American Yamp Part 1

general confusion were all more formidable and frequent than Indian attacks. Despite the harshness of the journey, by 1848 there were
approximated 20,000 Americans living west of the Rockies, with about three-fourths of that number in Oregon.

The great environmental and economic potential of the Oregon Territory led many to pack up their families and head west along the Oregon Trail. The Trail represented the
hopes of many for a better life, represented and reinforced by images like Bierstadt’s idealistic Oregon Trail.  Albert Bierstadt, Oregon Trail (Camp re), 1863. Wikimedia.

Many who moved nurtured a romantic vision of life, attracting more Americans who sought more than agricultural life and familial
responsibilities. The rugged individualism and military prowess of the West, encapsulated for some by service in the Mexican war, drew a
growing new breed west of the Sierra Nevada to meet with the Californians already there; a breed of migrants di erent from the modest
agricultural communities of the near-west.
If the great draw of the West served as manifest destiny’s kindling, then the discovery of gold in California was the spark that set the re
ablaze. The vast majority of western settlers sought land ownership, but the lure of getting rich quick drew younger single men (with some
women) to gold towns throughout the West. These adventurers and fortune-seekers then served as magnets for the arrival of others
providing services associated with the gold rush. Towns and cities grew rapidly throughout the West, notably San Francisco whose
population grew from about 500 in 1848 to almost 50,000 by 1853. Lawlessness, predictable failure of most fortune seekers, racial
con icts, and the slavery question all threatened manifest destiny’s promises.
On January 24, 1848 James W. Marshall, a contractor hired by John Sutter, discovered gold on Sutter’s sawmill land in the Sacramento
valley area of the California Territory. Throughout the 1850s, Californians beseeched Congress for a transcontinental railroad to provide
service for both passengers and goods from the Midwest and the East Coast. The potential economic bene ts for communities along
proposed railroads made the debate over the route rancorous. Growing dissent over the slavery issue also heightened tensions.
The great in ux of diverse people clashed in a combative and aggrandizing atmosphere of individualistic pursuit of fortune.33 Linguistic,
cultural, economic, and racial con ict roiled both urban and rural areas. By the end of the 1850s, Chinese and Mexican immigrants made

up 1/5th of the mining population in California. The ethnic patchwork of these frontier towns belied a clearly de ned socio-economic
arrangement that saw whites on top as landowners and managers with poor whites and ethnic minorities working the mines and assorted
jobs. The competition for land, resources, and riches furthered individual and collective abuses particularly against Indians and older
Mexican communities. California’s towns, as well as those dotting the landscape throughout the West, such as Coeur D’Alene in Idaho
and Tombstone in Arizona, struggled to balance security with economic development and the protection of civil rights and liberties.

This cartoon depicts a highly racialized image of a Chinese immigrant and Irish immigrant “swallowing” the United States–in the form of Uncle Sam. Networks of railroads and
the promise of American expansion can be seen in the background. “The great fear of the period That Uncle Sam may be swallowed by foreigners : The problem solved,” 1860-
1869, Library of Congress.
 

VI. The Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.

The expansion of in uence and territory o the continent became an important corollary to westward expansion. The U.S. government
sought to keep European countries out of the western hemisphere and applied the principles of manifest destiny to the rest of the
hemisphere. As Secretary of State for President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams held the responsibility for the satisfactory resolution

of ongoing border disputes between the United States, England, Spain, and Russia. Adams’ view of American foreign policy was put into
clearest practice in the Monroe Doctrine, which he had great in uence in crafting.

Increasingly aggressive incursions from Russians in the Northwest, ongoing border disputes with the British in Canada, the remote
possibility of Spanish reconquest of South America, and British abolitionism in the Caribbean all triggered an American response. In a
speech before the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4th, 1821, Secretary of State Adams acknowledged the American need for a
robust foreign policy that simultaneously protected and encouraged the nation’s growing and increasingly dynamic economy.

America…in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected
the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own…She is
the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all…She well knows that by once
enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign
independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the
wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume
the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy
would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet on her brows would no
longer beam with the ine able splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead
would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, ashing in false and tarnished lustre
the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the
world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit. . . . Her glory is not
dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a
shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has
been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of
mankind would permit, her practice. John Quincy Adams ((John Quincy Adams,
“Mr. Adams Oration, July 21, 1821,” quoted in Niles’ Weekly Register, Volume 20,
(Baltimore: H. Niles, 1821), 332.))

Adams’ great fear was not territorial loss. He had no doubt that Russian and British interests in North America could be arrested. Adams
held no reason to antagonize the Russians with grand pronouncements, nor was he generally called upon to do so. He enjoyed a good
relationship with the Russian Ambassador and stewarded through Congress most-favored trade status for the Russians in 1824. Rather,
Adams worried gravely about the ability of the United States to compete commercially with the British in Latin America and the
Caribbean. This concern deepened with the valid concern that America’s chief Latin American trading partner, Cuba, dangled perilously
close to outstretched British claws. Cabinet debates surrounding establishment of the Monroe Doctrine and geopolitical events in the
Caribbean focused attention on that part of the world as key to the future defense of U.S. military and commercial interests; the main
threat to those interests being the British. Expansion of economic opportunity and protection from foreign pressures became the
overriding goals of U.S. foreign policy.34 But despite the philosophical con dence present in the Monroe administration’s decree, the
reality of limited military power kept the Monroe Doctrine as an aspirational assertion. 

Bitter disagreements over the expansion of slavery into the new lands won from Mexico began even before the war ended. Many Northern
businessmen and Southern slave owners supported the idea of expanding slavery into the Caribbean as a useful alternative to continental
expansion, since slavery already existed in these areas. Some were critical of these attempts, seeing them as evidence of a growing slave-
power conspiracy. Many others supported attempts at expansion, like those previously seen in East Florida, even if these attempts were not
exactly legal. Filibustering, as it was called, involved privately nanced schemes directed at capturing and occupying foreign territory
without the approval of the U.S. government.

Filibustering took greatest hold in the imagination of Americans as they looked toward Cuba. Fears of racialized revolution in Cuba (as in
Haiti and Florida before it) as well as the presence of an aggressive British abolitionist in uence in the Caribbean energized the movement
to annex Cuba and encouraged libustering as expedient alternatives to lethargic o cial negotiations. Despite libustering’s seemingly
chaotic planning and destabilizing repercussions, those intellectually and economically guiding the e ort imagined a willing and receptive
Cuban population and expected an agreeable American business class. In Cuba, manifest destiny for the rst time sought territory o the
continent and hoped to put a unique spin on the story of success in Mexico. Yet, the annexation of Cuba, despite great popularity and
some military attempts led by Narciso Lopez, a Cuban dissident, never succeeded.35           

Other libustering expeditions were launched elsewhere, including two by William Walker, a former American soldier. Walker seized
portions of the Baja peninsula in Mexico and then later took power and established a slaving regime in Nicaragua. Eventually Walker was
executed in Honduras.36 These missions violated the laws of the United States, but wealthy Americans nanced various libusters and less-
wealthy adventurers were all too happy to sign up. Filibustering enjoyed its brief popularity into the late 1850s, at which point slavery and
concerns over session came to the fore. By the opening of the Civil War most saw these attempts as simply territorial theft.

 

VII. Conclusion

Debates over expansion, economics, diplomacy, and manifest destiny exposed some of the weaknesses of the American system.
The chauvinism of policies like Native American removal, the Mexican War, and libustering, existed alongside growing anxiety. Manifest
destiny attempted to make a virtue of America’s lack of history and turn it into the very basis of nationhood. To locate such origins, John
O’Sullivan and other champions of manifest destiny grafted biological and territorial imperatives – common among European de nitions
of nationalism – onto American political culture. The United States was the embodiment of the democratic ideal, they said. Democracy
had to be timeless, boundless, and portable. New methods of transportation and communication, the rapidity of the railroad and the
telegraph, the rise of the international market economy, and the growth of the American frontier provided shared platforms to help
Americans think across local identities and rea rm a national character.

 

VIII. Primary Sources

 

Cherokee Petition Protesting Removal, 1836

Native Americans responded di erently to the constant encroachments and attacks of American settlers. Some resisted violently.
Others worked to adapt to American culture and defend themselves using particularly American weapons like lawsuits and petitions.
The Cherokee did more to adapt than perhaps any other Native American group, creating a written constitution modeled o the

American constitution and adopting American culture in dress, speech, religion and economic activity. In this document, Cherokee
leaders protested the loss of their territory using a very American tactic: petitioning. 

John O’Sullivan Declares America’s Manifest Destiny, 1845

John Louis O’Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, articulated the long-standing American belief in the God-given mission of the
United States to lead the world in the transition to democracy. He called this America’s “manifest destiny.” This idea motivated wars
of American expansion. He explained this idea in the following essay where he advocated adding Texas to the United States.

Diary of a Woman Migrating to Oregon, 1853

The experience of migrating west into territory still controlled by Native Americans was di cult and dangerous. In these diary
excerpts we nd the experience of Amelia Stewart Knight who traveled with her husband and seven children from Iowa to Oregon.
She was pregnant the entire trip and gave birth to her eighth child on the side of the road near the journey’s end. 

Chinese Merchant Complains of Racist Abuse, 1860

The California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a major in ux of Asian immigrants to the new state. This number only grew after railroad
companies turned to Chinese laborers to build western railroads. Life for these immigrants was particularly di cult, as even nancially
successful Chinese immigrants faced considerable discrimination. In 1860, the Chinese merchant Pun Chi drafted this petition to
congress, calling on the legislature to do more to protect Chinese immigrants.

President Monroe Outlines the Monroe Doctrine, 1823

The spirit of Manifest Destiny had its corollary in an earlier piece of American foreign policy. Americans sought to remove colonizing
Europeans from the western hemisphere. As Secretary of State for President James Monroe, John Quincy Adams crafted what came to
be called the Monroe Doctrine. President Monroe outlined the principles of this policy in his seventh annual message to Congress,
excerpted here. 

Manifest Destiny Painting, 1872

Columbia, the female gure of America, leads Americans into the West and into the future by carrying the values of republicanism (as
seen through her Roman garb) and progress (shown through the inclusion of technological innovations like the telegraph) and
clearing native peoples and animals, seen being pushed into the darkness. 

Anti-Immigrant Cartoon, 1860

Many white Americans responded to increasing numbers of immigrants in the 1800s with great fear and xenophobic hatred, seeing
immigrants as threats to their vision of manifest destiny. This cartoon depicts a highly racialized image of a Chinese immigrant and
Irish immigrant “swallowing” the United States–in the form of Uncle Sam. In the second image the Chinese immigrant, swallows the
Irish immigrant. Networks of railroads and the promise of American expansion can be seen in the background.

 

IX. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Joshua Beatty and Gregg Lightfoot, with content contributions by Joshua Beatty, Ethan Bennett, Michelle
Cassidy, Jonathan Grandage, Gregg Lightfoot, Jose Juan Perez Melendez, Jessica Moore, Nick Roland, Matthew K. Saionz, Rowan
Steinecker, Patrick Troester, and Ben Wright.

Recommended citation: Joshua Beatty et al., “Manifest Destiny,” Joshua Beatty and Gregg Lightfoot, eds., in The American Yawp, Joseph
Locke and Ben Wright, eds., last modi ed August 1, 2017, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

 

Recommended Reading

Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008.
Brooks, James F. Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. Chapel Hill: UNC
Press, 2003.
Cusick, James G. The Other War of 1812: The Patriot War and the American Invasion of Spanish East Florida. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2007.
DeLay, Brian. War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Exley, Jo Ella Powell, Frontier Blood: The Saga of the Parker Family. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. 
Gómez, Laura E. Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Gordon, Sarah Barringer. The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Con ict in Nineteenth-Century
America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001.
Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Haas, Lisbeth. Conquest and Historical Identities in California, 1769-1936. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 
Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Holmes, Kenneth L. Covered Wagon Women: Diaries & Letters from the Western Trails, 1840-1849. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1995.
Horsman, Reginald. Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2009.
Hyde, Anne F. Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2011.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton, 2000. 
Larson, John Lauritz. Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early
United States. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001.
Lazo, Rodrigo. Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2006.
May, Robert E. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002.
Merry, Robert W. A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American
Continent. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009.
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2005. 
Perdue, Theda. “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 
Peters, Virginia Pergman. Women of the Earth Lodges: Tribal Life on the Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. 
Peterson, Dawn. Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2017. 

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2009.
Wilkins, David E. Hollow Justice: A History of Indigenous Claims in the United States. New Haven: Yale University Press,
2013.
Yarbrough, Faye, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 

 

Notes

1. Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). [↩]
2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American: A Lecture read before the Mercantile Library Association, Boston, February 7, 1844,” accessed May 18,

2015, http://www.emersoncentral.com/youngam.htm. [↩]
3. See Peter S. Onuf, “Imperialism and Nationalism in the Early American Republic,” in Empire’s Twin: U.S. Anti-imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age

of Terrorism, Ian Tyrell and Jay Sexton, eds. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 21-40. [↩]
4. Abraham Lincoln, “Lecture on Discoveries and Inventions: First Delivered April 6, 1858,” accessed May 18,

2015, http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/discoveries.htm. [↩]
5. Edmund Je erson Danziger, Great Lakes Indian Accommodation and Resistance During the Early Reservation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

2009), 11-13. [↩]
6. Malcolm J. Rohrbough, Trans-Appalachian Frontier, Third Edition: People, Societies, and Institutions, 1775-1850 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

2008), 474-479. [↩]
7. Mark Wyman, Immigrants in the Valley: Irish, Germans, and Americans in the Upper Mississippi Country, 1830-1860 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

Press, 2016), 128, 148-149. [↩]
8. Horace Greeley, New York Tribune, 1841. Although the phrase, “Go West, Young Man,” is often attributed to Greeley, the exhortation was most likely only

popularized by the newspaper editor in numerous speeches, letters, and editorials and always in the larger context of the comparable and superior health, wealth,
and advantages to be had in the West. [↩]
9. Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson: The Course of American Empire, 1767-1821 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977/1998), 344-355. [↩]
10. Thomas Sidney Jesup quoted in Kenneth Wiggins Porter, “Negroes and the Seminole War, 1835-1842,” The Journal of Southern History Vol. 30, No. 4
(November 1964), 427-450, quote on 427. [↩]
11. “President Andrew Jackson’s Message to Congress ‘On Indian Removal’ (1830),” accessed May 26, 2015, http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?

ash=true&doc=25&page=transcript. [↩]
12. Ibid. [↩]
13. Tim A. Garrison, “Worcester v. Georgia (1832).” New Georgia Encyclopedia, available online at http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-

politics/worcester-v-georgia-1832. [↩]
14. Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 15-21. [↩]
15. John Ross quoted in Brian Hicks, Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears, (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011), 210.

[↩]
16. Russell Thornton, The Cherokees: A Population History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 76. [↩]
17. Senate Document # 512, 23 Cong., 1 Sess. Vol. IV, p. x. Available online at https://books.google.com/books?

id=KSTlvxxCOkcC&dq=60,000+removal+indian&source=gbs_navlinks_s. [↩]
18. John P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). [↩]
19. Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). [↩]
20. Samuel J. Wells, “Federal Indian Policy: From Accommodation to Removal,” in Carolyn Reeves, ed., The Choctaw Before Removal (Jackson: The University

Press of Mississippi, 1985), 181-211. [↩]
21. William C. Sturtevant, Handbook of North American Indians: History of Indian-White Relations, Vol. 4 (Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 289. [↩]
22. Adrienne Caugh eld, True Women and Westward Expansion (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005). [↩]
23. Murray Newton Rothbard, Panic of 1819: Reactions and Policies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). [↩]
24. Carol Sheri , The Arti cial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996). [↩]
25. For more on the technology and transportation revolutions see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–

1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). [↩]
26. David Reimers, Other Immigrants: The Global Origins of the American People (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 27. [↩]

27. H. P. N. Gammel, ed., The Laws of Texas, 1822-1897 Volume 1 (Austin: 1898), 1063. Available online
at https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth5872/m1/1071/. [↩]

28. Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). [↩]
29. Quoted in, The Annual Register, Or, A View of the History and Politics of the Year 1846, Volume 88, (Washington: J.G. & F. Rivington, 1847), 377. [↩]
30. Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). [↩]
31. James M. Mcca rey, Army of Manifest Destiny: The American Soldier in the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 53. [↩]
32. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 51. [↩]
33. Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000). [↩]
34. Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of U.S. Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). [↩]
35. Tom Cha n, Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). [↩]
36. Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A History of the North American West, 1800-1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 471. [↩]

The American Yawp

13. The Sectional Crisis

This mural, created over eighty years after Brown’s death, captures the violence and religious fervor of the man and his era. John Steuart Curry, Tragic Prelude, 1938-1940, Kansas
State Capitol.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*
I. Introduction | II. Sectionalism in the Early Republic | III. The Crisis Joined | IV. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men | V. From Sectional Crisis

to National Crisis | VI. Conclusion | VII. Primary Sources | VIII. Reference Material

I. Introduction

Slavery’s western expansion created problems for the United States from the very start. Battles emerged over the westward expansion of
slavery and over the role of the federal government in protecting the interests of slaveholders. Northern workers felt that slavery suppressed
wages and stole land that could have been used by poor white Americans to achieve economic independence. Southerners feared that
without slavery’s expansion, the abolitionist faction would come to dominate national politics and an increasingly dense population of
slaves would lead to bloody insurrection and race war. Constant resistance from enslaved men and women required a strong proslavery
government to maintain order. As the North gradually abolished human bondage, enslaved men and women headed North on an
underground railroad of hideaways and safe houses. Northerners and Southerners came to disagree sharply on the role of the federal
government in capturing and returning these freedom seekers. While Northerners appealed to their states’ rights to refuse capturing
runaway slaves, Southerners demanded a national commitment to slavery. Enslaved laborers meanwhile remained vitally important to the
nation’s economy, fueling not only the southern plantation economy but also providing raw materials for the industrial North.

Di erences over the fate of slavery remained at the heart of American politics, especially as the United States expanded. After decades of
con ict, Americans north and south began to fear that the opposite section of the country had seized control of the government. By
November 1860, an opponent of slavery’s expansion arose from within the Republican Party. During the secession crisis that followed,
fears, nearly a century in the making, at last devolved into bloody war.

 

II. Sectionalism in the Early Republic

This map, published by the US Coast Guard, shows the percentage of slaves in the population in each county of the slave-holding states in 1860. The highest percentages lie along
the Mississippi River, in the “Black Belt” of Alabama, and coastal South Carolina, all of which were centers of agricultural production (cotton and rice) in the United States.
E. Hergesheimer (cartographer), Th. Leonhardt (engraver), Map Showing the Distribution of the Slave Population of the Southern States of the United States Compiled from the
Census of 1860, c. 1861. Wikimedia. 

Slavery’s history stretched back to antiquity. Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone in the world accepted it as a natural part of
life.1 English colonies north and south relied on enslaved workers who grew tobacco, harvested indigo and sugar, and worked in ports.
They generated tremendous wealth for the British crown. That wealth and luxury fostered seemingly limitless opportunities, and inspired
seemingly boundless imaginations. Enslaved workers also helped give rise to revolutionary new ideals, ideals that in time became the
ideological foundations of the sectional crisis. English political theorists, in particular, began to re-think natural law justi cations for
slavery. They rejected the longstanding idea that slavery was a condition that naturally suited some people. A new transatlantic antislavery
movement began to argue that freedom was the natural condition of man.2 

Revolutionaries seized onto these ideas to stunning e ect in the late eighteenth century. In the United States, France, and Haiti,
revolutionaries began the work of splintering the old order. Each revolution seemed to radicalize the next. Bolder and more expansive
declarations of equality and freedom followed one after the other. Revolutionaries in the United States declared, “All men are created
equal,” in the 1770s. French visionaries issued the “Declaration of Rights and Man and Citizen” by 1789.  But the most startling
development came in 1803. A revolution led by the island’s rebellious slaves turned France’s most valuable sugar colony into an
independent country administered by the formerly enslaved.

The Haitian Revolution marked an early origin of the sectional crisis. It helped splinter the Atlantic basin into clear zones of freedom and
un-freedom, shattering the longstanding assumption that African-descended slaves could not also be rulers. Despite the clear limitations of
the American Revolution in attacking slavery, the era marked a powerful break in slavery’s history. Military service on behalf of both the
English and the American army freed thousands of slaves. Many others simply used the turmoil of war to make their escape. As a result,
free black communities emerged—communities that would continually reignite the antislavery struggle. For nearly a century, most white
Americans were content to compromise over the issue of slavery, but the constant agitation of black Americans, both enslaved and free,
kept the issue alive.3 

The national breakdown over slavery occurred over a long timeline and across a broad geography. Debates over slavery in the American
West proved especially important. As the United States pressed westward, new questions arose as to whether those lands ought to be slave
or free. The framers of the Constitution did a little, but not much, to help resolve these early questions. Article VI of the 1787 Northwest
Ordinance banned slavery north and west of the Ohio River.4 Many took it to mean that the founders intended for slavery to die out, as
why else would they prohibit its spread across such a huge swath of territory?

Debates over the framer’s intentions often led to confusion and bitter debate, but the actions of the new government left better clues as to
what the new nation intended for slavery. Congress authorized the admission of Vermont (1791) and Kentucky (1792), with Vermont
coming into the Union as a free state, and Kentucky coming in as a slave state. Though Americans at the time made relatively little of the
balancing act suggested by the admission of a slave state and a free state, the pattern became increasingly important. By 1820, preserving
the balance of free states and slave states would be seen as an issue of national security.

New pressures challenging the delicate balance again arose in the West.  The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 more than doubled the size of the
United States. Questions immediately arose as to whether these lands would be made slave or free. Complicating matters further was the
rapid expansion of plantation slavery fueled by the invention of the cotton gin in 1793. Yet even with the booming cotton economy, many
Americans, including Thomas Je erson, believed that slavery was a temporary institution and would soon die out. Tensions rose with
the Louisiana Purchase, but a truly sectional national debate remained mostly dormant.

That debate, however, came quickly. Sectional di erences tied to the expansion of plantation slavery in the West were especially important
after 1803. The Ohio River Valley became an early fault line in the coming sectional struggle. Kentucky and Tennessee emerged as slave
states, while free states Ohio, Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) gained admission along the river’s northern banks. Borderland
negotiations and accommodations along the Ohio River fostered a distinctive kind of white supremacy, as laws tried to keep blacks out of
the West entirely. Ohio’s so-called “Black Laws,” of 1803 foreshadowed the exclusionary cultures of Indiana, Illinois, and several
subsequent states of the Old Northwest and later, the Far West.5 These laws often banned African American voting, denied black
Americans access to public schools, and made it impossible for non-whites to serve on juries and in local militias, among a host of other
restrictions and obstacles.

The Missouri Territory, by far the largest section of the Louisiana Territory, marked a turning point in the sectional crisis. Saint Louis, a
bustling Mississippi River town lled with powerful slave owners, loomed large as an important trade headquarters for networks in the
northern Mississippi Valley and the Greater West. In 1817, eager to put questions of whether this territory would be slave or free to rest,
Congress opened its debate over Missouri’s admission to the Union. Congressman James Tallmadge of New York proposed laws that

would gradually abolish slavery in the new state. Southern states responded with unanimous outrage, and the nation shuddered at an
undeniable sectional controversy.6

Congress reached a “compromise” on Missouri’s admission, largely through the work of Kentuckian Henry Clay. Maine would be
admitted to the Union as a free state. In exchange, Missouri would come into the Union as a slave state. Legislators sought to prevent
future con icts by making Missouri’s southern border at 36° 30′ the new dividing line between slavery and freedom in the Louisiana
Purchase lands. South of that line, running east from Missouri to the western edge of the Louisiana Purchase lands (near the present-day
Texas panhandle) slavery could expand. North of it, encompassing what in 1820 was still “unorganized territory,” there would be no
slavery.7 

The Missouri Compromise marked a major turning point in America’s sectional crisis because it exposed to the public just how divisive
the slavery issue had grown. The debate lled newspapers, speeches, and Congressional records. Antislavery and pro-slavery positions from
that point forward repeatedly returned to points made during the Missouri debates. Legislators battled for weeks over whether the
Constitutional framers intended slavery’s expansion or not, and these contests left deep scars. Even seemingly simple and straightforward
phrases like “All Men Are Created Equal” were hotly contested all over again. Questions over the expansion of slavery remained open, but
nearly all Americans concluded that the Constitution protected slavery where it already existed.

Southerners were not yet advancing arguments that said slavery was a positive good, but they did insist during the Missouri Debate that the
framers supported slavery and wanted to see it expand. In Article 1, Section 2, for example, the Constitution enabled representation in the
South to be based on rules de ning enslaved people as 3/5 of a voter, meaning southern white men would be overrepresented in Congress.
The Constitution also stipulated that Congress could not interfere with the slave trade before 1808, and enabled Congress to draft fugitive
slave laws.

Antislavery participants in the Missouri debate argued that the framers never intended slavery to survive the Revolution and in fact hoped
it would disappear through peaceful means. The framers of the Constitution never used the word “slave.” Slaves were referred to as
“persons held in service,” perhaps referring to English common law precedents that questioned the legitimacy of “property in man.”
Antislavery activists also pointed out that while the Congress could not pass a law limiting the slave trade by 1808, the framers had also
recognized the ip side of the debate and had thus opened the door to legislating the slave trade’s end once the deadline arrived. Language
in the Tenth Amendment, they claimed, also said slavery could be banned in the territories. Finally, they pointed to the due process clause
of the Fifth Amendment, which said that property could be seized through appropriate legislation.8 The bruising Missouri debates
ultimately transcended arguments about the Constitution. They became an all-encompassing referendum on the American past, present,
and future.

Despite the furor, the Missouri Crisis did not yet inspire hardened defenses of either slave or free labor as positive good. Those would come
in the coming decades. In the meantime, the uneasy consensus forged by the Missouri Debate managed to bring a measure of calm.

The Missouri debate had also deeply troubled the nation’s African Americans and Native Americans. By the time of the Missouri
compromise debate, both groups saw that whites never intended them to be citizens of the United States. In fact, the debates over
Missouri’s admission had o ered the rst sustained debate on the question of black citizenship, as Missouri’s State Constitution wanted to
impose a hard ban on any future black migrants. Legislators ultimately agreed that this hard ban violated the Constitution, but rea rmed
Missouri’s ability to deny citizenship to African Americans. Americans by 1820 had endured a broad challenge, not only to their cherished
ideals but also more fundamentally to their conceptions of self.

 

III. The Crisis Joined

Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1821 exposed deep fault lines in American society. But the Compromise created a new sectional
consensus that most white Americans, at least, hoped would ensure a lasting peace. Through sustained debates and arguments, white
Americans agreed that the Constitution could do little about slavery where it already existed and that slavery, with the State of Missouri as
the key exception, would never expand north of the 36°30′ line.

Once again westward expansion challenged this consensus, and this time the results proved even more damaging. Tellingly, enslaved
southerners were among the rst to signal their discontent. A rebellion led by Denmark Vesey in 1822 threatened lives and property
throughout the Carolinas. The nation’s religious leaders also expressed a rising discontent with the new status quo.9 The Second Great
Awakening further sharpened political di erences by promoting schisms within the major Protestant churches, schisms that also became
increasingly sectional in nature. Between 1820 and 1846, sectionalism drew on new political parties, new religious organizations, and new
reform movements.

As politics grew more democratic, leaders attacked old inequalities of wealth and power, but in doing so many pandered to a unity under
white supremacy. Slavery brie y receded from the nation’s attention in the early 1820s, but that would change quickly. By the last half of
the decade, slavery was back, and this time it appeared even more threatening.

Inspired by the social change of Jacksonian democracy, white men regardless of status would gain not only land and jobs, but also the right
to vote, the right to serve on juries, the right to attend public schools, and the right to serve in the militia and armed forces. In this post-
Missouri context, leaders arose to push the country’s new expansionist desires in aggressive new directions. As they did so, however, the
sectional crisis again deepened.

The Democratic Party initially seemed to o er a compelling answer to the problems of sectionalism by promising bene ts to white
working men of the North, South, and West, while also uniting rural, small town, and urban residents. Indeed, huge numbers of western,
southern, and northern workingmen rallied during the 1828 Presidential election behind Andrew Jackson. The Democratic Party tried to
avoid the issue of slavery and instead sought to unite Americans around shared commitments to white supremacy and desires to expand
the nation.

Democrats were not without their critics. Northerners seen as especially friendly to the South had become known as “Doughfaces” during
the Missouri debates, and as the 1830s wore on, more and more Doughfaced Democrats became vulnerable to the charge that they served
the Southern slave oligarchs better than they served their own northern communities. Whites discontented with the direction of the
country used the slur and other critiques to help chip away at Democratic Party majorities. The accusation that northern Democrats were
lap dogs for southern slaveholders had real power.10

The Whigs o ered an organized major party challenge to the Democrats. Whig strongholds often mirrored the patterns of westward
migrations out of New England. Whigs drew from an odd coalition of wealthy merchants, middle and upper class farmers, planters in the
Upland South, and settlers in the Great Lakes. Because of this motley coalition, the party struggled to bring a cohesive message to voters
in the 1830s. Their strongest support came from places like Ohio’s Western Reserve, the rural and Protestant-dominated areas of
Michigan, and similar parts of Protestant and small-town Illinois, particularly the fast-growing towns and cities of the state’s northern
half.11 

Whig leaders stressed Protestant culture, federal-sponsored internal improvements, and courted the support of a variety of reform
movements, including temperance, nativism, and even antislavery, though few Whigs believed in racial equality. These positions attracted a
wide range of gures, including a young convert to politics named Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln admired Whig leader Henry Clay of
Kentucky, and by the early 1830s, Lincoln certainly t the image of developing Whig. A veteran of the Black Hawk War, Lincoln had re-
located to New Salem, Illinois, where he worked a variety of odd jobs, living a life of thrift, self-discipline, and sobriety as he educated
himself in preparation for a professional life in law and politics.

The Whig Party blamed Democrats for defending slavery at the expense of the American people, but antislavery was never a core
component of the Whig platform. Several abolitionists grew so disgusted with the Whigs that they formed their own party, a true
antislavery party.  Activists in Warsaw, New York organized the antislavery Liberty Party in 1839. Liberty leaders demanded the end of
slavery in the District of Columbia, the end of the interstate slave trade, and the prohibition of slavery’s expansion into the West. But the
Liberty Party also shunned women’s participation in the movement and distanced themselves from visions of true racial egalitarianism.
Few Americans voted for the party. The Democrats and Whigs continued to dominate American politics.

Democrats and Whigs fostered a moment of relative calm on the slavery debate, partially aided by gag rules prohibiting discussion of
antislavery petitions. Arkansas (1836) and Michigan (1837) became the newest states admitted to the Union, with Arkansas coming in as a
slave state, and Michigan coming in as a free state. Michigan gained admission through provisions established in the Northwest Ordinance,
while Arkansas came in under the Missouri Compromise. Since its lands were below the line at 36° 30′ the admission of Arkansas did not
threaten the Missouri consensus. The balancing act between slavery and freedom continued.

Events in Texas would shatter the balance. Independent Texas soon gained recognition from a supportive Andrew Jackson administration
in 1837. But Jackson’s successor, President Martin Van Buren, also a Democrat, soon had reasons to worry about the Republic of Texas.
Texas struggled with ongoing con icts with Mexico and Indian raids from the powerful Comanche. The 1844 democratic presidential
candidate James K. Polk sought to bridge the sectional divide by promising new lands to whites north and south. Polk cited the annexation
of Texas and the Oregon Territory as campaign cornerstones.12 Yet as Polk championed the acquisition of these vast new lands, northern
Democrats grew annoyed by their southern colleagues, especially when it came to Texas. 

For many observers, the debates over Texas statehood illustrated that the federal government was clearly pro-slavery. Texas President Sam
Houston managed to secure a deal with Polk, and gained admission to the Union for Texas in 1845. Antislavery northerners also worried
about the admission of Florida, which entered the Union as a slave state in 1845. The year 1845 became a pivotal year in the memory of
antislavery leaders. As Americans embraced calls to pursue their “Manifest Destiny,” antislavery voices looked at developments in Florida
and Texas as signs that the sectional crisis had taken an ominous and perhaps irredeemable turn.

The 1840s opened with a number of disturbing developments for antislavery leaders. The 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg v.
Pennsylvania ruled that the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act trumped Pennsylvania’s personal liberty law.13 Antislavery activists
believed that the federal government only served southern slaveholders and were trouncing the states’ rights of the North. A number of
northern states reacted by passing new personal liberty laws in protest in 1843.

The rising controversy over the status of fugitive slaves swelled partly through the in uence of escaped former slaves, including Frederick
Douglass. Douglass’s entrance into northern politics marked an important new development in the nation’s coming sectional crisis. Born
into slavery in 1818 at Talbot County, Maryland, Douglass grew up, like many enslaved people, barely having known his own mother or
date of birth. And yet because of a range of unique privileges a orded him by the circumstances of his upbringing, as well as his own
genius and determination, Douglass managed to learn how to read and write. He used these skills to escape from slavery in 1837, when he
was just nineteen. By 1845, Douglass put the nishing touches on his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.14 The
book launched his life-long career as an advocate for the enslaved and helped further raise the visibility of black politics. Other former
slaves, including Sojourner Truth, joined Douglass in rousing support for antislavery, as did free black Americans like Maria Stewart, James
McCune Smith, Martin Delaney and numerous others.15 But black activists did more than deliver speeches. They also attacked fugitive
slave laws by helping thousands to escape. The incredible career of Harriet Tubman is one of the more dramatic examples. But the forces of
slavery had powerful allies at every level of government.

The year 1846 signaled new reversals to the antislavery cause, and the beginnings of a dark new era in American politics. President Polk and
his Democratic allies were eager to see western lands brought into the Union and were especially anxious to see the borders of the nation
extended to the shores of the Paci c Ocean. Critics of the administration blasted these e orts as little more than land-grabs on behalf of
slaveholders. Events in early 1846 seemed to justify antislavery complaints. Since Mexico had never recognized independent Texas, it

continued to lay claim to its lands, even after the United States admitted it to the Union. In January 1846, Polk ordered troops to Texas to
enforce claims stemming from its border dispute along the Rio Grande. Polk asked for war on May 11, 1846, and by September 1847, the
United States had invaded Mexico City. Whigs, like Abraham Lincoln, found their protests sidelined, but antislavery voices were becoming
more vocal and more powerful.
After 1846, the sectional crisis raged throughout North America. Debates swirled over whether the new lands would be slave or free. The
South began defending slavery as a positive good. At the same time, Congressman David Wilmot submitted his “Wilmot Proviso” late in
1846, banning the expansion of slavery into the territories won from Mexico. The Proviso gained widespread northern support and even
passed the House with bipartisan support, but it failed in the Senate.

 

IV. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men

The conclusion of the Mexican War gave rise to the 1848 Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo. The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the
United States. The spoils gained from the Mexican War were impressive, and it was clear they would help expand slavery. The United States
required Mexican o cials to cede the California and New Mexico Territories for $15 million dollars. With American soldiers occupying
their capital, Mexican leaders had no choice but sign or continue ghting a war they could not win. The new American territory included
lands that would become the future states of California, Utah, Nevada, most of Arizona, and well as parts of New Mexico, Colorado, and
Wyoming. 

Questions about the balance of free and slave states in the Union became even more erce after the US acquired these territories from Mexico by the 1848 in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo. Map of the Mexican Cession. Wikimedia.

The acquisition of so much land made it imperative to antislavery leaders that these lands not be opened to slavery. But knowing that the
Liberty Party was not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders instead hoped to foster a new and more competitive party,
which they called the Free Soil Party. Antislavery leaders entered the 1848 election hoping that their vision of a federal government
divorced from slavery might be heard. But both the Whigs and the Democrats, nominated pro-slavery southerners. Left unrepresented,
antislavery Free Soil leaders swung into action.

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 Bu alo, 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’s platform bridged the eastern and the western
leadership together and called for an end to slavery in Washington DC and a halt on slavery’s expansion in the territories.16 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% 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.17 In Congress, Free Soil members had enough votes to
swing power to either the Whigs or the Democrats.

The admission of Wisconsin as a free state in May 1848 helped cool tensions after the Texas and Florida admissions. But news from a
number of failed revolutions in Europe alarmed American reformers. As exiled radicals ltered out of Europe and into the United States, a
women’s rights movement also got underway at Seneca Falls, New York. Representing the rst of such meetings ever held in United States
history, it was led by gures like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause.18 Frederick
Douglass also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated the Declaration of Sentiments,
Grievances and Resolutions.19 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.

The upheavals signaled by 1848 came to a quick end. Taylor remained in o ce only a brief time until his unexpected death from a stomach
ailment in 1850. During Taylor’s brief time in o ce, the fruits of the Mexican War began to spoil. While he was alive, Taylor and his
administration struggled to nd 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 underway, and with the President
dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were o to a troubling start.

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 a airs. It fell to young Stephen Douglas, then, to shepherd the bills through the 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.

Henry Clay (“The Great Compromiser”) 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 paci ed for a time by the Compromise. P. F. Rothermel (artist), c. 1855. Wikimedia.

The Compromise of 1850 tried to o er something to everyone, but in the end it only worsened the sectional crisis. For southerners, the
package o ered 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
its bounds.

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’s debt.
But the Compromise debates soon grew ugly.

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 3/5 compromise of the Constitution gave southerners 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.

None of the individual 1850 Compromise measures proved more troubling to national and international observers than the Fugitive Slave
Act. In a clear bid to extend slavery’s in uence throughout the country, the act created special federal commissioners to determine the fate
of alleged fugitives without bene t 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’s 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.20 Many black northerners responded to the
new law by heading further north to Canada.
The 1852 Presidential election gave the Whigs their most stunning defeat and e ectively 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 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 bestselling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. ((Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: 1852).)) Sales for Uncle Tom’s Cabin were astronomical, eclipsed only by sales of the Bible.21
The book became a sensation and helped move antislavery into everyday conversation for many northerners. Despite the powerful
antislavery message, Stowe’s 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’s Cabin bolstered the abolitionist cause, the terms outlined by the
Compromise of 1850 appeared strong enough to keep the peace.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin intensi ed 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 di erent 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 horri c violence that both endured melted the hearts of many northerners and pressed some to join in the ght against slavery. Full-page illustration by
Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852. Wikimedia.

Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with con dence. Voters had
returned them to o ce in 1852 following the bitter ghts 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’s e orts 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.

Douglas proposed a bold plan in 1854 to cut o 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 ow through Chicago. But before he had even nished 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 in uenced by migrants ooding to the state to either protect or stop the spread of slavery.

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’s 1850 fugitive slave law. The case of Anthony Burns illustrates how the Fugitive Slave Law
radicalized many northerners.  On May 24, 1854, 20-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’ capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob gathered outside of the courthouse demanding Burns’ release. Two
days after the arrest, the crowd stormed the courthouse and shot a Deputy U.S. Marshall 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 United States Government had successfully
reenslaved Anthony Burns.22 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
governments imposing the Fugitive Slave Law on rebellious northern populations. In the words of Amos Adams Lawrence, “We went to
bed one night old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs & woke up stark mad Abolitionists.”23

Anthony Burns, the fugitive slave, appears in a portrait at the center of this 1855. Burns’ 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’ treatment spurred riots and protests by abolitionists and
citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. John Andrews (engraver), “Anthony Burns,” c.
1855. Library of Congress.

As northerners radicalized, organizations like the New England Emigrant Aid Society 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.

The year 1855 nearly derailed the northern antislavery coalition. A resurgent anti-immigrant movement brie y took advantage of the Whig
collapse, and nearly stole the energy of the anti-administration forces by channeling its frustrations into ghts 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’s attention
in ways the antislavery movement already had.24 

The antislavery political movements that started in 1854 coalesced as the coming Presidential election of 1856 accelerated the formation of
a new political party. Harkening back to the founding fathers, this new party called itself the Republican Party. Republicans moved into a
highly charged summer expecting great things for their cause. Following an explosive speech before Congress on May 19-20, Charles
Sumner was beaten by congressional representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina right on the oor of the Senate chamber. Among
other accusations, Sumner accused Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina of defending slavery so he could have sexual access to black
women.25 Butler’s cousin, representative Brooks felt that he had to defend his relative’s honor, and nearly killed Sumner as a result.

The Caning of Charles Sumner, 1856. Wikimedia.

The violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas.26 Proslavery 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 re-elected by his constituents later in the year. He received new canes emblazoned with
the words “Hit him again!”27

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 Frémont. Frémont’s antislavery
credentials may not have pleased many abolitionists, but his dynamic and talented wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, 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.28 Lincoln himself was
slow to join the coalition, yet by the summer of 1856, Lincoln had fully committed to the Frémont campaign.

Frémont lost, but Republicans celebrated that he won 11 of the 16 free states. This showing, they urged, was truly impressive for any party
making its rst run at the Presidency. Yet northern Democrats in crucial swing states remained unmoved by the Republican Party’s
appeals. Ulysses S. Grant of Missouri, for example, worried that Frémont 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, Frémont’s defeat was more than a disappointment. Believing their fate had been sealed as permanent
non-citizens, 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.

 

V. From Sectional Crisis to National Crisis

White antislavery leaders hailed Frémont’s defeat as a “glorious” one and looked ahead to the party’s future successes. For those still in
slavery, or hoping to see loved ones freed, the news was of course much harder to take. The Republican Party had promised the rise of an
antislavery coalition, but voters rebuked it. The lessons seemed clear enough.

Kansas loomed large over the 1856 election, darkening the national mood. The story of voter fraud in Kansas had begun years before in
1854, when nearby Missourians rst started crossing the border to tamper with the Kansas elections. Noting this, critics at the time
attacked the Pierce administration for not living up to the ideals of popular sovereignty by ensuring fair elections. From there, the crisis
only deepened. Kansas voted to come into the Union as a free state, but the federal government refused to recognize their votes and instead
recognized a sham pro-slavery legislature.
The sectional crisis had at last become a national crisis. “Bleeding Kansas” was the rst place to demonstrate that the sectional crisis could
easily, and in fact already was, exploding into a full-blown national crisis. As the national mood grew increasingly grim, Kansas attracted
militants representing the extreme sides of the slavery debate.
In the days after the 1856 Presidential election, Buchanan made his plans for his time in o ce clear. He talked with Chief Justice Roger
Taney on inauguration day about a court decision he hoped to see handled during his time in o ce. Indeed, not long after the
inauguration, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that would come to de ne Buchanan’s Presidency. The Dred Scott
decision, Scott v. Sandford, ruled that black Americans could not be citizens of the United States.29 This gave the Buchanan
administration and its southern allies a direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise. The court ruled that Scott, a Missouri slave, had
no right to sue in United States courts. The Dred Scott decision signaled that the federal government was now fully committed to
extending slavery as far and as wide as it might want.

Dred Scott’s Supreme Court case made clear that the federal government was no longer able or
willing to ignore the issue of slavery. More than that, all black Americans, Justice Taney
declared, could never be citizens of the United States. Though seemingly a disastrous decision
for abolitionists, this controversial ruling actually increased the ranks of the abolitionist
movement. Photograph of Dred Scott, 1857. Wikimedia.

The Dred Scott decision seemed to settle the sectional crisis by making slavery fully national, but in reality it just exacerbated sectional
tensions further. In 1857, Buchanan sent U.S. military forces to Utah, hoping to subdue Utah’s Mormon communities. This action,

however, led to renewed charges, many of them leveled from within his own party, that the administration was abusing its powers. Far
more important than the Utah invasion, however, was the ongoing events in Kansas. It was Kansas that at last proved to many northerners
that the sectional crisis would not go away unless slavery also went away.

The Illinois Senate race in 1858 put the scope of the sectional crisis on full display. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln challenged the
greatly in uential Democrat Stephen Douglas. Pandering to appeals to white supremacy, Douglas hammered the Republican opposition
as a “Black Republican” party bent on racial equality.30 The Republicans, including Lincoln, were thrown on the defensive. Democrats
hung on as best they could, but the Republicans won the House of Representatives and picked up seats in the Senate. Lincoln actually lost
his contest with Stephen Douglas, but in the process rmly established himself as a leading national Republican. After the 1858 elections,
all eyes turned to 1860. Given the Republican Party’s successes since 1854, it was expected that the 1860 Presidential election might
produce the nation’s rst antislavery president.

In the troubled decades since the Missouri Compromise, the nation slowly tore itself apart. Congressman clubbed each other nearly to
death on the oor of the Congress, and by the middle of the 1850s Americans were already at war on the Kansas and Missouri plains.
Across the country, cities and towns were in various stages of revolt against federal authority. Fighting spread even further against Indians
in the Far West and against Mormons in Utah. The nation’s militants anticipated a coming breakdown, and worked to exploit it. John
Brown, fresh from his actions in Kansas, moved east and planned more violence. Assembling a team from across the West, including black
radicals from Oberlin, Ohio, and throughout communities in Canada West, Brown hatched a plan to attack Harper’s Ferry, a federal
weapon’s arsenal in Virginia (now West Virginia). He would use the weapons to lead a slave revolt. Brown approached Frederick Douglass,
though Douglass refused to join.

Brown’s raid embarked on October 16. By October 18, a command under Robert E. Lee had crushed the revolt. Many of Brown’s men,
including his own sons, were killed, but Brown himself lived and was imprisoned. Brown prophesied while in prison that the nation’s
crimes would only be purged with blood. He went to the gallows in December 1859. Northerners made a stunning display of sympathy on
the day of his execution. Southerners took their reactions to mean that the coming 1860 election would be, in many ways, a referendum on
secession and disunion.

The execution of John Brown made him a martyr in abolitionist circles and a con rmed traitor in southern crowds. Both of these images continued to pervade public memory
after the Civil War, but in the North especially (where so many soldiers had died to help end slavery) his name was admired. Over two decades after Brown’s death, Thomas
Hovenden portrayed Brown as a saint. As he is lead to his execution for attempting to destroy slavery, Brown poignantly leans over a rail to kiss a black baby. Thomas Hovenden,
The Last Moments of John Brown, c. 1882-1884. Wikimedia.

Republicans wanted little to do with Brown and instead tried to portray themselves as moderates opposed to both abolitionists and
proslavery expansionists. In this climate, the parties opened their contest for the 1860 Presidential election. The Democratic Party fared

poorly as its southern delegates bolted its national convention at Charleston and ran their own candidate, Vice President John C.
Breckenridge of Kentucky. Hoping to eld a candidate who might nonetheless manage to bridge the broken party’s factions, the
Democrats decided to meet again at Baltimore, and nominated Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois.
The Republicans, meanwhile, held their boisterous convention in Chicago. The Republican platform made the party’s antislavery
commitments clear, also making wide promises to its white constituents, particularly westerners, with the promise of new land,
transcontinental railroads, and broad support of public schools.31 Abraham Lincoln, a candidate few outside of Illinois truly expected to
win, nonetheless proved far less polarizing than the other names on the ballot. Lincoln won the nomination, and with the Democrats in
disarray, Republicans knew their candidate Lincoln had a good chance of winning.

In this political cartoon, Abraham Lincoln uncomfortably straddles a rail supported by a black man and Horace Greeley (editor of the New York “Tribune”). The wood board is a
dual reference to the antislavery plank of the 1860 Republican platform — which Lincoln seemed to uneasily defend — and Lincoln’s backwoods origins. Louis Maurer, “The
Rail Candidate,” Currier & Ives, c. 1860. Library of Congress.

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6, gaining just 40% of the popular vote and not a single southern vote in the
Electoral College. Within days, southern states were organizing secession conventions. John J. Crittenden of Kentucky proposed a series of
compromises, but a clear pro-southern bias meant they had little chance of gaining Republican acceptance. Crittenden’s plan promised
renewed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and o ered a plan to keep slavery in the nation’s capital.32 Republicans by late 1860 knew
that the voters who had just placed them in power did not want them to cave on these points, and southern states proceed with their plans
to leave the Union. On December 20, South Carolina voted to secede, and issued its “Declaration of the Immediate Causes.”33 The
Declaration highlighted failure of the federal government to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act over competing personal liberty laws in

northern states. After the war many southerners claimed that secession was primarily motivated by a concern to preserve states’ rights, but
the primary complaint of the very rst ordinance of secession, listed the federal government’s failure to exert its authority over the northern
states.

The year 1861, then, saw the culmination of the secession crisis. Before he left for Washington, Lincoln told those who had gathered in
Spring eld to wish him well and that he faced a “task greater than Washington’s” in the years to come. Southerners were also learning the
challenges of forming a new nation. The seceded states grappled with internal divisions right away, as states with slaveholders sometimes
did not support the newly seceded states. In January, for example, Delaware rejected secession. But states in the lower south adopted a
di erent course. The State of Mississippi seceded. Later in the month, the states of Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana also all left
the Union. By early February, Texas had also joined the newly seceded states. In February, southerners drafted a constitution protecting
slavery and named a westerner, Je erson Davis of Mississippi, as their President. When Abraham Lincoln acted upon his constitutional
mandate as Commander in Chief following his inauguration on March 4, rebels calling themselves members of the Confederate States of
America opened re on Fort Sumter in South Carolina. Within days, Abraham Lincoln would demand 75,000 volunteers from the North
to crush the rebellion, and the American Civil War began.

 

VI. Conclusion

Slavery had long divided the politics of the United States. In time, these divisions became both sectional and irreconcilable. The rst and
most ominous sign of a coming sectional storm occurred over debates surrounding the admission of the State of Missouri in 1821. As
westward expansion continued, these fault lines grew even more ominous, particularly as the United States managed to seize even more
lands from its war with Mexico. The country seemed to teeter ever closer to a full-throated endorsement of slavery. But an antislavery
coalition arose in the middle 1850s calling itself the Republican Party. Eager to cordon o slavery and con ne it to where it already existed,
the Republicans won the presidential election of 1860 and threw the nation on the path to war.

Throughout this period, the mainstream of the antislavery movement remained committed to a peaceful resolution of the slavery issue
through e orts understood to foster the “ultimate extinction” of slavery in due time. But as the secession crisis revealed, the South could
not tolerate a federal government working against the interests of slavery’s expansion and decided to take a gamble on war with the United
States. Secession, in the end, raised the possibility of emancipation through war, a possibility most Republicans knew, of course, had
always been an option, but one they nonetheless hoped would never be necessary. By 1861 all bets were o , and the fate of slavery, and of
the nation, depended upon war.

 

VII. Primary Sources

Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842

Con icts between the power of the federal government and states’ rights strained American politics throughout the antebellum era.
During the 1840s and 1850s, the most consistent source of tension on the issue stemmed from northerners refusing to comply with
fugitive slave laws. As early as the 1780s, Pennsylvania passed laws that made it illegal to take a black person from the state for the
purpose of enslaving them. In the majority opinion, excerpted here, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story decided that the national
fugitive slave act overruled Pennsylvania’s law.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

In 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe published her bestselling antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Sales for Uncle Tom’s Cabin were
astronomical, eclipsed only by sales of the Bible. The book became a sensation and helped move antislavery into everyday conversation
for many northerners. In this passage, a senator and his wife debate the Fugitive Slave Law. 

Margaraetta Mason and Lydia Maria Child Discuss John Brown, 1860

After John Brown was arrested for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Lydia Maria Child wrote to the governor of Virginia requesting to visit
Brown. Margaretta Mason of Virginia wrote a searing letter to Child attacking her for supporting a murder. Child responded, and the
exchange of letters was published by the American Antislavery Society.

1860 Republican Party Platform

The 1860 Republican Party convention in Chicago created a platform that clearly opposed the expansion of slavery in the West and
the reopening of the slave trade. However, nothing in the document claimed that the government had the power to eliminate slavery
where it already existed. Controversies over slavery su use the platform, but maybe even more noticeable is the importance of the West
to the Republican Party.  

South Carolina Declaration of Secession, 1860

Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6 with just 40% of the popular vote and not a single southern vote in the
Electoral College. Within days, southern states were organizing secession conventions. On December 20, South Carolina voted to
secede, and issued its “Declaration of the Immediate Causes.”

E ects of the Fugitive Slave Law Lithograph, 1850

This lithograph imagines the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850.  Four well-dressed black men
are being hunted by a party of white men, seen in the background.  There are a number of ambiguities in the image – are the black
men slaves or free?  Are they trying to escape or not?  Where exactly are they?  These ambiguities speak to the concerns many
abolitionists had about the law, which required free citizens to return escaped slaves to their masters.

Sectional Crisis Map, 1856

This piece of Republican propaganda from the 1856 election makes clear distinctions between free states, slave states, and territories. 
Featured at the top of the page are engravings of John C. Fremont and his running mate, William C. Dayton.  A vibrant red sets o
the free states.  The chart, “Freedom vs. Slavery,” demonstrates the North’s economic and cultural superiority over slave states in terms
of everything from population per square mile, capital in manufactures, miles of railroad, the number of newspapers and public
libraries, and value of churches.

 

VIII. Reference Material

This chapter was edited by Jesse Gant, with content contributions by Je rey Bain-Conkin, Matthew A. Byron, Christopher Childers, Jesse
Gant, Christopher Null, Ryan Poe, Michael Robinson, Nicholas Wood, Michael Woods, and Ben Wright.

Recommended citation: Je rey Bain-Conkin et al., “The Sectional Crisis,” Jesse Gant, ed., in The American Yawp, Joseph Locke and Ben
Wright, eds., last modi ed August 1, 2017, http://www.AmericanYawp.com.

 

Recommended Reading

Bacon, Margaret Hope. But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis. Albany: SUNY Press, 2012. 
Baker, Jean H. A airs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-nineteenth Century. New York:
Fordham University Press, 1983.
Berlin, Ira. Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2003.
Boydston, Jeanne. Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990.
Bracey, Christopher Alan, Paul Finkelman, and David Thomas Konig, eds. The Dred Scott Case: Historical and Contemporary
Perspectives on Race and Law. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010.
Cutter, Barbara. Domestic Devils, Battle eld Angels: The Radicalization of American Womanhood, 1830-1865.. DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2003.
Engs, Robert F. and Randall M. Miller, eds. The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans’ First Generation.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
Etcheson, Nicole. Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.
Flexnor, Eleanor. Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1975.
Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970.
Grant, Susan-Mary. North Over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era. Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Holt, Michael. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999.
Howe, Daniel Walker. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.
Je rey, Julie R. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: North
Carolina University Press, 1998.
Jones, Martha S. All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
Kantrowitz, Stephen. More than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889. New York: Penguin
Press, 2012.
McDaniel, Caleb. The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform. Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013.
Oakes, James. The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014.
Potter, David M. The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861. New York: HarperCollins, 1976.
Quarles, Benjamin. Allies for Freedom: Blacks and John Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974.
Robertson, Stacey. Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010.
Sinha, Manisha. The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Smith, Kimberly K. The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason and Romance in Antebellum American Political Thought.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999.

Varon, Elizabeth. Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2008. 
Zaeske, Susan. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2003.

 

Notes

1. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). [↩]
2. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 164-212. [↩]
3. see “Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic” a digital exhibit from the Library Company of Philadelphia, available online

at www.librarycompany.org/blackfounders/#. [↩]
4. Northwest Ordinance; July 13, 1787, Charles C. Tansill, ed., Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (Washington D.C.:

Government Printing O ce, 1927), House Document No. 398. Available online at: avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nworder.asp. [↩]
5. Stephen Middleton, The Black Laws: Race and the Legal Process in Early Ohio (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005). [↩]
6. Lawrence Wilson, ed., The National Register: A weekly paper, containing a series of the important public documents, and the proceedings of Congress…Volume

VII (Washington City: 1819), 125. [↩]
7. Conference committee report on the Missouri Compromise, March 1, 1820; Joint Committee of Conference on the Missouri Bill, 03/01/1820-03/06/1820;

Record Group 128l; Records of Joint Committees of Congress, 1789-1989; National Archives. Available online at: https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?
ash=true&doc=22&page=transcript. [↩]

8. William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977). [↩]
9. Richard Furman, Rev. Dr. Richard Furman’s Exposition of the Views of the Baptists, relative to the colored population of the United States (Charleston, S.C.:

A.E. Miller, 1923), p. 1. [↩]
10. Nicholas Wood, ““A Sacri ce on the Altar of Slavery”: Doughface Politics and Black Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania, 1837–1838,” Journal of the Early

Republic, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 75-106. [↩]
11. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

[↩]
12. James K. Polk: “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1845. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency

Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25814. [↩]
13. Richard Peters, Report of the Case of Edward Prigg against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania… (Philadelphia: 1842). [↩]
14. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (Boston: 1845). [↩]
15. See Sojourner Truth, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, Olive Gilbert ed. (Boston: 1850), digital.library.upenn.edu/women/truth/1850/1850.html; Maria

Stewart, Maria W. Stewart: America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, Marilyn Richardson, ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); James
McCune Smith, The Works of James McCune Smith: Black Intellectual and Abolitionist, John Stau er, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Frank
A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delaney (Boston: 1868), esp p. 313-367, https://archive.org/details/lifepublicservic00inroll. [↩]
16. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). [↩]
17. Joseph Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2014). [↩]
18. Eleanor Flexnor, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). [↩]
19. Report of the Woman’s Rights Convention, Held at Seneca Falls, N.Y., July 19th and 20th, 1848 (Rochester, 1848). [↩]
20. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, Race, Law and American Society, Second Edition (New York: Routledge, 2013), 56. [↩]
21. Michael Winship, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: History of the Book in the 19th-Century United States” (University of Virginia, 2007). Accessed August 1,
2015: http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/interpret/exhibits/winship/winship.html. [↩]
22. Charles Harold Nichols, Many Thousand Gone: The Ex-slaves’ Account of Their Bondage and Freedom (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1963), 156. [↩]
23. Amos A. Lawrence to Giles Richards, June 1, 1854, quoted in Jane J. & William H. Pease, eds., The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns: A Problem in Law
Enforcement (Philadelphia: 1975), p. 43. [↩]
24. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850′s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). [↩]
25. Charles Sumner, The Crime Against Kansas, Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner in the Senate of the United States (Boston: 1856). Available online
at: https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/CrimeAgainstKSSpeech.pdf. [↩]
26. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004). [↩]
27. Williamjames Hull Ho er, The Caning of Charles Sumner: Honor, Idealism, and the Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010), 92. [↩]

28. Abraham Lincoln, “Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854″ in Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Roy P. Basler, ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1953), 247-283. Available online at: https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm. [↩]

29. Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sanford, March 6, 1857; Case Files 1792-1995; Record Group 267; Records of the Supreme
Court of the United States; National Archives. Accessed August 1, 2015: http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php? ash=true&doc=29. [↩]

30. Rodney O. Davis, Douglas L. Wilson, eds., The Lincoln Douglas Debates (Knox College, 2008), 68. [↩]
31. Republican Party Platforms: “Republican Party Platform of 1860,” May 17, 1860. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency

Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=29620. [↩]
32. Horace Greeley, The American Con ict: A History of the Great Rebellion in the United States of America, 1860-1864, Volume 1 (Hartford: 1864), 366-367.

[↩]
33. “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union,” The Avalon Project at the Yale Law

School. Accessed August 1, 2015: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp. [↩]

The American Yawp

14. The Civil War

Collecting the Dead. Cold Harbor, Virginia. April, 1865. Via Library of Congress.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*
I. Introduction | II. The Election of 1860 and Secession | III. A War for Union 1861-1863 | IV. War for Emancipation 1863-1865 |

V. Conclusion | VI. Primary Sources | VII. Reference Material

I. Introduction

The American Civil War, the bloodiest in the nation’s history, resulted in approximately 750,000 deaths.1 The war touched the life of
nearly every American as military mobilization reached levels never seen before or since. The vast majority of northerners went to war to
preserve the Union, but the war ultimately transformed into a struggle to eradicate slavery. African Americans, both enslaved and free
pressed the issue of emancipation and nurtured this transformation. Simultaneously, women thrust themselves into critical wartime roles
while navigating a world without many men of military age. The Civil War was a de ning event in the history of the United States and,
for the Americans thrust into it, a wrenching one.
 

II. The Election of 1860 and Secession

The 1860 presidential election was chaotic. In April, the Democratic Party convened in Charleston, South Carolina, the bastion of
secessionist thought in the South. The goal was to nominate a candidate for the party ticket, but the party was deeply divided. Northern
Democrats pulled for Senator Stephen Douglas, a pro-slavery moderate championing popular sovereignty, while Southern Democrats were
intent on endorsing someone other than Douglas. The parties leaders’ refusal to include a pro-slavery platform resulted in Southern
delegates walking out of the convention, preventing Douglas from gaining the two-thirds majority required for a nomination. The
Democrats ended up with two presidential candidates. A subsequent convention in Baltimore nominated Douglas, while southerners
nominated the current Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential candidate. The nation’s oldest party had split
over di erences in policy toward slavery.2 
Initially, the Republicans were hardly uni ed around a single candidate themselves. Several leading Republican men vied for their party’s
nomination. A consensus emerged at the May 1860 convention that the party’s nominee would need to carry all the free states—for only in
that situation could a Republican nominee potentially win. New York Senator William Seward, a leading contender, was passed over.
Seward’s pro-immigrant position posed a potential obstacle, particularly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, as a
relatively unknown but likable politician, rose from a pool of potential candidates and was selected by the delegates on the third ballot.
The electoral landscape was further complicated through the emergence of a fourth candidate, Tennessee’s John Bell, heading the
Constitutional Union Party. The Constitutional Unionists, comprised of former Whigs who teamed up with some southern Democrats,
made it their mission to avoid the specter of secession while doing little else to address the issues tearing the country apart.
Abraham Lincoln’s nomination proved a great windfall for the Republican Party. Lincoln carried all free states with the exception of New
Jersey (which he split with Douglas). 81.2% of the voting electorate came out to vote—at that point the highest ever for a presidential
election. Lincoln received fewer than 40% of the popular vote, but with the eld so split, that percentage yielded 180 electoral votes.
Lincoln was trailed by Breckinridge with his 72 electoral votes, carrying 11 of the 15 slave states, Bell came in third with 39 electoral votes,
and Douglas came in last, only able to garner twelve electoral votes despite carrying almost 30% of the popular vote. Since the Republican
platform prohibited the expansion of slavery in future western states, all future Confederate states, with the exception of Virginia, excluded
Lincoln’s name from their ballots.3

Abraham Lincoln, August 13, 1860, via Library of Congress.

The election of Lincoln and the perceived threat to the institution of slavery proved too much for the deep Southern states. South Carolina
acted almost immediately, calling a convention to declare secession. On December 20, 1860, the South Carolina convention voted
unanimously 169-0 to dissolve their Union with the United States.4 The other states across the Deep South quickly followed suit.
Mississippi adopted their own resolution on January 9, 1861, Florida followed on January 10, Alabama January 11, Georgia on January 19,
Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 1. Texas was the only state to put the issue up for a popular vote, but secession was widely
popular throughout the South.

Confederates quickly shed their American identity and adopted a new Confederate nationalism. Confederate nationalism was based on
several ideals, foremost among these being slavery. As Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated, the Confederacy’s
“foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery… is his natural
and normal condition.”5 The election of Lincoln in 1860 demonstrated that the South was politically overwhelmed. Slavery was
omnipresent in the pre-war South, and it served as the most common frame of reference for unequal power. To a Southern man, there was
no fate more terrifying than the thought of being reduced to the level of a slave. Religion likewise shaped Confederate nationalism, as
southerners believed that the Confederacy was ful lling God’s will. The Confederacy even veered from the American constitution by
explicitly invoking Christianity in their founding document. Yet in every case, all rationale for secession could be thoroughly tied to slavery.
“Our position is thoroughly identi ed with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world”, proclaimed the
Mississippi statement of secession.6 Thus for the original seven Confederate states (and those who would subsequently join), slavery’s
existence was the essential core of the edging Confederacy. 

The emblems of nationalism on this currency reveal much about the ideology underpinning the Confederacy: George Washington standing stately in a Roman toga indicates the
belief in the South’s honorable and aristocratic past; John C. Calhoun’s portrait emphasizes the Confederate argument of the importance of states’ rights; and, most importantly,
the image of African Americans working in elds demonstrates slavery’s position as foundational to the Confederacy. A ve and one hundred dollar Confederate States of
America interest bearing banknote, c. 1861 and 1862. Wikimedia.

Not all southerners participated in Confederate nationalism. Unionist southerners, most common in the upcountry where slavery was
weakest, retained their loyalty to the Union. These southerners joined the Union army and worked to defeat the Confederacy.7 Black
southerners, most of whom were slaves, overwhelmingly supported the Union, often running away from plantations and forcing the
Union army to reckon with slavery.8 

President James Buchanan would not directly address the issue of secession prior to his term’s end in early March. Any e ort to try and
solve the issue therefore fell upon Congress, speci cally a “Committee of Thirteen” including prominent men such as Stephen Douglas,
William Seward, Robert Toombs, and John Crittenden. In what became known as “Crittenden’s Compromise,” Senator Crittenden
proposed a series of Constitutional Amendments that guaranteed slavery in southern states states and territories, denied the Federal
Government interstate slave trade regulatory power, and o ered to compensate slave owners of unrecovered fugitive slaves. The
Committee of Thirteen ultimately voted down the measure, and it likewise failed in the full Senate vote (25-23). Reconciliation appeared
impossible.9 

The seven seceding states met in Montgomery, Alabama on February 4th to organize a new nation. The delegates selected Je erson Davis
of Mississippi as president and established a capital in Montgomery, Alabama (it would move to Richmond in May). Whether other states
of the Upper South would join the Confederacy remained uncertain. By the early spring of 1861, North Carolina and Tennessee had not
held secession conventions, while voters in Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas initially voted down secession. Despite this temporary boost
to the Union, it became abundantly clear that these acts of loyalty in the Upper South were highly conditional and relied on a clear lack of
intervention on the part of the Federal government. This was the precarious political situation facing Abraham Lincoln following his
inauguration on March 4, 1861.

 

III. A War for Union 1861-1863

In his inaugural address, Lincoln declared secession “legally void.”10 While he did not intend to invade Southern states, he would use force
to maintain possession of federal property within seceded states. Attention quickly shifted to the federal installation of Fort Sumter in
Charleston, South Carolina. The fort was in need of supplies, and Lincoln intended to resupply it. South Carolina called for U.S. soldiers
to evacuate the fort. Commanding o cer Major Robert Anderson refused. On April 12, 1861, Confederate Brigadier General P. G. T.
Beauregard red on the fort. Anderson surrendered on April 13th and the Union troops evacuated. In response to the attack, President
Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve three months to suppress the rebellion. The American Civil War had begun. 

Sent to then Secretary of War Simon Cameron on April 13, 1861, this telegraph announced that after “thirty hours of defending Fort Sumter, Major Robert Anderson had
accepted the evacuation o ered by Confederate General Beauregard. The Union had surrendered Fort Sumter, and the Civil War had o cially begun. “Telegram from Maj.
Robert Anderson to Hon. Simon Cameron, Secretary, announcing his withdrawal from Fort Sumter,” April 18, 1861; Records of the Adjutant General’s O ce, 1780’s-1917;
Record Group 94; National Archives

The assault on Fort Sumter and subsequent call for troops provoked several Upper South states to join the Confederacy. In total, eleven
states renounced their allegiance to the United States. The new Confederate nation was predicated on the institution of slavery and the
promotion of any and all interests that reinforced that objective. Some southerners couched their defense of slavery as a preservation of
states rights. But in order to protect slavery, the Confederate constitution left even less power to the states than the United States
constitution, an irony not lost on many.
Shortly after Lincoln’s call for troops, the Union adopted General-in-Chief Win eld Scott’s Anaconda Plan to suppress the rebellion. This
strategy intended to strangle the Confederacy by cutting o access to coastal ports and inland waterways via a naval blockade. Ground
troops would enter the interior. Like an anaconda snake, they planned to surround and squeeze the Confederacy.

Win eld Scott’s Anaconda Plan meant to slowly squeeze the South dry of its resources, blocking all coastal ports and inland waterways to prevent the importation of goods or the
export of cotton. This print, while poorly drawn, does a great job of making clear the Union’s plan. J.B. Elliott, “Scott’s great snake. Entered according to Act of Congress in the
year 1861,” 1861. Library of Congress.

The Border States of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, and Kentucky maintained geographic, social, political, and economic connections to
both the North and the South. All four were immediately critical to the outcome of the con ict. Abraham Lincoln famously quipped “I
think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game.”11 Lincoln and his military advisors realized that the loss of the Border
States could mean a signi cant decrease in Union resources and threaten the capital in Washington. Consequently, Lincoln hoped to foster
loyalty among their citizens, so Union forces could minimize their occupation. In spite of terrible guerrilla warfare in Missouri and
Kentucky, the four Border States remained loyal to the Union throughout the war.

Foreign countries, primarily in Europe, also watched the unfolding war with deep interest. The United States represented the greatest
example of democratic thought at the time, and individuals from as far a eld as Britain, France, Spain, Russia and beyond closely followed
events across the Atlantic Ocean. If the democratic experiment within the United States failed, many democratic activists in Europe
wondered what hope might exist for such experiments elsewhere. Conversely, those with close ties to the cotton industry watched with
other concerns. War meant the possibility of disrupting the cotton supply, and disruption could have catastrophic rami cations in
commercial and nancial markets abroad.

While Lincoln, his cabinet, and the War Department devised strategies to defeat the rebel insurrection, black Americans quickly forced the
issue of slavery as a primary issue in the debate. As early as 1861, black Americans implored the Lincoln administration to serve in the army
and navy.12 Lincoln initially waged a conservative, limited war. He believed that the presence of African American troops would threaten
the loyalty of slaveholding border states, and white volunteers might refuse to serve alongside black men. However, army commanders
could not ignore the growing populations of formerly enslaved people who escaped to freedom behind Union army lines. These former
enslaved people took a proactive stance early in the war and forced the federal government to act. As the number of refugees ballooned,
Lincoln and Congress found it harder to avoid the issue.13 

In May 1861, General Benjamin F. Butler went over his superiors’ heads and began accepting fugitive slaves who came to Fortress Monroe
in Virginia. In order to avoid the issue of the slaves’ freedom, Butler reasoned that runaway slaves were “contraband of war,” and he had as
much a right to seize them as he did to seize enemy horses or cannons.14 Later that summer Congress a rmed Butler’s policy in the First
Con scation Act. The act left “contrabands,” as these runaways were called, in a state of limbo. Once a slave escaped to Union lines, her
master’s claim was nulli ed. She was not, however, a free citizen of the United States. Runaways lived in “contraband camps,” where
disease and malnutrition were rampant. Women and men were required to perform the drudgework of war: raising forti cations, cooking
meals, and laying railroad tracks. Still, life as a contraband o ered a potential path to freedom, and thousands of slaves seized the
opportunity.

Enslaved African Americans who took freedom into their own hands and ran to Union lines congregated in what were called contraband camps, which existed alongside Union
army camps. As is evident in the photograph, these were crude, disorganized, and dirty places. But they were still centers of freedom for those eeing slavery. Contraband camp,
Richmond, Va, 1865. The Camp of the Contrabands on the Banks of the Mississippi, Fort Pickering, Memphis, Tenn, 1862. American Antiquarian Society.

Fugitive slaves posed a dilemma for the Union military. Soldiers were forbidden to interfere with slavery or assist runaways, but many
soldiers found such a policy unchristian. Even those indi erent to slavery were reluctant to turn away potential laborers or help the enemy
by returning his property. Also, fugitive slaves could provide useful information on the local terrain and the movements of Confederate
troops. Union o cers became particularly reluctant to turn away fugitive slaves when Confederate commanders began forcing slaves to
work on forti cations. Every slave who escaped to Union lines was a loss to the Confederate war e ort.

Any hopes for a brief con ict were eradicated when Union and Confederate forces met at the Battle of Bull Run, near Manassas, Virginia.
While not particularly deadly, the Confederate victory proved that the Civil War would be long and costly. Furthermore, in response to the
embarrassing Union rout, Lincoln removed Brigadier General Irvin McDowell and promoted Major General George B. McClellan to
commander of the newly formed Army of the Potomac. For nearly a year after the First Battle of Bull Run, the Eastern Theater remained
relatively silent. Smaller engagements only resulted in a bloody stalemate.

Photography captured the horrors of war as never before. Some Civil War photographers arranged the actors in their frames to capture the best picture, even repositioning bodies
of dead soldiers for battle eld photos. Alexander Gardner, “[Antietam, Md. Confederate dead by a fence on the Hagerstown road],” September 1862. Library of Congress.

But while the military remained quiet, the same could not be said of Republicans in Washington. The absence of fractious, stalling
Southerners in Congress allowed Republicans to nally pass the Whig economic package, including the Homestead Act, the Land-Grant
College Act (a.k.a. Morrill Act), and the Paci c Railroad Act.15 The federal government also began moving toward a more nationally
controlled currency system (the greenback) and the creation of banks with national characteristics. Such acts proved instrumental in the
expansion of the federal government and industry.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New and more destructive warfare technology emerged during this time that utilized discoveries and innovations in other areas of life, like transportation. This photograph shows
Robert E. Lee’s railroad gun and crew used in the main eastern theater of war at the siege of Petersburg, June 1864-April 1865. “Petersburg, Va. Railroad gun and crew,” between
1864 and 1865. Library of Congress.

The Democratic Party, absent its southern leaders, divided into two camps. War Democrats largely stood behind President Lincoln. “Peace
Democrats”—also known as “Copperheads”—clashed frequently with both War Democrats and Republicans. Copperheads were
sympathetic to the Confederacy; they exploited public anti-war sentiment (often the result of a lost battle or mounting casualties) and tried
to push President Lincoln to negotiate an immediate peace, regardless of political leverage or bargaining power. Had the Copperheads
succeeded in bringing about immediate peace, the Union would have been forced to recognize the Confederacy as a separate and legitimate
government and the institution of slavery would have remained intact.

While Washington buzzed with political activity, military life consisted of relative monotony punctuated by brief periods of horror. Daily
life for a Civil War soldier was one of routine. A typical day began around 6am and involved drill, marching, lunch break, and more drilling
followed by policing the camp. Weapon inspection and cleaning followed, perhaps one nal drill, dinner, and taps around 9 or 9:30
pm. Soldiers in both armies grew weary of the routine. Picketing or foraging a orded welcome distractions to the monotony.

Soldiers devised clever ways of dealing with the boredom of camp life. The most common activity was writing. These were highly literate
armies; nine out of every ten Federals and eight out of every ten Confederates could read and write.16 Letters home served as a tether

linking soldiers to their loved ones. Soldiers also read; newspapers were in high demand. News of battles, events in Europe, politics in
Washington and Richmond, and local concerns were voraciously sought and traded.

While there were nurses, camp followers, and some women who disguised themselves as men, camp life was overwhelmingly male. Soldiers
drank liquor, smoked tobacco, gambled, and swore. Social commentators feared that when these men returned home, with their hard-
drinking and irreligious ways, all decency, faith, and temperance would depart. But not all methods of distraction were detrimental.
Soldiers also organized debate societies, composed music, sang songs, wrestled, raced horses, boxed, and played sports.

Neither side could consistently provide supplies for their soldiers, so it was not uncommon, though o cially forbidden, for common
soldiers to trade with the enemy. Confederate soldiers prized northern newspapers and co ee. Northerners were glad to exchange these for
southern tobacco. Supply shortages and poor sanitation were synonymous with Civil War armies. The close proximity of thousands of
men bred disease. Lice were soldiers’ daily companions.

Music was popular among the soldiers of both armies, creating a diversion from the boredom and horror of the war. As a result, soldiers
often sang on fatigue duty and while in camp. Favorite songs often reminded the soldiers of home, including “Lorena,” “Home, Sweet
Home,” and “Just Before the Battle, Mother.” Dances held in camp o ered another way to enjoy music. Since there were often very few
women nearby, soldiers would dance with one another. 

When the Civil War broke out, one of the most popular songs among soldiers and civilians was “John Brown’s Body” which began “John
Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave.”  Started as a Union anthem praising John Brown’s actions at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, then
used by Confederates to vilify Brown, both sides’ version of the song stressed that they were on the right side. Eventually the words to Julia
Ward Howe’s poem “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” were set to the melody, further implying Union success. The themes of popular
songs changed over the course of the war, as feelings of inevitable success alternated with feelings of terror and despair.17 

After an extensive delay on the part of Union commander George McClellan, his 120,000 man Army of the Potomac moved via ship to the
peninsula between the York and James Rivers in Virginia. Rather than crossing overland via the former battle eld at Manassas Junction,
McClellan attempted to swing around the Rebel forces and enter the capital of Richmond before they knew what hit them. McClellan,
however, was an overly cautious man who consistently overestimated his adversaries’ numbers. This cautious approach played into the
Confederate favor on the outskirts of Richmond. Recently appointed commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, Confederate
General Robert E. Lee, forced McClellan to retreat from Richmond and his “Peninsular Campaign” became a tremendous failure.18 

Union forces met with little success in the East, but the Western Theater provided hope for the United States. In February 1862, Union
General Ulysses S. Grant’s captured Confederate Forts Henry and Donelson along the Tennessee River. Fighting in the West greatly
di ered from that in the East. At the First Battle of Bull Run, for example, two large armies fought for control of the nations’ capitals;
while in the West, Union and Confederate forces fought for control of the rivers, since the Mississippi River and its tributaries were a key
tenet of the Union’s Anaconda Plan. One of the deadliest of these clashes occurred along the Tennessee River at the Battle of Shiloh on
April 6-7, 1862. This battle, lasting only two days, was the costliest single battle in American history up to that time. The Union victory
shocked both the Union and the Confederacy with approximately 23,000 casualties, a number that exceeded casualties from all of the
United States’ previous wars combined.19 The subsequent capture of New Orleans by Union forces proved a heavy blow to the
Confederacy and capped an 1862 spring of success in the Western Theater. 

The Union and Confederate navies helped or hindered army movements around the many marine environments of the southern United
States. Each navy employed the latest technology to outmatch the other. The Confederate Navy, led by Stephen Russell Mallory, had the
unenviable task of constructing a eet from scratch and trying to fend o a vastly better equipped Union Navy. Led by Gideon Welles of
Connecticut, the Union Navy successfully implemented General-in-Chief Win eld Scott’s Anaconda Plan. The future of naval warfare
also emerged in the spring of 1862 as two “ironclad” warships fought to a duel at Hampton Roads, Virginia. The age of the wooden sail

was gone and naval warfare would be fundamentally altered. While advances in naval technology ruled the seas, African Americans on the
ground were complicating Union war aims to an even greater degree.

The creation of black regiments was another kind of innovation during the Civil War. Northern free blacks and newly freed slaves joined together under the leadership of white
o cers to ght for the Union cause. This novelty was not only bene cial for the Union war e ort; it also showed the Confederacy that the Union sought to destroy the
foundational institution (slavery) upon which their nation was built. William Morris Smith, “[District of Columbia. Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, at Fort Lincoln],”
between 1863 and 1866. Library of Congress.

By the summer of 1862, the actions of black Americans were pushing the Union towards a full-blown war of emancipation.20 Following
the First Con scation Act, in April 1862, Congress abolished the institution of slavery in the District of Columbia. In July 1862, Congress
passed the 2nd Con scation Act, e ectively emancipating slaves that came under Union control. Word traveled fast among enslaved
people, and this legislation led to even more runaways making their way into Union lines. Abraham Lincoln’s thinking began to evolve. By
the summer of 1862, Lincoln rst oated the idea of an Emancipation Proclamation to members of his Cabinet. By August 1862, he
proposed the rst iteration of the Emancipation Proclamation. While his cabinet supported such an idea, Secretary of State William
Seward insisted that Lincoln wait for a “decisive” Union victory so as not to appear too desperate a measure on the part of a failing
government.
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 

This African American family dressed in their nest clothes (including a USCT uniform) for this photograph, projecting respectability and dignity that was at odds with the
southern perception of black Americans. “[Unidenti ed African American soldier in Union uniform with wife and two daughters],” between 1863 and 1865. Library of
Congress.

This decisive moment that prompted the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation would occur in the fall of 1862 along Antietam creek
in Maryland. Emboldened by their success in the previous spring and summer, Lee and Confederate President Je erson Davis planned to
win a decisive victory in Union territory and end the war. On September 17, 1862, McClellan and Lee’s forces collided at the Battle of

Antietam near the town of Sharpsburg. This battle was the rst major battle of the Civil War to occur on Union soil. It remains the
bloodiest single day in American history with over 20,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in just twelve hours.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite the Confederate withdrawal and the high death toll, the Battle of Antietam was not a decisive Union victory. It did, however,
result in enough of a victory for Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves in areas under Confederate control.
There were signi cant exemptions to the Emancipation Proclamation including the border states, and parts of other states in the
Confederacy. A far cry from a universal end to slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation nevertheless proved vital shifting the war aims from
simple union to Emancipation. Framing it as a war measure, Lincoln and his Cabinet hoped that stripping the Confederacy of their labor
force would not only debilitate the Southern economy, but also weaken Confederate morale. Furthermore, the Battle of Antietam and the
issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation all but ensured that the Confederacy would not be recognized by European powers.
Nevertheless, Confederates continued ghting. Union and Confederate forces clashed again at Fredericksburg, Virginia in December
1862. This Confederate victory resulted in staggering Union casualties.

 

IV. War for Emancipation 1863-1865

As United States armies penetrated deeper into the Confederacy, politicians and the Union high command came to understand the
necessity, and bene t, of enlisting black men in the army and navy. Although a few commanders began forming black units in 1862, such
as Massachusetts abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s First South Carolina Volunteers (the rst regiment of black soldiers),
widespread enlistment did not occur until the Emancipation Proclamation went into e ect on January 1, 1863. “And I further declare and
make known,” Lincoln’s Proclamation read, “that such persons of suitable condition, will be received into the armed service of the United
States to garrison forts, positions, stations, and other places, and to man vessels of all sorts in said service.”21

The language describing black enlistment indicated Lincoln’s implicit desire to segregate African American troops from the main
campaigning armies of white soldiers. “I believe it is a resource which, if vigorously applied now, will soon close the contest. It works
doubly, weakening the enemy and strengthening us,” Lincoln remarked in August 1863 about black soldiering.22 Although more than
180,000 black men (ten percent of the Union army) served during the war, the majority of United States Colored Troops (USCT)
remained stationed behind the lines as garrison forces, often laboring and performing non-combat roles.

Black soldiers in the Union army endured rampant discrimination and earned less pay than white soldiers, while also facing the possibility
of being murdered or sold into slavery if captured. James Henry Gooding, a black corporal in the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteers,
wrote to Abraham Lincoln in September 1863, questioning why he and his fellow volunteers were paid less than white men. Gooding
argued that, because he and his brethren were born in the United States and sel essly left their private lives and to enter the army, they
should be treated “as American SOLDIERS, not as menial hirelings.”23
African American soldiers de ed the inequality of military service and used their positions in the army to reshape society, North and
South. The majority of USCT (United States Colored Troops) had once been enslaved, and their presence as armed, blue-clad soldiers sent
shockwaves throughout the Confederacy. To their friends and families, African American soldiers symbolized the embodiment of
liberation and the destruction of slavery. To white southerners, they represented the utter disruption of the Old South’s racial and social
hierarchy. As members of armies of occupation, black soldiers wielded martial authority in towns and plantations. At the end of the war, as
a black soldier marched by a cluster of Confederate prisoners, he noticed his former master among the group. “Hello, massa,” the soldier
exclaimed, “bottom rail on top dis time!”24

“Two Brothers in Arms.” The Library of Congress.

The majority of USCT occupied the South by performing garrison duty, other black soldiers performed admirably on the battle eld,
shattering white myths that docile, cowardly black men would fold in the maelstrom of war. Black troops fought in more than 400 battles
and skirmishes, including Milliken’s Bend and Port Hudson, Louisiana; Fort Wagner, South Carolina; Nashville; and the nal campaigns
to capture Richmond, Virginia. Fifteen black soldiers received the Medal of Honor, the highest honor bestowed for military heroism.
Through their voluntarism, service, battle eld contributions, and even death, black soldiers laid their claims for citizenship. “Once let a
black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.”  Frederick Douglass, the great black abolitionist, proclaimed, “and there is no power
on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”25
Many slaves accompanied their masters in the Confederate army. They served their masters as “camp servants,” cooking their meals, raising
their tents, and carrying their supplies. The Confederacy also impressed slaves to perform manual labor. There are three important points
to make about these “Confederate” slaves. First, their labor was almost always coerced. Second, people are complicated and have varying,
often contradictory loyalties. A slave could hope in general that the Confederacy would lose but at the same time be concerned for the
safety of his master and the Confederate soldiers he saw on a daily basis.
Finally, white Confederates did not see African Americans as their equals, much less as soldiers. There was never any doubt that black
laborers and camp servants were property. Though historians disagree on the matter, it is a stretch to claim that not a single African

American ever red a gun for the Confederacy; a camp servant whose master died in battle might well pick up his dead master’s gun and
continue ring, if for no other reason than to protect himself. But this was always on an informal basis. The Confederate government did,
in an act of desperation, pass a law in March 1865 allowing for the enlistment of black soldiers, but only a few dozen African Americans
(mostly Richmond hospital workers) had enlisted by the war’s end.

As 1863 dawned, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia continued its o ensive strategy in the East. One of the war’s major battles occurred
near the village of Chancellorsville, Virginia between April 30 and May 6, 1863. While the Battle of Chancellorsville was an outstanding
Confederate victory, it also resulted in heavy casualties and the mortal wounding of Confederate Major General “Stonewall” Jackson.

In spite of Jackson’s death, Lee continued his o ensive against Federal forces and invaded Pennsylvania in the summer of 1863. During the
three-day battle (July 1-3) at Gettysburg, heavy casualties crippled both sides. Yet, the devastating July 3 infantry assault on the Union
center, also known as Pickett’s Charge, caused Lee to retreat from Pennsylvania. The Gettysburg Campaign was Lee’s nal northern
incursion and the Battle of Gettysburg remains the bloodiest battle of the war, and in American history, with 51,000 casualties.

Concurrently in the West, Union forces continued their movement along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Grant launched his
campaign against Vicksburg, Mississippi in the winter of 1862. Known as the “Gibraltar of the West,” Vicksburg was the last holdout in
the West, and its seizure would enable uninhibited travel for Union forces along the Mississippi River. Grant’s Vicksburg Campaign,
which lasted until July 4, 1863, ended with the city’s surrender. The fall of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two.

Despite Union success in the summer of 1863, discontent over the war ran throughout the North. This was particularly true in the wake
of the Enrollment Act—the rst e ort at a draft among the northern populace during the Civil War. The working class citizens of New
York felt especially angered as wealthy New Yorkers paid $300 for substitutes, sparing themselves from the hardships of war. “A rich man’s
war, but a poor man’s ght,” became a popular refrain.26 The Emancipation Proclamation convinced many immigrants in northern cities
that freed people would soon take their jobs. This frustration culminated in the New York City Draft Riots in July 1863. Over the span of
four days, the white populace killed some 120 citizens including the lynching of at least eleven black New Yorkers. Property damage was in
the millions, including the complete destruction of more than fty properties—most notably that of the Colored Orphan Asylum. In an
ultimate irony, the largest civil disturbance to date in the United States (aside from the war itself) was only stopped by the deployment of
Union soldiers, some of whom came directly from Gettysburg.

Elsewhere, the North produced widespread displays of unity. Sanitary fairs originated in the old northwest and raised millions of dollars for
Union soldiers. Indeed, many women rose to take pivotal leadership roles in the sanitary fairs—a clear contribution to the northern war
e ort. The fairs also encouraged national unity within the North—something that became more important as the war dragged on and
casualties continued to mount. The northern homefront was complicated: overt displays of loyalty contrasted with violent dissent.

Thomas Nast, “Our Heroines, United States Sanitary Commission,” in Harper’s Weekly, April 9, 1864, via Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

A similar situation played out in the Confederacy. The Confederate Congress passed its rst conscription act in the spring of 1862, a full
year before their northern counterparts. Military service was required from all able-bodied males between 18 and 35 (eventually extended
to 45.) Notable exemptions likewise existed in the Confederacy, especially for those who owned twenty or more slaves. Discontent on the
present state of a airs in the Confederacy reached a boiling point in 1863. Through the spring of 1863 consistent food shortages led to
“bread riots” in several Confederate cities, most notably Richmond, Virginia and the Georgia cities of Augusta, Macon, and Columbus.
Confederate women led these mobs to protest food shortages and rampant in ation within the Confederate South. Exerting their own
political control, women dramatically impacted the war through violent actions in these cases, as well as constant petitions to Governors
for aid and the release of husbands from military service. One of these women wrote a letter to North Carolina Governor, Zebulon Vance,
saying “Especially for the sake of su ering women and children, do try and stop this cruel war.”27 Confederates waged a multi-front
struggle against Union incursion and internal dissent.

For some women, the best way to support their cause was spying on the enemy. When the war broke out, Rose O’Neal Greenhow was
living in Washington D.C., where she travelled in high social circles, gathering information for her Confederate contact. Suspecting
Greenhow of espionage, Allan Pinkerton placed her under surveillance, instigated a raid on her house to gather evidence, and then placed
her under house arrest, after which she was incarcerated in Old Capitol prison. Upon her release, she was sent, under guard, to Baltimore,
Maryland. From there Greenhow went to Europe to attempt to bring support to the Confederacy. Failing in her e orts, Greenhow
decided to return to America, boarding the blockade runner Condor, which ran aground near Wilmington, North Carolina.
Subsequently, she drowned after her lifeboat capsized in a storm. Greenhow gave her life for the Confederate cause, while Elizabeth “Crazy
Bet” Van Lew sacri ced her social standing for the Union. Van Lew was from a very prominent Richmond, Virginia family and spied on
the Confederacy, leading to her being “held in contempt & scorn by the narrow minded men and women of my city for my
loyalty.”28 Indeed, when General Ulysses Grant took control of Richmond, he placed a special guard on Van Lew. In addition to her
espionage activities, Van Lew also acted as a nurse to Union prisoners in Libby Prison. For pro-Confederate Southern women, there were

more opportunities to show their scorn for the enemy. Some women in New Orleans took these demonstrations to the level of dumping
their chamber pots onto the heads of unsuspecting Federal soldiers who stood underneath their balconies, leading to Benjamin Butler’s
infamous General Order Number 28, which arrested all rebellious women as prostitutes.

Pauline Cushman was an American actress and a wartime spy. Using her guile to fraternize with Confederate o cers, Cushman snuck military plans and drawings to Union
o cials in her shoes. She was caught, tried, and sentenced to death, but was apparently saved days before her execution by the occupation of her native New Orleans by Union
forces. Whether as spies, nurses, or textile workers, women were essential to the Union war e ort. “Pauline Cushman,” between 1855 and 1865. Library of Congress.

Military strategy shifted in 1864. The new tactics of “hard war” evolved slowly, as restraint towards southern civilians and property
ultimately gave way to a concerted e ort to demoralize southern civilians and destroy the southern economy. Grant’s successes at
Vicksburg and Chattanooga, Tennessee (November 1863) and Meade’s cautious pursuit of Lee after Gettysburg prompted Lincoln to
promote Grant to general-in-chief of the Union Army in early 1864. This change in command resulted in some of the bloodiest battles of
the Eastern Theater. Grant’s Overland Campaign, including the Battle of the Wilderness, the Battle of Cold Harbor, and the siege of
Petersburg, demonstrated Grant’s willingness to tirelessly attack the ever-dwindling Army of Northern Virginia. By June 1864, Grant’s
army surrounded the Confederate city of Petersburg, Virginia. Siege operations cut o Confederate forces and supplies from the capital of
Richmond. Meanwhile out west, Union armies under the command of William Tecumseh Sherman implemented hard war strategies and
slowly made their way through central Tennessee and north Georgia capturing the vital rail hub of Atlanta in September 1864.
Action in both theaters during 1864 caused even more casualties and furthered the devastation of disease. Disease haunted both armies,
and accounted for over half of all Civil War casualties. Sometimes as many as half of the men in a company could be sick. The
overwhelming majority of Civil War soldiers came from rural areas, where less exposure to diseases meant soldiers lacked immunities.
Vaccines for diseases such as smallpox were largely unavailable to those outside of cities or towns. Despite the common nineteenth-century
tendency to see city-men as weak or soft, soldiers from urban environments tended to succumb to fewer diseases than their rural
counterparts. Tuberculosis, measles, rheumatism, typhoid, malaria, and smallpox spread almost unchecked among the armies.

Pennsylvania Light Artillery, Battery B, Petersburg, Virginia. Photograph by Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1864. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Civil War medicine focused almost exclusively on curing the patient rather than preventing disease. Many soldiers attempted to cure
themselves by concocting elixirs and medicines themselves. These ine ective “home-remedies” were often made from various plants the
men found in woods or elds. There was no understanding of germ theory so many soldiers did things that we would consider unsanitary
today.29 They ate food that was improperly cooked and handled, and practiced what we would consider poor personal hygiene. They did
not take appropriate steps to ensure drinking water was free from bacteria. Diarrhea and dysentery were common. These diseases were
especially dangerous, as Civil War soldiers did not understand the value of replacing uids as they were lost. As such, men a ected by these
conditions would weaken, and become unable to ght or march, and as they became dehydrated their immune system became less
e ective, inviting other infections to attack the body. Through trial and error soldiers began to protect themselves from some of the more
preventable sources of infection. Around 1862 both armies began to dig latrines rather than rely upon the local waterways. Burying
human and animal waste also cut down on exposure to diseases considerably.

Medical surgery was limited and brutal. If a soldier was wounded in the torso, throat, or head there was little surgeons could do. Invasive
procedures to repair damaged organs or stem blood loss invariably resulted in death. Luckily for soldiers, only approximately one-in-six
combat wounds were to one of those parts. The remaining were to limbs, which was treatable by amputation. Soldiers had the highest
chance of survival if the limb was removed within 48 hours of injury. A skilled surgeon could amputate a limb around three to ve minutes
from start to nish. While the lack of germ theory again caused several unsafe practices, such as using the same tools on multiple patients,
wiping hands on lthy gowns, or placing hands in communal buckets of water, there is evidence that amputation o ered the best chance
of survival.