The Illinois Senate race in 1858 put the scope of the sectional crisis on full display. Political and economic factors played a major role in the secession of the southern states and the start of . In 1853, the Nebraska Territory was huge, extending from the northern end of Texas to the Canadian border. Federal troops lined the streets of Boston as Burns was marched to a ship, where he was sent back to slavery in Virginia. In this climate, the parties opened their contest for the 1860 presidential election. The violence in Washington pales before the many murders occurring in Kansas.26 Pro-slavery raiders attacked Lawrence, Kansas. A new transatlantic antislavery movement began to argue that freedom was the natural condition of humankind. In the majority opinion, excerpted here, Supreme Court justice Joseph Story decided that the national fugitive slave act overruled Pennsylvanias law. Democrats by 1853 were badly splintered along sectional lines over slavery, but they also had reasons to act with confidence. Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln challenged the greatly influential Democrat Stephen Douglas. Southerners and northerners grew ever more antagonistic as they debated the expansion of slavery in the West. 2. In June 1856, the newly named Republican Party held its nominating convention at Philadelphia and selected Californian John Charles Frmont. The country seemed to teeter ever closer to a full-throated endorsement of slavery. More than that, all Black Americans, Justice Taney declared, could never be citizens of the United States. They rejected the long-standing idea that slavery was a condition that naturally suited some people. Debates over slavery in the American West proved especially important. By the time of the Missouri Compromise debate, both groups saw that whites never intended them to be citizens of the United States. Southerners were also learning the challenges of forming a new nation. Where I differ is that I view this as not just another sectional crisis but the first. Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone in the world accepted it as a natural part of life. The lessons seemed clear enough. They generated tremendous wealth for the British crown. In the 1850s, antislavery leaders increasingly argued that Washington worked on behalf of enslavers while ignoring the interests of white working men. 7. Events in early 1846 seemed to justify antislavery complaints. The 1860 Republican Party convention in Chicago created a platform that clearly opposed the expansion of slavery in the West and the reopening of the slave trade. The South began defending slavery as a positive good. Questions immediately arose as to whether these lands would be made slave or free. A number of ex-Democrats committed to the party right away, including an important group of New Yorkers loyal to Martin Van Buren. The framers of the Constitution never used the word slave. "Bleeding Kansas" was the first place to demonstrate that the sectional crisis could easily, and in fact already was, exploding into a full-blown national crisis. The sectional crisis of the 1850s, in which Georgia played a pivotal role, led to the outbreak of the Civil War (1861-65). French visionaries issued the Declaration of Rights and Man and Citizen by 1789. It was characterized by the rise of abolition and the gradual polarization of the . Legislators battled for weeks over whether the Constitutional framers intended slaverys expansion or not, and these contests left deep scars. In Southern Chivalry: Argument versus Clubs (1856), by John Magee, South Carolinian Preston Brooks attacks Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner after his speech denouncing border ruffians pouring into Kansas from Missouri. But as the secession crisis revealed, the South could not tolerate a federal government working against the interests of slaverys expansion and decided to take a gamble on war with the United States. Article VI of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance banned slavery north and west of the Ohio River. The upheavals of 1848 came to a quick end. See Black Founders: The Free Black Community in the Early Republic, digital exhibit, Library Company of Philadelphia. . The 1840s opened with a number of disturbing developments for antislavery leaders. Prior to the American Revolution, nearly everyone in the world accepted it as a natural part of life. Southern states responded with unanimous outrage, and the nation shuddered at an undeniable sectional controversy. The 1842 Supreme Court case Prigg v. Pennsylvania ruled that the federal governments Fugitive Slave Act trumped Pennsylvanias personal liberty law.13 Antislavery activists believed that the federal government only served southern enslavers and were trouncing the states rights of the North. . Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6, gaining just 40 percent of the popular vote and not a single southern vote in the Electoral College. But the Liberty Party also shunned womens participation in the movement and distanced themselves from visions of true racial egalitarianism. Legislators rallied behind the Compromise of 1850, an assemblage of bills passed late in 1850, which managed to keep the promises of the Missouri Compromise alive. Brooks resigned his seat anyway, only to be reelected by his constituents later in the year. What was the main cause of sectional tension? Questions about the balance of free and slave states in the Union became even more fierce after the US acquired these territories from Mexico by the 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The Missouri Compromise marked a major turning point in Americas sectional crisis because it exposed to the public just how divisive the slavery issue had grown. The new coalition called for a national convention in August 1848 at Buffalo, New York. These laws often banned African American voting, denied black Americans access to public schools, and made it impossible for non-whites to serve on juries and in local militias, among a host of other restrictions and obstacles. Saint Louis, a bustling Mississippi River town filled with powerful slave owners, loomed large as an important trade headquarters for networks in the northern Mississippi Valley and the Greater West. Michigan gained admission through provisions established in the Northwest Ordinance, while Arkansas came in under the Missouri Compromise. Skip to content. In the troubled decades since the Missouri Compromise, the nation slowly tore itself apart. Throughout American history, tension has existed between several regions, but the competing views of the institution of slavery held by Northerners and Southerners was the preeminent sectional split and the defining political issue in the United States from the founding of the country until the American Civil War. Finally, they pointed to the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which said that property could be seized through appropriate legislation. Abraham Lincoln, and ultimately, the Civi l W ar. Word of Burnss capture spread rapidly through Boston, and a mob gathered outside the courthouse demanding Burnss release. The year 1861, then, saw the culmination of the secession crisis. The Ohio River Valley became an early fault line in the coming sectional struggle. slave state 1 Why was the sectional crisis important quizlet? The conclusion of the Mexican War led to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As the national mood grew increasingly grim, Kansas attracted militants representing the extreme sides of the slavery debate. It ma led a line of latitude that separated the land that would be slave states and those that would be free. Crittendens plan promised renewed enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and offered a plan to keep slavery in the nations capital.32 Republicans by late 1860 knew that the voters who had just placed them in power did not want them to cave on these points, and southern states proceeded with their plans to leave the Union. They became an all-encompassing referendum on the American past, present,andfuture. The framers of the Constitution did a little, but not much, to help resolve these early questions. But knowing that the Liberty Party was also not likely to provide a home to many moderate voters, leaders fostered a new and more competitive party, which they called the Free Soil Party. The admission of California as the newest free state in the Union cheered many northerners, but even the admission of a vast new state full of resources and rich agricultural lands was not enough. Far more important than the Utah invasion, however, were the ongoing events in Kansas. Maine would be admitted to the Union as a free state. English political theorists, in particular, began to rethink natural-law justifications for slavery. The horrific violence that both endured melted the hearts of many northerners and pressed some to join in the fight against slavery. At Harper's Ferry, Brown took over a town with a force of 14 whites and 5 blacks. South Carolina declaration of secession, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 contest on November 6 with just 40% of the popular vote and not a single southern vote in the Electoral College. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, American politics was shifting toward "sectional" conflict among the states of the North, South, and West. Tensions rose with the Louisiana Purchase, but a truly sectional national debate remained mostly dormant. 796 Words4 Pages. On all sides of the slavery issue, politics became increasingly militarized. Democrats and Whigs fostered a moment of relative calm on the slavery debate, partially aided by gag rules prohibiting discussion of antislavery petitions. It was Kansas that at last proved to many northerners that the sectional crisis would not go away unless slavery also went away. Wikimedia. The notorious confrontation between Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina and Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner depicted in Figure 1, illustrates the contempt between extremists on both sides. In January 1846, Polk ordered troops to Texas to enforce claims stemming from its border dispute along the Rio Grande. The Sectional Crisis of the 1850s began with the Compromise of 1850 and extended . This lithograph imagines the consequences of the Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850. 6 What was the. With so many competing dynamics under way, and with the president dead and replaced by Whig Millard Fillmore, the 1850s were off to a troubling start. As a symbol of the injustice of the slave system, Burns treatment spurred riots and protests by abolitionists and citizens of Boston in the spring of 1854. After the war many southerners claimed that secession was primarily motivated by a concern to preserve states rights, but the primary complaint of the very first ordinance of secession listed the federal governments failure to exert its authority over the northern states. Obes Rev. Wikimedia. He talked with Chief Justice Roger Taney on inauguration day about a court decision he hoped to see handled during his time in office. It ma led a line of latitude that separated the land that would be slave states and those that would be free. By 1861 all bets were off, and the fate of slavery, and of the nation, depended on war. Texas president Sam Houston managed to secure a deal with Polk and gained admission to the Union for Texas in 1845. The print shows a number of incendiary personalities, like John C. Calhoun, whose increasingly sectional beliefs were pacified for a time by the Compromise. While the Missouri Compromise effectively settled the question of slavery from 1820 to 1854, its repeal began the sectional conflict that eventually brought the nation into the Civil War. For nearly a century, most white Americans were content to compromise over the issue of slavery, but the constant agitation of Black Americans, both enslaved and free, kept the issue alive.3. Salmon P. Chase drafted a response in northern newspapers that exposed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as a measure to overturn the Missouri Compromise and open western lands for slavery. The treaty infuriated antislavery leaders in the United States. Southerners were not yet advancing arguments that said slavery was a positive good, but they did insist during the Missouri Debate that the framers supported slavery and wanted to see it expand. Since its lands were below the line at 3630, the admission of Arkansas did not threaten the Missouri consensus. Bolder and more expansive declarations of equality and freedom followed one after the other. The Dred Scott decision, Scott v. Sandford, ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens of the United States and therefore could be transported as chattel from any state to another regardless of state law.29 This gave the Buchanan administration and its southern allies a direct repudiation of the Missouri Compromise. Security B. And Anthony Burns was only one of hundreds of highly publicized episodes of the federal government imposing the Fugitive Slave Law on rebellious northern populations. The Sectional Crisis Sectionalism in the Early Republic Slavery's history stretched back to antiquity. The Nullification Crisis was a sectional crisis during the presidency of Andrew Jackson created by South Carolina's 1832 Ordinance of Nullification. Military service on behalf of both the English and the American army freed thousands of slaves. Why was the sectional crisis important? Kentucky and Tennessee emerged as slave states, while free states Ohio, Indiana (1816) and Illinois (1818) gained admission along the rivers northern banks. The Missouri Compromise marked a major turning point in Americas sectional crisis because it exposed to the public just how divisive the slavery issue had grown. As the Republicans gained power the Democrats continued to fracture along sectional lines, which only increased with the crisis over the Lecompton Constitution. Other formerly enslaved people, including Sojourner Truth, joined Douglass in rousing support for antislavery, as did free Black Americans like Maria Stewart, James McCune Smith, Martin Delaney, and numerous others.15 But Black activists did more than deliver speeches. Led by figures such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, women with deep ties to the abolitionist cause, it represented the first of such meetings ever held in U.S. history.18 Frederick Douglass also appeared at the convention and took part in the proceedings, where participants debated the Declaration of Sentiments, Grievances, and Resolutions.19 By August 1848, it seemed plausible that the Free Soil Movement might tap into these reforms and build a broader coalition. In the United States, France, and Haiti, revolutionaries began the work of splintering the old order. Legislators battled for weeks over whether the Constitutional framers intended slaverys expansion, and these contests left deep scars. After the 1858 elections, all eyes turned to 1860. This chapter was edited by Jesse Gant, with content contributions by Jeffrey Bain-Conkin, Matthew A. Byron, Christopher Childers, Jesse Gant, Christopher Null, Ryan Poe, Michael Robinson, Nicholas Wood, Michael Woods, and Ben Wright. Borderland negotiations and accommodations along the Ohio River fostered a distinctive kind of white supremacy, as laws tried to keep Black people out of the West entirely. As Americans embraced calls to pursue their manifest destiny, antislavery voices looked at developments in Florida and Texas as signs that the sectional crisis had taken an ominous and perhaps irredeemable turn. Stories from the Underground Railroad, 1855-56. Northerners made a stunning display of sympathy on the day of his execution. that the administration was abusing its powers. By early February, Texas had also joined the newly seceded states.