UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



5986 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



succeeded by Zachary Taylor before California 

 was admitted. 



Taylor's election was regarded as a great 

 Whig triumph; in reality it marked the down- 

 fall of the Whigs. Lewis Cass, the Democratic 

 candidate, and Van Buren, the Free-Soil candi- 

 date, represented parties with definite policies. 

 The Whig party had steadily refused to com- 

 mit itself on the slavery question; its policy 

 was to evade the issue. In this dilemma its 

 only salvation lay in Taylor, the "hero of 

 Buena Vista," who was nominated and elected. 

 The Whigs, however, labored for conciliation, 

 and chiefly through the efforts of Webster and 

 Clay, achieved the Compromise of 1850. For 

 a short time these compromise measures seemed 

 to be a real solution of the controversy, and 

 the administration of Fillmore, who became 

 President after the untimely death of Taylor, 

 was comparatively free from violence of speech 

 or action. 



But this peacefulness was only on the surface. 

 The Compromise of 1850 was followed by a 

 period like that preceding the War of 1812. 

 The older statesmen, Clay, Webster, Calhoun, 

 Polk and Taylor, the leaders of a generation, 

 had died. The new men w^o gradually suc- 

 ceeded to their leadership were radicals. 

 Charles Sumner, William H. Seward and Sal- 

 mon P. Chase, who entered the Senate, were 

 antislavery men of ability; men like Jefferson 

 Davis and Alexander H. Stephens, on the other 

 hand, insisted that Congress was bound to de- 

 fend the institution of slavery in the territories 

 from attack. 



Slavery the Issue. In this period of transi- 

 tion the Democratic candidate, Franklin Pierce, 

 was chosen President in 1852 by an overwhelm- 

 ing electoral vote. Practically the whole of 

 Pierce's administration is covered by the fights 

 in Congress over the admission of Kansas and 

 Nebraska. The enforcement of the Fugitive 

 Slave Law had already caused considerable 

 friction between the North and South, and the 

 Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 reopened all the 

 old controversies. Under the Missouri Com- 

 promise, slavery was prohibited in these terri- 

 tories, but by this new act, which embodied the 

 theory of squatter sovereignty, championed by 

 Stephen A. Douglas, the prohibition of slavery 

 was left to the choice of the inhabitants. The 

 act was ngt passed without a bitter struggle in 

 Congress, while in the territories there was law- 

 lessness and bloodshed in the attempt to con- 

 trol the local governments (see KANSAS, sub- 

 head History). 



Foreign relations, including Commodore Per- 

 ry's visit to Japan and the Ostend Manifesto, 

 were overshadowed by political events at home. 

 Between 1854 and 1856 there arose a great 

 political party, whose announced purpose was 

 to prevent the extension of slavery in the terri- 

 tories. Made up chiefly of Whigs and Know- 

 Nothings, this opposition, though still unor- 

 ganized, elected many of its candidates to 

 Congress, and in 1855 controlled the House of 

 Representatives; a year later, when it had be- 

 come the organized Republican party, it nearly 

 elected John C. Fremont to the Presidency. 



The new President was James Buchanan, by 

 nature a conservative and a believer in the 

 theory of states' rights. Two days after his 

 inauguration, the Supreme Court rendered the 

 Dred Scott decision, which declared the un- 

 constitutionally of the Missouri Compromise 

 and the duty of Congress to protect, not to pro- 

 hibit, slavery in the territories. The storm of 

 indignation which arose in the North gradually 

 led the South to adopt the view that the North 

 refused to recognize this duty of Congress, and 

 that even squatter sovereignty should not be 

 accepted by the South. . Although Minnesota 

 (1858) and Oregon (1859) were admitted as free 

 states, the Southern Senators were determined 

 to prevent the admission of Kansas under simi- 

 lar terms. The North was rapidly growing in 

 population and wealth; in 1790 no greater than 

 the South, it was now numerically nearly twice 

 as strong. In 1859 occurred John Brown's raid 

 at Harper's Ferry, a misguided attempt to free 

 the slaves, which yet showed the South the 

 dangers to which a slave population of 4,000,- 

 000 might subject the white population of only 

 8,000,000. 



As the date of the Presidential election of 

 1860 drew near there was considerable evidence 

 of the sentiment that there was no room for the 

 South in an antislavery Union. As early as 

 July, 1859, Senator Alfred Iverson (1798-1874) 

 of Georgia, declared that if a Free-Soil Presi- 

 dent were elected in 1860 he would favor the 

 formation of an independent Confederacy ; and 

 a few months later the governor of Georgia, 

 Joseph Emerson Brown (1821-1894), announced 

 similar views. 



Division and War. The political campaign 

 of 1860 is without doubt the most complicated 

 in the history of the United States. Of the 

 four candidates, John C. Breckinridge repre- 

 sented the Southern Democrats, who demanded 

 that Congress protect slavery in the territories ; 

 Stephen A. Douglas represented the Northern 



