PUSH TO THE CIVIL WARSECESSION

Failure of Compromise

Essential Questions:

What factors/events propel the nation toward a civil war?

At what point (if) does the war become “inevitable?”

Metaphor

Hammer blows to unionWedge:

Manifest destiny & Extension of slavery

Nature of the UnionConstitutional issues

BOP issues Tariff, FFII, Ext. of Slavery, Land

Ostend Manifesto - 1854US proposed annexation of Cuba North fears southern plot - “a

Caribbean slave empire”

Kansas-Nebraska Act 1854

Repeals Missouri Compromise – sacredBleeding Kansas – Bleeding Sumner Significance

Discredits popular sovereignty Kills Whigs Births Republicans Divided Democrats Know Nothings - Nativism

Degler – Impact of Republican party

With the formation of the Republican Party, the break up of the union became unavoidable. The new party’s very reason for being stood athwart the South’s drive for the expansion of slavery, and its almost immediate popularity in the most populous and growing North stood as a warning to the slave states that in time an antislavery government would gain power in Washington.

By the late 1850s the only alternative to the disruption of the Union, given the alignment of the parties and the hardening of the sectional attitudes, were that the North should become a slaveholding area or that the South should cease to be one. …..Tightly wrapped in their own cultural assumptions, Northerners and Southerners were now incapable of compromise. All that was left was mounting recrimination. Thus the immediate consequence of slavery was a terrible and costly war…..all the issues were in fact and in logic reducible to slavery.

Sack of Lawrence

Bleeding Sumner

Election of 1856

Scott v Sanford - 1857Issues – free territory –free man- basisNW ORD. & Mo. Comp. Scott can’t bring suit – not a citizen –

framers didn’t intend for people of African descent to become citizens

Taney =Blacks “no rights the white man was bound to respect”

Outcome – Obiter dictum Slavery – protected by constitution – 5th

Am Congress can’t limit expansion of slavery

–thus Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional

Nor can popular sovereignty

Crises of the 1850s

1857 – Panic – mutual blame – S. can make it alone

1857 – KS Reprise Lecompton Constitution English Bill Douglas opposed –this was not popular

sovereignty; lost S. support

Lincoln- Douglas Debates – 1858 – referendum on Dred Scott

and Popular SovereigntyL – takes the moral position

“A nation cannot exist half free and half slave.” BUT says that blacks are not socially, intellectually or politically equal when Douglas challenges him

Rights of the Declaration to all D – Freeport Doctrine

Don’t pass laws that protect slave holding

Crises of 1850s

1859 – Harpers Ferry – John Brown Armed revolt – greatest southern fears

1859 – Helperism & debate over Speaker of the House

John Brown’s Hanging- Lawrence

Last Moments of John Brown

Crisis: Election of 1860

Four Parties Lincoln – Republican Douglas - N Democrats Breckenridge – S Democrats Bell Constitutional Union

L wins electoral voteDeep South seceded after election

Election of 1860

New Orleans Daily Crescent – Nov 13, 1860

“They have robbed us of our property…they have set at naught the decrees of the Supreme Court, they have invaded our states and killed our citizens, they have declared their unalienable right to the Territories, they have nullified the laws of Congress, and finally they have capped the mighty pyramid of unfraternal promises by electing Abraham Lincoln…on a platform and by a system that indicates nothing but the subjugation of the South and the complete ruin of her social, political and industrial institutions.”

Confederate Constitution

Moderate – like the US constitution Protected slavery Central government can’t

Interfere w/ slavery Fund internal improvements Pass a protective tariff

Davis’ Inaugural February 1861

“Our present condition, achieved in a manner unprecedented in the history of the nations, illustrates the American idea that governments rest upon the consent of the governed, and it is the right of the people to alter or abolish governments whenever they become destructive of the ends for which they have been established….

As a necessity, not a choice we have resorted to the remedy of separation and henceforth our energies must be directed to the conduct of our own affairs and the perpetuity of the Confederacy which we have formed.”

Lincoln’s First Inaugural –March 1861

“…the union of these states is perpetual….the Union will endure forever – it being impossible to destroy it, except by some action not provided in the instrument itself….The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in 1774. It was furthered matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in 1776. It was further matured and the faith

Of all the then thirteen States expressly plighted and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation in 1778. And finally in 1787, one of the objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution, was ‘to form a more perfect union.’…It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union- that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void and the acts of violence within any state are insurrectionary or revolutionary…I consider …that the Union is unbroken …”

Crittenden Compromise

Extend Missouri Compromise to PacificFails – no group can make enough gains

“And the War Came “

Fort Sumter April of 1861 - resupplyLincoln cautious ---border states (8)

Border states = key population, rr, riversRest of South seceded – border states split --- but war = Union v.

Confederacy – not N v S

Crittenden ResolutionJuly 1861

“The war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those seceding States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality and rights of several states unimpaired and as soon as these objects are accomplished, the war ought to cease.”

Bombardment of Sumter

Why Secession and War?

Diverging SocietiesFailure of key institutions to provide

leadership & compromise Protection of liberty and opportunity

– Southern fears of colonial status – loss of indendence Free Soil v Pro Slavery Ideologies

When “inevitable?”

“From the rattle with which the nurse tickles the ear of the child born in the South to the shroud which covers the cold form in death, everything comes from the North. We rise from between sheets made in northern looms and pillows of northern feathers, to wash in basins made in the North. We eat from northern plates and dishes; our rooms are swept with northern brooms, our gardens dug with northern spades…and the very wood which feeds our fires, helved with hickory brought from Connecticut and New York.”

Degler on the Civil War

Once the war came, however, it brought to an abrupt close one period of American History and opened the door to another of a much different order. It was a testing of the American people as a nation; it was a watershed in their history.