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The Collapse of the Two-Party System
Following the compromise of 1850 and the crisis in Kansas, the nation's two major parties, the Whigs and Democrats, began to fracture along regional lines. In the North, the Whigs largely blended into a new party: the Republicans. Though their presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, was defeated in 1856, the party polled strongly in the North and showed that it was the Northern party of the future. In the South, the Republican Party was viewed as a divisive element. -
Two Regions on Separate Paths
While the South was devoted to an agrarian plantation economy with a slow growth in population, the North had embraced industrialization, large urban areas, infrastructure growth, as well as was experiencing high birth rates and a large influx of European immigrants. This boost in population doomed Southern efforts to maintain balance in the government as it meant the future addition of more free states and the election of a Northern, potentially anti-slavery, president. -
"Uncle Tom's Cabin"
One of the most polarizing episodes between North and South occurred upon the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which depicted the slave’s life as a relentless nightmare of sorrow and cruelty. Northern passions were inflamed while furious Southerners dismissed the story en masse as an outrageously skewed and unfair portrayal. After the conflict began it was said that Lincoln, upon meeting Mrs. Stowe said, “So you are the little lady who started this great war?' -
Abolitionism
Abolitionists ranged in their beliefs from those who thought that all slaves should be freed immediately William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass. Abolitionists campaigned for the end of the "peculiar institution" and supported anti-slavery causes such as the Free State movement in Kansas. Upon the rise of the Abolitionists, an ideological debate arose with the Southerners regarding the morality of slavery with both sides frequently citing Biblical sources. -
Kansas-Nebraska Act
In 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, sponsored by frequent presidential candidate Stephen A. Douglas, overturned the Missouri Compromise and permitted settlers in the Kansas Territory to choose for themselves whether they wanted a free or slave state. Outraged Northern abolitionists, horrified at the notion of slavery spreading by popular sovereignty, began raising funds to send anti-slave settlers to Kansas. -
The Dred Scott Decision
Dred Scott was a slave who sought citizenship through the American legal system, and whose case eventually ended up in the Supreme Court. The famous Dred Scott Decision in 1857 denied his request stating that no person with African blood could become a U.S. citizen. Besides denying citizenship for African-Americans, it also overturned the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had restricted slavery in certain U.S. territories. This caused fueds between slave and free states. -
The Raid on Harper's Ferry
On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and a band of followers seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), in what is believed to have been an attempt to arm a slave insurrection. (Brown denied this at his trial, but evidence indicated otherwise.) They were dislodged by a force of U.S. Marines led by Army lieutenant colonel Robert E. Lee. Brown was swiftly tried for treason against Virginia and hanged. -
John Brown's Raid
In October 1859, financed by the extreme wing of the Abolitionist movement, Brown and eighteen men attempted to raid the government armory at Harper's Ferry, VA. Believing that the nation's slaves were ready to rise up, Brown attacked with the goal of obtaining weapons for the insurrection. After initial success, the raiders were cornered in the armory's engine house by local militia. -
Southern Secession
South Carolina had threatened this before in the 1830s during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, over a tariff that benefited Northern manufacturers but increased the cost of goods in the South. Jackson had vowed to send an army to force the state to stay in the Union, and Congress authorized him to raise such an army. In 1860 and early 1861 South Carolina sent emissaries to other slave holding states urging their legislatures to follow its lead, nullify their contract with the United States. -
The Election of President Lincoln
Exacerbating tensions, the old Whig political party was dying. Many of its followers joined with members of the American Party (Know-Nothings) and others who opposed slavery to form a new political entity in the 1850s, the Republican Party. When the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election, Southern fears that the Republicans would abolish slavery reached a new peak. Lincoln was an avowed opponent of the expansion of slavery but said he would not interfere with it.
