Reading...
Play button
Play button
Use LEFT and RIGHT arrow keys to navigate between flashcards;
Use UP and DOWN arrow keys to flip the card;
H to show hint;
A reads text to speech;
17 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
|
The Compromise of 1850
|
Mexican War (1848)
United States contained an equal number (fifteen each) of free and slave states The vast territory gained by the war threatened to upset this balance Free-soil policy Extension of the Missouri Compromise line Popular sovereignty Offered the greatest hope for compromise This notion pleased neither free-soil nor proslavery extremists |
|
|
The Compromise of 1850
|
Utah and California sought admission to the Union as free states
Texas, admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845, aggravated matters by claiming the eastern half of New Mexico Northerners had grown increasingly unhappy with slavery in the District of Columbia Southerners complained about lax enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 |
|
|
Zachary Taylor Plan
|
Left the decision to the states
Utah and California to apply for admission as free states New Mexico (where the Mexican government had abolished slavery) was expected to do the same What would the North gain? What would the South gain? |
|
|
Henry Clay (Kentucky) Compromise Bill
|
The admission of California as a free state
The division of the remainder of the Mexican cession into two territories New Mexico Utah The settlement of the Texas-New Mexico boundary dispute on terms favorable to New Mexico As a pot-sweetener for Texas, an agreement that the federal government would assume the state’s large public debt Continuation of slavery in the District of Columbia but abolition of the slave trade A more effective fugitive slave law |
|
|
Henry Clay (Kentucky) Compromise Bill
|
Clay rolled all these proposals into a single “omnibus” bill
The debates over the compromise bill during late winter and early spring 1850 marked the last major appearance on the public stage of Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, the trio who had stood at the center of American political life since the War of 1812 |
|
|
July 1850
|
Zachary Taylor died
President Millard Fillmore (New York) supported Clay’s compromise Stephen A. Douglas (Illinois) Broke the omnibus into a series of individual measures Proposed that popular sovereignty settle the slavery issue in New Mexico and Utah Compromise of 1850 |
|
|
Assessing the Compromise
|
Northern victories
Admission of California Abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia Southern victories Stricter fugitive slave law |
|
|
Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act
|
Efforts to catch and return runaways inflamed emotions in both North and South. In 1854 a Boston mob aroused by antislavery speeches killed a courthouse guard in an abortive effort to rescue a fugitive slave Anthony Burns. Determined to enforce the law, President Franklin Pierce sent federal troops to escort Burns to the harbor, where a ship carried him back to slavery. As five platoons of troops marched Burns to the ship, 50,000 people lined the streets. One Bostonian hung from his window a black coffin bearing the words “the funeral of liberty.”
|
|
|
Northern Response
|
“Vigilance” committees spirited endangered blacks to Canada
Lawyers dragged out hearings to raise slave-catchers’ expenses “Personal liberty laws” hindered state officials’ enforcement of the law |
|
|
Harriet Beecher Stow’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)
|
Three hundred thousand copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were sold in 1852
1.2 million by summer 1853 State dramatizations reached perhaps fifty times as many people as the novel did David Potter concluded that the northern attitude toward slavery “was never quite the same after Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” |
|
|
The Election of 1852
|
Winfield Scott (Virginia)
Franklin Pierce (New Hampshire) Carried twenty-seven of the thirty-one states Collected 254 of 296 electoral votes Franklin Pierce was the last presidential candidate of the nineteenth century to carry the popular and electoral vote in both North and South |
|
|
How had the second party system kept the conflict over slavery in check?
|
Provided Americans other issues to argue about:
Banking Internal improvements Tariffs Temperance |
|
|
Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854)
|
Farmers wanted to organize the large territory west of Iowa and Missouri
Railroad enthusiasts who dreamed of a rail line linking the Midwest to the Pacific also wanted the territory organized |
|
|
Potential conflict loomed
|
Some southerners advocated a southern-based Pacific route rather than a midwestern one
Nebraska lay north of the Missouri Compromise line in the Louisiana Purchase, a region closed to slavery |
|
|
The Crisis of the Union (1857–1860)
|
The Dred Scott Case (1857)
The Lecompton Constitution (1857) The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1858) |
|
|
The Movement for Secession
|
South Carolina convention (December 20, 1860)
Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed Confederate State of America (February 4, 1861) |
|
|
The Coming of War
|
“Hold, occupy, and posses” federal property in the state that had seceded
Fort Pickens (Florida) Fort Sumter (Charleston, South Carolina) April 12, 1861 Virginia North Carolina Arkansas Tennessee |
