Transcript Political Events up to the Civil War Era

Political Events up to the Civil War
Era
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Missouri Compromise
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Texas Independence
Manifest Destiny / President Polk
Mexican American War
Compromise of 1850
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Kansas Nebraska Act – Popular Sovereignty
Dred Scott Decision
John Brown’s Raid
Rise of the Republicans / Lincoln’s Election
The Missouri Compromise - 1820
• 1st State from LA
Purchase land
• Slavery allowed in
MO, ME admitted
as free state to
“balance”
• “Decides” future of
slavery question
– 36 -30
• Why was the line
so far south?
What makes the South different?
• 1831 – Nat Turner’s
Rebellion
Abolitionism
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Early Gradualists
American Colonization Society
2nd Great Awakening
After 1830s – Radical
Abolitionists
Garrison – The Liberator
Douglass – The North Star
Abolition in South 1831 turning
point
Slavery v. Wage Slaves
Violence of 1850s
– Lovejoy
– Brown
Texas Independence
• 1821 Mexican
Independence
• Mex gov encourages
settlement of TX
• Slavery?
• Rise of Santa Anna
• War – Alamo, San
Jacinto
• Annexation by US?
– NO … till Polk
– Will lead to war…
American Progress 1872
1845 Manifest Destiny Article
• Texas has been absorbed into the Union in the inevitable
fulfilment of the general law which is rolling our
population westward; the connexion of which with that
ratio of growth in population which is destined within a
hundred years to swell our numbers to the enormous
population of two hundred and fifty millions (if nor more),
is too evident to leave us in doubt of the manifest design
of Providence in regard to the occupation of this
continent. It was disintegrated from Mexico in the natural
course of events, by a process perfectly legitimate on its
own part, blameless on ours; and in which all the
censures due to wrong, perfidy and folly, rest on Mexico
alone.
Polk – The Dark Horse
• Wins on un-abashed
expansionism
• Champion of Manifest
Destiny
• 1st Long Shot – “Dark
Horse” Candidate
• 54,40 or Fight! … (or
not)
• Spurs Mexican
American War
• End of the Whigs
The Mexican War
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How’d it start?
How’s it end?
Notable people?
Ramifications for Civil
War
• Monterrey, Buena
Vista, Mexico City
• Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo
Compromise of
1850
• California ready for
statehood
• Fugitive Slave Act
• Popular Sovereignty
• Voids Missouri Comp
“the little lady that
started this big war”
• Published 1852
• Outgrowth of
growing Abolition
movement from ’30s
• Garrison
• Douglass
• Stowe
• Tubman
• Truth
• John Brown’s
favorite book…
Sojourner Truth at Ohio Women’s
Rights Conference 1854
• "That man over there says that women need to be
helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to
have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me
into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any
best place, and ain't I a woman? ... I have plowed, and
planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could
head me -- and ain't I a woman? I could work as much
and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and
bear the lash as well -- and ain't I a woman? I have
borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to
slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none
but Jesus heard me -- and ain't I woman?"
The Kansas Nebraska Act - 1854
• After 1850 Compromise
• Kansas Territory = Part
of LA Purchase land
• Bleeding Kansas
– Border Ruffians v. Free
Soilers
– John Brown
• Lecompton Constitution
• Gives rise to
Republicans
"If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a slave state, can any
Southern state remain within it with honor?" Sen Hammond (SC)
The Republican Party
• Collection of Whigs,
Abolitionists, Northern
Democrats, Know Nothings,
Free Soilers
• Unifying Principle – No
extension of slavery
• National Attention b/c of
Bleeding Kansas
• John Fremont (1856
Election)
• Abraham TM Lincoln
Dred Scott Decision 1857
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Slaves can’t sue for freedom
Strikes down MO Compromise
Blurs slavery lines
Impact on Free Blacks
Impact on Lincoln and others
• We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that
the people of Missouri are on the verge of
making their State free, and we shall awake
to the reality, instead, that the Supreme
Court has made Illinois a slave State Lincoln 1858
John Brown’s Raid - 1859
1887
• "The crimes of this guilty land
will never be purged away but
with blood."
- John Brown, 2 December
1859
• Goal – Start massive slave
uprising
• Stopped – By town + US
Military
• Result – Further radicalized 2
sides
– Isolates south
– Lionizes Brown
Horace Greeley, New York Tribune
editorial 12/1859
• “We are not those who say, ‘If slavery is
wrong, then John Brown was wholly right.’
There are fit and unfit modes of combating
a great evil; we think Brown at Harper’s
Ferry pursued the latter…”
• “But his are the errors of a fanatic, not the
crimes of a felon.”
“The Last Days of John Brown”
Henry David Thoreau 1859
• “Men have been hung in the South before
for attempting rescue slaves, and the
North was not much stirred by it. Whence
then, this wonderful difference?”
• “We made a subtle distinction {in regard to
John Brown}, forgot human laws, and did
homage to an idea.”
Frederick Douglass – Letter to a
group of abolitionists 1860
• “To have been acquainted with John
Brown, shared his counsels, ….. I esteem
as among the highest privileges of my life.
We do but honor to ourselves in doing
honor to him….”
Editorial – Topeka Tribune
November 1859
• There are two classes of men who apologize for
“Old Brown”. The one does so openly boldly
and without fear….. They class him with a
Washington and a Bolivar.
• These two classes are alike the friends and
comforters of Brown, one by open praise and the
other in a tacit endorsement by telling what
somebody else has said … the instruments in
building up a reputation of martyr for Brown and
his confederates.”
Brown meets a slave mother on the
way to the scaffold. Currier and Ives
1863
Election of 1860
What do we expect southerners to do when this guy is
elected?
• “A house divided against itself can not
stand.” I believe this government can not
endure permanently half slave and half
free. I do not expect the Union to be
dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall;
but I do expect that it will cease to be
divided. It will become all one thing, or all
the other. Either the opponents of slavery
will arrest the further spread of it, and place
it where the public mind shall rest in the
belief that it is in the course of ultimate
extinction; or its advocates will push it
forward till it shall become alike lawful in all
the States, old as well as new, North as
well as South 1858
“Writing the Emancipation Proclamation” – AJ Volck, Baltimore 1862