who especially objected to the efforts of abolitionists to speed escaped
Africans out of the South. They viewed this as a direct attack on slavery.
The route to freedom was called the Underground Railroad
Railroad. Quakers
such as Levi Coffin, a Guilford County native, helped set up the railroad,
which stretched from the rim of the South to Canada. When completed,
it was like no other railroad in the United States. Its “tracks” were paths
through forests and fields. Its “stations” included barns, attics, cellars, and
any other place where runaways could hide. Its “conductors” were the
courageous people, including formerly enslaved Africans, who led the
runaways north.
The daring escapes of fugitives led Harriet Beecher Stowe to publish
Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Stowe, a Northern abolitionist, wanted to
inspire people to resist the Fugitive Slave Act, so she filled the book with
tales of cruelty, suffering, and desperate escape. The story was so moving
that it sold 400,000 copies within months. Southern states, however,
branded the book a pack of lies and banned its sale.
Slavery sparked more controversy in 1854. That year Senator Stephen
A. Douglas of Illinois proposed a bill to open two new territories for
settlement—Kansas and Nebraska. Both territories would be north of
the line established by the Missouri Compromise and
therefore off-limits to slavery. Douglas knew that this
fact would block Southern support for his bill. So, to win
over Southerners, Douglas suggested that the decision
about whether to allow slavery in the new territories be
settled by popular sovereignty
sovereignty—a vote by the residents
of the territories. Congress approved Douglas’s suggestion. It repealed the Missouri Compromise and passed the
Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The act outraged many Northerners. It also divided
the Whig Party, which was still the most important
party opposed to the Democrats. Southern Whigs were
mostly proslavery and supported the new law. Most
Northern Whigs, however, opposed slavery. Some, known
as “Conscience Whigs” because they saw slavery as a moral
evil, now began to support abolition. Others disliked slavery but still supported the Compromise of 1850. Unable to
agree, the Whig party fell apart.
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The Kansas-Nebraska Act
Harriet Tubman was the
most famous conductor of the
Underground Railroad. When she was
13, Tubman suffered a severe head
injury when an overseer struck her
for trying to protect a fellow slave
from a beating. She suffered fainting
spells for the rest of her life. Even so,
she managed to escape from slavery
and went on to conduct nineteen
trips on the Underground Railroad.
Slave owners offered $40,000 for
her capture—dead or alive—but no
one ever caught up with Tubman, or
the more than 300 “passengers” she
guided to freedom.
The Know-Nothing Party
Many former Whigs joined the Know-Nothing Party, officially called the American Party. The new party had begun
to develop in the 1840s as a reaction to a flood of new
Rumblings of Civil War 327