application to be annexed to the United States, became common, and taxed the energies of the Federal government. But these yielded in importance to the affairs in Kansas.
213. Nebraska was then supposed to be a desert, and attention was directed almost exclusively to Kansas. No sooner Kansas. had its organization left the matter of slavery to be decided by its “people” than the anti-slavery people of the North and West felt it to be their duty to see that the “people” of the Territory should be anti-slavery in sympathy. Emigrant associations were formed, and these shipped men and families to Kansas, arming them for their protection in the new country. Southern newspapers called for similar measures in the South, but the call was less effective. Southern men without slaves, settling a new state, were uncomfortably apt to prohibit slavery, as in California. Only slaveholders were trusty pro-slavery men; and such were not likely to take slaves to Kansas and risk their ownership on the result of the struggle. But for the people of Missouri, Kansas would have been free soil at once. Lying across the direct road to Kansas, the Missouri settlers blockaded the way of free-state settlers, crossed into Kansas, and voted profusely at the first Territorial election. The story of the contest between the free-state and pro-slavery settlers is told elsewhere (see Kansas: § History); here it need only be said that the struggle passed into a real civil war, the two powers mustering considerable armies, fighting battles, capturing towns and paroling prisoners. The struggle was really over in 1857, and the South was beaten. There were, however, many obstacles yet to be overcome before the new state of Kansas was recognized by Congress, after the withdrawal of the senators of the seceding states (1861).
214. In the heat of the Kansas struggle came the presidential election of 1856. The Democrats nominated James Buchanan, Election of 1856. declaring, as usual, for the strictest limitations of the powers of the Federal government on a number of points specified, and reaffirming the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska Act—the settlement of slavery by the people of a Territory. The remnant of the Whig party, including the Know-Nothings of the North and those Southern men who wished no further discussion of slavery, nominated the president who had gone out of office in 1853, Millard Fillmore. The Republican party nominated John C. Frémont; the bulk of its manifesto was taken up with protests against attempts to introduce slavery into the Territories; but it showed its broad-construction tendencies by declaring for appropriations of Federal moneys for internal improvements. The Democrats were successful in electing Buchanan;[1] but the position of the party was quite different from the triumph with which it had come out of the election of 1852. It was no longer master of twenty-seven of the thirty-one states; all New England and New York, all the North-West but Indiana and Illinois, all the free states but five, had gone against it; its candidate no longer had a majority of the popular vote. For the first time in the history of the country a distinctly anti-slavery candidate had obtained an electoral vote, and had even come near obtaining the presidency. Fillmore had carried but one state, Maryland; Buchanan had carried the rest of the South, with a few states in the North, and Frémont the rest of the North and none of the South. If things had gone so far that the two sections were to be constituted into opposing political parties, it was evident that the end was near.
215. Oddly enough the constitutionality of the Compromise of 1820 had never happened to come before the Supreme Court The Dred Scott Decision. for consideration. In 1856-1857 it came up for the first time. One Dred Scott, a Missouri slave who had been taken in 1834 to Illinois, a free state, and in 1836 to Minnesota, within the territory covered by the Compromise, and had some years after being taken back to Missouri in 1838 sued for his freedom, was sold (1852) to a citizen of New York. Scott then transferred his suit from the state to the Federal courts, under the power given them to try suits between citizens of different states, and the case came by appeal to the Supreme Court. Its decision, announced on the 6th of March 1857, put Scott out of court on the ground that a slave, or the descendant of slaves, could not be a citizen of the United States or have any standing in Federal courts. The opinion of Chief Justice Taney went on to attack the validity of the Missouri Compromise, for the reasons that one of the Constitutional functions of Congress was the protection of property; that slaves had been recognized as property by the Constitution, and that Congress was bound to protect, not to prohibit, slavery in the Territories.[2] The mass of the Northern people held that slaves were looked upon by the Constitution, not as property, but as “persons held to service or labour” by state laws; that the Constitutional function of Congress was the protection of liberty as well as of property; and that Congress was thus bound to prohibit, not to protect, slavery in the Territories. A large part of the North flouted the decision of the Supreme Court, and the storm of angry dissent which it aroused did the disunionists good service at the South. From this time the leading newspapers in the South maintained that the radical Southern view first advanced by Calhoun, and but slowly accepted by other Southern leaders, as to the duty of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories, had been confirmed by the Supreme Court, that the Northern Republicans had rejected it; even the “squatter sovereignty” of Northern Democrats could no longer be submitted to by the South.
216. The population of the United States in 1860 was over 31,000,000, an increase of more than 8,000,000 in ten years. Admission of Minnesota and Oregon. As the decennial increases of population became larger, so did the divergence of the sections in population, and still more in wealth and resources. Two more free states came in during this period—Minnesota (1858) and Oregon (1859)—and Kansas was clamouring loudly for the same privilege. The free and slave states, which had been almost equal in population in 1790, stood now as 19 to 12. And of the 12,000,000 in slave states, the 4,000,000 slaves and the 250,000 free blacks were not so much a factor of strength as a possible source of weakness and danger. No serious slave rising John Brown's Raid. had ever taken place in the South; but John Brown's attack (1859) on Harper's Ferry as the first move in a project to rouse the slaves (see Brown, John), and the alarm which it carried through the South, were tokens of a danger which added a new horror to the chances of civil war. It was not wonderful that men, in the hope of finding some compromise by which to avoid such a catastrophe, should be willing to give up everything but principle, nor that offers of compromise should urge Southern leaders further into the fatal belief that “the North would not fight.”
217. Northern Democrats, under the lead of Douglas, had been forced already almost to the point of revolt by the determination Division of the Democratic Party. of Southern senators to prevent the admission of Kansas as a free state, if not to secure her admission as a slave state. When the Democratic convention of 1860 met at Charleston the last strand of the last national political organization parted; the Democratic party itself was split at last by the slavery question. The Southern delegates demanded a declaration in favour of the duty of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories. It was all that the Douglas Democrats could then do to maintain themselves in a few Northern states; such a declaration meant political suicide everywhere, and they voted it down. The convention divided into two bodies. The Southern body adjourned to Richmond, and the Northern and Border state convention to Baltimore. Here the Northern delegates, by seating some delegates friendly to Douglas,
- ↑ Buchanan received 174 electoral votes, Frémont 114 and Fillmore 8. The popular vote was: for Buchanan, 1,838,169; for Frémont, 1,341,264; for Fillmore, 874,534.
- ↑ In his decision Taney, referring to the period before the adoption of the Constitution, wrote: “They (negroes) had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This was intended to be merely a historical statement, but it is often incorrectly quoted as if it referred to the status of the negro in 1857.
