The Road to War

1. The Road to War

2. Missouri Compromise • In the years leading up to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, tensions began to rise between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions within the U.S. Congress and across the country. • They reached a boiling point after Missouri’s 1819 request for admission to the Union as a slave state, which threatened to upset the delicate balance between slave states and free states. • To keep the peace, Congress orchestrated a two-part compromise, granting Missouri’s request but also admitting Maine as a free state.

3. Missouri Compromise • The extraordinarily bitter debate over Missouri’s application for admission ran from December 1819 to March 1820. Northerners, led by Senator Rufus King of New York, argued that Congress had the power to prohibit slavery in a new state. • Southerners like Senator William Pinkney of Maryland held that new states had the same freedom of action as the original thirteen and were thus free to choose slavery if they wished. • After the Senate and the House passed different bills and deadlock threatened, a compromise bill was worked out with the following provisions: • (1) Missouri was admitted as a slave state and Maine (formerly part of Massachusetts) as free, and • (2) except for Missouri, slavery was to be excluded from the Louisiana Purchase lands north of latitude 36°30′.

4. What future problems could arise as a result of the compromise?

5. Compromise of 1850 • After the Mexican-American War, the United States gained large areas of new territory. With it came the debate over whether or not to allow slavery in these new territories. • John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay debated over the issue for months before finally coming up with a solution.

6. Compromise Time • The territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without mention of slavery. (The decision would be made by the territories' inhabitants later, when they applied for statehood.) • Regarding Washington, the slave trade would be abolished in the District of Columbia, although slavery would still be permitted. • Finally, California would be admitted as a free state. To pacify slave-state politicians, who would have objected to the imbalance created by adding another free state, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed.

7. Controversial Fugitive Slave Act • Of all the bills that made up the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act was the most controversial. A fugitive is a person on the run from the law. • It required citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitive slaves. • It denied a fugitive's right to a jury trial. • All that was required of a slave to be deprived of their freedom was for a slave-holder or any white witness to swear that the suspect was the slave holder’s property.

8. Uncle Tom’s Cabin • One Northerner in particular who was astounded by the Fugitive Slave Act was Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist who had seen firsthand the plight of runaway slaves. • She wrote a book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel about a kind slave with a cruel master. The novel was a bestseller in the North, convincing many of the cruelties of slavery. • However many in the South were outraged at the book and said it was misleading and was propaganda: false or misleading information that is spread to further a cause.

9. Day 2: Road to War • Do It Now!! • Why was slavery such a dividing issue before the start of the Civil War?

10. The Kansas-Nebraska Act • The Kansas-Nebraska Act was an 1854 bill created by Stephen Douglas that mandated “popular sovereignty”–allowing settlers of a territory to decide whether slavery would be allowed within a new state’s borders. • Both the Kansas and the Nebraska territories laid an in area that the Missouri Compromise had banned slavery in. This meant that the area where the territories were located in would eventually enter the Union as free states.

11. Cont’d • As could be expected, the Southerners approved of this proposal—while Northerners did not. They believed that Douglas had betrayed them by reopening the issue of slavery in the territories. • Southern support enabled the Act to pass in Congress. President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat elected in 1852, signed the bill hoping that the slavery question would be forever banished from the halls of Congress.

12. Bleeding Kansas • The issue of allowing slavery in Kansas was left up to white citizens to vote on. Quickly, a flood of both pro-slavery and anti-slavery supports rushed into the territory included thousands of Missourians who illegally voted in the election. • When pro-slavery won by a large margin, the anti-slavery settlers refused to accept it and optioned to hold a second election. • Kansas now had two governments, each accepting their right to impose their rule in the territory.

13. John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre • John Brown was a radical abolitionist who believed the only way slavery would end was through violence and bloodshed. • After a pro-slavery sheriff tried to arrest anti-slavery advocates and attacked the town with 800 armed men, John Brown and his men decided to act. • They journeyed to a pro-slavery settlement in Pottawatomie where they murdered 5 pro-slavery men and boys. • This set off a chain of violence all over the territory with each side attacked one another—earning the territory the nickname Bleeding Kansas.

14. Splitting of Political Parties • After the Whig Party crumbled and split over the issue of slavery, a new party was formed: the Republican Party. • The anti-slavery stand attracted northern Democrats, Free-Soil Members, and some members of the No-Nothing Party. • Despite losing to Democrat James Buchanan in the 1856 election, the Republicans waged a strong anti-slavery campaign that won in 11 of the country’s 16 free states.

15. Dred Scott Case • In 1857, the Supreme Court delivered a shattering blow to the abolitionist movement when it resolved the court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. • Dred Scott was a enslaved man whose master lived in territories where slavery was illegal. With the help of abolitionists Scott sued for his freedom. • The outcome surprised both Northerners and Southerners. When Chief Justice Roger B. Taney gave the decision he said that: • 1. Because he was an African American, he had no right to sue in a federal court because he was not an American citizen. • 2. Living in a free state did not make a slave free. Slaves were property and property rights were protected by the Constitution. • 3. Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in any territory.

16. Harper’s Ferry • After John Brown was kicked out of Kansas after the Pottawatomie Massacre he returned to New England. • Enraged at the lack of success in Kansas, Brown hatched a plot to raise an army to free the enslaved people of the South. • In 1859, Brown and his supporters attacked a small town in Virginia called Harper’s Ferry. He assumed that the enslaved African Americans would join him in the revolt. • His goal was to seize guns that the US Army stored there.

17. John Brown’s Raid • Brown gained control of the arms but was quickly knocked down by Col. Robert E. Lee’s forces. • At his trail, he sat quietly but said as his final words, “If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the end of justice…I say, let it be done.” • When he was hanged for treason, church bells across the North tolled to mourn who many considered to be a hero. Southerners were shocked that they were praising a man who tried to lead a slave revolt.

18. Thinking Ahead… • How do you think these tensions between the North and South will add up in the election of 1860?