NA Boyer Ch 14.V2

CHAPTER 14 From Compromise to Secession, 1850–1861 n early July 1859 a man calling himself Isaac Smith and claiming to be a cat- Itle dealer rented a dilapidated farmhouse some seven miles from Harpers Ferry in northern Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains. Neighbors soon noticed that others had joined “Smith,” including two young women, and perhaps they observed a wagon loaded with fifteen boxes pull up to the farm one day. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary. True, the men stayed out of sight, but the women chatted amiably with neighbors, and “Smith” referred to the contents of the boxes merely as “hardware.” But in reality, everything was out of the ordinary. “Smith” was John Brown, a brooding abolitionist with a price on his head for the massacre of white southerners in Kansas in 1856 and with a conviction that God had ordained him “to purge this land with blood” of the evil of slavery. One of the women was his daughter, the other his daughter-in-law. The boxes contained rifles and revolvers, with which Brown and his recruits— white ideal- ists (including three of Brown’s sons), free blacks, and fugitive slaves— planned to raid Harpers Ferry, the site of a federal arsenal and armory, as a prelude to igniting a slave insurrection throughout the South. CHAPTER OUTLINE In some respects, Brown was a marginal figure in the abolitionist move- ment. Unlike better-known abolitionists, he had written no stirring tracts The Compromise of 1850 against slavery. But in Kansas, where civil war between free-staters and The Collapse of the Second Party System, 1853–1856 The Crisis of the Union, 1857–1860 The Collapse of the Union, 1860–1861 407 408 CHAPTER 14 From Compromise to Secession, 1850–1861 slave-staters had broken out in the mid-1850s, Brown opinion increasingly shifted toward sympathy for Brown. had acquired a reputation as someone who could han- Ralph Waldo Emerson exulted that Brown’s execution dle the rough stuff. Eastern abolitionists—most of whom would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” were philosophical pacifists, but who were starting to suspect that only violence would end slavery—were This chapter focuses on four major questions: fast developing a fascination with Brown. Little sus- pecting his plans for Harpers Ferry, they accepted ■ To what extent did the Compromise of 1850 repre- his disavowal of a role in the Kansas massacre and sent a genuine meeting of the minds between north- endorsed, with contributions, his plans to carry on the erners and southerners? How, specifically, did the fight against those who would forcibly turn Kansas into a controversy over enforcement of the Fugitive Slave slave state. Act contribute to the undoing of the Compromise? On the moonless evening of October 16, 1859, ■ Why did the Whig party collapse in the wake of the Brown and eighteen recruits (three were left behind to Kansas-Nebraska Act? Why did the Democratic guard the farmhouse) entered Harpers Ferry and quickly party not also collapse? seized the arsenal and armory. Expecting slaves—half of Harpers Ferry’s population was enslaved—to rally at ■ How did the outbreak of conflict in Kansas influence once to his cause, Brown then did nothing, while local the rise of the Republican party? Why was the whites, jumpy about the possibility of a slave insurrec- Republican doctrine of free soil able to unify north- tion ever since Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion (see Chapter erners against the South? 12), spread the alarm. Soon armed locals, their courage ■ What led southerners to conclude that the North was steeled by liquor, militia from surrounding areas, and bent not merely on restricting territorial slavery but U.S. Marines dispatched by President James Buchanan also on extinguishing slavery in southern states? and under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, clogged the streets of Harpers Ferry. On October 18 the Marines stormed the armory where Brown and most of THE COMPROMISE OF 1850 his men had taken refuge, severely wounded and captured Brown, and killed or mortally wounded ten others, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grim prediction that an American including two of Brown’s sons. Five men, including one victory in the Mexican War would be like swallowing of Brown’s sons, escaped; the remaining recruits were arsenic proved disturbingly accurate. When the war eventually captured and executed. Brown himself was ended in 1848, the United States contained an equal speedily tried, convicted, and hanged. number of free and slave states (fifteen each), but the In the immediate wake of Brown’s capture, promi- vast territory acquired by the war threatened to upset nent northerners distanced themselves from him. His this balance. Any solution to the question of slavery in lawyers contended that he was insane and hence not the Mexican cession ensured controversy, if not hostility. culpable for his deeds. But Brown himself derided the The doctrine of free soil, which insisted that Congress insanity defense. His conduct during his brief imprison- prohibit slavery in the territories, horrified southerners. ment was serene, his words eloquent. He told his captors The idea of extending the Missouri Compromise line that he had rendered to God the “greatest service man of 36° 30’ to the Pacific angered free-soilers because can.” For their part, white southerners came to reject the it would allow slavery in New Mexico and southern notion that Brown’s plot was the work of an isolated California, and southern proslavery extremists because lunatic. A search of the farmhouse after Brown’s cap- it conceded that Congress could bar slavery in some ter- ture quickly turned up incriminating correspondence ritories. A third solution, popular sovereignty, which between Brown and leading northern abolitionists. As promised to ease the slavery extension issue out of proslavery southerners saw it, Brown had botched the national politics by allowing each territory to decide the raid, but his plan to arm nonslaveholding southern question for itself, pleased neither free-soilers nor whites with guns and disaffected slaves with pikes proslavery extremists. (Brown had contracted for the manufacture of a thou- As the rhetoric escalated, events plunged the nation sand pikes) was plausible. In all the southern states into crisis. Utah and then California, both acquired from slaveholding whites were outnumbered by people who Mexico, sought admission to the Union as free states. did not own slaves (slaves, free blacks, and nonslave- Texas, admitted as a slave state in 1845, aggravated mat- holding whites) by more than three to one. Northern ters by claiming the eastern half of New Mexico, where The Compromise of 1850 409 the Mexican government had long since abolished in 1848 as the party of the Wilmot Proviso, southern slavery. Whigs expected more from the president than a propos- By 1850 these territorial issues had become inter- al that in effect yielded the proviso’s goal—the banning twined with two other concerns. Northerners increas- of slavery in the Mexican cession. Many southerners, in ingly attacked slavery in the District of Columbia, within addition, questioned Taylor’s assumption that slavery the shadow of the Capitol; southerners complained could never take root in California or New Mexico. To about lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. one observer, who declared that the whole controversy Any broad compromise would have to take both trou- over slavery in the Mexican cession “related to an imagi- blesome matters into account. nary negro in an impossible place,” southerners pointed out that both areas already contained slaves and that slaves could be employed profitably in mining gold and Zachary Taylor at the Helm silver. “California is by nature,” a southerner proclaimed, Although elected president in 1848 without a platform, “peculiarly a slaveholding State.” Calhoun trembled at Zachary Taylor came to office with a clear position on the thought of adding more free states. “If this scheme the issue of slavery in the Mexican cession. A slavehold- excluding slavery from California and New Mexico er himself, he took for granted the South’s need to should be carried out—if we are to be reduced to a mere defend slavery. Taylor insisted that southerners would handful ...wo, wo, I say to this Union.” Disillusioned best protect slavery if they refrained from rekindling the with Taylor, nine southern states agreed to send delega- issue of slavery in the territories. He rejected Calhoun’s tions to a southern convention that was scheduled to idea that the protection of slavery in the southern states meet in Nashville in June 1850. ultimately depended on the expansion of slavery in- to the western territories. In Taylor’s eyes, neither Henry Clay Proposes a Compromise California nor New Mexico was suited to slavery; in 1849 he told a Pennsylvania audience that “the people of the Taylor might have been able to contain mounting south- North need have no apprehension of the further exten- ern opposition if he had held a secure position in the sion of slavery.” Whig party. But the leading Whigs, among them Daniel Although Taylor looked to the exclusion of slavery Webster of Massachusetts and Henry Clay of Kentucky, from California and New Mexico, his position differed each of whom had presidential aspirations, never recon- from that embodied in the Wilmot Proviso, the free-soil ciled themselves to Taylor, a political novice. Early in measure proposed in 1846 by a northern Democrat. The 1850 Clay boldly challenged Taylor’s leadership by forg- proviso had insisted that Congress bar slavery in the ing a set of compromise proposals to resolve the range of territories ceded by Mexico. Taylor’s plan, in contrast, contentious issues.

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