Chapter 19

By the mid-1850s, sectional passions had grown personal and violent. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin continued to inflame northern opinion, while in Kansas, "Bleeding Kansas" showed that compromise over slavery's expansion was collapsing into open warfare.

The violence reached the U.S. Senate itself in 1856, when Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts with a cane after Sumner delivered a fiery antislavery speech. The North was horrified; parts of the South celebrated Brooks as a hero, and admirers sent him new canes.

In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott, an enslaved man who had lived in free territory, remained enslaved and had no standing to sue because Black Americans — free or enslaved — were not citizens.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's opinion went further, declaring that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories — effectively ruling the Missouri Compromise (already repealed) and the entire concept of popular sovereignty unconstitutional. The decision delighted the South and outraged the North, who saw it as proof of a "slave power" conspiracy controlling the federal government.

Taney's ruling stripped away any legal middle ground on slavery's expansion, forcing Americans to confront a stark choice between accepting slavery's spread everywhere or rejecting the Court's authority altogether.

Kansas's proslavery legislature produced the fraudulent Lecompton Constitution in 1857, submitted to voters under rigged conditions that guaranteed a proslavery outcome. President James Buchanan supported it, but Senator Stephen Douglas, true to his principle of fair popular sovereignty, broke with his own party to oppose it.

The controversy split the Democratic Party along sectional lines and delayed Kansas's admission to the Union — it would not enter until 1861, as a free state, after most southern senators had already left Congress.

Running for the Illinois Senate seat in 1858, Republican Abraham Lincoln challenged incumbent Stephen Douglas to a series of famous public debates. Lincoln argued that slavery was a moral wrong that must not spread further, while Douglas defended popular sovereignty.

At Freeport, Douglas tried to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision by arguing that territories could exclude slavery in practice simply by refusing to pass laws protecting it — the "Freeport Doctrine." Douglas narrowly won reelection, but his answer alienated southern Democrats, deepening the party's split, while Lincoln emerged as a national political figure.

In October 1859, the fiery abolitionist John Brown, who had led the Pottawatomie Massacre in Kansas, led a small band in seizing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm and spark a mass slave uprising.

The raid failed within days; Brown was captured, tried for treason, and hanged. Many northerners — including some abolitionists — mourned him as a martyr, tolling bells and holding memorial services, while white southerners saw the raid as horrifying proof that the North sought to incite race war and destroy their society.

The Democratic Party splintered completely in 1860: northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas, while southern "fire-eater" Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge on a platform protecting slavery in the territories. A remnant Constitutional Union Party, hoping to avoid the issue entirely, nominated John Bell.

With his opposition divided four ways, Republican Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with a clear majority of electoral votes — but almost no popular support in the South, where his name did not even appear on many ballots.

To many white southerners, Lincoln's election — despite his promises not to touch slavery where it already existed — signaled the doom of their social order. In December 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union.

Within weeks, six more states of the Deep South followed, and in February 1861 they formed the Confederate States of America, electing Jefferson Davis as president. Outgoing President Buchanan, believing secession illegal but also believing he lacked the constitutional power to stop it, did little to act — leaving the crisis for Lincoln to inherit when he took office in March 1861.