5.6 Failure of Compromise

Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois wanted to organize the Nebraska Territory so a transcontinental railroad could run west from Chicago. To win Southern votes, his bill divided the area into Kansas and Nebraska and let settlers decide on slavery by popular sovereignty. Because both territories lay north of 36°30′, the act repealed the Missouri Compromise.

Northerners were furious that a line respected for more than thirty years had been erased. The act destroyed the Whig Party, which split along sectional lines, and led to the founding of the Republican Party in 1854. The Republicans united former Whigs, Free-Soilers, antislavery Democrats and some Know-Nothings around one main goal: stopping slavery's spread into the territories. They were a purely Northern party.

Popular sovereignty turned Kansas into a battleground. Proslavery 'Border Ruffians' crossed from Missouri to vote illegally, creating a proslavery territorial legislature, while antislavery settlers, some sponsored by New England groups, set up a rival government. In May 1856 a proslavery force sacked the free-soil town of Lawrence. Days later, the abolitionist John Brown and his followers killed five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie Creek. Dozens of people died in the violence that followed.

The violence reached Congress too. In May 1856, after Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts gave a fierce antislavery speech, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat him with a cane on the Senate floor. Many Southerners praised Brooks; Northerners saw proof of Southern brutality.

In 1857–1858 President James Buchanan backed the proslavery Lecompton Constitution for Kansas even though most settlers opposed it. Douglas broke with Buchanan over it, splitting the Democrats, and Kansas voters rejected it. Kansas entered the Union as a free state in 1861.

Dred Scott was an enslaved man whose owner had taken him to live in the free state of Illinois and the free Wisconsin Territory. He sued for his freedom.

Chief Justice Roger Taney's majority opinion ruled that Black people, whether enslaved or free, were not citizens and so could not sue in federal court. It also ruled that Congress had no power to ban slavery in the territories, because that would deprive slaveholders of their property without due process under the Fifth Amendment. This meant the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along.

Southerners celebrated. Republicans were outraged, because the ruling made their main goal unconstitutional, and many Northerners feared that a 'Slave Power' controlled the federal government.

In 1858 Abraham Lincoln challenged Douglas for his Illinois Senate seat. In his 'House Divided' speech, Lincoln argued the nation could not remain half slave and half free. In seven debates, Lincoln pressed Douglas on how popular sovereignty could survive Dred Scott. At Freeport, Douglas answered that settlers could keep slavery out by refusing to pass laws protecting it. This Freeport Doctrine kept him popular in Illinois, and he won the seat, but it angered Southern Democrats. Lincoln became a national figure.

In October 1859 John Brown led a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to arm enslaved people for a revolt. It failed, and Brown was tried and hanged for treason against Virginia. Some Northerners hailed him as a martyr, which convinced many white Southerners that the North wanted to destroy slavery by violence.