Hey there and welcome back to Heimler's History. Now we've been going through Unit 5 of the AP US History curriculum and in the last video we considered the Compromise of 1850, which put a bandaid on the gushing neck wound of America's abject regional division over the issue of slavery. That calmed things down for a while, but ultimately any attempt to compromise over the issue ultimately failed. And that failure is what this video is all about.
So if you're ready to get them brain cows milked, let's get to it. Now I've already taken all the mystery out of it for you. Every attempt at compromise regarding slavery failed. But it'll be important to consider just what those attempts at political compromise were and why they failed to solve the problem.
Now, one of the main reasons politicians were fighting over this issue during this time period is because America just couldn't stop gathering up new lands in the West, and every time that happened, the question of whether slavery could exist in those new territories erupted all over again. I'm not going to tell you about the Compromise of 1850 in this video, since that's what the last video was about. So let's move forward in time and see what other compromises were made, and first up is the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Now, if you look at this map, you can clearly see that this northern section of the Louisiana Purchase was a above the 3630 line, which means, according to the Compromise of 1820, that slavery could not exist in that territory.
But in 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed that this territory be divided into two parts, the Kansas Territory and the Nebraska Territory. Additionally, he proposed that each territory decide by popular sovereignty whether to allow slavery or not. Just in case you forgot, popular sovereignty just means that the people living in those territories could decide for themselves whether to allow slavery.
And if you're listening closely, you'll no doubt see why this proposal is so important. proposal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act enraged some Americans, especially those of the Northern persuasion. By passing this law, Congress effectively overturned the Compromise of 1820, which Northerners held onto with exceeding tenacity. Now, one major fallout of the Popular Sovereignty decision is that violence erupted in Kansas between pro-slavery and anti-slavery folks. And why wouldn't it?
Like, if the people themselves got to decide the slavery question, then clearly each side was going to fight in order to gain control of the territory. This violence became known as Bleeding Kansas, and the violence continued on and off for several years. But in 1855, when it came time to elect a territorial legislature and therefore to decide once and for all the fate of Kansas with respect to slavery, something kind of wonky happened.
According to the voter rolls, there were something like 1,500 men eligible to vote. But when the votes were counted, there were like 6,000 votes. I'm just a humble history teacher who barely passed high school algebra, but even I can see that those numbers are a little kooky.
As it turned out, the explanation for all those additional votes wasn't that much of a puzzle. Like Missouri was right next door, and that was a slave state, and at the news that a new territorial legislature was being elected, thousands of pro-slavery Missourians flooded across the border and cast illegal votes for a pro-slavery territory. It was clearly fraudulent, but the pro-slavery folks in Kansas did not concede, nor did the anti-slavery folks, and so what was the solution? The solution was that But two rival state legislatures were established in Kansas.
The pro-slavery folks wrote up a constitution and established their legislature in Compton, while the anti-slavery folks refused to recognize the authority of the fraudulent constitution and wrote their own governing document and set up a rival legislature in Topeka. To make the fracture even worse, President Franklin Pierce went ahead and recognized the pro-slavery government as legitimate and the anti-slavery government as fraudulent. Now I hope you're starting to see why westward expansion and slavery were causing people to lose their ever-loving minds during this period.
Okay, so that was one attempt at compromise, and it was, in no uncertain terms, a failure. Let's look at another attempt, namely the Dred Scott decision of 1857. This was a case brought before the Supreme Court that had massive consequences for the slavery question, and the story goes like this. Dred Scott was an enslaved man who lived in Missouri, and he was taken by his master to live in Illinois and Wisconsin.
both places where slavery was illegal. And so on account of that, Dred Scott sued his master for his freedom, arguing that by virtue of living in free territory for two years, he was indeed free. Now, seems like a decent argument to me.
However, Chief Justice Roger Taney, who was a Southern Democrat, handed down a decision along with the majority of the court against Scott's argument. And the reasons behind that decision were as follows. First, Dred Scott was a slave and not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue in federal court.
Second, the Constitution clearly states that Congress cannot deprive any citizen of property without due process of law. Therefore, if enslaved people were property, then slave owners could take them anywhere they wanted without fear of being deprived of their property. Okay, are you listening to that?
Do you realize what that decision effectively accomplished? If slave owners could now take their property without fear of being deprived of their property, property anywhere they wanted, that means that any territory or any state in the Union would be open to slavery. Now knowing how tense everyone is about this slavery question, it's not hard to see how we're headed toward full-scale civil war at this point.
But there was still one step left to take, and that was the election of 1860, which I will take up in the next video. But for now, we need to consider how this boiling national anger affected the political parties. In a nutshell, the increasing division over slavery weakened the two-party system significantly. The Whig Party was the first casualty of this division as the result of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The party became bitterly divided between a pro-slavery faction who called themselves Cotton Whigs and anti-slavery Whigs who called themselves Conscience Whigs.
And at the same time that the Whig Party was going the way of the Dodo, the Democratic Party was gaining strength as a regional pro-slavery party. But the power of the Democrats would not go unopposed for long. A new party, namely the Republican Party, was born in 1854, which gathered together under one banner a seriously diverse group of folks.
Under the Republican banner, you had former members of the Know-Nothing Party, you had abolitionists, you had Free Soilers, you had Conscience Whigs, and quite a few others. Now to be clear, the Republicans did not advocate the abolition of slavery. They merely argued that slavery was a form of slavery.
should not be able to spread into new territories. But that nuance was lost on the Southern Democrats, who saw this party as a fundamental threat to the institution of slavery everywhere. And in 1858, which was a year of midterm elections, the Republicans actually did pretty well in their congressional races.
And that deeply frightened Southerners, because a presidential election was coming in 1860, and if a Republican... Republican was elected to that office, it would, in their eyes, mean the demise of the South. Thanks for watching. I've got more videos on Unit 5 right here, so click this playlist if you want to keep studying.
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