Chapter Overview

Popular sovereignty seemed to be the only means of compromise over the question of slavery in the Western territories. That idea failed dismally in Kansas, as was dramatically highlighted by an 1856 raid on Lawrence, Kansas, by a proslavery band, and John Brown's retaliatory Pottawattomie massacre. The escalating violence during the decade, most visibly in Kansas, pointed grimly to the impending breakup of the union.

Sectional Changes in American Society

The coming of the war occurred against the backdrop of continuing economic transformation that widened the gulf between northern and southern societies. Railroad construction became the dominant influence on economic growth. Railroads opened new lands to settlement, which in turn added more areas to the wider market. Railroads and high grain prices in Europe stimulated the expansion of commercial agriculture in the North, making grain exports as crucial to the nation's economy as cotton exports. The railroad network also served to link the West economically to the East rather than the South. Railroads altered the prairie landscape, and ambitious farmers plowed up the native grasses and planted wheat and other commercial crops. At the same time, industry boomed in the North and an immense tide of immigrants (especially Irish, Germans, and Scandinavians) provided cheap labor for the factories and swelled northern population (and thus political power) at the expense of the South.

With cotton prices relatively high, the South prospered in the 1850s. Even so, southern leaders complained about their section's dependence on the North for manufactured goods, shipping, and marketing services. Efforts to promote industrialization in the South or diversify its economy failed. The rising cost of slaves also reduced planters' margin of profit.

The Political Realignment of the 1850s

The fragile political system collapsed when Congress, spurred by Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas, passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and opening the remaining regions of the Louisiana Purchase to slavery under the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Thus the slavery issue was placed again at the center of national politics. At the same time, native-born Americans voiced growing hostility to the influx of immigrants. Given these strains, the old Jacksonian party system crumbled.

First to benefit from this political chaos was the secret nativist Know-Nothing or "American" party, which called for restrictions on the political power of immigrants and Catholics. The party grew rapidly in 1854 and 1855; so many Whigs joined the Know-Nothings that the Whig party folded. But at the height of its power, the Know-Nothing organization itself split over sectional issues and disappeared.

Meanwhile, northerners and southerners raced to settle Kansas. The first elections in the territory were marred by massive proslavery fraud, and before long, fighting broke out between proslavery and antislavery partisans. The continuing turmoil in Kansas, coupled with a brutal attack on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in the Senate Chamber in May 1856, greatly strengthened a new sectional party, the Republicans. By the 1856 election the Republicans had emerged as the strongest party in the North and the second strongest party in the nation, after the Democrats. The Republican party stood for the ideal of free labor. On ideological and moral grounds, they opposed the expansion of slavery and argued that the aristocratic Slave Power threatened republican government and the rights of white northerners.

The Worsening Crisis

Despite the Republicans' strong and unexpected showing, the Democrats carried the 1856 election. James Buchanan, the Democratic candidate, took office in 1857 intending to dampen sectional fury. These hopes were ruined by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision, which held that Congress could not prohibit slavery from a territory. Since this was their principal demand, Republicans were outraged. But Douglas' popular sovereignty was called into question as well. And Buchanan's effectiveness was further weakened by the beginning of a depression in 1857, which hurt the North more than the South.

Buchanan's attempt to force the admission of Kansas through Congress under the proslavery Lecompton Constitution split the Democratic party along sectional lines. Douglas broke with the president on this issue, marshaling opposition in Congress, which ultimately rejected the Lecompton Constitution. But Douglas was now the symbol of the deep sectional divisions in the Democratic party. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln challenged Douglas in Illinois for his Senate seat. Douglas narrowly won re-election, but Lincoln's strong race brought him national recognition and stature.

Southerners increasingly fretted about the future. They feared the growing power of what they called the "Black Republicans." They feared that white opportunity was eroding and that without new lands, slavery and the southern economy would stagnate. Various proposals to relieve the South's internal crisis failed, and more and more southern whites felt morally and politically isolated.

The Road to War

John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859 further alarmed southerners. They were even more shocked at the support Brown received from some prominent northern intellectuals. Such suspicions strengthened disunion sentiment. The Democratic party split in 1860, each faction nominating its own presidential candidate. The result was a four-way contest, in which Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, won the presidency on the strength of northern electoral votes, earning less than 40 percent of the popular vote nationwide. For the first time, a sectional antislavery party had elected a president.

Following Lincoln's election, the seven states of the Deep South, led by South Carolina, seceded and organized the Confederate States of America. Congress defeated all proposals to resolve the crisis; compromise efforts were doomed since neither the Republicans nor the secessionists of the Deep South were willing to make any concessions. When Lincoln sent supplies to the Union garrison at Fort Sumter, Confederate batteries opened fire and captured the fort. The North rallied to Lincoln's call for troops to restore the Union, but four more southern states -- the upper South -- seceded. The diverging economies of the two sections, the acute issue of slavery's status in the West, the weaknesses of the nation's political system, the ideology of republicanism with its fears of conspiracies against liberty, the differences between slave and free societies -- all were crucial to this outcome. And the war came.