Key Moments Leading to the Civil War, 1776-1859
1776: The Declaration of Independence, final version, fails to include a strong condemnation of slavery. Jefferson had written in his original draft: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.” South Carolina and Georgia objected, and the Congress omitted the passage.
1787: The Northwest Ordinance
Article 6, “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”
1787: The U.S. Constitution implicitly allows slavery with:
· The fugitive slave clause
· Slaves counting as 3/5 persons
· The possibility of ending the international slave trade as early as January 1, 1808
1819-1820: The Missouri Compromise
· Missouri would enter as a slave state, but no state north of the southern Missouri line in the Louisiana Purchase could be admitted as a slave state. The new line became latitude 36 degrees, 30 inches, replacing the old line, the Mason-Dixon line which separated Pennsylvania from Maryland.
· In addition, Maine, which had been under the control of Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state. So balance again: 12 to 12.
1828-1833: The Nullification Crisis
Andrew Jackson, a nationalist, declared: “The power to annul a law of the United States, assumed by one state, [is] incompatible with the existence of the Union, contradicted expressly by the letter of the Constitution, unauthorized by its spirit, inconsistent with every principle on which it was founded, and destructive of the great object for which it was formed.”
· Congress passed the Compromise Tariff, which very slowly lowered the duties–reducing them by 20% over 9 years.
· But, Congress also passed a “Force Bill,” giving President Jackson federal power to enforce compliance with the tariff, if South Carolina refused to federal sovereignty in the matter.
1846-1848: Manifest Destiny and the Mexican War
The Democratic Review stated in 1838: “The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. It its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles: to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere—its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens—and its congregation the Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling and owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood—of ‘peace and goodwill among men.’” By 1845, writers were being even more blunt. One congressman noted: “This continent was intended by Providence as a vast theater on which to work out the grand experiment of Republican Government, under the auspices of the Anglo-Saxon race.’”
1850: Compromise of 1850; the Fugitive Slave Law
Frederick Douglass said that “the only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make dead a dozen or more dead kidnapers. . . . After all, he concluded: most blacks “would hew their way to Liberty, despite the pale and puny opposition of their oppressors”
1854: Kansas-Nebraska Act; formation of the Republican Party
Popular Sovereignty: “All questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and in the new States to be formed therefrom, are to be left to the people residing therein, though their appropriate representatives.”
1856-1865: Bleeding Kansas
William Seward: “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers and is in right.”
1859: John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry
“I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away; but with blood.”
November 1860: Election of Abraham Lincoln
