Its been real its been fun But it
It’s been real, its been fun…. But it hasn’t been real fun. Wayward sisters depart.
Missouri Compromise • In Jan. , 1820, a bill to admit Maine as a state passed the House. The admission of Alabama as a slave state in 1819 had brought the slave states and free states to equal representation in the Senate, and it was seen that by pairing Maine (certain to be a free state) and Missouri, this equality would be maintained. The two bills were joined as one in the Senate, with the clause forbidding slavery in Missouri replaced by a measure prohibiting slavery in the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30'N lat. (the southern boundary of Missouri). The House rejected this compromise bill, but after a conference committee of members of both houses was appointed, the bills were treated separately, and in Mar. , • 1820, Maine was made a state and Missouri was authorized to adopt a constitution having no restrictions on slavery.
Missouri Compromise
Compromise 0 f 1850 - California was entered as a free state. • New Mexico and Utah were each allowed to use popular sovereignty to decide the issue of slavery. In other words, the people would pick whether the states would be free or slave. • The Republic of Texas gave up lands that it claimed in present day New Mexico and received $10 million to pay its debt to Mexico. • The slave trade was abolished in the District of Columbia. • The Fugitive Slave Act made any federal official who did not arrest a runaway slave liable to pay a fine. This was the most controversial part of the Compromise of 1850 and caused many abolitionists to increase their efforts against slavery.
Mason Dixon • The boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, regarded as the division between free and slave states before the Civil War. It was established between 1763 and 1767 by the British surveyors Charles Mason (17301787) and Jeremiah Dixon (died 1777).
Bleeding Kansas • The North-South Contest for Kansas • Northerners began to pour into Kansas, and Southerners were outraged, since they had supported the Compromise of 1850 under the impression that Kansas would become a slave state. • Thus, on election day in 1855, hordes of Southerners “border ruffians” from Missouri flooded the polls and elected Kansas to be a slave state; free-soilers were unable to stomach this and set up their own government in Topeka. – Thus, confused Kansans had to chose between two governments: one illegal (free government in Topeka) and the other fraudulent (slavery government in Shawnee). • In 1856, a group of pro-slavery raiders shot up and burnt part of Lawrence, thus starting violence.
Only in America • “Bully” Brooks and His Bludgeon • “Bleeding Kansas” was an issue that spilled into Congress: Senator Charles Sumner was a vocal anti-slaveryite, and his blistering speeches condemned all slavery supporters. • Congressman Preston S. Brooks decided that since Sumner was not a gentleman he couldn’t challenge him to a duel, so Brooks beat Sumner with a cane until it broke; nearby, Senators did nothing but watched, and Brooks was cheered on by the South. • However, the incident touched off fireworks, as Sumner’s “The Crime Against Kansas” speech was reprinted by the thousands, and it put Brooks and the South in the wrong.
Supreme Court • The Dred Scott Bombshell • On March 6, 1857, the Dred Scott decision was handed down by the Supreme Court. – Dred Scott was a slave whose master took him north into free states where he lived for many years. After his master’s death, he sued for his freedom from his new master, claiming that he had been in free territory and was therefore free. The Missouri Supreme Court agreed, freeing him, but his new master appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, which overruled the decision. • Outcomes or decisions of the case… – Chief Justice Roger Taney said that no slave could be a citizen of the U. S. in his justification.
A bad Man • John Brown: Murderer or Martyr? • John Brown now had a plan to invade the South, seize its arms, call upon the slaves to rise up and revolt, and take over the South and free it of slaves. But, in his raid of Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, the slaves didn’t revolt, and he was captured by the U. S. Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee and convicted of treason, sentenced to death, and hanged. • Brown, though insane, was not stupid, and he portrayed himself as a martyr against slavery, and when he was hanged, he instantly became a martyr for abolitionists; northerners rallied around his memory. Abolitionists were infuriated by his execution (as they’d conveniently forgotten his violent past). • The South was happy and saw justice. They also felt his actions were typical of the radical North.
Election of defection • The Electoral Upheaval of 1860 • Lincoln won with only 40% of the popular vote, and had the Democratic Party been more organized and energetic, they might have won. • It was a very sectional race: the North went to Lincoln, the South to Breckinridge, the “middle-ground” to the middle-of-the-road candidate in Bell, and popular-sovereignty-land went to Douglas. • The Republicans did not control the House or the Senate, and the South still had a five-to-four majority in the Supreme Court, but the South still decided to secede.
Lincoln Speaks • "In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it. • I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. " • Abraham Lincoln, March 4, 1861, From His First Inaugural Address
Lincoln…. • "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect that it will cease to be divided. It will become all the one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward until it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, north as well as south. "
It’s not me…. It’s you… • The Secessionist Exodus • South Carolina had threatened to secede if Lincoln was elected president, and now it went good on its word, seceding in December of 1860. – Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas (the Deep South) followed in the next six weeks, before Abe was inaugurated. – The seven secession states met in Montgomery, Alabama in February of 1861 and created the Confederate States of America, and they chose Jefferson Davis as president. • President Buchanan did nothing to force the confederacy back into the Union, partly because the Union troops were needed in the West and because the North was still apathetic toward secession; he simply left the issue for Lincoln to handle when he got sworn in.
When in the course of human events…. • Farewell to Union • The seceding states did so because they feared that their rights as a slaveholding minority were being threatened, and were alarmed at the growing power of the Republicans, plus, they believed that they would be unopposed despite what the Northerners claimed. • The South also hoped to develop its own banking and shipping, and to prosper. • Besides, in 1776, the 13 colonies had seceded from Britain and had won; now the South could do the same thing.
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