The Crime Against Kansas

DRED SCOTT, THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, AND THE PANIC OF 1857

UNIT #14

Background:

With the Lecompton constitution defeated and Kansas on the way to statehood as a free state (January 1, 1861) joining California, Minnesota, and Oregon, the North now enjoyed a four-state edge over the South. The South had lost its control of the Senate. Still, it controlled the Executive branch (with Buchanan) and most importantly, the Supreme Court. It was from the Supreme Court that the South was to launch its most powerful counterattack against the Republican Party and the foes of slavery. In this unit we will examine three explosive events that hastened the coming of the Civil War: (1) the Dred Scott decision, (2) the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, and (3) the political fallout from the Depression of 1857-58.

I. THE DRED SCOTT CASE, FEBRUARY 1857

A. BACKGROUND

B. THE ISSUES AND THE COURT’S DECISION

1. Three issues/legal questions:

a. Was Scott a citizen with a right to sue in federal court?

b. Had prolonged residence (two years in each place) in a free state and territory made

Scott free?

c. Was Fort Snelling actually free territory—that is, did Congress in 1820 have the

right to ban slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36-30?

2. Chief Justice Taney’s comprehensive ruling covering all aspects of the case:

a. Scott (and thus all slaves) ______.

b. Prolonged residence in free states/territories ______ once

he returned Missouri.

c. Congress ______.

Why? Because the Fifth Amendment protected persons from being deprived of life,

liberty, or property without due process, slavery was no difference from other

property, and a ban on slavery was therefore an unconstitutional deprivation of

property. Moreover, Congress could not authorize a territorial government to

exercise such a power --intended as a blow against “popular sovereignty.”

3. SUMMARY: COURT LEGALIZED SLAVERY IN THE TERRITORIES,

AND RENDERED POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY OBSOLETE. THE COURT

DID NOT WANT PEOPLE VOTING ON THE LEGALITY OF SLAVERY.

C. THE THREE-FOLD SIGNIFICANCE OF TANEY’S RULING:

1. ______

2. The principle of Dred Scott was not merely that Congress ______

______, but that

______!

3. Instead of crippling the Republican Party as Taney had hoped, the Dred Scott

decision strengthened it by widening the sectional schism among Democrats

(Douglas’s northern Democrats versus the southern Democrats).

D. THE REPUBLICAN “THESIS”

1. Republicans led by Seward and Lincoln depicted the decision as the consequence of a

“______.” Opponents of slavery were trying to stop its

spread, but advocates of slavery, said Lincoln, were trying to “push it forward,

till it shall become lawful in all the States…North as well as South.” How could

they do this? “______.” It is merely for the Supreme

Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it….”

2. Did Lincoln and other Republicans really believe that Dred Scott was part of a

conspiracy to expand slavery into free states?

a. “Recent scholarship ______.

b. In the context of Dred Scott, Lincoln’s “warning that slavery might become

lawful everywhere was …far from absurd.”

II. THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES, SUMMER 1858

A. THEME OF THE DEBATES: ______

B. LINCOLN’S ARGUMENT: ______

______

1. Lincoln’s celebrated FREEPORT QUESTION: ______

______

a. The point of the question: to nail the contradiction between Dred Scott and Douglas’

doctrine of popular sovereignty.

2. Douglas’s response also became famous as the FREEPORT DOCTRINE: ______

______

3. The two-fold significance of the Freeport Doctrine in the coming of the Civil War:

a. it prompted the South to demand a territorial slave code

b. ______

C. DOUGLAS ATTACKED LINCOLN ON TWO FRONTS:

1. First, Lincoln’s “HOUSE DIVIDED” metaphor: The country could continue to “exist

divided into free and slave states. To talk about ultimate extinction of slavery “is

revolutionary and destructive of the existence of this Government…and means warfare

between the North and the South, to be carried on with ruthless vengeance, until one

section or the other shall be driven to the wall and become the victim of the rapacity of

the other.” [184]

2. Second, Lincoln’s inclusion of blacks among those “created equal” was a “monstrous

heresy.” Douglas exploited the race issue: the Negro “must always occupy an inferior

position.”

D. LINCOLN’S RESPONSE:

1. He admitted that he believed black people were “entitled to all the natural rights

enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit

of happiness.”

2. Lincoln spelled out his position with clarity: “I am not, nor ever have been in favor of

bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,

that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, not of

qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people....”

E. THE TWO-FOLD SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DEBATES

1. Though he lost the election, Lincoln ______

______

2. Douglas’ Freeport Doctrine proved to be the issue that ______

______

III. THE POLITICAL FALLOUT FROM THE PANIC/DEPRESSION OF 1857-58

A. FOUR SECTIONAL ISSUES ILLUSTRATE HOW POLITICAL FALLOUT

FROM THE DEPRESSION EXACERBATED SECTIONAL TENSIONS

1. ______

2. ______

3. ______

4. Federal grants to states to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges.

B. THESE ISSUES REFLECT THE IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE BETWEEN N & S

1. “All three measures reflected the old Whig (now Republican) ideology of a harmony

of interests between capital and labor, which would benefit mutually from economic

growth and improved education. Along with a tariff to protect American workers and

entrepreneurs, these land-grant measures became the new Republican free-labor

version of Henry Clay’s venerable American System.” [193]

2. Three reasons why most southerners opposed these measures:

a. A homestead act: ______

b. Public education: ______

c. Transcontinental railroad: ______

C. THE SPLIT OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

1. The South was 100% opposed to popular sovereignty. Why? Because it would

______

______!

D. THE DEPRESSION BOLSTERED THE SOUTH’S SELF-CONFIDENCE AND

MADE IT MORE AGGRESSIVE

1. By the late 50’s the South had concluded that its economic and social system,

its civilization, was superior to the North’s. The Panic of 1857-58 only seemed to

confirm this, because the South’s export economy remained insulated from its effects.

“Slavery demonstrated the superiority of southern civilization,” declared Senator James

Hammond of South Carolina in his celebrated King Cotton speech on March 4, 1858. “In all

social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life….It

constitutes the very mudsill of society….Such a class you must have, or you would not have

that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement….Your whole hireling class

of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference

between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated…yours are hired by the

say, not cared for, and scantily compensated.” [196]

George Fitzhugh, a descendant of Virginia’s bluebloods, wrote prolifically about “the failure

of free society.” Free labor under capitalism was a war of each against all, wrote Fitzhugh, a

sort of social cannibalism. “Slavery is the natural and the norm of society.” [196]

“The great evil of Northern free society,” insisted a South Carolina journal, “is that it is

burdened with a servile class of mechanics and laborers, unfit for self-government, yet

clothed with the attributes and powers of citizens.” [197]

E. THE NORTH DID NOT APPRECIATE SOUTHERN SOCIOLOGY &

ECONOMIC THEORY

1. William H. Seward derided the southern doctrine that “labor in every society…is necessarily

unintellectual, groveling, and base.” The idea had produced the backwardness of the South,

said Seward, the illiteracy of its masses, the dependent colonial status of its economy. In

contrast “the free-labor system educates all alike, and by opening all the fields of industrial

employment to…all classes of men…brings into the highest possible activity all the physical,

moral and social energies of the whole State. A collision between these two systems

impended, “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that

the United States must and will…become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a

free-labor nation.” [198]

2. Southerners claimed that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of course it was,

said Lincoln. “I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which

laborers CAN strike when they want to….I like the system which lets a man quit when

he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. The glory of free labor, said

Lincoln, lay in its open competition for upward mobility, a competition in which most

Americans finished ahead of where they started in life. “I want every man to have the

chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his

condition. If the South got its way, warned Lincoln, “free labor that can strike will

give way to slave labor that cannot!” [198]