The Settlement of the West and the Conflict over Enslaved Labor, 1848-1860

Native nations along the west had suffered significant changes well before the United States defeated Mexico. The pace of change quickened, however, after the U.S. acquired the vast lands won from Mexico and especially after gold was discovered in California in 1848. Then, the influx of people, rapid growth of towns and cities, expansion of roads and railroads, increased demand for land and labor, and battles over economic and political control transformed nearly every aspect of western life. For Native peoples, mining, urbanization, and railroad construction devastated local habitats and intensified conflicts among nations and with U.S. citizens and soldiers. As U.S. citizens gained political control of the region, they passed laws to limit the rights of long-time Native American, Mexican, and Spanish residents. Even U.S. residents who moved West found themselves competing for rights and resources.

Despite increased opportunities for some, inequalities of class, race, and gender were largely reproduced in the western territories of the United States. The status of African Americans was uncertain in many parts of the West. Southern whites transported enslaved Blacks into newly-acquired lands, and free Blacks suffered discrimination in the new territories much as they had back east. Many white men found their opportunities limited when gold mines failed to produce the riches for which they had hoped, and they were forced to return to wage labor to survive. Women’s status also differed by nationality and race. Some benefited from the scarcity of women in the West at mid-century, but these temporary opportunities rarely offset the economic, political, and legal disadvantages of their sex.

Between the time of the first Spanish settlements in California in 1769 and the Gold Rush of 1849, disease, death, and labor exploitation devastated Native populations. The availability of horses and guns, which spread across the West in this same period, made nomadic polities more mobile, settled villages more vulnerable, big game hunting more wasteful, and conflicts among neighboring groups more deadly. Intertribal conflict on the Plains increased as well under the pressure of forced removal from other Native nations. The Anishinaabes (Chippewas), for example, pushed Očhéthi Šakówiŋs (Sioux) peoples out of the Minnesota territory in the 1830s and by midcentury Očhéthi Šakówiŋs peoples had themselves seized lands from the Poncas, Chaticks Si Chaticks (Pawnees), Hiraacás (Hidatsas), Nakoda Oyadebis (Assiniboines), Apsáalookes (Crows), Numakikis (Mandans), Sahnishs (Arikaras), and Baxojes (Iowas). In the 1840s and 1850s, the Dinés (Navajos), who were skilled horsemen, staged more destructive attacks once they possessed guns, not only against U.S. soldiers and settlers but also against their traditional enemies, the Utes and Pueblos.

In the late 1840s, when the United States took possession of the western Plains, California, and Oregon, some 360,000 Native people occupied the West. There were probably some 75,000 Native people on the Great Plains, including the Tsitsistas/Suhtais (Cheyennes), Niitsitapiis (Blackfeet), and Očhéthi Šakówiŋs (Sioux). These buffalo-hunting and warring nations fed European and American stereotypes of tipis, painted warriors, and chiefs in headdresses. Close to 85,000 Muscogees (Creeks), Cherokees, and other Southeastern Native peoples also inhabited western lands. Another 25,000, mostly Numunuus (Comanches) and Ndés (Apaches), resided in Texas. The Mexican Cession brought another 150,000 Native peoples into the United States, swelling the populations of Dinés (Navajos) and Ndés (Apaches). In the California region, approximately 100,000 members of the Chumash, Sho-Ka-Wah (Pomo) and Salinan polities came under United States laws and customs. Finally, some 25,000 Niimíipuus (Nez Perces), Yakamas (Yakimas), Walla Wallas, and Schitsu'umshs (Coeur d’Alenes) occupied the Oregon Territory, which came under U.S. control in 1846.

Some Native peoples quickly recognized the significance of the arrival of large numbers of Americans. In 1846, as thousands of U.S. soldiers swarmed into the West on their way to wage war with Mexico, Tsitsistas (Cheyenne) leader Ho'néoxheóvaestse (Yellow Wolf) noted the “diminishing numbers of his people, and the decrease of the once abundant buffalo,” and asserted that Native peoples would “have to adopt the habits of the white people. . . .” Though many Native people would have agreed with their aging Tsitsistas brother, others, especially the younger ones, were not yet ready to make further concessions. Resistance by Native peoples in the Plains region ended only after decades of bloody warfare, which greatly decimated their numbers. Ho'néoxheóvaestse himself was killed in a massacre by U.S. soldiers in 1864 at Sand Creek in Colorado Territory.

In California, the small size of existing Native polities and the outbreak of deadly epidemics limited Native resistance efforts. In the early 1840s, men like U.S. Army Captain John Sutter, stationed in California, confiscated Native lands in the central part of the state, a process made easier by a smallpox epidemic that claimed thousands of Native peoples' lives in the 1830s. Sutter recruited and coerced the Nisenans who lived in the area to work his land, alternating material incentives with corporal punishment to control them. When California declared independence from Mexico in 1846, the U.S. government began playing a more important role in the region, and Sutter became the local agent for Native affairs, in charge of land grants, labor contracts, and the distribution of supplies. At the same time, more and more Americans began moving into California, most coming south from Oregon or across the Plains from the east. Soon the discovery of gold near Sutter’s Mill unleashed a floodtide of migration, creating even more difficult conditions for Native peoples in the region.

On January 24, 1848, James Marshall discovered gold in a millrace along the American River. Word of the event quickly circulated through the local area. In May, the San Francisco Californian reported that “the whole country from San Francisco to Los Angeles, and from the sea shore to the base of the Sierra Nevadas, resounds with the sordid cry of ‘gold, GOLD, GOLD!’ while the field is left half planted, the house half built, and everything neglected but the manufacture of shovels and pickaxes.” By year’s end, the news had spread across the nation.

The 700 or so new settlers who had arrived in California in1848 were joined by thousands and then tens of thousands of Americans in 1849 and 1850. These later pioneers, known as Forty-Niners, cared little about farming, trading, or building settlements. They came to stake a claim. Gold fever drew Irish, Scottish, French, and German miners to California along with Chileans, Mexicans, Peruvians, and Americans. In 1849 alone, some eighty thousand gold-hungry adventurers—most of them men—poured into the area. In the rush to control the most promising sites, armed Americans assaulted foreign-born competitors, especially Chinese, Chilean, Peruvian, Mexican, and French miners, often driving them off their claims. In one case, U.S. miners drove out a group of sixty Chinese immigrants who had been hired by a British mining company. Whites knew that, amid the general violence and lawlessness that characterized life along the Mother Lode, assaults on Asians or Hispanics, even deadly assaults, were unlikely to lead to arrest, much less conviction.

Despite the violence, mining camps turned into boomtowns literally overnight. A typical mining camp, Nevada City emerged at the intersection of two creeks in the Sierra foothills in the fall of 1849. A few cabins, a general store, and hundreds of tents appeared along the creek beds during the winter. In the spring, thousands of men streamed into the area seeking their fortunes. A few decided to pursue wealth not by panning for gold, but by providing the necessities of life for those who did. Stores and saloons sprang up on the small flat along Deer Creek. New roads, carved out to assure a steady supply of goods, brought more merchants and miners into the town. In spring 1850, miner William Swain described the area’s astonishing growth:

The speculators, traders, gamblers, women and thieves keep their eyes on the mines and when the miners move, they all move. This spring there was but one house in Nevada City, now there is said to be 17,000 men in and about it. . . . Everything is in a state of fermentation, rolling and tumbling about.

The fermentation that Swain observed created new problems for the region’s Native peoples, such as the Nisenans. The miners and others rushing in razed the forests to make way for camps, towns, and roads. They used timber for sluices, dams, houses, shops, and fuel. The miners imported food from afar, since they considered nutritionally inadequate the seeds and acorns that Nisenans harvested. The new settlers killed off deer and other animals and destroyed fish habitats, while devastating fires swept the Sierra mining towns and water remained in short supply. Nisenans nearly disappeared along with their homes and food supplies.

Over the next decade, the mining camps spread. New methods, such as hydraulic mining, made the process of mining more profitable for a few, but most Forty-Niners eventually worked for wages, just as they had back east. These changes were even more detrimental to the land and to Native communities. The experience of the Nisenans echoed in every area where miners settled, shattering the fragile eco-systems that had supported many Native peoples in the California region. Meanwhile Spaniards and Mexicans found themselves exploited in the same ways in which they had once mistreated Native peoples: the newcomers expropriated their land, imposed new forms of labor, and sexually abused local women. In California during the 1850s, the  population of Native peoples plummeted to between 30,000 and 35,000. Even those Native peoples who had served the American cause—fighting with U.S. troops against Mexico in 1846 or aiding American forces in putting down a rebellion led by the Kupangaxwichems (Cupenos) in 1851—were denied the rights to citizenship, suffrage, and property that were guaranteed to whites.

Life on the western mining frontier was difficult even for white workers, who had the privileges accorded their race. Most did not strike it rich, and after using up their original stake searching for gold, they had nothing with which to purchase land, tools, or supplies. Many were thus forced to become wage laborers in mines or railroads, or to find jobs as seasonal workers or tenants on large farms owned by wealthy whites. Others moved to the region’s widely scattered cities, seeking jobs on the docks in San Francisco or in Sacramento’s food processing plants. Many found themselves working shoulder-to-shoulder with those Chinese, Mexicans, and African Americans they had hoped to rise above.

Still, to most white Americans, California remained a land of promise, and a few achieved the success they sought, though not necessarily in the way they had imagined. Henry Bush, for instance, who failed to strike it rich in the mines, bought a plot of land north of San Francisco, started a vineyard there, and made his fortune in grapes rather than gold. Continued dreams of economic opportunity led many workers who faced miserable conditions and low wages to ignore the benefits of class solidarity. Instead, in an effort to keep California’s wealth for whites only, white employees often cooperated with employers to exclude those they defined as “intruders”—Native Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, Spaniards, and Asians.

The obstacles created by white workers and employers were reinforced by the passage of laws that taxed “foreigners” working in mining areas, including Mexicans who had lived in the region longer than many of the lawmakers. Another series of California regulations restricted the rights of those residents considered to be nonwhite. African Americans, although free, were denied the right to vote, claim a homestead, hold public office, serve on a jury, or attend school with white children. In San Francisco in the 1850s, it was even illegal for Blacks to ride streetcars. In addition, “no black or mulatto person or Indian” was “permitted to give evidence in favor of or against a white person” in court. In 1854, the state Supreme Court affirmed, in the case of People v. George Hall, that Native peoples could not testify against whites in court and—incredibly—that Asians were "Indians." Therefore, Chinese also were prohibited from giving testimony in court.

In 1855, the court clarified its stance, arguing that the Chinese were “a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior incapable of progress or intellectual development beyond a certain point.” Still, the Chinese population in California increased—numbering some twenty-five thousand by the mid-1850s—and spread into other western states, like Nevada and Idaho. Though these immigrants performed critical services for mine owners and other miners—cooking, cleaning, and doing the most arduous manual labor—they were never accepted as part of the new western working class.

When white women began moving west in large numbers in the 1850s, they harbored popular, but distorted, images of Native Americans, Mexicans, and other “foreigners.” White women’s initial scarcity in the West and their growing numbers after 1850 created challenges and opportunities for all women in the region.

Susan Magoffin, the wife of a trader, was one of the first U.S.- born women to travel in the “New” Mexico territory, in 1846. In her diary, she noted with shock that Mexican women wore loose blouses, flowing skirts, and no corsets, which to her suggested they had loose sexual morals. Yet she also appreciated their personal warmth and hospitality. Magoffin was surprised to discover that Mexican law granted married women property rights that were denied women under U.S. law. When the region was annexed by the United States in 1848, Mexican women lost not only the right to control their own property after marriage, but also the right to custody of their children and the right to sue in court without the consent of fathers or husbands. Still, Spanish and Mexican legal traditions did mitigate some of the worst features of United States law. For instance, married women in the West held greater rights over family property than did their counterparts back East.

Despite some legal benefits accorded western women, pioneer wives generally had to accede to their husbands’ wishes, including the man’s desire to uproot his household and head to the frontier. Of course, some women eagerly embraced the opportunity and adventure offered by the frontier, but those who did not had little choice but to acquiesce. In spring of 1853, for example, Abigail Bush, whose husband Henry had left for California three years earlier, finally followed him west. With her “wee daughter” and three sons, she traveled to New York City and then set sail for the long voyage around South America to California. Despite the desire to reunite her family, Abigail lamented those forced to “leav[e] Home, its Comforts and Endearments” only to be “Doomed to Disappointment, Sorrow, & a Grave” far from family and friends. Although Abigail Bush had been the first American woman to preside over a woman’s rights convention (in Rochester in 1848), she could not refuse her husband’s decision to move to California. (See Chapter 8)

Although many women shared Abigail Bush’s dilemma, few traveled by sea to California. In the years after the gold rush, most migrants journeyed in family groups on the overland trails by wagon train. These trains included many recently married couples with young children, infants, or babies on the way. During the long and difficult journey, families were often forced to abandon some of their possessions in order to lighten the wagons, with family heirlooms and other items of “merely sentimental” value being the first to go. Women and children typically gathered fuel and hauled water, tasks that could be incredibly burdensome on the Plains where both water and trees were scarce. Frontier families often cooked over “buffalo chips,” that is dried dung, gathered along the edges of the trail. In addition, whether pregnant, ill, or exhausted, women still performed the necessary domestic chores of washing clothes, preparing meals, and caring for children amid the chaos of constant movement.

During the crises that all too frequently confronted these pioneers, women might also take on men’s roles, such as driving the wagons, caring for the horses, or burying the dead. Catherine Haun and her husband traveled west from Iowa in spring 1849. She later recalled that one man “was bitten on the ankle by a venomous snake,” and “his limb had to be amputated with the aid of a common handsaw. Fortunately, for him, he had a good, brave wife who helped and cheered him into health and usefulness. . . .” Still, “the woman had to do a man’s work as they were alone,” that is, they had no other family with them on the trail.

Elizabeth Smith, who traveled the Oregon Trail two years earlier, might have offered sympathy and advice. Her husband fell ill in November 1847, after nearly six months on the trail. Elizabeth had to take charge of the wagons and seven children, including her baby daughter. After reaching Portland, Oregon, Mrs. Smith found shelter, cared for her husband and children through the cold, wet winter, and sold what goods they had to buy food. On February 2, 1848, the final tragedy hit. “Today we buried my earthly companion,” she wrote in her diary. “Now I know what none but widows know; that is, how comfortless is that of a widow’s life, especially when left in a strange land, without money or friends, and the care of seven children.”

As the Smiths’ experience suggests, when families settled in mining camps or farm villages, life could be even more difficult than it was along the trail. Houses were sometimes widely separated, leaving women with little social contact or domestic help beyond their immediate family. Men’s employment was often erratic, and work for women, though plentiful, rarely paid well. Moreover, many of the opportunities for female employment—in the dance halls and brothels that sprouted in mining towns, for instance—were not considered appropriate for respectable married women. Mrs. Smith sent her two oldest sons to work in the mines while still quite young, and she did laundry and cooking for others to make ends meet. A year and a half after her husband’s death, she married a widower with ten children of his own, and finally found the economic security that had driven her husband to move west in the first place.

Even those whose families survived the westward journey intact, staked a homestead, and started a farm faced hardship. Enormous labor was required to build a house, construct basic furnishings, break the ground, plant the first crops, keep a cow and chickens, do the milking, collect the eggs, churn the butter, make the clothes and bedding, complete the harvest, haul the water, chop the wood, and keep the household clean and the family fed. Although men, women, and children all did their share, women’s work was particularly taxing. For young wives, childbearing and caring for infants added to the physical burdens of frontier life. Women had far fewer opportunities than their husbands and sons to travel to nearby farms, trading posts, or towns and, as a result, many suffered from isolation and depression. Churches were few and far between, and doctors and midwives were often too far away to attend births or provide assistance in emergencies. This placed the major burden of caring for the family’s physical and spiritual needs on women.

Yet despite these burdens, some white women benefited from moving west. Because of the scarcity of white women on the frontier, those who made the trip were often highly prized as wives and mothers. Single women could marry into established families, and widows like Elizabeth Smith usually found new husbands quickly. Those who chose to remain single and had the skills to farm could gain access to homesteads. Other women used their skills at sewing, cooking, laundry, shopkeeping, or writing to launch successful business ventures. By the late nineteenth century, pioneer women would build on the importance of their labor to achieve political rights and professional status not available to women back east.

Pioneers on the western frontier led lives filled with work and family. Even after the invention of the telegraph and the construction of railroads, many households remained isolated and did not receive regular mail deliveries and newspaper reports. Western political leaders, however, were often anxious to gain access to federal support and most hoped one day to apply for statehood for their territories. When statehood was at stake, western residents quickly became swept up in the political dramas unfolding back East. The most important issue in many cases was whether a territory would gain admission as a free labor state or an enslaved labor state. the outcome of these debates was significant for all westerners, but particularly for African Americans who had moved or been forced to travel west.

Slavery existed in many of the western territories, though of the newly settled lands it flourished only in Texas and Oklahoma. Still, however circumscribed, the expansion of the plantation system exacerbated the brutality of slavery. On the frontier, enslave African Americans were increasingly subject to abuses as a consequence of absentee ownership. Black women, denied the minimal protections offered by extended families, suffered increased sexual abuse in frontier regions where men once again dominated the population. There, too, it was difficult to supply enslaved workers with sufficient food, clothing, and housing because the expansion of settlement outstripped the extension of railroads, banks, and other agents of commercial development.

Slavery was only legal in the Utah Territory, Texas, and Oklahoma in the mid-nineteenth century West, and the number of enslaved persons in the Far West remained small throughout the period. The vast majority of enslaved African Americans living west of the Mississippi River worked in Texas, where they comprised 30 percent of the population in 1860, and Oklahoma, where they comprised nearly 15 percent and were held in bondage by Cherokees, Muscogees (Creeks), and other Native peoples. Yet officials in other territories generally ignored the existence of enslaved persons within their borders rather than challenge their white owners, who were seen as valuable settlers. Black laborers thus suffered oppressive conditions whether legally enslaved or technically free.

Brutal work conditions, harsh discipline, and scorching temperatures affected growing numbers of enslaved African Americans as the planter frontier pushed west. There was little division of labor by sex or age; every body was needed to pull stumps, dig ditches, cut cane, plant cotton, and build houses, slave quarters, barns, and roads. One enslaved Texan recalled years later that the work day lasted from “can see to can’t see.” Throughout the Southwest, moreover, enslaved African Americans were captured and killed in raids by Numunuus (Comanches) and other Native polities trying to stop the influx of white settlers. Those who escaped still faced capture by Native peoples as well as vast stretches of arid land.

Life on the frontier could be particularly harsh for isolated enslaved women, whether on the Oklahoma and Texas frontier or in older settlements like Missouri. Celia, a thirteen-year-old African American, learned the horrors of isolation as soon as her new enslaver, Robert Newsom, picked her up in his wagon. On the trip to his Missouri farm, Newsom, a widower, assaulted the girl. Once settled, he repeated his sexual assaults whenever he chose. When Celia sought protection by taking up with one of the two enslaved males on Newsom’s farm, her owner ignored her pleas to be left alone. Celia refused to accept her fate, and set a trap for her enslaver. She killed Newsom with a hatchet the night of June 23, 1855, after he had assaulted her. She then cut up and burned his body in her fireplace. Celia was eventually charged with murder and found some sympathy among whites appalled by her tale of abuse. Unfortunately for Celia, her case came to trial in the midst of renewed conflicts over slavery, most notably in the neighboring Kansas Territory. In this context, acts of open defiance by a enslaved African Americans could not go unpunished. An all-white jury ultimately found Celia guilty, and she was hanged.

The expansion of slavery as the nation pushed west inspired growing opposition in the free states. Although the majority of whites, North and South, accepted slavery where it already existed, more and more opposed its extension into new territories. Of course many were more concerned with saving western lands for whites than with limiting the abuse of Blacks. Nonetheless, these converts to free soil principles began to swell the antislavery ranks. Between 1849 and 1854, those who opposed slavery and/or its expansion clashed head-to-head with southern planters and their supporters. The most severe conflicts erupted over the admission to statehood, first, of California and, then, Kansas. Although a resolution was reached in each case, the battles heightened suspicions on both sides, and the compromises themselves laid the foundation for future conflicts.

For instance, the Compromise of 1850, by which California was admitted to the union, included a new and expanded Fugitive Slave Law that ignited outrage in the free states and attracted new recruits to the anti-slavery cause.

In California, the number of U.S. residents had grown so rapidly that in 1849 political leaders sought statehood without having ever applied for territorial status. This made California the focal point of debates over slave labor and free labor that continued to dominate eastern political life. Just before California applied for statehood, northerners who wanted the West left open for settlement by free men founded the Free Soil Party. (See Chapter 8) Seeking to alleviate the pressures created by immigration and provide a fresh start for those families who were unable to find prosperity in increasingly crowded eastern cities, Free Soilers advocated a non-slave West, but they did not advocate abolition. They were willing to leave slavery alone where it already existed, thereby hoping to assuage the concerns of southerners.

The events unfolding around California tested the strengths and limits of free-soil sentiment. Zachary Taylor, a Whig enslaver, had been elected President in 1848. (See Chapter 8) He encouraged California’s application for statehood as a means of strengthening the Whig Party nationally. Here, thought Taylor, was an opportunity to defuse Free Soil Party support by demonstrating that a southern Whig could oversee the entrance of free states to the Union. Taylor’s success in this endeavor depended on his ability to convince other southern Whigs that slavery could be protected in the South without expanding the institution into every western territory.

Taylor’s plan ran into several obstacles. Congressional Democrats, Whigs, and Free Soilers all wanted reassurances that the interests of their constituents would be protected. And no one seemed convinced that the simple admission of California as a free state could ensure those interests. After lengthy and contentious arguments, Congress rejected the idea of either allowing or forbidding slavery in the West by federal law and, instead, stitched together a compromise.

The construction and passage of this compromise involved some of the most charismatic figures and some of the most dramatic oratory in the history of the U.S. Senate. Henry Clay, architect of the Missouri Compromise thirty years earlier, spearheaded this effort at national reconciliation even though he was old and ill. His bill called for passage of five measures: (1) California would be admitted as a free state; (2) territorial governments would be formed without restrictions on slavery in the rest of the land acquired from Mexico; (3) the federal government would assume Texas’s public debt in exchange for Texas yielding in its border dispute with New Mexico; (4) the slave trade, but not slavery itself, would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and (5) a new and more effective fugitive slave law would go into effect. But despite his appeals to shared national principles, Clay could not get the bill passed.

Among his most forceful opponents was John C. Calhoun, sixty-six years old and in worse health than Clay. Since Calhoun was unable to rise from his seat, a colleague read his speech. Calhoun demanded that the South be granted equal rights in the territories, that the North obey all fugitive slave laws, and that the North cease its attacks on the institution of slavery. He even suggested that the country be ruled by two presidents, one representing the North and one the South, each with veto power. Though he claimed that he, like Clay, wanted to save the Union, his blueprint for sectional reconciliation required the North to acquiesce to the South.

Massachusetts’ elder statesman, Senator Daniel Webster, reassured the North, however, that this would not happen. Older than Calhoun by two years but still healthy, and hopeful of gaining the White House one day, Webster rallied support to Clay’s cause. In a brilliant speech, he urged calm, advocated idealism, and praised patriotism. But even Webster could not convince a majority of his colleagues to vote for Clay’s compromise bill. He was perhaps glad when his appointment as secretary of state removed him from the Senate and the acrimonious debate. Death removed Calhoun, in July 1850. And although Clay remained in the Senate until his death two years later, he retreated from its leadership.

After six months of debate, then, the California issue remained unsettled. But at this point a younger and more pragmatic group of Senators took over the negotiations. These men—including William H. Seward of New York, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois—initially seemed even less willing to compromise. Seward adamantly opposed Clay’s bill; Davis just as adamantly favored slavery and its expansion; and Douglas staunchly favored western growth and development. Yet the three managed to move the legislation forward. Douglas provided the critical breakthrough when he broke Clay’s bill apart, allowing Senators to vote for the sections they favored without accepting the sections they opposed.

Ultimately, the Compromise of 1850 consisted of a series of separate bills passed by different, and sometimes competing, coalitions. Northeasterners and midwesterners, for instance, nearly all supported the admission of California as a free state and the abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia. Southerners, on the other hand, voted overwhelmingly for the new Fugitive Slave Law, which denied jury trials to accused freedom seekers and empowered any marshal pursuing them to force local citizens to join the hunt. On each issue, just enough party loyalists crossed sectional lines to assure passage. In addition, the sudden death of President Taylor in July 1850, who despite his support for California’s admission had threatened to veto the larger compromise of which it was a part, paved the way for the bill’s passage. The new president, Millard Fillmore, not only supported the compromise but used his powers as president to convince northern Whigs to support it as well.

Leaders of both major parties congratulated themselves on the 1850 compromise. “Much . . . may be effected by a conciliatory temper and discreet measures,” declared Whig Philip Hone. “All praise to the defenders of the Union!” Former Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass declared confidently, “I do not believe any party could now be built in relation to this question of slavery. I think the question is settled in the public mind.” Political and business leaders organized rallies in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati, in support of the compromise.

Many workers and farmers also approved the new agreement in hopes that it would prevent the disruption of the Union and improve their chances for upward mobility. Large numbers of working folk saw slavery as synonymous with degradation, and cries of “wage slavery” condemned capitalists who oppressed their employees. But equating wage labor with slavery did not lead to sympathy for enslaved persons themselves. Native-born and immigrant white workers were equally likely to define their own status as free men by distinguishing themselves from enslaved workers. In addition, many white workers harbored racist attitudes not only toward enslaved African Americans but toward free Blacks as well. They often viewed with suspicion formerly enslaved escapees to the North, seeing them as competition for scarce jobs and as diminishing, by their race alone, the wages and status of free white workers. This led once again to a desire to keep slavery and African Americans out of the western territories, where white workers assumed that African Americans would necessarily undermine the value of free labor.

Still, although Douglas, Seward, and Davis could take credit for completing the work Clay had begun, they failed to embrace the elder statesman’s concern about national reconciliation. Achieving compromise only through the appeasement of separate and antagonistic interests did not solve the nation’s racial crisis. Instead it soon revitalized sectional hostilities. The most controversial section of the 1850 Compromise—the Fugitive Slave Law—served as the next lightning rod.

One of the Fugitive Slave Law’s major targets was the “underground railroad,” a network of thousands of free Blacks and white sympathizers who concealed, sheltered, clothed, and guided freedom seekers in the course of their northward flight. The best known of the “conductors” who served this railroad was Harriet Tubman, who escaped from slavery in Maryland in 1849. Over the next decade, Tubman returned to the South nineteen times, repeatedly risking capture and death in order to liberate more than three hundred others. In the North, local vigilance committees—composed largely of free Blacks and white Quakers—kept the railroad going. Free Blacks provided most of the labor and funds required by the cause despite their long hours of work and limited economic opportunities. African American members of the New York support committee were able to pledge only fifty cents a month; those in Philadelphia contributed even less. Fortunately, a few wealthy families, like the Fortens (free Blacks) and the Motts (white Quakers), were also deeply committed to keeping the railroad running.

During the 1840s, enslavers grew more anxious about the underground railroad, even though the number of successful enslaved escapeed may not have increased. Escapes affected far more than the few thousand who actually fled. News traveled through the enslaved communities "grapevine telegraph," emboldening many who were still in bondage. At the same time, successful escapees such as Frederick Douglass and William and Ellen Craft, who had escaped from Georgia in December 1848, became powerful and effective antislavery speakers in the United States and Britain. The Fugitive Slave Law, its proponents hoped, would not only reduce the number of escapes but also drive earlier runaways such as Tubman, Douglass, and the Crafts back into hiding.

Instead, the new law had the opposite effect, re-invigorating protests against slavery and against enslavers who were viewed as abusing federal power. A law that forced them to assist slave owners in returning freedom seekers to bondage enraged long-time abolitionists and their new allies. They held mass meetings throughout the North and Midwest. At one gathering in Allegheny City, near Pittsburgh, land reformer John Ferral, a veteran of the Workingmen’s movement of the 1820s and 1830s, attacked the Fugitive Slave Law and proposed a state constitutional amendment that gave black males the right to vote. The meeting approved his proposal at a time when only five northern states enfranchised African Americans on an equal basis with whites. A number of antislavery Whigs captured seats in northern Congressional elections in fall 1850 as a result of this popular reaction to the Fugitive Slave Law.

Other dissenters took direct action. In Boston, Philadelphia, Syracuse, Chicago, and elsewhere, Black and white opponents of slavery used force to protect fugitives from their hunters, sometimes attacking and even killing the pursuers. In October of 1850, Boston abolitionists helped two enslaved persons escape to freedom and drove the Georgia slave-catcher pursuing them out of town. A year later, in Syracuse, New York, a crowd of two thousand broke into the courthouse to free a single freedom seeker. And that same fall, a group of free Blacks and formerly enslaved escapees in the Quaker community of Christiana, Pennsylvania, armed themselves with guns against a group of slave-catchers, killed a Maryland enslaver, and severely wounded his son. In this case, despite the willingness of federal officials to intervene on the enslavers’ behalf, public outrage forced the government to drop charges against those who had defied the Fugitive Slave Act by force of arms.

The 1852 publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a tragic tale of slavery and slave-hunters, enhanced popular opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. Harriet Beecher Stowe first published the story in serial form in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper. When published in book form, it sold three hundred thousand copies in one year, electrified northern readers, and infused opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law with a powerful emotional appeal.

Against this background, the Free Soil Party expanded its ranks. Contradicting some politicians’ claims that the Compromise of 1850 would forestall the growth of parties focused on slavery, the legislation created stronger bonds between established antislavery forces and free soil advocates. In addition, the Free Soil Party gained support from some immigrant groups, including German émigrés who had been politicized by their experience in European revolutions in 1848-1849. These immigrants focused first on issues of class inequality. “The rich and distinguished here stand higher above the law than in any country,” exclaimed one German-born Pittsburgher. In America, he went on, “in the land that boasts of its humanity, that claims to be at the very top of civilization . . . the laboring classes are treated in as shameful a manner as in Europe, with all its ancient prejudices.” The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act reinforced the sense among many immigrants that the fight for free soil and against slavery must be won if the move to America was truly going to improve their lives.

Contrary to the hopes of its sponsors, then, the Compromise of 1850 inflamed antislavery feeling in the North. As long as slavery seemed geographically contained and remote, free-state residents could try to ignore it, considering it someone else’s worry and someone else’s sin. But by refusing to outlaw slavery in the West and then welcoming slave hunters into the free states and requiring all citizens to aid them, the new law put an end to those illusions. Like the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Law seemed to bear out the abolitionist claim that chattel slavery endangered freedom everywhere, not merely in the South.

How does the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 reveal what citizens can do when they consider a federal law immoral or unjust?

Before the battles over the Fugitive Slave Law could ebb, struggles over slavery erupted in the Great Plains. The focal point of this battle was the Kansas-Nebraska bill, submitted to Congress in January 1854 by Democratic Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas had speculated heavily in western lands and hoped that by attracting settlers to the region he could persuade Congress to route a planned transcontinental railroad through the area. Since many southern Senators preferred a more southern route, Douglas offered them an incentive to vote for his bill. He included a clause that allowed residents of the territory to decide by popular vote whether or not they would permit slavery. Since the Nebraska Territory lay north of the 30° 30’ line set by the Missouri Compromise, allowing residents there to vote on whether to become a slave state or a free state would effectively remove all federal barriers to the spread of slavery throughout the West.

In its final version, Douglas’s bill not only explicitly annulled the terms of the Missouri Compromise, which in the more than three decades since its passage had become nearly sacrosanct as the final statement on the boundary between free and slave territory. It also divided the Great Plains into two territories—Kansas and Nebraska—in order to assuage the concerns of free-state Iowans and slave-state Missourians. New anti-slavery and pro-slavery forces could each hope to win control over one of the new territories. Then, to replace the Missouri Compromise line, Douglas proposed a doctrine he called “popular sovereignty.” This doctrine left the future of slavery to be decided by registered voters in each territory seeking admission as a state.

Reaction was almost instantaneous. A group of anti-slavery congressmen issued an impassioned and widely circulated manifesto calling the new law “a criminal betrayal of precious rights.” In the West, they said, “it has been expected, freedom-loving emigrants from Europe, and energetic and intelligent laborers from our own land, will find homes of comfort and fields of useful enterprise.” But Douglas’s law would turn this great expanse “into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”

Widely reprinted and translated, this appeal aroused a firestorm of protest that dwarfed opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. More than three hundred free soil rallies in the North and West mobilized tens of thousands of people of all social backgrounds. Some were leading merchants and bankers in major northern cities, long-time advocates of compromise and friendly relations with enslavers. They now pleaded with the South to withdraw the bill in order to avoid inflaming the already dangerous anti-slavery sentiment in the North. Whig leader Amos Lawrence, a Boston merchant, begged them to “pause before they proceed further to disturb the peace which we hoped the Compromise of 1850 would have made perpetual.” Others opposed to Douglas’s bill were staunchly against slavery on principle. They denounced the bill not for causing bad sectional feelings, but because (as one group declared) it “authorizes the further extension of slavery.”

Despite these strong objections, the Senate passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act on March 3, 1854. The majority that favored the legislation included many southern Senators, who viewed “popular sovereignty” as the best hope for expanding slavery into the West. To achieve victory, these southerners combined with northern Democrats who hoped this bill would provide the basis for expanding their party’s support. On May 22, the House added its assent by a narrow margin.

Advocates in both houses of Congress had gained the support of President Franklin Pierce. Pierce, an obscure New Hampshire Democrat, was elected in 1852 when the Whig Party suffered deep divisions over the issue of slavery. Pierce attempted to avoid the issue of slavery as a candidate and as president. But his election just a year after the Fugitive Slave Law went into effect made such a stance impossible. Instead, Pierce chose to send federal troops into northern cities, such as Boston, when abolitionists stormed courthouses and attempted to free recaptured freedom seekers. In 1854, Pierce came out in support of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, helping to win over enough northern Democratic Congressmen to assure its passage. He signed it into law in May 1854.

In elections that fall, candidates of the so-called Know Nothing Party (see chapter 8), who claimed that they, too, wanted to protect the white race, gained ground in local and state contests. They temporarily controlled the governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Yet voters in these very same states elected Free Soilers to office in significant numbers. Clearly, this latest attempt at resolving the slavery controversy had only inflamed the conflict.

During the next two years, political passions burned fiercely in Kansas. Pro-slavery Missourians poured across the border, hoping to claim the Kansas Territory for themselves. But even more settlers arrived from the free states. Thousands were aided by abolitionists back east who formed the Kansas Emigrant Aid Society to assure the territory would remain a haven for free labor. Confronted by a free soil majority, the pro-slavery forces quickly resorted to armed intimidation and violence. When anti-slavery forces responded, undeclared guerrilla war followed.

One especially passionate antagonist in this battle was John Brown. Born in 1800 into a white family of New England stock, Brown was deeply attached to the country’s revolutionary traditions and stirred by the great religious awakenings of the age. Over the years, he tried his hand at various occupations to support himself and his growing family. He sometimes achieved a modest prosperity, but Brown prized other things above commercial success. “To get a little property together,” he once wrote his son, “is really a low mark to be firing at through life.” Personal independence, democracy, equal rights, self-discipline, and self-respect—the traditional republican values of the North’s small producers—meant more to him. The quickening commercialization of American life disturbed Brown, for he perceived it as a threat both to his world and to his moral code. And the Panic of 1837, which ruined him along with so many others, confirmed his worst fears.

As the years went by, Brown’s views about society and its ills grew clearer. Of all society’s wrongs, none repelled him so thoroughly as human bondage. Here was truly the “sum of all villainies,” the starkest challenge to all the social and religious beliefs that shaped his outlook. From the 1830s on, Brown aided freedom sekers from his home in northern New York State, and after 1850, he worked with free Blacks to resist the Fugitive Slave Law.

In the mid-1850s, five of John Brown’s sons joined the anti-slavery advocates moving to Kansas. Encountering armed groups of southerners determined to force slavery upon the territory, they called on their father for aid, and he soon joined them. In the often brutal fighting that followed in “Bleeding Kansas,” Brown earned a reputation for ferocity and an uncompromising hostility to slavery and racism generally. He proclaimed “the manhood of the Negro race” and expressed his antislavery convictions with a vehemence alien even to many Free Soilers.

Confrontations in the West soon found their echo back east. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, an eloquent spokesman for African American rights, denounced the efforts of Democrats in the White House and Congress to force slavery into a free Kansas. He was particularly vehement in a speech he gave in May 1856, in which he attacked his Senate colleague, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, for having taken “the harlot slavery” as his mistress. He called the efforts of pro-slavery forces to establish their own government in the territory the “Crime Against Kansas.” In retaliation for Sumner’s inflammatory remarks, a distant cousin of Butler, the young congressman Preston Brooks, attacked Sumner with his walking cane. Brooks beat Sumner unconscious, landing some thirty blows while the Senator sat at his desk, unable to defend himself.

In Kansas, such brutality had become commonplace. Hannah Anderson Ropes, a young mother of two, had moved to Lawrence, Kansas, in the fall of 1855 to join her husband. She wrote heart-wrenching letters to her mother back in Brookline, Massachusetts, including one on November 21, in which she described the dangers that surrounded her family.

How strange it will seem to you to hear that I have loaded pistols and a bowie knife upon my table at night, three of Sharp’s rifles, loaded, standing in the room. . . . All the week every preparation has been made for our defense; and everybody is worn with want of sleep.

Her fear, and that of her neighbors, was that pro-slavery Missourians would cross the border and launch an all-out attack on the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence.

In the summer of 1856, pro-slavery forces did attack Lawrence, destroying two newspaper offices, burning buildings, looting stores, and beating residents. Hearing the news, John Brown, accompanied by four sons and two anti-slavery supporters, sought revenge against a small settlement of pro-slavery families along Pottawatamie Creek. Using broadswords, Brown and his followers rousted five families out of their beds in the middle of the night, murdered and mutilated five of the men, and left their wives and children to spread the tale of terror. The attack on Lawrence and the so-called “Pottawatamie Massacre” provoked a guerrilla war that raged in Kansas for months and cost some two hundred lives.

Despite the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its support by pro-slavery Democrats, residents of Kansas finally established a free state government in mid-1858. That victory, however, ended neither the broader dispute over slavery nor John Brown’s role in it. The battle in Kansas, in fact, only stoked the flames of national conflict and convinced Brown that a final reckoning was near. If it was only violence that had kept Kansas free, he asked, how could peaceful methods alone secure the same ends throughout the country? When his brother Jeremiah urged moderation, John replied "that he knew that he was in the line of his duty, and he must pursue it, though it should destroy him and his family. He . . . was satisfied that he was the chosen instrument in the hands of God to war against slavery."

Many now agreed with Brown that a peaceful end to slavery no longer seemed likely. For decades, the concerted efforts of politicians North and South had staved off a direct confrontation between the enslaved-labor and wage-labor systems. But in “Bleeding Kansas,” the systems met head to head. As Congressman Abraham Lincoln wrote a Kentucky friend a year before the bloody conflicts in Kansas:

You spoke [in 1819] of “the peaceful extinction of slavery” and used other expressions to indicate your belief that the thing was, at some time, to have an end. Since then we have had thirty-six years of experience, and this experience has demonstrated, I think, that there is no peaceful extinction of slavery in prospect for us.

The Missouri Compromise line, which had promised so much in 1819, was now gone. With its demise, controversies over slavery multiplied and the country’s two major political parties finally broke apart.  The Whigs’ disintegration began with the Compromise of 1850. By opposing the Compromise, President Zachary Taylor alienated ardently proslavery voters, dooming the Whig Party’s future prospects in the South. The remaining Whigs were deeply divided; some attempted to overshadow the antislavery movement altogether by combining forces with the nativist American (or Know Nothing) Party. Anti-immigrant riots in Baltimore and other east coast cities suggested that this strategy might be successful, but after making quick gains, the movement soon collapsed. The slavery question had simply become unavoidable. In mid-1855, the Know-Nothing Party itself split into proslavery and antislavery factions.

Democrats, meanwhile, suffered a series of splits and defections, beginning with the founding of the Free Soil Party in 1848. By 1854 and 1855, massive numbers of midwestern free soil Democrats had left the party, alienated by Democratic support for popular sovereignty in Kansas and Nebraska. The formation of a national Republican Party in 1856 cut deeply into northern Democratic support and highlighted the increasingly sectional character of partisan political alignments.

The Republican Party coalesced out of the large but amorphous opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill of 1854. In their first party platform, drafted in 1856, Republicans denounced slavery as immoral and insisted on halting its further westward expansion. The new party attracted support from many formerly competing interests, including antislavery Whigs, Democrats, former Free Soilers, and Know-Nothings. One of its earliest organizers, Alvan Bovay, was a veteran land reformer and former Whig. Labor leader and land reformer John Commerford became a Republican spokesman in New York. But party leaders also included some prosperous northern businessmen, many of them rising manufacturers, often from relatively humble backgrounds, who had been competing against the established mercantile elite for years. Meanwhile, many of the North’s largest merchants and manufacturers with important southern ties threw their political support to the Know-Nothings or to northern Democrats. Leading Republicans were more commonly middle-class men (especially lawyers, professional politicians, editors, and journalists) who accepted the values of the North’s free-labor industrial system and were ready to fight for it—more so than much of the elite.

Yet the great majority of those who rallied to the Republican Party’s banner during the 1850s were small farmers, small shopkeepers, and skilled urban working people, most of them native-born. Significant numbers of ordinary laborers also voted Republican. And the Republicans gained the support of many reform-minded northerners, including many who were denied the right to vote. Large numbers of free Blacks, for instance, who were disfranchised in northern states by literacy, residency, or monetary requirements, supported the Republicans, as they had the Free Soilers. And many women, white and Black, who had earlier formed societies to aid abolition and Free Soil efforts, now threw their resources behind the Republican Party.

The election of the Democratic presidential candidate in 1856, James Buchanan, did little to allay fears of sectional conflict. Buchanan had sought the presidential nomination before. He succeeded this time because his party could not afford to renominate the sitting President, Franklin Pierce, who was too closely linked to the bloody events in Kansas. In addition, the Democrats hoped to gain favor among northern voters by nominating a candidate from their region. Buchanan was perfect: a dignified elder statesman from Pennsylvania who had been minister to Great Britain in the years that the Kansas-Nebraska conflict flared. He may have been uninspiring and unimaginative, but Buchanan was also uncontroversial and uncommitted on popular sovereignty and the extension of slavery.

The Republicans chose John C. Frémont, who had gained his reputation as a celebrated army explorer and leader in the conquest of California. He embodied the free-soil vision of America’s manifest destiny. Compared with the mere ten percent of the vote that the Free Soil candidate, Martin Van Buren, had won just eight years earlier, Frémont’s thirty-three percent of the total votes reflected a major transformation in public thinking. Debates over western territories had inspired this change. Frémont carried eleven of the sixteen free states and forty-five percent of all ballots cast in the North. The Republican campaign slogan—“Free soil, free labor, free men”—summarized the goals and ideals that drove millions into its ranks, almost overnight.

Though the Democrats won the 1856 election, the Republican Party’s dramatic gains accelerated the drive toward national conflict. Observing the deepening isolation of their political allies in the North, southern planters began to see the majority in the free states as entirely hostile to slavery. To them it was only a matter of time before Republicans gained control of the national government and used its power to undermine slavery everywhere—first in the West, then in the old South. These specific fears grew out of other, more general worries about southern society and its internal frictions and conflicts. Most immediately, what impact would a Republican national government have upon the enslaved population?

Throughout the South, Blacks were paying close attention to national politics, pondering the significance of this new division of the white population, and hoping for liberation through a Republican victory. The 1856 election brought with it stories of plans for insurrections by enslaved Blacks in at least six southern states. Though no such uprising occurred in the 1850s,  everyday resistance by enslaved workers and attempts to escape to freedom kept planters anxious. The rise of the Republicans only made matters worse. “The recent Presidential canvass has had a deleterious effect on the enslaved population,” reported a Nashville, Tennessee, editor in alarm. “The negroes manifested an unusual interest in the result and attended the political meetings of the whites in large numbers. This is dangerous.” A Memphis colleague agreed: “If this eternal agitation of the slavery question does not cease we may expect servile insurrections in dead earnest.”

In the meantime, some Republican leaders as well as some writers who supported the new party began courting the nonslaveholding whites of the South. Francis P. Blair, Jr., was elected to Congress from St. Louis in 1856, suggesting that Republicans could gain popular support in enslaved labor states, at least those on the border. The National Era, an antislavery paper since the 1840s, responded to Blair’s election by declaring, “We no longer stand upon the defensive. We have crossed the line, and are upon slaveholding ground.” North Carolinian Hinton Helper’s book, The Impending Crisis of the South, published in 1857, aided Republicans among southern-born residents of the Midwest. Helper argued that slavery was a political and economic curse on the South, driving nonslaveholding whites into poverty, forcing their wives and daughters to labor in the fields, and encouraging many to abandon the South altogether. Although others had made these claims before, here was a “son of the South,” as Horace Greeley noted, “who speaks with an authority and a weight which no outsider can have.” So impressed were Republicans with Helper’s appeal to non-slaveholders in the South that they printed an abridged version of the book in 1859 and circulated it widely in the North.

The immediate impact of Hinton Helper’s book in the South was minor. No abolitionist, Helper abhorred the necessity for poor whites to mingle with southern Blacks under the plantation system. Nonetheless, planters feared the long-term effects of his work and severely punished those caught circulating it. For them, it was another sign of the dangers that the Republican Party posed to enslavers. So it was with growing seriousness that southern politicians threatened to pull their states out of the federal union and beyond the reach of the Republicans in order to preserve their social power and human property.

Although slavery had emerged as a critical political issue, the enslavement of Blacks remained first and foremost a system of labor. Indeed it was the threatened loss of enslaved workers’ labor power and the profits thus generated that led enslavers to fight so vehemently for their “peculiar” institution. In this battle, northerners repeatedly touted the superiority of free labor, portraying northern workers as independent and responsible citizens who contributed mightily to both economic prosperity and western expansion. Yet northern workers, especially those employed in the burgeoning cities and factory towns along the Atlantic coast and in railroad, maritime, and mining trades throughout the free states, often expressed biting criticisms of the capitalist system. Indeed, those workers who identified themselves as “wage slaves” suggested that their employers were the equivalent of slave drivers. Thus, even as the growing sectional crisis overshadowed the grievances of free workers in national political debates, affluent and working-class northerners clashed with each other in numerous cities and towns. At the same time, conflicts among workers continued to undermine class solidarity as immigrants and the native-born, free Blacks and whites, and women and men vied with each other in defining a working-class agenda.

Both Democratic and Republican politicians sought the support of their poor and working-class neighbors. Especially in the North and West, where white workingmen had gained the right to vote in large numbers, elections might turn on who appealed most effectively to their needs. Republicans’ use of the slogan “free labor, free soil, free men” attracted many northern workers to the party. During the 1850s, as elections to national office became crucial in determining the outcome of sectional debates over slavery, some groups of workers renewed their efforts to build powerful labor organizations. Although most were focused on improving wages and working conditions rather than political clout, organized labor had a greater chance of influencing political campaigns than did individual workers.

Workers could not, however, influence the courts. Judges sympathetic to slavery had their own responses to questions of citizenship, rights, and race. This was demonstrated most powerfully by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1857 ruling on a case brought by a enslaved man named Dred Scott.

Throughout the 1840s, efforts to establish unions and other working-class organizations were limited. The prolonged effects of the Panic of 1837, the influx of massive numbers of Irish and German immigrants, the promise of economic opportunity in the West, and highly-charged debates over the rights of African Americans and women repeatedly disrupted class-based alliances. Even immigrant workers were divided by language, religious affiliation, and political beliefs. Moreover, some immigrants sought relief from oppressive conditions not through class solidarity but in neighborhood gangs that pitted one group of young men against another.

By mid-century, however, workers renewed their organizing efforts. As employers repeatedly pitted one group against another, workers gradually learned a hard lesson. Although most white workers still refused to include Blacks in their associations and most male organizations continued to exclude women, coalitions among white working-class men developed regionally and nationally. By 1860, some men even supported strikes by women, especially in the shoe and textile industries where women formed a large portion of the labor force.

The 1850s thus saw significant advances for the labor movement, including the beginnings of nationwide organization. Such efforts even gained support among free laborers in southern cities like Baltimore, Richmond, St. Louis, and New Orleans, raising new fears among planters about the rise of Republicanism on their own soil. After 1850, national unions sprang up among hat finishers, cigarmakers, typesetters, plumbers, painters, stonecutters, shoemakers, and iron molders. Some disappeared almost as fast as they arose, and in most cases, the “national” organizations only existed in the free states. Moreover, rarely did the national organizations show leadership on controversial issues, such as the admission of African American, Mexican, Asian, or women workers to member unions. Nonetheless, in laying the groundwork for later more successful efforts at labor organizing, these early national unions suggested the power of free workers to develop their own agenda and the need for both northern Republicans and southern enslavers to respond to workers’ concerns.

The case of the national union of iron molders—founded largely at the instigation of William H. Sylvis—illustrates the development of national labor organizations. Born in 1828, Sylvis sought training and work as an iron molder in the 1840s, as the iron industry was mushrooming to meet demands for industrial tools and machinery. At first the few skilled ironworkers earned good wages, but as the number of molders increased, foundry owners reduced wages and imposed harsh working conditions. Simultaneously, a small number of large companies able to afford newer and more expensive equipment centralized control over iron production. When Sylvis tried to open his own foundry, the costs drove him out of business, and he was soon trudging Pennsylvania’s roads in search of wage work.

Settling in Philadelphia in 1853, he attempted to support his new wife and a growing family on a journeyman molder’s meager wages. During the 1830s and 1840s, journeymen molders had formed several local unions around the country, most of which organized to negotiate a single agreement or to call a single strike. The Philadelphia molders were among the first workers to move toward a larger and more permanent organization. Their 1855 constitution declared, “In the present organization of society, laborers single-handed are powerless . . . but combined there is no power of wrong they may not openly defy.” Two years later, when some of Sylvis’s coworkers struck over a twelve percent wage cut, Sylvis joined the strike as well as the picket committee.

The Philadelphia molders’ action failed when an economic depression developed in 1857, but the defeat failed to destroy the union. Sylvis, the union secretary, threw himself into the job of strengthening the organization and its ties to other molders’ associations. The rise of a national market convinced Sylvis that molders had to organize nationally as well, and he played a central role in founding the National Molders’ Union in 1859.

At the same time, Lynn shoemakers also stepped up their protest activity. Declining wages, repeated layoffs, and disruptions caused by the introduction of the sewing machine finally exploded in 1860 in the largest strike the nation had ever seen. Over twenty thousand men and women laid down their tools—more than a third of all shoe workers in Massachusetts.

The Lynn strikers said they were defending individual dignity and freedom. To emphasize that point, they linked their struggle to symbols of national independence, launching the strike on George Washington’s birthday, and they defended their rights with the rallying cry, “sink not to the state of a slave.” On March 7, eight hundred women, including strikers and their supporters, marched through the wintry streets of Lynn behind a banner proclaiming, “American ladies will not be slaves: Give us a fair compensation and we labor cheerfully.” The Lynn strikers turned out in huge street demonstrations, fought the use of scab labor, and battled the town marshal when he and his deputies intervened on the side of the bosses. Bolstered by additional police, the employers won the day. Nevertheless, the determined Lynn strikers became a symbol for other laborers seeking better treatment. And their repeated invocation of the slavery theme carried great significance in the context of heightened sectional tensions.

How does pictorial coverage about an 1850s riot show ways that images of the urban poor expressed and influenced public opinion about immigration?

Southern planters challenged northern workers’ claims that their condition was similar to that of enslaved African Americans. Many agreed with Virginia planter George Fitzhugh that so-called “free” labor was more exploitative than slavery. (See Chapter 9) Arguing that “the subjection of man to man” occurs in every country and every region of the country, proslavery advocates contrasted the “hunger and cold” and the daily suffering of impoverished “free” laborers with what they considered the humanitarian Christian arrangements of slavery. Using such reasoning in conjunction with older Biblical justifications for bondage, more and more southern planters argued that the South must stand firm behind its “peculiar institution.”

Indeed, some did more than stand firm. William Walker, a Tennessee-born enslaver, and fifty-eight mercenaries “invaded” Nicaragua in May 1855. Within six months, he succeeded in exploiting civil unrest in the country to declare himself president. Walker’s government, which opened Nicaragua to slavery, was recognized by the United States in 1856. But he was overthrown a year later by forces financed by his former sponsor, the railroad entrepreneur Cornelius Vanderbilt.

In that same year, 1857, the Supreme Court bolstered planters’ commitment to enslaved labor within the United States when it rejected the claim of a Missouri enslaved man named Dred Scott that he had become free when his enslaver took him out of the South and into a free state (Illinois) and a free territory (Wisconsin). The Court, filled with southerners and Democrats, and led by aging Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a former slaveholder, pronounced unconstitutional all laws restricting the free movement of property, including human property. Indeed, Taney asserted further, Scott had no right to bring suit at all because since the founding of the American republic no black person in the United States had enjoyed any “rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Although Taney had already freed his own enslaved workers, he was committed to defending his beloved South against Republican threats to its time-honored institutions.

Northerners were horrified. They argued that the Dred Scott decision, followed to its logical conclusion, could lead to legalizing slave ownership not only in the territories but in the free states as well.The New York Tribune declared the decision was the work of “five slaveholders and two doughfaces,” the latter referring to the two northern justices, both Democrats, who supported the majority decision. The “dictum,” it claimed, was “entitled to just as much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” The remedy, according to the Chicago Tribune, was “the ballot box” and the election of a Republican President in 1860.

For proslavery firebrands, the Dred Scott decision was just the kind of guarantee for enslaved labor they sought. Some went so far as to demand the resumption of the Atlantic slave trade. Others called for an automatic veto over all federal legislation affecting southern interests. Southern politicians also tried to limit the rights of the foreign-born in their midst, and southern congressmen blocked homestead legislation that would have made western land more available to small farmers. A law turning western land over to independent farmers rather than reserving it for planters, exclaimed the Charleston Mercury, would be “the most dangerous abolition bill which has ever been directly passed by Congress.”

In the context of heightened proslavery rhetoric and the Dred Scott decision, northern laborers faced new dangers. A Supreme Court that refused Dred Scott’s petition for freedom and denied Congress any power to restrict the expansion of slavery, was not likely to support the rights of workers. At the same time, they had new opportunities, as the expansion of suffrage to white working class men in most free states assured that they would have a critical role to play in political contests for federal power.

While working-class men and women in the North and West built organizations to defend their rights in the 1850s, most enslaved southerners had to rely on family and community networks to lessen the brutalities of bondage. Individual acts of resistance continued, but these could only disrupt, not end the system of slavery. Enslaved individuals needed allies, though probably few imagined finding them among white men. Then, in 1859, as the nation lurched toward a final showdown, John Brown reappeared on the national stage and made clear that at least some white men would risk their lives to end the brutal institution. A year later, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States. Although Lincoln was no abolitionist firebrand like Brown, southern planters considered him sufficiently radical that his election heightened fears over the future of slavery.

On October 16, 1859, John Brown, three of his sons, and nineteen associates—Black and white—launched a raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Trained in Kansas, the men planned to seize the arms stored at the arsenal, liberate enslaved African Americans from Virginia plantations, and then retreat into the Allegheny Mountains. There they hoped to fortify a base from which to encourage, assist, and defend additional insurrections and escapes. The constitution that Brown drafted for this projected haven envisioned a utopian society in which “All captured or confiscated property, and all property [that is] the product of the labor of those belonging to this organization and their families, shall be held as the property of the whole, equally, without distinction.”

Brown had gained substantial financial support from a group of six respected abolitionists, all white, but he could not convince Frederick Douglass or other prominent Black abolitionists to join his ranks. Though impressed by Brown’s commitment, Douglass was convinced the project was suicidal. He was right. The plan pitted a handful of poorly armed men against virtually the entire white population of Virginia—and the South—plus the armed forces of the U.S. government. Though Brown and his men did capture the arsenal in the middle of the night, they never managed to free any enslaved workers, and they failed to escape. A detachment of U.S. Marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J.E.B. Stuart quickly surrounded the insurgents, subjected them to withering fire, and finally captured most of the survivors. By the afternoon, eight of Brown’s men, among them two of his sons, were dead. Three townsmen had also died, and two more raiders were killed in the final battle. Brown was captured, promptly indicted, and tried for treason, murder, and fomenting insurrection. On November 2, he was convicted, and one month later he was hanged. In one of his last letters, he wrote, “Men cannot imprison, or chain, or hang the soul. I go joyfully in behalf of millions that ‘have no rights’ that this great and glorious, this Christian republic, ‘is bound to respect.

Though unsuccessful, the Harpers Ferry raid reverberated through the country. Southern leaders pointed to it as the final proof of the North’s violent intentions. Republican moderates like Abraham Lincoln hastily condemned Brown’s deed. Others rejected Brown’s tactics but nonetheless saluted his values and goals. White abolitionists, enslaved southerners, and free Black Americans nationwide grieved at Brown’s execution and proclaimed him a martyr in the American revolutionary pantheon. Church bells throughout the North pealed in mourning. In December 1859, Baltimore police, concerned about the activities of local African Americans, broke into an annual ball held by free Black people in the city. What they saw no doubt heightened their fears: the hall was draped in banners bearing John Brown’s likeness and a bust of him was inscribed “The martyr—God bless him.” The struggles so long waged over western territory had finally come home to the South.

In 1860 matters came to a head. The Democratic Party—the last major national bastion of the compromise forces—could not agree on a single platform or candidate. The slavery issue had simply become too explosive. Democrats divided their party and their electoral strength in half as northern Democrats nominated Stephen Douglas while their southern counterparts, desperate to gain federal protection for slavery, chose Buchanan’s Vice-President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. A weak echo of the old Whig and Know-Nothing forces dubbed itself the Constitutional Union Party and made a futile attempt to delay action on the slavery issue a while longer. Their ticket was composed of John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts.

The Republicans, however, stood united, determined to win and then to resolve the nation’s sectional crisis once and for all. Looking past better-known party leaders—like Senator William Seward of New York and Governor Salmon P. Chase of Ohio—the Republican delegates selected Abraham Lincoln as their presidential candidate. Lincoln had several advantages. He was more moderate on slavery than Seward or Chase; he had demonstrated his skills as a debater during the 1858 Illinois congressional campaign; he had represented small farmers and workers throughout his career; and he lived in an area of the Midwest where voter support was critical to winning the presidency.

Both the North and the West went heavily Republican in the election, with Douglas, supported by northern Democrats, picking up most of the rest of the vote. On national questions, workers had no doubt that their interests lay with the party of Lincoln. The workers of Lynn gave stunning majorities to Republicans at the state level and to Lincoln for president.

In the North, only New Jersey resisted Lincoln’s triumphal sweep of the free states. In the South, the small urban vote generally went to the Constitutional Union Party, while the rural majority went heavily to Breckinridge and his proslavery southern Democrats. Lincoln’s majority in the North and West proved sufficient to ensure his election as president. Though he received only forty percent of the popular vote nationwide, he earned the necessary majority of electoral votes by winning in the most populous states.

Yet this was the first time in American history that a president had been elected without a single southern electoral vote. Clearly the South was now in a dependent relationship within the national government, and the free states could pass legislation against the interests of the South with the full support of the U.S. President. Lincoln’s election  opened one of the most important and dramatic chapters in the nation’s history. It signaled, as one observer noted, “the beginning of the Second American Revolution.”

The Republican victory in 1860 grew out of the social, economic, cultural, and political changes that had taken place in the United States during the preceding half-century. By preserving enslaved labor, the first American Revolution stopped far short of the Declaration of Independence’s stated goal—a society based on the principle that “all men are created equal.” For a number of decades, national leaders worked long, hard, and successfully to hold together a nation increasingly divided by two distinct labor systems.

But as the enslaved-labor South and the free-labor North matured, they developed needs, interests, and values that each region found to be ultimately unacceptable in the other. Enslavers and their supporters became more and more committed to chattel slavery, viewing it as the essential prop to their own independence, while to them the North’s vaunted “free society” became an object of fear and loathing. And although northerners hotly disagreed among themselves about the meaning of “free labor,” most came to view the expansion of slavery as a direct threat to northerners’ own rights, freedoms, and aspirations. The ongoing resistance to slavery and the response it evoked from slaveholders kept the issue alive and the stakes high.

Disputes over the future of the West manifested and exacerbated the growing sectional clash, destroyed the old two-party system, and gave life to Republicanism. “Bleeding Kansas” and Harpers Ferry revealed how sharp the conflict had become and anticipated the way in which it would at last be resolved. John Brown continued to symbolize the powerful currents that drove North and South toward war. In late 1859, Brown died a traitor’s death, brought to the gallows by U.S. troops led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. Two short years later, U.S. troops marched into battle against Lee. On their lips was a fighting song that began “John Brown’s Body lies a moldering in the grave,” but “his soul goes marching on.”