THE GREAT EXPERIMENT: A NATION DIVIDED

PART III — A COUNTRY DIVIDING

When Compromise Began to Fail

For decades, Americans had found ways to postpone the argument.

When slavery threatened to divide the country, political leaders negotiated.

They debated.

They drew boundaries.

They admitted free states and slave states.

They created compromises designed to preserve the Union.

The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had been one of the most important.

But compromise had not answered the underlying question.

Would slavery be permitted to expand as the United States expanded?

Then America acquired more territory.

The question returned.

And this time, the political system would have much more difficulty containing it.

America Moves West Again

By the 1840s, the United States was expanding rapidly.

Settlers continued moving west.

Texas had become an independent republic after separating from Mexico and was annexed by the United States in 1845.

Disputes involving Texas and the United States contributed to growing tensions with Mexico.

In 1846, war began between the United States and Mexico.

American forces eventually prevailed.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, ended the war and transferred an enormous amount of territory to the United States.

The country now possessed vast new western lands that included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, and portions of several other states.

Once again, expansion created opportunity.

And once again, expansion created the same question.

Would slavery expand into the new territory?

The Wilmot Proviso

Even before the war with Mexico ended, the issue had reached Congress.

In 1846, Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed that slavery be prohibited in territory acquired from Mexico.

His proposal became known as the Wilmot Proviso.

It passed the House at different points but never became law.

Its importance went beyond the legislation itself.

The debate revealed something happening inside American politics.

Increasingly, political divisions were not simply between parties.

They were becoming divisions between sections of the country.

Northern representatives could disagree with other northerners.

Southern representatives could disagree with other southerners.

But slavery's expansion was increasingly creating a political divide between North and South.

The old political arrangements were beginning to strain.

Then California Changed Everything

The discovery of gold in California in 1848 accelerated migration westward.

California's population grew rapidly.

Soon California sought admission to the Union.

Its proposed constitution prohibited slavery.

That created another political problem.

California's admission as a free state threatened the sectional balance that political leaders had spent decades trying to preserve.

At the same time, other disputes were developing.

What would happen to slavery in the remaining territory acquired from Mexico?

What would happen to people escaping slavery and reaching free states?

What should happen to the slave trade in the nation's capital?

Where would the boundary between Texas and New Mexico be drawn?

Once again, the country turned toward compromise.

The Compromise of 1850

Some of the most experienced political leaders in the country became involved.

Henry Clay.

Daniel Webster.

John C. Calhoun.

Stephen Douglas.

The result became known collectively as the Compromise of 1850.

It was actually a series of laws rather than one single piece of legislation.

California entered the Union as a free state.

Territorial governments were established for Utah and New Mexico, with the question of slavery left to be resolved without the kind of geographic prohibition that had characterized the Missouri settlement.

The boundary between Texas and New Mexico was settled.

The slave trade—but not slavery itself—was ended in Washington, D.C.

And Congress enacted a much stronger Fugitive Slave Act.

Once again, Congress had found a way through an immediate crisis.

But one part of the settlement would soon create another.

The Fugitive Slave Act

People escaping slavery had existed throughout American history.

The Constitution contained a fugitive slave provision.

Congress had passed earlier legislation addressing its enforcement.

But the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 strengthened federal requirements dramatically.

Federal and local officials could be required to participate in enforcement.

People accused of being fugitives faced a legal process that provided them few protections.

People who assisted escapes could face penalties.

And enforcement extended into states where slavery itself was illegal.

That changed the nature of the conflict.

For many northerners, slavery was no longer something they could regard simply as an institution existing somewhere else.

Federal law could require action involving alleged fugitives inside free states.

Some northerners resisted enforcement.

Some states adopted measures intended to protect free Black residents or impede aspects of enforcement.

Abolitionists intensified their opposition.

Slaveholders and their political allies argued that the Constitution and federal law required the return of people escaping slavery.

A dispute over slavery was becoming a dispute about federal authority, state resistance, constitutional obligations, individual rights, and the meaning of freedom itself.

The compromise intended to calm the country had created another source of sectional anger.

Compromise Was Becoming Harder

The Compromise of 1850 temporarily addressed the crisis created by the territory acquired after the Mexican-American War.

But the fundamental disagreement remained.

Then, only four years later, Congress reopened a question many Americans thought had been settled since 1820.

The issue concerned two new territories:

Kansas and Nebraska.

And the consequences would be enormous.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced legislation organizing the Kansas and Nebraska territories.

Douglas supported a principle known as popular sovereignty.

Instead of Congress determining whether slavery would be permitted in a territory, the people settling there would decide.

On its surface, the idea offered a democratic solution:

Let the settlers vote.

But there was a major problem.

Both Kansas and Nebraska were north of the 36°30′ line established by the Missouri Compromise.

Under the old arrangement, slavery had been prohibited there.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively repealed that restriction.

Territory that had been closed to slavery under the Missouri Compromise could now potentially permit it.

A compromise that had helped manage sectional conflict for more than three decades was gone.

The Argument Moves to Kansas

If settlers would decide whether slavery was permitted, then suddenly who settled Kansas mattered enormously.

People supporting slavery moved into the territory.

People opposing its expansion moved there as well.

Organizations encouraged migration.

Residents of neighboring Missouri crossed into Kansas during elections, contributing to disputed voting and accusations of fraud.

Competing political organizations emerged.

Eventually, rival governments claimed authority.

The question Congress had attempted to settle through popular sovereignty was no longer merely being debated in Washington.

It was being fought over on the ground.

And then the fighting became literal.

Bleeding Kansas

Violence erupted between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces.

In May 1856, pro-slavery forces attacked the free-state community of Lawrence, destroying printing presses and damaging or burning buildings.

Soon afterward, radical abolitionist John Brown and several followers killed five pro-slavery men near Pottawatomie Creek.

Violence continued.

People were killed.

Communities were threatened.

Armed groups formed.

Kansas became known as:

“Bleeding Kansas.”

The phrase captured something deeply troubling about the country's political condition.

Americans had spent decades debating whether slavery would expand westward.

Now Americans were killing one another over it.

Kansas became a warning of what sectional conflict could become when political compromise failed.

The Political System Was Changing Too

The crisis transformed American politics.

The Whig Party, once one of the country's major political parties, collapsed during the 1850s.

The Democratic Party faced increasingly serious sectional divisions.

New political organizations appeared.

Among them was the Republican Party, formed in the 1850s from people with different previous political affiliations who shared opposition to the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

That distinction is important.

The central Republican position in its early development concerned preventing slavery's expansion into the territories.

The emergence of the party showed how profoundly the territorial question was reshaping American politics.

The country's party system itself was reorganizing around the unresolved issue.

Then the Supreme Court Entered the Argument

While Congress struggled with slavery in the territories and violence continued in Kansas, another dispute was moving through the courts.

At its center were Dred Scott and Harriet Scott.

The Scotts were enslaved.

They had lived for periods in areas where slavery was prohibited.

They sued for their freedom.

Their legal struggle eventually reached the United States Supreme Court.

In 1857, the Court issued one of the most consequential decisions in American history:

Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The Dred Scott Decision

The Supreme Court ruled against Scott.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote the majority opinion.

The decision held that people of African descent covered by the ruling could not claim United States citizenship under the Constitution and therefore Scott could not bring his case in federal court on that basis.

But the Court went further.

It also concluded that Congress lacked constitutional authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

That meant the Missouri Compromise's restriction on slavery had been unconstitutional according to the Court.

Think about what had happened.

Congress had spent decades trying to determine where slavery could and could not expand.

It had drawn geographic boundaries.

It had passed compromises.

It had organized territories.

Now the Supreme Court had declared that Congress could not constitutionally prohibit slavery in the territories in the manner it had attempted.

Instead of removing slavery from national politics, the decision intensified the controversy.

Dred Scott Was a Person Before He Was a Court Case

It is easy for famous Supreme Court cases to become legal abstractions.

But Dred Scott was not simply the name of a decision.

He was a man seeking freedom.

His wife, Harriet Scott, also sought freedom.

They had children whose futures were connected to the outcome.

Their legal struggle lasted for years.

The Scotts initially won their freedom in a Missouri court before that decision was reversed.

Dred Scott continued pursuing the case.

After the Supreme Court ruled against him, the Scott family was eventually transferred to the Blow family, who granted them their freedom in 1857.

Dred Scott died the following year.

The constitutional questions surrounding his case would continue long after his death.

Politics Was Becoming Sectional

By the late 1850s, several developments had converged.

The Missouri Compromise had been repealed legislatively.

Kansas had descended into violence.

The Supreme Court had ruled that Congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.

The Republican Party was growing on a platform opposing slavery's territorial expansion.

The Democratic Party was increasingly divided between northern and southern factions.

A political system that had once produced national coalitions was becoming increasingly organized along sectional lines.

And then another event shocked the country.

John Brown

John Brown believed slavery was a profound moral evil.

He also believed violence could be justified in fighting it.

Brown had already participated in the bloodshed in Kansas.

In October 1859, he and a small group of followers attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

Brown hoped his raid could help trigger a broader uprising against slavery.

It failed.

United States Marines, under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, stormed Brown's position.

Brown was captured.

He was tried by Virginia authorities, convicted, and executed.

The raid had failed militarily.

Politically, however, its impact was enormous.

Many white southerners viewed the attack as evidence that slavery and their communities were under growing threat.

Responses in the North varied considerably. Some condemned Brown's violence, while some abolitionists admired his willingness to die fighting slavery.

Brown became another symbol of just how far the national argument had moved.

A dispute once repeatedly contained through congressional compromise had produced political collapse, territorial bloodshed, a sweeping Supreme Court ruling, and now an attempted armed uprising.

The Center Was Disappearing

America had always contained political disagreement.

That was not new.

What was changing was the ability of national institutions and political coalitions to contain one particular disagreement.

The question of slavery had become intertwined with:

Territorial expansion.

Federal authority.

States' rights.

Property claims.

Individual liberty.

Citizenship.

Political representation.

Western settlement.

And the balance of power between sections of the country.

These issues were connected differently by different Americans.

But again and again, the same institution stood near the center of the crisis:

Slavery.

The National Park Service summarizes the long road to war as involving disputes over economic practices, cultural values, and the reach of federal power, while identifying the role of slavery in American society as the most important of those longstanding tensions.

Compromise Had Not Disappeared

Even now, war was not inevitable.

That distinction matters.

Americans were still voting.

Congress was still legislating.

Courts were still deciding cases.

Political parties were still campaigning.

People were still proposing compromises.

Most Americans had never experienced a civil war and could not know exactly what the next few years would bring.

History looks inevitable when we read it backward.

It rarely feels inevitable to the people living through it.

But by 1860, the mechanisms that had repeatedly contained the slavery controversy were under extraordinary pressure.

The Missouri Compromise was gone.

The Compromise of 1850 had created new conflict.

Popular sovereignty had produced violence in Kansas.

Dred Scott had intensified rather than settled the constitutional dispute.

National political parties were fracturing.

And distrust between sections of the country was deepening.

Then came a presidential election.

The Election of 1860

Four major candidates competed for the presidency in 1860.

The Democratic Party had split.

Northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas.

Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge.

The Constitutional Union Party nominated John Bell.

The Republican Party nominated a former Illinois congressman:

Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln and the Republican platform opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories.

Lincoln won the presidency.

But his victory revealed just how sectional American politics had become.

He carried the presidency through overwhelming strength in the free states while receiving no electoral votes from the Deep South.

Before Lincoln even took office, the next crisis began.

Secession

South Carolina moved first.

In December 1860, a convention voted to leave the United States.

Other Deep South states followed.

Their secession documents are essential to understanding what happened next because they allow the states themselves to explain their reasoning.

Those documents discussed constitutional arguments, federal-state relations, northern resistance to fugitive-slave obligations, and threats they perceived to the institution of slavery.

Mississippi's declaration was particularly explicit, identifying its position with slavery.

South Carolina's declaration emphasized disputes between slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, including northern resistance to fugitive-slave requirements.

These were not descriptions written generations later.

They were explanations produced during secession itself.

The argument over slavery's future had reached a new stage.

States were now leaving the Union.

A Country Dividing

The path from the Missouri Compromise to secession was not a straight line.

There was no single moment when civil war suddenly became unavoidable.

Instead, there was a series of decisions.

Territorial expansion.

Political compromises.

Federal legislation.

Resistance to federal legislation.

Popular sovereignty.

Violence in Kansas.

Supreme Court decisions.

Political realignment.

Abolitionist activism.

Pro-slavery political resistance.

John Brown's raid.

The election of 1860.

And finally:

Secession.

For decades, Americans had asked whether slavery could expand with the country.

Now the question had become much larger.

Could the country itself survive the disagreement?

The answer would no longer come only from Congress.

It would no longer come only from elections.

And it would no longer come only from the courts.

Soon it would come from armies.

NEXT — PART IV

Why the Civil War Happened

Slavery, Secession, States' Rights, and the Union

By early 1861, states had begun leaving the United States.

They gave reasons for doing so.

The federal government faced an extraordinary constitutional and political crisis.

Could a state legally leave the Union?

Would the federal government permit secession?

What role did slavery play?

Where did arguments about states' rights fit?

Why did Abraham Lincoln initially describe preservation of the Union as his central objective?

And why did four additional slave states join the Confederacy only after fighting began?

To understand why Americans went to war, we have to separate later interpretations from the historical record.

We have to read what political leaders said.

We have to read the secession documents.

We have to examine the Constitution.

And we have to understand something essential:

Why a country that had spent generations compromising finally reached a point where compromise failed.

THE GREAT EXPERIMENT CONTINUES.

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Politics 1776