Failure of Compromise

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 destabilized the territorial slavery question by repealing the Missouri Compromise line and applying popular sovereignty to land previously declared free.
• Trace the chain of political shocks between 1854 and 1859, including Bleeding Kansas, the caning of Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott decision, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry.
• Account for the collapse of the Second Party System and the formation of the Republican Party as a sectional response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
• Use Skill 5.B (Causation) to distinguish proximate political triggers of the secession crisis from longer-running structural causes such as slavery's centrality to the Southern economy.
• Account for how Roger Taney's Dred Scott opinion radicalized Northern public opinion against the federal judiciary and the Pierce-Buchanan Democratic establishment.

The Compromise of 1850 had bought the Union four years of uneasy quiet. Stephen Douglas, the Illinois senator who had brokered much of that compromise and who wanted a transcontinental railroad to start in his home state of Illinois, broke the quiet himself. His Kansas-Nebraska Act, signed by President Franklin Pierce on May 30, 1854, organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories under popular sovereignty and explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise line of thirty-six degrees, thirty minutes north (KC-5.2.II.B.ii). Land that the federal government had committed to keeping free since 1820 was reopened to the possibility of slavery on the basis of a settler vote whose timing the statute did not specify. Antislavery Northerners, including former Whigs, Free Soilers, and a number of antislavery Democrats, treated the repeal as a betrayal so fundamental that it required a new political vehicle. Within months, conventions in Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan, organized what would soon become the Republican Party, an explicitly sectional Northern coalition organized around the principle that slavery should not be permitted to expand into any federal territory (KC-5.2.II.C).

Kansas became the first proving ground for popular sovereignty, and the territory promptly demonstrated that the doctrine could not contain the conflict it was meant to resolve. Pro-slavery Missourians, organized as Border Ruffians, crossed the state line in the territorial elections of March 1855 and cast thousands of fraudulent ballots; the resulting pro-slavery legislature, seated at Lecompton, enacted a draconian slave code. Free-state settlers refused to recognize the Lecompton government and organized a rival territorial government and constitution at Topeka. Two governments now claimed legitimate authority in the same territory. In May 1856, a pro-slavery posse sacked the free-state town of Lawrence; three days later, John Brown and his sons murdered five pro-slavery settlers along Pottawatomie Creek in retaliation. Newspapers across the North reported the events under the heading Bleeding Kansas, and a phrase intended as alarmist fundraising became the standard description of a low-grade civil war that killed roughly fifty-five people in the territory between 1855 and 1859.

The violence was not confined to the territories. On May 19 and 20, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered a two-day address titled "The Crime Against Kansas," denouncing the Pierce administration and personally insulting Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Two days later, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, Butler's cousin, walked onto the Senate floor and beat Sumner unconscious with a metal-tipped cane. Sumner's injuries were severe enough that he could not return to the Senate for more than three years; his empty desk became an antislavery icon. Brooks resigned, was reelected by a landslide, and received commemorative canes from admirers across the South. The episode persuaded many Northerners that political compromise with the slaveholding interest was no longer possible because the institutions of compromise themselves were no longer safe. Republican vote totals in the 1856 presidential election, the first the new party contested, exceeded one and a third million.

The Supreme Court intervened in March 1857 with the most consequential ruling of the decade. Dred Scott v. Sandford arose from the lawsuit of an enslaved man who claimed his earlier residence in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin had made him free. Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing for a seven-to-two majority, made three rulings, each broader than the case required (KC-5.2.II.B.ii). First, he held that people of African descent, free or enslaved, were not citizens of the United States and had no standing to sue in federal court. Second, he held that residence in a free jurisdiction did not extinguish enslaved status, because the Constitution recognized property in enslaved persons. Third, and most explosively, he held that Congress had no constitutional authority to ban slavery in any federal territory, voiding the Missouri Compromise of 1820 retroactively and undermining the central premise of the Republican free-soil platform. Northern public opinion read the ruling as proof that the federal judiciary itself had been captured by the slaveholding interest. Frederick Douglass argued that the ruling, taken seriously, made every Northern state legally vulnerable to the importation of enslaved labor; abolitionists who had worked through ordinary politics began to argue that ordinary politics had been foreclosed.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates of August through October 1858 took place against this backdrop. Abraham Lincoln, a former one-term Whig congressman running as the Republican challenger for Stephen Douglas's Illinois Senate seat, opened his campaign with the "House Divided" speech in Springfield, arguing that the country could not endure permanently half slave and half free and that the Dred Scott decision was one logical step in a longer effort to nationalize slavery. The seven debates that followed, held across Illinois between Ottawa in August and Alton in October, were transcribed by stenographers and reprinted nationally. At Freeport, Lincoln pinned Douglas with the question of whether settlers in a federal territory could exclude slavery before forming a state constitution, given the Dred Scott ruling. Douglas's answer, that settlers could effectively exclude slavery by refusing to pass the police regulations slavery required, became known as the Freeport Doctrine. The reply may have helped Douglas hold his Senate seat, but it permanently alienated the Southern wing of his Democratic Party, which now demanded an explicit federal slave code for the territories. Douglas lost the 1858 contest in the legislature by a narrow margin, and Lincoln lost the Senate seat, but the debates made Lincoln a national figure and split the Democrats two years before the election the party could not afford to lose (KC-5.2.II.C).

John Brown, who had returned from Kansas convinced that armed action against slavery was both necessary and sanctified, spent eighteen months recruiting a small interracial force and raising funds from a circle of New England abolitionists known as the Secret Six. On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown led twenty-one men into the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in northwestern Virginia, intending to seize the weapons stored there and use them to spark a general uprising of enslaved people across the upper South. The plan failed almost immediately. Local militia surrounded Brown within a day; a detachment of United States Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee captured what remained of his force on the morning of October 18. Ten of Brown's men were killed in the fighting; Brown himself was wounded, tried by the Commonwealth of Virginia for treason and inciting servile insurrection, and hanged at Charles Town on December 2, 1859.

The political effects of the raid outran the raid itself. White Southerners read Harpers Ferry as the logical conclusion of two decades of antislavery agitation: the Republican Party had become powerful enough to capture Northern legislatures, the federal judiciary had been publicly defied by Northern juries refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, and a Connecticut-born abolitionist had attempted to put rifles into the hands of the enslaved. Many Northerners, including the New England transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, hailed Brown as a martyr; the bells of churches across the North were rung on the day of his execution. The Republican leadership, including Lincoln, condemned the raid itself, but the visible Northern reverence for Brown convinced enough Southern observers that the two sections had become incompatible political communities. The Democratic Party split into Northern and Southern wings at its 1860 Charleston convention; the Whig coalition was already finished; the Constitutional Union Party, the last major attempt to organize a non-sectional coalition around abstract loyalty to the Union, lasted one election (KC-5.2.II.C). The political conditions that produced secession in the winter of 1860 to 1861 were in place by the time the bell tolled in Charles Town.

The five sources below mark the political stations of the failure: the legal repeal of compromise, the violence on the Senate floor, the constitutional ruling that closed off the free-soil platform, the senatorial debates that nationalized Lincoln, and the gallows speech that turned a failed raid into a Northern martyrology.

1. (Causation) Identify the single political event between 1854 and 1859 that you regard as the most consequential cause of the secession crisis. Defend the choice with reference to at least two of the five sources in this lesson.
2. (Continuity and Change) Compare the political response to the Compromise of 1850 with the political response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Why did one statute produce four years of relative quiet and the other dissolve the Whig Party within a year?
3. (Comparison) Compare the political effects of the Dred Scott decision with the political effects of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Both events were treated by contemporaries as conclusive proof that compromise had failed. Whose conclusions, the Northern or the Southern, were more historically consequential, and on what grounds?
4. (Causation) Account for the formation of the Republican Party between 1854 and 1856. Why was a new party necessary, and why did the new party have to be sectional rather than national in scope?
5. (Causation) The phrase "Slave Power conspiracy" became central to Republican rhetoric after Dred Scott. Defend or rebut the claim that the events of 1854 to 1859 made the conspiracy thesis a reasonable inference from the available evidence.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.