The Antebellum South and abolition
Those of you who read the daily posts from historian (and Mainer) Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, will be familiar with her telling of the remarkable transformation of American government in the short years prior to and along the course of the Civil War.
As contentiousness about slavery grew, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and (my native) Maine was separated from Massachusetts and admitted as a free state. Slavery was also prohibited above the 36th parallel and in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.
By the early 1850s, control of the government was in the hands of profoundly wealthy southern slaveholders, who controlled the presidency, the senate, and the supreme court. Exercising their power, they oversaw the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. Introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the Kansas Nebraska Act divided land west of Missouri into two new territories, with the provision that decisions about slavery there would be a matter of popular sovereignty. This effectively overturned the Missouri Compromise, because of the prospect that slavery would now be allowed in territory where it had previously been prohibited.
The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case further inflamed tensions about slavery. The Supreme Court declared that enslaved people were not citizens, and therefore were not entitled to protection from the federal government. The Dred Scott decision also found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.
As the storyline developed, antislavery men in the north from across the political spectrum gathered and energized a growing consensus of opposition to Kansas Nebraska. (Men were the public face of antislavery activism, but women had been active in the abolition movement for years, and several of the leaders of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls grew out of that movement.) Conversations developed around the north, engaging ordinary people along with legislators and formal leaders.
By 1858, there was widespread enthusiasm in the north for abolition. A new Republican party had been established, championed by Abraham Lincoln, to embody the equalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Enslaved people were, in fact, people. Not property.
Lincoln, of course, was elected in 1860. Union success at the terrible battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the confidence in September, 1862, to announce the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued the following July. And I suspect that most of us have at some point memorized the Gettysburg Address, dedicating a national cemetery after the equally horrific battle, that November.
Professor Richardson’s summary in her telling of the story:
“In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom."
Those of you who read the daily posts from historian (and Mainer) Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, will be familiar with her telling of the remarkable transformation of American government in the short years prior to and along the course of the Civil War.
As contentiousness about slavery grew, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820. Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state and (my native) Maine was separated from Massachusetts and admitted as a free state. Slavery was also prohibited above the 36th parallel and in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory.
By the early 1850s, control of the government was in the hands of profoundly wealthy southern slaveholders, who controlled the presidency, the senate, and the supreme court. Exercising their power, they oversaw the passage of the Kansas Nebraska Act in 1854. Introduced by Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the Kansas Nebraska Act divided land west of Missouri into two new territories, with the provision that decisions about slavery there would be a matter of popular sovereignty. This effectively overturned the Missouri Compromise, because of the prospect that slavery would now be allowed in territory where it had previously been prohibited.
The 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford case further inflamed tensions about slavery. The Supreme Court declared that enslaved people were not citizens, and therefore were not entitled to protection from the federal government. The Dred Scott decision also found that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that congress lacked authority to prohibit slavery in federal territories.
As the storyline developed, antislavery men in the north from across the political spectrum gathered and energized a growing consensus of opposition to Kansas Nebraska. (Men were the public face of antislavery activism, but women had been active in the abolition movement for years, and several of the leaders of the 1848 Women's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls grew out of that movement.) Conversations developed around the north, engaging ordinary people along with legislators and formal leaders.
By 1858, there was widespread enthusiasm in the north for abolition. A new Republican party had been established, championed by Abraham Lincoln, to embody the equalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Enslaved people were, in fact, people. Not property.
Lincoln, of course, was elected in 1860. Union success at the terrible battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the confidence in September, 1862, to announce the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation, which was issued the following July. And I suspect that most of us have at some point memorized the Gettysburg Address, dedicating a national cemetery after the equally horrific battle, that November.
Professor Richardson’s summary in her telling of the story:
“In less than ten years the country went from a government dominated by a few fabulously wealthy men who rejected the idea that human beings are created equal and who believed they had the right to rule over the masses, to a defense of government of the people, by the people, for the people, and to leaders who called for a new birth of freedom."