Sectional Crisis & Civil War — Print · U.S. & New York History: Indigenous Nations to Reconstruction, Grade 7

Part 1 · Why the territories and not the states

It is easy to assume the argument was simply whether slavery should exist. For most politicians before 1860 it was not. Lincoln campaigned in 1860 on stopping slavery from spreading, and said repeatedly that he had no lawful power and no intention to interfere with it in the states where it stood.

The reason is constitutional. Slavery was a matter of state law, and the federal government had no authority to reach into South Carolina and end it. Territories were different: they were governed by Congress until they became states, so Congress unquestionably could decide whether slavery entered them.

That turned every acquisition into a crisis. Louisiana in 1803, Texas in 1845, the Mexican cession in 1848 -- each one reopened the same question, and each time the answer would decide which section gained senators for the next generation.

Look at the figure for the shape of the problem. In 1850 the free states held about 62 per cent of the House and exactly half the Senate. Southern politicians could read the census as well as anyone and knew the House was gone permanently. Holding the Senate was the whole strategy, and holding the Senate meant new slave states.

Part 2 · The balance rule

Missouri applied for statehood in 1819 as a slave state, which would have broken a tie of eleven and eleven. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri with slavery and Maine without it, keeping the chamber level, and drew a line west along latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes: slavery permitted below it in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase, barred above.

The pairing then became a habit. Arkansas came in with Michigan, Florida with Iowa, Texas with Wisconsin. The Senate stayed at parity for thirty years not by accident but by an arrangement both sides understood and neither wrote into the Constitution.

The arrangement had an expiry date built into geography. The land left above the line was far larger than the land below it, and the land below it was mostly dry. Everyone could see that if the rule held, the free states would eventually have the Senate too.

Thomas Jefferson, then seventy-six, wrote that the news of the Missouri crisis woke him like a fire bell in the night and that he considered it the knell of the Union. He was forty-one years early, and right about the mechanism: a line drawn on a map had turned a moral argument into a permanent geographic one.

Part 3 · The three-fifths clause and the complaint about it

The Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population when apportioning House seats and electoral votes. Enslaved people could not vote, so the effect was to give extra representation to the white voters of the states that held them -- a bonus of roughly twenty House seats by 1800 and the same number of extra electoral votes.

That margin decided things. Jefferson's win over Adams in 1800 would probably have gone the other way without it, and northern critics never let the point go, calling the effect the slave power.

The complaint is worth stating carefully, because it is easy to repeat it wrongly. The grievance was not that enslaved people were counted as less than whole human beings in some moral ledger; the three-fifths figure was a bargaining compromise over how much political credit enslavers got for people they denied any voice. The antislavery position in 1787 was to count them at zero for representation, precisely because counting them rewarded the enslaver.

Combined with Senate parity, the arrangement gave a minority section a durable veto over national policy. That veto held for seventy years, and the record of its use -- the gag rule, the Fugitive Slave Act, the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso -- is what convinced a growing number of northerners that the problem was structural rather than regional bad manners.

It is worth noticing how unusual that arrangement is. A system of government normally lets a majority eventually get its way; this one let a shrinking minority block change indefinitely, because the blocking power sat in a chamber that ignores population entirely. Americans argued then, as they argue now, about whether equal state representation is a flaw or the whole point of a senate, but nobody in 1850 doubted what it was holding in place.

Part 4 · The Wilmot Proviso

In August 1846, with the war against Mexico only months old, a first-term Pennsylvania congressman named David Wilmot attached an amendment to an appropriations bill: slavery should be barred from any territory acquired from Mexico.

What happened next is the clearest demonstration in the whole period of the two chambers. The proviso passed the House. It died in the Senate. It was reintroduced and passed the House again, and died in the Senate again. Members voted by section rather than by party, with northern Whigs and northern Democrats on one side and southern Whigs and southern Democrats on the other.

That realignment is the real news. The Whig and Democratic parties had been national organisations with wings in both sections, and a national party is a machine for making sectional compromise, because each wing needs the other to win a presidential election. Once voting ran along the Mason-Dixon line instead, the machine stopped working.

The Free Soil Party ran a presidential candidate in 1848 on Wilmot's position, won no states but took enough votes in New York to decide the election, and showed that an explicitly sectional party was viable. Six years later the Republicans were founded on the same principle, and in 1860 one of them won.

Wilmot himself is a useful corrective to a tidy story. He was no abolitionist and said so plainly: he wanted the new land kept for free white labour and objected to his own constituents competing against plantations, not to slavery as an injustice. A great deal of northern free-soil feeling was of exactly this kind, which is why the war that came began as a war about the Union and only later became a war about freedom.

Part 1 · Five bills that did not add up to one

The Compromise of 1850 did five things. California entered as a free state. Utah and New Mexico territories were organised with the slavery question left to their settlers. The public slave trade in Washington, DC was abolished, though holding people there remained legal. Texas gave up its claim to a large piece of New Mexico and the federal government assumed ten million dollars of Texan debt. And a far harsher fugitive slave law replaced the weak one of 1793.

Clay, Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun made their last great speeches on it; Calhoun, too ill to stand, had his read aloud for him and died within a month. Webster backed the compromise including the fugitive law, and his reputation in Massachusetts never recovered.

Douglas's procedural trick deserves attention. By splitting the package, he let northern members vote for California and abstain on the fugitive law, and southern members do the reverse. Each bill passed; no coalition ever supported the whole settlement; and so the settlement had no constituency willing to defend it when it came under strain.

It bought four years. Measured against what came after, that is not nothing, and some historians argue the delay mattered because the North grew faster than the South in those years. It is also the last time the old method worked at all.

Part 2 · The law that came north

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is worth reading closely because its details explain the reaction. An accused person could not testify in their own defence and got no jury. The case was heard by a federal commissioner who was paid ten dollars if he ruled for the claimant and five dollars if he ruled for the accused. Any citizen could be deputised into a posse and fined or jailed for refusing.

Every one of those provisions was a gift to the abolitionists. A tribunal that pays the judge double for one verdict is not a court anybody can defend, and free Black northerners now faced being seized on an affidavit and shipped south with no way to answer. Thousands left for Canada in the following months.

The enforcement cases made the point in public. When Anthony Burns was arrested in Boston in 1854, it took federal troops and artillery to walk one man to the harbour through a crowd of thousands, at a cost to the government of around forty thousand dollars; Burns was marched past buildings hung with black cloth. Boston had voted for the compromise; Boston watched this and changed its mind.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote *Uncle Tom's Cabin* in direct response, serialised from 1851 and published as a book in 1852. It sold around 300,000 copies in its first year in a country of 23 million, and was staged in theatres for decades. Its sentimentality is easy to mock and its portrait of Black character has been criticised ever since, but it did what no pamphlet had: it made slavery a story about families to readers who had never thought about it.

Part 3 · Kansas-Nebraska and what popular sovereignty meant

In 1854 Douglas introduced a bill organising Nebraska and Kansas territories on popular sovereignty: the settlers would vote on slavery themselves. Both lay above the 36 degrees 30 minutes line, so the bill explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise. Douglas wanted a transcontinental railroad routed through Chicago and needed southern votes for it.

It passed, and it destroyed his party. Northern Democrats were wiped out in the next elections, the Whig Party collapsed entirely, and in 1854 the Republican Party was founded on a single plank: no slavery in the territories. A thirty-four-year settlement had been repealed to get a railroad.

In Kansas, popular sovereignty meant whoever showed up. Thousands of Missourians crossed the border to vote illegally in the 1855 election, electing a legislature that promptly made it a crime to argue against slavery; free-state settlers set up a rival government at Topeka. In May 1856 a proslavery posse sacked the town of Lawrence, and days later John Brown and his sons killed five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek with broadswords.

The violence reached Congress in the same month. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a speech insulting South Carolina, and Representative Preston Brooks walked onto the Senate floor and beat him with a cane until it broke, injuring him so badly he could not return for three years. Southern admirers mailed Brooks replacement canes. By 1856 the two sections could not be relied on to argue with words.

Part 4 · Why compromise stopped working

Compromise requires something divisible. Money, land and offices can be split; the 1820 line split the map and the 1850 bargain split a package of unrelated favours. What could not be split was whether a person is property, and every arrangement worked only by avoiding that question rather than answering it.

Each round also raised the stakes. In 1820 the argument was over one state; by 1850 it was over a region the size of western Europe; by 1854 the previous settlement itself was on the table, which told both sides that nothing agreed was safe.

The 1850 law added the decisive new element: personal implication. A northerner could support the Missouri Compromise and never think about slavery again, because it happened elsewhere. After 1850 it happened in their own courthouse and could require their own hands, and people who have been made complicit tend not to stay moderate.

By the end of 1856 the party system that had absorbed sectional conflict for twenty years was gone. The Whigs were dead, the Democrats were a southern party with a shrinking northern wing, and a party that existed only in the North had come second in a presidential election at its first attempt. The next lesson is about what happened when it came first.

One habit is worth carrying out of this lesson. When a settlement is described as a compromise, ask who had to give up something they considered a matter of right rather than a matter of interest. Interests can be traded and split; rights cannot, and a bargain that asks someone to trade one will hold only as long as nobody tests it.

Part 1 · Eleven years, two courts, one question

Dred Scott was born into slavery in Virginia around 1799 and brought to St Louis by the Blow family in 1830. About two years later he was sold to Dr John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, and the Army is what makes this case possible. Emerson was posted first to Fort Armstrong in Illinois, a free state since 1818, and then to Fort Snelling in what is now Minnesota — territory north of the 36°30′ line, where the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had banned slavery outright. Scott lived on free soil for roughly seven years, held by a man whose own employer had made that soil free.

At Fort Snelling, about 1837, Dred married Harriet Robinson, who was perhaps nineteen and enslaved by the local Indian agent. Their wedding was a civil ceremony before a justice of the peace — an extraordinary detail, because in a slave state the marriages of enslaved people had no legal standing at all. Their daughter Eliza was born on a steamboat on the Mississippi, north of the compromise line. The family's whole existence sat on the wrong side of the law that said they were property.

Emerson died in 1843 and his widow Irene inherited the Scotts. On 6 April 1846 Dred and Harriet each filed suit in St Louis. They were not inventing a theory. Missouri courts had followed a rule since Winny v. Whitesides in 1824 — once free, always free — and had freed at least a dozen people on it. The Scotts won their retrial in 1850. Then in 1852 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed them 2–1 and threw the precedent away, with Judge William Scott writing that “times are not now as they were when the former decisions on this subject were made.” The law had not changed. The politics had.

Part 2 · What the Court held, and what Taney wrote

The case reached the Supreme Court as *Dred Scott v. Sandford* and was argued twice. The decision came down on 6 March 1857, two days after James Buchanan was sworn in as president. The vote was 7–2. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, then seventy-nine and a Marylander who had freed the people he had himself enslaved, wrote for the majority.

He made three rulings. First, that a person of African descent, whether free or enslaved, could not be a citizen of the United States, so Scott had no right even to file in a federal court. Second, that returning to Missouri returned Scott to Missouri law, so his years on free soil bought him nothing. Third — and this was the part nobody expected — that Congress had never had the constitutional power to prohibit slavery in a territory. That made the Missouri Compromise of 1820 void, thirty-seven years after it passed.

Taney wrote that at the time the Constitution was adopted, Black Americans had been regarded as “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” He presented this as a description of what the founders had believed, and used it to decide what the Constitution must therefore mean. Justice Benjamin Curtis demolished the history in dissent: at ratification, free Black men could vote in five of the thirteen states — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey and North Carolina — and in some they had voted on the Constitution itself. People who help ratify a constitution are plainly among the citizens it creates. Curtis resigned from the Court within months.

Part 3 · A ruling that settled nothing

Buchanan and Taney expected the decision to end the territorial fight. It did the opposite, because of what it did to the Republican Party. The Republicans had organised in 1854 around a single policy: keep slavery out of the western territories. The Court had just announced that this policy was unconstitutional. A party built on one plank had been told the plank did not exist.

They did not disband; they campaigned against the Court. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas argued the decision through seven debates across Illinois. At Freeport, Lincoln asked Douglas how settlers could exclude slavery if the Court said no government could. Douglas answered that slavery needed local police regulations to survive, so a territory could kill it by refusing to pass them. The answer held Illinois for him and lost him the South, and the Democratic Party split in two in 1860 — which is how Lincoln won with under forty per cent of the popular vote.

This is worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of what people expect courts to do. A Supreme Court ruling is final as law and it was obeyed as law: Dred Scott stayed enslaved. But it did not make anyone agree. Within four years of the decision eleven states had left the Union.

Part 4 · What happened to the Scotts, and how the ruling died

The Scotts lost in March 1857 and were free by 26 May 1857 — eleven weeks later, and not by any court. Irene Emerson had remarried, and her new husband Calvin Chaffee turned out to be an abolitionist congressman, which was politically unbearable once the newspapers noticed. Ownership was transferred to Taylor Blow, a son of the family that had first enslaved Dred Scott, who walked into the St Louis courthouse and signed the manumission papers.

Dred Scott worked as a porter at Barnum's Hotel in St Louis. He died of tuberculosis on 17 September 1858, about sixteen months after winning the freedom he had spent eleven years suing for. Harriet lived until 1876 and saw the amendment that answered the Court.

That amendment is how the ruling ended. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on 9 July 1868, opens: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” That sentence was written to destroy Taney's holding, and it did. *Dred Scott* has never been formally overruled by any later Court — it did not need to be. It was killed by constitutional amendment, which is the heaviest tool the system has.

Part 1 · Seven debates in Illinois

Lincoln opened the 1858 campaign by saying that a house divided against itself cannot stand and that the country would become all one thing or all the other. Douglas answered that the country had lived half slave and half free for seventy years, since the Constitution was written in 1787, and could continue indefinitely if each place decided for itself.

At Freeport, Lincoln asked the question that cost Douglas the presidency. The Dred Scott decision of 1857 had just held that Congress could not bar slavery from a territory; could the settlers of a territory therefore exclude it, as popular sovereignty promised? Douglas said yes in effect, because slavery needed local police regulations to survive and a legislature could simply decline to pass them.

That answer, the Freeport Doctrine, was honest and fatal. It satisfied Illinois and enraged the South, which heard a man explaining how to nullify a Supreme Court ruling they had just won. Two years later it helped split his party.

Note what Lincoln was and was not saying. He opposed the extension of slavery and called it a moral wrong, and he also said at Charleston that he was not in favour of social and political equality between the races, a statement his admirers have been uncomfortable with ever since. He was running in Illinois in 1858, and reading him as a finished abolitionist flattens a man who moved a great deal in the next seven years.

Lincoln lost. Senators were chosen by state legislatures then, not by voters, and the Democrats held enough seats. But the debates were reprinted across the country and he published them as a book in 1860, which is how a one-term congressman became a plausible nominee.

Part 2 · Harpers Ferry

Brown had come out of Kansas with a plan: seize the federal arsenal in Virginia, distribute the weapons, and build a force in the mountains that enslaved people could join. He raised money from New England backers, recruited twenty-one men including five Black men and three of his sons, and attacked on 16 October 1859.

It went wrong at once. Nobody rose to join him, the raiders were surrounded in an engine house, and a detachment of marines commanded by Colonel Robert E. Lee took the building in three minutes. Ten raiders died, including two of Brown's sons. Brown was tried for treason against Virginia, convicted, and hanged on 2 December.

His conduct at the trial changed everything. Wounded and calm, he told the court that if it was thought necessary that he should forfeit his life for the furtherance of justice and mingle his blood with the blood of millions in this slave country, let it be done. Emerson compared him to a saint; church bells rang in parts of New England on the day he died; and Thoreau defended him in print.

Southern readers saw northern crowds mourning a man who had tried to arm their slaves and drew the obvious conclusion, whether or not it was fair. Most northerners condemned the raid, and the Republican Party disavowed it immediately, but the funeral bells were what got reported in Richmond. Militia companies formed across the South through 1860, which meant that when war came the Confederacy already had the beginnings of an army.

Part 3 · Four candidates, one winner

The Democratic convention met in Charleston in April 1860 and broke apart over whether the party platform should guarantee slavery in the territories. Northern Democrats nominated Douglas; southern Democrats walked out and nominated John C. Breckinridge. A fourth group of former Whigs formed the Constitutional Union Party behind John Bell on the platform that the Constitution should simply be obeyed and the subject dropped.

The Republicans met in Chicago and passed over better-known men for Lincoln, partly because he had made fewer enemies and partly because he could carry the lower North. His name did not appear on the ballot in ten southern states.

The result: Lincoln 1.87 million votes, about 39.8 per cent, and 180 electoral votes. Douglas came second in popular votes with about 29.5 per cent and won exactly one state, Missouri. Breckinridge took the Deep South, Bell took three border states.

The arithmetic is worth doing carefully, because the common claim that the split elected Lincoln is only half right. Even if every vote for Douglas, Breckinridge and Bell had gone to one candidate, Lincoln's margins in the populous northern states were large enough to give him an electoral majority anyway. The split mattered less to the outcome than to the legitimacy of it: a president chosen by under 40 per cent, with nothing in the South, was easy to describe as a sectional ruler imposed on an unwilling region.

Part 4 · Secession, and what the documents say

South Carolina's convention voted to leave on 20 December 1860. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas followed by 1 February 1861, and delegates formed the Confederate States of America at Montgomery that month, electing Jefferson Davis president. All of this happened before Lincoln was inaugurated on 4 March.

Several of those states published declarations of the causes of secession, and the historian's job here is easy because they were not shy. Mississippi's begins by saying its position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world. Texas listed the free states' refusal to return fugitives. South Carolina's complaint was almost entirely about northern states nullifying the Fugitive Slave Act.

This matters because a different explanation became popular afterwards. From the 1870s a version took hold in which the war had been about states' rights and tariffs rather than slavery, and it is still repeated. The test is straightforward: read what the seceding states said at the time, when they were trying to persuade each other rather than defend themselves to posterity, and compare it with what their defenders said thirty years later.

Fort Sumter sat in Charleston harbour, held by a small federal garrison running out of food. Lincoln notified South Carolina that he was sending provisions and no weapons, which left the Confederacy choosing between allowing a federal fort to be resupplied or firing first. Batteries opened on 12 April 1861 and the fort surrendered after thirty-four hours with nobody killed in the bombardment. Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, which had refused to secede over the election, left rather than furnish troops against other southern states.

Part 1 · The ledger, and why it did not settle anything

Read the figure first and the advantage looks overwhelming. The Union had four times the free population, nine times the factory output, more than twice the railroad mileage and almost all the gunmaking capacity, plus a navy, a treasury and diplomatic recognition.

The asymmetry in war aims is what cancels much of that. To win, the Union had to march into a region of 750,000 square miles, defeat its armies, occupy its cities and hold them against a hostile population. To win, the Confederacy had to not lose, and wait for the 1864 northern election.

Defending is also cheaper than attacking. A defender knows the ground, has shorter supply lines, and in this war had rifled muskets accurate at several hundred yards against attacking formations that had been taught tactics designed for smoothbore guns accurate at eighty. Assaults that would have worked in 1815 slaughtered the men making them.

The one resource the ledger leaves out ended up mattering most. The 3.5 million enslaved people in the Confederacy were its labour force, and they were also the Union's largest potential recruiting pool. When the war aim changed in 1863, roughly 180,000 Black soldiers and sailors joined the Union forces, a number larger than most of the armies in the field.

Part 2 · Strategy and the border states

General Winfield Scott proposed what the newspapers mocked as the Anaconda Plan: blockade the coast, take the Mississippi, and squeeze rather than charge. It was dismissed in 1861 as too slow and is essentially what won the war, which is a useful lesson about public impatience.

The blockade had to cover 3,500 miles of coastline and was porous for years, but it worked by degrees. The Confederacy exported cotton and imported almost everything manufactured, so cutting the trade starved it of rifles, railway iron, medicine and eventually shoes.

Four slave states stayed in the Union: Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri. Together they held substantial population, the gun works at Harpers Ferry, the Ohio River and the capital's land approaches. Lincoln is supposed to have said he hoped to have God on his side but he must have Kentucky, and he governed accordingly, suspending habeas corpus in Maryland and arresting legislators to keep it from voting on secession.

That calculation explains the first eighteen months of Union policy. Lincoln said the war was for the Union and not against slavery, overruled generals who freed enslaved people in their districts, and offered compensated emancipation to the border states, who refused. The first battle at Bull Run in July 1861 ended with a Union rout and civilians who had driven out from Washington with picnics fleeing back along the same road. Nobody said ninety days again.

Part 3 · Antietam

In September 1862 Lee marched into Maryland, hoping a victory on northern soil would bring British and French recognition and break northern nerve before the autumn elections. Then two Union soldiers found a copy of his orders, Special Order 191, wrapped around three cigars in an abandoned camp, and General McClellan knew exactly how Lee's army was divided.

Antietam was fought on 17 September 1862 along a creek near Sharpsburg. In a single day roughly 22,700 men were killed, wounded or went missing, more than on any other day in American history, and the photographs Alexander Gardner took of the dead still lying in the sunken road were exhibited in New York weeks later. It was the first time most Americans had seen what a battlefield actually looked like.

Tactically it settled nothing. Lee held his ground, McClellan declined to use his reserves, and the Confederate army withdrew across the Potomac intact; Lincoln removed McClellan for not pursuing.

Strategically it decided two things. Lee's invasion had failed, so Britain and France shelved recognition and never returned to it. And Lincoln had been holding a draft of the Emancipation Proclamation since July, waiting for a victory so that it would not read as a desperate measure. Five days after the battle, on 22 September, he issued it, declaring that enslaved people in areas still in rebellion on 1 January 1863 would be free. From that point no European power could intervene on the Confederate side without appearing to fight for slavery.

Part 4 · 1863 to Appomattox

July 1863 brought two results within a day of each other. At Gettysburg, Lee's second invasion ended in three days of fighting and about 51,000 casualties, closing with a frontal assault across open ground that lost more than half the men who made it. On 4 July, Vicksburg surrendered to Grant after a six-week siege, giving the Union the whole Mississippi and cutting the Confederacy in two.

Grant was brought east in 1864 and fought differently. Where previous commanders withdrew to reorganise after a bloody engagement, he kept moving south after each one, accepting losses the Union could replace and the Confederacy could not. Northern newspapers called him a butcher; the casualty exchange was in fact roughly even, and that was the point.

The 1864 election was the Confederacy's last real hope, and for much of that summer Lincoln expected to lose. Sherman's capture of Atlanta in September changed the mood, Lincoln won comfortably, and Sherman then marched to the sea, destroying railways, mills and crops across Georgia on the principle that an army's supply base is a military target.

Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House on 9 April 1865, and the remaining forces followed over the next two months. Lincoln was shot five days after Appomattox and died on 15 April, which removed the one man with both the authority and the inclination to shape what came next. The last lesson of this chapter is about what came next, and about how much the shape of it depended on his absence.

A note on the figures you will meet in other books. The traditional death toll of 620,000 came from an 1889 count of army records; a demographer working from census data in 2011 put it closer to 750,000, and most historians now give a range. Both numbers are defensible, both rest on incomplete records, and a source that reports either one as exact is telling you something about the author rather than about the war.