The Crisis of the 1850s
In the settlement of the war between Mexico and
the United States (1846-1848), America acquired the territories
of California, New Mexico, and Utah. It was a situation that
brought the return of slavery as a major national issue. Intense
debate was temporarily resolved by the Compromise of 1850 in
which Congress recognized California as a free state, allowed
territorial voters to decide (popular sovereignty) whether to
ban or allow slavery in Utah and New Mexico, banned the slave
trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia, and
strengthened the fugitive slave law requiring the return of
escaped slaves to their owners. During the rest of the 1850s,
the slavery question continued to agitate American politics.
In 1854, in an attempt to spur population growth in the western
territories in advance of a transcontinental railroad, Senator
Stephen Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, introduced a bill to
establish the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. In order to
gain Southern support, the bill stipulated that slavery in the
new territories would be decided by popular sovereignty.
Therefore, the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the 1820 Missouri
Compromise ban on slavery north of 36° 30' in the lands of the
Louisiana Purchase. As Kansas tried to organize a territorial
government, conflict between pro- and anti-slavery factions
became violent and erupted into a miniature civil war called
“Bleeding Kansas.”
The issue of slavery in the territories divided the Whig Party
along a North-South line and soon led to its demise. In its
place arose the Republican Party, which was composed of former
Whig, Democratic, and
nativist American (“Know Nothing”) Party members who opposed
the Kansas-Nebraska Act and favored “free soil”—a ban on
slavery—in the Western territories. In the 1856 presidential
election, Democrat James Buchanan defeated Republican John C.
Fremont and American Party nominee Millard Fillmore,
45%-33%-22%. A few days after Buchanan’s inauguration in March
1857, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the
Dred Scott case, declaring that neither the territorial nor
federal government had the constitutional authority to ban
slavery in the territories. Senator Douglas, the leading
proponent of popular sovereignty, responded by claiming that
slavery would still not gain a foothold in the west if
territorial governments refused to pass laws supporting the
institution (i.e., a slave code).
In 1858, Republican Abraham Lincoln, a prominent lawyer and
former one-term congressman (1847-1849), challenged Douglas for
his senate seat. In accepting the Republican nomination, Lincoln
delivered his “House Divided” speech in which he warned that the
nation could not endure permanently half-slave and half-free.
Douglas agreed to an unprecedented series of debates held in
towns across the state and which focused on the issue of
slavery. The Democrats won control of the state legislature and
reelected Douglas to the U.S. Senate, but Lincoln gained
national attention and became a possible contender for the
Republican presidential nomination two years later.
In the closing months of 1859, the nation’s attention was
riveted by the failed attempt of abolitionist John Brown to
capture a federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and use
the weapons to arm a slave rebellion. Brown and his men were
captured and executed. Many white Southerners erroneously
assumed that most Northerners were abolitionists like Brown.
The Democratic Party
Splits
The issue of slavery in the
western territories had ended the Whig Party and given rise to
the free-soil Republican Party, but it also created a bitter
internal division within the Democratic Party. On April 23,
1860, the Democratic National Convention convened in Charleston,
South Carolina. The Southern Democratic delegates had arrived
determined to have their party endorse in its platform a federal
slave code for the territories. They believed that if Congress
did not pass a federal slave code, then most territories would
enter the Union as free states; in turn, the new free-state
majorities in Congress would enact and the free-state
legislatures would ratify a constitutional amendment abolishing
slavery in the entire country. Northern Democrats, led by
Senator Douglas, opposed endorsing a federal slave code. They
wanted the territories themselves to decide the fate of slavery
without federal interference.
Douglas was the leading candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination, but he faced competition from Senator
Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, former Treasury Secretary James
Guthrie of Kentucky, and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee.
Douglas had been weakened politically by his bitter and public
struggle with Democratic President James Buchanan over the issue
of slavery in the Kansas Territory, particularly concerning the
pro-slavery Lecompton
Constitution which the president had endorsed and which
Douglas helped defeat in Congress. Buchanan’s deputies had
worked behind the scenes against Douglas during his 1858
senatorial re-election campaign and did the same at the 1860
national convention.
Douglas’s stance on slavery in the territories—advocacy of
popular sovereignty, support of territories (in the wake of
Dred Scott) refusing to pass slave codes, and opposition to
a federal slave code—had undermined much of his support in the
South. Well-organized opposition to Douglas among the Southern
delegates was led by William Yancey, a former congressman from
Alabama, Robert Barnwell Rhett, a former senator from South
Carolina, and Robert Toombs, a senator from Georgia. They
dominated the Committee on Resolutions, whose majority report
endorsed a federal slave code for the territories. However, the
Douglas-backed minority report, which endorsed congressional
non-interference, rather than a federal slave code, was adopted
by the full delegation, 165 to 138. That result provoked the
entire delegations from Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and
Texas, most of the delegations from Georgia, South Carolina, and
Virginia, and part of the delegations from Arkansas and
Delaware, to leave the convention. The remaining delegates
attempted to nominate a presidential candidate. Although Douglas
held a clear majority over Hunter and Guthrie, he was not able
to reach the two-thirds requirement. On May 3, after 57 ballots,
delegates decided to adjourn and reconvene in Baltimore,
Maryland, on June 18.
The bolting Democrats (mainly Southerners) had agreed to meet in
Richmond on June 11, but then descended on Baltimore a week
later as the regular Democrats (mostly Northern) began their
convention. There was confusion and jostling over which
delegations would be seated, but the Douglas forces prevailed
and on June 23 the “Little Giant” was nominated for president
with 181½ votes on the second ballot to 7½ for Vice President
John C. Breckinridge. The delegates then nominated Senator
Benjamin Fitzpatrick of Alabama for vice president, but he
declined, so the convention turned to Herschel Johnson of
Georgia, who accepted. Disgruntled delegates joined those who
had withdrawn from the Charleston convention to meet at Maryland
Institute Hall in Baltimore, where they nominated Breckinridge,
a Kentuckian, for president and Senator Joseph Lane, an
Oregonian, for vice president. Both sides claimed they were the
true representatives of the national party.
The Constitutional
Union Convention
Previously, on May 9, a group consisting mainly
of old-line Whigs and a few former American Party members (“Know
Nothings”) and calling themselves the Constitutional Union Party
had met at a national convention in Baltimore. On the second
ballot, delegates chose former Senator John Bell of Tennessee as
their presidential nominee, over Governor Sam Houston of Texas,
Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky, and former Representative
John Botts of Virginia, all Southern moderates. The famed orator
Edward Everett of Massachusetts was selected as Bell’s
vice-presidential running mate. The Constitutional Unionists
believed that the slavery issue was needlessly tearing the
nation apart. They tried to appeal to moderates in all parties
and in all sections. Ignoring specific policy proposals, the new
party’s brief platform emphasized the generalities of peace,
union, and compromise: “the Constitution of the country, the
union of the states, and the enforcement of the laws.”
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