The National Debate over Slavery

Objective

• Objective:

• Students will identify the causes for the unraveling of the compromise of 1850.

I. The Fugitive Slave Act

• Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act– The law had a number of flaws:

• Alleged fugitives were not entitled to trial by a jury or a speedy trial

• They could not testify on their own behalf• Law enforcement officials made more money for

convictions of alleged fugitives than for those who were found not guilty. <- Problem with this?

I. The Fugitive Slave Act

• Northern resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act– Some northerners felt that the law was

immoral, especially since it was often used as a way to capture free blacks!

• Some organized “vigilance committees” to protect African-Americans

• Others worked for the passage of STATE personal liberty laws.

– What were these laws?

I. The Fugitive Slave Act

• The Southern Reaction– Southerners approved of the Fugitive Slave

Act. – However, they were enraged by the personal

liberty laws. • Why?

II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– Harriet Beecher Stowe, an abolitionist living in

Maine, published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. – It was a scathing moral critique of slavery

• It focused specifically on the damage slavery did to black families

II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– It was commercial hit in the North and it was

very successful in making many northerners abolitionists.

• Lincoln: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."

II. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin– Southerners were not pleased!– They argued that it was a fictional account of

slavery that greatly exaggerated the facts– They also noted that Stowe had only visited a

plantation once– Some Southerners responded with anti-Uncle

Tom literature.

III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

• The Advance of Slavery– Most of the land that comprised the Louisiana

Purchase was still unorganized territory.– Stephen Douglas, of Illinois, wanted these

western lands settled. • He also wanted a railroad (one subsidized by the

government) to go through Chicago, not a southern city.

III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

• The Compromise dissipates– Douglas proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act

to not only help settle the West, but to convince Southerners to allow the railroad to go through Chicago

III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

• The Compromise dissipates– The Act called for dividing the Purchase into

two territories, Kansas and Nebraska. – Both territories would eventually become

states. Their slave status would be determined by popular sovereignty.

– Douglas assumed that Kansas would be a slave state, and that Nebraska would a free state.

III. The Kansas-Nebraska Act

• The Northern Reaction– The South loved the Act, as it expanded the territory

in which slavery could exist.– Northerners were outraged- much more outraged

than Douglas expected. Many more northerners had become abolitionists by this time!

– Though the Act became law in 1854, the North was embittered, and some northerners became determined to stop the advance of slavery by any means necessary.

IV. Review

• What caused the Compromise of 1850 to unravel?