Transcript Document

What
do
you the
think
the
white
people
are
doing?
How
What
would
are
aasoutherner
African
Americans
feel
about
doing?
this?
Why
would
southerner
feel
that
this
What
do
you
see
here?
violated the Compromise of 1850?
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WhyWhy
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northerners?
vote for the act?
The Fugitive Slave Law
• No one was happy with the Fugitive Slave
Law passed under the Compromise of 1850.
• Under the law, any person arrested as a runaway slave
had almost no legal rights.
• In addition, any person who helped a slave escape, or
refused to aid slave catchers, could be jailed.
• Many northerners refused to support the law, angering
slaveholders and making the law impossible to enforce.
• Of the tens of thousands of fugitives living in the North
during the 1850s, only 299 were captured and returned
to their owners.
they were asked to help slave catchers.
northerners refused to obey it.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• In 1851, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, a
northerner, apparently
had a vision while she
was sitting in church.
• Her vision was of a
saintly slave known as
Uncle Tom who was
whipped to death by
his cruel master, Simon
Legree.
Uncle Tom’s • Stowe raced home and
wrote down her vision.
Cabin
It would later become
part of a much longer
story that was first
published in
installments (parts) in an
abolitionist newspaper.
• In 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published as a novel.
• It was soon turned into a play as well.
• It aroused powerful emotions about slavery and in the
North, it turned millions of people against slavery.
• Meanwhile, in the South, the novel and its author were
scorned and cursed.
it aroused powerful emotions against
slavery.
it turned people against slavery.
The Ostend Manifesto
• It was a message sent to the secretary of state by
three American diplomats who were meeting in
Ostend, Belgium.
• President Franklin Pierce had been trying to purchase
the island of Cuba from Spain, but Spain had refused
the offer.
• The message from the diplomats urged the U.S.
government to seize Cuba by force if necessary.
• When the message leaked to the public, angry
northerners charged Pierce’s government of wanting
to grab Cuba in order to add another slave state to
the Union.
The KansasNebraska Act
• Senator Stephen A. Douglas of
Illinois drafted a bill to create two
new territories on the Great
Plains, Kansas and Nebraska.
• Under the bill, the Missouri
Compromise would be scrapped
and it would be left to the settlers
themselves to vote on whether to
permit slavery in the two
territories.
• Northerners feared that it would
lead to more slave states, but
Douglas told them that the
climates of Kansas and Nebraska
were not suited for slavery.
Bloodshed
in Kansas
• After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, settlers poured
into Kansas. Most of these settlers were peaceful farmers,
but some moved to Kansas either to support or to oppose
slavery.
• Before long, Kansas had two competing governments, one
for slavery and one against it.
Bloodshed in Kansas
• The struggle over slavery turned violent when
pro-slavery settlers from Missouri invaded
Lawrence, Kansas, the home of the anti-slavery
government.
• The invaders burned a hotel, looted several
homes, and tossed the presses of two abolitionist
newspapers into the Kaw River.
• Two days later, an abolitionist named John Brown
and seven of his followers invaded the pro-slavery
town of Pottawatomie. They dragged five men
they suspected of supporting slavery from their
homes and hacked them to death with swords.
John Brown and the clash of pro-slavery and
anti-slavery forces in Kansas
it overturned the Missouri
Compromise and allowed slavery north of
o
36 30’ in the Louisiana Territory.
they could take slaves into the Louisiana
Territory.
Charles Sumner
• The violence in Kansas
greatly upset Senator
Charles Sumner of
Massachusetts.
• In 1856, he gave a
passionate speech
entitled “The Crime
Against Kansas,” where
he accused Douglas of
having plotted with
southerners to make
Kansas a slave state.
Violence in
Congress
• One of the
southerners
Sumner attacked
in his speech
was Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina.
• Two days after the Sumner’s speech, Senator
Butler’s nephew, South Carolina representative
Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner in the Senate,
beating him with his cane until it broke in half.
Reactions to the Attack
• Reactions to the attack on Sumner showed how
badly divided the country had become.
• Many southerners applauded Brooks for
defending the honor of his family and the South.
• Southern supporters sent Brooks new canes to
replace the one he had broken on Sumner’s head.
• Most northerners viewed the beating as another
example of southern brutality.
The Dred Scott
Case
• In 1857, the slavery
controversy shifted from
Congress to the Supreme
Court with a case concerning
a Missouri slave named Dred
Scott.
• Years earlier, Scott had
traveled with his owner to
Wisconsin, where slavery was
banned by the Missouri
Compromise. Upon his
return to Missouri, Scott went
to court to win his freedom,
arguing that his stay in
Wisconsin had made him a
free man.
The Dred Scott Case
•
1.
2.
3.
4.
The nine Supreme Court justices had four key
questions to decide:
As a slave, was Dred Scott a citizen who had the
right to bring a case before a federal court?
Did his time in Wisconsin make him a free man?
Did Congress have the power to make any laws
at all concerning slavery in the territories?
And, if so, was the Missouri Compromise a
constitutional use of that power?
he had lived in a free territory.
they felt slave owners should have the right
to take their slaves anywhere.
Group Work
• Work with your partner to develop a
compromise.
• In developing your compromise, find the best
way to protect your side’s interests without
escalating (increasing) the tensions.
• You and your partner must both agree upon
the compromise.
• Once agreed upon, write down your
compromise under Part 2 on pg. 148.
The Dred Scott Decision
• The Supreme Court decided by a vote of five to
four that Scott could not sue for his freedom in a
federal court because he was not a citizen.
• Nor could he become a citizen because no African
American, whether slave or free, was an American
citizen – or could ever become one.
The Dred Scott Decision
• The Supreme Court also rejected Scott’s argument
that his stay in Wisconsin had made him a free
man because the Missouri Compromise was
unconstitutional.
• The argument of the Court was as follows:
– Slaves are property.
– The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution says that
property cannot be taken from people without due
process of law – that is, a proper court hearing.
– Banning slavery in a territory is the same as taking
property away from slaveholders who would like to
bring their slaves into that territory and that is
unconstitutional.
Reactions to the Dred Scott Decision
• Southerners applauded the
decision and hoped that the
issue of slavery in the
territories had been finally
settled in their favor.
• Northerners were stunned
and outraged by the Court’s
decision.
- Dred Scott could not sue for his
freedom in a federal court because
he was not a citizen, nor could any
African American ever become one.
- Scott’s stay in Wisconsin did not
make him a free man because the
Missouri Compromise was
unconstitutional.
- Congress cannot ban slavery in
the territories.