AP U.S. History 5.6: Failure of Compromise

The Compromise of 1850 dealt with the land won from Mexico. It left open the rest of the West. In January 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois introduced a bill that divided the land just west of Missouri into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. Douglas argued for popular sovereignty: the settlers of a territory, not Congress, would decide whether slavery would be legal there. The act, passed on May 30, 1854, said that it was "the true intent and meaning of this act not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom."

That collided with an older deal. Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery was outlawed in Louisiana Purchase land north of the 36°30' line, and both new territories lay north of it. The new act said the 1820 ban "is hereby declared inoperative and void." Antislavery Northerners were outraged that land closed to slavery for more than thirty years was open again.

In Kansas, popular sovereignty turned an election into a race. Proslavery and antislavery settlers rushed in, the fighting earned the name "Bleeding Kansas," and the National Archives judges that the act "aggravated the split between North and South on the issue of slavery until reconciliation seemed virtually impossible."

Source: Kansas-Nebraska Act, with transcript (National Archives).

Dred Scott, an enslaved man, had lived with his enslaver at Fort Snelling, then in the free Territory of Wisconsin. In 1846 he and his wife, Harriet, sued for their freedom, claiming that they had become free by living in a territory where slavery was prohibited. On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney read the Supreme Court's majority opinion.

The Court ruled two things. First, a Black American whose ancestors had been brought to the country and sold as slaves, free or enslaved, could not be a citizen, so Scott could not sue in a federal court. Taney wrote that at the founding Black people had been regarded as "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," and he relied on that reading of the founding to hold that they could not be citizens. Second, Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a federal territory. The Missouri Compromise ban, the opinion said, "is not warranted by the Constitution, and is therefore void."

A ruling meant to end the argument raised the stakes instead. If Congress could not keep slavery out of a territory, the central goal of the new Republican Party, which opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had helped found, was unconstitutional by the Court's reading. The National Archives judges that the decision moved the nation a step closer to the Civil War.

Source: Dred Scott v. Sandford, with transcript (National Archives).

By the 1830s two parties, the Democrats and the Whigs, had formed, and they competed for votes in both the North and the South. That contest is called the Second Party System. A party with members in both sections could be split from inside by a fight over slavery.

In the 1850s two issues wore down voters' loyalty to both parties. One was slavery in the territories, which the Kansas-Nebraska Act had reopened. The other was nativism, hostility to immigrants. Large numbers of newcomers, mainly from Ireland and Germany, kept arriving, and a strongly anti-Catholic nativist movement set out to limit their political power and cultural influence. Voters drawn to either cause had less reason to stay with the party they had always backed.

The Second Party System ended, and the strain showed even among the Democrats. A Democratic convention's platform of June 18, 1860, admitted that "difference of opinion exists in the Democratic party as to the nature and extent of the powers of a Territorial Legislature, and as to the powers and duties of Congress" over slavery in the territories. The most it could promise was that "the Democratic party will abide by the decision of the Supreme Court."

Source: Democratic Party Platform, 1860 (Avalon Project).

A sectional party draws its strength from one part of the country. The breakup of the old system fostered such parties, and the most important was new. Opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act helped found the Republican Party, which "opposed the spread of slavery into the territories." Its goal was free soil: western land kept open to free labor and closed to slavery.

Southern leaders saw a party that did not need them. In January 1861 Georgia's secession convention described it this way: "The party of Lincoln, called the Republican party, under its present name and organization, is of recent origin. It is admitted to be an anti-slavery party." And: "The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of this organization." Of the party's first run for president, Georgia wrote: "They raised their standard in 1856 and were barely defeated."

Read Georgia's words as a hostile source, written to justify leaving the Union. "Barely defeated" is Georgia's claim, chosen to make the threat look large, so do not take it as a vote count. What the passage does show is how Southern leaders saw a party that drew its strength from the North alone: as a danger to slavery.

Sources: Kansas-Nebraska Act (National Archives); Georgia's declaration of causes, 1861 (Avalon Project).