Narrative vividly portray the inhumanity of slavery, it i simultaneously made manifest the intense humanity of the slaves, especially of the brilliant, self-educated Douglass himself. Active as a lecturer in the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society, Douglass parted company with Garrison over the issue of breaking with the Union. Douglass wanted to work within the Constitution.
The Tortured Course of Compromise
The awkward Missouri Compromise hammered out in 1820 began to buckle in 1848-49 when gold was discovered in California. The territory was officially transferred to the United States by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War on February 2, 1848. On January 24, 1848, just a few days before the treaty was signed, gold was found at a sawmill on the South Fork of the American River. During the height of the gold rush, in .1849, more than 80,000 fortune seekers poured into the territory. This event suddenly made statehood for the territory an urgent issue. But would California be admitted as a slave state or free?
In 1846, Congress, seeking a means of bringing the Mexican War to a speedy conclusion, had debated a bill to appropriate $2 million to compensate Mexico for “territorial adjustments.” Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot introduced an amendment to the bill, called the Wilmot Proviso, that would have barred the introduction of slavery into any land acquired by the United States as a result of the war. As usual, Southern opposition to the limitation of slavery was articulated by South Carolina’s John C. Calhoun. He proposed four resolutions:
1. Territories, including those acquired as a result of the war, were the common and joint property of the states.
2. Congress, acting as agent for the states, could make no law discriminating between the states and depriving any state of its rights with regard to any territory.
3. The enactment of any national law regarding slavery would violate the Constitution and the doctrine of states’ rights.
4. The people have the right to form their state government as they wish, provided that its government is republican.
As if Calhoun’s resolutions were not enough, he dropped another bombshell, warning that failure to maintain a balance between the demands of the North and the South would lead to “civil war.”
1850
Congress labored over the next three years to bolster the 1820 compromise. Thanks to abolitionists such as Garrison and Douglass, most Northerners were no longer willing to allow slavery to extend into any new territory, whether it lay above or below the line drawn by the Missouri Compromise. To break the dangerous stalemate, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan advanced the doctrine of “popular sovereignty,” proposing that new territories would be organized without any mention of slavery one way or the other. When the territory wrote its own constitution and applied for admission as a state, the people of the territory would vote to be slave or free. As to California, it would be admitted to the Union directly instead of going through an interim of territorial status.
Southerners cringed. They assumed that California would vote itself free, as would New Mexico down the line. Senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster worked out a new compromise. California would indeed be admitted to the Union as a free state. The other territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War would be subject to “popular sovereignty.” In addition, the slave trade in the District of Columbia would be discontinued. To appease the South, however, a strong Fugitive Slave Law was passed, strictly forbidding Northerners to grant: refuge to escaped slaves. Finally, the federal government agreed to assume debts Texas (admitted as a slave state in 1845) incurred before it was annexed to the United States.
As with the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 pleased no one completely. Abolitionists were outraged by the Fugitive Slave Law, while states’ rights supporters saw the slave-free balance in Congress as shifting inexorably northward.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
In the Compromise of 1850, many observers saw the handwriting on the wall: the Union was coming apart at the seams. In 1854, the territories of Nebraska and Kansas applied for statehood. In response, Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise and passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which left the question of slavery to “popular sovereignty.” There was never any doubt that Nebraskans would vote themselves a free state, but Kansas was very much up for grabs. Pro-slavery Missourians suddenly flooded across the border, elected a pro-slavery territorial legislature, then, mission accomplished, returned to Missouri. Anti-slavery Iowans likewise poured in, but they decided to settle. Soon a chronic state of civil warfare developed between pro-and anti-slavery factions in Kansas. The situation became so ugly that the territory was soon called “Bleeding Kansas.”
The anti-slavery faction set up its headquarters at the town of Lawrence. In 1856, pro-slavery “border ruffians” raided Lawrence, setting fire to a hotel and a number of houses, and destroying a printing press. In the process, several townspeople were killed. During the night of May 24, John Brown, a radical abolitionist who had taken command of the territory’s so-called Free Soil Militia, led four of his sons and two other followers in an assault on pro-slavery settlers along the Pottawatomie River. Five defenseless settlers were hacked to death with sabers. Claiming responsibility for the act, Brown pronounced it payback for the sack of Lawrence. The incident was just one jarring passage in a grim overture to the great Civil War.
The Dred Scott Disgrace
In 1857, at the height of the Kansas bloodshed, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in with a decision concerning the case of one Dred Scott, a fugitive slave. Scott had belonged to John Emerson of Saint Louis. An army surgeon, Emerson had been transferred first to Illinois and then to Wisconsin Territory, with his slave in tow. When Emerson died in 1846, Scott returned to Saint Louis and sued Emerson’s widow for his freedom, arguing that lie was a citizen of Missouri, now free by virtue of having lived in Illinois, where slavery was banned by the Northwest Ordinance, and in Wisconsin Territory, where the terms of the Missouri Compromise made slavery illegal. The Missouri state court decided against Scott, but his lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court.
The high court was divided along regional lines. The anti-slavery Northern justices sided with Scott, while the pro-slavery Southerners upheld the Missouri state court decision. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had the final word. He ruled, in the first place, that neither free blacks nor enslaved blacks were citizens of the Untied States and, therefore, could not sue in federal court. That ruling would have been enough to settle the case, but Taney went on. He held that the Illinois law banning slavery had no force on Scott after he returned to Missouri, a slave state. The law that obtained in Wisconsin was likewise null and void, Taney argued, because the Missouri Compromise was (he said) unconstitutional. According to Taney, the law violated the fifth amendment to the Constitution, which bars the government from depriving an individual of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law.
The decision outraged abolitionists and galvanized their cause. Here was the spectacle of the United States Supreme Court using the Bill of Rights to deny freedom to a human being! Here was the federal government saying to slave owners that their ownership of human beings would be honored and protected everywhere in the nation! No longer was the slavery issue a question of how the nation could expand westward while maintaining a balance in Congress. It was now an issue of property. Justice Taney’s decision had put slavery beyond compromise. If, as his decision implied, the rights of slaveholders were to be universally respected as long as slavery existed,
