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As the Mexican American War began in 1846, several divisions opened within the Whig Party. Many Northern Whigs condemned the war as a slaveholders' scheme to expand slavery into western territory, while Southern Whigs supported it as a patriotic cause. These early fractures over the war undermined the party's unity and set in motion the political breakdown that would later explode during the elections of 1852. (Mcpherson, 117-121). -
The Free Soil Party was a short-lived but influential U.S. political party formed in 1848. Its central purpose was to oppose the expansion of slavery into the western territories acquired after the Mexican-American War. -
The Compromise of 1850 was a series of five laws passed by the U.S. Congress to ease tensions between free and slave states after the Mexican–American War. As western lands were being settled, the nation was sharply divided over whether slavery would expand. -
The Kansas–Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. It opened them to popular sovereignty, letting settlers decide whether to allow slavery. This overturned the Missouri Compromise and triggered violent conflict. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers flooded into Kansas to influence the vote. The act shattered the Whig Party, split the Democrats, and helped give rise to the Republican Party. -
Anthony Burns was an enslaved man who had escaped to Boston. He was seized under the Fugitive Slave Act. Northern protests rose up but federal troops enforced his return to slavery in a dramatic display that shocked many previously apathetic northerners. The case rose northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act and revealed to northerners the federal government's commitment to protecting slavery. -
After denouncing slavery in the Senate, Charles Sumner was brutally beaten by Representative Preston Brooks. The incident shocked the North and became proof of southern “violence” in the national imagination. -
Lincoln declared to rally the troops for the coming contest in 1856. He stated, ‘‘Can we not come together, for the future . . . Let past
differences, as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us
reinaugurate the good old ‘central issues’ of the Republic. We can do it (Varon, 287). -
The Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were not citizens and that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories. The decision outraged the North and convinced many that the "Slave Power" dominated the federal government. -
A sharp financial panic had swept through the United States in the wake of falling international grain prices and the breakdown of key banks. The North was wracked with unemployment and business failure while the South was less affected due to the stability in cotton prices. This deepened sectional tensions as many southerners argued the crisis proved the superiority of a slave-based economy. -
Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election of 1860, not carrying a single southern state and thereby convinced many white southerners that they had lost all national political influence. The victory of Lincoln in the election, based on the issue of opposing the spread of slavery into western territories, tightened southern fears about the threat to their political and economic system. His election directly triggered the first wave of secession, beginning with South Carolina in December 1860.