14 The American Civil Warin their political culture. Such a center
had deteriorated because of economic and
social change. The Compromise of 1850
was representative of the nature of
congressional responses, attempting to
placate both Northerners and Southerners.
Although it admitted California as a free
state, which offset the balance in the
Senate in favor of Northern states, it also
imposed a tougher Fugitive Slave Act. In
many respects the Compromise of 1850
was at best an armistice to an American
political culture attempting to wrest itself
from permanent divisions along sectional
lines.
The publication In 1852 of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, a best-selling anti-slavery novel by
Harriet Beecher Stowe, further intensified
the emotionally charged atmosphere
surrounding slavery. It hardened Northern
middle-class attitudes regarding slavery's
incompatibility with the nation's democratic
principles. So popular and offensive was the
book that, at one point during the Civil War
when Abraham Lincoln finally met Harriet
Beecher Stowe, he referred to her as 'the
little lady who made this big war.'
Sectional tensions erupted in 1854
when the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the
Missouri Compromise and allowed the
ambiguous concept of 'popular sovereignty'
(let the people of the territories decide) to
settle the question of whether or not slavery
would exist. When it passed, Illinois Senator
Stephen A. Douglas prophesied that the
Kansas-Nebraska Act would 'raise a hell of
a storm.' Although it opened the landscape
for the construction of a transcontinental
railroad, it signaled the collapse of the
Whig Party, served as a catalyst for the new
Republican Party, and was instrumental in
the growth of the one-party Democratic
South.
In 1857, the Supreme Court attempted to
settle the issue that Congress had failed to
solve. By ruling in the Dred Scott case that
Congress had no right to single out slave
property for prohibition in the territories
(areas owned by the US government but not
yet divided into states), the Court endorsed
what Southerners had believed all along -
slavery was protected by the Constitution.
Many Northerners concluded that politically
a slave power did exist and that it had won a
triumphant victory over the forces of free
soil and free labor.
Territorial conflicts were so central to
the future of the republic that the religious
culture divided into factions. Parishioners
came to believe in an anti-slavery God in
the North and a pro-slavery God in the
South. As institutional centers fragmented,
the election of 1856 signaled a departure
from an American culture forced to
compromise repeatedly on issues of vital
significance to the nation's future. Although
James Buchanan won, the Democrats
became unavoidably divided. Republicans
employed the rhetoric of complete
prohibition of slavery in the territories,
and many white Southerners interpreted
this as simply a disguise for the true
intentions of the party to eventually
abolish the institution.
In the debate over the territories, both
parties claimed to be defending republican
standards of individual freedom, liberty,
honor, and moral righteousness. Yet, such
fundamental disagreements, whether moral
or political, over how these standards should
be applied to the problems confronting the
nation gave rise to hardened perceptions of
each other. They became consumed by
seeing one another as enemies.
By the end of the 1850s, hardened
perceptions, emotionally charged legislative
disputes, and vicious recriminations cast a
mold of uncompromising attitude. In
1858, running for the Illinois senate,
Lincoln perhaps best summed up the
young republic's crisis in his famous 'House
Divided' speech. 'I believe this government
cannot endure, permanently half slaves and
half free,' he concluded. The Civil War that
erupted in 1861 revealed that Southerners
and Northerners were fighting to preserve
the fundamental patterns and practices of
their economic and social life. What
Americans had failed to solve during
peacetime, they would now settle by war.