United States History

E

1

Women’s Rights

The delegates to the first Women’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848 were veterans of other reforms. They were members of missionary societies, of the temperance movement, and of the moral reform crusade (a movement to end prostitution, obscenity, and lewdness). Most of all, they were veterans of an antislavery movement that attacked patriarchy and hierarchy in all forms. Many applied the logic of social reform to themselves, and they began to think of themselves as human beings first and as women second. See also Women’s Rights: Early Struggles for Equal Rights in the United States.

Noting that Jesus made no distinction between the proper duties of women and men, delegates to the Seneca Falls convention attacked the subordinate status of women. Beginning with a manifesto based on the Declaration of Independence, women at Seneca Falls demanded civil and legal equality for women. In particular, they wanted the right to vote. In the American republic, political participation, they argued, separated people who counted from those who did not.

E

2

Abolition

The logic of Northern social reform applied more clearly to slavery than to nearly any other habit or institution. From the beginning, slaves resisted their own enslavement. In the 18th century, Quakers and a few other whites opposed the institution. The American Revolution, with its rhetoric of universal natural rights, called slavery into serious question. Northern states abolished it, and Southern evangelicals, along with some of the leading slaveholders of the upper South, thought about liberating the slaves. After 1816 the American Colonization Society proposed to “repatriate” freed slaves to Africa, although the intent of this organization was less to liberate slaves than to deport free blacks. Free blacks understood that, and most of them opposed returning to Africa.

But it was not until the 1830s that significant numbers of middle–class Northerners began to agitate for the immediate emancipation of slaves and for their incorporation as equals into the republic. Like other social reforms, abolitionism took root among the most radical Northern Whigs, and it was based in the middle–class revivals of the 1820s and 1830s.

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In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston abolitionist, published the first issue of The Liberator, an antislavery newspaper. In 1833 Garrison helped form the American Anti–Slavery Society. The new movement included Northeastern Quakers and Unitarians and Northern blacks.

Abolitionism’s largest base of support, however, was among the evangelical middle class of New England, upstate New York, and the Old Northwest (the former Northwest Territory). These people lived in a reform culture that saw moral free will and Christian love as pitted against brutality and power. As the New England Anti–Slavery Society put it in 1833, antislavery “means, finally, that right shall take the supremacy over wrong, principle over brute force, humanity over cruelty, honesty over theft, purity over lust, honor over baseness, love over hatred, and religion over heathenism.” It was in such stark opposites that evangelical reformers viewed the world.

Sometimes working with white abolitionists, sometimes working independently, Northern free blacks also demanded freedom for the slaves. Hundreds of anonymous women and men operated an Underground Railroad that hid escaped slaves, often smuggling them to Canada. Along with pamphleteer David Walker, orator and editor Frederick Douglass, and uncompromising mystic Sojourner Truth, they formed a dedicated wing of the antislavery movement.

Abolitionists knew that they were a minority. They also knew that the two parties—Democrats in particular—wanted to keep moral and sectional questions out of politics and would try to ignore the abolition movement. They decided to attack the party system as well as slavery. They organized a postal campaign in 1835, sending massive amounts of antislavery literature through the mails. Southerners and most Northerners branded this literature as dangerous, and the Democratic administration could not avoid the issue.

In the next year, abolitionists began sending hundreds of petitions to Congress. Some of the petitions were against annexation of slaveholding Texas; others demanded the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia or the end of the interstate slave trade. Each of these issues was within the constitutional sphere assigned to Congress.

In the process of building these campaigns, abolitionists turned themselves into an organized movement. They also urged the national government to debate slavery—something that most congressmen from both sections and both parties wanted to avoid. President Andrew Jackson, rather than formally censor the mail, simply allowed local postmasters to destroy mail that they considered dangerous. And Democrats in Congress, with help from Southern Whigs, devised a gag rule whereby Congress tabled antislavery petitions without reading them. At the same time, Northern mobs attacked abolitionists and their sympathizers as threats to racial purity and social order.

These measures gave abolitionists what many of them had wanted: They tied the defense of slavery to assaults on free speech and the right of petition. No less a figure than ex-president John Quincy Adams, who had returned to government as a congressman from Massachusetts, led the fight against the gag rule. It was a fight that convinced many Northerners that Southern slavery corrupted republican government and threatened Northern civil liberties. Beginning as a tiny radical minority, abolitionists had helped force the nation to confront the troublesome problem of slavery.

XI

Coming of the Civil War

A

An Overview

As early as the Constitutional Convention of 1787, American leaders had known that they could not settle the differences between the states committed to slavery and those that were not. The three–fifths rule, the constitutional promise not to halt the international slave trade until 1808, and the banning of slavery in the Northwest Territory were all attempts to avoid confronting differences between the North and South.

Some Northerners thought Southerners would recognize the inefficiency of slavery and end it voluntarily—a hope that was dashed by the cotton boom and the South’s recommitment to slavery. Many Southerners thought that an agrarian coalition uniting the South and West could keep Northeastern commercial interests from running the country. They realized that hope when a South–West coalition elected Thomas Jefferson president in 1800.

But by the 1830s the market revolution had tied Northeastern factories and Northwestern farms into a roughly unified, commercialized North. Most Northerners were committed to free–market capitalism, individual opportunity, and free labor, and many contrasted what they believed to be the civilizing effects of hard work and commerce with the supposed laziness and barbarism of the slave South. For their part, white Southerners began to see themselves as a beleaguered minority.

Following the 1819 crisis over statehood for Missouri, a national two–party system developed, and both parties worked to prevent sectional differences from becoming the focus of politics. They were successful until the Mexican War gave the United States huge new territories. Territorial questions had to be handled by Congress, and the question of whether slavery would be allowed into lands ceded by Mexico immediately became the all–consuming issue in national politics. By the mid–1850s the old party system was in ruins. An antislavery Republican Party became dominant in the North and elected Abraham Lincoln president in 1860. With an antislavery party in control of the White House, slave states seceded beginning in December 1860. The Union refused to let them go, and the Civil War began.

B

The Wilmot Proviso

Both the North and the South saw the issue of slavery in the territories as a simple question of right and wrong, but the issue traveled through elaborate twists and turns from 1846 through the beginning of the Civil War.

Many Northern Democrats in Congress were disappointed with President James K. Polk (1845-1849). Some represented market–oriented constituencies that supported a moderately protective tariff and federal internal improvements. Polk was a Southerner and an old Jacksonian, and he opposed both of those measures. Northern Democrats also disliked Polk’s willingness to compromise with the British on expansion into Oregon, while he went to war with Mexico over Texas. It looked to many Democratic Northerners as though the Democratic Party was less interested in the expansion of the agrarian republic than in the expansion of slavery.

Among these Democrats was Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania. In 1846, during the war with Mexico, he proposed what became known as the Wilmot Proviso, banning slavery from all territory taken from Mexico. In subsequent years the proviso was repeatedly attached to territorial legislation. In the House, combinations of Northern Whigs and Democrats passed it several times, but the proviso was always stopped in the Senate. The Wilmot Proviso would become the principal plank in the platform of the Republican Party.

President Polk and his cabinet favored extending the Missouri Compromise line west to the Pacific, a solution that would allow slavery in the New Mexico Territory and in Southern California, but ban it from Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Northern California. Neither the North nor the South favored Polk’s solution. In 1849 President Zachary Taylor proposed allowing the residents of individual territories to decide the question of slavery for themselves—a solution that became known as popular sovereignty. Again, there was too little support. While the Wilmot Proviso stood as the extreme Northern position, John C. Calhoun, a senator for South Carolina, staked out an extreme position for the South. Slaves, he said, were property, and masters could carry their slaves into any territory of the United States.

C

The Compromise of 1850

Although no proposed solution was acceptable to all sides, the question of slavery in the territories could not be postponed. In 1848 gold was discovered in California, and thousands of Americans rushed to the region (see Gold Rush of 1849). The previous year, Brigham Young had led Mormon settlers to the Salt Lake Valley, in what became the northeastern corner of the Mexican Cession in 1848. At the same time, slaveholding Texas claimed half of New Mexico. It was at this point that politicians proposed a series of measures that became known as the Compromise of 1850. California was admitted as a free state. The remainder of the land taken from Mexico was divided into Utah and New Mexico territories and organized under popular sovereignty. The Texas claims in New Mexico were denied. The slave trade (but not slavery) was banned in the District of Columbia, and a stronger fugitive slave law went into effect. These measures resolved the question of slavery in the territories in ways that tended to favor the North, then enacted additional measures important to both antislavery and proslavery forces. The compromise was less a permanent solution than an answer to an immediate crisis. It would satisfy neither section. One historian has called it the Armistice of 1850.