Secession! Peaceable secession! Sir,
your eyes and mine are never destined
to see that miracle.
- Daniel Webster
1
 The sovereign people of a territory should determine the
statutes of slavery.
 A good compromise?
 1848
 Gen. Lewis Cass (D)
War of 1812 veteran,
supported slavery
 Gen. Zachary Taylor (W)
“Old Rough and Ready,”
no official slavery stance
(but a slave holder)
 Free Soil Party: “free soil, free speech, free labor, free
men” (feared competition for jobs in the West)
2
 The Free Soil Party's
candidate was Martin
Van Buren.
 Van Buren finished last,
receiving just over 10% of
the total votes cast.
 Voters did elect 16
Free Soilers to the U.S.
Congress, including 2
Senators and 14 members of
the House of Representatives.
3
 The Free Soilers opposed slavery's expansion into any




new territories or states.
Believed that the government could not end slavery
where it already existed but that it could restrict slavery
in new areas.
Feared competition with Southern slaveholders.
 Northerners who wanted to own land in the West
feared that they would not be able to compete
economically with slave labor (the “free labor” part).
The majority were not abolitionists.
Some Free Soilers believed that African Americans were
inferior to white people. These Free Soilers had no desire
to provide African Americans with equal political,
economic, and social rights.
4
 Population of California
 14,000 in 1848
 100,000 in 1850
 250,000 in 1852.
 These increases are by immigration alone, for
hardly anyone is being born there
 In 1850 just 8% of the population is female.
In the mining towns that figure falls to 2%.
 Forty-niners do not arrive with women.
 Why do these male/female statistics matter?
 Applies for statehood as a FREE state (15 v. 15)
5
in 1850 and Southerners panic
 Virginia-born, slave holding Louisianan as
president
 Cabinet and Supreme Court majority
 Outnumbered in the House but equal in the
Senate (California as a free state, though?)
 Cotton fields expanding
 Cotton profitability rising
6
 Losing potential slave territory while losing
numbers in the Sen. and the H. of R.
 Wilmot Proviso (Mex. Cession, remember?)
and/or Tallmadge Amendment (that was the
gradual abolition in Missouri, remember?)
set precedents for the rest of the U.S.A.
 Abolition in the District of Columbia?
 Free Soilers in Congress
 What about Constitutional guarantees?
 The Underground Railroad (maybe 1000
7
runaways per year)
(page 422)
 Clay (73), Webster (68) and Calhoun (68) battle it out

Peaceable secession? Why, what would be the result?
Where is the line to be drawn? What States are to be seceded?
What is to remain American? What am I to be? An American
no longer? Am I to become a sectional man, a local man, a
separatist, with no country in common with the gentlemen
who sit around me here, or who fill the other house of
Congress? Heaven forbid! Where is the flag of the republic to
remain? Where is the eagle still to tower? or is he to cower, and
shrink, and fall to the ground? Why, Sir, our ancestors, our
fathers and our grandfathers, those of them that are yet living
amongst us with prolonged lives, would rebuke and reproach
us; and our children and our grandchildren would cry out
shame upon us, if we of this generation should dishonor these
ensigns of the power of the government and the harmony of
that Union which is every day felt among us with so much joy
and gratitude.
8
-Daniel Webster (Seventh of March Speech)
To the North
 California admitted as a FREE state
 Abolition of the slave trade (but NOT slavery) in the
District of Columbia
To the South
 New Mexico and Utah open to popular sovereignty
 A more stringent fugitive slave law (aiding escaped
slaves could lead to fines and jail)
“We went to bed one night old-fashioned, conservative,
Compromise Union Whigs and waked up stark mad
9
abolitionists!”
10
 Democrats
 Franklin Pierce (a “doughface” or a
Northerner with Southern sympathies)
 Whigs
 Winfield Scott (“Old Fuss and Feathers”)
 Northern Whigs hated the party’s
platform (support for the fugitive slave
law and Compromise of 1850) but
supported Scott (anti-slavery reputation)
 Southern Whigs supported the party’s
11
platform but hated Scott
The End of the Whig Party: It splits on
slavery (“Conscience” Whigs in the N.
versus “Cotton” Whigs in the S.) 
12
 The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty in Central America
 Commodore Matthew Perry and Japan
 Cuba
 Polk tried to buy it for $100,000,000.00
 Ostend Manifesto
 Offer $120,000,000
 If rejected, we will just take the island since the
Spanish presence jeopardizes American interests
 Gadsden Purchase (1853) for a southern
transcontinental railroad to California …
maybe (let’s take a look at the previous slide)
13
 How about a NORTHERN route for the
transcontinental rr…maybe from Chicago?
 Heavy investments in Chicago real estate and
railway stock
 The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)
 Nebraska split into two
 Apply the democratic concept of popular
sovereignty (what’s due west of KS? Of NE?)
 And the Missouri Compromise?
 Gives birth to the Republican Party
14
 A coalition of the foes of the Kansas-Nebraska Act
15
“A house divided against itself cannot
stand. I believe this government cannot
endure permanently half slave and half
free.”
-Abraham Lincoln 1858
16
 “So you’re the little woman
who wrote the book that
made this great war”
-A. Lincoln to Stowe in 1862
 Fiction
 Tom and Eliza vs.
Simon Legree
 Read worldwide
 What support could the
South expect now?
17
 A white Southerner from North Carolina
 No moral judgments
 No crusade against the
“peculiar institution”
 Condemned a labor system
that limited opportunities
of poor non-slave holding,
Southern whites, retarded
their economic progress and kept them
in poverty and “backwardness”
18
 Democrats (Popular Sovereignty)
 James Buchanan
 Republicans
 John C. Fremont
 A coalition of “conscience”
Whigs, Free Soilers and
northern Democrats
 Know Nothings (Nat. Union)
 Millard Fillmore
 Nativists = Anti-foreign
(“Americans Must Rule America!”)
19
20
 Free Soilers, Northern abolitionists and the New
Eng. Emigrant Aid Society faced off against proslave forces also streaming into the state
 Divided Democrats
 Douglas in Cong. (supporting true popular
sovereignty) vs. Buchanan in the W.H.
(supporting the hated Lecompton
Constitution which supported slavery in
Kansas)
 John Brown and the Pottawatomie Massacre
 5 proslavery sympathizers murdered and
21
dismembered
22
 Dred Scott (a slave) sued for his
freedom following years spent in a
free Illinois and Wisconsin
 #1 Scott would not be granted his freedom
 #2 Scott was a black slave and therefore not a citizen
(the citizenship of the South’s ¼ million free blacks
is now in question) so he had no right to sue
 #3 Slaves = property, therefore Congress had no
power (never did) to ban slavery from the territories
regardless of what the territorial legislatures might
want
 What about popular sovereignty? Missouri
23
Compromise?
 ". . . . . . We think they [people of African ancestry] are
. . . not included, and were not intended to be
included, under the word "citizens" in the
Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the
rights and privileges which that instrument provides
for and secures to citizens of the
United States. . . ."
— Chief Justice Roger B. Taney,
speaking for the majority (1857)
24
 In the North: Grain growers hard hit
 In the South
 Steady and favorable cotton prices
(does the South really need the North afterall?)
 Demands for free homesteads
 Great idea for Northerners (but not all)
 What about Southerners?
 Homestead Act (25 cents/acre)
 Angers Eastern industrialists
 Angers slaveholders
 Vetoed by Buchanan
 A low Southern backed tariff led manufacturers
to seek more protection
 Republicans have their issues: farms for the
farmless, protection for the unprotected
25
26
 Abraham Lincoln presents Stephen Douglas
with this dilemma…
 What if the people of a territory vote slavery down?
 The Supreme Court (Dred Scott) said they can’t
 You (Kansas-Nebraska Act) said they could…pop. sov.
 Stephen Douglas and the Freeport Doctrine
 If slavery were voted down, it would stay down
 If the laws were passed to protect slavery, the
people would have to enforce them, and they
wouldn’t if they disapproved of slavery
 Winning Illinois hurts Douglas in his quest for
the presidency
27
28
The Saint, whose fate yet
hangs in suspense, but
whose martyrdom, if it
shall be perfected, will
make the gallows as
glorious as the cross
29
-Emerson
 Stephen Douglas – popular with northern Democrats
 John Breckenridge was favored by southern Democrats
 John Bell forms a compromise position known as the
“Constitutional Union Party”
 Abraham Lincoln
 Non-extension of slavery (Free Soilers are happy)
 Protective tariffs (N. manufacturers are happy)
 Federal funding of internal improvements (Westerners
are happy)
 Free homesteads (farmers are happy)
30
It is a surprising fact that Lincoln, often rated among the
greatest presidents, ranks near the bottom in percentage of
popular votes. In all the eleven states that seceded, he received
31
only a scattering of votes (only about 1.5% in Virginia)
CANDIDATE
J. BELL
J. BRECKENRIDGE
POPULAR
VOTE
592,906
846,356
% OF POP.
VOTE
12.61%
18.20%
ELECTORAL
VOTE
39
72
S. DOUGLAS
A. LINCOLN
1,382,713
1,865,593
29.40%
39.79%
12
180
32
The vote by county for Lincoln was virtually all cast in the
North. The northern Democrat, Douglas, was also nearly shut
out in the South, which divided its votes between Breckinridge
and Bell.
33
Copyright (c) Houghton Mifflin Company. All Rights Reserved.
34
35
State
Secession
S. Carolina December 20, 1860
Mississippi
January 9, 1861
Florida
January 10, 1861
Alabama
January 11, 1861
Georgia
January 19, 1861
Louisiana
January 26, 1861
Texas
February 1, 1861
Virginia
April 17, 1861
Arkansas
May 6, 1861
N. Carolina
May 20, 1861
Tennessee
June 8, 1861
This shows the opposition of the anti-planter, anti-slavery
mountain whites in the Appalachian region. There was also
considerable resistance to secession in Texas.
36
37
This northern
cartoon
expressed the
sentiment of
many people
north of the
Mason-Dixon
line that
secession was a
self-defeating
move, doomed
to failure.
38
Chicago Historical Society