Politics becomes sectional
The 1856 presidential election is important because it revealed the realignment of national politics by region. Although the Republicans lost the election to Buchanan, the party dominated the North, with the exception of a few key states (Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana). This win was to be the South’s last political victory. The growing power of the Republicans in the Northern states and the number of Republicans who would enter the House and Senate were frightening prospects for Southerners. Political power was clearly shifting to the North.
As time went on, the South found fewer and fewer options in the face of the Republicans’ open hostility to the expansion of slavery. Southerners believed that if slavery could not expand naturally, the South would then be hostage to the interests of the North. Many Southern leaders had called for leaving the Union, or secession, as the only hope for the future. A few Southern hotheads, soon called “fire-eaters,” had threatened this in 1850, but their arguments were discounted. As Republican power grew in the North after 1856, however, Southerners began to take the words of the fire-eaters more seriously.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN: EARLY CAREER, 1809–1860
Abraham Lincoln is most likely the greatest mythical character in all of American history. His image is commonly known to every schoolchild: the tall, lanky, homely man in plain dark clothes and a stovepipe hat. Born in poverty in Kentucky, Lincoln lived on the Indiana and Illinois frontier, where he developed a reputation as a man of ambition and intelligence, despite his lack of formal schooling. After several attempts at different careers, including a short term as a militia leader during the Black Hawk War in 1832, he settled on politics. From 1834 to 1842 he served in the Illinois state legislature. At 25, he read law and joined the bar in 1836. In 1846, he was elected to a term in Congress. After one term, he retired from politics and returned to law. The Kansas-Nebraska Act brought him back to politics. Refuting popular sovereignty, he spoke earnestly of his dislike of slavery and the necessity that it be banned from the new territories. In 1856 he joined the Republican Party, and the same year he was a contender for the vice presidential nomination. In 1858 Lincoln challenged Douglas for the U.S. Senate seat. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln lost the election, but gained a large following in the North for his ability to speak plainly and sincerely about the issue of slavery and its expansion into the territories. With a presidential election only two years away, Lincoln was on his way to political greatness.
Southern reaction to the Republican Party
Many influential leaders in the cotton South came to believe that separation from the Union was inevitable to save their way of life. To many Southern partisans, Northerners were cold, self-righteous and mercenary, all too willing to impose their beliefs on others. Others cited the economic and social benefits of the slave-based cotton economy. Slaveholders controlled most of the wealth in the United States. The value of slaves as property exceeded $3 billion dollars – more than all the nation's accumulated wealth in manufacturing and transportation. Still others spoke of filibusters, quasi-legal military expeditions to Central America and Cuba, to secure new American territory for slavery.
More and more moderate Northerners and Southerners began to see their opponents as threats to their way of life, leading to a growing sense that no solution was possible. As a result, every event after 1856 created a heightened sense of danger. Events moved decisions to a crisis point very quickly in the years between 1856 and 1860.
It is not surprising that in the midst of this intense sectional debate over constitutional rights and slavery that the Supreme Court should become involved. Many hoped the Supreme Court’s decision on the legality of extending slavery in the territories would put the issue to rest once and for all. Of course, many of these same people had hoped the Kansas-Nebraska Act would settle the issue forever, too.
SOME COLD, HARD FACTS TO CONSIDER
As both the North and South became increasingly hostile to each other, both regions rhetorically wrapped themselves in the mantle of purity and righteousness. It needs to be made clear that neither section was free of the fear and hostility to Blacks, whether free or slave. In the South, the slave system, however beneficent and humane, depended in the end on the threat of violence to compel obedience and compliance. In this way, it was a tyrannical system and a damning charge against the institution. The North, which was more than 98% white in 1860, was hostile to Blacks. Laws restricted civil liberties, such as voting; schools and many churches, theaters, restaurants, rail cars, and hotels were strictly segregated. Blacks could not testify against whites in court, and some Midwest states banned Blacks from entering their states altogether. Blacks in the cities of the North lived in bleak conditions. Jobs were scarce, as whites preferred to hire Irish immigrants. Violence directed against Blacks was commonplace, and sympathetic support was rare. Thus, the larger problem in America was not slavery, per se, but the fact that Blacks and whites were coexisting in two vastly different and separate worlds.
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott, a slave belonging to an army doctor, had been taken from Missouri, which allowed slavery, to two non-slaveholding states, Illinois and Wisconsin, in the 1830s. After the doctor’s death, Scott claimed he was no longer a slave because he had resided in free states. The case wound its way through the lower courts until it came to the Supreme Court in 1856. Lawyers are sometimes more confusing than historians. Essentially, Scott’s lawyers argued that a slave once in free territory was a free man.
In retrospect, the Supreme Court could have avoided a great deal of trouble by simply ruling in favor of the lower court’s decision, which pointed out that the Constitution did not recognize slaves as citizens. But because slavery and its extension into new territories had become such a contentious issue, the Court took on Scott’s case with the goal of settling the issue once and for all. Unfortunately, the Court was involving itself into a highly volatile political situation. This was not the time for another view to be added to a very angry debate. Nevertheless, Roger B. Taney, the chief justice (and a Southern Democrat), lit the fuse on the powder keg.
The Court ruled seven to two against Scott’s claim. Interestingly, each judge decided to write his own opinion. Taney’s became the decision of record. On the basic issue of Scott’s freedom, the Court agreed with the lower court’s determination that Scott was not a citizen of either a state or the United States, and therefore could not bring a suit before a court. Taney could have stopped there, but he went on to find that Scott was still a slave because neither Congress nor any territorial legislature had the authority to restrict slavery anywhere.
SECESSION, NORTHERN STYLE
People tend to associate the concept of secession only with the South. Actually the first region to threaten to secede, or leave the Union, was New England, which was a stronghold of the Federalist Party. Despairing over the United States’ apparent defeat in the War of 1812 and never supporting the war in the first place, New England threatened to leave the Union. In fact, the Federalists began organizing a convention to take the New England states out of the Union. The enthusiasm for this bold act quickly disappeared as news of American battlefield victories and a peace settlement