CHAPTER 13 A House Divided, 1840–1861
This chapter concentrates on the events that led to the Civil War. It opens with a vignette demonstrating the touchiness of southerners
about slavery by the 1850s: Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis objected to placing a “liberty cap” atop the statue planned for the U.S. Capi-
tol’s dome because of the association of such caps with ancient Roman slaves’ yearning for freedom. The main reason slavery had
assumed a central role in the nation’s debate by the 1850s was territorial expansion—what many Americans called their “manifest
destiny” to control the continent, a topic the chapter explores through coverage of Texas independence and annexation, the settlement
of Oregon and California, and, finally, the Mexican War. The war with Mexico, begun in 1846 by President James Polk to acquire
California, was relatively short but controversial because many believed the war would encourage slavery’s expansion. Opponents
included Henry David Thoreau and Abraham Lincoln. The ultimate acquisition of California and most of the rest of the present Amer-
ican Southwest (the Mexican Cession) formally occurred with the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the war. Soon,
thousands of Americans and others flocked to California because of the discovery of gold there in early 1848. This gold rush created
wealth as well as ethnic conflict. Also, even before the treaty transferred land to the United States, Rep. David Wilmot (D–
Pennsylvania) proposed banning slavery from territory that might be taken from Mexico. This “Wilmot Proviso” gave rise to the Free
Soil Party, which spread antislavery’s appeal far beyond abolitionists and intensified sectional debate.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Introduction: Statue of Freedom
1. Jefferson Davis opposed plans to erect a statue atop the U.S. Capitol dome wearing a liberty cap because it could be seen
as symbolic of slaves seeking freedom.
II. Fruits of Manifest Destiny
A. Continental Expansion
2. Americans settled in Oregon (administered by both England and the United States) and Utah (part of Mexico).
a. Many believed God wanted the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean.
B. The Mexican Frontier: New Mexico and California
1. Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821.
a. The northern frontier of Mexico was California, New Mexico, and Texas.
2. California’s non-Indian population in 1821 was vastly outnumbered by Indians.
C. The Texas Revolt
1. The first part of Mexico to be settled by significant numbers of Americans was Texas.
2. Alarmed that its grip on the area was weakening, the Mexican government in 1830 annulled existing land contracts and
barred future emigration from the United States.
3. General Antonio López de Santa Anna sent an army in 1835 to impose central authority.
4. Rebels formed a provisional government that soon called for Texan independence.
5. Texas desired annexation by the United States, but neither Jackson nor Van Buren acted on that because of political
concerns regarding adding another slave state.
D. The Election of 1844
2. James Polk, a Tennessee slaveholder and friend of Jackson, received the Democratic nomination instead of Van Buren.
3. Dark horse Polk defeated Clay in a close election.
E. The Road to War
1. Polk had four clearly defined goals:
a. Reduce the tariff
2. Polk initiated war with Mexico to get California.
F. The War and Its Critics
1. Although most Americans (inspired by manifest destiny) supported the war, a vocal minority feared that the only aim of
the war was to acquire new land for the expansion of slavery.
1. Combat took place on three fronts:
2. Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848
H. The Texas Borderland
1. As borders shifted, some residents suddenly became aliens.
a. Some Tejanos sent their children to English–speaking schools, but most refused to convert from Catholicism to
2. The area between the Nueces River and the Rio Grande was claimed by both Texas and Mexico and controlled by
Comanche Indians.
I. Race and Manifest Destiny
1. A region (northern Mexico) that for centuries had been united was suddenly split in two, dividing families and severing
trade routes.
2. The spirit of manifest destiny gave a new stridency to ideas about racial superiority.
5. The Texas constitution adopted after independence not only included protections for slavery but also denied civil rights to
Indians and persons of African origin.
J. Gold Rush California
1. The non-Indian population was 15,000 in 1848 but climbed to 360,000 by 1860.
2. California’s gold-rush population was incredibly diverse.
a. Latinos
K. California and the Boundaries of Freedom
2. The boundaries of freedom in California were tightly drawn.
L. Opening Japan
1. The U.S. Navy’s Commodore Matthew Perry sailed warships into Tokyo Harbor and demanded that Japan negotiate a
trade treaty with the United States (1853–1854).
III. A Dose of Arsenic
A. The Wilmot Proviso
1. Territory from Mexico fraying bonds of union
2. In 1846, Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed a resolution prohibiting slavery from all territory acquired
from Mexico.
3. In 1848, opponents of slavery’s expansion organized the Free Soil Party.
B. The Free Soil Appeal
1. The Free Soil position had a popular appeal in the North because it would limit southern power in the federal government.
2. Wage earners of the North also favored the Free Soil movement.
3. The Free Soil platform of 1848 called both for barring slavery from western territories and for the federal government
providing homesteads to settlers without cost.
C. Crisis and Compromise
1. The year 1848 brought revolution in Europe, only to be suppressed by counterrevolution.
2. With the slavery issue appearing more and more ominous, established party leaders moved to resolve differences between
the sections.
a. The Compromise of 1850 included:
i. Admission of California as a free state
D. The Great Debate
1. Powerful leaders spoke for and against the Compromise:
2. President Taylor, Compromise opponent, died in office, and the new president, Millard Fillmore, secured the adoption of
the Compromise.
E. The Fugitive Slave Issue
1. The Fugitive Slave Act allowed special federal commissioners to determine the fate of alleged fugitives without benefit of
2. In a series of dramatic confrontations, fugitives, aided by abolitionist allies, violently resisted capture.
4. Voices of Freedom (Primary Source document feature) showcases a letter from northern whites in Connecticut to the
Middletown Sentinel and Witness vowing to resist the Fugitive Slave Act (1850).
F. Douglas and Popular Sovereignty
1. Franklin Pierce won the 1852 presidential election.
3. Douglas introduced a bill to establish territorial governments for Nebraska and Kansas so that a transcontinental railroad
could be constructed.
G. The Kansas-Nebraska Act
1. Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery had been prohibited in the Kansas-Nebraska area.
2. The Appeal of the Independent Democrats was issued by antislavery congressmen opposed to the Kansas-Nebraska bill
because it would potentially open the area to slavery.
3. The Kansas-Nebraska bill became law.
a. Democrats were no longer unified, as many northern Democrats opposed the bill.
IV. The Rise of the Republican Party
A. The Northern Economy
1. The rise of the Republican Party reflected underlying economic and social changes.
a. The railroad network grew from 5,000 miles to 30,000 by 1860.
3. Two great areas of industrial production had arisen:
B. The Rise and Fall of the Know-Nothings
1. In 1854, the American, or Know-Nothing, Party emerged as a political party appealing to anti–Catholic and anti-
immigrant and, in the North, antislavery sentiments.
2. In many states, however, these white European immigrants could vote even before becoming citizens.
C. The Free Labor Ideology
1. Republicans managed to convince most northerners (antislavery Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, and Know–
Nothings) that the “Slave Power” posed a more immediate threat to their liberties and aspirations than did “popery”
(Catholicism) or immigration.
2. Free labor could not compete with slave labor, and so slavery’s expansion had to be halted to ensure freedom for the white
laborer.
3. Republicans cried “freedom national,” meaning not abolition but ending the federal government’s support of slavery.
D. Bleeding Kansas and the Election of 1856
1. Bleeding Kansas seemed to discredit Douglas’s policy of leaving the decision of slavery up to the local population—thus,
aiding the Republicans.
2. The election of 1856 demonstrated that parties had reoriented themselves along sectional lines.
V. The Emergence of Lincoln
A. The Dred Scott Decision
1. After having lived in free territories, the slave Dred Scott sued for his freedom.
2. The Supreme Court justices addressed three questions:
3. Speaking for the majority, Chief Justice Roger A. Taney declared that only white persons could be citizens of the United
States.
4. Scott remained a slave, as Illinois law had no effect on him.
5. Taney ruled that Congress possessed no power under the Constitution to bar slavery from a territory, so Scott was still a
slave.
6. Who Is an American? (Primary Source document feature) includes a section of the Dred Scott decision by Chief Justice
Roger Taney (1857).
B. The Decision’s Aftermath
2. The Buchanan administration tried to admit Kansas as a slave state under the Lecompton Constitution.
C. Lincoln and Slavery
1. In seeking reelection, Douglas faced an unexpectedly strong challenge from Abraham Lincoln.
D. The Lincoln-Douglas Campaign
1. Lincoln campaigned against Douglas for Illinois’s senate seat.
2. The Lincoln-Douglas debates remain classics of American political oratory.
a. To Lincoln, freedom meant opposition to slavery.
3. Lincoln shared many of the racial prejudices of his day.
4. Douglas was reelected by a narrow margin.
E. John Brown at Harpers Ferry
1. An armed assault by the abolitionist John Brown on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, further heightened
sectional tensions.
2. Placed on trial for treason to the state of Virginia, Brown’s execution turned him into a martyr to much of the North.
3. The South did not like the adulation of Brown in the North.
F. The Rise of Southern Nationalism
1. More and more southerners were speaking openly of southward expansion.
2. By the late 1850s, southern leaders were making every effort to strengthen the bonds of slavery.
G. The Democratic Split
1. At the 1860 convention, the Democratic Party reaffirmed the doctrine of popular sovereignty with its platform.
a. Delegates from seven Lower South states left the convention.
2. This split led to two separate conventions six weeks later.
3. The Democratic Party, the last great bond of national unity, had been shattered.
H. The Nomination of Lincoln
1. Republicans nominated Lincoln over William Seward, who had a reputation for radicalism.
3. The party platform:
a. Denied the validity of the Dred Scott decision
I. The Election of 1860
1. In effect, two presidential campaigns took place in 1860:
2. The most striking thing about the election returns was their sectional character.
3. Without a single vote in ten southern states, Lincoln was elected the nation’s sixteenth president.
VI. The Impending Crisis
A. The Secession Movement
2. In the months that followed Lincoln’s election, seven states, stretching from South Carolina to Texas, seceded from the
Union.
B. The Secession Crisis
1. President Buchanan denied that a state could secede but also insisted that the federal government had no right to use force
against it.
2. The Crittenden plan proposed the protection of slavery where it existed and the extension of the Missouri Compromise
line to the Pacific Ocean.
3. The Confederate States of America was formed before Lincoln’s inauguration by the seven states that had seceded.
a. Jefferson Davis was president.
C. And the War Came
1. In time, Lincoln believed, secession might collapse from within.
3. Lincoln made sure the North did not fire the first shot.
5. Four Upper South states (Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia) seceded and joined the Confederacy rather
than aid Lincoln in suppressing the rebellion.
SUGGESTED DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
• Discuss the controversy over Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom.
• Discuss manifest destiny. Was westward expansion across the continent inevitable? How was the language of freedom used to
justify expansion?
• Discuss how westward expansion and the Mexican War affected California. What role did East Asian markets play?
• What were the promises and realities of free labor? Why didn’t proponents of free labor also take on the issue of abolition?
• What destroyed the second American party system, and how was the electorate realigned?
• Describe the California gold rush and its impact on the Native Americans of the state.
SUPPLEMENTAL WEB AND VISUAL RESOURCES
John Brown
Kansas-Nebraska Act
Lincoln
Lincoln-Douglas Debates
Manifest Destiny
Sectionalism and Politics in the 1850s
The Mexican War
SUPPLEMENTAL PRINT RESOURCES
Chaffin, Tom. Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Cause of American Empire. New York: Hill & Wang, 2002.
Dolan, Eric Jay. When America First Met China: An Exotic History of Tea, Drugs, and Money in the Age of Sail. New York: Liveright, 2012.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Freehling, William W. The Road to Disunion, Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Gienapp, William. “Nativism and the Creating of a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War.” Journal of American History 72, no. 3
(1985): 529–559.
Goldfield, David. America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2011.
Grimsted, David. American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Holt, Michael. The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999.
Hurtado, Albert. Indian Survival on the California Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
Johnson, Susan Lee. Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000.
Karsten, Peter. “Labor’s Sorrow? Workers, Bosses, and the Courts in Antebellum America.” Reviews in American History 21, no. 2 (1993): 447–453.
Maizlish, Stephen E. A Strife of Tongues: The Compromise of 1850 and the Ideological Foundations of the American Civil War. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2018.
INTERACTIVE INSTRUCTOR ACTIVITIES
1. Form the class into an audience to play out the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. Divide the students into two groups: Lincoln supporters and
Douglas supporters. Allow the groups to meet separately to familiarize themselves with the debate and the main points for either side. Each group
should select a spokesperson to play Lincoln or Douglas. Ask each group to compile a set of questions to ask the opposition during the debate.
Questions that the instructor can ask include: Should slavery expand? What is the role of free blacks in America? Should we restrict Irish immi-
gration?
2. Display images of the California gold rush and ask the students to write down their impressions of the images, including the features they detect in
the foreground and background. Then hold a class discussion for each image in which the instructor asks the students how features of the images