Unit 5 Princeton Review Flashcards
(30 cards)
Before the Civil War
The election of 1844 pitted James Polk against Whig leader Henry Clay.
Though the differences between the Whig and Democratic platforms may seem hazy by modern standards, and there was more than a little overlap, in one respect the two parties were sharply opposed.
Above all else, the Whigs stood for a policy of internal improvements: building bridges, dredging harbors, digging canals, and in short civilizing the lands the United States already possessed.
Democrats tended to be expansionists, set on pushing the nation’s borders ever outward.
They also felt that it was not the government’s place to do anything with newly added land, and it should instead be kept in private hands, even if that meant living in a country of meandering dirt roads instead of railways.
Compare Whig-dominated New England, dotted with bustling towns and busy factories, to the heavily Democratic South with its isolated plantations, and you have a sense of the two parties’ disparate visions for America.
The election was close, but Polk won.
Polk took office in election of 1844 with four goals, and having pledged to serve only one term, had only four years in which to accomplish them.
The first goal was to restore the practice of keeping government funds in the Treasury; Andrew Jackson had kept them in so-called pet banks, and the results had been disastrous.
The second was to reduce tariffs.
Both of these were accomplished by the end of 1846.
Polk Dealing With Texas
In the last days of his administration, President Tyler had proposed the annexation of Texas.
Northern congressmen were alarmed: Texas was huge and lay entirely south of the Missouri Compromise line, raising the prospect that it might end up being divided into as many as five slave states.
They demanded that Polk maintain the balance by annexing the entirety of the Oregon Country,
“54°40 ́ or Fight,”
but Polk recognized that the United States could hardly afford to fight two territorial wars at the same time, particularly if one was against Great Britain, the other claimant to the Oregon Country.
Consequently, he conceded on demands for expansion deep into Canada and set about instead to negotiate a more reasonable American-Canadian border.
Therefore the Oregon Treaty
ORegon Treaty
signed with Great Britain in 1846, allowed the United States to acquire peacefully what is now Oregon, Washington, and parts of Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.
It also established the current northern border of the region.
Polk and Mexico
Reasonably certain that war in the Northwest could be avoided, Polk concentrated on efforts to claim the Southwest from Mexico.
He tried to buy the territory, and when that failed, he challenged Mexican authorities on the border of Texas, provoking a Mexican attack on American troops.
Mexico was already agitated over the annexation of Texas, which had gained its independence from Mexico in 1836 (remember the Alamo?).
Polk then used the border attack to argue for a declaration of war. Congress granted the declaration, and in 1846 the Mexican-American War began.
Whigs, such as first-term member of the House of Representatives Abraham Lincoln, questioned Polk’s claim that the Mexicans had fired first, but Congress declared war anyway.
“Spot” Resolutions
Whigs were almost universally opposed to the Mexican-American War, as were abolitionists and anti-imperialists.
“Spot” Resolutions
When the young Whig Abraham Lincoln was a Representative in the U.S. Congress, he proposed a series of “spot” resolutions, demanding that Democrat President Polk reveal the exact “spot” where American blood had been spilled by Mexican soldiers, Polk’s main argument when asking for the War.
Lincoln was later criticized by some for this persistent approach and was nicknamed “spotty Lincoln.”
The Mexican-American War did not have universal support from the American public.
Northerners feared that new states in the West would become slave states, thus tipping the balance in Congress in favor of proslavery forces.
Opponents argued that Polk had provoked Mexico into war at the request of powerful slaveholders, and the idea that a few slave owners had control over the government became popular.
Those rich Southerners who allegedly were “pulling the strings” were referred to as the Slave Power by suspicious Northerners.
The gag rule in 1836 raised suspicions of a Slave Power and the defeat of the Wilmot Proviso,
Wilmot Proviso
a congressional bill prohibiting the extension of slavery into any territory gained from Mexico, reinforced those suspicions.
The main thing to remember about Wilmot Proviso is the outcome of the vote.
Vote fell along not party lines but sectional ones. Northern Whigs and Northern Democrats were overwhelmingly in favor, Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats were overwhelming opposed
Political parties split/change
Over the course of the next decade, the Democrats would become even more southern-dominated than before, while the Whigs would split between the anti-slavery, northern “Conscience Whigs” and the pro-slavery, southern “Cotton Whigs,” and would thus follow the Federalists into extinction.
New parties would rise to take its place, the first of which was the Free-Soil Party, a regional, single-issue party devoted to the goals of the Wilmot Proviso.
It should be noted that the Free-Soil Party was largely opposed to the expansion of slavery not because they were abolitionists but because they didn’t want white settlers to have to compete with slave labor in new territories.
Mexican War, Outcomes
While debate raged on, so too did the Mexican War, which went very well for American forces.
The United States prevailed so easily in Texas that Polk not only ordered troops south to Mexico but also across the Southwest and into California, hoping to grab the entire region by war’s end.
When the United States successfully invaded Mexico City, the war was over.
In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
Gadsden Purchase
Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848)
Mexico handed over almost all of the modern Southwest: Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, and Utah.
This is known as the Mexican Cession.
The United States, in return, paid $15 million for the land.
Gadsden Purchase
The United States a few years later (in 1854) would purchase additional land in southern regions of modern Arizona and New Mexico from a cash-strapped Mexico in the Gadsden Purchase for $10 million.
The intent was to use this land for a transcontinental railroad along a southern route across the country.
The addition of this new territory greatly increased the nation’s potential wealth, especially when gold was found at Sutter’s Mill during the year that the treaty was signed.
However, it also posed major problems regarding the status of slavery.
New Territory Caused problems regarding slavery
The chief problem was that by an accident of geography, it just so happened that, east of the Mississippi, the territory of the United States was divided evenly between lands suited for plantation agriculture, where slavery flourished, and those that were not, and where slavery died out shortly after independence.
Now the country extended all the way to the Pacific—but even south of the Missouri Compromise line, lands west of the Mississippi were not suitable for growing cotton, or tobacco, or any of the traditional plantation crops.
Southerners saw a future in which slavery was confined, not to the southern half of the country, but to the southeastern quarter of it, and where they would therefore be greatly outvoted should free-soil advocates decide to ban slavery everywhere.
Southerners therefore decided that the time had come to rip up the Missouri Compromise and attempt to open up more areas to slavery.
Their first step was to introduce the concept of popular sovereignty.
Popular sovereignty meant that the territories themselves would decide, by vote, whether to allow slavery within their borders.
The Compromise of 1850: Major Players: John Calhoun
Democrat Senator from South Carolina Defender of slavery
Opposed the Compromise of 1850 Advocate for states’ rights and secession Spurred notion of popular sovereignty for Mexican Cession territories
The Compromise of 1850: Major Players: Daniel Webster
Whig Senator from Massachusetts Supported the Compromise in order to preserve the Union and avert Civil War
In the Seventh of March speech, characterized himself “not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a northern man, but as an American….”
Risked offending his abolitionist voter base by accepting the Compromise
The Compromise of 1850: Major Players: Henry Clay
Whig Senator from Kentucky
Drafted and formally proposed the Compromise of 1850
Helped to clarify the final boundaries of Texas
Originally proposed banning slavery in the entire Mexican Cession
Wanted a stringent Fugitive Slave Act
California
Sectional strife over the new territories started as the ink was drying on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
During the Gold Rush, settlers had flooded into California, and the populous territory wanted statehood. Californians had already drawn up a state constitution.
That constitution prohibited slavery, and so, of course, the South opposed California’s bid for statehood.
At the very least, proslavery forces argued, southern California should be forced to accept slavery, in accordance with the boundary drawn by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
The debate grew so hostile that southern legislators began to discuss openly the possibility of secession.
Democrat Stephen Douglas (not to be confused with Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass) and Whig Henry Clay hammered out what they thought to be a workable solution, known as the Compromise of 1850.
After California, no new states would be admitted to the Union until 1858.
Compromise of 1850.
Together, the bills admitted California as a free state, at the price of the enactment of a stronger fugitive slave law.
They also created the territories of Utah and New Mexico, but they left the status of slavery up to each territory to decide only when it came time for each to write its constitution, thus reinforcing the concept of popular sovereignty.
The Compromise of 1850 abolished the slave trade, not slavery itself, in Washington, D.C.
Proponents of this provision argued that it was immoral to “buy and sell human flesh in the shadow of the nation’s capitol.”
Opinions/Impact of Compromise of 1850
Instituting popular sovereignty and a new fugitive slave law posed serious problems.
The definition of popular sovereignty was so vague that Northerners and Southerners could interpret the law entirely differently to suit their own positions.
The fugitive slave law, meanwhile, made it much easier to retrieve escaped enslaved people, but it required citizens of free states to cooperate in their retrieval.
Abolitionists considered it coercive, immoral, and an affront to their liberty.
Antislavery literature
Antislavery sentiments in the North grew stronger in 1852 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a sentimental novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a then-obscure writer.
Stowe, a Northerner, based her damning depictions of plantation life on information provided her by abolitionist friends.
She wisely avoided political preaching, instead playing on people’s sympathies.
The book sold more than a million copies and was adapted into several popular plays that toured America and Europe.
Like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense during the Revolutionary War Era, it was an extremely powerful piece of propaganda, awakening antislavery sentiment in millions who had never before given the issue much thought.
Kansas and Nebraska Territories
However, the contentious status of the new territories proved increasingly problematic. Settlers entering the Kansas and Nebraska territories found no established civil authority.
Congress also wanted to build railways through the territory, but they needed some form of government to impose order, secure land (a task that included driving out Native Americans), and supervise construction.
Kansas-Nebraska Act
A law that created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and allowed residents of these territories to decide through popular sovereignty whether to permit slavery.
It effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, which had banned slavery north of a certain latitude
Getting Kansas Nebraska Act passed
Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas promoted the Kansas- Nebraska Act because he wanted the transcontinental railroad to terminate in Illinois, which would bring money and jobs to his home state.
Douglas worked to create a coalition of Southerners who would want to repeal the Missouri Compromise and Northerners who wanted the railroad to end in the Illinois region, getting the act passed through Congress over the strong objection of antislavery Whigs and antislavery Democrats.
Reaction to/Effects of Kansas-Nebraska Act
Northerners considered the new law a betrayal, regarding it as further evidence of the Slave Power’s domination of government.
In response, many northern states passed laws weakening the Fugitive Slave Act.
These laws, called personal liberty laws, required a trial by jury for all alleged fugitives and guaranteed them the right to a lawyer.
Southerners, who thought the fugitive slave law would be the final word on the issue, were furious.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act also drove the final stake into the heart of the Whig Party. Antislavery Whigs, growing more impassioned about the issue and more convinced that the national party would never take a strong stand, joined northern Democrats and former Free-Soilers (whose single issue was effectively defeated by Kansas-Nebraska) to form a new party, the Republicans.
