{"id":140,"date":"2023-03-07T18:17:49","date_gmt":"2023-03-07T18:17:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-5-4\/"},"modified":"2023-04-26T18:47:28","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T18:47:28","slug":"module-5-4","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/chapter\/module-5-4\/","title":{"raw":"5.4 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men","rendered":"5.4 Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men"},"content":{"raw":"The conclusion of the Mexican War led to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. The spoils of war were impressive, but it was clear they would help expand slavery. Antislavery activists, who already judged the Mexican War a slaveholders\u2019 plot, vowed that no new territories would be opened to slavery. But knowing that the Liberty Party was also not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders fostered a new and more competitive party, which they called the Free Soil Party. Antislavery leaders had thought that their vision of a federal government divorced from slavery might be represented by the major parties in that year\u2019s presidential election, but both the Whigs and the Democrats nominated pro-slavery southerners. Left unrepresented, antislavery Free Soil leaders swung into action.<\/span>\r\n
\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Map Questions about the balance of free and slave states in the Union became even more fierce after the US acquired these territories from Mexico by the 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Map of the Mexican Cession, 2008. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDemanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called Conscience Whigs. The new coalition called for a national convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, New York. A number of ex-Democrats committed to the party right away, including an important group of New Yorkers loyal to Martin Van Buren. The Free Soil Party\u2019s platform bridged the eastern and western leadership together and called for an end to slavery in Washington, D.C., and a halt on slavery\u2019s expansion in the territories.1<\/sup><\/a> The Free Soil movement hardly made a dent in the 1848 presidential election, but it drew more than four times the popular vote won by the Liberty Party earlier. It was a promising start. In 1848, Free Soil leaders claimed just 10 percent of the popular vote but won over a dozen House seats and even managed to win one Senate seat in Ohio, which went to Salmon P. Chase.2<\/sup><\/a> In Congress, Free Soil members had enough votes to swing power to either the Whigs or the Democrats.\r\n\r\nThe admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May 1848 helped cool tensions after the Texas and Florida admissions. Meanwhile, news from a number of failed European revolutions alarmed American reformers, but as exiled radicals filtered into the United States, a strengthening women\u2019s rights movement also flexed its muscle at Seneca Falls, New York. Led by figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause, it represented the first of such meetings ever held in U.S. history.3<\/sup><\/a> Frederick Douglass also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated the Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions.4<\/sup><\/a> By August 1848, it seemed plausible that the Free Soil Movement might tap into these reforms and build a broader coalition. In some ways that is precisely what it did. But come November, the spirit of reform failed to yield much at the polls. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor bested Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan.\r\n\r\nThe upheavals of 1848 came to a quick end. Taylor remained in office only a brief time until his unexpected death from a stomach ailment in 1850. During Taylor\u2019s brief time in office, the fruits of the Mexican War began to spoil. While Taylor was alive, his administration struggled to find a good remedy. Increased clamoring for the admission of California, New Mexico, and Utah pushed the country closer to the edge. Gold had been discovered in California, and as thousands continued to pour onto the West Coast and through the trans-Mississippi West, the admission of new states loomed. In Utah, Mormons were also making claims to an independent state they called Deseret. By 1850, California wanted admission as a free state. With so many competing dynamics under way, and with the president dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were off to a troubling start.\r\n\r\nCongressional leaders like Henry Clay and newer legislators like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois were asked to broker a compromise, but this time it was clear no compromise could bridge all the diverging interests at play in the country. Clay eventually left Washington disheartened by affairs. It fell to young Stephen Douglas, then, to shepherd the bills through Congress, which he in fact did. Legislators rallied behind the Compromise of 1850, an assemblage of bills passed late in 1850, which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise alive.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Henry Henry Clay (\u201cThe Great Compromiser\u201d) addresses the U.S. Senate during the debates over the Compromise of 1850. The print shows a number of incendiary personalities, like John C. Calhoun, whose increasingly sectional beliefs were pacified for a time by the Compromise. P. F. Rothermel (artist), c. 1855. \u202fWikimedia.<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe Compromise of 1850 tried to offer something to everyone, but in the end it only worsened the sectional crisis. For southerners, the package offered a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered the federal government to deputize regular citizens in arresting runaways. The New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory would be allowed to determine their own fates as slave or free states based on popular sovereignty. The compromise also allowed territories to submit suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of fugitive slaves within their bounds.\r\n\r\nThe admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners, but even the admission of a vast new state full of resources and rich agricultural lands was not enough. In addition to California, northerners also gained a ban on the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but not the full emancipation abolitionists had long advocated. Texas, which had already come into the Union as a slave state, was asked to give some of its land to New Mexico in return for the federal government absorbing some of the former republic\u2019s debt. But the compromise debates soon grew ugly.\r\n\r\nAfter the Compromise of 1850, antislavery critics became increasingly certain that slaveholders had co-opted the federal government, and that a southern Slave Power secretly held sway in Washington, where it hoped to make slavery a national institution. These northern complaints pointed back to how the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution gave southerners proportionally more representatives in Congress. In the 1850s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that Washington worked on behalf of slaveholders while ignoring the interests of white working men.\r\n\r\nNone of the individual measures in the Compromise of 1850 proved more troubling to antislavery Americans than the Fugitive Slave Act. In a clear bid to extend slavery\u2019s influence throughout the country, the act created special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even court testimony. Under its provisions, local authorities in the North could not interfere with the capture of fugitives. Northern citizens, moreover, had to assist in the arrest of fugitive slaves when called upon by federal agents. The Fugitive Slave Act created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal power, including an alarming increase in the nation\u2019s policing powers. Many northerners were also troubled by the way the bill undermined local and state laws. The law itself fostered corruption and the enslavement of free black northerners. The federal commissioners who heard these cases were paid $10 if they determined that the defendant was a slave and only $5 if they determined he or she was free.5<\/sup><\/a> Many black northerners responded to the new law by heading farther north to Canada.\r\n\r\nThe 1852 presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and effectively ended their existence as a national political party. Whigs captured just 42 of the 254 electoral votes needed to win. With the Compromise of 1850 and plenty of new lands, peaceful consensus seemed to be on the horizon. Antislavery feelings continued to run deep, however, and their depth revealed that with a Democratic Party misstep, a coalition united against the Democrats might yet emerge and bring them to defeat. One measure of the popularity of antislavery ideas came in 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe published her best-selling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>. Sales for Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> were astronomical, eclipsed only by sales of the Bible.6<\/sup><\/a> The book became a sensation and helped move antislavery into everyday conversation for many northerners. Despite the powerful antislavery message, Stowe\u2019s book also reinforced many racist stereotypes. Even abolitionists struggled with the deeply ingrained racism that plagued American society. While the major success of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> bolstered the abolitionist cause, the terms outlined by the Compromise of 1850 appeared strong enough to keep the peace.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Full-page Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin intensified an already hot debate over slavery throughout the United States. The book revolves around Eliza (the woman holding the young boy) and Tom (standing with his wife Chloe), each of whom takes a very different path: Eliza escapes slavery using her own two feet, but Tom endures his chains only to die by the whip of a brutish master. The horrific violence that both endured melted the hearts of many northerners and pressed some to join in the fight against slavery. Full-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin, 1852. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nDemocrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with confidence. Voters had returned them to office in 1852 following the bitter fights over the Compromise of 1850. Emboldened, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late 1853 to help organize the Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In 1853, the Nebraska Territory was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian border. Altogether, it encompassed present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, and Montana. Douglas\u2019s efforts to amend and introduce the bill in 1854 opened dynamics that would break the Democratic Party in two and, in the process, rip the country apart.\r\n\r\nDouglas proposed a bold plan in 1854 to cut off a large southern chunk of Nebraska and create it separately as the Kansas Territory. Douglas had a number of goals in mind. The expansionist Democrat from Illinois wanted to organize the territory to facilitate the completion of a national railroad that would flow through Chicago. But before he had even finished introducing the bill, opposition had already mobilized. Salmon P. Chase drafted a response in northern newspapers that exposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a measure to overturn the Missouri Compromise and open western lands for slavery. Kansas-Nebraska protests emerged in 1854 throughout the North, with key meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan. Kansas would become slave or free depending on the result of local elections, elections that would be greatly influenced by migrants flooding to the state to either protect or stop the spread of slavery.\r\n\r\nOrdinary Americans in the North increasingly resisted what they believed to be a pro-slavery federal government on their own terms. The rescues and arrests of fugitive slaves Anthony Burns in Boston and Joshua Glover in Milwaukee, for example, both signaled the rising vehemence of resistance to the nation\u2019s 1850 fugitive slave law. The case of Anthony Burns illustrates how the Fugitive Slave Law radicalized many northerners. On May 24, 1854, twenty-year-old Burns, a preacher who worked in a Boston clothing shop, was clubbed and dragged to jail. One year earlier, Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia, and a group of slave catchers had come to return him to Richmond. Word of Burns\u2019s capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob gathered outside the courthouse demanding Burns\u2019s release. Two days after the arrest, the crowd stormed the courthouse and shot a deputy U.S. Marshal to death. News reached Washington, and the federal government sent soldiers. Boston was placed under martial law. Federal troops lined the streets of Boston as Burns was marched to a ship, where he was sent back to slavery in Virginia. After spending over $40,000, the U.S. government had successfully reenslaved Anthony Burns.7<\/sup><\/a> A short time later, Burns was redeemed by abolitionists who paid $1,300 to return him to freedom, but the outrage among Bostonians only grew. And Anthony Burns was only one of hundreds of highly publicized episodes of the federal government imposing the Fugitive Slave Law on rebellious northern populations. In the words of Amos Adams Lawrence, \u201cWe went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"450\"]\"\" Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, appears in a portrait at the center of this 1855. Burns\u2019 arrest and trial, possible because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, became a rallying cry. As a symbol of the injustice of the slave system, Burns\u2019 treatment spurred riots and protests by abolitionists and citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. John Andrews (engraver), \u201cAnthony Burns,\u201d c. 1855. \u202fLibrary of Congress.<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n\r\nAs northerners radicalized, organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company provided guns and other goods for pioneers willing to go to Kansas and establish the territory as antislavery through popular sovereignty. On all sides of the slavery issue, politics became increasingly militarized.\r\n\r\nThe year 1855 nearly derailed the northern antislavery coalition. A resurgent anti-immigrant movement briefly took advantage of the Whig collapse and nearly stole the energy of the anti-administration forces by channeling its frustrations into fights against the large number of mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants in American cities. Calling themselves Know-Nothings, on account of their tendency to pretend ignorance when asked about their activities, the Know-Nothing or American Party made impressive gains in 1854 and 1855, particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic. But the anti-immigrant movement simply could not capture the nation\u2019s attention in ways the antislavery movement already had.9<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nThe antislavery political movements that started in 1854 coalesced with the formation of a new political party. Harking back to the founding fathers, its organizers named it the Republican Party. Republicans moved forward into a highly charged summer.\r\n\r\nFollowing an explosive speech before Congress on May 19\u201320, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was violently beaten with a cane by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the Senate chamber. Among other accusations, Sumner accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks\u2019s cousin, of defending slavery so he could have sexual access to black women.10<\/sup><\/a> Brooks felt that he had to defend his relative\u2019s honor and nearly killed Sumner as a result.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"700\"]\"Illustration The Caning of Charles Sumner, 1856. Wikimedia<\/a>.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas.11<\/sup><\/a> Pro-slavery raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas. Radical abolitionist John Brown retaliated, murdering several pro-slavery Kansans in retribution. As all of this played out, the House failed to expel Brooks. Brooks resigned his seat anyway, only to be reelected by his constituents later in the year. He received new canes emblazoned with the words \u201cHit him again!\u201d12<\/sup><\/a>\r\n\r\nWith sectional tensions at a breaking point, both parties readied for the coming presidential election. In June 1856, the newly named Republican Party held its nominating convention at Philadelphia and selected Californian John Charles Fr\u00e9mont. Fr\u00e9mont\u2019s antislavery credentials may not have pleased many abolitionists, but his dynamic and talented wife, Jessie Benton Fr\u00e9mont, appealed to more radical members of the coalition. The Kansas-Nebraska debate, the organization of the Republican Party, and the 1856 presidential campaign all energized a new generation of political leaders, including Abraham Lincoln. Beginning with his speech at Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln carved out a message that encapsulated better than anyone else the main ideas and visions of the Republican Party.13<\/sup><\/a> Lincoln himself was slow to join the coalition, yet by the summer of 1856, Lincoln had fully committed to the Fr\u00e9mont campaign.\r\n\r\nFr\u00e9mont lost, but Republicans celebrated that he won eleven of the sixteen free states. This showing, they urged, was truly impressive for any party making its first run at the presidency. Yet northern Democrats in crucial swing states remained unmoved by the Republican Party\u2019s appeals. Ulysses S. Grant of Missouri, for example, worried that Fr\u00e9mont and Republicans signaled trouble for the Union itself. Grant voted for the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, believing a Republican victory might bring about disunion. In abolitionist and especially black American circles, Fr\u00e9mont\u2019s defeat was more than a disappointment. Believing their fate had been sealed as permanent noncitizens, some African Americans would consider foreign emigration and colonization. Others began to explore the option of more radical and direct action against the Slave Power.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"640\"]\"Magee, Magee, J. L.. \u201cForcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler.\u201d 1856. At The Library of Congress Digital Collection.<\/a>[\/caption]\r\n

Notes<\/h4>\r\n
    \r\n \t
  1. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  2. Joseph Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848<\/em> (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  3. Eleanor Flexnor, Century of Struggle: The Women\u2019s Rights Movement in the United States<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  4. Report of the Woman\u2019s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848<\/em> (Rochester: Dick, 1848).\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  5. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law and American Society, Second Edition<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  6. Michael Winship, \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin: History of the Book in the 19th-Century United States\u201d (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2007), http:\/\/utc.iath.virginia.edu\/interpret\/exhibits\/winship\/winship.html, accessed August 1, 2015. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  7. Charles Harold Nichols, Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-slaves\u2019 Account of Their Bondage and Freedom<\/em> (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1963), 156. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  8. Amos A. Lawrence to Giles Richards, June 1, 1854, quoted in Jane J. Pease and William H. Pease, eds., The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns: A Problem in Law Enforcement<\/em> (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975), 43. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  9. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  10. Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas, Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate of the United States <\/em>(New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1856), https:\/\/www.senate.gov\/artandhistory\/history\/resources\/pdf\/CrimeAgainstKSSpeech.pdf. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  11. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era<\/em> (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  12. William James Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 92. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n \t
  13. Abraham Lincoln, \u201cPeoria Speech, October 16, 1854,\u201d in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln<\/em>, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 247\u2013283, https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/liho\/learn\/historyculture\/peoriaspeech.htm. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\r\n<\/ol>\r\n<\/div>","rendered":"

    The conclusion of the Mexican War led to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. The spoils of war were impressive, but it was clear they would help expand slavery. Antislavery activists, who already judged the Mexican War a slaveholders\u2019 plot, vowed that no new territories would be opened to slavery. But knowing that the Liberty Party was also not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders fostered a new and more competitive party, which they called the Free Soil Party. Antislavery leaders had thought that their vision of a federal government divorced from slavery might be represented by the major parties in that year\u2019s presidential election, but both the Whigs and the Democrats nominated pro-slavery southerners. Left unrepresented, antislavery Free Soil leaders swung into action.<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Map
    Questions about the balance of free and slave states in the Union became even more fierce after the US acquired these territories from Mexico by the 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Map of the Mexican Cession, 2008. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Demanding an alternative to the pro-slavery status quo, Free Soil leaders assembled so-called Conscience Whigs. The new coalition called for a national convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, New York. A number of ex-Democrats committed to the party right away, including an important group of New Yorkers loyal to Martin Van Buren. The Free Soil Party\u2019s platform bridged the eastern and western leadership together and called for an end to slavery in Washington, D.C., and a halt on slavery\u2019s expansion in the territories.1<\/sup><\/a> The Free Soil movement hardly made a dent in the 1848 presidential election, but it drew more than four times the popular vote won by the Liberty Party earlier. It was a promising start. In 1848, Free Soil leaders claimed just 10 percent of the popular vote but won over a dozen House seats and even managed to win one Senate seat in Ohio, which went to Salmon P. Chase.2<\/sup><\/a> In Congress, Free Soil members had enough votes to swing power to either the Whigs or the Democrats.<\/p>\n

    The admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May 1848 helped cool tensions after the Texas and Florida admissions. Meanwhile, news from a number of failed European revolutions alarmed American reformers, but as exiled radicals filtered into the United States, a strengthening women\u2019s rights movement also flexed its muscle at Seneca Falls, New York. Led by figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause, it represented the first of such meetings ever held in U.S. history.3<\/sup><\/a> Frederick Douglass also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated the Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions.4<\/sup><\/a> By August 1848, it seemed plausible that the Free Soil Movement might tap into these reforms and build a broader coalition. In some ways that is precisely what it did. But come November, the spirit of reform failed to yield much at the polls. Whig candidate Zachary Taylor bested Democrat Lewis Cass of Michigan.<\/p>\n

    The upheavals of 1848 came to a quick end. Taylor remained in office only a brief time until his unexpected death from a stomach ailment in 1850. During Taylor\u2019s brief time in office, the fruits of the Mexican War began to spoil. While Taylor was alive, his administration struggled to find a good remedy. Increased clamoring for the admission of California, New Mexico, and Utah pushed the country closer to the edge. Gold had been discovered in California, and as thousands continued to pour onto the West Coast and through the trans-Mississippi West, the admission of new states loomed. In Utah, Mormons were also making claims to an independent state they called Deseret. By 1850, California wanted admission as a free state. With so many competing dynamics under way, and with the president dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were off to a troubling start.<\/p>\n

    Congressional leaders like Henry Clay and newer legislators like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois were asked to broker a compromise, but this time it was clear no compromise could bridge all the diverging interests at play in the country. Clay eventually left Washington disheartened by affairs. It fell to young Stephen Douglas, then, to shepherd the bills through Congress, which he in fact did. Legislators rallied behind the Compromise of 1850, an assemblage of bills passed late in 1850, which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise alive.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Henry
    Henry Clay (\u201cThe Great Compromiser\u201d) addresses the U.S. Senate during the debates over the Compromise of 1850. The print shows a number of incendiary personalities, like John C. Calhoun, whose increasingly sectional beliefs were pacified for a time by the Compromise. P. F. Rothermel (artist), c. 1855. \u202fWikimedia.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The Compromise of 1850 tried to offer something to everyone, but in the end it only worsened the sectional crisis. For southerners, the package offered a tough new fugitive slave law that empowered the federal government to deputize regular citizens in arresting runaways. The New Mexico Territory and the Utah Territory would be allowed to determine their own fates as slave or free states based on popular sovereignty. The compromise also allowed territories to submit suits directly to the Supreme Court over the status of fugitive slaves within their bounds.<\/p>\n

    The admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners, but even the admission of a vast new state full of resources and rich agricultural lands was not enough. In addition to California, northerners also gained a ban on the slave trade in Washington, D.C., but not the full emancipation abolitionists had long advocated. Texas, which had already come into the Union as a slave state, was asked to give some of its land to New Mexico in return for the federal government absorbing some of the former republic\u2019s debt. But the compromise debates soon grew ugly.<\/p>\n

    After the Compromise of 1850, antislavery critics became increasingly certain that slaveholders had co-opted the federal government, and that a southern Slave Power secretly held sway in Washington, where it hoped to make slavery a national institution. These northern complaints pointed back to how the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution gave southerners proportionally more representatives in Congress. In the 1850s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that Washington worked on behalf of slaveholders while ignoring the interests of white working men.<\/p>\n

    None of the individual measures in the Compromise of 1850 proved more troubling to antislavery Americans than the Fugitive Slave Act. In a clear bid to extend slavery\u2019s influence throughout the country, the act created special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of a jury trial or even court testimony. Under its provisions, local authorities in the North could not interfere with the capture of fugitives. Northern citizens, moreover, had to assist in the arrest of fugitive slaves when called upon by federal agents. The Fugitive Slave Act created the foundation for a massive expansion of federal power, including an alarming increase in the nation\u2019s policing powers. Many northerners were also troubled by the way the bill undermined local and state laws. The law itself fostered corruption and the enslavement of free black northerners. The federal commissioners who heard these cases were paid $10 if they determined that the defendant was a slave and only $5 if they determined he or she was free.5<\/sup><\/a> Many black northerners responded to the new law by heading farther north to Canada.<\/p>\n

    The 1852 presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and effectively ended their existence as a national political party. Whigs captured just 42 of the 254 electoral votes needed to win. With the Compromise of 1850 and plenty of new lands, peaceful consensus seemed to be on the horizon. Antislavery feelings continued to run deep, however, and their depth revealed that with a Democratic Party misstep, a coalition united against the Democrats might yet emerge and bring them to defeat. One measure of the popularity of antislavery ideas came in 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe published her best-selling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>. Sales for Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> were astronomical, eclipsed only by sales of the Bible.6<\/sup><\/a> The book became a sensation and helped move antislavery into everyday conversation for many northerners. Despite the powerful antislavery message, Stowe\u2019s book also reinforced many racist stereotypes. Even abolitionists struggled with the deeply ingrained racism that plagued American society. While the major success of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> bolstered the abolitionist cause, the terms outlined by the Compromise of 1850 appeared strong enough to keep the peace.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Full-page
    Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin intensified an already hot debate over slavery throughout the United States. The book revolves around Eliza (the woman holding the young boy) and Tom (standing with his wife Chloe), each of whom takes a very different path: Eliza escapes slavery using her own two feet, but Tom endures his chains only to die by the whip of a brutish master. The horrific violence that both endured melted the hearts of many northerners and pressed some to join in the fight against slavery. Full-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin, 1852. \u202fWikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with confidence. Voters had returned them to office in 1852 following the bitter fights over the Compromise of 1850. Emboldened, Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas introduced a set of additional amendments to a bill drafted in late 1853 to help organize the Nebraska Territory, the last of the Louisiana Purchase lands. In 1853, the Nebraska Territory was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian border. Altogether, it encompassed present-day Nebraska, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, and Montana. Douglas\u2019s efforts to amend and introduce the bill in 1854 opened dynamics that would break the Democratic Party in two and, in the process, rip the country apart.<\/p>\n

    Douglas proposed a bold plan in 1854 to cut off a large southern chunk of Nebraska and create it separately as the Kansas Territory. Douglas had a number of goals in mind. The expansionist Democrat from Illinois wanted to organize the territory to facilitate the completion of a national railroad that would flow through Chicago. But before he had even finished introducing the bill, opposition had already mobilized. Salmon P. Chase drafted a response in northern newspapers that exposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a measure to overturn the Missouri Compromise and open western lands for slavery. Kansas-Nebraska protests emerged in 1854 throughout the North, with key meetings in Wisconsin and Michigan. Kansas would become slave or free depending on the result of local elections, elections that would be greatly influenced by migrants flooding to the state to either protect or stop the spread of slavery.<\/p>\n

    Ordinary Americans in the North increasingly resisted what they believed to be a pro-slavery federal government on their own terms. The rescues and arrests of fugitive slaves Anthony Burns in Boston and Joshua Glover in Milwaukee, for example, both signaled the rising vehemence of resistance to the nation\u2019s 1850 fugitive slave law. The case of Anthony Burns illustrates how the Fugitive Slave Law radicalized many northerners. On May 24, 1854, twenty-year-old Burns, a preacher who worked in a Boston clothing shop, was clubbed and dragged to jail. One year earlier, Burns had escaped slavery in Virginia, and a group of slave catchers had come to return him to Richmond. Word of Burns\u2019s capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob gathered outside the courthouse demanding Burns\u2019s release. Two days after the arrest, the crowd stormed the courthouse and shot a deputy U.S. Marshal to death. News reached Washington, and the federal government sent soldiers. Boston was placed under martial law. Federal troops lined the streets of Boston as Burns was marched to a ship, where he was sent back to slavery in Virginia. After spending over $40,000, the U.S. government had successfully reenslaved Anthony Burns.7<\/sup><\/a> A short time later, Burns was redeemed by abolitionists who paid $1,300 to return him to freedom, but the outrage among Bostonians only grew. And Anthony Burns was only one of hundreds of highly publicized episodes of the federal government imposing the Fugitive Slave Law on rebellious northern populations. In the words of Amos Adams Lawrence, \u201cWe went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"\"
    Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, appears in a portrait at the center of this 1855. Burns\u2019 arrest and trial, possible because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, became a rallying cry. As a symbol of the injustice of the slave system, Burns\u2019 treatment spurred riots and protests by abolitionists and citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. John Andrews (engraver), \u201cAnthony Burns,\u201d c. 1855. \u202fLibrary of Congress.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    As northerners radicalized, organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Company provided guns and other goods for pioneers willing to go to Kansas and establish the territory as antislavery through popular sovereignty. On all sides of the slavery issue, politics became increasingly militarized.<\/p>\n

    The year 1855 nearly derailed the northern antislavery coalition. A resurgent anti-immigrant movement briefly took advantage of the Whig collapse and nearly stole the energy of the anti-administration forces by channeling its frustrations into fights against the large number of mostly Catholic German and Irish immigrants in American cities. Calling themselves Know-Nothings, on account of their tendency to pretend ignorance when asked about their activities, the Know-Nothing or American Party made impressive gains in 1854 and 1855, particularly in New England and the Middle Atlantic. But the anti-immigrant movement simply could not capture the nation\u2019s attention in ways the antislavery movement already had.9<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    The antislavery political movements that started in 1854 coalesced with the formation of a new political party. Harking back to the founding fathers, its organizers named it the Republican Party. Republicans moved forward into a highly charged summer.<\/p>\n

    Following an explosive speech before Congress on May 19\u201320, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was violently beaten with a cane by Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the Senate chamber. Among other accusations, Sumner accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, Brooks\u2019s cousin, of defending slavery so he could have sexual access to black women.10<\/sup><\/a> Brooks felt that he had to defend his relative\u2019s honor and nearly killed Sumner as a result.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Illustration
    The Caning of Charles Sumner, 1856. Wikimedia<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    The violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas.11<\/sup><\/a> Pro-slavery raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas. Radical abolitionist John Brown retaliated, murdering several pro-slavery Kansans in retribution. As all of this played out, the House failed to expel Brooks. Brooks resigned his seat anyway, only to be reelected by his constituents later in the year. He received new canes emblazoned with the words \u201cHit him again!\u201d12<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

    With sectional tensions at a breaking point, both parties readied for the coming presidential election. In June 1856, the newly named Republican Party held its nominating convention at Philadelphia and selected Californian John Charles Fr\u00e9mont. Fr\u00e9mont\u2019s antislavery credentials may not have pleased many abolitionists, but his dynamic and talented wife, Jessie Benton Fr\u00e9mont, appealed to more radical members of the coalition. The Kansas-Nebraska debate, the organization of the Republican Party, and the 1856 presidential campaign all energized a new generation of political leaders, including Abraham Lincoln. Beginning with his speech at Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln carved out a message that encapsulated better than anyone else the main ideas and visions of the Republican Party.13<\/sup><\/a> Lincoln himself was slow to join the coalition, yet by the summer of 1856, Lincoln had fully committed to the Fr\u00e9mont campaign.<\/p>\n

    Fr\u00e9mont lost, but Republicans celebrated that he won eleven of the sixteen free states. This showing, they urged, was truly impressive for any party making its first run at the presidency. Yet northern Democrats in crucial swing states remained unmoved by the Republican Party\u2019s appeals. Ulysses S. Grant of Missouri, for example, worried that Fr\u00e9mont and Republicans signaled trouble for the Union itself. Grant voted for the Democratic candidate, James Buchanan, believing a Republican victory might bring about disunion. In abolitionist and especially black American circles, Fr\u00e9mont\u2019s defeat was more than a disappointment. Believing their fate had been sealed as permanent noncitizens, some African Americans would consider foreign emigration and colonization. Others began to explore the option of more radical and direct action against the Slave Power.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

    \"Magee,
    Magee, J. L.. \u201cForcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler.\u201d 1856. At The Library of Congress Digital Collection.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

    Notes<\/h4>\n
      \n
    1. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    2. Joseph Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848<\/em> (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2014). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    3. Eleanor Flexnor, Century of Struggle: The Women\u2019s Rights Movement in the United States<\/em> (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    4. Report of the Woman\u2019s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848<\/em> (Rochester: Dick, 1848).\"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    5. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law and American Society, Second Edition<\/em> (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    6. Michael Winship, \u201cUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin: History of the Book in the 19th-Century United States\u201d (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2007), http:\/\/utc.iath.virginia.edu\/interpret\/exhibits\/winship\/winship.html, accessed August 1, 2015. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    7. Charles Harold Nichols, Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-slaves\u2019 Account of Their Bondage and Freedom<\/em> (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1963), 156. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    8. Amos A. Lawrence to Giles Richards, June 1, 1854, quoted in Jane J. Pease and William H. Pease, eds., The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns: A Problem in Law Enforcement<\/em> (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1975), 43. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    9. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    10. Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas, Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate of the United States <\/em>(New York: Greeley and McElrath, 1856), https:\/\/www.senate.gov\/artandhistory\/history\/resources\/pdf\/CrimeAgainstKSSpeech.pdf. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    11. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era<\/em> (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    12. William James Hull Hoffer, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War <\/em>(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 92. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n
    13. Abraham Lincoln, \u201cPeoria Speech, October 16, 1854,\u201d in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln<\/em>, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 247\u2013283, https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/liho\/learn\/historyculture\/peoriaspeech.htm. \"image\"<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"menu_order":46,"template":"","meta":{"pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"class_list":["post-140","chapter","type-chapter","status-publish","hentry"],"part":252,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":479,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/140\/revisions\/479"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/252"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/140\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=140"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pressbooks.ccconline.org\/ppschis1210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}