all right so let's take a look at what was actually in the compromise of 1850. for the most part it is a four-part plan it brought california in as a free state it outlawed the slave trade in washington dc but not slavery it enacted a very harsh fugitive slave law and it said that popular sovereignty would decide the issue of slavery in the remaining territory taken from mexico which is mostly utah and new mexico people celebrated because they believed that the civil war had been averted now in the lesser parts of the compromise texas gave up its claims in new mexico in exchange for the u.s assuming texas's debt from when it had been an independent nation and half of that debt was paid directly to texas bondholders texas had to figure out how it was going to spend this money and it actually used it to fund a public school system which of course was white only but it's still one of the only public school systems in the south before the civil war let's talk a little bit about the main parts of the deal though for one california will be a free state which is what it wanted northerners didn't like that slavery was legal in dc the nation's capital either and they drew depictions of slavery against government buildings in dc to show the hypocrisy of the government allegedly based on freedom and liberty dealing in slave trading right outside you know the capital so slavery would continue in dc but no more slave trade it doesn't change a whole lot but you have to at least walk over to maryland or virginia to buy and sell slaves instead of being able to do it within the nation's capital popular sovereignty in the remaining territories did little to settle this controversy so settlers moving into the new territories got into violent and vicious conflicts over whether slavery would be allowed in a territory and how that vote would go when there were enough people there to vote that really harsh fugitive slave law uh was the breaking point uh for a lot of white americans an effective one had been on the books for years and of course this goes back to the the fugitive slave clause of the us constitution but as you've read free states passed personal liberty laws that allowed people and state officials to just not enforce it because they didn't want to have to you know prop up slavery in a free state they considered it immoral these states said they would not cooperate with the federal government in recapturing slaves and they put the burden of proof on the slave owner to prove that this person really was a runaway slave so the south had wanted a stronger fugitive slave law for a while and the law they got denied suspected runaway slaves a jury trial denied them the right to testify on their own behalf and denied basic constitutional protections to these people it also required all northerners to turn in fugitive slaves and aid in recapturing them if possible so it essentially made all northerners law men responsible for enforcing the laws if they'd been deputized it became illegal to look the other way and not turn in a runaway slave if you didn't actively act to capture that person and turn them over to law enforcement you had broken the law yourself but to enforce the law required one to participate in and protect the institution of slavery which a lot of white northerners weren't okay with there was also a financial incentive to find runaways and to not be wrong or at least to admit you were wrong about that person actually being a runaway slave because the federal government set up a reward amount for turning in runaway slaves and their reward was higher for an actual runaway than for someone you mistook as a runaway so the fugitive slave law emboldened what had been a disheartened and furious abolitionist movement frustrated with the constitution the government and these compromises that kept keeping slavery alive on july 4th 1854 william lloyd garrison spoke at an anti-slavery rally standing in front of an american flag hung upside down and bordered in black in protest now when you drape a flag in black you're putting it into mourning right as if there's something it's morning it's you know upset about he then burned a copy of the u.s constitution calling it quote a covenant with death and an agreement with hell as the crown cried amen garrison ground the ashes of the burned constitution beneath the heel of his shoe abolitionist author harriet beecher stowe's uncle tom's cabin in 1852 was an anti-slavery novel in direct response to the fugitive slave law so why did she write uncle tom's cabin because of the fugitive slave law as you saw in the documentary last week in 1849 harriet beecher stowe's 18 month old son charlie had died and his death inspired her to write uncle tom's cabin in which slave heroine eliza is threatened with the loss of a child when her owner moves to sell him away from her not because the owner is a terrible human being but he's in debt and the best way he knows how to get out of debt is to sell enslaved people and break up these families so part of the novel's moral is that slavery turns everyone into a bad person that there is no good slave owner like harriet jacob's work stowe appealed to the emotions of northern white women showing a young woman trying to protect her purity and a mom trying to protect her child stowe called on northern readers to disobey the unjust fugitive slave law and many did just that so we're seeing this idea of civil disobedience really become part of the abolitionist movement lincoln later and probably he never actually said this but there's a story that later when he was introduced to stowe he called her the little woman who started this big war meaning the civil war so anthony burns ran away from virginia and slavery to massachusetts a free state in march of 1854 and when his master found him in may he was arrested and held on the third floor of the federal courthouse a crowd of about 2 000 people gathered at the courthouse demanding burns be freed one deputy was stabbed to death but they kept the crowd from rescuing or freeing burns president by this point was franklin pierce who ordered the marines to assist and on june 2nd 1854 after he was convicted of being a fugitive slave which you've read about a federal ship returned burns to virginia an estimated 50 000 people lined the streets screaming kidnappers at the american servicemen leading burns in shackles to the ship his return was immediate sensation a transformational moment for witnesses it rallied northerners against the tyrannical reach of the slave power into free society so they begin to say that yeah we live in a free state but how free is it if southerners can come up and kidnap our neighbors and either return them to slavery or claim that they are runaways and take a person who was born free into slavery now a black church raised thirteen hundred dollars to purchase burns and within a year he was back in massachusetts a free man but his return by the federal government operating in a free state really changed how most americans saw the institution of slavery the north saw a southern pro-slavery conspiracy in the compromise of 1850 and within the us government northern states were far more populous than the south but the federal government and federal laws still privileged southern views and interests and slavery over northern ones slave owners although less than one percent of the american population seemed to run the government for their own benefit they refused to pay taxes on slaves or submit to regulation and they could get away with that because of the three-fist compromise in many cases and yet they demanded federal power to hunt down their runaway slaves and to expand slavery into new territories they silenced opposition like the gag rule and like censoring the post office and they warned voters that slavery was all that protected the status of poor white men as they insisted that they had a right to spread slavery west northerners pointed to that 1836 gag rule and the censorship of mail service and the oregon betrayal of failing to live up to 5440 or fight so northerners really see a southern conspiracy bent on kind of turning the american government into a slave government right where slavery would be legal in all states regardless of what people actually wanted while the south saw a northern conspiracy and the refusal to return runaway slaves and to respect so-called property rights in free territories and even free states they don't understand why they can't bring enslaved people into those free territories or even free states if their property which legally in the south they were and they also see this in the growing movement to stop slavery from spreading westward which they consider their right to take their quote unquote property wherever they please now in the 1850s southerners tried to take latin american countries to continue expanding slavery and we call this filibustering now today filibustering is basically running down the clock when a bill is up for a vote in the senate usually sometimes in the house mostly the senate but in the 19th century filibustering referred to private military ventures to establish colonies or states with slavery so basically we're talking about private individuals moving somewhere overthrowing the government and then asking the u.s government to take them in as a slave state anyone want to take a shot what is arguably the most successful filibuster in u.s history in which a bunch of white americans with slaves went to a different country overthrew that government and then asked to become part of the united states we're living in it it's called texas after attempting to take baja california unsuccessfully william walker successfully conquered nicaragua during its civil war so he takes advantage of a power vacuum and becomes basically the leader of nicaragua but he's overthrown and later executed by the hondurans even so these filibusters these attempts by white southerners to take new land for slave territories outraged northerners and fed into this idea that there really was the southern conspiracy to make slavery kind of the heart of the american government in the presidential election of 1852 the winner was democrat franklin pierce who we've already mentioned he's a southern sympathizer who wanted to take land in latin america now private american citizens had tried and failed on three separate occasions to take over spanish-controlled cuba but in october of 1854 three u.s diplomats met in austin belgium to discuss cuba believing they had pierce's blessing to act so they think pierce's government is going to help them probably by sending the military to physically take over cuba and make it an american slave state they argue that cuba belonged quote naturally to the great family of states of which the union is the providential nursery the plan was to offer to buy cuba from spain and if spain declined the authors warned quote by every law human and divine we shall be justified and resting it from spain this is the exact same plan they had for mexico and taking texas and all of that land through california so the u.s plan was to encourage rebellion amongst cubans and then take cuba by force they argued that spanish cuba established in 1762 violated the monroe doctrine which wasn't passed until 1823. there's a problem here the document explaining the plan was sent to pierce but somehow it leaked to the press and that's a crucial point there was an explosion of resentment and criticism in free states so much so that the secretary of state denied any knowledge of the deal which is almost entirely untrue and he blamed the consul in cuba even though that's a lie so they they basically say we didn't know anything about this it's it's you know these other diplomats who are doing this it's not part of pierce's cabinet right we're not involved even though they were absolutely involved the question for historians remains how did this thing get leaked in the first place and in reality we don't know but the most likely thing what most historians believe is that the pierce administration actually leaked this thing to test the public reaction to see if they could get away with it and when the response was that poor the u.s did not officially try to take cuba under the pierce administration so i have here a political cartoon called the democratic platform so of course pierce is a democrat democrats are that southern party that's intent on expanding slavery so there is cuba burning in the background on the right and a settlement in kansas which we'll talk about a little bit burning on the left and an attack on charles sumner a senator here in the front which we'll also talk about in a little bit basically the point of the the cartoon is that the democrats are embracing violence in order to expand slavery and that that's really all they believe in now that the united states spanned from coast to coast politicians began planning a transcontinental railroad now stephen douglas is from illinois and he wants that railroad to begin in chicago and go to california but railroad companies didn't want to take on the expense and risk of building in unsettled areas and most of the west at this point doesn't have a lot of white settlement in it so douglas decides that he needs to create federal territories out here to encourage settlement even though you're supposed to have you know a minimum number of people before you're declared a territory so douglas proposed a bill to organize territories west of missouri and iowa called kansas and nebraska but the competition between free and slave states over balance in the senate was still at issue these territories were both north of 3630 right which is down here and they're both in the original louisiana purchase territory so under the missouri compromise they're part of that louisiana territory they're north of 3630 they must be free territories and they must become free states two free states but slave states would never agree to be outnumbered in this way so douglas couldn't get the votes to organize these territories so to fix this douglas proposes the kansas-nebraska act of 1854 which passes make sure you write that down kansas nebraska act eliminated the missouri compromise line of 3630 and replaced it with popular sovereignty so under the missouri compromise right we agreed some states are allowed to have some territories in the louisiana territory are allowed to have slavery some aren't now we're going to say those territories that weren't allowed to have slavery can maybe have it if enough people move there with slavery and vote for it popular sovereignty but nothing is offered to free states in the north to make up for this it is entirely one-sided favoring southern slavery moving into these territories free states were furious and rightly so independent democrats denounced the act as a gross violation of a sacred pledge meaning the missouri compromise the kansas nebraska act made a concession to the south over extending slavery without any equivalent concession to the north and it broke the older compromise betraying the agreement that this territory would be free in exchange for missouri having slavery it offered nothing in response to the free states of the north and in doing so it destroyed the whig party and it doomed pierce's hopes for further expansion because the idea of expansion and whether or not slavery would be allowed there is now so controversial so the kansas nebraska act kills the whig party and i'll let you start guessing what party's going to pop up in its place but first proceed to the next part of the lecture page to learn a little bit more about president franklin pierce and take a close look at pierce's face he resembles the modern politician he's related to see if you can recognize the resemblance and figure out who