NORTH AND SOUTH

Southerners argued that slave labor should be allowed in Missouri and all the other lands that formed part of the Louisiana Purchase. Both abolitionists and other northerners objected strongly to this. Northern farmers moving west did not want to find themselves competing for land against southerners who had slaves to do their work for them. Eventually the two sides agreed on a compromise. Slavery would be permitted in the Missouri and Arkansas territories but banned in lands to the west and north of Missouri.

The Missouri Compromise, as it was called, did not end the disputes between North and South. By the early 1830s another angry argument was going on. This time the argument began over import duties. Northern states favored such duties because they protected their young industries against the competition of foreign maunfactured goods. Southern states opposed them because southerners relied upon foreign manufacturers for both necessities and luxuries of many kinds. Import duties would raise the prices of such goods.

During the argument about import duties a southern political leader named John C. Calhoun raised a much more serious question. He claimed that a state had the right to disobey any federal law if the state believed that the law would harm its interests. This idea was strongly supported by other southerners. It became known as the "states' rights doctrine."

Calhoun's claim was strongly denied by Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. The power to decide whether the federal authorities were acting rightly or wrongly belonged to the Supreme Court, said Webster, not to individual states. If states were given the right to disobey the federal government, he said, it would become "a mere rope of sand" and lose its power to hold the country together. Webster's speech was a warning to Americans that the states' rights doctrine could become a serious threat to the unity of the United States.

In the next twenty years the United States grew much bigger. In 1846 it divided the Oregon Territory with Britain. In 1848 it took vast areas of the Southwest from Mexico. Obtaining these new lands raised again the question that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had tried to settle - should slavery be allowed on new American territory? Once again southerners answered "yes." And once again northerners said "no."

In 1850 Congress voted in favor of another compromise. California was admitted to the United States as a free state, while people who lived in Utah and New Mexico were given the right to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery.

To persuade southerners to agree to these arrangements, Congress passed a new Fugitive Slave Act. This was a law to make it easier for southerners to recapture slaves who escaped from their masters and fled for safety to free states. The law called for "severe penalties on anyone assisting Negroes to escape from bondage."

Slave owners had long offered rewards, or "bounties," for the return of runaway slaves. This had created a group of men called "bounty hunters." These men made their living by hunting down fugitive slaves in order to collect the rewards on them. With the support of the new law, bounty hunters now began searching free states for escaped slaves.

The Fugitive Slave Act angered many northerners who had not so far given much thought to the rights and wrongs of slavery. Some northern judges refused to enforce it. Other people provided food, money, and hiding places for fugitives. They mapped out escape routes and moved runaway slaves by night from one secret hiding place to another. The final stop on these escape routes was Canada, where fugitives could be followed by neither American laws nor bounty hunters.

Because railroads were the most modern form of transport at this time, this carefully organized system was called the "Underground Railroad." People providing money to pay for it were called "stockholders." Guides who led the fugitives to freedom were called "conductors," and hiding places were called "depots." All these were terms that were used on ordinary railroads.

Many conductors on the Underground Railway were former slaves themselves. Often they traveled deep into slave states to make contact with runaways. This was a dangerous thing to do. If conductors were captured they could end up as slaves again - or dead. As the number of fugitive slaves increased, gunfights between bounty hunters and conductors became more and more common.

In 1854 a Senator named Stephen Douglas persuaded Congress to end the Missouri Compromise. West of Missouri, on land that was supposed to be closed to slavery, was a western territory called Kansas. In 1854 Congress voted to let its people decide for themselves whether to permit slavery there.

A race began to win control of Kansas. Pro-slavery immigrants poured in from the South and anti-slavery immigrants from the North. Each group was determined to outnumber the other. Soon fighting and killing began. Pro-slavery raiders from Missouri burned a town called Lawrence and killed some of its people. In reply, a half-mad abolitionist named John Brown led a raid in which a number of supporters of slavery were killed. Because of all the fighting and killing in the territory Americans everywhere began referring to it as "bleeding Kansas."

Neither side won the struggle to control Kansas in the 1850s. Because of the trouble there, Congress delayed its admission to the United States. But in 1858 the supporters of slavery won a victory of another sort.

A slave named Dred Scott had been taken by his owner to live in a free state. Scott asked the Supreme Court to declare that this had made him legally free. But the Court refused. It said that black slaves had no rights as American citizens. It added also that Congress had gone beyond its constitutional powers in claiming the right to prohibit slavery in the western territories.

The Dred Scott decision caused great excitement in the United States. Southern slave owners were delighted. Opponents of slavery were horrified. The Supreme Court seemed to be saying that free states had no right to forbid slavery within their boundaries and that slave owners could put their slaves to work anywhere.

A few years earlier opponents of slavery had formed a new political group called the Republican Party. When Senator Stephen Douglas asked the voters of Illinois to re-elect him to Congress in 1858, he was challenged by a Republican named Abraham Lincoln. In a series of public debates with Douglas, Lincoln said that the spread of slavery must be stopped. He was willing to accept slavery in the states where it already existed, but that was all. Looking to the future of the United States he gave his listeners a warning. "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free."

Lincoln lost the 1858 election to Douglas. But his stand against slavery impressed many people. In 1860 the Republicans chose him as their candidate in that year's presidential election.

By now relations between North and South were close to breaking point. In 1859 the same John Brown who had fought in "bleeding Kansas" had tried to start a slave rebellion in Virginia. He attacked an army weapons store at a place called Harpers Ferry. The attack failed and Brown was captured, tried for treason and hanged. But that was not the end of John Brown. Many northerners claimed that he was a martyr in the struggle against slavery. They even wrote a song about him. "John Brown's body lies a-moldering in the grave," they sang, "but his soul goes marching on."

Southerners saw the raid on Harpers Ferry differently. They believed that it was a sign that the North was preparing to use force to end slavery in the South. In the presidential election of 1860 the southerners put forward a candidate of their own to oppose Lincoln. They threatened that the South would break away, or "secede," from the United States if Lincoln became President.

In every southern state a majority of the citizens voted against Lincoln. But voters in the North supported him and he won the election. A few weeks later, in December 1860, the state of South Carolina voted to secede from the United States. It was soon joined by ten more southern states. In February 1861, these eleven states announced that they were now an independent nation, the Confederate States of America, often known as the Confederacy.

The nineteenth century's bloodiest war, the American Civil War, was about to begin.

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 45 ff.