Chapter19: Drifting Toward Disunion

Question 1

Why did Stowe write Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

Answer 1

Dismayed by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, she was determined to awaken the North to the wickedness of slavery by laying bare its terrible inhumanity, especially the cruel splitting of families.

Question 2

The deeper sources of Stowe’s antislavery sentiments lay what?

Answer 2

in the evangelical religious crusades of the Second Great Awakening

Question 3

What was the fame of Stowe’s novel?

Answer 3

~The success of the novel at home and abroad was sensational.
~Several hundred thousand copies were published in the first year
~was translated into more than a score of languages.
It was also put on the stage in “Tom shows” for lengthy runs.
~To millions of people, it made slavery appear almost as evil as it really was

Question 4

What was the effect of Stowe’s novel?

Answer 4

~The truth is that Uncle Tom’s Cabin did help start the Civil War—and win it.
~ Uncounted thousands of readers swore that they would have nothing to do with the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law
~Boys in Blue who volunteered to fight the Civil War
~governments in London and Paris seriously considered intervening in behalf of the South, but they were sobered by the realization that many of their own people, aroused by the “Tom-mania,” might not support them

Question 5

Was Stowe’s writing an unfair indictment?

Answer 5

Stowe had never witnessed slavery at first hand in the Deep South, but she had seen it briefly during a visit to Kentucky, and she had lived for many years in Ohio, a center of Underground Railroad activity

Question 6

What was The Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton Helper about?

Answer 6

Hating both slavery and blacks, he attempted to prove by an array of statistics that indirectly the nonslaveholding whites were the ones who suffered most from the millstone of slavery. Unable to secure a publisher in the South, he finally managed to find one in the North.

Question 7

What was effect of The Impending Crisis of the South by Hinton Helper?

Answer 7

Helper’s influence was negligible among the
poorer whites to whom he addressed his message. His book, with its “dirty allusions,” was banned in the South, where book-burning parties were held. But in the North, untold thousands of copies, many in condensed form, were distributed as campaign literature by the Republicans.

Question 8

Where was the worst possible workings of popular sovereignty?

Answer 8

Kansas

Question 9

Who were the newcomers who ventured into Kansas?

Answer 9

Most of the northerners were just ordinary westward-moving pioneers in search of richer lands beyond the sunset. But a small part of the inflow was financed by groups of northern abolitionists or free-soilers

Question 10

What was the New England Emigrant Aid Co?

And what did they carry with them?

Answer 10

The most famous of these antislavery ~organizations was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which sent about two thousand people to the troubled area to forestall the South—and also to make a profit.
~many of them carried the deadly new breech-loading Sharps rifles, nicknamed “Beecher’s Bibles” after the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother), who had helped raise money for their purchase.

Question 11

How did Southerns feel about Kansas?

Answer 11

They had supported the Kansas-Nebraska scheme of Douglas with the unspoken understanding that Kansas would become slave and Nebraska free.

Question 12

Why was it a losing game to plant blacks in Kansas?

Answer 12

slaves were valuable and volatile property,
and foolish indeed were owners who would take them where bullets were flying and where the soil might be voted free under popular sovereignty

Question 13

When the day came in 1855 to elect members of the first territorial legislature, what happened?

Answer 13

proslavery “border ruffians” poured in from Missouri to vote early and often.

Question 14

How was there two governments in Kansas?

Answer 14

The South “won” the election for Kansas to become a slave state and set up a government at Shawnee Mission.
Free-soilers cried foul and set up their own government in Topeka.
Thus, after the election, there were two governments: one slave and based on a bogus election, and one free and illegitimate.

Question 15

What was the prelude to a bloodier tragedy?

Answer 15

The breaking point came in 1856 when a gang of pro-slavery raiders, alleging provocation, shot up and burned a part of the free-soil town of Lawrence

Question 16

What did John Brown do at Pottawatomie Creek?

Answer 16

In May 1856, The violence continued when John Brown and men set out for revenge for Lawrence. At Pottawatomie Creek he killed and chopped up 5 slavery supporters.

Question 17

Altogether ,what did the Kansas conflict do?

Answer 17

destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property, paralyzed agriculture in certain areas, and cost scores of lives.

Question 18

What was the Lecompton Constitution?

Answer 18

The proslavery forces, then in the saddle, devised a tricky document known as the Lecompton Constitution. The people were not allowed to vote for or against the constitution as a whole, but for the constitution either “with slavery” or “with no slavery.” If they voted against slavery, one of the remaining provisions of the constitution would protect the owners of slaves already in Kansas. So whatever the outcome, there would still be black bondage in Kansas.

Question 19

What was Pres. James Buchanan stance on the Lecompton Constitution?

Answer 19

Blind to sharp divisions within his own Democratic party, Buchanan threw the
weight of his administration behind the notorious Lecompton Constitution
Pres. James Buchanan gave his approval, but the Senate had to approve the Constitution.

Question 20

What was Douglass stance on the Lecompton Constitution?

Answer 20

But Senator Douglas, who had championed true popular sovereignty, would have none of this semipopular fraudulency. Deliberately tossing away his strong support in the South for the presidency, he fought courageously for fair play and democratic principles.

Question 21

Overall results of Lecompton Constitution?

Answer 21

The end results were (a) the Democratic party was terribly divided, (b) Kansas was now left in limbo—somewhere in between a territory and a state, and (c) the slavery question was still not answered.

Question 22

What happened to Demo party?

Answer 22

President Buchanan, by antagonizing the numerous Douglas Democrats in the North, hopelessly divided the once-powerful Democratic party. Until then, it had been the only remaining national party for the Whigs were dead and the Republicans were
sectional.

Question 23

Senator Charles Sumner of MA on the floor of Senate in 1856?

Answer 23

was a leading abolitionist—one of the few prominent in political life. Highly educated but cold, humorless, intolerant, and egotistical, he had made himself one
of the most disliked men in the Senate. Brooding over the turbulent miscarriage of popular sovereignty, he delivered a blistering speech titled “The Crime Against Kansas.”
He also referred insultingly to South Carolina and to its white-haired Senator Andrew Butler, one of the best-liked members of the Senate

Question 24

How did Congressman Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina took vengeance?

Answer 24

he resented the insults to his state and to its senator, a distant cousin. His code of honor called for a duel, but in the South one fought only with one’s social equal. On May 22, 1856, he approached Sumner, then
sitting at his Senate desk, and pounded the orator with an eleven-ounce cane until it broke. The victim fell bleeding and unconscious to the floor, while several nearby senators refrained from interfering.

Question 25

Effect of Sumner-Brooks Affair?

Answer 25

House of Representatives could not muster enough votes to expel the South Carolinian, but he resigned and was triumphantly reelected. Southern admirers deluged Brooks with canes, some of them gold-headed, to replace the one that had been broken. The injuries to Sumner’s head and nervous system
were serious. He was forced to leave his seat for three and a half years and go to Europe for treatment that was both painful and costly.

Question 26

What did The Sumner-Brooks clash and the ensuing reactions reveal?

Answer 26

how dangerously inflamed passions

were becoming, North and South.

Question 27

Election of 1856 nominees ?

Answer 27

Democrats met in Cincinnati to nominate James Buchanan.
Delegates of the fast-growing Republican party met in Philadelphia to nominate Fremont, so-called Pathfinder of the West.
The Republican platform came out
vigorously against the extension of slavery into the territories, while the Democrats declared no less emphatically for popular sovereignty.

Question 28

American Party or Know nothing Party?

Answer 28

The recent influx of immigrants from Ireland and Germany had alarmed “nativists,” as many old-stock Protestants were called.
They organized the American party, known also as the Know-Nothing party because of its secretiveness.
in 1856 nominated the lackluster ex-president Millard Fillmore.

Question 29

Who wanted to cut into Rep strength?

Answer 29

Remnants of the dying Whig party likewise endorsed Fillmore, and they and the Know-Nothings threatened to cut into Republican strength

Question 30

Who won the Election 1856

Answer 30

A bland Buchanan, although polling less than a

majority of the popular vote, won handily.

Question 31

Why did the rousing Republicans go down to

defeat?

Answer 31

Frémont lost much ground because of grave
doubts as to his honesty, capacity, and sound judgment.
Perhaps more damaging were the violent
threats of the southern “fire-eaters” that the election of a sectional “Black Republican” would be a declaration of war on them, forcing them to secede.
Many northerners, anxious to save both the Union and their profitable business connections with the South, were thus intimidated into voting for Buchanan.
Innate conservatism triumphed, assisted by so-called southern bully-ism

Question 32

Dred Scott Case problem?

Answer 32

Dred Scott, a black slave, had lived with his master for five years in Illinois and Wisconsin Territory. Backed by interested abolitionists, he sued for freedom on the basis of his long residence on free soil. Scott was a black slave and not a citizen, and hence could not sue in federal courts.

Question 33

Dred Scott Case rulings

Answer 33

A majority of the Court decreed that
because a slave was private property, he or she could be taken into any territory and legally held there in slavery. The reasoning was that the Fifth Amendment clearly forbade Congress to deprive people of their property without due process of law. Now the Court ruled that the Compromise of 1820 had been unconstitutional all along: Congress had no power to ban slavery from the territories, regardless even of what the territorial legislatures themselves might want

Question 34

What did the Dred Scott caused?

Answer 34

Bitterness caused by the Dred Scott decision was deepened by hard times, which dampened a period of feverish prosperity.

Question 35

Was the panic of 1857 really bad?

Answer 35

The storm was not so bad economically as the panic of 1837, but psychologically it was probably the worst of the nineteenth century

Question 36

What caused panic of 1857?

Answer 36

Impouring California gold played its part by helping to inflate the currency.
~The demands of the Crimean War had over-stimulated the growing of grain
~while frenzied speculation in land and railroads had further ripped the economic fabric.
~Unemployment, accompanied by hunger meetings in urban areas, was widespread. “

Question 37

Who was hit hardest by the panic of 1857?

Answer 37

The North, including its grain growers, was

hardest hit. The South, enjoying favorable cotton prices abroad

Question 38

What fatal delusion helped drive the overconfident southerners closer to a shooting showdown?

Answer 38

Panic conditions seemed further proof that cotton was king and that its economic kingdom was stronger than that of the North.

Question 39

North demanded what for their financial distress?

Answer 39

the demand for free farms of 160 acres from the public domain. For several decades interested groups had been urging the federal government to abandon its ancient policy of selling the land for revenue. Instead, the argument ran, acreage should be given outright to the sturdy pioneers as a reward for risking health and life to develop it

Question 40

How did Easter industrialist feel about free land?

Answer 40

Eastern industrialists had long been unfriendly to free land; some of them feared that their underpaid workers would be drained off to the West.

Question 41

How did South feel about free land?

Answer 41

The South was even more bitterly opposed, partly because gang-labor slavery could not flourish on a mere 160 acres.
Free farms would merely fill up the territories more rapidly with free-soilers and further tip the political balance against the South.

Question 42

Homestead act?

Answer 42

In 860, after years of debate, Congress finally passed a homestead act—one that made public lands available at a nominal sum of twenty-five cents an acre. But the homestead
act was stabbed to death by the veto pen of President Buchanan, near whose elbow sat leading southern sympathizers.

Question 43

What did The panic of 1857 also created?

Answer 43

a clamor for higher tariff rates.

Question 44

Tariff of 1857?

Answer 44

New law, responding to pressures from the South, reduced duties to about 20 percent on dutiable goods—the lowest point since the War of 1812.

Question 45

After the tariff, the industrialists in the North wanted what?

Answer 45

need for higher duties and increased protection

Question 46

Thus the panic of 1857 gave the Republicans two surefire economic issues for the election of 1860?

Answer 46

protection for the unprotected and farms for the farmless

Question 47

Why was Lincoln widely referred to as “Honest Abe?”

Answer 47

because he would refuse cases that he had to suspend his conscience to defend

Question 48

What does Lincoln challenge for senate seat? Why is it dumb?

Answer 48

Lincoln, as Republican nominee for the Senate seat, boldly challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates.
This was a rash act, because the stumpy
senator was probably the nation’s most devastating debater. Douglas promptly accepted Lincoln’s challenge, and seven meetings were arranged from August to October 1858

Question 49

Freeport Doctrine

Answer 49

No matter how the Supreme Court ruled,
Douglas argued, slavery would stay down if the people voted it down. Laws to protect slavery would have to be passed by the territorial legislatures.

Question 50

How did Lincoln feel about losing the debates?

Answer 50

Although defeated, he had shambled into the national limelight in company with the most prominent northern politicians

Question 51

What was the effect of debates on Douglass?

Answer 51

But Douglas, in winning Illinois, hurt his own chances of winning the presidency, while further splitting his splintering party. After his opposition to the Lecompton Constitution for Kansas and his further defiance of the Supreme Court at Freeport, southern emocrats were determined to break up the party (and the Union) rather than accept him.

Question 52

Harpers Ferry raid?

Answer 52

His crackbrained scheme was to invade
the South secretly with a handful of followers, call upon the slaves to rise, furnish them with arms, and establish a kind of black free state as a sanctuary. Brown secured several thousand dollars for firearms from northern abolitionists and finally arrived in hilly western Virginia with some twenty men, including several blacks. At scenic Harpers Ferry, he
seized the federal arsenal in October 1859, incidentally killing seven innocent people, including a free black, and injuring ten or so more. But the slaves, largely ignorant of Brown’s strike, failed to rise, and the wounded Brown and the remnants of his tiny band were quickly captured by U.S. Marines under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee.

Question 53

“Old Brown” was convicted of what?

Answer 53

“Old Brown” was convicted of murder and treason after a hasty but legal trial.

Question 54

The effects of Harpers Ferry?

Answer 54

South,already embittered,“Osawatomie Brown” was a wholesale murderer and
an apostle of treason. Many southerners asked how they could possibly remain in the Union while a “murderous gang of abolitionists” were financing armed bands to “Brown” them. Moderate northerners, including Republican leaders, openly deplored this mad exploit. But the South naturally concluded that the violent abolitionist view was shared by the entire North
Abolitionists and other ardent free-soilers were infuriated by Brown’s execution.

Question 55

Demo candidates for Election of 1860?

Answer 55

Deeply divided, the Democrats met in Charleston, South Carolina, with Douglas the leading candidate of the northern wing of the party. The platform came out squarely
for popular sovereignty and, as a sop to the South against obstruction of the Fugitive Slave Law by the states.
~~~Angered southern Democrats promptly organized a rival convention in Baltimore, in which many of the northern states were unrepresented. They selected as their leader the stern-jawed vice president, John C. Breckinridge—-he platform favored the extension of slavery into the territories and the annexation of slave-populated Cuba.

Question 56

Constitutional Union party in Election of 1860

Answer 56

~~~~ Constitutional Union party, met in Baltimore and nominated for the presidency John Bell of TN

Question 57

Rep candidate in Election of 1860?

Answer 57

They gathered in Chicago and picked Lincoln
The Republican platform had a seductive
appeal for just about every important non southern: group: for the free-soilers, nonextension of slavery; for the northern manufacturers, a protective tariff; for the immigrants, no abridgment of rights; for the Northwest, a Pacific railroad; for the West, internal improvements at federal expense; and for the farmers, free homesteads from the public domain.

Question 58

Why was Lincoln a minority president?

Answer 58

Sixty percent of the voters preferred some other candidate. He was also a sectional
president, for in ten southern states, where he was not allowed on the ballot, he polled no popular votes.

Question 59

Why was it bad for the broken up Demo party in Election of 1860?

Answer 59

if the Democrats had not broken up, they could have entered the campaign with higher enthusiasm and better organization and might have won

Question 60

the South, despite its electoral defeat, was

not badly off. Why?

Answer 60

Although the Republicans had elected Lincoln, they controlled neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives. The federal government could not touch slavery in those states where it existed except by a constitutional amendment, and such an amendment could be defeated by one-fourth of the states

Question 61

What did SC threatened to do if the “sectional” Lincoln came in?

Answer 61

Meeting at Charleston in December 1860,
South Carolina unanimously voted to secede. During the next six weeks, six other states of the lower South, though somewhat less united, followed the leader over the precipice: Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. Four more were to join them later, bringing the total to eleven

Question 62

Confederate States of America?

Answer 62

Formally meeting at Montgomery,
Alabama, in February 1861, created a government known as the Confederate States of America. As their president they chose Jefferson Davis

Question 63

Who was blamed for not holding the seceders in the Union by sheer force?

Answer 63

President Buchanan

Question 64

One important reason why Buchanan did not resort to force was ???

Answer 64

was that the tiny standing army of some fifteen thousand men, then widely scattered, was urgently needed to control the Indians in the West

Question 65

Crittenden Compromise

Answer 65

he proposed Crittenden amendments to the
Constitution were designed to appease the South. Slavery in the territories was to be prohibited north of 36° 30’, but south of that line it was to be given federal protection in all territories existing or “here-after to be acquired” (such as Cuba). Future states,
north or south of 36° 30’, could come into the Union with or without slavery, as they should choose. In short, the slavery supporters were to be guaranteed full rights in the southern territories, as long as they were territories, regardless of the wishes of the majority under popular sovereignty.

Question 66

Lincoln’s reaction to Crittenden Compromise?

Answer 66

Lincoln flatly rejected the Crittenden scheme, which offered some slight prospect of success, and all hope of compromise evaporated

Question 67

Why were Southerners dismayed by the triumph of the new sectional Republican party

Answer 67

seemed to threaten their rights as a slaveholding minority.
They were weary of free-soil criticism, abolitionist nagging, and northern interference, ranging from the Underground Railroad to John Brown’s raid.

Question 68

Why Many southerners supported secession?

Answer 68

because they felt sure that their departure would be unopposed
~They were confident Yankee would not or could not fight.
~They believed that northern manufacturers and bankers, so heavily dependent on southern cotton and markets, would not dare to cut their own economic throats with their own unionist swords

Question 69

Why were fermenting in the South?

Answer 69

Worldwide impulses of nationalism—then stir-

ring in Italy, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere—were fermenting in the South.