Explain the justifications for the doctrine of manifest destiny, including material and idealistic motivations. How did western expansion affect the sectional tensions between the North and South?
Why did many Americans criticize the Mexican War? How did they see expansion as a threat to American liberties?
Why did Stephen Douglas, among others, believe that “popular sovereignty” could resolve sectional divisions of the 1850s? Why did the idea not work out?
How did 12-years-a-Slave show the affect of increased demand for slaves and how it led to the kidnapping and sale of free blacks from the North?
Resources:
Attached files and
Foner Chapter 13 summary A House Divided, 1840–1861
This chapter concentrates on the events that led to the Civil War. It opens with a vignette demonstrating the touchiness of southerners about slavery by the 1850s. Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis objected to placing a “liberty cap” atop the statue planned for the U.S. Capitol’s dome because of the association of such caps with ancient Roman slaves’ yearning for freedom. The main reason slavery had assumed a central role in the nation’s debate by the 1850s was territorial expansion—what many Americans called their “manifest destiny” to control the continent, a topic the chapter explores through coverage of Texas independence and annexation, the settlement of Oregon and California, and finally the Mexican War. The war with Mexico, begun in 1846 by President James Polk in an effort to acquire California, was relatively short but controversial because many believed the war would encourage slavery’s expansion. Opponents included Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln. The ultimate acquisition of California and most of the rest of the present American Southwest (the Mexican Cession) formally occurred with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Soon, thousands of Americans and others flocked to California because of the discovery of gold there in early 1848. This gold rush created wealth as well as ethnic conflict. Also, even before the treaty transferred land to the United States, Representative David Wilmot (D-Pennsylvania) proposed banning slavery from territory that might be taken from Mexico. This Wilmot Proviso gave rise to the Free Soil Party, which spread antislavery’s appeal far beyond abolitionists and intensified sectional debate.
The Compromise of 1850 solved the issue of the status of slavery within the Mexican Cession but created new controversy with a stronger Fugitive Slave Act. The Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) reopened the sectional divide over slavery in the territories by overturning the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition on slavery in what were now Kansas and Nebraska territories. The consequences of the act included political realignment with the collapse of the Whigs, a brief nativist Know-Nothing movement, and the rise in the North of the Republican Party, based on free labor ideology. In addition, a short civil war broke out between free soil and proslavery factions in Kansas. The attempt of the U.S. Supreme Court to settle the slavery controversy resulted in the Dred Scott decision (1857). Chief Justice Roger Taney’s ruling that blacks could not be U.S. citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery from territories pleased most southern whites but angered many northerners. That the Court did not solve the issue is clear when reading this chapter’s “Voices of Freedom,” a selection from one of the debates in the 1858 U.S. Senate race between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. Another election, that for president in 1860, took place amid mounting sectional tension due to John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry and the division of the Democratic Party over whether to protect slavery in territories. The Republican Lincoln won this highly sectional election, which led to the secession of seven slave states and the formation of the Confederate States of America before his inauguration. The chapter ends with the April 1861 Fort Sumter crisis, which kicked off the Civil War.
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