In Episode 13 of Star-Spangled Studies, Dr. G unpacks how the 1850s sectional crisis shattered the Union. Key topics include:

• Senate caning of Charles Sumner & breakdown of debate

• Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s moral impact

• Kansas–Nebraska Act, popular sovereignty & “Bleeding Kansas”

• Rise of the Republican Party

• Dred Scott decision’s political earthquake

• John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry

• 1860 election: four-way split & Lincoln’s sectional victory

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Hello, y'all.

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It's me.

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It's me.

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It's Dr.

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G.

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Welcome back to Star-Spangled Studies.

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The date is May 22nd, 1856.

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The place.

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The floor of the United States Senate.

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A chamber supposedly dedicated

to reason debate Massachusetts.

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Senator Charles Sumner, a staunch

abolitionist is at his desk

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signing copies of his recent

speech, the Crime Against Kansas.

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He had viciously attacked the institution

of slavery and its defenders, including

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Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina.

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Suddenly a figure looms over him.

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It's Representative Preston

Brooks, Senator Butler's, kinsman

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Brooks' voice is low and steady.

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Quote, Mr.

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Sumner, I have read your

speech twice over carefully.

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It is a liable on South Carolina and Mr.

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Butler, who is a relative of

mine before Sumner can react,

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Brooks raises a thick gutta per.

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Came with a heavy gold head

and he brings it down with full

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force on Sumner's skull again.

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Then again, blinded by his own blood

Sumner struggles to rise his long legs

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trapped beneath his desk, which is

bolted to the floor with a mighty roar.

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He rips the desk from its iron

mooring, staggers into the aisle,

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but the beating doesn't stop.

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Brooks continues to rain down, blows

the cane shattering into splinters

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until Sumner collapses unconscious and

bleeding profusely on the Senate floor.

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Brooks would later boast of delivering

quote, about 31st rate stripes.

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End quote.

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Stunned onlookers, including other

southern congressmen who blocked anyone

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from intervening, simply watched the

savage Assault was more than a personal

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vendetta, which it was, but it was a

symbol of what the nation had become.

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It represented as one historian put it.

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The breakdown of reason discourse.

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How did the United States, a nation

founded on ideals of liberty and debate

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arrive at a point where political

differences were settled with a

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cane on the floors of the Senate?

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This brings us to one of the great

debates among historians of the Civil

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War was this conflict as New York Senator

Williams Seward famously declared.

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An irrepressible conflict between two

societies, so fundamentally different.

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That war was inevitable, or was

it as a later group of revisionist

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Historians like James C.

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Randall and Al and Avery Craven argued

a Repressible conflict, a needless

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war brought on by a blundering

generation of extremist politicians

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who failed to find compromise

that could have saved the union.

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Today we will explore the questions

by examining the decade long fuse,

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that 1850s decade that was lit by

compromise and it ended in war.

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So let's go.

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So how did we get here?

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Well, we've seen throughout this entire

course how we've got here, obviously,

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but today's story is actually gonna

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with an attempt to avoid violence.

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The union that by 1850 was in peril.

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The vast territory acquired from

Mexico had thrown the nation into a

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crisis over the future of slavery.

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California, like we mentioned last

episode was flooded now with settlers

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from the Gold Rush in California.

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Now that it had the population of

necessary to do so was demanding

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admission as a state and a free

state, and once again threaten to

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shatter the delicate balance of power

between north and south in the Senate.

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Into this breach stepped the giants

of a fading political generation.

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At the center was Henry Clay of

Kentucky, the aging great compromiser,

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who rose to offer one last grand

bargain to save the nation.

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It is a work of mutual concession.

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A work in which for the sake of peace

and Concord one party abates his extreme

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demands and consideration of an abatement

of extreme demands by the other party.

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Let us discard all

resentment, all passions.

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Let us go to the altar of our country

and swear as the oath was taken of

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Old that we will preserve her union.

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End quote.

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Clay's plea for unity was met

with a grim prophecy, John C.

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Calhoun of South Carolina, so frail

at this point from tuberculosis that

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he had to have his speech read by a

colleague delivered a haunting warning.

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The North's relentless attacks

on slavery he argued had already

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destroyed the union's equilibrium.

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I have senators believe from

the first that the agitation of

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the subject of slavery would.

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If not prevented by some

timely and effective measure.

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End in Disunion.

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Entertaining this opinion I have on

all proper occasions endeavor to call

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the attention of both the two great

parties, but without success, the

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agitation has been permitted to proceed

until it can no longer be disguised

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or denied that the union is in danger.

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End quote, slavery in his other words.

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Breaking the union out of this crucible

of hope and despair emerged The great

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compromise of 1850 and Great is in

quotation marks and is definitely

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was not that it wasn't a single

bill, but it was a package of five

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separate laws cleverly steered through

Congress by the rising political

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star Stephen Douglas of Illinois.

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It was a classic political bargain

with something for everybody.

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To put it very plainly, California

becomes admitted as a free

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state popular sovereignty.

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The will of the people would determine

whether or not new territories when

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applying for statehood could become

free or slave states, and this was

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to be used in Utah and New Mexico.

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It set Texas's boundaries while

also settling its debt that it

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had assumed during the wars.

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The slave trade was also banned in

Washington DC but the most contentious

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part of this, this compromise

contained what historian David Potter

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has argued was the poison chalice,

the one piece of the bargain that

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the South demanded above all others.

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A new draconian fugitive slave

Act would provide and prove to

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be the very thing that made this

compromise unsustainable long term.

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This new fugitive slave law was

breathtaking in its severity.

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It denied accused fugitives the right

to a jury trial or even to testify in

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their own defense, federal commissioners

were paid more for returning a person

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to slavery than for setting them free.

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That could be a problem, as I'm

sure you can see, maybe most

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explosively, it demanded that all

citizens, including northerners.

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Were by law required to actively assist

in the capture of his alleged runaways.

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Any person found not assisting or

impeding on the capture of runaway or

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alleged runaway slaves was fined with

heavy fines and even prison sentences,

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even if you just aided in their escape.

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The South had demanded this law to secure

what it called its property rights, a key

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condition for them to remain in the union.

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Yet its enforcement had a profoundly

radicalizing effect on the north.

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It dragged the reality of slavery.

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For many northerners had been a

distant, abstract institution.

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Into their neighborhoods,

into their town squares.

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The site of federal marshals seizing

people, some of whom have lived as free

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members of their communities for years

and sending them back to the south.

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Without due process turned many moderates

into staunch opponents of the slave power.

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Northern states passed what they

called personal liberty laws to

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obstruct the Federal Act, which

in turn convinced southerners that

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the North would never honor, honor

its constitutional obligations.

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The very measured to secure

the union became the most

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powerful force driving it apart.

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Northerners were exercising what

they called state's rights to not

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enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.

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Southerners became so upset at this

that they demanded that the federal

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government enforce the Fugitive Slave

Act against the will of the Northerners.

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An irony.

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Not lost on Northerners when Southern

States said that they were defending

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their state's rights to slavery.

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If a law demanded you violate your

conscience, would you obey it?

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The Fugitive Slave Act forced that

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a novel written by a minister's wife,

Harriet Beecher STO, turned that political

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question into a national moral crisis.

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She wrote the book, uncle Tom's

Cabin, and this wasn't just a

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book, it was a cultural earthquake.

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It sold over 300,000

copies in its first year.

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The novels power lay in its

ability to move the debate

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from the halls of congress.

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Into the hearts of its readers.

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It personalized the horrors of slavery.

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It focused on the emotional traumas

of family separation, the conflict

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between human law and God's law.

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This is captured perfectly in the

scene where the wife of a Senator, Mrs.

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Bird, learns of the Fugitive Slave Act.

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Her husband just voted for quote, you

ought to be ashamed, John Poor homeless.

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Houseless creatures.

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It is shameful, wicked abominable law.

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And I'll break it for one.

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The first time I get a chance,

and I hope I have a chance, I do

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end quote this sentiment that Mrs.

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Bird said, this higher moral

law that trumped the laws of

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the state electrified the north.

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It terrified.

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The South STOs novel reframe

slavery not as a political issue

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to be compromised over, but as a

national sin that demanded absolute

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opposition and eventually reckoning.

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In response, the South didn't

just defend its institution.

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It built an entire counter

morality movement around it.

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Southern intellectuals, like ones

we have met, George Fitzhugh,

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argued that slavery was not the

necessary evil, but a positive good.

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In fact, his 1850.

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Work, the universal law of slavery.

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Fitz Hued made the stunning claim

that southern slaves were in fact

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the happiest, and in some senses,

freest people in the world End quote.

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Why would he say something like this?

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Because unlike the northern wage slave,

in his estimation, who were exploited by

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capitalists and abandoned when sick or old

enslaved persons were cared for throughout

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their entire lives, this argument created

two irreconcilable moral universes.

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On one side, slavery was a

soul crushing sin on the other.

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It was a benevolent, paternalistic

system political skill.

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No matter how great could not, and cannot

bridge a chasm that wide, the conflict

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was becoming truly irrepressible.

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As we've seen.

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The compromise of 1850 was

a failed attempt to calm the

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waters of this national debate.

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And they would come to a head

once more a few years later, with

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the Kansas Nebraska Act of 1854.

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And this was itself a political hurricane.

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The architect of this storm was

Senator Steven Douglas, who we

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had talked about previously.

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He was known as the little

giant from Illinois.

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His great ambition was a

transcontinental railroad that would

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bind the nation together with its

eastern terminus in his home state.

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To achieve this, he needed to organize the

vast Nebraska territory, west of Missouri.

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His solution was a concept that

he called popular sovereignty.

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Quote, the great principle is the right

of every community to judge and decide for

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itself whether a thing is right or wrong.

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I deny the right of Congress

to force a slave holding state

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upon an unwilling people.

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I deny their right to force a free

state upon an unwilling people leave

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the people thereof perfectly free

to form and regulate their domestic

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institutions in their own way.

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End quote.

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To Douglass.

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This was the essence of democracy.

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But to make it happen, his Kansas

Nebraska Act explicitly had to repeal

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the Missouri compromise of 1820, which

for the previous 34 years had prohibited

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slavery in this very territory.

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He wanted organized.

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The political explosion of this was

immediate and it was catastrophic.

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It actually shattered the wig party and it

split it along sectional lines, and from

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the Ashes rose, A new political force.

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A party founded on a single potent idea

of stopping the expansion of slavery.

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This was the birth of

the Republican party.

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But the true test of popular

sovereignty came not in Washington,

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but actually on the plains of Kansas.

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The territory itself became the

test of popular sovereignty and

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what some historians call the

first shots of the Civil War.

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Pro-slavery supporters, they were

called border Ruffians, had stormed

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across the border from Missouri to stuff

ballot boxes and terrorize violently.

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Any anti-slavery settlers who

might vote for this to become.

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A free state.

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In response, abolitionist societies like

the New England Immigrant Aid Company

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funded the migration of what they

called free soilers to the territory

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to vote to make it a free state.

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The result, of course, as you

can see, was not democracy.

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It was Civil war.

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Julia Lovejoy, an abolitionist settler

who moved to Kansas with her family.

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Chronicled the horror to letter

in letters to eastern newspapers.

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Quote, our hearts, sicken at the

atrocities perpetuated daily.

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Upon the innocent and un offending

ostomy has been laid in ashes.

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Every house burned and four of

our men killed 50 ostomy families.

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Shelterless are now living in their

wagons in the woods endeavoring to

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escape these fiends in human form.

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Heaven and Elijah's

Ravens to feed on them.

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End quote, soon, Kansas would have

two rival governments, a pro-slavery,

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one in La Compton, and a free

state one in Topeka, and a gorilla

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war raged across the territory.

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This is what we know today

as bleeding Kansas, and this

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became a national spectacle.

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It was a terrifying microcosm of

the larger conflict over slavery.

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It proved that popular sovereignty,

Douglass's, democratic solution

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was a failure and not just a

failure, but a bloody failure.

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The North and the South were no longer

willing to vote on the future of

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slavery they were willing to kill for

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after the political process

failed so spectacularly in Kansas.

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Many hope the nation's highest legal

authority, the Supreme Court could

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resolve this crisis in some manner.

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In 1857, it was given that chance the

case of an enslaved man named Dred

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Scott provided such an opportunity.

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Scott had been taken by his enslave

into the free state of Illinois and then

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the free Wisconsin territory, and he

sued for his freedom, arguing that his

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residents on free soil made him free.

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Chief Justice Roger b Taney, or

Tawney, as it's pronounced, was a

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southerner, and he saw a chance not

just to rule on Scott's case, but to

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settle the slavery question forever.

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The decision he wrote would become one

of the most reviled in American history.

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The court's ruling was a

sweeping three-part bombshell.

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First, it declared that black

people, whether enslaved or

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free, were not and could never

be citizens of the United States.

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He wrote that they were quote beings of

an inferior order and altogether unfit

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to associate with the white race and

so far inferior that they had no right.

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Which a white man was bound to respect.

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End quote.

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Second, the court ruled that the Missouri

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Congress, he argued, had no authority to

ban slavery from any federal territory.

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Third, he argued that enslaved people were

property and the Fifth Amendment protected

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a slave holder's right to that property.

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Anywhere in these United States the impact

of this court decision, the highest court

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in the land was seismic for the South.

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It was a total victory, a judicial

confirmation of their most extreme

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constitutional arguments for the

newly formed Republican party.

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It was a disaster.

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The court had just declared their entire

platform, the prevention of slavery's

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expansion to be unconstitutional.

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More than that, the Dred Scott decision

destroyed what little faith the North

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had left in the federal government.

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To many, it looked like a coordinated

conspiracy by a slave power that

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now controlled the presidency, the

Congress, and the Supreme Court, the

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highest court in the land had not

acted as a neutral arbiter of the law.

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It acted as a partisan

weapon for the south.

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With the political and legal avenues

for compromise, seemingly exhausted the

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path to a violent resolution only group.

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The Supreme Court decision in the

Dred Scott Case did lead to violence.

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It radicalized a man named John Brown.

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John Brown was a man forged in

the fires of bleeding Kansas.

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He was a religious zealot who

believed he was God's chosen

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instrument to destroy slavery.

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In October of 1859, John Brown and a

small band of 21 followers, including

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both black and white adherence,

launched a daring raid on the federal

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arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.

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His plan was audacious and desperate.

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Seize the arsenal's, 100,000 rifles,

arm local slaves, and spark a massive

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rebellion that would sweep through the

south, ending slavery in a tide of blood.

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The raid was an ultimate failure.

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Local slaves did not rise up.

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And within 36 hours, Brown's forces

were cornered in an engine house by

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the US Marines, under the command

of a man named Colonel Robert E.

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Lee.

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John Brown's true impact came

not in battle, but in his

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trial and later martyrdom.

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His final speech of the court

was a masterpiece of defiant

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eloquence that transformed him

from a failed revolutionary.

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Into a prophetic figure quote,

I deny everything but what I

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have all along admitted of a

design on my part to free slaves.

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I believe that to have interfered as

I have done in behalf of his despised

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poor was not wrong, but right.

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Now if it is deemed necessary that

I should forfeit my life for the

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furtherance of the ends of justice

and mingle my blood further with the

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blood of my children and with the blood

of millions in the slave countries

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whose rights are disgraced by wicked,

cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit.

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So let it be done.

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The nation was utterly.

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Polarized by his actions and his

words In the South, the raid was a

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confirmation of their deepest fears.

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They saw Brown as a terrorist.

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The living embodiment of the

violent northern abolitionist

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fanaticism sent to murder them

in their beds while they slept.

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The Richmond inquired declared that the

raid had advanced the cause of Disunion

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more than any other vent end quote.

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In the north, the

reaction was more complex.

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While many condemned his violence,

a powerful and influential group,

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including figures like Ralph Waldo

Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

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hailed him as a saint in a martyr.

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No one captured the shift

better than Frederick Douglas.

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Douglas, the former slave, had met with

Brown before the raid and called the

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plan a steel trap, refusing to join him.

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But after Brown's execution,

Douglass embraced the John

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Brown way, as he called it.

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He argued that moral appeals had

failed and that slave holders

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would only respond to fear.

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Possibly later violence.

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We must reach the slave holder's conscious

through his fear of personal danger.

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We must make him feel that there

is death in the air about him, that

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there is death in the pot before him,

that there is death all around him.

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End quote.

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John Brown's raid was the

emotional point of no return.

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It transformed a political conflict

now into a Holy War for the South.

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It was now a war of survival,

but for many in the north, it

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was now a righteous crusade.

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The middle ground, the age of

compromises had been burned away.

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By 1860, the nation stood on a precipice.

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The Democratic Party, that

last great national political

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institution finally shattered under

the weight of the slavery issue.

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At their convention, Southern

Delegates walked out and the

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party split and it nominated two

separate candidates to be president.

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This fracturing of politics paved the

way for one of the most consequential

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elections in American history.

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The 1860 presidential race featured

four major candidates, a clear

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sign of a nation breaking apart.

349

The Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln

of Illinois on a platform of halting

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slavery's expansion into the territories.

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Northern Democrats nominated Stephen

Douglas, still the champion and still

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championing popular sovereignty.

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The Southern Democrats nominated Vice

President John c Breckenridge, who

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demanded federal protection for slavery.

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Everywhere.

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And the new Constitutional Union party

nominated John Bell, whose entire

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platform was essentially to ignore the

slavery issue and beg for national unity.

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The result was a sectional victory.

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Abraham Lincoln won the presidency with

less than 40% of the popular vote, but he

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swept nearly every free state, giving him

a clear majority in the electoral college.

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To the south.

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His election was not a

legitimate democratic outcome.

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It was a hostile takeover by a

purely sectional anti-slavery party.

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They saw it as the final proof that their

way of life had no future in the union.

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So we returned to our central

question then, was the Civil War

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an irrepressible conflict or the

product of a blundering generation?

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The Blundering generation thesis suggests

that better leadership could have forged

368

another compromise that the war was a

tragic, avoidable failure of politics.

369

But the events of the 1850s present

a powerful counter argument to that.

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The failure of the compromise of

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Kansas, the Supreme Court's radical

Dred Scott decision in the emotional

372

firestorm from John Brown's raid.

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Each event systematically dismantled

the potential for political compromise.

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Each event revealed a chasm between North

and South that was not merely political,

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but deeply moral and social and economic.

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As historian Eric Foner has argued,

the conflict was ultimately about

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two fundamentally incompatible

social systems and their competing

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vision for the nation's future.

379

One, based on free labor.

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And won on slave labor by 1860.

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The conflict certainly seemed

irrepressible in December, just weeks

382

after Lincoln's election, South Carolina

seceded from the Union declaring that the

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federal government had become its enemy.

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The house was now finally divided.

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After Lincoln's was president-elect

of a fractured republic.

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He had won the election, but he

had lost half of the country.

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The time for debate, for

Compromise for Politics was over.

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The crisis had reached its peak.

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In our next episode, we'll cross the line

from a crisis to conflict as we witnessed

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the first shots of the American Civil War.

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I'm Dr.

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G.

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I'll see y'all in the past.