, mostly
small in scale, have been attempted since
Jamestown. But in competition with democratic
free enterprise and free land, virtually all of them
sooner or later failed or changed their methods.
Among the longest-lived sects were the Shakers. Led
by Mother Ann Lee, they began in the 1770s to set
up the first of a score or so of religious communities.
The Shakers attained a membership of about six
thousand in 1840, but since their monastic customs
prohibited both marriage and sexual relations, they
were virtually extinct by 1940.

The Dawn of Scientific Achievement

Early Americans, confronted with pioneering prob-
lems, were more interested in practical gadgets than
in pure science. Jefferson, for example, was a gifted
amateur inventor who won a gold medal for a new
type of plow. Noteworthy also were the writings of
the mathematician Nathaniel Bowditch (1733–1838)

Utopian Communities 333

334 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

on practical navigation and of the oceanographer
Matthew F. Maury (1806–1873) on ocean winds and
currents. These writers promoted safety, speed, and
economy. But as far as basic science was concerned,
Americans were best known for borrowing and
adapting the findings of Europeans.

Yet the Republic was not without scientific tal-
ent. The most influential American scientist of the
first half of the nineteenth century was Professor
Benjamin Silliman (1779–1864), a pioneer chemist
and geologist who taught and wrote brilliantly at
Yale College for more than fifty years. Professor
Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), a distinguished French-
Swiss immigrant, served for a quarter of a century at
Harvard College. A path-breaking student of biology
who sometimes carried snakes in his pockets, he

insisted on original research and deplored the
reigning overemphasis on memory work. Professor
Asa Gray (1810–1888) of Harvard College, the
Columbus of American botany, published over 350
books, monographs, and papers. His textbooks set
new standards for clarity and interest.

Lovers of American bird lore owed much to
the French-descended naturalist John J. Audubon
(1785–1851), who painted wild fowl in their natural
habitat. His magnificently illustrated Birds of Amer-
ica attained considerable popularity. The Audubon
Society for the protection of birds was named after
him, although as a young man he shot much feath-
ered game for sport.

Medicine in America, despite a steady growth of
medical schools, was still primitive by modern stan-

dards. Bleeding remained a common cure, and a
curse as well. Smallpox plagues were still dreaded,
and the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadel-
phia took several thousand lives. “Bring out your
dead!’’ was the daily cry of the corpse-wagon drivers.

People everywhere complained of ill health—
malaria, the “rheumatics,’’ the “miseries,’’ and the
chills. Illness often resulted from improper diet,
hurried eating, perspiring and cooling off too
rapidly, and ignorance of germs and sanitation. “We
was sick every fall, regular,’’ wrote the mother of
future president James Garfield. Life expectancy
was still dismayingly short—about forty years for a
white person born in 1850, and less for blacks. The
suffering from decayed or ulcerated teeth was enor-
mous; tooth extraction was often practiced by the
muscular village blacksmith.

Self-prescribed patent medicines were common
(one dose for people, two for horses) and included
Robertson’s Infallible Worm Destroying Lozenges.
Fad diets proved popular, including the whole-
wheat bread and crackers regimen of Sylvester Gra-
ham. Among home remedies was the rubbing of
tumors with dead toads. The use of medicine by the
regular doctors was often harmful, and Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes declared in 1860 that if the medi-
cines, as then employed, were thrown into the sea,
humans would be better off and the fish worse off.

Victims of surgical operations were ordinarily
tied down, often after a stiff drink of whiskey. The
surgeon then sawed or cut with breakneck speed,
undeterred by the piercing shrieks of the patient.
A priceless boon for medical progress came in
the early 1840s, when several American doctors

and dentists, working independently, successfully
employed laughing gas and ether as anesthetics.

Artistic Achievements

Architecturally, America contributed little of note
in the first half of the century. The rustic Republic,
still under pressure to erect shelters in haste, was
continuing to imitate European models. Public
buildings and other important structures followed
Greek and Roman lines, which seemed curiously
out of place in a wilderness setting. A remarkable
Greek revival came between 1820 and 1850, partly

Science and Health 335

An outbreak of cholera occurred in New York
City in 1832, and a wealthy businessman,
Philip Hone (1780–1851), wrote in his diary
for the Fourth of July,

“The alarm about the cholera has prevented
all the usual jollification under the public
authority. . . . The Board of Health reports
to-day twenty new cases and eleven deaths
since noon yesterday. The disease is here in
all its violence and will increase. God grant
that its ravages may be confined, and its visit
short.’’

The Oneida Community

John Humphrey Noyes (1811–1886), the founderof the Oneida Community, repudiated the old
Puritan doctrines that God was vengeful and that
sinful mankind was doomed to dwell in a vale of
tears. Noyes believed in a benign deity, in the sweet-
ness of human nature, and in the possibility of a
perfect Christian community on earth. “The more
we get acquainted with God,” he declared, “the
more we shall find it our special duty to be happy.”

That sunny thought was shared by many early-
nineteenth-century American utopians (a word
derived from Greek that slyly combines the mean-
ings of “a good place” and “no such place”). But
Noyes added some wrinkles of his own. The key to
happiness, he taught, was the suppression of self-
ishness. True Christians should possess no private
property—nor should they indulge in exclusive
emotional relationships, which bred jealousy, quar-
reling, and covetousness. Material things and sexual
partners alike, Noyes preached, should be shared.
Marriage should not be monogamous. Instead all
members of the community should be free to love
one another in “complex marriage.” Noyes called his
system “Bible Communism.”

Tall and slender, with piercing blue eyes and
reddish hair, the charismatic Noyes began voicing
these ideas in his hometown of Putney, Vermont, in
the 1830s. He soon attracted a group of followers
who called themselves the Putney Association, a
kind of extended family whose members farmed
five hundred acres by day and sang and prayed
together in the evenings. They sustained their spiri-
tual intensity by submitting to “Mutual Criticism,”
in which the person being criticized would sit in
silence while other members frankly discussed his
or her faults and merits. “I was, metaphorically,
stood upon my head and allowed to drain till all the
self-righteousness had dripped out of me,” one man
wrote of his experience with Mutual Criticism.

The Putney Association also indulged in sexual
practices that outraged the surrounding commu-

nity’s sense of moral propriety. Indicted for adultery
in 1847, Noyes led his followers to Oneida, in the sup-
posedly more tolerant region of New York’s Burned-
Over District, the following year. Several affiliated
communities were also established, the most impor-
tant of which was at Wallingford, Connecticut.

The Oneidans struggled in New York until they
were joined in the 1850s by Sewell Newhouse, a
clever inventor of steel animal traps. The manufac-
ture of Newhouse’s traps, and other products such
as sewing silk and various types of bags, put the
Oneida Community on a sound financial footing. By
the 1860s Oneida was a flourishing commonwealth
of some three hundred people. Men and women
shared equally in all the community’s tasks, from
field to factory to kitchen. The members lived under
one roof in Mansion House, a sprawling building
that boasted central heating, a well-stocked library,
and a common dining hall, as well as the “Big Hall”
where members gathered nightly for prayer and
entertainment. Children at the age of three were
removed from direct parental care and raised com-
munally in the Children’s House until the age of thir-
teen or fourteen, when they took up jobs in the
community’s industries. They imbibed their reli-
gious doctrines with their school lessons:

I-spirit
With me never shall stay,

We-spirit
Makes us happy and gay.

Oneida’s apparent success fed the utopian
dreams of others, and for a time it became a great
tourist attraction. Visitors from as far away as
Europe came to picnic on the shady lawns, specu-
lating on the sexual secrets that Mansion House
guarded, while their hosts fed them strawberries
and cream and entertained them with music.

But eventually the same problems that had
driven Noyes and his band from Vermont began to
shadow their lives at Oneida. Their New York neigh-
bors grew increasingly horrified at the Oneidans’

336

licentious sexual practices, including the selective
breeding program by which the community
matched mates and gave permission—or orders—
to procreate, without regard to the niceties of matri-
mony. “It was somewhat startling to me,” one
straight-laced visitor commented, “to hear Miss
������������������� speak about her baby.”

Yielding to their neighbors’ criticisms, the Onei-
dans gave up complex marriage in 1879. Soon other
“communistic” practices withered away as well. The
communal dining hall became a restaurant, where
meals were bought with money, something many
Oneidans had never used before. In 1880 the Onei-

dans abandoned communism altogether and
became a joint-stock company specializing in the
manufacture of silver tableware. Led by Noyes’s son
Pierrepont, Oneida Community, Ltd., grew into the
world’s leading manufacturer of stainless steel
knives, forks, and spoons, with annual sales by the
1990s of some half a billion dollars.

As for Mansion House, it still stands in central
New York, but it now serves as a museum and pri-
vate residence. The “Big Hall” is the site of Oneida,
Ltd.’s annual shareholders’ meetings. Ironically,
what grew from Noyes’s religious vision was not
utopia but a mighty capitalist corporation.

337

stimulated by the heroic efforts of the Greeks in the
1820s to wrest independence from the “terrible
Turk.’’ About midcentury strong interest developed
in a revival of Gothic forms, with their emphasis on
pointed arches and large windows.

Talented Thomas Jefferson, architect of revolu-
tion, was probably the ablest American architect of
his generation. He brought a classical design to his
Virginia hilltop home, Monticello—perhaps the
most stately mansion in the nation. The quadrangle
of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville,
another of Jefferson’s creations, remains one of the
finest examples of classical architecture in America.

The art of painting continued to be handi-
capped. It suffered from the dollar-grabbing of a raw
civilization; from the hustle, bustle, and absence of
leisure; from the lack of a wealthy class to sit for por-
traits—and then pay for them. Some of the earliest
painters were forced to go to England, where they
found both training and patrons. America exported
artists and imported art.

Painting, like the theater, also suffered from the
Puritan prejudice that art was a sinful waste of
time—and often obscene. John Adams boasted that
“he would not give a sixpence for a bust of Phidias or
a painting by Raphael.’’ When Edward Everett, the
eminent Boston scholar and orator, placed a statue
of Apollo in his home, he had its naked limbs draped.

Competent painters nevertheless emerged.
Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), a spendthrift Rhode
Islander and one of the most gifted of the early group,
wielded his brush in Britain in competition with the
best artists. He produced several portraits of Wash-
ington, all of them somewhat idealized and dehu-
manized. Truth to tell, by the time he posed for Stuart,
the famous general had lost his natural teeth and
some of the original shape of his face. Charles Willson
Peale (1741–1827), a Marylander, painted some sixty
portraits of Washington, who patiently sat for about
fourteen of them. John Trumbull (1756–1843), who
had fought in the Revolutionary War, recaptured its
scenes and spirit on scores of striking canvases.

338 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

During the nationalistic upsurge after the War of
1812, American painters of portraits turned increas-
ingly from human landscapes to romantic mirror-
ings of local landscapes. The Hudson River school
excelled in this type of art. At the same time, portrait
painters gradually encountered some unwelcome
competition from the invention of a crude photo-
graph known as the daguerreotype, perfected about
1839 by a Frenchman, Louis Daguerre.

Music was slowly shaking off the restraints of
colonial days, when the prim Puritans had frowned
upon nonreligious singing. Rhythmic and nostalgic
“darky’’ tunes, popularized by whites, were becom-
ing immense hits by midcentury. Special favorites
were the uniquely American minstrel shows, featur-
ing white actors with blackened faces. “Dixie,’’ later
adopted by the Confederates as their battle hymn,
was written in 1859, ironically in New York City by an
Ohioan. The most famous black songs, also ironi-
cally, came from a white Pennsylvanian, Stephen C.
Foster (1826–1864). His one excursion into the South
occurred in 1852, after he had published “Old Folks
at Home.’’ Foster made a valuable contribution to
American folk music by capturing the plaintive spirit
of the slaves. An odd and pathetic figure, he finally
lost both his art and his popularity and died in a
charity ward after drowning his sorrows in drink.

The Blossoming
of a National Literature

“Who reads an American book?’’ sneered a British
critic of 1820. The painful truth was that the nation’s
rough-hewn, pioneering civilization gave little
encouragement to “polite’’ literature. Much of the
reading matter was imported or plagiarized from
Britain.

Busy conquering a continent, the Americans
poured most of their creative efforts into practical
outlets. Praiseworthy were political essays, like The
Federalist of Hamilton, Jay, and Madison; pamphlets,
like Tom Paine’s Common Sense; and political ora-
tions, like the masterpieces of Daniel Webster. In the
category of nonreligious books published before
1820, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1818) is
one of the few that achieved genuine distinction. His
narrative is a classic in its simplicity, clarity, and
inspirational quality. Even so, it records only a frag-
ment of “Old Ben’s’’ long, fruitful, and amorous life.

A genuinely American literature received a
strong boost from the wave of nationalism that fol-
lowed the War of Independence and especially the
War of 1812. By 1820 the older seaboard areas were
sufficiently removed from the survival mentality of
tree-chopping and butter-churning so that litera-
ture could be supported as a profession. The
Knickerbocker Group in New York blazed brilliantly
across the literary heavens, thus enabling America
for the first time to boast of a literature to match its
magnificent landscapes.

Washington Irving (1783–1859), born in New
York City, was the first American to win international
recognition as a literary figure. Steeped in the tradi-
tions of New Netherland, he published in 1809 his
Knickerbocker’s History of New York, with its amusing
caricatures of the Dutch. When the family business
failed, Irving was forced to turn to the goose-feather
pen. In 1819–1820 he published The Sketch Book,
which brought him immediate fame at home and
abroad. Combining a pleasing style with delicate
charm and quiet humor, he used English as well as
American themes and included such immortal
Dutch-American tales as “Rip Van Winkle’’ and “The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow.’’ Europe was amazed to find
at last an American with a feather in his hand, not in
his hair. Later turning to Spanish locales and biogra-
phy, Irving did much to interpret America to Europe
and Europe to America. He was, said the Englishman
William Thackeray, “the first ambassador whom the
New World of letters sent to the Old.’’

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was the
first American novelist, as Washington Irving was
the first general writer, to gain world fame and to
make New World themes respectable. Marrying into
a wealthy family, he settled down on the frontier of
New York. Reading one day to his wife from an
insipid English novel, Cooper remarked in disgust
that he could write a better book himself. His wife
challenged him to do so—and he did.

After an initial failure, Cooper launched out
upon an illustrious career in 1821 with his second
novel, The Spy—an absorbing tale of the American
Revolution. His stories of the sea were meritorious
and popular, but his fame rests most enduringly
on the Leatherstocking Tales. A deadeye rifleman
named Natty Bumppo, one of nature’s noblemen,
meets with Indians in stirring adventures like The
Last of the Mohicans. James Fenimore Cooper’s
novels had a wide sale among Europeans, some of
whom came to think of all American people as

Landmarks in Arts and Literature 339

born with tomahawk in hand. Actually Cooper was
exploring the viability and destiny of America’s
republican experiment, by contrasting the unde-
filed values of “natural men,’’ children of the
wooded wilderness, with the artificiality of modern
civilization.

A third member of the Knickerbocker group in
New York was the belated Puritan William Cullen
Bryant (1794–1878), transplanted from Massachu-
setts. At age sixteen he wrote the meditative and
melancholy “Thanatopsis’’ (published in 1817),
which was one of the first high-quality poems pro-
duced in the United States. Critics could hardly
believe that it had been written on “this side of the
water.’’ Although Bryant continued with poetry, he
was forced to make his living by editing the influen-
tial New York Evening Post. For over fifty years, he set
a model for journalism that was dignified, liberal,
and conscientious.

Trumpeters of Transcendentalism

A golden age in American literature dawned in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century, when an
amazing outburst shook New England. One of the
mainsprings of this literary flowering was tran-
scendentalism, especially around Boston, which
preened itself as “the Athens of America.’’

The transcendentalist movement of the 1830s
resulted in part from a liberalizing of the straight-
jacket Puritan theology. It also owed much to for-
eign influences, including the German romantic
philosophers and the religions of Asia. The tran-
scendentalists rejected the prevailing theory,
derived from John Locke, that all knowledge comes
to the mind through the senses. Truth, rather, “tran-
scends’’ the senses: it cannot be found by observa-
tion alone. Every person possesses an inner light

340 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

that can illuminate the highest truth and put him or
her in direct touch with God, or the “Oversoul.’’

These mystical doctrines of transcendentalism
defied precise definition, but they underlay con-
crete beliefs. Foremost was a stiff-backed individu-
alism in matters religious as well as social. Closely
associated was a commitment to self-reliance, self-
culture, and self-discipline. These traits naturally
bred hostility to authority and to formal institutions
of any kind, as well as to all conventional wisdom.
Finally came exaltation of the dignity of the individ-
ual, whether black or white—the mainspring of a
whole array of humanitarian reforms.

Best known of the transcendentalists was
Boston-born Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882).
Tall, slender, and intensely blue-eyed, he mirrored
serenity in his noble features. Trained as a Unitarian
minister, he early forsook his pulpit and ultimately
reached a wider audience by pen and platform. He
was a never-failing favorite as a lyceum lecturer and
for twenty years took a western tour every winter.
Perhaps his most thrilling public effort was a Phi
Beta Kappa address, “The American Scholar,’’ deliv-
ered at Harvard College in 1837. This brilliant
appeal was an intellectual Declaration of Independ-
ence, for it urged American writers to throw off
European traditions and delve into the riches of
their own backyards.

Hailed as both a poet and a philosopher,
Emerson was not of the highest rank as either.
He was more influential as a practical philosopher
and through his fresh and vibrant essays en-
riched countless thousands of humdrum lives.
Catching the individualistic mood of the Republic,
he stressed self-reliance, self-improvement, self-
confidence, optimism, and freedom. The secret of
Emerson’s popularity lay largely in the fact that his
ideals reflected those of an expanding America. By
the 1850s he was an outspoken critic of slavery, and
he ardently supported the Union cause in the Civil
War.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was Emer-
son’s close associate—a poet, a mystic, a transcen-
dentalist, and a nonconformist. Condemning a
government that supported slavery, he refused to
pay his Massachusetts poll tax and was jailed for a
night.* A gifted prose writer, he is well known for
Walden: Or Life in the Woods (1854). The book is a
record of Thoreau’s two years of simple existence in
a hut that he built on the edge of Walden Pond, near
Concord, Massachusetts. A stiff-necked individual-
ist, he believed that he should reduce his bodily
wants so as to gain time for a pursuit of truth
through study and meditation. Thoreau’s Walden
and his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience exer-
cised a strong influence in furthering idealistic
thought, both in America and abroad. His writings
later encouraged Mahatma Gandhi to resist British
rule in India and, still later, inspired the develop-
ment of American civil rights leader Martin Luther
King, Jr.’s thinking about nonviolence.

Bold, brassy, and swaggering was the open-
collared figure of Brooklyn’s Walt Whitman
(1819–1892). In his famous collection of poems
Leaves of Grass (1855), he gave free rein to his gush-
ing genius with what he called a “barbaric yawp.’’
Highly romantic, emotional, and unconventional,
he dispensed with titles, stanzas, rhymes, and at
times even regular meter. He handled sex with
shocking frankness, although he laundered his
verses in later editions, and his book was banned in
Boston.

Leading Transcendentalists 341

In 1849 Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
published On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience, asserting,

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That
government is best which governs least’; and
I should like to see it acted up to more
rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it
finally amounts to this, which also I believe—
‘That government is best which governs not
at all’; and when men are prepared for it,
that will be the kind of government which
they will have. Government is at best an
expedient; but most governments are
usually, and all governments are sometimes,
inexpedient.’’

*The story (probably apocryphal) is that Emerson visited
Thoreau at the jail and asked, “Why are you here?’’ The reply
came, “Why are you not here?’’

Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was at first a financial
failure. The only three enthusiastic reviews that it
received were written by the author himself—
anonymously. But in time the once-withered Leaves
of Grass, revived and honored, won for Whitman an
enormous following in both America and Europe.
His fame increased immensely among “Whitmani-
acs’’ after his death.

Leaves of Grass gained for Whitman the infor-
mal title “Poet Laureate of Democracy.’’ Singing
with transcendental abandon of his love for the
masses, he caught the exuberant enthusiasm of
an expanding America that had turned its back on
the Old World:

All the Past we leave behind;
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world,

varied world;
Fresh and strong the world we seize—world

of labor and the march—
Pioneers! O Pioneers!

Here at last was the native art for which critics had
been crying.

Glowing Literary Lights

Certain other literary giants were not actively asso-
ciated with the transcendentalist movement,
though not completely immune to its influences.
Professor Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–
1882), who for many years taught modern lan-
guages at Harvard College, was one of the most pop-
ular poets ever produced in America. Handsome
and urbane, he lived a generally serene life, except
for the tragic deaths of two wives, the second of
whom perished before his eyes when her dress
caught fire. Writing for the genteel classes, he was
adopted by the less cultured masses. His wide
knowledge of European literature supplied him with

342 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

In 1876 the London Saturday Review referred
to Walt Whitman (1819–1892) as the author
of a volume of

“so-called poems which were chiefly
remarkable for their absurd extravagances
and shameless obscenity, and who has since,
we are glad to say, been little heard of
among decent people.’’

In 1888 Whitman wrote,

“I had my choice when I commenced. I bid
neither for soft eulogies, big money returns,
nor the approbation of existing schools and
conventions. . . . I have had my say entirely
my own way, and put it unerringly on record
—the value thereof to be decided by time.’’

many themes, but some of his most admired
poems—“Evangeline,’’ “The Song of Hiawatha,’’ and
“The Courtship of Miles Standish’’—were based on
American traditions. Immensely popular in Europe,
Longfellow was the only American ever to be hon-
ored with a bust in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster
Abbey.

A fighting Quaker, John Greenleaf Whittier
(1807–1892), with piercing dark eyes and swarthy
complexion, was the uncrowned poet laureate of
the antislavery crusade. Less talented as a writer
than Longfellow, he was vastly more important in
influencing social action. His poems cried aloud
against inhumanity, injustice, and intolerance,
against

The outworn rite, the old abuse,
The pious fraud transparent grown.

Undeterred by insults and the stoning of mobs,
Whittier helped arouse a calloused America on the
slavery issue. A supreme conscience rather than a
sterling poet or intellect, Whittier was one of the
moving forces of his generation, whether moral,
humanitarian, or spiritual. Gentle and lovable, he
was preeminently the poet of human freedom.

Many-sided Professor James Russell Lowell
(1819–1891), who succeeded Professor Longfellow
at Harvard, ranks as one of America’s better poets.
He was also a distinguished essayist, literary critic,
editor, and diplomat—a diffusion of talents that
hampered his poetical output. Lowell is remem-
bered as a political satirist in his Biglow Papers,
especially those of 1846 dealing with the Mexican
War. Written partly as poetry in the Yankee dialect,
the Papers condemned in blistering terms the
alleged slavery-expansion designs of the Polk
administration.

The scholarly Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809–1894), who taught anatomy with a sparkle at
Harvard Medical School, was a prominent poet,
essayist, novelist, lecturer, and wit. A nonconformist
and a fascinating conversationalist, he shone
among a group of literary lights who regarded
Boston as “the hub of the universe.’’ His poem “The
Last Leaf,’’ in honor of the last “white Indian’’ of the
Boston Tea Party, came to apply to himself. Dying at
the age of eighty-five, he was the “last leaf’’ among
his distinguished contemporaries.*

Two women writers whose work remains enor-
mously popular today were also tied to this New
England literary world. Louisa May Alcott
(1832–1888) grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, in
the bosom of transcendentalism, alongside neigh-
bors Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. Her philosopher
father Bronson Alcott occupied himself more devot-
edly to ideas than earning a living, leaving his
daughter to write Little Women (1868) and other
books to support her mother and sisters. Not far
away in Amherst, Massachusetts, poet Emily Dick-
inson (1830–1886) lived as a recluse but created her
own original world through precious gems of
poetry. In deceptively spare language and simple
rhyme schemes, she explored universal themes of

Prominent Writers 343

*Oliver Wendell Holmes had a son with the same name who
became a distinguished justice of the Supreme Court
(1902–1932) and who lived to be ninety-four, less two days.

nature, love, death, and immortality. Although she
refused during her lifetime to publish any of her
poems, when she died, nearly two thousand of them
were found among her papers and eventually made
their way into print.

The most noteworthy literary figure produced
by the South before the Civil War, unless Edgar Allan
Poe is regarded as a southerner, was novelist
William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870). Quantita-
tively, at least, he was great: eighty-two books
flowed from his ever-moist pen, winning for
him the title “the Cooper of the South.’’ His
themes dealt with the southern frontier in colonial
days and with the South during the Revolutionary
War. But he was neglected by his own section, even
though he married into the socially elite and
became a slaveowner. The high-toned planter
aristocracy would never accept the son of a poor
Charleston storekeeper.

Literary Individualists
and Dissenters

Not all writers in these years believed so keenly in
human goodness and social progress. Edgar Allan
Poe (1809–1849), who spent much of his youth in
Virginia, was an eccentric genius. Orphaned at an
early age, cursed with ill health, and married to a
child-wife of thirteen who fell fatally ill of tuberculo-
sis, he suffered hunger, cold, poverty, and debt. Fail-
ing at suicide, he took refuge in the bottle and
dissipated his talent early. Poe was a gifted lyric
poet, as “The Raven’’ attests. A master stylist, he also
excelled in the short story, especially of the horror
type, in which he shared his alcoholic nightmares
with fascinated readers. If he did not invent the
modern detective novel, he at least set new high
standards in tales like “The Gold Bug.’’

Poe was fascinated by the ghostly and ghastly,
as in “The Fall of the House of Usher’’ and other sto-
ries. He reflected a morbid sensibility distinctly at
odds with the usually optimistic tone of American
culture. Partly for this reason, Poe has perhaps been
even more prized by Europeans than by Americans.
His brilliant career was cut short when he was found

drunk in a Baltimore gutter and shortly thereafter
died.

Two other writers reflected the continuing
Calvinist obsession with original sin and with the
never-ending struggle between good and evil. In
somber Salem, Massachusetts, writer Nathaniel
Hawthorne (1804–1864) grew up in an atmosphere
heavy with the memories of his Puritan forebears
and the tragedy of his father’s premature death on
an ocean voyage. His masterpiece was The Scarlet
Letter (1850), which describes the Puritan practice
of forcing an adultress to wear a scarlet “A” on her
clothing. The tragic tale chronicles the psychologi-
cal effects of sin on the guilty heroine and her secret
lover (the father of her baby), a minister of the
gospel in Puritan Boston. In The Marble Faun
(1860), Hawthorne dealt with a group of young
American artists who witness a mysterious murder
in Rome. The book explores the concepts of the
omnipresence of evil and the dead hand of the past
weighing upon the present.

Herman Melville (1819–1891), an orphaned and
ill-educated New Yorker, went to sea as a youth
and served eighteen adventuresome months on a
whaler. “A whale ship was my Yale College and my
Harvard,’’ he wrote. Jumping ship in the South Seas,
he lived among cannibals, from whom he provi-
dently escaped uneaten. His fresh and charming
tales of the South Seas were immediately popular,
but his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851), was
not. This epic novel is a complex allegory of good
and evil, told in terms of the conflict between a
whaling captain, Ahab, and a giant white whale,
Moby Dick. Captain Ahab, having lost a leg to the
marine monster, lives only for revenge. His pursuit
finally ends when Moby Dick rams and sinks Ahab’s
ship, leaving only one survivor. The whale’s exact
identity and Ahab’s motives remain obscure. In the
end the sea, like the terrifyingly impersonal and
unknowable universe of Melville’s imagination,
simply rolls on.

Moby Dick was widely ignored at the time of
its publication; people were accustomed to more
straightforward and upbeat prose. A disheartened
Melville continued to write unprofitably for some
years, part of the time eking out a living as a customs
inspector, and then died in relative obscurity and
poverty. Ironically, his brooding masterpiece about

344 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

the mysterious white whale had to wait until the
more jaded twentieth century for readers and for
proper recognition.

Portrayers of the Past

A distinguished group of American historians was
emerging at the same time that other writers were
winning distinction. Energetic George Bancroft
(1800–1891), who as secretary of the navy helped
found the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1845, has
deservedly received the title “Father of American
History.’’ He published a spirited, superpatriotic his-
tory of the United States to 1789 in six (originally
ten) volumes (1834–1876), a work that grew out of
his vast researches in dusty archives in Europe and
America.

Two other historians are read with greater
pleasure and profit today. William H. Prescott

(1796–1859), who accidentally lost the sight of an
eye while in college, conserved his remaining weak
vision and published classic accounts of the con-
quest of Mexico (1843) and Peru (1847). Francis
Parkman (1823–1893), whose eyes were so defective
that he wrote in darkness with the aid of a guiding
machine, penned a brilliant series of volumes
beginning in 1851. In epic style he chronicled the
struggle between France and Britain in colonial
times for the mastery of North America.

Early American historians of prominence were
almost without exception New Englanders, largely
because the Boston area provided well-stocked
libraries and a stimulating literary tradition. These
writers numbered abolitionists among their rela-
tives and friends and hence were disposed to view
unsympathetically the slavery-cursed South. The
writing of American history for generations to come
was to suffer from an antisouthern bias perpetuated
by this early “made in New England’’ interpretation.

Pioneering Historians 345

346 CHAPTER 15 The Ferment of Reform and Culture, 1790–1860

C h r o n o l o g y

1700s First Shaker communities formed

1794 Thomas Paine publishes The Age of Reason

1795 University of North Carolina founded

1800 Second Great Awakening begins

1819 Jefferson founds University of Virginia

1821 Cooper publishes The Spy, his first successful
novel

Emma Willard establishes Troy (New York)
Female Seminary

1825 New Harmony commune established

1826 American Temperance Society founded

1828 Noah Webster publishes dictionary
American Peace Society founded

1830 Joseph Smith founds Mormon Church
Godey’s Lady’s Book first published

1830-
1831 Finney conducts revivals in eastern cities

1835 Lyceum movement flourishes

1837 Oberlin College admits female students
Mary Lyon establishes Mount Holyoke

Seminary
Emerson delivers “The American Scholar’’

address

1841 Brook Farm commune established

1843 Dorothea Dix petitions Massachusetts
legislature on behalf of the insane

1846-
1847 Mormon migration to Utah

1848 Seneca Falls Woman’s Rights Convention
held

Oneida Community established

1850 Hawthorne publishes The Scarlet Letter

1851 Melville publishes Moby Dick
Maine passes first law prohibiting liquor

1855 Whitman publishes Leaves of Grass

VA R Y I N G VIEWPOINTS

Reform: Who? What? How? and Why?

Early chronicles of the antebellum period univer-sally lauded the era’s reformers, portraying them
as idealistic, altruistic crusaders intent on improv-
ing American society.

After World War II, however, some historians
began to detect selfish and even conservative
motives underlying the apparent benevolence of
the reformers. This view described the advocates of
reform as anxious, upper-class men and women
threatened by the ferment of life in antebellum
America. The pursuit of reforms like temperance,
asylums, prisons, and mandatory public education
represented a means of asserting “social control.” In
this vein, one historian described a reform move-
ment as “the anguished protest of an aggrieved class
against a world they never made.” In Michael Katz’s

treatment of early educational reform, proponents
were community leaders who sought a school sys-
tem that would ease the traumas of America’s indus-
trialization by inculcating business-oriented values
and discipline in the working classes.

The wave of reform activity in the 1960s
prompted a reevaluation of the reputations of the
antebellum reformers. These more recent interpre-
tations found much to admire in the authentic reli-
gious commitments of reformers and especially in
the participation of women, who sought various
social improvements as an extension of their func-
tion as protectors of the home and family.

The scholarly treatment of abolitionism is a
telling example of how reformers and their cam-
paigns have risen and fallen in the estimation of his-

Varying Viewpoints 347

torians. To northern historians writing in the late
nineteenth century, abolitionists were courageous
men and women so devoted to uprooting the evil of
slavery that they were willing to dedicate their lives
to a cause that often ostracized them from their
communities. By the early twentieth century, how-
ever, an interpretation more favorable to the South
prevailed, one that blamed the fanaticism of the
abolitionists for the Civil War. But as the racial
climate in the United States began to change by
the mid-twentieth century, historians once again
showed sympathy for the abolitionist struggle, and
by the 1960s abolitionist men and women were
revered as ideologically committed individuals ded-
icated not just to freeing the enslaved but to saving
the moral soul of America.

Recently scholars animated by the modern femi-
nist movement have inspired a reconsideration of
women’s reform activity. It had long been known, of
course, that women were active participants in chari-
table organizations. But not until Nancy Cott, Kathryn
Sklar, Mary Ryan, and other historians began to look
more closely at what Cott has called “the bonds of
womanhood” did the links between women’s domes-
tic lives and their public benevolent behavior fully
emerge. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg showed in her study
of the New York Female Moral Reform Society, for
example, that members who set out at first to convert
prostitutes to evangelical Protestantism and to close
down the city’s many brothels soon developed an ide-

ology of female autonomy that rejected male domi-
nance. When men behaved in immoral or illegal ways,
women reformers claimed that they had the right—
even the duty—to leave the confines of their homes
and actively work to purify society. More recently,
historians Nancy Hewitt and Lori Ginzberg have
challenged the assumption that all women reform-
ers embraced a single definition of female identity.
Instead they have emphasized the importance of class
differences in shaping women’s reform work, which
led inevitably to tensions within female ranks. Giving
more attention to the historical evolution of female
reform ideology, Ginzberg has also detected a shift
from an early focus on moral uplift to a more class-
based appeal for social control.

Historians of the suffrage movement have
emphasized another kind of exclusivity among
women reformers—the boundaries of race. Ellen
DuBois has shown that after a brief alliance with the
abolitionist movement, many female suffrage
reformers abandoned the cause of black liberation
in an effort to achieve their own goal with less con-
troversy. Whatever historians may conclude about
the liberating or leashing character of early reform,
it is clear by now that they have to contend with the
ways in which class, gender, and race divided
reformers, making the plural—reform movements—
the more accurate depiction of the impulse to
“improve” that pervaded American society in the
early nineteenth century.

For further reading, see page A10 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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348

PART TH R E E

TESTING THE
NEW NATION

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�

1820–1877

The Civil War of 1861 to1865 was the awesome
trial by fire of American
nationhood, and of the
American soul. All Ameri-
cans knew, said Abraham
Lincoln, that slavery “was
somehow the cause of this
war.” The war tested, in
Lincoln’s ringing phrase at
Gettysburg, whether any
nation “dedicated to the
proposition that all men
are created equal . . . can
long endure.” How did this
great and bloody conflict
come about? And what
were its results?

American slavery was
by any measure a “peculiar institution.” Slavery was
rooted in both racism and economic exploitation,
and depended for its survival on brutal repression.
Yet the American slave population was the only
enslaved population in history that grew by means

of its own biological repro-
duction—a fact that sug-
gests to many historians
that conditions under slav-
ery in the United States
were somehow less puni-
tive than those in other
slave societies. Indeed a
distinctive and durable
African-American culture
managed to flourish under
slavery, further suggesting
that the slave regime pro-
vided some “space” for
African-American cultural
development. But how-
ever benignly it might
be painted, slavery still
remained a cancer in the

heart of American democracy, a moral outrage that
mocked the nation’s claim to be a model of social
and political enlightenment. As time went on, more
and more voices called more and more stridently
for its abolition.

The nation lived
uneasily with slavery
from the outset. Thomas
Jefferson was only one
among many in the
founding generation who
felt acutely the conflict
between the high princi-
ple of equality and the
ugly reality of slavery. The
federal government in
the early Republic took
several steps to check
the growth of slavery. It
banned slavery in the
Old Northwest in 1787,
prohibited the further
importation of slaves
after 1808, and declared
in the Missouri Compro-
mise of 1820 that the
vast western territories
secured in the Louisiana
Purchase were forever
closed to slavery north
of the state of Missouri.
Antislavery sentiment even abounded in the South
in the immediate post-Revolutionary years. But as
time progressed, and especially after Eli Whitney’s
invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s, the south-
ern planter class became increasingly dependent on
slave labor to wring profits from the sprawling plan-
tations that carpeted the South. As cotton cultivation
spread westward, the South’s stake in slavery grew
deeper, and the abolitionist outcry grew louder.

The controversy over slavery significantly inten-
sified following the war with Mexico in the 1840s.
“Mexico will poison us,” predicted the philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he proved distressingly
prophetic. The lands acquired from Mexico—most
of the present-day American Southwest, from Texas
to California—reopened the question of extending
slavery into the western territories. The decade and
a half following the Mexican War—from 1846 to

1861—witnessed a series
of ultimately ineffec-
tive efforts to come to
grips with that question,
including the ill-starred
Compromise of 1850, the
conflict-breeding Kansas-
Nebraska Act of 1854,
and the Supreme Court’s
inflammatory decision
in the Dred Scott case
of 1857. Ultimately, the
slavery question was set-
tled by force of arms, in
the Civil War itself.

The Civil War, as
Lincoln observed, was
assuredly about slavery.
But as Lincoln also
repeatedly insisted, the
war was about the viabil-
ity of the Union as well
and about the strength of
democracy itself. Could a
democratic government,
built on the principle of

popular consent, rightfully deny some of its citizens
the same right to independence that the American
revolutionaries had exercised in seceding from the
British Empire in 1776? Southern rebels, calling the
conflict “The War for Southern Independence,”
asked that question forcefully, but ultimately it, too,
was answered not in the law courts or in the legisla-
tive halls but on the battlefield.

The Civil War unarguably established the
supremacy of the Union, and it ended slavery as
well. But as the victorious Union set about the task
of “reconstruction” after the war’s end in 1865, a
combination of weak northern will and residual
southern power frustrated the goal of making the
emancipated blacks full-fledged American citizens.
The Civil War in the end brought nothing but free-
dom—but over time, freedom proved a powerful
tool indeed.

349

350

16

The South and the
Slavery Controversy

���

1793–1860

If you put a chain around the neck of a slave,
the other end fastens itself around your own.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, 1841

A t the dawn of the Republic, slavery faced anuncertain future. Touched by Revolutionary
idealism, some southern leaders, including Thomas
Jefferson, were talking openly of freeing their slaves.
Others predicted that the iron logic of economics
would eventually expose slavery’s unprofitability,
speeding its demise.

But the introduction of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin
in 1793 scrambled all those predictions. Whitney’s
invention made possible the wide-scale cultivation
of short-staple cotton. The white fiber rapidly
became the dominant southern crop, eclipsing
tobacco, rice, and sugar. The explosion of cotton
cultivation created an insatiable demand for labor,
chaining the slave to the gin, and the planter to the
slave. As the nineteenth century opened, the rein-
vigoration of southern slavery carried fateful impli-
cations for blacks and whites alike—and threatened
the survival of the nation itself.

“Cotton Is King!’’

As time passed, the Cotton Kingdom developed into
a huge agricultural factory, pouring out avalanches of
the fluffy fiber. Quick profits drew planters to the vir-
gin bottomlands of the Gulf states. As long as the soil
was still vigorous, the yield was bountiful and the
rewards were high. Caught up in an economic spiral,
the planters bought more slaves and land to grow
more cotton, so as to buy still more slaves and land.

Northern shippers reaped a large part of the
profits from the cotton trade. They would load
bulging bales of cotton at southern ports, transport
them to England, sell their fleecy cargo for pounds
sterling, and buy needed manufactured goods for
sale in the United States. To a large degree, the pros-
perity of both North and South rested on the bent
backs of southern slaves.

The Cotton Empire 351

Cotton accounted for half the value of all Ameri-
can exports after 1840. The South produced more
than half of the entire world’s supply of cotton—a
fact that held foreign nations in partial bondage.
Britain was then the leading industrial power. Its
most important single manufacture in the 1850s
was cotton cloth, from which about one-fifth of its
population, directly or indirectly, drew its liveli-
hood. About 75 percent of this precious supply of
fiber came from the white-carpeted acres of the
South.

Southern leaders were fully aware that Britain
was tied to them by cotton threads, and this depend-
ence gave them a heady sense of power. In their
eyes “Cotton was King,’’ the gin was his throne, and
the black bondsmen were his henchmen. If war
should ever break out between North and South,
northern warships would presumably cut off the
outflow of cotton. Fiber-famished British factories
would then close their gates, starving mobs would
force the London government to break the block-

ade, and the South would triumph. Cotton was a
powerful monarch indeed.

The Planter “Aristocracy’’

Before the Civil War, the South was in some respects
not so much a democracy as an oligarchy—or a gov-
ernment by the few, in this case heavily influenced
by a planter aristocracy. In 1850 only 1,733 families
owned more than 100 slaves each, and this select
group provided the cream of the political and social
leadership of the section and nation. Here was the
mint-julep South of the tall-columned and white-
painted plantation mansion—the “big house,’’
where dwelt the “cottonocracy.’’

The planter aristocrats, with their blooded
horses and Chippendale chairs, enjoyed a lion’s
share of southern wealth. They could educate their
children in the finest schools, often in the North or
abroad. Their money provided the leisure for study,
reflection, and statecraft, as was notably true of men
like John C. Calhoun (a Yale graduate) and Jefferson
Davis (a West Point graduate). They felt a keen sense
of obligation to serve the public. It was no accident
that Virginia and the other southern states pro-
duced a higher proportion of front-rank statesmen
before 1860 than the “dollar-grubbing’’ North.

But even in its best light, dominance by a
favored aristocracy was basically undemocratic. It
widened the gap between rich and poor. It ham-
pered tax-supported public education, because the

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) wrote in 1782,

“The whole commerce between master and
slave is a perpetual exercise of the . . . most
unremitting despotism on the one part, and
degrading submissions on the other. . . .
Indeed I tremble for my country when I
reflect that God is just; that his justice
cannot sleep forever.’’

Unlike Washington, Jefferson did not free his
slaves in his will; he had fallen upon
distressful times.

rich planters could and did send their children to
private institutions.

A favorite author of elite southerners was Sir
Walter Scott, whose manors and castles, graced by
brave Ivanhoes and fair Rowenas, helped them
idealize a feudal society, even when many of their
economic activities were undeniably capitalistic.
Southern aristocrats, who sometimes staged joust-
ing tournaments, strove to perpetuate a type of
medievalism that had died out in Europe—or was
rapidly dying out.* Mark Twain later accused Sir
Walter Scott of having had a hand in starting the
Civil War. The British novelist, Twain said, aroused
the southerners to fight for a decaying social struc-
ture—“a sham civilization.’’

The plantation system also shaped the lives of
southern women. The mistress of a great plantation
commanded a sizable household staff of mostly
female slaves. She gave daily orders to cooks, maids,
seamstresses, laundresses, and body servants. Rela-
tionships between mistresses and slaves ranged
from affectionate to atrocious. Some mistresses
showed tender regard for their bondswomen, and
some slave women took pride in their status as
“members’’ of the household. But slavery strained
even the bonds of womanhood. Virtually no slave-
holding women believed in abolition, and relatively

few protested when the husbands and children of
their slaves were sold. One plantation mistress har-
bored a special affection for her slave Annica but
noted in her diary that “I whipt Annica’’ for
insolence.

Slaves of the Slave System

Unhappily, the moonlight-and-magnolia tradition
concealed much that was worrisome, distasteful,
and sordid. Plantation agriculture was wasteful,
largely because King Cotton and his money-hungry
subjects despoiled the good earth. Quick profits led
to excessive cultivation, or “land butchery,’’ which
in turn caused a heavy leakage of population to the
West and Northwest.

The economic structure of the South became
increasingly monopolistic. As the land wore thin,
many small farmers sold their holdings to more
prosperous neighbors and went north or west. The
big got bigger and the small smaller. When the Civil
War finally erupted, a large percentage of southern
farms had passed from the hands of the families
that had originally cleared them.

Another cancer in the bosom of the South was
the financial instability of the plantation system.
The temptation to overspeculate in land and slaves
caused many planters, including Andrew Jackson in

352 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

*Oddly enough, by legislative enactment, jousting became the
official state sport of Maryland in 1962.

his later years, to plunge in beyond their depth.
Although the black slaves might in extreme cases be
fed for as little as ten cents a day, there were other
expenses. The slaves represented a heavy invest-
ment of capital, perhaps $1,200 each in the case of
prime field hands, and they might deliberately
injure themselves or run away. An entire slave quar-
ter might be wiped out by disease or even by light-
ning, as happened in one instance to twenty
ill-fated blacks.

Dominance by King Cotton likewise led to a dan-
gerous dependence on a one-crop economy, whose
price level was at the mercy of world conditions. The
whole system discouraged a healthy diversification
of agriculture and particularly of manufacturing.

Southern planters resented watching the North
grow fat at their expense. They were pained by the
heavy outward flow of commissions and interest to
northern middlemen, bankers, agents, and shippers.

True souls of the South, especially by the 1850s,
deplored the fact that when born, they were
wrapped in Yankee-made swaddling clothes and
that they spent the rest of their lives in servitude to
Yankee manufacturing. When they died, they were
laid in coffins held together with Yankee nails and
were buried in graves dug with Yankee shovels. The
South furnished the corpse and the hole in the
ground.

The Cotton Kingdom also repelled large-scale
European immigration, which added so richly to the
manpower and wealth of the North. In 1860 only 4.4
percent of the southern population were foreign-
born, as compared with 18.7 percent for the North.
German and Irish immigration to the South was
generally discouraged by the competition of slave
labor, by the high cost of fertile land, and by Euro-
pean ignorance of cotton growing. The diverting of
non-British immigration to the North caused the
white South to become the most Anglo-Saxon sec-
tion of the nation.

The White Majority

Only a handful of southern whites lived in Grecian-
pillared mansions. Below those 1,733 families in
1850 who owned a hundred or more slaves were
the less wealthy slaveowners. They totaled in 1850
some 345,000 families, representing about 1,725,000
white persons. Over two-thirds of these families—
255,268 in all—owned fewer than ten slaves each.
All told, only about one-fourth of white southerners
owned slaves or belonged to a slaveowning family.

The smaller slaveowners did not own a majority
of the slaves, but they made up a majority of the
masters. These lesser masters were typically small

Problems in the Cotton South 353

Basil Hall (1788–1844), an Englishman,
visited part of the cotton belt on a river
steamer (1827–1828). Noting the
preoccupation with cotton, he wrote,

“All day and almost all night long, the captain,
pilot, crew, and passengers were talking of
nothing else; and sometimes our ears were
so wearied with the sound of cotton! cotton!
cotton! that we gladly hailed a fresh
inundation of company in hopes of some
change—but alas! . . . ‘What’s cotton at?’
was the first eager inquiry. ‘Ten cents [a
pound ],’ ‘Oh, that will never do!’”

1,733 own 100 or more slaves

6,196 own 50–99

29,733 own 20–49

54,595 own 10 –19

80,765 own 5–9

105,683 own 2– 4

68,820 own 1 each

Slaveowning Families, 1850
More than half of all slaveholding families
owned fewer than four slaves. In contrast,
2 percent of slaveowners owned more than
fifty slaves each. A tiny slaveholding elite
held a majority of slave property in the
South. The great majority of white
southerners owned no slaves at all.

farmers. With the striking exception that their
household contained a slave or two, or perhaps an
entire slave family, the style of their lives probably
resembled that of small farmers in the North more
than it did that of the southern planter aristocracy.

They lived in modest farmhouses and sweated
beside their bondsmen in the cotton fields, laboring
callus for callus just as hard as their slaves.

Beneath the slaveowners on the population pyra-
mid was the great body of whites who owned no

354 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

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slaves at all. By 1860 their numbers had swelled to
6,120,825—three-quarters of all southern whites.
Shouldered off the richest bottomlands by the mighty
planters, they scratched a simple living from the thin-
ner soils of the backcountry and the mountain val-

leys. To them, the riches of the Cotton Kingdom were
a distant dream, and they often sneered at the lordly
pretensions of the cotton “snobocracy.’’ These red-
necked farmers participated in the market economy
scarcely at all. As subsistence farmers, they raised

The Spread of the Slave Power 355

Distribution of Slaves, 1820
The philosopher Ralph Waldo
Emerson, a New Englander,
declared in 1856, “I do not see
how a barbarous community and a
civilized community can constitute
a state. I think we must get rid of
slavery or we must get rid of
freedom.’’

Distribution of Slaves,
1860

corn and hogs, not cotton, and often lived isolated
lives, punctuated periodically by extended socializ-
ing and sermonizing at religious camp meetings.

Some of the least prosperous nonslaveholding
whites were scorned even by slaves as “poor white
trash.’’ Known also as “hillbillies,’’ “crackers,’’ or
“clay eaters,’’ they were often described as listless,
shiftless, and misshapen. Later investigations have
revealed that many of them were not simply lazy
but sick, suffering from malnutrition and parasites,
especially hookworm.

All these whites without slaves had no direct
stake in the preservation of slavery, yet they were
among the stoutest defenders of the slave system.
Why? The answer is not far to seek.

The carrot on the stick ever dangling before
their eyes was the hope of buying a slave or two and
of parlaying their paltry holdings into riches—all in
accord with the “American dream’’ of upward social
mobility. They also took fierce pride in their pre-
sumed racial superiority, which would be watered
down if the slaves were freed. Many of the poorer
whites were hardly better off economically than the
slaves; some, indeed, were not so well-off. But even
the most wretched whites could take perverse
comfort from the knowledge that they outranked
someone in status: the still more wretched African-
American slave. Thus did the logic of economics
join with the illogic of racism in buttressing the
slave system.

In a special category among white southerners
were the mountain whites, more or less marooned
in the valleys of the Appalachian range that
stretched from western Virginia to northern Georgia
and Alabama. Civilization had largely passed them
by, and they still lived under spartan frontier condi-
tions. They were a kind of living ancestry, for some
of them retained Elizabethan speech forms and
habits that had long since died out in Britain.

As independent small farmers, hundreds of
miles distant from the heart of the Cotton Kingdom
and rarely if ever in sight of a slave, these mountain
whites had little in common with the whites of the
flatlands. Many of them, including future president
Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, hated both the
haughty planters and their gangs of blacks. They
looked upon the impending strife between North
and South as “a rich man’s war but a poor man’s
fight.’’

When the war came, the tough-fibered moun-
tain whites constituted a vitally important penin-
sula of Unionism jutting down into the secessionist

Southern sea. They ultimately played a significant
role in crippling the Confederacy. Their attachment
to the Union party of Abraham Lincoln was such
that for generations after the Civil War, the only con-
centrated Republican strength in the solid South
was to be found in the southern highlands.

Free Blacks: Slaves Without Masters

Precarious in the extreme was the standing of the
South’s free blacks, who numbered about 250,000 by
1860. In the upper South, the free black population
traced its origins to a wavelet of emancipation
inspired by the idealism of Revolutionary days. In
the deeper South, many free blacks were mulattoes,
usually the emancipated children of a white planter
and his black mistress. Throughout the South were
some free blacks who had purchased their freedom
with earnings from labor after hours. Many free
blacks owned property, especially in New Orleans,
where a sizable mulatto community prospered.
Some, such as William T. Johnson, the “barber of
Natchez,’’ even owned slaves. He was the master of
fifteen bondsmen; his diary records that in June
1848 he flogged two slaves and a mule.

The free blacks in the South were a kind of
“third race.’’ These people were prohibited from
working in certain occupations and forbidden from
testifying against whites in court. They were always
vulnerable to being highjacked back into slavery
by unscrupulous slave traders. As free men and
women, they were walking examples of what might
be achieved by emancipation and hence were

356 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

“Arthur Lee, Freeman,” petitioned the General
Assembly of Virginia in 1835 for permission
to remain in the state despite a law against
the residency of free blacks. After asserting his
upstanding moral character, he implored,

“He therefore most respectfully and earnestly
prays that you will pass a law permitting him
on the score of long and meritorious service
to remain in the State, together with his wife
and four children, and not force him in his
old age to seek a livelihood in a new Country.”

Free Blacks and Enslaved Blacks 357

resented and detested by defenders of the slave
system.

Free blacks were also unpopular in the North,
where about another 250,000 of them lived. Several
states forbade their entrance, most denied them the
right to vote, and some barred blacks from public
schools. In 1835 New Hampshire farmers hitched
their oxen to a small schoolhouse that had dared to
enroll fourteen black children and dragged it into a
swamp. Northern blacks were especially hated by
the pick-and-shovel Irish immigrants, with whom
they competed for menial jobs. Much of the agita-
tion in the North against the spread of slavery into
the new territories in the 1840s and 1850s grew out
of race prejudice, not humanitarianism.

Antiblack feeling was in fact frequently stronger
in the North than in the South. The gifted and elo-
quent former slave Frederick Douglass, an aboli-
tionist and self-educated orator of rare power, was
several times mobbed and beaten by northern row-
dies. It was sometimes observed that white south-
erners, who were often suckled and reared by black
nurses, liked the black as an individual but despised
the race. The white northerner, on the other hand,
often professed to like the race but disliked individ-
ual blacks.

Plantation Slavery

In society’s basement in the South of 1860 were
nearly 4 million black human chattels. Their num-
bers had quadrupled since the dawn of the century,
as the booming cotton economy created a seem-
ingly unquenchable demand for slave labor. Legal
importation of African slaves into America ended in
1808, when Congress outlawed slave imports. But
the price of “black ivory’’ was so high in the years
before the Civil War that uncounted thousands of
blacks were smuggled into the South, despite the
death penalty for slavers. Although several were
captured, southern juries repeatedly acquitted
them. Only one slave trader was ever executed, N. P.
Gordon, and this took place in New York in 1862, the
second year of the Civil War. Yet the huge bulk of the
increase in the slave population came not from
imports but instead from natural reproduction—a
fact that distinguished slavery in America from
other New World societies and that implied much
about the tenor of the slave regime and the condi-
tions of family life under slavery.

Above all, the planters regarded the slaves
as investments, into which they had sunk nearly

$2 billion of their capital by 1860. Slaves were the
primary form of wealth in the South, and as such
they were cared for as any asset is cared for by a pru-
dent capitalist. Accordingly, they were sometimes,
though by no means always, spared dangerous
work, like putting a roof on a house. If a neck was
going to be broken, the master preferred it to be that
of a wage-earning Irish laborer rather than that of a
prime field hand, worth $1,800 by 1860 (a price that
had quintupled since 1800). Tunnel blasting and
swamp draining were often consigned to itinerant
gangs of expendable Irishmen because those per-
ilous tasks were “death on niggers and mules.’’

Slavery was profitable for the great planters,
though it hobbled the economic development of the
region as a whole. The profits from the cotton boom
sucked ever more slaves from the upper to the lower
South, so that by 1860 the Deep South states of
South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and
Louisiana each had a majority or near-majority of
blacks and accounted for about half of all slaves in
the South.

Breeding slaves in the way that cattle are bred
was not openly encouraged. But thousands of
blacks from the soil-exhausted slave states of the
Old South, especially tobacco-depleted Virginia,
were “sold down the river’’ to toil as field-gang
laborers on the cotton frontier of the lower Missis-
sippi Valley. Women who bore thirteen or fourteen
babies were prized as “rattlin’ good breeders,’’ and
some of these fecund females were promised their
freedom when they had produced ten. White mas-
ters all too frequently would force their attentions
on female slaves, fathering a sizable mulatto popu-
lation, most of which remained enchained.

Slave auctions were brutal sights. The open sell-
ing of human flesh under the hammer, sometimes

358 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

with cattle and horses, was among the most revolt-
ing aspects of slavery. On the auction block, families
were separated with distressing frequency, usually
for economic reasons such as bankruptcy or the
division of “property’’ among heirs. The sundering
of families in this fashion was perhaps slavery’s
greatest psychological horror. Abolitionists de-
cried the practice, and Harriet Beecher Stowe seized
on the emotional power of this theme by putting it
at the heart of the plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Life Under the Lash

White southerners often romanticized about
the happy life of their singing, dancing, banjo-
strumming, joyful “darkies.’’ But how did the slaves
actually live? There is no simple answer to this ques-
tion. Conditions varied greatly from region to

region, from large plantation to small farm, and
from master to master. Everywhere, of course, slav-
ery meant hard work, ignorance, and oppression.
The slaves—both men and women—usually toiled
from dawn to dusk in the fields, under the watchful
eyes and ready whip-hand of a white overseer or
black “driver.’’ They had no civil or political rights,
other than minimal protection from arbitrary mur-
der or unusually cruel punishment. Some states
offered further protections, such as banning the sale
of a child under the age of ten away from his or her
mother. But all such laws were difficult to enforce,
since slaves were forbidden to testify in court or
even to have their marriages legally recognized.

Floggings were common, for the whip was the
substitute for the wage-incentive system and the
most visible symbol of the planter’s mastery. Strong-
willed slaves were sometimes sent to “breakers,’’
whose technique consisted mostly in lavish laying

Life Under Slavery 359

In 1852, Maria Perkins, a woman enslaved in
Virginia, wrote plaintively to her husband
about the disruption that the commercial
traffic in slaves was visiting upon their
family:

“I write you a letter to let you know of my
distress my master has sold albert to a
trader on Monday court day and myself and
other child is for sale also and I want you to
let hear from you very soon before next cort
if you can I dont know when I dont want you
to wait till Christmas I want you to tell Dr
Hamelton and your master if either will buy
me they can attend to it know and then I can
go after-wards I dont want a trader to get
me they asked me if I had got any person to
buy me and I told them no they took me to
the court houste too they never put me up a
man buy the name of brady bought albert
and is gone I dont know whare they say he
lives in Scottesville my things is in several
places some is in staunton and if I should be
sold I dont know what will become of them I
dont expect to meet with the luck to get
that way till I am quite heart sick nothing
more I am and ever will be your kind wife
Maria Perkins.”

on of the lash. As an abolitionist song of the 1850s
lamented,

To-night the bond man, Lord
Is bleeding in his chains;
And loud the falling lash is heard
On Carolina’s plains!

But savage beatings made sullen laborers, and lash
marks hurt resale values. There are, to be sure,
sadistic monsters in any population, and the
planter class contained its share. But the typical
planter had too much of his own prosperity riding
on the backs of his slaves to beat them bloody on a
regular basis.

By 1860 most slaves were concentrated in the
“black belt’’ of the Deep South that stretched from
South Carolina and Georgia into the new southwest
states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. This
was the region of the southern frontier, into which
the explosively growing Cotton Kingdom had burst
in a few short decades. As on all frontiers, life was

often rough and raw, and in general the lot of the
slave was harder here than in the more settled areas
of the Old South.

A majority of blacks lived on larger plantations
that harbored communities of twenty or more
slaves. In some counties of the Deep South, espe-
cially along the lower Mississippi River, blacks
accounted for more than 75 percent of the popula-
tion. There the family life of slaves tended to be rela-
tively stable, and a distinctive African-American
slave culture developed. Forced separations of
spouses, parents, and children were evidently more
common on smaller plantations and in the Upper
South. Slave marriage vows sometimes proclaimed,
“Until death or distance do you part.’’

With impressive resilience, blacks managed to
sustain family life in slavery, and most slaves were
raised in stable two-parent households. Continuity
of family identity across generations was evidenced
in the widespread practice of naming children for
grandparents or adopting the surname not of a
current master, but of a forebear’s master. African-
Americans also displayed their African cultural roots
when they avoided marriage between first cousins,
in contrast to the frequent intermarriage of close rel-
atives among the ingrown planter aristocracy.

360 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

Examining the Evidence 361

Bellegrove Plantation, Donaldsville, Louisiana,
Built 1857 The sugar-growing Bellegrove Planta-
tion—on the banks of the Mississippi River ninety-
five miles north of New Orleans—was laid out on a
grander scale than many southern plantations. In
this rendering from an advertisement for Belle-
grove’s sale in 1867, the planter John Orr’s home
was identified as a “mansion” and quarters for his
field hands proved extensive: twenty double-
cabins built for slaves, now for “Negroes,” and a
dormitory, described in the ad but not pictured
here, housing one hundred and fifty laborers.
Because of the unhealthy work involved in cultivat-
ing sugar cane, such as constant digging of
drainage canals to keep the cane from rotting in
standing water, many planters hired immigrant—
usually Irish—labor to keep their valuable slaves
out of physical danger. The presence of a hospital
between the slave cabins and the mansion indi-

cates the very real threat to health. The layout of
Bellegrove reflects the organization of production
as well as the social relations on a sugar plantation.
The storehouse where preserved sugar awaited
shipping stood closest to the Mississippi River, the
principal transportation route, whereas the sugar
house, the most important building on the planta-
tion with its mill, boilers, and cooking vats for con-
verting syrup into sugar, dominated the cane fields.
Although the “big house” and slave quarters stood
in close proximity, hedges surrounding the
planter’s home shut out views of both sugar pro-
duction and labor. Within the slave quarters, the
overseer’s larger house signified his superior status,
while the arrangement of cabins ensured his super-
vision of domestic as well as work life. What else
does the physical layout of the plantation reveal
about settlement patterns, sugar cultivation, and
social relationships along the Mississippi?

African roots were also visible in the slaves’ reli-
gious practices. Though heavily Christianized by the
itinerant evangelists of the Second Great Awaken-
ing, blacks in slavery molded their own distinctive
religious forms from a mixture of Christian and
African elements. They emphasized those aspects of
the Christian heritage that seemed most pertinent
to their own situation—especially the captivity of
the Israelites in Egypt. One of their most haunting
spirituals implored,

Tell old Pharaoh
“Let my people go.’’

And another lamented,

Nobody knows de trouble I’ve had
Nobody knows but Jesus

African practices also persisted in the “responsorial’’
style of preaching, in which the congregation fre-
quently punctuates the minister’s remarks with
assents and amens—an adaptation of the give-and-
take between caller and dancers in the African ring-
shout dance.

The Burdens of Bondage

Slavery was intolerably degrading to the victims.
They were deprived of the dignity and sense of
responsibility that come from independence and
the right to make choices. They were denied an edu-
cation, because reading brought ideas, and ideas
brought discontent. Many states passed laws for-
bidding their instruction, and perhaps nine-tenths
of adult slaves at the beginning of the Civil War were
totally illiterate. For all slaves—indeed for virtually
all blacks, slave or free—the “American dream’’ of
bettering one’s lot through study and hard work was
a cruel and empty mockery.

Not surprisingly, victims of the “peculiar institu-
tion’’ devised countless ways to throw sand in its
gears. When workers are not voluntarily hired and
adequately compensated, they can hardly be
expected to work with alacrity. Accordingly, slaves
often slowed the pace of their labor to the barest
minimum that would spare them the lash, thus fos-
tering the myth of black “laziness’’ in the minds of
whites. They filched food from the “big house’’ and
pilfered other goods that had been produced or
purchased by their labor. They sabotaged expensive

equipment, stopping the work routine altogether
until repairs were accomplished. Occasionally they
even poisoned their master’s food.

The slaves also universally pined for freedom.
Many took to their heels as runaways, frequently in
search of a separated family member. A black girl,
asked if her mother was dead, replied, “Yassah, mas-
sah, she is daid, but she’s free.’’ Others rebelled,
though never successfully. In 1800 an armed insur-
rection led by a slave named Gabriel in Richmond,
Virginia, was foiled by informers, and its leaders
were hanged. Denmark Vesey, a free black, led
another ill-fated rebellion in Charleston in 1822.
Also betrayed by informers, Vesey and more than
thirty followers were publicly strung from the gal-
lows. In 1831 the semiliterate Nat Turner, a visionary
black preacher, led an uprising that slaughtered
about sixty Virginians, mostly women and children.
Reprisals were swift and bloody.

The dark taint of slavery also left its mark on the
whites. It fostered the brutality of the whip, the
bloodhound, and the branding iron. White south-
erners increasingly lived in a state of imagined
siege, surrounded by potentially rebellious blacks
inflamed by abolitionist propaganda from the
North. Their fears bolstered an intoxicating theory
of biological racial superiority and turned the South
into a reactionary backwater in an era of progress—
one of the last bastions of slavery in the Western
world. The defenders of slavery were forced to
degrade themselves, along with their victims. As
Booker T. Washington, a distinguished black leader
and former slave, later observed, whites could not
hold blacks in a ditch without getting down there
with them.

Early Abolitionism

The inhumanity of the “peculiar institution’’ gradually
caused antislavery societies to sprout forth. Abolition-
ist sentiment first stirred at the time of the Revolution,
especially among Quakers. Because of the widespread
loathing of blacks, some of the earliest abolitionist
efforts focused on transporting the blacks bodily back
to Africa. The American Colonization Society was
founded for this purpose in 1817, and in 1822 the
Republic of Liberia, on the fever-stricken West African
coast, was established for former slaves. Its capital,
Monrovia, was named after President Monroe. Some

362 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

fifteen thousand freed blacks were transported there
over the next four decades. But most blacks had no
wish to be transplanted into a strange civilization
after having become partially Americanized. By 1860
virtually all southern slaves were no longer Africans,
but native-born African-Americans, with their own
distinctive history and culture. Yet the colonization
idea appealed to some antislaveryites, including
Abraham Lincoln, until the time of the Civil War.

In the 1830s the abolitionist movement took on
new energy and momentum, mounting to the pro-
portions of a crusade. American abolitionists took
heart in 1833 when their British counterparts
unchained the slaves in the West Indies. Most impor-
tant, the religious spirit of the Second Great Awaken-
ing now inflamed the hearts of many abolitionists
against the sin of slavery. Prominent among them
was lanky, tousle-haired Theodore Dwight Weld, who
had been evangelized by Charles Grandison Finney
in New York’s Burned-Over District in the 1820s. Self-
educated and simple in manner and speech, Weld
appealed with special power and directness to his
rural audiences of untutored farmers.

Spiritually inspired by Finney, Weld was materi-
ally aided by two wealthy and devout New York mer-
chants, the brothers Arthur and Lewis Tappan. In
1832 they paid his way to Lane Theological Semi-
nary in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was presided over
by the formidable Lyman Beecher, father of a
remarkable brood, including novelist Harriet
Beecher Stowe, reformer Catharine Beecher, and
preacher-abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher. Expelled
along with several other students in 1834 for organ-
izing an eighteen-day debate on slavery, Weld and
his fellow “Lane Rebels’’—full of the energy and ide-
alism of youth—fanned out across the Old North-
west preaching the antislavery gospel. Humorless
and deadly earnest, Weld also assembled a potent
propaganda pamphlet, American Slavery As It Is
(1839). Its compelling arguments made it among
the most effective abolitionist tracts and greatly
influenced Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.

Ardent Abolitionists 363

(Slavery prohibited
by Ordinance of 1787)

OLD NORTHWEST

THE LOUISIANA
PURCHASE, 1803

SLAVE STATES

PA.
1780 N.J.

1804

N.Y.
1799

N.H.
1783

MASS.
1780

MASS. 1780

CONN.
1784

R.I.
1784

1777
VT.

By state constitution

By state statutes in force
(gradual emancipation)

Early Emancipation
in the North

Radical Abolitionism

On New Year’s Day, 1831, a shattering abolitionist
blast came from the bugle of William Lloyd Garri-
son, a mild-looking reformer of twenty-six. The
emotionally high-strung son of a drunken father
and a spiritual child of the Second Great Awakening,
Garrison published in Boston the first issue of his
militantly antislavery newspaper The Liberator. With
this mighty paper broadside, Garrison triggered a
thirty-year war of words and in a sense fired one of
the opening barrages of the Civil War.

Stern and uncompromising, Garrison nailed his
colors to the masthead of his weekly. He proclaimed
in strident tones that under no circumstances
would he tolerate the poisonous weed of slavery but
would stamp it out at once, root and branch:

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompro-
mising as justice. . . . I am in earnest—I will not
equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat
a single inch—and I WILL BE HEARD!

Other dedicated abolitionists rallied to Garri-
son’s standard, and in 1833 they founded the Ameri-
can Anti-Slavery Society. Prominent among them
was Wendell Phillips, a Boston patrician known as
“abolition’s golden trumpet.’’ A man of strict princi-
ple, he would eat no cane sugar and wear no cotton
cloth, since both were produced by southern slaves.

Black abolitionists distinguished themselves as
living monuments to the cause of African-American
freedom. Their ranks included David Walker, whose
incendiary Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the
World (1829) advocated a bloody end to white
supremacy. Also noteworthy were Sojourner Truth,
a freed black woman in New York who fought tire-
lessly for black emancipation and women’s rights,
and Martin Delaney, one of the few black leaders to
take seriously the notion of mass recolonization of
Africa. In 1859 he visited West Africa’s Niger Valley
seeking a suitable site for relocation.

364 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

The greatest of the black abolitionists was Fred-
erick Douglass. Escaping from bondage in 1838 at the
age of twenty-one, he was “discovered’’ by the aboli-
tionists in 1841 when he gave a stunning impromptu
speech at an antislavery meeting in Massachusetts.
Thereafter he lectured widely for the cause, despite
frequent beatings and threats against his life. In 1845
he published his classic autobiography, Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass. It depicted his remark-
able origins as the son of a black slave woman and a
white father, his struggle to learn to read and write,
and his eventual escape to the North.

Douglass was as flexibly practical as Garrison
was stubbornly principled. Garrison often appeared
to be more interested in his own righteousness than
in the substance of the slavery evil itself. He repeat-
edly demanded that the “virtuous’’ North secede
from the “wicked’’ South. Yet he did not explain how
the creation of an independent slave republic would
bring an end to the “damning crime’’ of slavery.
Renouncing politics, on the Fourth of July, 1854, he
publicly burned a copy of the Constitution as “a
covenant with death and an agreement with hell’’ (a
phrase he borrowed from a Shaker condemnation
of marriage). Critics, including some of his former
supporters, charged that Garrison was cruelly prob-
ing the moral wound in America’s underbelly but
offering no acceptable balm to ease the pain.

Douglass, on the other hand, along with other
abolitionists, increasingly looked to politics to end

The Abolitionist Crusade 365

Frederick Douglass (1817?–1895), the
remarkable ex-slave, told of Mr. Covey, a
white owner who bought a single female
slave “as a breeder.’’ She gave birth to twins at
the end of the year.

“At this addition to the human stock Covey
and his wife were ecstatic with joy. No one
dreamed of reproaching the woman or
finding fault with the hired man, Bill Smith,
the father of the children, for Mr. Covey
himself had locked the two up together every
night, thus inviting the result.’’

After hearing Frederick Douglass speak in
Bristol, England, in 1846, Mary A. Estlin
wrote to an American abolitionist,

“[T]here is but one opinion of him. Wherever
he goes he arouses sympathy in your cause
and love for himself. . . . Our expectations
were highly roused by his narrative, his
printed speeches, and the eulogisms of the
friends with whom he has been staying: but
he far exceeds the picture we had formed
both in outward graces, intellectual power
and culture, and eloquence.”*

*From Clare Taylor, ed., British and American Abolitionists, An
Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh University
Press, 1974), p. 282.

the blight of slavery. These political abolitionists
backed the Liberty party in 1840, the Free Soil party
in 1848, and eventually the Republican party in the
1850s. In the end, most abolitionists, including even
the pacifistic Garrison himself, followed out the
logic of their beliefs and supported a frightfully
costly fratricidal war as the price of emancipation.

High-minded and courageous, the abolitionists
were men and women of goodwill and various col-
ors who faced the cruel choice that people in many
ages have had thrust upon them: when is evil so
enormous that it must be denounced, even at the
risk of precipitating bloodshed and butchery?

The South Lashes Back

Antislavery sentiment was not unknown in the
South, and in the 1820s antislavery societies were
more numerous south of the Mason-Dixon line*
than north of it. But after about 1830, the voice of
white southern abolitionism was silenced. In a last
gasp of southern questioning of slavery, the Virginia
legislature debated and eventually defeated various
emancipation proposals in 1831–1832. That debate
marked a turning point. Thereafter all the slave
states tightened their slave codes and moved to pro-
hibit emancipation of any kind, voluntary or com-
pensated. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 sent a wave
of hysteria sweeping over the snowy cotton fields,
and planters in growing numbers slept with pistols
by their pillows. Although Garrison had no demon-
strable connection with the Turner conspiracy, his
Liberator appeared at about the same time, and he
was bitterly condemned as a terrorist and an inciter
of murder. The state of Georgia offered $5,000 for his
arrest and conviction.

The nullification crisis of 1832 further im-
planted haunting fears in white southern minds,
conjuring up nightmares of black incendiaries and
abolitionist devils. Jailings, whippings, and lynch-
ings now greeted rational efforts to discuss the slav-
ery problem in the South.

Proslavery whites responded by launching a
massive defense of slavery as a positive good. In

doing so, they forgot their own section’s previous
doubts about the morality of the “peculiar institu-
tion.’’ Slavery, they claimed, was supported by the
authority of the Bible and the wisdom of Aristotle. It
was good for the Africans, who were lifted from the
barbarism of the jungle and clothed with the bless-
ings of Christian civilization. Slavemasters did
indeed encourage religion in the slave quarters. A
catechism for blacks contained such passages as,

Q. Who gave you a master and a mistress?
A. God gave them to me.
Q. Who says that you must obey them?
A. God says that I must.

White apologists also pointed out that master-
slave relationships really resembled those of a fam-
ily. On many plantations, especially those of the Old
South of Virginia and Maryland, this argument had
a certain plausibility. A slave’s tombstone bore this
touching inscription:

JOHN:
A faithful servant:

and true friend:
Kindly, and considerate:
Loyal, and affectionate:
The family he served
Honours him in death:
But, in life they gave him love:
For he was one of them

Southern whites were quick to contrast the
“happy’’ lot of their “servants’’ with that of the over-
worked northern wage slaves, including sweated
women and stunted children. The blacks mostly
toiled in the fresh air and sunlight, not in dark and
stuffy factories. They did not have to worry about
slack times or unemployment, as did the “hired
hands’’ of the North. Provided with a jail-like form of
Social Security, they were cared for in sickness and
old age, unlike northern workers, who were set
adrift when they had outlived their usefulness.

These curious proslavery arguments only
widened the chasm between a backward-looking
South and a forward-looking North—and indeed
much of the rest of the Western world. The south-
erners reacted defensively to the pressure of their
own fears and bristled before the merciless nagging
of the northern abolitionists. Increasingly the white
South turned in upon itself and grew hotly intoler-
ant of any embarrassing questions about the status
of slavery.

366 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

*Originally the southern boundary of colonial Pennsylvania.

Regrettably, also, the controversy over free peo-
ple endangered free speech in the entire country.
Piles of petitions poured in upon Congress from the
antislavery reformers, and in 1836 sensitive south-
erners drove through the House the so-called Gag
Resolution. It required all such antislavery appeals
to be tabled without debate. This attack on the right
of petition aroused the sleeping lion in the aged ex-
president, Representative John Quincy Adams, and
he waged a successful eight-year fight for its repeal.

Southern whites likewise resented the flooding
of their mails with incendiary abolitionist literature.
Even if blacks could not read, they could interpret
the inflammatory drawings, such as those that
showed masters knocking out slaves’ teeth with
clubs. In 1835 a mob in Charleston, South Carolina,
looted the post office and burned a pile of abolition-
ist propaganda. Capitulating to southern pressures,
the Washington government in 1835 ordered south-
ern postmasters to destroy abolitionist material and
called on southern state officials to arrest federal
postmasters who did not comply. Such was “freedom
of the press’’ as guaranteed by the Constitution.

The Abolitionist Impact in the North

Abolitionists—especially the extreme Garrisoni-
ans—were for a long time unpopular in many parts
of the North. Northerners had been brought up to

revere the Constitution and to regard the clauses on
slavery as a lasting bargain. The ideal of Union,
hammered home by the thundering eloquence of
Daniel Webster and others, had taken deep root,
and Garrison’s wild talk of secession grated harshly
on northern ears.

The North also had a heavy economic stake in
Dixieland. By the late 1850s, the southern planters
owed northern bankers and other creditors about
$300 million, and much of this immense sum would
be lost—as, in fact, it later was—should the Union
dissolve. New England textile mills were fed with cot-
ton raised by the slaves, and a disrupted labor sys-
tem might cut off this vital supply and bring
unemployment. The Union during these critical
years was partly bound together with cotton threads,
tied by lords of the loom in collaboration with the so-
called lords of the lash. It was not surprising that
strong hostility developed in the North against the
boat-rocking tactics of the radical antislaveryites.

Repeated tongue-lashings by the extreme aboli-
tionists provoked many mob outbursts in the North,
some led by respectable gentlemen. A gang of young
toughs broke into Lewis Tappan’s New York house in
1834 and demolished its interior, while a crowd in
the street cheered. In 1835 Garrison, with a rope tied
around him, was dragged through the streets of
Boston by the so-called Broadcloth Mob but escaped
almost miraculously. Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, of
Alton, Illinois, not content to assail slavery, im-
pugned the chastity of Catholic women. His printing

White Southerners on the Defensive 367

press was destroyed four times, and in 1837 he was
killed by a mob and became “the martyr abolition-
ist.’’ So unpopular were the antislavery zealots that
ambitious politicians, like Lincoln, usually avoided
the taint of Garrisonian abolition like the plague.

Yet by the 1850s the abolitionist outcry had
made a deep dent in the northern mind. Many citi-

zens had come to see the South as the land of the
unfree and the home of a hateful institution. Few
northerners were prepared to abolish slavery out-
right, but a growing number, including Lincoln,
opposed extending it to the western territories. Peo-
ple of this stamp, commonly called “free-soilers,’’
swelled their ranks as the Civil War approached.

368 CHAPTER 16 The South and the Slavery Controversy, 1793–1860

C h r o n o l o g y

1793 Whitney’s cotton gin transforms southern
economy

1800 Gabriel slave rebellion in Virginia

1808 Congress outlaws slave trade

1817 American Colonization Society formed

1820 Missouri Compromise

1822 Vesey slave rebellion in Charleston
Republic of Liberia established in Africa

1829 Walker publishes Appeal to the Colored
Citizens of the World

1831 Nat Turner slave rebellion in Virginia
Garrison begins publishing The Liberator

1831- Virginia legislature debates slavery and
1832 emancipation

1833 British abolish slavery in the West Indies
American Anti-Slavery Society founded

1834 Abolitionist students expelled from Lane
Theological Seminary

1835 U.S. Post Office orders destruction of
abolitionist mail

“Broadcloth Mob’’ attacks Garrison

1836 House of Representatives passes “Gag
Resolution”

1837 Mob kills abolitionist Lovejoy in Alton,
Illinois

1839 Weld publishes American Slavery As It Is

1840 Liberty party organized

1845 Douglass publishes Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass

1848 Free Soil party organized

VA R Y I N G VIEWPOINTS

What Was the True Nature of Slavery?

By the early twentieth century, the predictableaccounts of slavery written by partisans of the
North or South had receded in favor of a romantic
vision of the Old South conveyed through popular
literature, myth, and, increasingly, scholarship. That
vision was persuasively validated by the publication
of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips’s landmark study, Ameri-
can Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips made three key

arguments. First, he claimed that slavery was a
dying economic institution, unprofitable to the
slaveowner and an obstacle to the economic devel-
opment of the South as a whole. Second, he con-
tended that slavery was a rather benign institution
and that the planters, contrary to abolitionist
charges of ruthless exploitation, treated their chat-
tels with kindly paternalism. Third, he reflected the

Varying Viewpoints 369

dominant racial attitudes of his time in his belief
that blacks were inferior and submissive by nature
and did not abhor the institution that enslaved
them.

For nearly a century, historians have debated
these assertions, sometimes heatedly. More sophisti-
cated economic analysis has refuted Phillips’s claim
that slavery would have withered away without a
war. Economic historians have demonstrated that
slavery was a viable, profitable, expanding economic
system and that slaves constituted a worthwhile
investment for their owners. The price of a prime
field hand rose dramatically, even in the 1850s.

No such definitive conclusion has yet been
reached in the disputes over slave treatment. Begin-
ning in the late 1950s, historians came increasingly
to emphasize the harshness of the slave system. One
study, Stanley Elkins’s Slavery (1959), went so far as
to compare the “peculiar institution” to the Nazi
concentration camps of World War II. Both were
“total institutions,” Elkins contended, which “infan-
tilized” their victims.

More recently, scholars such as Eugene Gen-
ovese have moved beyond debating whether slavery
was kind or cruel. Without diminishing the depriva-
tions and pains of slavery, Genovese has conceded
that slavery embraced a strange form of paternal-
ism, a system that reflected not the benevolence of
southern slaveholders, but their need to control and
coax work out of their reluctant and often recalci-
trant “investments.” Furthermore, within this pater-
nalist system, black slaves were able to make
reciprocal demands of their white owners and to
protect a “cultural space” of their own in which fam-
ily and religion particularly could flourish. The
crowning paradox of slaveholder paternalism was
that in treating their property more humanely,
slaveowners implicitly recognized the humanity of
their slaves and thereby subverted the racist under-
pinnings upon which their slave society existed.

The revised conceptions of the master-slave
relationship also spilled over into the debate about

slave personality. Elkins accepted Phillips’s portrait
of the slave as a childlike “Sambo” but saw it as a
consequence of slavery rather than a congenital
attribute of African-Americans. Kenneth Stampp,
rejecting the Sambo stereotype, stressed the fre-
quency and variety of slave resistance, both mild
and militant. A third view, imaginatively docu-
mented in the work of Lawrence Levine, argues that
the Sambo character was an act, an image that
slaves used to confound their masters without
incurring punishment. Levine’s Black Culture and
Black Consciousness (1977) shares with books by
John Blassingame and Herbert Gutman an empha-
sis on the tenacity with which slaves maintained
their own culture and kin relations, despite the
hardships of bondage. Most recently, historians
have attempted to avoid the polarity of repression
versus autonomy. They assert the debasing oppres-
sion of slavery, while also acknowledging slaves’
ability to resist the dehumanizing effects of enslave-
ment. The challenge before historians today is to
capture the vibrancy of slave culture and its legacy
for African-American society after emancipation,
without diminishing the brutality of life under the
southern slave regime.

A new sensitivity to gender, spurred by the
growing field of women’s history, has also expanded
the horizons of slavery studies. Historians such
as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Jacqueline Jones, and
Catherine Clinton have focused on the ways in
which slavery differed for men and women, both
slaves and slaveholders. Enslaved black women, for
example, had the unique task of negotiating an
identity out of their dual responsibilities as planta-
tion laborer, even sometimes caretaker of white
women and children, and anchor of the black fam-
ily. By tracing the interconnectedness of race and
gender in the American South, these historians have
also shown how slavery shaped conceptions of mas-
culinity and femininity within southern society, fur-
ther distinguishing its culture from that of the
North.

For further reading, see page A11 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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370

17

Manifest Destiny
and Its Legacy

��

�

1841–1848

Our manifest destiny [is] to overspread the continent
allotted by Providence for the free development of our

yearly multiplying millions.

JOHN L. O’SULLIVAN, 1845*

Territorial expansion dominated American diplo-macy and politics in the 1840s. Settlers swarm-
ing into the still-disputed Oregon Country
aggravated relations with Britain, which had staked
its own claims in the Pacific Northwest. The clamor
to annex Texas to the Union provoked bitter tension
with Mexico, which continued to regard Texas as a
Mexican province in revolt. And when Americans
began casting covetous eyes on Mexico’s northern-
most province, the great prize of California, open
warfare erupted between the United States and its
southern neighbor. Victory over Mexico added vast
new domains to the United States, but it also raised
thorny questions about the status of slavery in the
newly acquired territories—questions that would be
answered in blood in the Civil War of the 1860s.

The Accession of “Tyler Too’’

A horde of hard-ciderites descended upon Washing-
ton early in 1841, clamoring for the spoils of office.
Newly elected President Harrison, bewildered by
the uproar, was almost hounded to death by Whig
spoilsmen.

The real leaders of the Whig party regarded “Old
Tippecanoe’’ as little more than an impressive fig-
urehead. Daniel Webster, as secretary of state, and
Henry Clay, the uncrowned king of the Whigs and
their ablest spokesman in the Senate, would grasp
the helm. The aging general was finally forced to
rebuke the overzealous Clay and pointedly remind
him that he, William Henry Harrison, was president
of the United States.

Unluckily for Clay and Webster, their schemes
soon hit a fatal snag. Before the new term had fairly
started, Harrison contracted pneumonia. Wearied

*Earliest known use of the term Manifest Destiny, sometimes
called “Manifest Desire.’’

The Whigs in Power 371

by official functions and plagued by office seekers,
the enfeebled old warrior died after only four weeks
in the White House—by far the shortest administra-
tion in American history, following by far the longest
inaugural address.

The “Tyler too’’ part of the Whig ticket, hitherto
only a rhyme, now claimed the spotlight. What man-
ner of man did the nation now find in the presidential
chair? Six feet tall, slender, blue-eyed, and fair-haired,
with classical features and a high forehead, John Tyler
was a Virginia gentleman of the old school—gracious
and kindly, yet stubbornly attached to principle. He
had earlier resigned from the Senate, quite unneces-
sarily, rather than accept distasteful instructions
from the Virginia legislature. Still a lone wolf, he had
forsaken the Jacksonian Democratic fold for that of
the Whigs, largely because he could not stomach the
dictatorial tactics of Jackson.

Tyler’s enemies accused him of being a Demo-
crat in Whig clothing, but this charge was only par-
tially true. The Whig party, like the Democratic
party, was something of a catchall, and the acciden-
tal president belonged to the minority wing, which
embraced a number of Jeffersonian states’ righters.
Tyler had in fact been put on the ticket partly to
attract the vote of this fringe group, many of whom
were influential southern gentry.

Yet Tyler, high-minded as he was, should never
have consented to run on the ticket. Although the
dominant Clay-Webster group had published no
platform, every alert politician knew what the
unpublished platform contained. And on virtually
every major issue, the obstinate Virginian was at
odds with the majority of his adoptive Whig party,
which was pro-bank, pro–protective tariff, and
pro–internal improvements. “Tyler too’’ rhymed
with “Tippecanoe,’’ but there the harmony ended.
As events turned out, President Harrison, the Whig,
served for only 4 weeks, whereas Tyler, the ex-
Democrat who was still largely a Democrat at heart,
served for 204 weeks.

John Tyler: A President
Without a Party

After their hard-won, hard-cider victory, the Whigs
brought their not-so-secret platform out of Clay’s
waistcoat pocket. To the surprise of no one, it out-
lined a strongly nationalistic program.

Financial reform came first. The Whig Congress
hastened to pass a law ending the independent trea-
sury system, and President Tyler, disarmingly agree-
able, signed it. Clay next drove through Congress a
bill for a “Fiscal Bank,’’ which would establish a new
Bank of the United States.

Tyler’s hostility to a centralized bank was noto-
rious, and Clay—the “Great Compromiser’’—would
have done well to conciliate him. But the Kentuck-
ian, robbed repeatedly of the presidency by lesser
men, was in an imperious mood and riding for a fall.
When the bank bill reached the presidential desk,
Tyler flatly vetoed it on both practical and constitu-
tional grounds. A drunken mob gathered late at
night near the White House and shouted insultingly,
“Huzza for Clay!’’ “A Bank! A Bank!’’ “Down with the
Veto!’’

The stunned Whig leaders tried once again.
Striving to pacify Tyler’s objections to a “Fiscal
Bank,’’ they passed another bill providing for a “Fis-
cal Corporation.’’ But the president, still unbending,
vetoed the offensive substitute. The Democrats
were jubilant: they had been saved from another
financial “monster’’ only by the pneumonia that had
felled Harrison.

372 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

Whig extremists, seething with indignation,
condemned Tyler as “His Accidency’’ and as an
“Executive Ass.’’ Widely burned in effigy, he received
numerous letters threatening him with death. A wave
of influenza then sweeping the country was called
the “Tyler grippe.’’ To the delight of Democrats, the
stiff-necked Virginian was formally expelled from his
party by a caucus of Whig congressmen, and a seri-
ous attempt to impeach him was broached in the
House of Representatives. His entire cabinet resigned
in a body, except Secretary of State Webster, who
was then in the midst of delicate negotiations with
England.

The proposed Whig tariff also felt the prick of
the president’s well-inked pen. Tyler appreciated the
necessity of bringing additional revenue to the Trea-
sury. But old Democrat that he was, he looked with a
frosty eye on the major tariff scheme of the Whigs
because it provided, among other features, for a dis-
tribution among the states of revenue from the sale
of public lands in the West. Tyler could see no point
in squandering federal money when the federal
Treasury was not overflowing, and he again wielded
an emphatic veto.

Chastened Clayites redrafted their tariff bill.
They chopped out the offensive dollar-distribution
scheme and pushed down the rates to about the

moderately protective level of 1832, roughly 32 per-
cent on dutiable goods. Tyler had no fondness for a
protective tariff, but realizing the need for addi-
tional revenue, he reluctantly signed the law of
1842. In subsequent months the pressure for higher
customs duties slackened as the country gradually
edged its way out of the depression. The Whig slo-
gan, “Harrison, Two Dollars a Day and Roast Beef,’’
was reduced by unhappy Democrats to, “Ten Cents
a Day and Bean Soup.’’

A War of Words with Britain

Hatred of Britain during the nineteenth century
came to a head periodically and had to be lanced by
treaty settlement or by war. The poison had festered
ominously by 1842.

Anti-British passions were composed of many
ingredients. At bottom lay the bitter, red-coated
memories of the two Anglo-American wars. In addi-
tion, the genteel pro-British Federalists had died
out, eventually yielding to the boisterous Jacksonian
Democrats. British travelers, sniffing with aris-
tocratic noses at the crude scene, wrote acidly
of American tobacco spitting, slave auctioneering,

lynching, eye gouging, and other unsavory features
of the rustic Republic. Travel books penned by these
critics, whose views were avidly read on both sides of
the Atlantic, stirred up angry outbursts in America.

But the literary fireworks did not end here.
British magazines added fuel to the flames when,
enlarging on the travel books, they launched sneer-
ing attacks on Yankee shortcomings. American jour-
nals struck back with “you’re another’’ arguments,
thus touching off the “Third War with England.’’ For-
tunately, this British-American war was fought with
paper broadsides, and only ink was spilled. British
authors, including Charles Dickens, entered the fray
with gall-dipped pens, for they were being denied
rich royalties by the absence of an American copy-
right law.*

Sprawling America, with expensive canals to dig
and railroads to build, was a borrowing nation in
the nineteenth century. Imperial Britain, with its
overflowing coffers, was a lending nation. The well-
heeled creditor is never popular with the down-at-
the-heels debtor, and the phrase “bloated British
bond-holder’’ rolled bitterly from many an Ameri-
can tongue. When the panic of 1837 broke and sev-
eral states defaulted on their bonds or repudiated
them openly, honest Englishmen assailed Yankee
trickery. One of them offered a new stanza for an old
song:

Yankee Doodle borrows cash,
Yankee Doodle spends it,

And then he snaps his fingers at
The jolly flat [simpleton] who lends it.

Troubles of a more dangerous sort came closer
to home in 1837, when a short-lived insurrection
erupted in Canada. It was supported by such a small
minority of Canadians that it never had a real
chance of success. Yet hundreds of hot-blooded
Americans, hoping to strike a blow for freedom
against the hereditary enemy, furnished military
supplies or volunteered for armed service. The
Washington regime tried arduously, though futilely,
to uphold its weak neutrality regulations. But again,
as in the case of Texas, it simply could not enforce
unpopular laws in the face of popular opposition.

A provocative incident on the Canadian frontier
brought passions to a boil in 1837. An American

steamer, the Caroline, was carrying supplies to the
insurgents across the swift Niagara River. It was
finally attacked on the New York shore by a deter-
mined British force, which set the vessel on fire.
Lurid American illustrators showed the flaming
ship, laden with shrieking souls, plummeting over
Niagara Falls. The craft in fact sank short of the
plunge, and only one American was killed.

This unlawful invasion of American soil—a
counterviolation of neutrality—had alarming after-
maths. Washington officials lodged vigorous but
ineffective protests. Three years later, in 1840, the
incident was dramatically revived in the state of
New York. A Canadian named McLeod, after
allegedly boasting in a tavern of his part in the Caro-
line raid, was arrested and indicted for murder. The
London Foreign Office, which regarded the Caroli

ne

raiders as members of a sanctioned armed force
and not as criminals, made clear that his execution
would mean war. Fortunately, McLeod was freed
after establishing an alibi. It must have been air-
tight, for it was good enough to convince a New York
jury. The tension forthwith eased, but it snapped
taut again in 1841, when British officials in the
Bahamas offered asylum to 130 Virginia slaves who
had rebelled and captured the American ship
Creole.

Manipulating the Maine Maps

An explosive controversy of the early 1840s involved
the Maine boundary dispute. The St. Lawrence River
is icebound several months of the year, as the
British, remembering the War of 1812, well knew.
They were determined, as a defensive precaution
against the Yankees, to build a road westward from
the seaport of Halifax to Quebec. But the proposed
route ran through disputed territory—claimed also
by Maine under the misleading peace treaty of 1783.
Tough-knuckled lumberjacks from both Maine and
Canada entered the disputed no-man’s-land of the
tall-timbered Aroostook River valley. Ugly fights
flared up, and both sides summoned the local mili-
tia. The small-scale lumberjack clash, which was
dubbed the “Aroostook War,’’ threatened to widen
into a full-dress shooting war.

As the crisis deepened in 1842, the London For-
eign Office took an unusual step. It sent to Washing-
ton a nonprofessional diplomat, the conciliatory

Tensions with Britain 373

*Not until 1891 did Congress extend copyright privileges to for-
eign authors.

financier Lord Ashburton, who had married a
wealthy American woman. He speedily established
cordial relations with Secretary Webster, who had
recently been lionized during a visit to Britain.

The two statesmen, their nerves frayed by pro-
tracted negotiations in the heat of a Washington
summer, finally agreed to compromise on the
Maine boundary. On the basis of a rough, split-the-
difference arrangement, the Americans were to
retain some 7,000 square miles of the 12,000 square
miles of wilderness in dispute. The British got less
land but won the desired Halifax-Quebec route.
During the negotiations the Caroline affair, malin-
gering since 1837, was patched up by an exchange
of diplomatic notes.

An overlooked bonus sneaked by in the small
print of the same treaty: the British, in adjusting the
U.S.-Canadian boundary farther west, surrendered
6,500 square miles. The area was later found to con-
tain the priceless Mesabi iron ore of Minnesota.

The Lone Star of Texas
Shines Alone

During the uncertain eight years since 1836, Texas
had led a precarious existence. Mexico, refusing
to recognize Texas’s independence, regarded the
Lone Star Republic as a province in revolt, to be
reconquered in the future. Mexican officials loudly
threatened war if the American eagle should ever
gather the fledgling republic under its protective
wings.

The Texans were forced to maintain a costly mil-
itary establishment. Vastly outnumbered by their
Mexican foe, they could not tell when he would
strike again. Mexico actually did make two half-
hearted raids that, though ineffectual, foreshad-
owed more fearsome efforts. Confronted with such
perils, Texas was driven to open negotiations with
Britain and France, in the hope of securing the
defensive shield of a protectorate. In 1839 and 1840,
the Texans concluded treaties with France, Holland,
and Belgium.

Britain was intensely interested in an independ-
ent Texas. Such a republic would check the south-
ward surge of the American colossus, whose bulging
biceps posed a constant threat to nearby British
possessions in the New World. A puppet Texas,
dancing to strings pulled by Britain, could be turned
upon the Yankees. Subsequent clashes would create
a smoke-screen diversion, behind which foreign
powers could move into the Americas and challenge
the insolent Monroe Doctrine. French schemers
were likewise attracted by the hoary game of divide
and conquer. These actions would result, they
hoped, in the fragmentation and militarization of
America.

Dangers threatened from other foreign quarters.
British abolitionists were busily intriguing for a
foothold in Texas. If successful in freeing the few
blacks there, they presumably would inflame the
nearby slaves of the South. In addition, British mer-
chants regarded Texas as a potentially important free-
trade area—an offset to the tariff-walled United

374 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

(Acquired by
United States)

(Given up by
United States)

Quebec

Montreal Halifax

NOVA SCOTIA

N.H.

VT.
MAINE

NEW
BRUNSWICK

QUEBEC

S t
. L

aw
ren

ce
R. St. John R.

Ar
oo

st
oo

k

R

.

Proposed road route
Webster-Ashburton treaty line

Maine Boundary Settlement, 1842

The London Morning Chronicle greeted the
Webster-Ashburton treaty thus:

“See the feeling with which the treaty has
been received in America; mark the
enthusiasm it has excited. What does this
mean? Why, either that the Americans have
gained a great diplomatic victory over us, or
that they have escaped a great danger, as
they have felt it, in having to maintain their
claim by war.’’

Disputes over Texas and Oregon 375

States. British manufacturers likewise perceived that
those vast Texas plains constituted one of the great
cotton-producing areas of the future. An independent
Texas would relieve British looms of their chronic
dependence on American fiber—a supply that might
be cut off in time of crisis by embargo or war.

The Belated Texas Nuptials

Partly because of the fears aroused by British
schemers, Texas became a leading issue in the presi-
dential campaign of 1844. The foes of expansion
assailed annexation, while southern hotheads cried,
“Texas or Disunion.’’ The proexpansion Democrats
under James K. Polk finally triumphed over the
Whigs under Henry Clay, the hardy perennial candi-
date. Lame duck president Tyler thereupon inter-
preted the narrow Democratic victory, with dubious
accuracy, as a “mandate’’ to acquire Texas.

Eager to crown his troubled administration with
this splendid prize, Tyler deserves much of the
credit for shepherding Texas into the fold. Many
“conscience Whigs’’ feared that Texas in the Union
would be red meat to nourish the lusty “slave
power.’’ Aware of their opposition, Tyler despaired
of securing the needed two-thirds vote for a treaty in
the Senate. He therefore arranged for annexation by
a joint resolution. This solution required only a sim-
ple majority in both houses of Congress. After a spir-
ited debate, the resolution passed early in 1845, and
Texas was formally invited to become the twenty-
eighth star on the American flag.

Mexico angrily charged that the Americans had
despoiled it of Texas. This was to some extent true in
1836, but hardly true in 1845, for the area was no
longer Mexico’s to be despoiled of. As the years
stretched out, realistic observers could see that the
Mexicans would not be able to reconquer their lost
province. Yet Mexico left the Texans dangling by
denying their right to dispose of themselves as they
chose.

By 1845 the Lone Star Republic had become a
danger spot, inviting foreign intrigue that menaced
the American people. The continued existence of
Texas as an independent nation threatened to
involve the United States in a series of ruinous wars,
both in America and in Europe. Americans were in a
“lick all creation’’ mood when they sang “Uncle
Sam’s Song to Miss Texas’’:

If Mexy back’d by secret foes,
Still talks of getting you, gal;

Why we can lick ’em all you know
And then annex ’em too, gal.

What other power would have spurned the
imperial domain of Texas? The bride was so near,
so rich, so fair, so willing. Whatever the peculiar
circumstances of the Texas revolution, the United
States can hardly be accused of unseemly haste in
achieving annexation. Nine long years were surely a
decent wait between the beginning of the courtship
and the consummation of the marriage.

Oregon Fever Populates Oregon

The so-called Oregon Country was an enormous
wilderness. It sprawled magnificently west of the
Rockies to the Pacific Ocean, and north of California
to the line of 54° 40’—the present southern tip of the
Alaska panhandle. All or substantial parts of this
immense area were claimed at one time or another
by four nations: Spain, Russia, Britain, and the
United States.

Two claimants dropped out of the scramble.
Spain, though the first to raise its banner in Oregon,
bartered away its claims to the United States in the
so-called Florida Treaty of 1819. Russia retreated to
the line of 54° 40′ by the treaties of 1824 and 1825
with America and Britain. These two remaining
rivals now had the field to themselves.

British claims to Oregon were strong—at least
to that portion north of the Columbia River. They
were based squarely on prior discovery and explo-

In winning Oregon, the Americans had great
faith in their procreative powers. Boasted one
congressman in 1846,

“Our people are spreading out with the aid of
the American multiplication table. Go to the
West and see a young man with his mate of
eighteen; after the lapse of thirty years, visit
him again, and instead of two, you will find
twenty-two. That is what I call the American
multiplication table.’’

ration, on treaty rights, and on actual occupation.
The most important colonizing agency was the far-
flung Hudson’s Bay Company, which was trading
profitably with the Indians of the Pacific Northwest
for furs.

Americans, for their part, could also point
pridefully to exploration and occupation. Captain
Robert Gray in 1792 had stumbled upon the majes-
tic Columbia River, which he named after his ship;
and the famed Lewis and Clark expedition of
1804–1806 had ranged overland through the Oregon
Country to the Pacific. This shaky American toehold
was ultimately strengthened by the presence of mis-
sionaries and other settlers, a sprinkling of whom
reached the grassy Willamette River valley, south of
the Columbia, in the 1830s. These men and women
of God, in saving the soul of the Indian, were instru-
mental in saving the soil of Oregon for the United
States. They stimulated interest in a faraway domain
that countless Americans had earlier assumed
would not be settled for centuries.

Scattered American and British pioneers in Ore-
gon continued to live peacefully side by side. At the
time of negotiating the Treaty of 1818 (see p. 251),

the United States had sought to divide the vast
domain at the forty-ninth parallel. But the Brit-
ish, who regarded the Columbia River as the St.
Lawrence of the West, were unwilling to yield this
vital artery. A scheme for peaceful “joint occupation’’
was thereupon adopted, pending future settlement.

The handful of Americans in the Willamette Val-
ley was suddenly multiplied in the early 1840s,
when “Oregon fever’’ seized hundreds of restless
pioneers. In increasing numbers, their creaking cov-
ered wagons jolted over the two-thousand-mile
Oregon Trail as the human rivulet widened into a
stream.* By 1846 about five thousand Americans
had settled south of the Columbia River, some of
them tough “border ruffians,’’ expert with bowie
knife and “revolving pistol.’’

The British, in the face of this rising torrent of
humanity, could muster only seven hundred or so

376 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

*The average rate of progress in covered wagons was one to two
miles an hour. This amounted to about one hundred miles a
week, or about five months for the entire journey. Thousands
of humans, in addition to horses and oxen, died en route. One
estimate is seventeen deaths a mile for men, women, and
children.

subjects north of the Columbia. Losing out lopsid-
edly in the population race, they were beginning to
see the wisdom of arriving at a peaceful settlement
before being engulfed by their neighbors.

A curious fact is that only a relatively small seg-
ment of the Oregon Country was in actual contro-
versy by 1845. The area in dispute consisted of the
rough quadrangle between the Columbia River on
the south and east, the forty-ninth parallel on the
north, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. Britain had
repeatedly offered the line of the Columbia; America
had repeatedly offered the forty-ninth parallel. The
whole fateful issue was now tossed into the presi-
dential election of 1844, where it was largely over-
shadowed by the question of annexing Texas.

A Mandate (?) for Manifest Destiny

The two major parties nominated their presidential
standard-bearers in May 1844. Ambitious but often
frustrated Henry Clay, easily the most popular man
in the country, was enthusiastically chosen by the
Whigs at Baltimore. The Democrats, meeting there
later, seemed hopelessly deadlocked. Finally the
expansionists, dominated by the pro-Texas south-
erners, trotted out and nominated James K. Polk of
Tennessee, America’s first “dark-horse’’ or “surprise’’
presidential candidate.

Polk may have been a dark horse, but he was
hardly an unknown or decrepit nag. Speaker of the
House of Representatives for four years and gover-
nor of Tennessee for two terms, he was a deter-
mined, industrious, ruthless, and intelligent public
servant. Sponsored by Andrew Jackson, his friend
and neighbor, he was rather implausibly touted by
Democrats as yet another “Young Hickory.’’ Whigs
attempted to jeer him into oblivion with the taunt,
“Who is James K. Polk?’’ They soon found out.

The campaign of 1844 was in part an expression
of the mighty emotional upsurge known as Manifest
Destiny. Countless citizens in the 1840s and 1850s,
feeling a sense of mission, believed that Almighty
God had “manifestly’’ destined the American people
for a hemispheric career. They would irresistibly
spread their uplifting and ennobling democratic
institutions over at least the entire continent, and
possibly over South America as well. Land greed and
ideals—“empire’’ and “liberty’’—were thus conven-
iently conjoined.

Expansionist Democrats were strongly swayed
by the intoxicating spell of Manifest Destiny. They
came out flat-footedly in their platform for the
“Reannexation of Texas’’* and the “Reoccupation of
Oregon,’’ all the way to 54° 40′. Outbellowing the
Whig log-cabinites in the game of slogans, they
shouted “All of Oregon or None.’’ They also con-
demned Clay as a “corrupt bargainer,’’ a dissolute
character, and a slaveowner. (Their own candidate,
Polk, also owned slaves—a classic case of the pot
calling the kettle black.)

The Oregon Controversy 377

*The United States had given up its claims to Texas in the so-
called Florida Purchase Treaty with Spain in 1819 (see p. 252).
The slogan “Fifty-four forty or fight’’ was evidently not coined
until two years later, in 1846.

The Whigs, as noisemakers, took no back seat.
They countered with such slogans as “Hooray for
Clay’’ and “Polk, Slavery, and Texas, or Clay, Union,
and Liberty.’’ They also spread the lie that a gang of
Tennessee slaves had been seen on their way to a
southern market branded with the initials J. K. P.
( James K. Polk).

On the crucial issue of Texas, the acrobatic Clay
tried to ride two horses at once. The “Great Compro-
miser’’ appears to have compromised away the
presidency when he wrote a series of confusing let-
ters. They seemed to say that while he personally
favored annexing slaveholding Texas (an appeal to
the South), he also favored postponement (an
appeal to the North). He might have lost more
ground if he had not “straddled,’’ but he certainly
alienated the more ardent antislaveryites.

In the stretch drive, “Dark Horse’’ Polk nipped
Henry Clay at the wire, 170 to 105 votes in the Elec-
toral College and 1,338,464 to 1,300,097 in the popu-
lar column. Clay would have won if he had not lost
New York State by a scant 5,000 votes. There the tiny
antislavery Liberty party absorbed nearly 16,000
votes, many of which would otherwise have gone to
the unlucky Kentuckian. Ironically, the anti-Texas
Liberty party, by spoiling Clay’s chances and helping
to ensure the election of pro-Texas Polk, hastened
the annexation of Texas.

Land-hungry Democrats, flushed with victory,
proclaimed that they had received a mandate from
the voters to take Texas. But a presidential election
is seldom, if ever, a clear-cut mandate on anything.
The only way to secure a true reflection of the vot-
ers’ will is to hold a special election on a given issue.
The picture that emerged in 1844 is one not of man-
date but of muddle. What else could there have been
when the results were so close, the personalities so
colorful, and the issues so numerous—including
Oregon, Texas, the tariff, slavery, the bank, and
internal improvements? Yet this unclear “mandate’’
was interpreted by President Tyler as a crystal-clear
charge to annex Texas—and he signed the joint res-
olution three days before leaving the White House.

Polk the Purposeful

“Young Hickory’’ Polk, unlike “Old Hickory’’ Jack-
son, was not an impressive figure. Of middle height
(five feet eight inches), lean, white-haired (worn
long), gray-eyed, and stern-faced, he took life seri-
ously and drove himself mercilessly into a prema-
ture grave. His burdens were increased by an
unwillingness to delegate authority. Methodical and
hard-working but not brilliant, he was shrewd,

378 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

narrow-minded, conscientious, and persistent.
“What he went for he fetched,’’ wrote a contempo-
rary. Purposeful in the highest degree, he developed
a positive four-point program and with remarkable
success achieved it completely in less than four
years.

One of Polk’s goals was a lowered tariff. His sec-
retary of the Treasury, wispy Robert J. Walker,
devised a tariff-for-revenue bill that reduced the
average rates of the Tariff of 1842 from about 32 per-
cent to 25 percent. With the strong support of low-
tariff southerners, Walker lobbied the measure
through Congress, though not without loud com-
plaints from the Clayites, especially in New England
and the middle states, that American manufactur-
ing would be ruined. But these prophets of doom
missed the mark. The Walker Tariff of 1846 proved to

be an excellent revenue producer, largely because it
was followed by boom times and heavy imports.

A second objective of Polk was the restoration
of the independent treasury, unceremoniously
dropped by the Whigs in 1841. Pro-bank Whigs in
Congress raised a storm of opposition, but victory at
last rewarded the president’s efforts in 1846.

The third and fourth points on Polk’s “must list’’
were the acquisition of California and the settle-
ment of the Oregon dispute.

“Reoccupation’’ of the “whole’’ of Oregon had
been promised northern Democrats in the cam-
paign of 1844. But southern Democrats, once they
had annexed Texas, rapidly cooled off. Polk, himself
a southerner, had no intention of insisting on the
54° 40′ pledge of his own platform. But feeling
bound by the three offers of his predecessors to

Polk Takes Command 379

London, he again proposed the compromise line of
49°. The British minister in Washington, on his own
initiative, brusquely spurned this olive branch.

The next move on the Oregon chessboard was
up to Britain. Fortunately for peace, the ministry
began to experience a change of heart. British anti-
expansionists (“Little Englanders’’) were now per-
suaded that the Columbia River was not after all the
St. Lawrence of the West and that the turbulent
American hordes might one day seize the Oregon
Country. Why fight a hazardous war over this wilder-
ness on behalf of an unpopular monopoly, the Hud-
son’s Bay Company, which had already “furred out’’
much of the area anyhow?

Early in 1846 the British, hat in hand, came
around and themselves proposed the line of 49°.
President Polk, irked by the previous rebuff, threw
the decision squarely into the lap of the Senate. The

senators speedily accepted the offer and approved
the subsequent treaty, despite a few diehard shouts
of “Fifty-four forty forever!’’ and “Every foot or not
an inch!’’ The fact that the United States was then a
month deep in a war with Mexico doubtless influ-
enced the Senate’s final vote.

Satisfaction with the Oregon settlement among
Americans was not unanimous. The northwestern
states, hotbed of Manifest Destiny and “fifty-four
fortyism,’’ joined the antislavery forces in condemn-
ing what they regarded as a base betrayal by the
South. Why all of Texas but not all of Oregon?
Because, retorted the expansionist Senator Benton
of Missouri, “Great Britain is powerful and Mexico is
weak.’’

So Polk, despite all the campaign bluster, got
neither “fifty-four forty’’ nor a fight. But he did get
something that in the long run was better: a reason-
able compromise without a rifle being raised.

Misunderstandings with Mexico

Faraway California was another worry of Polk’s. He
and other disciples of Manifest Destiny had long
coveted its verdant valleys, and especially the spa-
cious bay of San Francisco. This splendid harbor
was widely regarded as America’s future gateway to
the Pacific Ocean.

The population of California in 1845 was curi-
ously mixed. It consisted of perhaps thirteen thou-
sand sun-blessed Spanish-Mexicans and as many as
seventy-five thousand dispirited Indians. There were
fewer than a thousand “foreigners,” mostly Ameri-
cans, some of whom had “left their consciences’’
behind them as they rounded Cape Horn. Given
time, these transplanted Yankees might yet bring Cal-
ifornia into the Union by “playing the Texas game.’’

Polk was eager to buy California from Mexico,
but relations with Mexico City were dangerously
embittered. Among other friction points, the United
States had claims against the Mexicans for some $3
million in damages to American citizens and their
property. The revolution-riddled regime in Mexico
had formally agreed to assume most of this debt but
had been forced to default on its payments.

A more serious bone of contention was Texas.
The Mexican government, after threatening war if
the United States should acquire the Lone Star
Republic, had recalled its minister from Washington

380 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

House Vote on Tariff of 1846

Regions For Against

New England 9 19
Middle states 18 44
West and Northwest 29 10
South and Southwest 58 20

TOTAL 114 93

Spanish treaty line, 1819

54°40′

49°

42°

M E X I C O

U N I T E D STATES

B R I T I S H �
N O R T H A M E R I C A �

( C A N A D A )
OREGON

COUNTRY
Ft. Vancouver

British treaty line, 1818

Focus of dispute by 1846

PACIFIC
OCEAN

Willamette R.

Puget Sound

F
ra

se
r

R
.

Sn a ke

R

Missou ri R

Y
ell

ows t o

ne
R

Area of original dispute
over Oregon

Ore
gon

Tra
il

Compromise line, 1846

C
ol

um

bia R.

The Oregon Controversy, 1846

following annexation. Diplomatic relations were
completely severed.

Deadlock with Mexico over Texas was further
tightened by a question of boundaries. During the
long era of Spanish-Mexican occupation, the south-
western boundary of Texas had been the Nueces
River. But the expansive Texans, on rather far-
fetched grounds, were claiming the more southerly
Rio Grande instead. Polk, for his part, felt a strong
moral obligation to defend Texas in its claim, once it
was annexed.

The Mexicans were far less concerned about
this boundary quibble than was the United States.
In their eyes all of Texas was still theirs, although
temporarily in revolt, and a dispute over the two
rivers seemed pointless. Yet Polk was careful to keep
American troops out of virtually all of the explosive
no-man’s-land between the Nueces and the Rio
Grande, as long as there was any real prospect of
peaceful adjustment.

The golden prize of California continued to
cause Polk much anxiety. Disquieting rumors (now

known to have been ill-founded) were circulating
that Britain was about to buy or seize California—
a grab that Americans could not tolerate under the
Monroe Doctrine. In a last desperate throw of the
dice, Polk dispatched John Slidell to Mexico City as
minister late in 1845. The new envoy, among other
alternatives, was instructed to offer a maximum of
$25 million for California and territory to the east.
But the proud Mexican people would not even per-
mit Slidell to present his “insulting’’ proposition.

American Blood on American (?) Soil

A frustrated Polk was now prepared to force a show-
down. On January 13, 1846, he ordered four thou-
sand men, under General Zachary Taylor, to march
from the Nueces River to the Rio Grande, provoca-
tively near Mexican forces. Polk’s presidential diary
reveals that he expected at any moment to hear of a
clash. When none occurred after an anxious wait, he
informed his cabinet on May 9, 1846, that he pro-
posed to ask Congress to declare war on the basis of
(1) unpaid claims and (2) Slidell’s rejection. These, at
best, were rather flimsy pretexts. Two cabinet mem-
bers spoke up and said that they would feel better
satisfied if Mexican troops should fire first.

That very evening, as fate would have it, news
of bloodshed arrived. On April 25, 1846, Mexican
troops had crossed the Rio Grande and attacked
General Taylor’s command, with a loss of sixteen
Americans killed or wounded.

Polk, further aroused, sent a vigorous war mes-
sage to Congress. He declared that despite “all our
efforts’’ to avoid a clash, hostilities had been forced

Causes of the Mexican War 381

On June 1, 1860, less than a year before he
became president, Abraham Lincoln
(1809–1865) wrote,

“The act of sending an armed force among
the Mexicans was unnecessary, inasmuch as
Mexico was in no way molesting or menacing
the United States or the people thereof; and
. . . it was unconstitutional, because the
power of levying war is vested in Congress,
and not in the President.’’

upon the country by the shedding of “American
blood upon the American soil.’’ A patriotic Congress
overwhelmingly voted for war, and enthusiastic vol-
unteers cried, “Ho for the Halls of the Montezumas!’’
and “Mexico or Death!’’ Inflamed by the war fever,
even antislavery Whig bastions melted and joined
with the rest of the nation, though they later con-
demned “Jimmy Polk’s war.’’ As James Russell Lowell
of Massachusetts lamented,

Massachusetts, God forgive her,
She’s akneelin’ with the rest.

In his message to Congress, Polk was making
history—not writing it. If he had been a historian, he
would have explained that American blood had
been shed on soil that the Mexicans had good
reason to regard as their own. A gangling, rough-
featured Whig congressman from Illinois, one Abra-
ham Lincoln, introduced certain resolutions that
requested information as to the precise “spot’’ on
American soil where American blood had been
shed. He pushed his “spot’’ resolutions with such
persistence that he came to be known as the “spotty
Lincoln,’’ who could die of “spotted fever.’’ The more

382 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

Major Campaigns of the Mexican War

extreme antislavery agitators of the North, many of
them Whigs, branded the president a liar—“Polk the
Mendacious.’’

Did Polk provoke war? California was an imper-
ative point in his program, and Mexico would not
sell it at any price. The only way to get it was to use
force or wait for an internal American revolt. Yet
delay seemed dangerous, for the claws of the British
lion might snatch the ripening California fruit from
the talons of the American eagle. Grievances against
Mexico were annoying yet tolerable; in later years
America endured even worse ones. But in 1846
patience had ceased to be a virtue, as far as Polk
was concerned. Bent on grasping California by fair
means or foul, he pushed the quarrel to a bloody
showdown.

Both sides, in fact, were spoiling for a fight.
Feisty Americans, especially southwestern expan-
sionists, were eager to teach the Mexicans a lesson.
The Mexicans, in turn, were burning to humiliate
the “Bullies of the North.’’ Possessing a considerable
standing army, heavily overstaffed with generals,
they boasted of invading the United States, freeing
the black slaves, and lassoing whole regiments of
Americans. They were hoping that the quarrel with
Britain over Oregon would blossom into a full-dress
war, as it came near doing, and further pin down the
hated yanquis. A conquest of Mexico’s vast and arid
expanses seemed fantastic, especially in view of the
bungling American invasion of Canada in 1812.

Both sides were fired by moral indignation. The
Mexican people could fight with the flaming sword
of righteousness, for had not the “insolent’’ Yankee
picked a fight by polluting their soil? Many earnest
Americans, on the other hand, sincerely believed
that Mexico was the aggressor.

The Mastering of Mexico

Polk wanted California—not war. But when war
came, he hoped to fight it on a limited scale and
then pull out when he had captured the prize. The
dethroned Mexican dictator Santa Anna, then exiled
with his teenage bride in Cuba, let it be known that
if the American blockading squadron would permit
him to slip into Mexico, he would sell out his coun-
try. Incredibly, Polk agreed to this discreditable
intrigue. But the double-crossing Santa Anna, once

he returned to Mexico, proceeded to rally his coun-
trymen to a desperate defense of their soil.

American operations in the Southwest and in
California were completely successful. In 1846 Gen-
eral Stephen W. Kearny led a detachment of seven-
teen hundred troops over the famous Santa Fe Trail
from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe. This sunbaked
outpost, with its drowsy plazas, was easily captured.
But before Kearny could reach California, the fertile
province was won. When war broke out, Captain
John C. Frémont, the dashing explorer, just “hap-
pened’’ to be there with several dozen well-armed
men. In helping to overthrow Mexican rule in 1846,
he collaborated with American naval officers and
with the local Americans, who had hoisted the ban-
ner of the short-lived California Bear Flag Republic.

General Zachary Taylor meanwhile had been
spearheading the main thrust. Known as “Old
Rough and Ready’’ because of his iron constitution
and incredibly unsoldierly appearance—he some-
times wore a Mexican straw hat—he fought his way
across the Rio Grande into Mexico. After several
gratifying victories, he reached Buena Vista. There,
on February 22–23, 1847, his weakened force of
five thousand men was attacked by some twenty
thousand march-weary troops under Santa Anna.
The Mexicans were finally repulsed with extreme
difficulty, and overnight Zachary Taylor became the
“Hero of Buena Vista.’’ One Kentuckian was heard to
say that “Old Zack’’ would be elected president in
1848 by “spontaneous combustion.’’

Sound American strategy now called for a
crushing blow at the enemy’s vitals—Mexico City.
General Taylor, though a good leader of modest-
sized forces, could not win decisively in the semi-
deserts of northern Mexico. The command of the
main expedition, which pushed inland from the
coastal city of Vera Cruz early in 1847, was entrusted
to General Winfield Scott. A handsome giant of a
man, Scott had emerged as a hero from the War of
1812 and had later earned the nickname “Old Fuss
and Feathers’’ because of his resplendent uniforms
and strict discipline. He was severely handicapped
in the Mexican campaign by inadequate numbers of
troops, by expiring enlistments, by a more numer-
ous enemy, by mountainous terrain, by disease, and
by political backbiting at home. Yet he succeeded in
battling his way up to Mexico City by September
1847 in one of the most brilliant campaigns in
American military annals. He proved to be the most

War with Mexico 383

distinguished general produced by his country
between 1783 and 1861.

Fighting Mexico for Peace

Polk was anxious to end the shooting as soon as he
could secure his territorial goals. Accordingly, he
sent along with Scott’s invading army the chief clerk
of the State Department, Nicholas P. Trist, who
among other weaknesses was afflicted with an over-
fluid pen. Trist and Scott arranged for an armistice
with Santa Anna, at a cost of $10,000. The wily dicta-
tor pocketed the bribe and then used the time to
bolster his defenses.

Negotiating a treaty with a sword in one hand
and a pen in the other was ticklish business. Polk,
disgusted with his blundering envoy, abruptly

recalled Trist. The wordy diplomat then dashed off a
sixty-five-page letter explaining why he was not
coming home. The president was furious. But Trist,
grasping a fleeting opportunity to negotiate, signed
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2,
1848, and forwarded it to Washington.

The terms of the treaty were breathtaking. They
confirmed the American title to Texas and yielded
the enormous area stretching westward to Oregon
and the ocean and embracing coveted California.
This total expanse, including Texas, was about one-
half of Mexico. The United States agreed to
pay $15 million for the land and to assume the
claims of its citizens against Mexico in the amount
of $3,250,000 (see “Makers of America: The Cali-
fornios,’’ pp.

386

–387).

Polk submitted the treaty to the Senate. Although
Trist had proved highly annoying, he had generally
followed his original instructions. And speed was

384 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

imperative. The antislavery Whigs in Congress—
dubbed “Mexican Whigs’’ or “Conscience Whigs’’
—were denouncing this “damnable war’’ with
increasing heat. Having secured control of the House
in 1847, they were even threatening to vote down
supplies for the armies in the field. If they had done
so, Scott probably would have been forced to retreat,
and the fruits of victory might have been tossed away.

Another peril impended. A swelling group of
expansionists, intoxicated by Manifest Destiny, was
clamoring for all of Mexico. If America had seized it,
the nation would have been saddled with an expen-
sive and vexatious policing problem. Farseeing
southerners like Calhoun, alarmed by the mounting
anger of antislavery agitators, realized that the
South would do well not to be too greedy. The treaty
was finally approved by the Senate, 38 to 14. Oddly
enough, it was condemned both by those oppo-
nents who wanted all of Mexico and by opponents
who wanted none of it.

Victors rarely pay an indemnity, especially after
a costly conflict has been “forced’’ on them. Yet Polk,
who had planned to offer $25 million before fighting
the war, arranged to pay $18,250,000 after winning
it. Cynics have charged that the Americans were
pricked by guilty consciences; apologists have
pointed proudly to the “Anglo-Saxon spirit of fair
play.’’ A decisive factor was the need for haste, while
there was still a responsible Mexican government to
carry out the treaty and before political foes in the
United States, notably the antislavery zealots, sabo-
taged Polk’s expansionist program.

Profit and Loss in Mexico

As wars go, the Mexican War was a small one. It cost
some thirteen thousand American lives, most of
them taken by disease. But the fruits of the fighting
were enormous.

America’s total expanse, already vast, was
increased by about one-third (counting Texas)—an
addition even greater than that of the Louisiana
Purchase. A sharp stimulus was given to the spirit
of Manifest Destiny, for as the proverb has it, the
appetite comes with eating.

As fate ordained, the Mexican War was the
blood-spattered schoolroom of the Civil War. The
campaigns provided priceless field experience for
most of the officers destined to become leading
generals in the forthcoming conflict, including Cap-
tain Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Ulysses S. Grant.
The Military Academy at West Point, founded in
1802, fully justified its existence through the well-
trained officers. Useful also was the navy, which did
valuable work in throwing a crippling blockade
around Mexican ports. The Marine Corps, in exis-
tence since 1798, won new laurels and to this day
sings in its stirring hymn about the Halls of
Montezuma.

The army waged war without defeat and without
a major blunder, despite formidable obstacles and a
half-dozen or so achingly long marches. Chagrined
British critics, as well as other foreign skeptics, reluc-
tantly revised upward their estimate of Yankee mili-
tary prowess. Opposing armies, moreover, emerged
with increased respect for each other. The Mexicans,
though poorly led, fought heroically. At Chapulte-
pec, near Mexico City, the teenage lads of the mili-
tary academy there (los niños) perished to a boy.

Long-memoried Mexicans have never forgotten
that their northern enemy tore away about half of
their country. The argument that they were lucky
not to lose all of it, and that they had been paid
something for their land, has scarcely lessened their
bitterness. The war also marked an ugly turning
point in the relations between the United States
and Latin America as a whole. Hitherto, Uncle Sam
had been regarded with some complacency, even
friendliness. Henceforth, he was increasingly feared
as the “Colossus of the North.’’ Suspicious neighbors
to the south condemned him as a greedy and
untrustworthy bully, who might next despoil them
of their soil.

The Peace Settlement with Mexico 385

Early in 1848 the New York Evening Post
demanded,

“Now we ask, whether any man can coolly
contemplate the idea of recalling our troops
from the [Mexican] territory we at present
occupy . . . and . . . resign this beautiful
country to the custody of the ignorant
cowards and profligate ruffians who have
ruled it for the last twenty-five years? Why,
humanity cries out against it. Civilization and
Christianity protest against this reflux of the
tide of barbarism and anarchy.’’

Such was one phase of Manifest Destiny.

The Californios

In 1848 the United States, swollen with the spoils ofwar, reckoned the costs and benefits of the conflict
with Mexico. Thousands of Americans had fallen in
battle, and millions of dollars had been invested in a
war machine. For this expenditure of blood and
money, the nation was repaid with ample land—
and with people, the former citizens of Mexico who
now became, whether willingly or not, Americans.
The largest single addition to American territory in
history, the Mexican Cession stretched the United
States from sea to shining sea. It secured Texas,
brought in vast tracts of the desert Southwest, and
included the great prize—the fruited valleys and
port cities of California. There, at the conclusion of
the Mexican War, dwelled some thirteen thousand
Californios—descendants of the Spanish and Mexi-
can conquerors who had once ruled California.

The Spanish had first arrived in California in
1769, extending their New World empire and out-

racing Russian traders to bountiful

San Francisco

Bay. Father Junipero Serra, an enterprising Francis-
can friar, soon established twenty-one missions
along the coast. Indians in the iron grip of the mis-
sions were encouraged to adopt Christianity and
were often forced to toil endlessly as farmers and
herders, in the process suffering disease and degra-
dation. These frequently maltreated mission Indi-
ans occupied the lowest rungs on the ladder of
Spanish colonial society.

Upon the loftiest rungs perched the Californios.
Pioneers from the Mexican heartland of New Spain,
they had trailed Serra to California, claiming land
and civil offices in their new home. Yet even the
proud Californios had deferred to the all-powerful
Franciscan missionaries until Mexico threw off the
Spanish colonial yoke in 1821, whereupon the
infant Mexican government turned an anxious eye
toward its frontier outpost.

Mexico now emptied its jails to send settlers to
the sparsely populated north, built and garrisoned
fortresses, and, most important, transferred author-
ity from the missions to secular (that is, govern-
mental) authorities. This “secularization’’ program
attacked and eroded the immense power of the
missions and of their Franciscan masters—with
their bawling herds of cattle, debased Indian work-
ers, millions of acres of land, and lucrative foreign

386

trade. The frocked friars had commanded their fief-
doms so self-confidently that earlier reform efforts
had dared to go no further than levying a paltry tax
on the missions and politely requesting that the
missionaries limit their floggings of Indians to fif-
teen lashes per week. But during the 1830s, the
power of the missions weakened, and much of their
land and their assets were confiscated by the Cali-
fornios. Vast ranchos (ranches) formed, and from
those citadels the Californios ruled in their turn
until the Mexican War.

The Californios’ glory faded in the wake of the
American victory, even though in some isolated
places they clung to their political offices for a
decade or two. Overwhelmed by the inrush of Anglo
gold-diggers—some eighty-seven thousand after
the discovery at Sutter’s Mill in 1848—and undone
by the waning of the pastoral economy, the Cali-
fornios saw their recently acquired lands and their
recently established political power slip through
their fingers. When the Civil War broke out in 1861,
so harshly did the word Yankee ring in their ears that
many Californios supported the South.

By 1870 the Californios’ brief ascendancy had
utterly vanished—a short and sad tale of riches to

rags in the face of the Anglo onslaught. Half a cen-
tury later, beginning in 1910, hundreds of thou-
sands of young Mexicans would flock into California
and the Southwest. They would enter a region liber-
ally endowed with Spanish architecture and arti-
facts, bearing the names of Spanish missions and
Californio ranchos. But they would find it a land
dominated by Anglos, a place far different from that
which their Californio ancestors had settled so
hopefully in earlier days.

387

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(1823)

San Francisco

Monterey

San Francisco de Asís
(1776)

San José

(1797)

Santa Cruz
(1791)

San Juan Bautista
(1797)

Soledad
(1791)

San Miguel
(1797)

San Luis Obispo
(1772)

Santa Ynez
(1804)

San Buenaventura
(1782) San Fernando Rey

(1797)

San Gabriel

(1771)

San Juan Capistrano
(1776)

San Luis Rey
(1798)

San Diego
de Alcalá

(1769)

Santa Barbara
(1786)

La Purísima
Concepción

(1787)

San Antonio
de Padua

(1771)

San Carlos
Borromeo

(1770)

Santa Clara
(1777)

San Rafael
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Missions

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Spanish Missions and Presidios

Most ominous of all, the war rearoused the
snarling dog of the slavery issue, and the beast did
not stop yelping until drowned in the blood of the
Civil War. Abolitionists assailed the Mexican conflict
as one provoked by the southern “slavocracy’’ for its
own evil purposes. As James Russell Lowell had
Hosea Biglow drawl in his Yankee dialect,

They jest want this Californy
So’s to lug new slave-states in

To abuse ye, an’ to scorn ye,
An’ to plunder ye like sin.

In line with Lowell’s charge, the bulk of the Ameri-
can volunteers were admittedly from the South and
Southwest. But, as in the case of the Texas revolu-
tion, the basic explanation was proximity rather
than conspiracy.

Quarreling over slavery extension also erupted
on the floors of Congress. In 1846, shortly after the
shooting started, Polk had requested an appropria-
tion of $2 million with which to buy a peace. Repre-
sentative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, fearful of the
southern “slavocracy,’’ introduced a fateful amend-
ment. It stipulated that slavery should never exist in
any of the territory to be wrested from Mexico.

The disruptive Wilmot amendment twice
passed the House, but not the Senate. Southern
members, unwilling to be robbed of prospective
slave states, fought the restriction tooth and nail.
Antislavery men, in Congress and out, battled
no less bitterly for the exclusion of slaves. The
“Wilmot Proviso,’’ eventually endorsed by the legis-
latures of all but one of the free states, soon came
to symbolize the burning issue of slavery in the
territories.

In a broad sense, the opening shots of the Mexi-
can War were the opening shots of the Civil War.
President Polk left the nation the splendid physical
heritage of California and the Southwest but also
the ugly moral heritage of an embittered slavery dis-
pute. “Mexico will poison us,’’ said the philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Even the great champion
of the South, John C. Calhoun, had prophetically
warned that “Mexico is to us the forbidden fruit . . .
the penalty of eating it would be to subject our insti-
tutions to political death.’’ Mexicans could later take
some satisfaction in knowing that the territory
wrenched from them had proved to be a venomous
apple of discord that could well be called Santa
Anna’s revenge.

388 CHAPTER 17 Manifest Destiny and Its Legacy, 1841–1848

Chronology 389

C h r o n o l o g y

1837 Canadian rebellion and Caroline incident

1841 Harrison dies after four weeks in office
Tyler assumes presidency

1842 Aroostook War over Maine boundary
Webster-Ashburton treaty

1844 Polk defeats Clay in “Manifest Destiny’’
election

1845 United States annexes Texas

1846 Walker Tariff
Independent Treasury restored
United States settles Oregon dispute with

Britain

1846 United States and Mexico clash over
Texas boundary

Kearny takes Santa Fe
Frémont conquers California
Wilmot Proviso passes House of

Representatives

1846-
1848 Mexican War

1847 Battle of Buena Vista
Scott takes Mexico City

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo

For further reading, see page A12 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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390

18

Renewing the
Sectional Struggle

���

1848–1854

Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir, your eyes and
mine are never destined to see that miracle

.

DANIEL WEBSTER,
SEVENTH OF MARCH SPEECH, 1850

The year 1848, highlighted by a rash of revolu-tions in Europe, was filled with unrest in Amer-
ica. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo had officially
ended the war with Mexico, but it had initiated
a new and perilous round of political warfare in
the United States. The vanquished Mexicans had
been forced to relinquish an enormous tract of
real estate, including Texas, California, and all the
area between. The acquisition of this huge domain
raised anew the burning issue of extending slavery
into the territories.

Northern antislaveryites had rallied behind the
Wilmot Proviso, which flatly prohibited slavery in
any territory acquired in the Mexican War. Southern
senators had blocked the passage of the proviso, but
the issue would not die. Ominously, debate over
slavery in the area of the Mexican Cession threat-
ened to disrupt the ranks of both Whigs and Demo-
crats and split national politics along North-South
sectional lines.

The Popular Sovereignty Panacea

Each of the two great political parties was a vital
bond of national unity, for each enjoyed powerful
support in both North and South. If they should be
replaced by two purely sectional groupings, the
Union would be in peril. To politicians, the wisest
strategy seemed to be to sit on the lid of the slavery
issue and ignore the boiling beneath. Even so, the
cover bobbed up and down ominously in response
to the agitation of zealous northern abolitionists
and impassioned southern “fire-eaters.’’

Anxious Democrats were forced to seek a new
standard-bearer in 1848. President Polk, broken in
health by overwork and chronic diarrhea, had
pledged himself to a single term. The Democratic
National Convention at Baltimore turned to an
aging leader, General Lewis Cass, a veteran of the
War of 1812. Although a senator and diplomat of

wide experience and considerable ability, he was
sour-visaged and somewhat pompous. His enemies
dubbed him General “Gass’’ and quickly noted that
Cass rhymed with jackass. The Democratic plat-
form, in line with the lid-sitting strategy, was silent
on the burning issue of slavery in the territories.

But Cass himself had not been silent. His views
on the extension of slavery were well known
because he was the reputed father of “popular sov-
ereignty.’’ This was the doctrine that stated that the
sovereign people of a territory, under the general
principles of the Constitution, should themselves
determine the status of slavery.

Popular sovereignty had a persuasive appeal.
The public liked it because it accorded with the
democratic tradition of self-determination. Politi-
cians liked it because it seemed a comfortable com-
promise between the abolitionist bid for a ban on
slavery in the territories and southern demands that
Congress protect slavery in the territories. Popular
sovereignty tossed the slavery problem into the laps
of the people in the various territories. Advocates of
the principle thus hoped to dissolve the most stub-
born national issue of the day into a series of local
issues. Yet popular sovereignty had one fatal defect:
it might serve to spread the blight of slavery.

Political Triumphs for General Taylor

The Whigs, meeting in Philadelphia, cashed in on
the “Taylor fever.’’ They nominated frank and honest
Zachary Taylor, the “Hero of Buena Vista,’’ who had
never held civil office or even voted for president.
Henry Clay, the living embodiment of Whiggism,
should logically have been nominated. But Clay had
made too many speeches—and too many enemies.

As usual, the Whigs pussyfooted in their plat-
form. Eager to win at any cost, they dodged all trou-
blesome issues and merely extolled the homespun
virtues of their candidate. The self-reliant old fron-
tier fighter had not committed himself on the issue
of slavery extension. But as a wealthy resident of
Louisiana, living on a sugar plantation, he owned
scores of slaves.

Ardent antislavery men in the North, distrusting
both Cass and Taylor, organized the Free Soil party.
Aroused by the conspiracy of silence in the Demo-
cratic and Whig platforms, the Free-Soilers made
no bones about their own stand. They came out

foursquare for the Wilmot Proviso and against slav-
ery in the territories. Going beyond other antislav-
ery groups, they broadened their appeal by
advocating federal aid for internal improvements
and by urging free government homesteads for
settlers.

The new party assembled a strange assortment
of new fellows in the same political bed. It attracted
industrialists miffed at Polk’s reduction of protective
tariffs. It appealed to Democrats resentful of Polk’s
settling for part of Oregon while insisting on all
of Texas—a disparity that suggested a menacing
southern dominance in the Democratic party.
It harbored many northerners whose hatred was
directed not so much at slavery as at blacks and

The Popular Sovereignty Doctrine 391

who gagged at the prospect of sharing the
newly acquired western territories with African-
Americans. It also contained a large element of
“conscience Whigs,’’ heavily influenced by the aboli-
tionist crusade, who condemned slavery on moral
grounds. The Free-Soilers trotted out wizened for-
mer president Van Buren and marched into the fray,
shouting, “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free
men.” These freedoms provided the bedrock on
which the Free-Soilers built their party. Free-Soilers
condemned slavery not so much for enslaving
blacks but for destroying the chances of free white
workers to rise up from wage-earning dependence
to the esteemed status of self-employment. Free-
Soilers argued that only with free soil in the West
could a traditional American commitment t

o

upward mobility continue to flourish. If forced to
compete with slave labor, more costly wage labor
would inevitably wither away, and with it the
chance for the American worker to own property. As
the first widely inclusive party organized around the
issue of slavery and confined to a single section,
the Free Soil party foreshadowed the emergence of
the Republican party six years later.

With the slavery issue officially shoved under
the rug by the two major parties, the politicians on
both sides opened fire on personalities. The ama-
teurish Taylor had to be carefully watched, lest his
indiscreet pen puncture the reputation won by his
sword. His admirers puffed him up as a gallant
knight and a Napoleon, and sloganized his remark,
allegedly uttered during the Battle of Buena Vista,
“General Taylor never surrenders.’’ Taylor’s wartime
popularity pulled him through. He harvested
1,360,967 popular and 163 electoral votes, as com-
pared with Cass’s 1,222,342 popular and 127 elec-
toral votes. Free-Soiler Van Buren, although winning
no state, polled 291,263 ballots and apparently
diverted enough Democratic strength from Cass in
the crucial state of New York to throw the election to
Taylor.

“Californy Gold’’

Tobacco-chewing President Taylor—with his
stumpy legs, rough features, heavy jaw, black hair,
ruddy complexion, and squinty gray eyes—was a
military square peg in a political round hole. He
would have been spared much turmoil if he could
have continued to sit on the slavery lid. But the dis-

covery of gold in California, early in 1848, blew the
cover off.

A horde of adventurers poured into the valleys
of California. Singing “O Susannah!’’ and shouting
“Gold! Gold! Gold!’’ they began tearing frantically at
the yellow-graveled streams and hills. A fortunate
few of the bearded miners “struck it rich’’ at the “dig-
gings.’’ But the luckless many, who netted blisters
instead of nuggets, probably would have been
money well ahead if they had stayed at home unaf-
fected by the “gold fever,’’ which was often followed
by more deadly fevers. The most reliable profits
were made by those who mined the miners, notably
by charging outrageous rates for laundry and other
personal services. Some soiled clothing was even
sent as far away as the Hawaiian Islands for
washing.

392 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

California Gold Rush Country Miners from all over the
world swarmed over the rivers that drained the western slope
of California’s Sierra Nevada. Their nationalities and religions,
their languages and their ways of life, are recorded in the
colorful place names they left behind.

The overnight inpouring of tens of thousands of
people into the future Golden State completely
overwhelmed the one-horse government of Califor-
nia. A distressingly high proportion of the newcom-
ers were lawless men, accompanied or followed by
virtueless women. A contemporary song ran,

Oh what was your name in the States?
Was it Thompson or Johnson or Bates?
Did you murder your wife,
And fly for your life?
Say, what was your name in the States?

An outburst of crime inevitably resulted from
the presence of so many miscreants and outcasts.
Robbery, claim jumping, and murder were com-
monplace, and such violence was only partly
discouraged by rough vigilante justice. In San Fran-
cisco, from 1848 to 1856, there were scores of law-
less killings but only three semilegal hangings.

A majority of Californians, as decent and law-
abiding citizens needing protection, grappled
earnestly with the problem of erecting an adequate
state government. Privately encouraged by Presi-
dent Taylor, they drafted a constitution in 1849 that
excluded slavery and then boldly applied to Con-
gress for admission. California would thus bypass
the usual territorial stage, thwarting southern con-
gressmen seeking to block free soil. Southern politi-
cians, alarmed by the Californians’ “impertinent’’
stroke for freedom, arose in violent opposition.
Would California prove to be the golden straw that
broke the back of the Union?

The California Gold Rush 393

The idea that many ne’er-do-wells went west
is found in the Journals ( January 1849) of
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882):

“If a man is going to California, he announces
it with some hesitation; because it is a
confession that he has failed at home.”

A married woman wrote from the California
goldfields to her sister in New England in
1853,

“i tell you the woman are in great demand in
this country no matter whether they are
married or not you need not think strange
if you see me coming home with some good
looking man some of these times with a
pocket full of rocks. . . . it is all the go here
for Ladys to leave there Husbands two out
of three do it there is a first rate Chance
for a single woman she can have her choice
of thousands i wish mother was here she
could marry a rich man and not have to lift
her hand to do her work. . . .”

394 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

Sectional Balance
and the Underground Railroad

The South of 1850 was relatively well-off. It then
enjoyed, as it had from the beginning, more than its
share of the nation’s leadership. It had seated in the
White House the war hero Zachary Taylor, a
Virginia-born, slaveowning planter from Louisiana.
It boasted a majority in the cabinet and on the
Supreme Court. If outnumbered in the House, the
South had equality in the Senate, where it could at
least neutralize northern maneuvers. Its cotton
fields were expanding, and cotton prices were prof-
itably high. Few sane people, North or South,
believed that slavery was seriously threatened
where it already existed below the Mason-Dixon
line. The fifteen slave states could easily veto any
proposed constitutional amendment.

Yet the South was deeply worried, as it had been
for several decades, by the ever-tipping political bal-
ance. There were then fifteen slave states and fifteen
free states. The admission of California would
destroy the delicate equilibrium in the Senate, per-
haps forever. Potential slave territory under the
American flag was running short, if it had not in fact

disappeared. Agitation had already developed in the
territories of New Mexico and Utah for admission as
nonslave states. The fate of California might well
establish a precedent for the rest of the Mexican
Cession territory—an area purchased largely with
southern blood.

Texas nursed an additional grievance of its own.
It claimed a huge area east of the Rio Grande and
north to the forty-second parallel, embracing in part
about half the territory of present-day New Mexico.
The federal government was proposing to detach
this prize, while hot-blooded Texans were threaten-
ing to descend upon Santa Fe and seize what they
regarded as rightfully theirs. The explosive quarrel
foreshadowed shooting.

Many southerners were also angered by the
nagging agitation in the North for the abolition of
slavery in the District of Columbia. They looked
with alarm on the prospect of a ten-mile-square
oasis of free soil thrust between slaveholding Mary-
land and slaveholding Virginia.

Even more disagreeable to the South was the
loss of runaway slaves, many of whom were assisted
north by the Underground Railroad. This virtual
freedom train consisted of an informal chain of
“stations’’ (antislavery homes), through which

scores of “passengers’’ (runaway slaves) were spir-
ited by “conductors’’ (usually white and black abo-
litionists) from the slave states to the free-soil
sanctuary of Canada.

The most amazing of these “conductors’’ was an
illiterate runaway slave from Maryland, fearless
Harriet Tubman. During nineteen forays into the
South, she rescued more than three hundred slaves,
including her aged parents, and deservedly earned
the title “Moses.’’ Lively imaginations later exagger-
ated the role of the Underground Railroad and its
“stationmasters,’’ but its existence was a fact.

By 1850 southerners were demanding a new
and more stringent fugitive-slave law. The old one,
passed by Congress in 1793, had proved inadequate
to cope with runaways, especially since unfriendly
state authorities failed to provide needed coopera-
tion. Unlike cattle thieves, the abolitionists who ran
the Underground Railroad did not gain personally
from their lawlessness. But to the slaveowners, the
loss was infuriating, whatever the motives. The
moral judgments of the abolitionists seemed, in
some ways, more galling than outright theft. They

reflected not only a holier-than-thou attitude but
a refusal to obey the laws solemnly passed by
Congress.

Estimates indicate that the South in 1850 was
losing perhaps 1,000 runaways a year out of its total
of some 4 million slaves. In fact, more blacks proba-
bly gained their freedom by self-purchase or volun-
tary emancipation than ever escaped. But the
principle weighed heavily with the slavemasters.
They rested their argument on the Constitution,
which protected slavery, and on the laws of Con-
gress, which provided for slave-catching. “Although
the loss of property is felt,’’ said a southern senator,
“the loss of honor is felt still more.’’

Southern Anxieties 395

Texas and the Disputed Area Before the

Compromise of 1850

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Twilight of the Senatorial Giants

Southern fears were such that Congress was con-
fronted with catastrophe in 1850. Free-soil Califor-
nia was banging on the door for admission, and
“fire-eaters’’ in the South were voicing ominous
threats of secession. The crisis brought into the con-
gressional forum the most distinguished assem-
blage of statesmen since the Constitutional
Convention of 1787—the Old Guard of the dying
generation and the young gladiators of the new.
That “immortal trio’’—Clay, Calhoun, and Web-
ster—appeared together for the last time on the
public stage.

Henry Clay, now seventy-three years of age,
played a crucial role. The “Great Pacificator’’ had
come to the Senate from Kentucky to engineer his
third great compromise. The once-glamorous
statesman—though disillusioned, enfeebled, and
racked by a cruel cough—was still eloquent, concil-
iatory, and captivating. He proposed and skillfully
defended a series of compromises. He was ably sec-
onded by thirty-seven-year-old Senator Stephen
A. Douglas of Illinois, the “Little Giant’’ (five feet
four inches), whose role was less spectacular but
even more important. Clay urged with all his per-
suasiveness that the North and South both make
concessions and that the North partially yield by
enacting a more feasible fugitive-slave law.

Senator John C. Calhoun, the “Great Nullifier,”
then sixty-eight and dying of tuberculosis, champi-
oned the South in his last formal speech. Too weak

to deliver it himself, he sat bundled up in the Senate
chamber, his eyes glowing within a stern face, while
a younger colleague read his fateful words. Although
approving the purpose of Clay’s proposed conces-
sions, Calhoun rejected them as not providing ade-
quate safeguards. His impassioned plea was to leave
slavery alone, return runaway slaves, give the South
its rights as a minority, and restore the political bal-
ance. He had in view, as was later revealed, an
utterly unworkable scheme of electing two presi-
dents, one from the North and one from the South,
each wielding a veto.

Calhoun died in 1850, before the debate was
over, murmuring the sad words, “The South! The
South! God knows what will become of her!’’ Appre-
ciative fellow citizens in Charleston erected to his
memory an imposing monument, which bore the
inscription “Truth, Justice, and the Constitution.’’
Calhoun had labored to preserve the Union and had
taken his stand on the Constitution, but his propos-
als in their behalf almost undid both.

Daniel Webster next took the Senate spotlight to
uphold Clay’s compromise measures in his last
great speech, a three-hour effort. Now sixty-eight
years old and suffering from a liver complaint
aggravated by high living, he had lost some of the
fire in his magnificent voice. Speaking deliberately
and before overflowing galleries, he urged all rea-
sonable concessions to the South, including a new
fugitive-slave law with teeth.

As for slavery in the territories, asked Webster,
why legislate on the subject? To do so was an act of
sacrilege, for Almighty God had already passed the
Wilmot Proviso. The good Lord had decreed—
through climate, topography, and geography—that
a plantation economy, and hence a slave economy,
could not profitably exist in the Mexican Cession
territory.* Webster sanely concluded that compro-
mise, concession, and sweet reasonableness would
provide the only solutions. “Let us not be pygmies,’’
he pleaded, “in a case that calls for men.’’

If measured by its immediate effects, Webster’s
famed Seventh of March speech, 1850, was his
finest. It helped turn the tide in the North toward
compromise. The clamor for printed copies became
so great that Webster mailed out more than 100,000,
remarking that 200,000 would not satisfy the
demand. His tremendous effort visibly strength-

396 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

*Webster was wrong here; within one hundred years, California
had become one of the great cotton-producing states of the
Union.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher and
moderate abolitionist, was outraged by
Webster’s support of concessions to the South
in the Fugitive Slave Act. In February 1851 he
wrote in his Journal,

“I opened a paper to-day in which he [Web-
ster] pounds on the old strings [of liberty] in
a letter to the Washington Birthday feasters
at New York. ‘Liberty! liberty!’ Pho! Let Mr.
Webster, for decency’s sake, shut his lips once
and forever on this word. The word liberty in
the mouth of Mr. Webster sounds like the
word love in the mouth of a courtesan.”

ened Union sentiment. It was especially pleasing to
the banking and commercial centers of the North,
which stood to lose millions of dollars by secession.
One prominent Washington banker canceled two
notes of Webster’s, totaling $5,000, and sent him
a personal check for $1,000 and a message of
congratulations.

But the abolitionists, who had assumed Webster
was one of them, upbraided him as a traitor, worthy
of bracketing with Benedict Arnold. The poet Whit-
tier lamented,

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!

The glory from his gray hairs gone
For evermore!

These reproaches were most unfair. Webster, who
had long regarded slavery as evil but disunion as
worse, had, in fact, always despised the abolitionists
and never joined their ranks.

Deadlock and Danger on Capitol Hill

The stormy congressional debate of 1850 was not
finished, for the Young Guard from the North were
yet to have their say. This was the group of newer
leaders who, unlike the aging Old Guard, had not
grown up with the Union. They were more inter-
ested in purging and purifying it than in patching
and preserving it.

William H. Seward, the wiry and husky-throated
freshman senator from New York, was the able
spokesman for many of the younger northern radi-
cals. A strong antislaveryite, he came out unequivo-
cally against concession. He seemed not to realize
that compromise had brought the Union together

and that when the sections could no longer com-
promise, they would have to part company.

Seward argued earnestly that Christian legisla-
tors must obey God’s moral law as well as man’s
mundane law. He therefore appealed, with refer-
ence to excluding slavery in the territories, to an
even “higher law’’ than the Constitution. This
alarming phrase, wrenched from its context, may
have cost him the presidential nomination and the
presidency in 1860.

The Compromise of 1850 397

Compromise of 1850

Concessions to the North Concessions to the South

California admitted as a free state The remainder of the Mexican Cession area to be
formed into the territories of New Mexico and Utah,
without restriction on slavery, hence open to popular
sovereignty

Territory disputed by Texas and New Mexico to be Texas to receive $10 million from the federal

surrendered to New Mexico government as compensation

Abolition of the slave trade (but not slavery) in the A more stringent fugitive-slave law, going beyond that

District of Columbia of 1793

As the great debate in Congress ran its heated
course, deadlock seemed certain. Blunt old Presi-
dent Taylor, who had allegedly fallen under the
influence of men like “Higher Law’’ Seward, seemed
bent on vetoing any compromise passed by Con-
gress. His military ire was aroused by the threats of
Texas to seize Santa Fe. He appeared to be doggedly
determined to “Jacksonize’’ the dissenters, if need
be, by leading an army against the Texans in person
and hanging all “damned traitors.’’ If troops had
begun to march, the South probably would have ral-
lied to the defense of Texas, and the Civil War might
have erupted in 1850.

Breaking the Congressional Logjam

At the height of the controversy in 1850, President
Taylor unknowingly helped the cause of concession
by dying suddenly, probably of an acute intestinal
disorder. Portly, round-faced Vice President Millard
Fillmore, a colorless and conciliatory New York
lawyer-politician, took over the reins. As presiding
officer of the Senate, he had been impressed with
the arguments for conciliation, and he gladly signed
the series of compromise measures that passed
Congress after seven long months of stormy debate.
The balancing of interests in the Compromise of
1850 was delicate in the extreme.

The struggle to get these measures accepted by
the country was hardly less heated than in Congress.
In the northern states, “Union savers’’ like Senators
Clay, Webster, and Douglas orated on behalf of the
compromise. The ailing Clay himself delivered more
than seventy speeches, as a powerful sentiment for
acceptance gradually crystallized in the North. It
was strengthened by a growing spirit of goodwill,
which sprang partly from a feeling of relief and
partly from an upsurge of prosperity enriched by
California gold.

But the “fire-eaters’’ of the South were still vio-
lently opposed to concessions. One extreme South
Carolina newspaper avowed that it loathed the
Union and hated the North as much as it did Hell
itself. A movement in the South to boycott northern
goods gained some headway, but in the end the
southern Unionists, assisted by the warm glow of
prosperity, prevailed.

In mid-1850 an assemblage of southern extrem-
ists had met in Nashville, Tennessee, ironically near

the burial place of Andrew Jackson. The delegates
not only took a strong position in favor of slavery
but condemned the compromise measures then
being hammered out in Congress. Meeting again
later in the year after the bills had passed, the con-
vention proved to be a dud. By that time southern
opinion had reluctantly accepted the verdict of
Congress.

Like the calm after a storm, a second Era of
Good Feelings dawned. Disquieting talk of seces-
sion subsided. Peace-loving people, both North and
South, were determined that the compromises
should be a “finality’’ and that the explosive issue of
slavery should be buried. But this placid period of
reason proved all too brief.

Balancing the Compromise Scales

Who got the better deal in the Compromise of 1850?
The answer is clearly the North. California, as a free
state, tipped the Senate balance permanently
against the South. The territories of New Mexico
and Utah were open to slavery on the basis of popu-
lar sovereignty. But the iron law of nature—the
“highest law’’ of all—had loaded the dice in favor of
free soil. The southerners urgently needed more
slave territory to restore the “sacred balance.’’ If they
could not carve new states out of the recent con-
quests from Mexico, where else might they get
them? In the Caribbean was one answer.

Even the apparent gains of the South rang hol-
low. Disgruntled Texas was to be paid $10 million
toward discharging its indebtedness, but in the long
run this was a modest sum. The immense area in
dispute had been torn from the side of slaveholding
Texas and was almost certain to be free. The South
had halted the drive toward abolition in the District
of Columbia, at least temporarily, by permitting the
outlawing of the slave trade in the federal district.
But even this move was an entering wedge toward
complete emancipation in the nation’s capital.

Most alarming of all, the drastic new Fugitive
Slave Law of 1850—“the Bloodhound Bill’’—stirred
up a storm of opposition in the North. The fleeing
slaves could not testify in their own behalf, and they
were denied a jury trial. These harsh practices, some
citizens feared, threatened to create dangerous
precedents for white Americans. The federal com-
missioner who handled the case of a fugitive would

398 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

receive five dollars if the runaway were freed and
ten dollars if not—an arrangement that strongly
resembled a bribe. Freedom-loving northerners
who aided the slave to escape were liable to heavy
fines and jail sentences. They might even be ordered
to join the slave-catchers, and this possibility
rubbed salt into old sores.

So savage was this “Man-Stealing Law’’ that it
touched off an explosive chain reaction in the North.
Many shocked moderates, hitherto passive, were
driven into the swelling ranks of the antislaveryites.
When a runaway slave from Virginia was captured in
Boston in 1854, he had to be removed from the city
under heavy federal guard through streets lined with

The Fugitive Slave Law 399

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Free
Slave
Decision left to territory

Slavery After the Compromise
of 1850 Regarding the Fugitive
Slave Act provisions of the Com-
promise of 1850, Ralph Waldo
Emerson declared (May 1851) at
Concord, Massachusetts, “The act
of Congress . . . is a law which
every one of you will break on the
earliest occasion—a law which no
man can obey, or abet the obey-
ing, without loss of self-respect
and forfeiture of the name of
gentleman.” Privately he wrote in
his Journal, “This filthy enact-
ment was made in the nineteenth
century, by people who could
read and write. I will not obey it,
by God.”

sullen Yankees and shadowed by black-draped
buildings festooned with flags flying upside down.
One prominent Bostonian who witnessed this grim
spectacle wrote that “we went to bed one night old-
fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs
and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.’’

The Underground Railroad stepped up its
timetable, and infuriated northern mobs rescued
slaves from their pursuers. Massachusetts, in a
move toward nullification suggestive of South Car-
olina in 1832, made it a penal offense for any state
official to enforce the new federal statute. Other
states passed “personal liberty laws,’’ which denied
local jails to federal officials and otherwise ham-
pered enforcement. The abolitionists rent the heav-
ens with their protests against the man-stealing
statute. A meeting presided over by William Lloyd
Garrison in 1851 declared, “We execrate it, we spit
upon it, we trample it under our feet.’’

Beyond question, the Fugitive Slave Law was an
appalling blunder on the part of the South. No sin-
gle irritant of the 1850s was more persistently

galling to both sides, and none did more to awaken
in the North a spirit of antagonism against the
South. The southerners in turn were embittered
because the northerners would not in good faith
execute the law—the one real and immediate
southern “gain’’ from the Great Compromise. Slave-
catchers, with some success, redoubled their efforts.

Should the shooting showdown have come in
1850? From the standpoint of the secessionists, yes;
from the standpoint of the Unionists, no. Time was
fighting for the North. With every passing decade,
this huge section was forging further ahead in pop-
ulation and wealth—in crops, factories, foundries,
ships, and railroads.

Delay also added immensely to the moral
strength of the North—to its will to fight for the
Union. In 1850 countless thousands of northern
moderates were unwilling to pin the South to the
rest of the nation with bayonets. But the inflamma-
tory events of the 1850s did much to bolster the Yan-
kee will to resist secession, whatever the cost. This
one feverish decade gave the North time to accumu-

400 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

The Legal Status of Slavery, from the Revolution to the Civil War

late the material and moral strength that provided
the margin of victory. Thus the Compromise of
1850, from one point of view, won the Civil War for
the Union.

Defeat and Doom for the Whigs

Meeting in Baltimore, the Democratic nominating
convention of 1852 startled the nation. Hopelessly
deadlocked, it finally stampeded to the second
“dark-horse’’ candidate in American history, an
unrenowned lawyer-politician, Franklin Pierce,
from the hills of New Hampshire. The Whigs tried to
jeer him back into obscurity with the cry, “Who is
Frank Pierce?’’ Democrats replied, “The Young Hick-
ory of the Granite Hills.’’

Pierce was a weak and indecisive figure.
Youngish, handsome, militarily erect, smiling, and
convivial, he had served without real distinction in
the Mexican War. As a result of a painful groin injury
that caused him to fall off a horse, he was known as
the “Fainting General,’’ though scandalmongers
pointed to a fondness for alcohol. But he was ene-
myless because he had been inconspicuous, and as
a prosouthern northerner, he was acceptable to the
slavery wing of the Democratic party. His platform
came out emphatically for the finality of the Com-
promise of 1850, Fugitive Slave Law and all.

The Whigs, also convening in Baltimore, missed
a splendid opportunity to capitalize on their record
in statecraft. Able to boast of a praiseworthy
achievement in the Compromise of 1850, they
might logically have nominated President Fillmore
or Senator Webster, both of whom were associated
with it. But having won in the past only with military
heroes, they turned to another, “Old Fuss and Feath-
ers’’ Winfield Scott, perhaps the ablest American
general of his generation. Although he was a huge
and impressive figure, his manner bordered on
haughtiness. His personality not only repelled the
masses but eclipsed his genuinely statesmanlike
achievements. The Whig platform praised the Com-
promise of 1850 as a lasting arrangement, though
less enthusiastically than the Democrats.

With slavery and sectionalism to some extent
soft-pedaled, the campaign again degenerated into
a dull and childish attack on personalities. Demo-
crats ridiculed Scott’s pomposity; Whigs charged
that Pierce was the hero of “many a well-fought

bottle.’’ Democrats cried exultantly, “We Polked ’em
in ’44; we’ll Pierce ’em in ’52.’’

Luckily for the Democrats, the Whig party was
hopelessly split. Antislavery Whigs of the North
swallowed Scott as their nominee but deplored his
platform, which endorsed the hated Fugitive Slave
Law. The current phrase ran, “We accept the candi-
date but spit on the platform.’’ Southern Whigs, who
doubted Scott’s loyalty to the Compromise of 1850
and especially the Fugitive Slave Law, accepted the
platform but spat on the candidate. More than five
thousand Georgia Whigs—“finality men’’—voted in
vain for Webster, although he had died nearly two
weeks before the election.

General Scott, victorious on the battlefield, met
defeat at the ballot box. His friends remarked whim-
sically that he was not used to “running.’’ Actually,
he was stabbed in the back by his fellow Whigs,
notably in the South. The pliant Pierce won in a
landslide, 254 electoral votes to 42, although the
popular count was closer, 1,601,117 to 1,385,453.

The election of 1852 was fraught with frighten-
ing significance, though it may have seemed tame at
the time. It marked the effective end of the disor-
ganized Whig party and, within a few years, its com-
plete death. The Whigs’ demise augured the eclipse
of national parties and the worrisome rise of purely
sectional political alignments. The Whigs were gov-
erned at times by the crassest opportunism, and
they won only two presidential elections (1840,
1848) in their colorful career, both with war heroes.
They finally choked to death trying to swallow the
distasteful Fugitive Slave Law. But their great con-
tribution—and a noteworthy one indeed—was to
help uphold the ideal of the Union through their
electoral strength in the South and through the
eloquence of leaders like Henry Clay and Daniel
Webster. Both of these statesmen, by unhappy coin-
cidence, died during the 1852 campaign. But the
good they had done lived after them and con-
tributed powerfully to the eventual preservation of a
united United States.

President Pierce the Expansionist

At the outset the Pierce administration displayed
vigor. The new president, standing confidently
before some fifteen thousand people on inaugura-
tion day, delivered from memory a clear-voiced

The Election of 1852 401

inaugural address. His cabinet contained aggressive
southerners, including as secretary of war one Jef-
ferson Davis, future president of the Confederacy.
The people of Dixie were determined to acquire
more slave territory, and the compliant Pierce was
prepared to be their willing tool.

The intoxicating victories of the Mexican War
stimulated the spirit of Manifest Destiny. The con-
quest of a Pacific frontage, and the discovery of gold
on it, aroused lively interest in the transisthmian
land routes of Central America, chiefly in Panama
and Nicaragua. Many Americans were looking even
further ahead to potential canal routes and to the
islands flanking them, notably Spain’s Cuba.

These visions especially fired the ambitions of
the “slavocrats.’’ They lusted for new territory after
the Compromise of 1850 seemingly closed most
of the lands of the Mexican Cession to the “peculiar
institution.’’ In 1856 a Texan proposed a toast that
was drunk with gusto: “To the Southern republic
bounded on the north by the Mason and Dixon line
and on the South by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec
[southern Mexico], including Cuba and all other
lands on our Southern shore.’’

Southerners took a special interest in Nicaragua.
A brazen American adventurer, William Walker, tried
repeatedly to grab control of this Central American
country in the 1850s. (He had earlier attempted and

failed to seize Baja California from Mexico and turn
it into a slave state.) Backed by an armed force
recruited largely in the South, he installed himself as
president in July 1856 and promptly legalized slav-
ery. One southern newspaper proclaimed to the
planter aristocracy that Walker—the “gray-eyed man
of destiny’’—“now offers Nicaragua to you and your
slaves, at a time when you have not a friend on the
face of the earth.’’ But a coalition of Central Ameri-
can nations formed an alliance to overthrow him.
President Pierce withdrew diplomatic recognition,
and the gray-eyed man’s destiny was to crumple
before a Honduran firing squad in 1860.

Nicaragua was also of vital concern to Great
Britain, the world’s leading maritime and commer-
cial power. Fearing that the grasping Yankees would
monopolize the trade arteries there, the British
made haste to secure a solid foothold at Greytown,
the eastern end of the proposed Nicaraguan canal
route. This challenge to the Monroe Doctrine forth-
with raised the ugly possibility of an armed clash.
The crisis was surmounted in 1850 by the Clayton-
Bulwer Treaty, which stipulated that neither Amer-
ica nor Britain would fortify or secure exclusive
control over any future isthmian waterway. This
agreement, at the time, seemed necessary to halt
the British, but to American canal promoters in later
years, it proved to be a ball and chain.

402 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

Caribbean Sea

Gulf of
Mexico

PACIFIC OCEAN

Isthmus of�
Tehuantepec

NICARAGUA

HONDURAS

BELIZE�
(BRITISH�
HONDURAS)

GUATEMALA

SALVADOR

COSTA RICA

COLOMBIA�
(NEW GRANADA)

CUBA�
(Spanish)

JAMAICA�
(British)

Proposed canal route,
then a land-and-water route

Future
Panama Canal

British agents and traders
influence natives

Greytown

Central America, c. 1850, Showing
British Possessions and Proposed
Canal Routes Until President
Theodore Roosevelt swung into action
with his big stick in 1903, a Nicaraguan
canal, closer to the United States, was
generally judged more desirable than
a canal across Panama.

America had become a Pacific power with the
acquisition of California and Oregon, both of which
faced Asia. The prospects of a rich trade with the Far
East now seemed rosier. Americans had already
established contacts with China, and shippers were
urging Washington to push for commercial inter-
course with Japan. The mikado’s empire, after some
disagreeable experiences with the European world,
had withdrawn into a cocoon of isolationism and
had remained there for over two hundred years. The
Japanese were so protective of their insularity that
they prohibited shipwrecked foreign sailors from
leaving and refused to readmit to Japan their own
sailors who had been washed up on the West Coast
of North America. But by 1853, as events proved,
Japan was ready to emerge from reclusion, partly
because of the Russian menace.

The Washington government was now eager to
pry open the bamboo gates of Japan. It dispatched a
fleet of awesome, smoke-belching warships, com-
manded by Commodore Matthew C. Perry, brother
of the hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in 1813. By a

judicious display of force and tact, he persuaded the
Japanese in 1854 to sign a memorable treaty. It pro-
vided for only a commercial foot in the door, but it
was the beginning of an epochal relationshi

p

between the Land of the Rising Sun and the Western
world. Ironically, this achievement attracted little
notice at the time, partly because Perry devised no
memorable slogan.

Coveted Cuba:
Pearl of the Antilles

Sugar-rich Cuba, lying off the nation’s southern
doorstep, was the prime objective of Manifest Des-
tiny in the 1850s. Supporting a large population of
enslaved blacks, it was coveted by the South as the
most desirable slave territory available. Carved into
several states, it would once more restore the politi-
cal balance in the Senate.

Cuba was a kind of heirloom—the most impor-
tant remnant of Spain’s once-mighty New World
empire. Polk, the expansionist, had taken steps to
offer $100 million for it, but the sensitive Spaniards
had replied that they would see it sunk into the
ocean before they would sell it to the Americans at
any price. With purchase completely out of the
question, seizure was apparently the only way to
pluck the ripening fruit.

Private adventurers from the South now under-
took to shake the tree of Manifest Destiny. During
1850–1851 two “filibustering” expeditions (from the
Spanish filibustero, meaning “freebooter” or “pirate”),
each numbering several hundred armed men,
descended upon Cuba. Both feeble efforts were
repelled, and the last one ended in tragedy when the
leader and fifty followers—some of them from the
“best families’’ of the South—were summarily shot
or strangled. So outraged were the southerners that
an angry mob sacked Spain’s consulate in New
Orleans.

Spanish officials in Cuba rashly forced a show-
down in 1854, when they seized an American
steamer, Black Warrior, on a technicality. Now was
the time for President Pierce, dominated as he was
by the South, to provoke a war with Spain and seize
Cuba. The major powers of Europe—England,
France, and Russia—were about to become bogged
down in the Crimean War and hence were unable to
aid Spain.

Caribbean Diplomacy 403

An incredible cloak-and-dagger episode fol-
lowed. The secretary of state instructed the Ameri-
can ministers in Spain, England, and France to
prepare confidential recommendations for the
acquisition of Cuba. Meeting initially at Ostend,
Belgium, the three envoys drew up a top-secret dis-
patch, soon known as the Ostend Manifesto. This
startling document urged that the administration
offer $120 million for Cuba. If Spain refused, and if
its continued ownership endangered American
interests, the United States would “be justified in
wresting’’ the island from the Spanish.

The secret Ostend Manifesto quickly leaked out.
Northern free-soilers, already angered by the Fugi-
tive Slave Law and other gains for slavery, rose in an
outburst of wrath against the “manifesto of brig-
ands.’’ Confronted with disruption at home, the red-
faced Pierce administration was forced to drop its
brazen schemes for Cuba.

Clearly the slavery issue, like a two-headed
snake with the heads at each other’s throat, dead-
locked territorial expansion in the 1850s. The North,
flushed with Manifest Destiny, was developing a
renewed appetite for Canada. The South coveted
Cuba. Neither section would permit the other to get
the apple of its eye, so neither got either. The shack-
led black hands of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom, whose plight had already stung the conscience
of the North, now held the South back from Cuba.
The internal distresses of the United States were
such that, for once, it could not take advantage of
Europe’s distresses—in this case the Crimean War.

Pacific Railroad
Promoters and the
Gadsden Purchase

Acute transportation problems were another
legacy of the Mexican War. The newly acquired
prizes of California and Oregon might just as well
have been islands some eight thousand miles west
of the nation’s capital. The sea routes to and from
the Isthmus of Panama, to say nothing of those
around South America, were too long. Covered-
wagon travel past bleaching animal bones was
possible, but slow and dangerous. A popular song
recalled,

They swam the wide rivers and crossed the
tall peaks,

And camped on the prairie for weeks upon
weeks.

Starvation and cholera and hard work and
slaughter,

They reached California spite of hell and high
water.

Feasible land transportation was imperative—
or the newly won possessions on the Pacific Coast
might break away. Camels were even proposed as
the answer. Several score of these temperamental
beasts—“ships of the desert’’—were imported from
the Near East, but mule-driving Americans did not
adjust to them. A transcontinental railroad was
clearly the only real solution to the problem.

Railroad promoters, both North and South, had
projected many drawing-board routes to the Pacific
Coast. But the estimated cost in all cases was so
great that for many years there could obviously be
only one line. Should its terminus be in the North or
in the South? The favored section would reap rich
rewards in wealth, population, and influence. The
South, losing the economic race with the North, was
eager to extend a railroad through adjacent south-
western territory all the way to California.

Another chunk of Mexico now seemed desir-
able, because the campaigns of the recent war had
shown that the best railway route ran slightly south
of the Mexican border. Secretary of War Jefferson
Davis, a Mississippian, arranged to have James
Gadsden, a prominent South Carolina railroad man,
appointed minister to Mexico. Finding Santa Anna

404 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

The first platform of the newly born
(antislavery) Republican party in 1856
lashed out at the Ostend Manifesto, with its
transparent suggestion that Cuba be seized.
The plank read,

“Resolved, That the highwayman’s plea, that
‘might makes right,’ embodied in the Ostend
Circular, was in every respect unworthy of
American diplomacy, and would bring shame
and dishonor upon any Government or
people that gave it their sanction.”

in power for the sixth and last time, and as usual in
need of money, Gadsden made gratifying headway.
He negotiated a treaty in 1853, which ceded to the
United States the Gadsden Purchase area for $10
million. The transaction aroused much criticism
among northerners, who objected to paying a huge
sum for a cactus-strewn desert nearly the size of
Gadsden’s South Carolina. Undeterred, the Senate
approved the pact, in the process shortsightedly
eliminating a window on the Sea of Cortez.

No doubt the Gadsden Purchase enabled the
South to claim the coveted railroad with even
greater insistence. A southern track would be easier
to build because the mountains were less high and
because the route, unlike the proposed northern
lines, would not pass through unorganized territory.
Texas was already a state at this point, and New
Mexico (with the Gadsden Purchase added) was a
formally organized territory, with federal troops
available to provide protection against marauding
tribes of Indians. Any northern or central railroad
line would have to be thrust through the unorgan-
ized territory of Nebraska, where the buffalo and
Indians roamed.

Northern railroad boosters quickly replied that
if organized territory were the test, then Nebraska
should be organized. Such a move was not prema-
ture, because thousands of land-hungry pioneers
were already poised on the Nebraska border. But all
schemes proposed in Congress for organizing the
territory were greeted with apathy or hostility by
many southerners. Why should the South help cre-

ate new free-soil states and thus cut its own throat
by facilitating a northern railroad?

Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Scheme

At this point in 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of
Illinois delivered a counterstroke to offset the Gads-
den thrust for southern expansion westward. A
squat, bull-necked, and heavy-chested figure, the
“Little Giant’’ radiated the energy and breezy opti-
mism of the self-made man. An ardent booster for
the West, he longed to break the North-South dead-
lock over westward expansion and stretch a line of
settlements across the continent. He had also
invested heavily in Chicago real estate and in rail-
way stock and was eager to have the Windy City
become the eastern terminus of the proposed
Pacific railroad. He would thus endear himself to
the voters of Illinois, benefit his section, and enrich
his own purse.

A veritable “steam engine in breeches,’’ Douglas
threw himself behind a legislative scheme that
would enlist the support of a reluctant South. The
proposed Territory of Nebraska would be sliced into
two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Their status
regarding slavery would be settled by popular sover-
eignty—a democratic concept to which Douglas
and his western constituents were deeply attached.
Kansas, which lay due west of slaveholding Mis-
souri, would presumably choose to become a slave

The Gadsden Purchase 405

The Gadsden Purchase, 1853

Los Angeles

Tucson
El Paso

Houston

CALIFORNIA

MEXICO

TEXAS

NEW MEXICO�

TERRITORY

R
io

G
rande

Colorado R.

Sea
of C

ortez

PACIFIC
OCEAN

Gadsen Purchase

Future route of the
Southern Pacific Railroad
(completed in 1882)

state. But Nebraska, lying west of free-soil Iowa,
would presumably become a free state.

Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska scheme ran head-
long into a formidable political obstacle. The Mis-
souri Compromise of 1820 had forbidden slavery in
the proposed Nebraska Territory, which lay north of
the sacred 36° 30′ line, and the only way to open the
region to popular sovereignty was to repeal the
ancient compact outright. This bold step Douglas
was prepared to take, even at the risk of shattering
the uneasy truce patched together by the Compro-
mise of 1850.

Many southerners, who had not conceived of
Kansas as slave soil, rose to the bait. Here was a
chance to gain one more slave state. The pliable
President Pierce, under the thumb of southern
advisers, threw his full weight behind the Kansas-
Nebraska Bill.

But the Missouri Compromise, now thirty-four
years old, could not be brushed aside lightly. What-
ever Congress passes it can repeal, but by this time
the North had come to regard the sectional pact as
almost as sacred as the Constitution itself. Free-soil
members of Congress struck back with a vengeance.
They met their match in the violently gesticulating
Douglas, who was the ablest rough-and-tumble
debater of his generation. Employing twisted logic
and oratorical fireworks, he rammed the bill
through Congress, with strong support from many
southerners. So heated were political passions that
bloodshed was barely averted. Some members car-
ried a concealed revolver or a bowie knife—or both.

Douglas’s motives in prodding anew the snarling
dog of slavery have long puzzled historians. His per-

406 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

sonal interests have already been mentioned. In
addition, his foes accused him of angling for the
presidency in 1856. Yet his admirers have argued
plausibly in his defense that if he had not champi-
oned the ill-omened bill, someone else would have.

The truth seems to be that Douglas acted some-
what impulsively and recklessly. His heart did not
bleed over the issue of slavery, and he declared
repeatedly that he did not care whether it was voted
up or down in the territories. What he failed to per-
ceive was that hundreds of thousands of his fellow
citizens in the North did feel deeply on this moral
issue. They regarded the repeal of the Missouri Com-
promise as an intolerable breach of faith, and they
would henceforth resist to the last trench all future
southern demands for slave territory. As Abraham
Lincoln said, the North wanted to give to pioneers in
the West “a clean bed, with no snakes in it.’’

Genuine leaders, like skillful chess players, must
foresee the possible effects of their moves. Douglas
predicted a “hell of a storm,’’ but he grossly under-
estimated its proportions. His critics in the North,
branding him a “Judas’’ and a “traitor,’’ greeted his
name with frenzied boos, hisses, and “three groans
for Doug.’’ But he still enjoyed a high degree of pop-
ularity among his following in the Democratic party,
especially in Illinois, a stronghold of popular
sovereignty.

Congress Legislates a Civil War

The Kansas-Nebraska Act—a curtain raiser to a
terrible drama—was one of the most momentous
measures ever to pass Congress. By one way of reck-
oning, it greased the slippery slope to Civil War.

Antislavery northerners were angered by what
they condemned as an act of bad faith by the
“Nebrascals’’ and their “Nebrascality.’’ All future

The Kansas-Nebraska Act 407

Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner
(1811–1874) described the Kansas-Nebraska
Bill as “at once the worst and the best Bill on
which Congress ever acted.” It was the worst
because it represented a victory for the slave
power in the short run. But it was the best, he
said prophetically, because it

“annuls all past compromises with slavery,
and makes all future compromises
impossible. Thus it puts freedom and slavery
face to face, and bids them grapple. Who can
doubt the result?”

Kansas and Nebraska, 1854
The future Union Pacific Railroad
(completed in 1869) is shown. Note
the Missouri Compromise line of
36° 30′ (1820).

36°30′
36°30′

M
isso

u
ri

R
.

P latte R.

C
ol

or
ad

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A r kansas R.

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NEBRASKA�
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TERRITORY
OREGON�

TERRITORY

UTAH�
TERRITORY

NEW MEXICO�
TERRITORY TEXAS

INDIAN�
TERR.

ARKANSAS�
TERR.

MISSOURI

IOWA

ILLINOIS

WISCONSIN

MINNESOTA�
TERRITORY

KANSAS TERRITORY

C A N A D A
WASH.�
TERR.

Ogden

Omaha

compromise with the South would be immeasur-
ably more difficult, and without compromise there
was bound to be conflict.

Henceforth the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, pre-
viously enforced in the North only halfheartedly, was
a dead letter. The Kansas-Nebraska Act wrecked two
compromises: that of 1820, which it repealed specifi-
cally, and that of 1850, which northern opinion
repealed indirectly. Emerson wrote, “The Fugitive
[Slave] Law did much to unglue the eyes of men, and
now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring.’’ Northern
abolitionists and southern “fire-eaters’’ alike saw less
and less they could live with. The growing legion of
antislaveryites gained numerous recruits, who
resented the grasping move by the “slavocracy’’ for
Kansas. The southerners, in turn, became inflamed
when the free-soilers tried to control Kansas, con-
trary to the presumed “deal.’’

The proud Democrats—a party now over half
a century old—were shattered by the Kansas-
Nebraska Act. They did elect a president in 1856, but
he was the last one they were to boost into the White
House for twenty-eight long years.

Undoubtedly the most durable offspring of the
Kansas-Nebraska blunder was the new Republican
party. It sprang up spontaneously in the Middle West,
notably in Wisconsin and Michigan, as a mighty
moral protest against the gains of slavery. Gathering
together dissatisfied elements, it soon included dis-
gruntled Whigs (among them Abraham Lincoln),
Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know-Nothings, and other
foes of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The hodgepodge
party spread eastward with the swiftness of a prairie
fire and with the zeal of a religious crusade. Unheard-
of and unheralded at the beginning of 1854, it elected
a Republican Speaker of the House of Representa-
tives within two years. Never really a third-party
movement, it erupted with such force as to become
almost overnight the second major political party—
and a purely sectional one at that.

At long last the dreaded sectional rift had
appeared. The new Republican party would not be
allowed south of the Mason-Dixon line. Countless
southerners subscribed wholeheartedly to the sen-
timent that it was “a nigger stealing, stinking, putrid,
abolition party.’’ The Union was in dire peril.

408 CHAPTER 18 Renewing the Sectional Struggle, 1848–1854

C h r o n o l o g y

1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends
Mexican War

Taylor defeats Cass and Van Buren for
presidency

1849 California gold rush

1850 Fillmore assumes presidency after Taylor’s
death

Compromise of 1850, including Fugitive
Slave Law

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain

1852 Pierce defeats Scott for presidency

1853 Gadsden Purchase from Mexico

1854 Commodore Perry opens Japan
Ostend Manifesto proposes seizure of

Cuba
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Republican party organized

1856 William Walker becomes president of
Nicaragua and legalizes slavery

For further reading, see page A13 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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19

Drifting Toward
Disunion

���

1854–1861

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe
this government cannot endure permanently half

slave and half free

.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 1858

The slavery question continued to churn thecauldron of controversy throughout the 1850s.
As moral temperatures rose, prospects for a peace-
ful political solution to the slavery issue simply
evaporated. Kansas Territory erupted in violence
between proslavery and antislavery factions in 1855.
Two years later the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott
decision invalidated the Missouri Compromise of
1820, which had imposed a shaky lid on the slavery
problem for more than a generation. Attitudes on
both sides progressively hardened. When in 1860
the newly formed Republican party nominated for
president Abraham Lincoln, an outspoken oppo-
nent of the further expansion of slavery, the stage
was set for all-out civil war.

Stowe and Helper:
Literary Incendiaries

Sectional tensions were further strained in 1852,
and later, by an inky phenomenon. Harriet Beecher
Stowe, a wisp of a woman and the mother of a half-
dozen children, published her heartrending novel
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dismayed by the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Law, she was determined to awaken
the North to the wickedness of slavery by laying
bare its terrible inhumanity, especially the cruel
splitting of families. Her wildly popular book relied
on powerful imagery and touching pathos. “God
wrote it,’’ she explained in later years—a reminder

409

that the deeper sources of her antislavery senti-
ments lay in the evangelical religious crusades of
the Second Great Awakening.

The success of the novel at home and abroad
was sensational. Several hundred thousand copies
were published in the first year, and the totals soon
ran into the millions as the tale was translated into
more than a score of languages. It was also put on
the stage in “Tom shows” for lengthy runs. No other
novel in American history—perhaps in all history—
can be compared with it as a political force. To mil-
lions of people, it made slavery appear almost as
evil as it really was.

When Mrs. Stowe was introduced to President
Lincoln in 1862, he reportedly remarked with twin-
kling eyes, “So you’re the little woman who wrote
the book that made this great war.” The truth is that
Uncle Tom’s Cabin did help start the Civil War—and
win it. The South condemned that “vile wretch in
petticoats” when it learned that hundreds of thou-
sands of fellow Americans were reading and believ-

ing her “unfair” indictment. Mrs. Stowe had never
witnessed slavery at first hand in the Deep South,
but she had seen it briefly during a visit to Kentucky,
and she had lived for many years in Ohio, a center of
Underground Railroad activity.

Uncle Tom, endearing and enduring, left a pro-
found impression on the North. Uncounted thou-
sands of readers swore that henceforth they would
have nothing to do with the enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Law. The tale was devoured by mil-
lions of impressionable youths in the 1850s—some
of whom later became the Boys in Blue who volun-
teered to fight the Civil War through to its grim
finale. The memory of a beaten and dying Uncle
Tom helped sustain them in their determination to
wipe out the plague of slavery.

The novel was immensely popular abroad,
especially in Britain and France. Countless readers
wept over the kindly Tom and the angelic Eva, while
deploring the brutal Simon Legree. When the guns
in America finally began to boom, the common

410 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

people of England sensed that the triumph of the
North would spell the end of the black curse. The
governments in London and Paris seriously consid-
ered intervening in behalf of the South, but they
were sobered by the realization that many of their
own people, aroused by the “Tom-mania,” might
not support them.

Another trouble-brewing book appeared in
1857, five years after the debut of Uncle Tom. Titled
The Impending Crisis of the South, it was written by
Hinton R. Helper, a nonaristocratic white from

North Carolina. Hating both slavery and blacks, he
attempted to prove by an array of statistics that indi-
rectly the nonslaveholding whites were the ones
who suffered most from the millstone of slavery.
Unable to secure a publisher in the South, he finally
managed to find one in the North.

Helper’s influence was negligible among the
poorer whites to whom he addressed his message.
His book, with its “dirty allusions,” was banned in
the South, where book-burning parties were held.
But in the North, untold thousands of copies, many

Examining the Evidence 411

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin As works of fiction,
novels pose tricky problems
to historians, whose principal
objective is to get the factual
record straight. Works of the
imagination are notoriously un-
reliable as descriptions of real-
ity; and only rarely is it known
with any degree of certainty what
a reader might have felt when
confronting a particular fictional
passage or theme. Yet a novel like
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle
Tom’s Cabin had such an unar-
guably large impact on the
American (and worldwide) de-
bate over slavery that historians
have inevitably looked to it for
evidence of the mid-nineteenth-
century ideas and attitudes to
which Stowe appealed. The pas-
sage quoted here is especially
rich in such evidence—and even
offers an explanation for the logic
of the novel’s title. Stowe cleverly
aimed to mobilize not simply her readers’ sense
of injustice, but also their sentiments, on behalf
of the antislavery cause. Why is the cabin
described here so central to Stowe’s novel? What
sentimental values does the cabin represent?
What is the nature of the threat to those values?

What does it say about nineteenth-century
American culture that Stowe’s appeal to sentiment
succeeded so much more dramatically in exciting
antislavery passions than did the factual and
moral arguments of many other (mostly male)
abolitionists?

in condensed form, were distributed as campaign
literature by the Republicans. Southerners were fur-
ther embittered when they learned that their north-
ern brethren were spreading these wicked “lies.”
Thus did southerners, reacting much as they did to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, become increasingly unwilling
to sleep under the same federal roof with their hos-
tile Yankee bedfellows.

The North-South Contest for Kansas

The rolling plains of Kansas had meanwhile been
providing an example of the worst possible work-
ings of popular sovereignty, although admittedly
under abnormal conditions.

Newcomers who ventured into Kansas were a
motley lot. Most of the northerners were just ordi-
nary westward-moving pioneers in search of richer
lands beyond the sunset. But a small part of the
inflow was financed by groups of northern abolition-
ists or free-soilers. The most famous of these antislav-
ery organizations was the New England Emigrant Aid
Company, which sent about two thousand people to
the troubled area to forestall the South—and also to
make a profit. Shouting “Ho for Kansas,” many of
them carried the deadly new breech-loading Sharps
rifles, nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles” after the Rev-
erend Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
brother), who had helped raise money for their pur-
chase. Many of the Kansas-bound pioneers sang
Whittier’s marching song (1854):

We cross the prairie as of old
The pilgrims crossed the sea,
To make the West, as they the East,
The homestead of the free!

Southern spokesmen, now more than ordinarily
touchy, raised furious cries of betrayal. They had
supported the Kansas-Nebraska scheme of Douglas
with the unspoken understanding that Kansas
would become slave and Nebraska free. The north-
ern “Nebrascals,” allegedly by foul means, were now
apparently out to “abolitionize” both Kansas and
Nebraska.

A few southern hotheads, quick to respond in
kind, attempted to “assist” small groups of well-
armed slaveowners to Kansas. Some carried ban-
ners proclaiming,

Let Yankees tremble, abolitionists fall,
Our motto is, “Give Southern Rights to All.”

412 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

In the closing scenes of Harriet Beecher
Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s brutal master,
Simon Legree, orders the $1,200 slave savagely
beaten (to death) by two fellow slaves.
Through tears and blood, Tom exclaims,

“No! no! no! my soul an’t yours Mas’r! You
haven’t bought it—ye can’t buy it! It’s been
bought and paid for by One that is able to
keep it. No matter, no matter, you can’t
harm me!” “I can’t” said Legree, with a
sneer; “we’ll see—we’ll see! Here, Sambo,
Quimbo, give this dog such a breakin’ in as
he won’t get over this month!”

Bleeding Kansas,
1854–1860 “Enter every
election district in Kansas . . .
and vote at the point of a
bowie knife or revolver,” one
proslavery agitator exhorted
a Missouri crowd. Proslavery
Missouri senator David
Atchison declared that “there
are 1,100 men coming over
from Platte County to vote,
and if that ain’t enough we
can send 5,000—enough to
kill every Goddamned
abolitionist in the Territory.”

NEBRASKA TERRITORY

UTAH

TERR.

NEW MEXICO

TERRITORY

INDIAN TERRITORY

Oswatomie

Lawrence

Lecompton

Topeka

Kansas
City

Leavenworth

MISSOURI

Pottawatomie
Massacre
May 24,1856

M
issouri R.

Ka n s a s
R .

O
sa

g
e

R

.

Shawnee
Mission

KANSAS TERRITORY

Present-day �
Kansas

But planting blacks on Kansas soil was a losing
game. Slaves were valuable and volatile property,
and foolish indeed were owners who would take
them where bullets were flying and where the soil
might be voted free under popular sovereignty. The
census of 1860 found only 2 slaves among 107,000
souls in all Kansas Territory and only 15 in Nebraska.
There was much truth in the charge that the whole
quarrel over slavery in the territories revolved
around “an imaginary Negro in an impossible place.”

Crisis conditions in Kansas rapidly worsened.
When the day came in 1855 to elect members of the
first territorial legislature, proslavery “border ruffi-
ans” poured in from Missouri to vote early and
often. The slavery supporters triumphed and then
set up their own puppet government at Shawnee
Mission. The free-soilers, unable to stomach this
fraudulent conspiracy, established an extralegal
regime of their own in Topeka. The confused
Kansans thus had their choice between two govern-
ments—one based on fraud, the other on illegality.

Tension mounted as settlers also feuded over
conflicting land claims. The breaking point came in
1856 when a gang of proslavery raiders, alleging
provocation, shot up and burned a part of the free-
soil town of Lawrence. This outrage was but the
prelude to a bloodier tragedy.

Kansas in Convulsion

The fanatical figure of John Brown now stalked
upon the Kansas battlefield. Spare, gray-bearded,
and iron-willed, he was obsessively dedicated to the
abolitionist cause. The power of his glittering gray
eyes was such, so he claimed, that his stare could
force a dog or cat to slink out of a room. Becoming
involved in dubious dealings, including horse steal-
ing, he moved to Kansas from Ohio with a part of his
large family. Brooding over the recent attack on
Lawrence, “Old Brown” of Osawatomie led a band of
his followers to Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856.
There they literally hacked to pieces five surprised
men, presumed to be proslaveryites. This fiendish
butchery, clearly the product of a deranged mind,
besmirched the free-soil cause and brought vicious
retaliation from the proslavery forces.

Civil war in Kansas, which thus flared forth in
1856, continued intermittently until it merged with
the large-scale Civil War of 1861–1865. Altogether,

the Kansas conflict destroyed millions of dollars’
worth of property, paralyzed agriculture in certain
areas, and cost scores of lives.

Yet by 1857 Kansas had enough people, chiefly
free-soilers, to apply for statehood on a popular-
sovereignty basis. The proslavery forces, then in the
saddle, devised a tricky document known as the
Lecompton Constitution. The people were not
allowed to vote for or against the constitution as a
whole, but for the constitution either “with slavery”
or “with no slavery.” If they voted against slavery,
one of the remaining provisions of the constitution
would protect the owners of slaves already in
Kansas. So whatever the outcome, there would still
be black bondage in Kansas. Many free-soilers, infu-
riated by this ploy, boycotted the polls. Left to them-
selves, the proslaveryites approved the constitution
with slavery late in 1857.

The scene next shifted to Washington. President
Pierce had been succeeded by the no-less-pliable
James Buchanan, who was also strongly under

The Contest for Kansas 413

southern influence. Blind to sharp divisions within
his own Democratic party, Buchanan threw the
weight of his administration behind the notorious
Lecompton Constitution. But Senator Douglas, who
had championed true popular sovereignty, would
have none of this semipopular fraudulency. Deliber-
ately tossing away his strong support in the South
for the presidency, he fought courageously for fair
play and democratic principles. The outcome was a
compromise that, in effect, submitted the entire
Lecompton Constitution to a popular vote. The free-
soil voters thereupon thronged to the polls and
snowed it under. Kansas remained a territory until
1861, when the southern secessionists left Congress.

President Buchanan, by antagonizing the nu-
merous Douglas Democrats in the North, hopelessly
divided the once-powerful Democratic party. Until
then, it had been the only remaining national party,

for the Whigs were dead and the Republicans were
sectional. With the disruption of the Democrats came
the snapping of one of the last important strands in
the rope that was barely binding the Union together.

“Bully” Brooks and His Bludgeon

“Bleeding Kansas” also spattered blood on the floor
of the Senate in 1856. Senator Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts, a tall and imposing figure, was a
leading abolitionist—one of the few prominent in
political life. Highly educated but cold, humorless,
intolerant, and egotistical, he had made himself one
of the most disliked men in the Senate. Brooding
over the turbulent miscarriage of popular sover-
eignty, he delivered a blistering speech titled “The
Crime Against Kansas.” Sparing few epithets, he
condemned the proslavery men as “hirelings picked
from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civi-
lization.” He also referred insultingly to South Car-
olina and to its white-haired Senator Andrew Butler,
one of the best-liked members of the Senate.

Hot-tempered Congressman Preston S. Brooks
of South Carolina now took vengeance into his own
hands. Ordinarily gracious and gallant, he resented
the insults to his state and to its senator, a distant
cousin. His code of honor called for a duel, but in
the South one fought only with one’s social equals.
And had not the coarse language of the Yankee, who
probably would reject a challenge, dropped him to a
lower order? To Brooks, the only alternative was to
chastise the senator as one would beat an unruly
dog. On May 22, 1856, he approached Sumner, then
sitting at his Senate desk, and pounded the orator
with an eleven-ounce cane until it broke. The victim
fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor, while
several nearby senators refrained from interfering.

Sumner had been provocatively insulting, but
this counteroutrage put Brooks in the wrong. The
House of Representatives could not muster enough
votes to expel the South Carolinian, but he resigned
and was triumphantly reelected. Southern admirers
deluged Brooks with canes, some of them gold-
headed, to replace the one that had been broken.
The injuries to Sumner’s head and nervous system
were serious. He was forced to leave his seat for
three and a half years and go to Europe for treat-
ment that was both painful and costly. Meanwhile,
Massachusetts defiantly reelected him, leaving his

414 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

seat eloquently empty. Bleeding Sumner was thus
joined with bleeding Kansas as a political issue.

The free-soil North was mightily aroused against
the “uncouth” and “cowardly” “Bully” Brooks. Copies
of Sumner’s abusive speech, otherwise doomed to
obscurity, were sold by the tens of thousands. Every
blow that struck the senator doubtless made thou-
sands of Republican votes. The South, although not
unanimous in approving Brooks, was angered not
only because Sumner had made such an intemper-
ate speech but because it had been so extravagantly
applauded in the North.

The Sumner-Brooks clash and the ensuing reac-
tions revealed how dangerously inflamed passions
were becoming, North and South. It was ominous
that the cultured Sumner should have used the lan-
guage of a barroom bully and that the gentlemanly
Brooks should have employed the tactics and tools
of a thug. Emotion was displacing thought. The blows
rained on Sumner’s head were, broadly speaking,
among the first blows of the Civil War.

“Old Buck” Versus “The Pathfinder”

With bullets whining in Kansas, the Democrats
met in Cincinnati to nominate their presidential
standard-bearer of 1856. They shied away from both

the weak-kneed President Pierce and the dynamic
Douglas. Each was too indelibly tainted by the
Kansas-Nebraska Act. The delegates finally chose
James Buchanan (pronounced by many Buck-
anan), who was muscular, white-haired, and tall (six
feet), with a short neck and a protruding chin.
Because of an eye defect, he carried his head cocked
to one side. A well-to-do Pennsylvania lawyer, he
had been serving as minister to London during the
recent Kansas-Nebraska uproar. He was therefore
“Kansas-less,” and hence relatively enemyless. But
in a crisis that called for giants, “Old Buck”
Buchanan was mediocre, irresolute, and confused.

Delegates of the fast-growing Republican party
met in Philadelphia with bubbling enthusiasm.
“Higher Law” Seward was their most conspicuous
leader, and he probably would have arranged to win
the nomination had he been confident that this
was a “Republican year.” The final choice was Cap-
tain John C. Frémont, the so-called Pathfinder of
the West—a dashing but erratic explorer-soldier-
surveyor who was supposed to find the path to the
White House. The black-bearded and flashy young
adventurer was virtually without political experi-
ence, but like Buchanan he was not tarred with the
Kansas brush. The Republican platform came out
vigorously against the extension of slavery into the
territories, while the Democrats declared no less
emphatically for popular sovereignty.

An ugly dose of antiforeignism was injected into
the campaign, even though slavery extension
loomed largest. The recent influx of immigrants
from Ireland and Germany had alarmed “nativists,”
as many old-stock Protestants were called. They
organized the American party, known also as the
Know-Nothing party because of its secretiveness,

The Sumner-Brooks Clash and the Campaign of 1856 41

5

Regarding the Brooks assault on Sumner, one
of the more moderate antislavery journals
(Illinois State Journal) declared,

“Brooks and his Southern allies have
deliberately adopted the monstrous creed
that any man who dares to utter sentiments
which they deem wrong or unjust, shall be
brutally assailed. . . .”

One of the milder southern responses came
from the Petersburg ( Virginia) Intelligencer:

“Although Mr. Brooks ought to have selected
some other spot for the altercation than the
Senate chamber, if he had broken every bone
in Sumner’s carcass it would have been a just
retribution upon this slanderer of the South
and her individual citizens.”

Spiritual overtones developed in the Frémont
campaign, especially over slavery. The
Independent, a prominent religious journal,
saw in Frémont’s nomination “the good hand
of God.” As election day neared, it declared,

“Fellow-Christians! Remember it is for Christ,
for the nation, and for the world that you
vote at this election! Vote as you pray! Pray
as you vote!”

and in 1856 nominated the lackluster ex-president
Millard Fillmore. Antiforeign and anti-Catholic,
these superpatriots adopted the slogan “Americans
Must Rule America.” Remnants of the dying Whig
party likewise endorsed Fillmore, and they and the
Know-Nothings threatened to cut into Republican
strength.

Republicans fell in behind Frémont with the zeal
of crusaders. Shouting “We Follow the Pathfinder”
and “We Are Buck Hunting,” they organized glee
clubs, which sang (to the tune of the “Marseillaise”),

Arise, arise ye brave!
And let our war-cry be,
Free speech, free press, free soil, free men,
Fré-mont and victory!

“And free love,” sneered the Buchanan supporters
(“Buchaneers”).

Mudslinging bespattered both candidates. “Old
Fogy” Buchanan was assailed because he was a
bachelor: the fiancée of his youth had died after a
lovers’ quarrel. Frémont was reviled because of his
illegitimate birth, for his young mother had left her
elderly husband, a Virginia planter, to run away with
a French adventurer. In due season she gave birth to
John in Savannah, Georgia—further to shame the

South. More harmful to Frémont was the allegation,
which alienated many bigoted Know-Nothings and
other “nativists,” that he was a Roman Catholic.

The Electoral Fruits of 1856

A bland Buchanan, although polling less than a
majority of the popular vote, won handily. His tally
in the Electoral College was 174 to 114 for Frémont,
with Fillmore garnering 8. The popular vote was
1,832,955 for Buchanan to 1,339,932 for Frémont,
and 871,731 for Fillmore.

Why did the rousing Republicans go down to
defeat? Frémont lost much ground because of grave
doubts as to his honesty, capacity, and sound judg-
ment. Perhaps more damaging were the violent
threats of the southern “fire-eaters” that the election
of a sectional “Black Republican” would be a decla-
ration of war on them, forcing them to secede.
Many northerners, anxious to save both the Union
and their profitable business connections with
the South, were thus intimidated into voting for
Buchanan. Innate conservatism triumphed, as-
sisted by so-called southern bullyism.

416 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

It was probably fortunate for the Union that
secession and civil war did not come in 1856, follow-
ing a Republican victory. Frémont, an ill-balanced
and second-rate figure, was no Abraham Lincoln. And
in 1856 the North was more willing to let the South
depart in peace than in 1860. Dramatic events from
1856 to 1860 were to arouse hundreds of thousands of
still-apathetic northerners to a fighting pitch.

Yet the Republicans in 1856 could rightfully
claim a “victorious defeat.” The new party—a mere
two-year-old toddler—had made an astonishing
showing against the well-oiled Democratic ma-
chine. Whittier exulted:

Then sound again the bugles,
Call the muster-roll anew;

If months have well-nigh won the field,
What may not four years do?

The election of 1856 cast a long shadow for-
ward, and politicians, North and South, peered anx-
iously toward 1860.

The Dred Scott Bombshell

The Dred Scott decision, handed down by the
Supreme Court on March 6, 1857, abruptly ended
the two-day presidential honeymoon of the unlucky
bachelor, James Buchanan. This pronouncement
was one of the opening paper-gun blasts of the Civil
War.

Basically, the case was simple. Dred Scott, a
black slave, had lived with his master for five years
in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Backed by inter-
ested abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the basis
of his long residence on free soil.

The Supreme Court proceeded to twist a simple
legal case into a complex political issue. It ruled, not
surprisingly, that Dred Scott was a black slave and
not a citizen, and hence could not sue in federal
courts.* The tribunal could then have thrown out
the case on these technical grounds alone. But a
majority decided to go further, under the leadership
of emaciated Chief Justice Taney from the slave state
of Maryland. A sweeping judgment on the larger
issue of slavery in the territories seemed desirable,
particularly to forestall arguments by two free-soil
justices who were preparing dissenting opinions.
The prosouthern majority evidently hoped in this
way to lay the odious question to rest.

Taney’s thunderclap rocked the free-soilers back
on their heels. A majority of the Court decreed that
because a slave was private property, he or she could
be taken into any territory and legally held there in
slavery. The reasoning was that the Fifth Amend-
ment clearly forbade Congress to deprive people
of their property without due process of law. The
Court, to be consistent, went further. The Missouri

The Dred Scott Decision 417

*This part of the ruling, denying blacks their citizenship, seri-
ously menaced the precarious position of the South’s quarter-
million free blacks.

WASHINGTON

TERRITORY

OREGON
TERRITORY

CALIF.
4

UTAH
TERRITORY

UNORGANIZED

TERR.

KANSAS
TERRITORY

MICH.
6

N.Y.
35

MINNESOTA
TERRITORY

IOWA
4

NEBRASKA

TERRITORY

MO.
9

ARK.

4

LA.

6

TEXAS

4

NEW MEXICO
TERRITORY

MISS.

7

ALA.
9

GA.
10

FLA.

3

TENN. 12

N.C.

10

S.C.

8

VA.

15

PA.
27

OHIO
23IND.

13

ILL.
11

WISC.
5

KY.
12

ME.
8

N.H.
5

VT.
5

MASS.
13

R.I. 4
CONN. 6

N.J. 7
DEL. 3
MD. 8

Buchanan—Democratic
Frémont—Republican
Fillmore—American

Presidential Election of 1856
(electoral vote by state) The fateful
split of 1860 was foreshadowed.
The regional polarization in 1856,
shown here, was to be even sharper
four years later, as illustrated by the
maps on page 426.

Compromise, banning slavery north of 36° 30′, had
been repealed three years earlier by the Kansas-
Nebraska Act. But its spirit was still venerated in the
North. Now the Court ruled that the Compromise of
1820 had been unconstitutional all along: Congress
had no power to ban slavery from the territories,
regardless even of what the territorial legislatures
themselves might want.

Southerners were delighted with this unex-
pected victory. Champions of popular sovereignty
were aghast, including Senator Douglas and a host
of northern Democrats. Another lethal wedge was
thus driven between the northern and southern
wings of the once-united Democratic party.

Foes of slavery extension, especially the Repub-
licans, were infuriated by the Dred Scott setback.
Their chief rallying cry had been the banishing of
bondage from the territories. They now insisted that
the ruling of the Court was merely an opinion, not a
decision, and no more binding than the views of a
“southern debating society.” Republican defiance of
the exalted tribunal was intensified by an awareness
that a majority of its members were southerners and
by the conviction that it had debased itself—“sullied
the ermine”—by wallowing in the gutter of politics.

Southerners in turn were inflamed by all this
defiance. They began to wonder anew how much
longer they could remain joined to a section that
refused to honor the Supreme Court, to say nothing
of the constitutional compact that had established it.

The Financial Crash of 1857

Bitterness caused by the Dred Scott decision was
deepened by hard times, which dampened a period
of feverish prosperity. Late in 1857 a panic burst
about Buchanan’s harassed head. The storm was not
so bad economically as the panic of 1837, but psy-
chologically it was probably the worst of the nine-
teenth century.

418 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

The decision of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney
(1777–1864) in the case of Dred Scott referred
to the status of slaves when the Constitution
was adopted:

“They had for more than a century before
been regarded as beings of an inferior order;
and altogether unfit to associate with the
white race, either in social or political
relations; and so far inferior that they had no
rights which the white man was bound to
respect. . . . This opinion was at that time
fixed and universal in the civilized portion of
the white race,”

Taney’s statement accurately described
historical attitudes, but it deeply offended
antislaveryites when applied to conditions in
1857.

What caused the crash? Inpouring California
gold played its part by helping to inflate the cur-
rency. The demands of the Crimean War had over-
stimulated the growing of grain, while frenzied
speculation in land and railroads had further ripped
the economic fabric. When the collapse came, over
five thousand businesses failed within a year.
Unemployment, accompanied by hunger meetings
in urban areas, was widespread. “Bread or Death”
stated one desperate slogan.

The North, including its grain growers, was
hardest hit. The South, enjoying favorable cotton
prices abroad, rode out the storm with flying colors.
Panic conditions seemed further proof that cotton
was king and that its economic kingdom was
stronger than that of the North. This fatal delusion
helped drive the overconfident southerners closer
to a shooting showdown.

Financial distress in the North, especially in
agriculture, gave a new vigor to the demand for free
farms of 160 acres from the public domain. For sev-
eral decades interested groups had been urging the
federal government to abandon its ancient policy of
selling the land for revenue. Instead, the argument
ran, acreage should be given outright to the sturdy
pioneers as a reward for risking health and life to
develop it.

A scheme to make outright gifts of homesteads
encountered two-pronged opposition. Eastern
industrialists had long been unfriendly to free land;
some of them feared that their underpaid workers
would be drained off to the West. The South was
even more bitterly opposed, partly because gang-
labor slavery could not flourish on a mere 160 acres.
Free farms would merely fill up the territories more
rapidly with free-soilers and further tip the political
balance against the South. In 1860, after years of
debate, Congress finally passed a homestead act—
one that made public lands available at a nominal
sum of twenty-five cents an acre. But the homestead
act was stabbed to death by the veto pen of Presi-
dent Buchanan, near whose elbow sat leading
southern sympathizers.

The panic of 1857 also created a clamor for
higher tariff rates. Several months before the crash,
Congress, embarrassed by a large Treasury surplus,
had enacted the Tariff of 1857. The new law,
responding to pressures from the South, reduced
duties to about 20 percent on dutiable goods—the
lowest point since the War of 1812. Hardly had the
revised rates been placed on the books when finan-
cial misery descended like a black pall. Northern

manufacturers, many of them Republicans, noisily
blamed their misfortunes on the low tariff. As the
surplus melted away in the Treasury, industrialists
in the North pointed to the need for higher duties.
But what really concerned them was their desire for
increased protection. Thus the panic of 1857 gave
the Republicans two surefire economic issues for
the election of 1860: protection for the unprotected
and farms for the farmless.

An Illinois Rail-Splitter Emerges

The Illinois senatorial election of 1858 now claimed
the national spotlight. Senator Douglas’s term was
about to expire, and the Republicans decided to run
against him a rustic Springfield lawyer, one Abra-
ham Lincoln. The Republican candidate—6 feet 4
inches in height and 180 pounds in weight—pre-
sented an awkward but arresting figure. Lincoln’s
legs, arms, and neck were grotesquely long; his head
was crowned by coarse, black, and unruly hair; and
his face was sad, sunken, and weather-beaten.

The Panic of 1857 419

Lincoln was no silver-spoon child of the elite.
Born in 1809 in a Kentucky log cabin to impover-
ished parents, he attended a frontier school for not
more than a year; being an avid reader, he was
mainly self-educated. All his life he said, “git,” “thar,”
and “heered.” Although narrow-chested and some-
what stoop-shouldered, he shone in his frontier
community as a wrestler and weight lifter, and spent
some time, among other pioneering pursuits, as a
splitter of logs for fence rails. A superb teller of
earthy and amusing stories, he would oddly enough
plunge into protracted periods of melancholy.

Lincoln’s private and professional life was not
especially noteworthy. He married “above himself”
socially, into the influential Todd family of Ken-
tucky; and the temperamental outbursts of his high-
strung wife, known by her enemies as the “she wolf,”
helped to school him in patience and forbearance.
After reading a little law, he gradually emerged as
one of the dozen or so better-known trial lawyers
in Illinois, although still accustomed to carrying
important papers in his stovepipe hat. He was
widely referred to as “Honest Abe,” partly because
he would refuse cases that he had to suspend his
conscience to defend.

The rise of Lincoln as a political figure was less
than rocketlike. After making his mark in the Illinois
legislature as a Whig politician of the logrolling
variety, he served one undistinguished term in Con-
gress, 1847–1849. Until 1854, when he was forty-five
years of age, he had done nothing to establish a
claim to statesmanship. But the passage of the
Kansas-Nebraska Act in that year lighted within him
unexpected fires. After mounting the Republican
bandwagon, he emerged as one of the foremost
politicians and orators of the Northwest. At the
Philadelphia convention of 1856, where John Fré-
mont was nominated, Lincoln actually received 110
votes for the vice-presidential nomination.

The Great Debate:
Lincoln Versus Douglas

Lincoln, as Republican nominee for the Senate seat,
boldly challenged Douglas to a series of joint
debates. This was a rash act, because the stumpy
senator was probably the nation’s most devastating
debater. Douglas promptly accepted Lincoln’s chal-
lenge, and seven meetings were arranged from
August to October 1858.

At first glance the two contestants seemed ill
matched. The well-groomed and polished Douglas,
with bearlike figure and bullhorn voice, presented a
striking contrast to the lanky Lincoln, with his baggy
clothes and unshined shoes. Moreover, “Old Abe,”
as he was called in both affection and derision, had
a piercing, high-pitched voice and was often ill at
ease when he began to speak. But as he threw him-
self into an argument, he seemed to grow in height,
while his glowing eyes lighted up a rugged face. He
relied on logic rather than on table-thumping.

The most famous debate came at Freeport, Illi-
nois, where Lincoln nearly impaled his opponent on
the horns of a dilemma. Suppose, he queried, the
people of a territory should vote slavery down? The
Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had

420 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

In 1832, when Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
became a candidate for the Illinois
legislature, he delivered a speech at a
political gathering:

“I presume you all know who I am. I am
humble Abraham Lincoln. I have been
solicited by many friends to become a
candidate for the Legislature. My [Whiggish]
politics are short and sweet, like the old
woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national
bank. I am in favor of the internal-
improvement system, and a high protective
tariff. These are my sentiments and political
principles. If elected, I shall be thankful; if
not, it will be all the same.”

He was elected two years later.

decreed that they could not. Who would prevail, the
Court or the people?

Legend to the contrary, Douglas and some south-
erners had already publicly answered the Freeport
question. The “Little Giant” therefore did not hesitate
to meet the issue head-on, honestly and consistently.
His reply to Lincoln became known as the “Freeport
Doctrine.” No matter how the Supreme Court ruled,
Douglas argued, slavery would stay down if the peo-
ple voted it down. Laws to protect slavery would have
to be passed by the territorial legislatures. These
would not be forthcoming in the absence of popular
approval, and black bondage would soon disappear.
Douglas, in truth, had American history on his side.
Where public opinion does not support the federal
government, as in the case of Jefferson’s embargo, the
law is almost impossible to enforce.

The upshot was that Douglas defeated Lincoln
for the Senate seat. The “Little Giant’s” loyalty to
popular sovereignty, which still had a powerful
appeal in Illinois, probably was decisive. Senators
were then chosen by state legislatures; and in the
general election that followed the debates, more pro-
Douglas members were elected than pro-Lincoln
members. Yet thanks to inequitable apportionment,

The Rise of Lincoln 421

Lincoln expressed his views on the relation of
the black and white races in 1858, in his first
debate with Stephen A. Douglas:

“I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor
of the race to which I belong, having the
superior position. I have never said anything
to the contrary, but I hold that notwith-
standing all this, there is no reason in the
world why the negro is not entitled to all the
natural rights enumerated in the Declaration
of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as
much entitled to those rights as the white
man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not
my equal in many respects—certainly not in
color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual
endowment. But in the right to eat the
bread, without leave of anybody else, which
his own hand earns, he is my equal and the
equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of
every living man.”

the districts carried by Douglas supporters repre-
sented a smaller population than those carried by
Lincoln supporters. “Honest Abe” thus won a clear
moral victory.

Lincoln possibly was playing for larger stakes
than just the senatorship. Although defeated, he
had shambled into the national limelight in com-
pany with the most prominent northern politicians.
Newspapers in the East published detailed accounts
of the debates, and Lincoln began to emerge as a
potential Republican nominee for president. But
Douglas, in winning Illinois, hurt his own chances
of winning the presidency, while further splitting
his splintering party. After his opposition to the
Lecompton Constitution for Kansas and his further
defiance of the Supreme Court at Freeport, south-
ern Democrats were determined to break up the
party (and the Union) rather than accept him. The
Lincoln-Douglas debate platform thus proved to be
one of the preliminary battlefields of the Civil War.

John Brown: Murderer or Martyr?

The gaunt, grim figure of John Brown of bleeding
Kansas infamy now appeared again in an even more
terrible way. His crackbrained scheme was to invade
the South secretly with a handful of followers, call
upon the slaves to rise, furnish them with arms, and
establish a kind of black free state as a sanctuary.
Brown secured several thousand dollars for firearms
from northern abolitionists and finally arrived in
hilly western Virginia with some twenty men,
including several blacks. At scenic Harpers Ferry, he
seized the federal arsenal in October 1859, inciden-
tally killing seven innocent people, including a free
black, and injuring ten or so more. But the slaves,
largely ignorant of Brown’s strike, failed to rise, and
the wounded Brown and the remnants of his tiny
band were quickly captured by U.S. Marines under
the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee.
Ironically, within two years Lee became the preemi-
nent general in the Confederate army.

“Old Brown” was convicted of murder and trea-
son after a hasty but legal trial. His presumed insan-
ity was supported by affidavits from seventeen
friends and relatives, who were trying to save his
neck. Actually thirteen of his near relations were
regarded as insane, including his mother and
grandmother. Governor Wise of Virginia would have

been most wise, so his critics say, if he had only
clapped the culprit into a lunatic asylum.

But Brown—“God’s angry man”—was given
every opportunity to pose and to enjoy martyrdom.
Though probably of unsound mind, he was clever
enough to see that he was worth much more to the
abolitionist cause dangling from a rope than in any
other way. His demeanor during the trial was digni-
fied and courageous, his last words (“this is a beauti-
ful country”) were to become legendary, and he
marched up the scaffold steps without flinching. His
conduct was so exemplary, his devotion to freedom
so inflexible, that he took on an exalted character,
however deplorable his previous record may have
been. So the hangman’s trap was sprung, and Brown
plunged not into oblivion but into world fame. A
memorable marching song of the impending Civil
War ran,

John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave,
His soul is marching on.

422 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

Upon hearing of John Brown’s execution,
escaped slave and abolitionist Harriet
Tubman (c. 1820–1913) paid him the highest
tribute for his self-sacrifice:

“I’ve been studying, and studying upon it, and
its clar to me, it wasn’t John Brown that died
on that gallows. When I think how he gave
up his life for our people, and how he never
flinched, but was so brave to the end; its clar
to me it wasn’t mortal man, it was God in
him.”

Not all opponents of slavery, however, shared
Tubman’s reverence for Brown. Republican
presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln
dismissed Brown as deluded:

“[The Brown] affair, in its philosophy,
corresponds with the many attempts,
related in history, at the assassination of
kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods
over the oppression of a people till he fancies
himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate
them. He ventures the attempt, which ends
in little else than his own execution.”

The effects of Harpers Ferry were calamitous.
In the eyes of the South, already embittered,
“Osawatomie Brown” was a wholesale murderer and
an apostle of treason. Many southerners asked how
they could possibly remain in the Union while
a “murderous gang of abolitionists” were financing
armed bands to “Brown” them. Moderate northern-
ers, including Republican leaders, openly deplored
this mad exploit. But the South naturally concluded
that the violent abolitionist view was shared by
the entire North, dominated by “Brown-loving”
Republicans.

Abolitionists and other ardent free-soilers were
infuriated by Brown’s execution. Many of them were
ignorant of his bloody past and his even more
bloody purposes, and they were outraged because
the Virginians had hanged so earnest a reformer
who was working for so righteous a cause. On the
day of his execution, free-soil centers in the North

tolled bells, fired guns, lowered flags, and held
rallies. Some spoke of “Saint John” Brown, and the
serene Ralph Waldo Emerson compared the new
martyr-hero with Jesus. The gallows became a cross.
E. C. Stedman wrote,

And Old Brown,
Osawatomie Brown,
May trouble you more than ever,

when you’ve nailed his coffin down!

The ghost of the martyred Brown would not be laid
to rest.

John Brown’s Raid 423

The Disruption of the Democrats

Beyond question the presidential election of 1860
was the most fateful in American history. On it hung
the issue of peace or civil war.

Deeply divided, the Democrats met in Charles-
ton, South Carolina, with Douglas the leading can-
didate of the northern wing of the party. But the
southern “fire-eaters” regarded him as a traitor, as a
result of his unpopular stand on the Lecompton
Constitution and the Freeport Doctrine. After a bit-
ter wrangle over the platform, the delegates from
most of the cotton states walked out. When the
remainder could not scrape together the necessary
two-thirds vote for Douglas, the entire body dis-
solved. The first tragic secession was the secession
of southerners from the Democratic National Con-
vention. Departure became habit-forming.

The Democrats tried again in Baltimore. This
time the Douglas Democrats, chiefly from the
North, were firmly in the saddle. Many of the
cotton-state delegates again took a walk, and
the rest of the convention enthusiastically nomi-
nated their hero. The platform came out squarely
for popular sovereignty and, as a sop to the South,

against obstruction of the Fugitive Slave Law by the
states.

Angered southern Democrats promptly organ-
ized a rival convention in Baltimore, in which many
of the northern states were unrepresented. They
selected as their leader the stern-jawed vice presi-
dent, John C. Breckinridge, a man of moderate

424 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

Alexander H. Stephens (1812–1883), destined
the next year to become vice president of the
new Confederacy, wrote privately in 1860 of
the anti-Douglas Democrats who seceded
from the Charleston convention:

“The seceders intended from the beginning to
rule or ruin; and when they find they cannot
rule, they will then ruin. They have about
enough power for this purpose; not much
more; and I doubt not but they will use it.
Envy, hate, jealousy, spite . . . will make
devils of men. The secession movement was
instigated by nothing but bad passions.”

views from the border state of Kentucky. The plat-
form favored the extension of slavery into the terri-
tories and the annexation of slave-populated Cuba.

A middle-of-the-road group, fearing for the
Union, hastily organized the Constitutional Union
party, sneered at as the “Do Nothing” or “Old Gen-
tleman’s” party. It consisted mainly of former Whigs
and Know-Nothings, a veritable “gathering of gray-
beards.” Desperately anxious to elect a compromise
candidate, they met in Baltimore and nominated for
the presidency John Bell of Tennessee. They went
into battle ringing hand bells for Bell and waving
handbills for “The Union, the Constitution, and the
Enforcement of the Laws.”

A Rail-Splitter Splits the Union

Elated Republicans were presented with a heaven-
sent opportunity. Scenting victory in the breeze as
their opponents split hopelessly, they gathered in
Chicago in a huge, boxlike wooden structure called
the Wigwam. William H. Seward was by far the best
known of the contenders. But his radical utterances,
including his “irrepressible conflict” speech at
Rochester in 1858, had ruined his prospects.* His
numerous enemies coined the slogan “Success
Rather Than Seward.” Lincoln, the favorite son of
Illinois, was definitely a “Mr. Second Best,” but he
was a stronger candidate because he had made
fewer enemies. Overtaking Seward on the third
ballot, he was nominated amid scenes of the wildest
excitement.

The Republican platform had a seductive
appeal for just about every important nonsouthern

group: for the free-soilers, nonextension of slavery;
for the northern manufacturers, a protective tariff;
for the immigrants, no abridgment of rights; for the
Northwest, a Pacific railroad; for the West, internal
improvements at federal expense; and for the farm-
ers, free homesteads from the public domain. Allur-
ing slogans included “Vote Yourselves a Farm” and
“Land for the Landless.”

Southern secessionists promptly served notice
that the election of the “baboon” Lincoln—the “abo-
litionist” rail-splitter—would split the Union. In
fact, “Honest Abe,” though hating slavery, was no
outright abolitionist. As late as February 1865, he
was inclined to favor cash compensation to the
owners of freed slaves. But for the time being, he
saw fit, perhaps mistakenly, to issue no statements
to quiet southern fears. He had already put himself
on record; and fresh statements might stir up fresh
antagonisms.

As the election campaign ground noisily for-
ward, Lincoln enthusiasts staged roaring rallies and
parades, complete with pitch-dripping torches and
oilskin capes. They extolled “High Old Abe,” the
“Woodchopper of the West,” and the “Little Giant
Killer,” while groaning dismally for “Poor Little
Doug.” Enthusiastic “Little Giants” and “Little
Dougs” retorted with “We want a statesman, not a
rail-splitter, as President.” Douglas himself waged a
vigorous speaking campaign, even in the South, and
threatened to put the hemp with his own hands
around the neck of the first secessionist.

Deeply Divided Democrats 425

Election of 1860

Popular Percentage of
Candidate Vote Popular Vote Electoral Vote

Lincoln 1,865,593 39.79% 180 (every vote of the free states
except for 3 of New Jersey’s 7
votes)

Douglas 1,382,713 29.40 12 (only Missouri and 3 of New
Jersey’s 7 votes)

Breckinridge 848,356 18.20 72 (all the cotton states)
Bell 592,906 12.61 39 (Virginia, Kentucky,

Tennessee)

*Seward had referred to an “irrepressible conflict” between slav-
ery and freedom, though not necessarily a bloody one.

The returns, breathlessly awaited, proclaimed a
sweeping victory for Lincoln (see the table on p. 425).

The Electoral Upheaval of 1860

Awkward “Abe” Lincoln had run a curious race. To a
greater degree than any other holder of the nation’s
highest office (except John Quincy Adams), he was a
minority president. Sixty percent of the voters pre-
ferred some other candidate. He was also a sectional
president, for in ten southern states, where he was
not allowed on the ballot, he polled no popular

votes. The election of 1860 was virtually two elec-
tions: one in the North, the other in the South.
South Carolinians rejoiced over Lincoln’s victory;
they now had their excuse to secede. In winning the
North, the “rail-splitter” had split off the South.

Douglas, though scraping together only twelve
electoral votes, made an impressive showing. Boldly
breaking with tradition, he campaigned energeti-
cally for himself. (Presidential candidates customar-
ily maintained a dignified silence.) He drew
important strength from all sections and ranked a
fairly close second in the popular-vote column. In
fact, the Douglas Democrats and the Breckinridge

426 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

WASHINGTON
TERR.
NEBRASKA
TERR.
UNORGANIZED
TERR.

UNORGANIZED
TERR.

KANSAS
TERR.

NEW MEXICO
TERR.
UTAH
TERR.

ORE.

3

CALIF.
4

TEX.

4

LA.
6
ARK.
4
MO.
9
IOWA
4

MINN.
4 WIS.

5
ILL.
11

IND.
13

MICH.
6

OHIO
23

KY.
12
TENN. 12
MISS.
7
ALA.
9
GA.
10

FLA.
3

S.C.
8
N.C.
10
VA.
15

PA.
27

N.Y.
35
ME.
8

MD.
8

DEL. 3
N.J. 4 & 3

CONN. 6
R.I. 4

MASS. 13

N.H.
5

VT.
5

WASHINGTON
TERR.
NEBRASKA
TERR.
UNORGANIZED
TERR.
UNORGANIZED
TERR.
KANSAS
TERR.
NEW MEXICO
TERR.
UTAH
TERR.

Lincoln—Republican

Breckinridge—Democratic

Bell—Constitutional Union

Douglas—Democratic

No votes cast

Presidential Election of 1860
(electoral vote by state)
It is a surprising fact that Lincoln,
often rated among the greatest
presidents, ranks near the bottom
in percentage of popular votes. In all
the eleven states that seceded, he
received only a scattering of one
state’s votes—about 1.5 percent
in Virginia.

Presidential Election of 1860
(showing popular vote by county)
The vote by county for Lincoln was
virtually all cast in the North. The
northern Democrat, Douglas, was
also nearly shut out in the South,
which divided its votes between
Breckinridge and Bell. (Note that
only citizens of states could vote;
inhabitants of territories could not.)

Democrats together amassed 365,476 more votes
than did Lincoln.

A myth persists that if the Democrats had only
united behind Douglas, they would have tri-
umphed. Yet the cold figures tell a different story.
Even if the “Little Giant” had received all the elec-
toral votes cast for all three of Lincoln’s opponents,
the “rail-splitter” would have won, 169 to 134
instead of 180 to 123. Lincoln still would have car-
ried the populous states of the North and the North-
west. On the other hand, if the Democrats had not
broken up, they could have entered the campaign
with higher enthusiasm and better organization and
might have won.

Significantly, the verdict of the ballot box did not
indicate a strong sentiment for secession. Breckin-
ridge, while favoring the extension of slavery, was no
disunionist. Although the candidate of the “fire-
eaters,” in the slave states he polled fewer votes than
the combined strength of his opponents, Douglas
and Bell. He even failed to carry his own Kentucky.

Yet the South, despite its electoral defeat, was
not badly off. It still had a five-to-four majority on
the Supreme Court. Although the Republicans had
elected Lincoln, they controlled neither the Senate
nor the House of Representatives. The federal gov-
ernment could not touch slavery in those states
where it existed except by a constitutional amend-
ment, and such an amendment could be defeated
by one-fourth of the states. The fifteen slave states

numbered nearly one-half of the total—a fact not
fully appreciated by southern firebrands.

The Secessionist Exodus

But a tragic chain reaction of secession now began
to erupt. South Carolina, which had threatened to
go out if the “sectional” Lincoln came in, was as
good as its word. Four days after the election of the
“Illinois baboon” by “insulting” majorities, its legis-
lature voted unanimously to call a special conven-
tion. Meeting at Charleston in December 1860,
South Carolina unanimously voted to secede. Dur-
ing the next six weeks, six other states of the lower
South, though somewhat less united, followed the
leader over the precipice: Alabama, Mississippi,
Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Four more
were to join them later, bringing the total to eleven.

With the eyes of destiny upon them, the sev-
en seceders, formally meeting at Montgomery,
Alabama, in February 1861, created a government
known as the Confederate States of America. As
their president they chose Jefferson Davis, a digni-
fied and austere recent member of the U.S. Senate
from Mississippi. He was a West Pointer and a for-
mer cabinet member with wide military and admin-
istrative experience; but he suffered from chronic

The Election of Lincoln 427

Southern Opposition to Secession,
1860–1861 (showing vote by county)
This county vote shows the opposition
of the antiplanter, antislavery mountain
whites in the Appalachian region. There
was also considerable resistance to
secession in Texas, where Governor
Sam Houston, who led the Unionists,
was deposed by secessionists.

Against secession

For secession

Conventions divided

No returns available

TEX.
ARK.
LA.
MISS.

TENN.

VA.
N.C.
S.C.

GA.
ALA.

FLA.

ill-health, as well as from a frustrated ambition to be
a Napoleonic strategist.

The crisis, already critical enough, was deep-
ened by the “lame duck”* interlude. Lincoln,
although elected president in November 1860,
could not take office until four months later, March
4, 1861. During this period of protracted uncer-
tainty, when he was still a private citizen in Illinois,
seven of the eleven deserting states pulled out of the
Union.

President Buchanan, the aging incumbent, has
been blamed for not holding the seceders in the
Union by sheer force—for wringing his hands
instead of secessionist necks. Never a vigorous man
and habitually conservative, he was now nearly sev-
enty, and although devoted to the Union, he was
surrounded by prosouthern advisers. As an able
lawyer wedded to the Constitution, he did not
believe that the southern states could legally secede.
Yet he could find no authority in the Constitution
for stopping them with guns.

“Oh for one hour of Jackson!” cried the advo-
cates of strong-arm tactics. But “Old Buck”
Buchanan was not “Old Hickory,” and he was faced
with a far more complex and serious problem. One
important reason why he did not resort to force was
that the tiny standing army of some fifteen thou-
sand men, then widely scattered, was urgently
needed to control the Indians in the West. Public
opinion in the North, at that time, was far from will-
ing to unsheathe the sword. Fighting would merely
shatter all prospects of adjustment, and until the
guns began to boom, there was still a flickering
hope of reconciliation rather than a contested
divorce. The weakness lay not so much in Buchanan
as in the Constitution and in the Union itself. Ironi-
cally, when Lincoln became president in March, he

428 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

*The “lame duck” period was shortened to ten weeks in 1933 by
the Twentieth Amendment (see the Appendix).

Three days after Lincoln’s election, Horace
Greeley’s influential New York Tribune
(November 9, 1860) declared,

“If the cotton States shall decide that they
can do better out of the Union than in it, we
insist on letting them go in peace. The right
to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it
exists nevertheless. . . . Whenever a consid-
erable section of our Union shall deliberately
resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive
measures designed to keep it in. We hope
never to live in a republic, whereof one
section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”

After the secession movement got well under
way, Greeley’s Tribune changed its tune.

essentially continued Buchanan’s wait-and-see
policy.

The Collapse of Compromise

Impending bloodshed spurred final and frantic
attempts at compromise—in the American tradi-
tion. The most promising of these efforts was spon-
sored by Senator James Henry Crittenden of
Kentucky, on whose shoulders had fallen the mantle
of a fellow Kentuckian, Henry Clay.

The proposed Crittenden amendments to the
Constitution were designed to appease the South.
Slavery in the territories was to be prohibited north
of 36° 30′, but south of that line it was to be given
federal protection in all territories existing or “here-
after to be acquired” (such as Cuba). Future states,
north or south of 36° 30′, could come into the Union
with or without slavery, as they should choose. In
short, the slavery supporters were to be guaranteed
full rights in the southern territories, as long as they
were territories, regardless of the wishes of the
majority under popular sovereignty. Federal protec-
tion in a territory south of 36° 30′ might conceivably,
though improbably, turn the entire area perma-
nently to slavery.

Lincoln flatly rejected the Crittenden scheme,
which offered some slight prospect of success, and
all hope of compromise evaporated. For this refusal
he must bear a heavy responsibility. Yet he had been
elected on a platform that opposed the extension of
slavery, and he felt that as a matter of principle, he
could not afford to yield, even though gains for slav-
ery in the territories might be only temporary.

The Failed Crittenden Compromise 429

NEBRASKA�
TERR.

UNORG.�
TERR.

KANSAS�
TERR.

UNORG.�
TERR.NEW MEXICO�

TERR.

UTAH�
TERR.

WASHINGTON�
TERR.

ORE.

CALIF.�
�

TEXAS

36°30′
36°30′

Slavery prohibited during
territorial status, thereby
virtually assuring free-soil states

Slavery protected during
territorial status; states
might be either slave or free

Proposed Crittenden Compromise,
1860 Stephen A. Douglas claimed that
“if the Crittenden proposition could have
been passed early in the session [of
Congress], it would have saved all the
States, except South Carolina.” But
Crittenden’s proposal was doomed—
Lincoln opposed it, and Republicans
cast not a single vote in its favor.

One reason why the Crittenden Compromise
failed in December 1860 was the prevalence
of an attitude reflected in a private letter of
Senator James Henry Hammond (1807–1864)
of South Carolina on April 19:

“I firmly believe that the slave-holding South is
now the controlling power of the world—that
no other power would face us in hostility.
Cotton, rice, tobacco, and naval stores
command the world; and we have sense to
know it, and are sufficiently Teutonic to carry
it out successfully. The North without us
would be a motherless calf, bleating about,
and die of mange and starvation.”

Larger gains might come later in Cuba and Mexico.
Crittenden’s proposal, said Lincoln, “would amount
to a perpetual covenant of war against every people,
tribe, and state owning a foot of land between here
and Tierra del Fuego.”

As for the supposedly spineless “Old Fogy”
Buchanan, how could he have prevented the Civil
War by starting a civil war? No one has yet come up
with a satisfactory answer. If he had used force on
South Carolina in December 1860, the fighting
almost certainly would have erupted three months
sooner than it did, and under less favorable circum-
stances for the Union. The North would have
appeared as the heavy-handed aggressor. And the
crucial Border States, so vital to the Union, probably
would have been driven into the arms of their “way-
ward sisters.”

Farewell to Union

Secessionists who parted company with their sister
states left for a number of avowed reasons, mostly
relating in some way to slavery. They were alarmed
by the inexorable tipping of the political balance
against them—“the despotic majority of numbers.”
The “crime” of the North, observed James Russell
Lowell, was the census returns. Southerners were
also dismayed by the triumph of the new sectional
Republican party, which seemed to threaten their
rights as a slaveholding minority. They were weary
of free-soil criticism, abolitionist nagging, and
northern interference, ranging from the Under-
ground Railroad to John Brown’s raid. “All we ask is
to be let alone,” declared Confederate president Jef-
ferson Davis in an early message to his congress.

430 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

Many southerners supported secession because
they felt sure that their departure would be unop-
posed, despite “Yankee yawp” to the contrary. They
were confident that the clodhopping and codfishing
Yankee would not or could not fight. They believed
that northern manufacturers and bankers, so heav-
ily dependent on southern cotton and markets,
would not dare to cut their own economic throats
with their own unionist swords. But should war
come, the immense debt owed to northern creditors
by the South—happy thought—could be promptly
repudiated, as it later was.

Southern leaders regarded secession as a
golden opportunity to cast aside their generations
of “vassalage” to the North. An independent Dix-
ieland could develop its own banking and shipping
and trade directly with Europe. The low Tariff of
1857, passed largely by southern votes, was not in
itself menacing. But who could tell when the
“greedy” Republicans would win control of Con-
gress and drive through their own oppressive pro-
tective tariff? For decades this fundamental friction
had pitted the North, with its manufacturing plants,
against the South, with its agricultural exports.

Worldwide impulses of nationalism—then stir-
ring in Italy, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere—were
fermenting in the South. This huge area, with its dis-
tinctive culture, was not so much a section as a sub-
nation. It could not view with complacency the
possibility of being lorded over, then or later, by
what it regarded as a hostile nation of northerners.

The principles of self-determination—of the
Declaration of Independence—seemed to many

southerners to apply perfectly to them. Few, if any,
of the seceders felt that they were doing anything
wrong or immoral. The thirteen original states had
voluntarily entered the Union, and now seven—ulti-
mately eleven—southern states were voluntarily
withdrawing from it.

Historical parallels ran even deeper. In 1776
thirteen American colonies, led by the rebel George
Washington, had seceded from the British Empire
by throwing off the yoke of King George III. In
1860–1861, eleven American states, led by the rebel
Jefferson Davis, were seceding from the Union by
throwing off the yoke of “King” Abraham Lincoln.
With that burden gone, the South was confident
that it could work out its own peculiar destiny more
quietly, happily, and prosperously.

Secession 431

Regarding the Civil War, the London Times
(November 7, 1861) editorialized,

“The contest is really for empire on the side of
the North, and for independence on that of
the South, and in this respect we recognize
an exact analogy between the North and the
Government of George III, and the South and
the Thirteen Revolted Provinces.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), the
northern poet and essayist, wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly shortly after the secessionist
movement began,

“The fault of the free States in the eyes of the
South is not one that can be atoned for by
any yielding of special points here and there.
Their offense is that they are free, and that
their habits and prepossessions are those of
freedom. Their crime is the census of 1860.
Their increase in numbers, wealth, and
power is a standing aggression. It would not
be enough to please the Southern States
that we should stop asking them to abolish
slavery: what they demand of us is nothing
less than that we should abolish the spirit of
the age. Our very thoughts are a menace.”

432 CHAPTER 19 Drifting Toward Disunion, 1854–1861

C h r o n o l o g y

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle
Tom’s Cabin

1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act
Republican party forms

1856 Buchanan defeats Frémont and Fillmore
for presidency

Sumner beaten by Brooks in Senate
chamber

Brown’s Pottawatomie Massacre

1856-
1860 Civil war in “bleeding Kansas”

1857 Dred Scott decision
Lecompton Constitution rejected

1857 Panic of 1857
Tariff of 1857
Hinton R. Helper publishes The Impending

Crisis of the South

1858 Lincoln-Douglas debates

1859 Brown raids Harpers Ferry

1860 Lincoln wins four-way race for presidency
South Carolina secedes from the Union
Crittenden Compromise fails

1861 Seven seceding states form the
Confederate States of America

VA R Y I N G VIEWPOINTS

The Civil War: Repressible or Irrepressible?

Few topics have generated as much controversyamong American historians as the causes of the
Civil War. The very names employed to describe
the conflict—notably “Civil War” or “War Between
the States,” or even “War for Southern Independ-
ence”—reveal much about the various authors’
points of view. Interpretations of the great conflict
have naturally differed according to section, and
have been charged with both emotional and moral
fervor. Yet despite long and keen interest in the ori-
gins of the conflict, the causes of the Civil War
remain as passionately debated today as they were a
century ago.

The so-called Nationalist School of the late
nineteenth century, typified in the work of historian
James Ford Rhodes, claimed that slavery caused the
Civil War. Defending the necessity and inevitability
of the war, these northern-oriented historians cred-
ited the conflict with ending slavery and preserving
the Union. But in the early twentieth century, pro-
gressive historians, led by Charles and Mary Beard,
presented a more skeptical interpretation. The
Beards argued that the war was not fought over slav-
ery per se, but rather was a deeply rooted economic

struggle between an industrial North and an agri-
cultural South. Anointing the Civil War the “Second
American Revolution,” the Beards claimed that the
war precipitated vast changes in American class
relations and shifted the political balance of power
by magnifying the influence of business magnates
and industrialists while destroying the plantation
aristocracy of the South.

Shaken by the disappointing results of World
War I, a new wave of historians argued that the Civil
War, too, had actually been a big mistake. Rejecting
the nationalist interpretation that the clash was
inevitable, James G. Randall and Avery Craven
asserted that the war had been a “repressible con-
flict.” Neither slavery nor the economic differences
between North and South were sufficient causes for
war. Instead Craven and others attributed the
bloody confrontation to the breakdown of political
institutions, the passion of overzealous reformers,
and the ineptitude of a blundering generation of
political leaders.

Following the Second World War, however, a
neonationalist view regained authority, echoing the
earlier views of Rhodes in depicting the Civil War as

Varying Viewpoints 433

an unavoidable conflict between two societies, one
slave and one free. For Allan Nevins and David M.
Potter, irreconcilable differences in morality, politics,
culture, social values, and economies increasingly
eroded the ties between the sections and inexorably
set the United States on the road to Civil War.

Eric Foner and Eugene Genovese have empha-
sized each section’s nearly paranoid fear that the
survival of its distinctive way of life was threatened
by the expansion of the other section. In Free Soil,
Free Labor, Free Men (1970), Foner emphasized that
most northerners detested slavery not because it
enslaved blacks, but because its existence—and
particularly its rapid extension—threatened the
position of free white laborers. This “free labor ide-
ology” increasingly became the foundation stone
upon which the North claimed its superiority over
the South. Eugene Genovese has argued that the
South felt similarly endangered. Convinced that the
southern labor system was more humane than
the northern factory system, southerners saw north-
ern designs to destroy their way of life lurking at
every turn—and every territorial battle.

Some historians have placed party politics at the
center of their explanations for the war. For them, no
event was more consequential than the breakdown

of the Jacksonian party system. When the slavery
issue tore apart both the Democratic and the Whig
parties, the last ligaments binding the nation
together were snapped, and the war inevitably came.

More recently, historians of the “Ethnocultural
School,” especially Michael Holt, have acknowl-
edged the significance of the collapse of the estab-
lished parties, but have offered a different analysis
of how that breakdown led to war. They note that
the two great national parties before the 1850s
focused attention on issues such as the tariff, bank-
ing, and internal improvements, thereby muting
sectional differences over slavery. According to this
argument, the erosion of the traditional party sys-
tem is blamed not on growing differences over slav-
ery, but on a temporary consensus between the two
parties in the 1850s on almost all national issues
other than slavery. In this peculiar political atmos-
phere, the slavery issue rose to the fore, encouraging
the emergence of Republicans in the North and
secessionists in the South. In the absence of regular,
national, two-party conflict over economic issues,
purely regional parties (like the Republicans) coa-
lesced. They identified their opponents not simply
as competitors for power but as threats to their way
of life, even to the life of the Republic itself.

For further reading, see page A13 of the Appendix. For web resources, go to http://college.hmco.com.

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