The coming of the Civil War (2)

The Dred Scott Case

Dred Scott

Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia in about 1800. In 1830 he was taken to St Louis and sold to an army surgeon, who took him to Illinois, then to Wisconsin Territory (later Minnesota) and finally returned him to St Louis in 1842. His master died in 1843 and in 1846 Scott filed a suit in the Missouri courts claiming that residence in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory made him free. A jury decided in his favour but the state Supreme Court decided

Chief Justice Taney

against him. The case of Scott v. Sandford  finally came to the Supreme Court.  On 6 March 1857 the Court delivered its decision.  Speaking for his colleagues, the majority of whom were from the South, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland argued that Scott had no legal standing because he lacked citizenship. At the time of the Constitution, he stated, blacks

had for more than a century been regarded as …so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.  

Very controversially he also ruled that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional since it deprived citizens of their property in slaves. This meant that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from a territory.  As the Missouri Compromise was dead anyway, this was a pointless provocation. The South was delighted, but the North was now convinced that the Supreme Court had been subverted by a slave conspiracy. 

The coming of the Civil War (1)

The United States after the Compromise of 1850

The Fugitive Slave Act

Slave kidnap poster, Boston 1851

On 9 September 1850 California became the 31st state of the Union. On 18 September President Millard Fillmore signed into law the Fugitive Slave Act. This deeply controversial provision of the Compromise of 1850 called for federal jurisdiction over runaway slaves and for their prompt return to their southern owners. The law also denied them a trial by jury or the right to testify on their own behalf. Any white man who attempted to help a slave escape its owner would be subjected to a heavy fine and/or six months’ imprisonment.  The federal commissioner who returned a slave to his owner was to receive $10 but only $5 dollars if he did not return the slave.  

In the North, particularly New England, the Fugitive Slave Act  was bitterly denounced.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: ‘This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century by people who could read and write', and he urged his neighbours to break the law. 

One aspect of this law-breaking was the Underground Railroad 

Harriet Tubman

whereby fugitive slaves were hidden and smuggled into Canada. The escaped slave Harriet Tubman was already actively engaged in rescuing slaves. However, in spite of protests, the law seemed to be working. In the first six years of the act only three fugitives were forcibly rescued from the slave-catchers.  On the other hand, fewer than two hundred slaves were captured and returned. 

Harriet Beecher Stowe

From June 1851 to April 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and the wife of a prominent biblical scholar, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in serial form in the journal, National Era. It was published in book form on 20 March 1852 and became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century. Initially, however,  it sold better in Britain than America.  The country was enjoying a surge of prosperity and the presidential campaign of 1852 showed that neither side wished to raise the issue of slavery.

The 1852 election

Another consequence of the 1850 Compromise was the break-up of the Whig party, with the Southern Whigs abandoning the party for the Democrats.   For the election of 1852 the Democrats chose Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire candidate, in preference to Stephen A. Douglas from Illinois. Pierce committed his party to adhere to the Compromise, and defeated his Whig rival, General Winfield Scott by 254 electoral votes to 42.  But the divisions over slavery were now so deep that his presidency was doomed to failure.

The new politics

Economic developments

In the early nineteenth century, the United States changed rapidly and a distinctive American identity emerged.

As settlers poured westwards, the United States developed a transport infrastructure to cope with the movements of population. In 1806 congress authorized the National Road (also known as the Cumberland Road), America’s first interstate highway. Construction started at Cumberland, Maryland in 1811, and the road reached Vandalia, Illinois, in 1839.  The West was becoming increasingly significant. 

Since 1817 the Erie Canal had been under construction and was opened in 1825. At  363 miles long and with 83 locks it was the longest canal in the world, and it cost $7 million dollars to build. By linking the Great Lakes with New York City via the Hudson River, it connected the Western interior to the Atlantic. 

In 1828 the cornerstone for the Baltimore and Ohio railroad was laid on 4 July 1828.  At the end of 1829 it carried passengers on the first completed 13-mile stretch. By 1850 America had nine thousand miles of track. 

Cornerstone of the B&O, laid July 4, 1828
by Charles Carroll of Carrollton,
now displayed at the B&O Railroad Museum.
Public domain

Agriculture remained central to the American economy: cotton and tobacco in the South, grains and livestock in the North and West. Industry was also growing, as skilled immigrants brought with them their knowledge of British production technologies. In 1822 Boston investors opened the mechanised Lowell cotton mills along the Merrimack River. However the majority of American towns were commercial rather than manufacturing centres, providing goods and services for the surrounding farms. It was only after the Civil War that industrialization seriously took shape. 

The Mexican War and its aftermath

General Winfield Scott enters Mexico City
13 September 1847
Public domain

‘Manifest Destiny’

Andrew Jackson's recognition of the Lone Star Republic exacerbated the already existing tensions over slavery. For the next seven years there was continuous agitation to bring Texas into the Union. Though many American politicians correctly predicted that the annexation of Texas would bring problems,  the tide was flowing against their caution. This was the period of ‘manifest destiny'. To people like the Democratic newspaper editor John O’Sullivan, it was ‘manifest destiny’ that the United States would soon possess not only Texas but Oregon and later California. 

The flag of the Republic of Texas
the 'Lone Star Republic',
officially adopted 1839

The annexation of Texas

Even before O’Sullivan had coined the term, the issue of manifest destiny was a live one in politics. In the run-up to the election of 1844 the former President, Martin van Buren, opposed the annexation of Texas because he wanted to stop the expansion of slavery.  He was backed by a majority in Congress. Henry Clay spoke for many when he asserted that ‘annexation and war with Mexico were identical’. But as a result, Van Buren lost the Democratic nomination to to James K. Polk, the former Governor of Tennessee, who had gained the support of Andrew Jackson. Polk’s win was a victory for manifest destiny. 

Slavery: 'the peculiar institution'

Eyre Crowe, Slave Auction at Richmond, Virginia in
Illustrated London News, 1856

The paradox

Thomas Jefferson

The great paradox of the newly independent United States was that many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were slave-owners. Slaves comprised 40 per cent of the population of Virginia, and Jefferson owned about two hundred slaves on his estate in Monticello. It is a near certainty that he was the father of the children of his  slave, Sally Hemmings. New archaeological discoveries are opening up more information about her living quarters.

Jefferson was acutely aware of the incongruity of his position and he looked forward to a time when slavery could be abolished. However, he was convinced that black people were inferior to whites, and he believed that their lack of intelligence and dark skin rendered them better able than whites to work in the heat of the South. It is not surprising, therefore, that his vision of republican liberty was not realised - it was too full of inconsistencies. In the following generations many of his fellow-southerners came to see slavery not as a necessary evil but as a positive good – so much so that they were prepared to fight a war to preserve what they called their ‘peculiar institution’.

The establishment of slavery

The first Africans arrived in North America in August 1619, when a Dutch trading vessel blown off course landed at Jamestown and sold twenty Africans as indentured labour. These were not slaves, but during the seventeenth century the colonists began to develop laws that established slavery. In 1800 one inhabitant in five was a slave.  By 1860 4.4 million African Americans lived in the United States, nearly 90 percent of them slaves.  But against these numbers there were nearly 27 million free whites.