Political Crises 1850-60

The growing divide and John Brown www.explaininghistory.com

Lincoln's rise to power in the new Republican Party coincided with a new way of viewing the slavery debate that would give the South no choice but to go to war. He believed that the constitution did not require Congress to simply balance slave and non slave states, he believed Congress could abolish slavery across America if it voted to do so. Is this actually what the constitution said?

Lincoln believed that the Wilmot Proviso had proved that this was lawful, and that slavery had been banned in the states won from Mexico, so it could be abolished anywhere.
In the South there was a separate sense of national identity forming. Nationalism was a powerful force in the early 19th century, with famous spokesmen like Andrew Jackson. While practically all Northerners supported the Union, Southerners were split between those loyal to the entire United States (called "unionists") and those loyal primarily to the southern region and then the Confederacy. C. Vann Woodward said of the latter group, "A great slave society...had grown up and miraculously ourished in the heart of a thoroughly bourgeois and partly puritanical republic. It had renounced its bourgeois origins and elaborated and

painfully rationalized its institutional, legal, metaphysical, and religious defenses....When the crisis came it chose to ght. It proved to be the death struggle of a society, which went down in ruins." Perceived insults to Southern collective honor included the enormous popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the actions of abolitionist John Brown in trying to incite a slave rebellion in 1859. While the South moved toward a Southern nationalism, leaders in the North were also becoming more nationally minded, and rejected any notion of splitting the Union. The Republican national electoral platform of 1860 warned that Republicans regarded disunion as treason and would not tolerate it: "We denounce those threats of disunion...as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of

contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant people sternly to rebuke and forever silence." The South ignored the warnings: Southerners did not realize how ardently the North would ght to hold the Union together. The Case of John Brown and Harper's Ferry. John Brown was born at Torrington, Connecticut, on 9th May, 1800. The family moved to Ohio in 1805 where his father worked as a tanner. John's father was staunchly antislavery and was a voluntary agent for the Underground Railroad. Brown studied for the Congregational ministry in Connecticut but changed his mind and returned to work with his father in Hudson, Ohio. He had a variety of different jobs including work as a tanner, wool merchant, land surveyor and farmer. Married twice, he was the father of twenty children. In 1849

Brown and his family settled in a black community founded in North Elba on land donated by the AntiSlavery campaigner, Gerrit Smith. While at North Elba, Brown developed strong opinions about the evils of slavery and gradually became convinced that it would be necessary to use force to overthrow this system. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, Brown recruited forty-four men into the United States League of Gileadites, an organization founded to resist slave-catchers. In 1855 Brown and ve of his sons moved to Kansas Territory to help antislavery forces obtain control of this region. His home in Osawatomie was burned in 1856 and one of his sons was killed. With the support of Gerrit Smith, Samuel G. Howe, and other prominent Abolitionists, Brown moved to Virginia where he established a refuge for runaway slaves. In 1859 he led a party of 21 men in a successful

attack on the federal armoury at Harper's Ferry. Brown hoped that his action would encourage slaves to join his rebellion, enabling him to form an emancipation army. Two days later the armoury was stormed by Robert E. Lee and a company of marines. Brown and six men barricaded themselves in an enginehouse, and continued to ght until Brown was seriously wounded and two of his sons had been killed. John Brown was tried and convicted of insurrection, treason and murder. He was executed on 2nd December, 1859. Six other men involved in the raid were also hanged. The song, John Brown's Body, commemorating the Harper's Ferry raid, was a highly popular marching song with Republican soldiers during the American Civil War.