EXPANSION, FRAGMENTATION, AND REUNIFICATION 141
When Kansas opened for settlement later that
year, the worst fears of Northerners were realized.
Armed and passionate opponents of slavery flooded
into the territory to fight equally determined pro-
slavery agitators. The violent skirmishes of “Bleeding
Kansas” incensed Republicans, but they also
provided a rallying cry for their party and enlarged its
following. In 1856, Republicans mounted their first
presidential campaign and nominated the heroic
western explorer John Fremont as their candidate
(see page 132). As the nation’s first entirely sectional
party, the Republicans faced an uphill battle. They
worked to recruit votes by championing “Free Soil,
Free Labor, Free Men, Fremont!”
This is just one of many maps issued by the
Republicans during that campaign of 1856. All
of these maps and broadsides excoriated the
Democratic Party for betraying the nation’s future.
Here, John Jay—grandson of the revolutionary
founder—warned of a future dominated by slavery.
He annotated the map with census statistics to
demonstrate that a conspiracy of slaveholders
controlled the nation’s institutions, resources, and
political power.
Maps like Jay’s were everywhere during the
campaign, visual arguments that the fate of the West
hinged on the election. To be sure, there were doubts
about the viability of plantation agriculture in the
arid West. Moreover, by this time Washington and
Oregon had largely been established and settled as
free territories. But the stark urgency of the map is
the key to its power, for it reminded Americans that
slavery continuously divided the nation and its parties
along sectional lines. Similar maps were issued in
German, aimed at drawing immigrants away from the
Democrats and into the Republican fold.
Jay’s map also reminds us that what heightened
opposition to slavery in the 1850s was the prospect
of its expansion into the West rather than its
longstanding presence in the South. In 1857 the
Supreme Court seemed to confirm Republican
fears by expanding the rights of slaveholders in the
territories through its Dred Scott v. Sanford decision.
The majority opinion—like the Kansas–Nebraska
Act—infuriated Republicans and swelled their
ranks. Three years later, they elected Abraham
Lincoln to the presidency.