Flashcards on APUSH Ch. 19

Sectional tensions were further strained in 1852, and later, by an inky phenomenon. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a wisp of a woman and the mother of six children, published her heart-rendering novel ______. Dismayed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, she was determined to awaken the North to the wickedness of slavery by laying bare its terrible inhumanity, esp. the cruel splitting of families. Several hundred thousand copies were published in the first year, and the totals soon ran into the millions as the tale was translated into more than a score of languages. To millions of people, it made slavery appear almost as evil as it really was. The novel did help the Civil War - and win it. The South condemned that "vile wretch in petticoats" when it learned that hundreds of thousands of fellow Americans were reading and believing her "unfair" indictment. It also left a profound impression on the North. Readers swore henceforth they would have nothing to do with the Fugitive Slave Law. The tale was devoured by millions of impressionable youths in the 1850s - some of whom later became the Boys in Blue who volunteered to fight the Civil War through to its grim finale. The memory of a beaten and dying Uncle Tom helped sustain them in their determination to wipe out the plague of slavery.

Another trouble-brewing book appeared in 1857. Titled ____, it was written by ____, a non-aristocratic white from North Carolina. Hating both slavery and blacks, he attempted to prove by an array of statistics that indirectly the nonslaveholding whites were the ones who suffered most from the millstone of slavery. Unable to secure a publisher in the South, he finally managed to find one in the North. His influence was unimportant among the poorer whites whom he addressed in his message. Yet the South's planter elite certainly took note of his audacity, which fueled their fears that the nonslaveholding majority might abandon them. The book was banned from the South and fed to the flames at book-burning parties. In the North untold thousands of copies, many in condensed form, were distributed as campaign literature by the Republicans. The South became distrusting of the Yankees because they believed the "lies" of "___" and "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

Newcomers who ventured into Kansas were a motley lot. Most northerners were just ordinary westward-moving pioneers in search of richer lands beyond the sunset. But a small portion was financed by groups of northern abolitionists or free-soilers. The most famous of these antislavery organizations was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which sent thousands of people to the troubled area to forestall the South - and also to make a profit (paid them to move their to win pop. sov. for free-soilers). Southern spokesmen raised furious cries of betrayal. They had supported the Kansas-Nebraska scheme of Douglass with the unspoken understanding that Kansas would become slave and Nebraska free. Southern hotheads came to assist small groups of well-armed slaveowners to Kansas (but wouldn't bring their slaves bc it was dangerous - bullets flying).

____ led a band of followers to ___ Creek in May 1856. They literally hacked to pieces five surprised men, presumed to be antislaveryites. This fiendish butchery besmirched the free-soil cause and brought vicious retaliation from the proslavery forces. Civil War in Kansas thus erupted in 1856 and continued intermittently until it merged with the large-scale Civil War of 1861-1865. The Kansas conflict destroyed millions of dollars' worth of property, paralyzed agriculture in certain areas, and cost scores of lives.

By 1857 Kansas had enough people, chiefly free-soilers, to apply for statehood on a popular-sovereignty basis. The proslavery forces, then in the saddle, devised a tricky document known as the _____. The people were not allowed to vote for or against the constitution as a whole, but for the constitution either "with slavery" or "without slavery." If they voted against slavery, one of the remaining provisions of the constitution would protect the owners of slaves already in Kansas. So whatever the outcome, there would still be slavery in Kansas. Many free-soilers, infuriated by this ploy, boycotted the polls. Left to themselves, the proslaveryites approved the constitution with slavery late in 1857.

President Buchanan, by antagonizing the numerous Douglas Democrats in the North (he had threw his weight behind the Lecompton Constitution, while Douglass had been all about popular sovereignty), hopelessly divided the once-powerful Democratic party. Until then, it had been the only remaining national party, for the Whigs were dead and the Republicans were sectional. With the disruption of the Democrats came the snapping of one of the last important strands in the rope that was barely binding the Union together.

"Bleeding Kansas" also splattered blood on the floor of the Senate in 1856. Senator ____ of Massachusetts, a tall and imposing figure, was a leading abolitionist - one of the few prominent in political life. He had made himself one of the most disliked men in the Senate. Brooding over the turbulent miscarriage of popular sovereignty, he delivered a blistering speech titled "_____." He condemned the proslavery men as "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization." He also referred insultingly to South Carolina and to its white-haired senator Andrew Butler; one of the best-liked members of the Senate.

Hot-tempered Congressmen ___ of South Carolina took vengeance (after Sumner's speech) into his own hands. On May 22, 1856, he approached Sumner, then sitting at his Senate desk, and pounded the orator with an eleven-ounce cane until it broke. The victim fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor, while several nearby senators refrained from interfering. Sumner's injuries to his head and nervous system were serious, and he was forced to leave his seat for three and a half years to receive a painful and costly treatment in Europe. Meanwhile, Massachusetts defiantly reelected him, leaving his seat eloquently empty. Bleeding Sumner was thus joined with bleeding Kansas as a political issue.

With bullets whining in Kansas, the Democrats met in Cincinnati to nominate their presidential standard-bearer of 1856. The delegates finally chose ___, shying away from both President Pierce and Douglas (they were both indelibly tainted by the Kansas-Nebraska Act). The Republicans nominated Fremont, and the Know-Nothings nominated Fillmore. A well-to-do Pennsylvania lawyer, he had been serving as minister to London during the recent Kansas-Nebraska uproar. He won the election, polling less than a majority of the popular vote. His tally in the Electoral College was 174 to 114 for Fremont, with Fillmore gathering 8.

An ugly dose of antiforeignism was injected into the campaign, even though slavery extension loomed largest. The recent influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany had alarmed "nativists," as many old-stock Protestants were called. They organized the American party, also known as the ___ part because of its secretiveness, and in 1856 nominated the lackluster ex-president Millard Fillmore. Antiforeign and anti-Catholic, the superpatriots adopted the slogan "Americans Must Rule America." Remnants of the dying Whig party likewise endorsed Fillmore, and they and the ___ threatened to cut into Republican strength.

The Republicans met in Philadelphia with bubbling enthusiasm and nominated Captain John C. Fremont. The Republican platform came out vigorously against the extension of slavery into the territories, while the Democrats declared no less forcefully for popular sovereignty. They fell in behind Fremont with the zeal of crusaders. Shouting "We Follow the Pathfinder" and "We Are Buck Hunting," they organized glee clubs.

The ___ decision handed down by the Supreme Court on May 6, 1857, abruptly ended the two-day presidential honeymoon of the unlucky bachelor, James Buchanan. Scott, a black slave, had lived with his master for five years in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Backed by interested abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil. The Court proceeded to twist a simple legal case into a complex political issue. It ruled that Scott was a black slave and not a citizen, and hence could not sue in federal courts. The tribunal could then have thrown out the case on these technical grounds alone. But a majority decided to go further, under the leadership of Chief Justice Taney from the slave state Maryland. A majority of the Court decreed that because a slave was private property, he or she could be taken into any territory and legally held there in slavery. The reasoning was that the Fifth Amendment clearly forbade Congress to deprive people of their property without due process of the law. They also stated that the Missouri Compromise (which had been repealed 3 years earlier but still was alive in spirit in the North) had been unconstitutional all along: Congress had no power to ban slavery from the territories, regardless even of what the territorial legislatures themselves might want.

Southerners were delighted with this unexpected victory from the Supreme Court. Champions of pop. sov. were aghast, including Senator Douglas and a host of northerner Democrats. Another lethal wedge was thus driven between the northern and southern wings of the Democratic party. Foes of slavery extension, esp. the Republicans, were infuriated by the ___ set back. Their chief rallying cry had been the banishing of bondage from the territories. They now insisted that the ruling of the Court was merely an opinion, not a decision, and no more binding than the views of a "southern debating society." Republican defiance of the exalted tribunal was intensified by an awareness that a majority of its members were southerners and by the conviction that it had debased itself - "sullied by ermine" - by wallowing in the gutter of politics. Southerners were inflamed by all this defiance. They begun to wonder anew how much longer they could remained joined to a section that refused to honor the Supreme Court, to say nothing of the constitutional compact it established.

Late in 1857 a panic burst about Buchanan's harassed head. The storm was not so bad economically as the panic of 1837, but psychologically it was probably the worst of the nineteenth century. Inpouring California gold played its part in starting the crash by helping to inflate the currency. The pains of the Crimean War had overstimulated the growing of grain, while frenzied speculation in land and railroads had further ripped the economic fabric. When the collapse came, over five thousand businesses failed within a year. Unemployment, accompanied by hunger meetings in urban areas, was widespread. The North, including its grain growers, was hardest hit. The South, enjoying favorable cotton prices abroad, rode out the storm with flying colors. ADD? TARIFFS! PAGE 419

The Illinois senatorial election of 1858 now claimed the national spotlight. Senator Douglas's term was about to end, and the Republicans decided to run against him a rustic Springfield lawyer, one ____. The Republican candidate presented an awkward but arresting figure. He was no silver-spoon child of the elite. Born in 1809 in a Kentucky log cabin to impoverished parents, he attended a frontier school for not more than a year; being an avid reader, he was mainly self taught. His private and professional lives were not esp. noteworthy. He married "above himself" socially, into the influential Todd family of Kentucky, and the temperamental outbursts of his high-strung wife helped to school him in patience and forbearance. After reading a little law, he gradually emerged as one of the dozen or so better-known trial lawyers in Illinois, although still accustomed to carrying important papers in his stovepipe hat. After making his mark in Illinois legislature as a Whig politician of the logrolling variety, he served one undistinguished term in Congress. Until 1854 he had done nothing to establish a claim to statesmanship. But the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in that year lighted within him unexpected fires. After mounting the Republican bandwagon, he emerged as one of the foremost politicians and orators of the Northwest. At the Philadelphia convention of 1856, where Fremont was nominated, he actually received 110 votes for the vice-presidential nomination.

Lincoln, as Republican nominee for the Senate seat, boldly challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates. This was a rash act, because the senator was probably the nation's most devastating debater. Douglas promptly accepted Lincoln's challenge, and seven meetings were arranged from August to October 1858. The most famous debate came at Freeport, Illinois, where Lincoln nearly impaled his opponent on the horns of a dilemma. ADD?

During the Lincoln-Douglas debate in Freeport, Illinois: Suppose, Lincoln queried, the people of a territory should vote slavery down? The Supreme Court in the Dred Scott decision had decreed that they could not. Who would prevail, the Court or the people? Douglas's response became known as the "____." No matter how the Court ruled, Douglas argued, slavery would stay down if the people voted it down. Laws to protect slavery would have to be passed by territorial legislatures. These would not be forthcoming in the absence of popular approval, and black bondage would soon disappear.

___ of bleeding Kansas infamy now appeared again in an even more terrible way. His scheme was to invade the South secretly with a handful of followers, call upon the slaves to rise, furnish them with arms, and establish a kind of black free state as a sanctuary. He secured several thousand dollars for firearms from northern abolitionists and finally arrived in hilly western Virginia with some twenty men, including several blacks. At scenic ___, he seized the federal arsenal in October 1859, incidentally killing seven innocent people and injuring ten or so more. But the slaves, largely ignorant of his strike, failed to rise, and the wounded Brown and remnants of his tiny band were quickly captured by US Marines under the command of Lt. Col. ______. Ironically, within two years ___ became the preeminent general in the Confederate army. "Old Brown" was was convicted of murder and treason after a hasty but legal trial. He presumed insanity was supported by affidavits from 17 friends and relatives. But Brown was given every opportunity to pose and enjoy martyrdom. He was clever enough to see that he was worth much more to the abolitionist movement dangling from a rope than in any other way. The effects of ___ were calamitous. In the eyes of the South, Brown was a wholesale murderer and an apostle of treason. Abolitionists and free-soilers were infuriated by Brown's execution. They were outraged because the Virginians had hanged so earnest a reformer who was working for a righteous cause.

Deeply divided, the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina, with ___ the leading the northern wing of the party. But the "fire-eaters" regarded him as a traitor, as a result of his unpopular stand on the Lecompton Constitution and the Freeport Doctrine. The delegates failed to wrangle the necessary 2/3 vote for __. They tried again in Baltimore. This time the __ Democrats, chiefly in the North, were firmly in saddle. They nominated their hero, and the platform came out squarely for pop. sov. and, as a stop to the South, against obtrusion of the Fugitive Slave Law by the states.

Southern Democrats, angered by the Douglas Democrat's platform, promptly organized a rival convention in Baltimore, in which many of the northern states were unrepresented. They selected as their leader the stern-jawed VP John C. ____. The platform favored the extension of slavery into the territories and the annexation of the slave-populated Cuba.

A middle-of-the-road group (between North and South Democrats), fearing the Union, hastily organized the ____, sneered at as the "Do Nothing" or "Old Gentleman's" party. It consisted mainly of former Whigs and Know-Nothings, a veritable "gathering of graybeards." Desperately anxious to elect a compromise candidate, they met in Baltimore and nominated for the presidency John ___ of Tennessee. "The Union, the Constitution, and the Enforcement of the Laws."

Elated Republicans, scenting victory in the breeze as their opponents split hopelessly, gathered in Chicago. William H. Seward was by far the best known of the contenders. But his radical utterances, including his "irresponsible conflict" speech at Rochester in 1858, had ruined his prospects. ___, the favorite son of Illinois, was definitely a "Mr. Second Best," but he was a stronger candidate because he had made fewer enemies. Overtaking Seward on the third ballot, he was nominated amid scenes of the wildest excitement. The Republican platform had appeal for just about every nonsouthern group: for the free-soilers, nonextension of slavery; for the northern manufacturers, a protective tariff; for the immigrants, no abridgment of rights; for the Northwest, a Pacific railroad; for the West, internal improvements at federal expense; and for the farmers, free homesteads from the public domain.

Four Candidates/Parties: Lincoln Republicans, Douglass Democrats (North), Breckinridge Democrats (South), and Bell from the Constitutional Union party. Southern secessionists promptly served notice that the election of the "baboon" Lincoln would split the Union. Lincoln won as a minority president with 180 electoral votes (every vote of the free states except for 3 of New Jersey's 7 votes). Douglas receive 12 electoral votes (only Missouri and 3 of New Jersey's 7 votes), Breckinridge received 72 (all the cotton states), and Bell received 39 (Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee). The territories of Washington, Utah, New Mexico, Nebraska, Kansas, and the unorganized territories (between Nebraska and Minnesota, and below Kansas) did not cast any votes. MAPS PAGE 426-27. ADD FROM PAGE 427

The action of withdrawing formally from membership of a federation or body, esp. a political state. When Lincoln became president, South Carolina had reason to rejoice: they had an excuse to secede. In winning the North, the "rail-splitter" had split off the South. A tragic chain reaction of secession now begun to erupt. Four days after the election of Lincoln, South Carolina's legislature voted unanimously to call a special convention. Meeting in Charleston in December 1860, the convention unanimously voted to secede. During the next six weeks, six other states of the lower South, though somewhat less united, followed the leader over the precipice: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Four more were to join them later, bringing the total to eleven.

The seceders created a government known as the ____. As their president they chose ____, a dignified and austere recent member of the US Senate from Mississippi. He was a West Pointer and a former cabinet member with wide military and administrative experience; but he suffered from chronic ill health, as well as from a frustrated ambition to be a Napoleonic strategist.

Impending bloodshed spurred final and frantic attempts at compromise - in the American tradition. The most promising of these efforts was sponsored by Senator James Henry ___ of Kentucky, on whose shoulders had fallen the mantle of a fellow Kentuckian, Henry Clay. The proposed ___ amendments to the Constitution were designed to appease the South. Slavery in the territories was to be prohibited north of 36° 30' line, but south of that line it was to be given federal protection in all the territories existing or "hereafter to be acquired" (such as Cuba). Future states, north or south of the 36° 30', could come into the Union with or without slavery, as they should choose. In short, slavery supporters were to be guaranteed full rights in the southern territories, as long as they were territories, regardless of the wishes of the majority under pop. sov. Federal protection of in a territory south of the line might conceivably, though improbably, turn the entire area permanently to slavery. Lincoln flatly rejected the scheme, which offered some slight prospect of success, and all hope of compromise evaporated. He had been elected on a platform against the extension of slavery, and he felt that as matter of principle, he could not afford to yield, even though gains for slavery in territories might only be temporary.

Secessionists who parted company with their sister states left for a number of avowed reasons, mostly relating in some way to slavery. They were alarmed by the inexorable tipping of the political balance against them. The southerners were also dismayed by the triumph of the new sectional Republican party, which seemed to threaten their rights as a slaveholding minority. They were weary of free-soil criticism, abolitionist nagging, and northern interference, ranging from the Underground Railroad to John Brown's raid. Many southerners supported secession because they felt sure the departure would be unopposed, despite "Yankee yawp" to the contrary. They were confident the Yankees would not or could not fight. They believed that northern manufacturers and bankers, who relied heavily on southern cotton and markets, would not dare to cut their own economic throats with their own unionist swords. ADD