Know-Nothings, Republicans, and the Demise of the Two-Party System 353make Chicago the terminus of a transcontinental rail-
road, but construction could not begin until the route
was cleared of Indians and brought under some kind of
civil control.
The powerful southern faction in Congress
wanted the railroad to pass through New Orleans or
Memphis; it refused to support Douglas’s proposal.
The railroad question aside, Nebraska would presum-
ably become a free state, for it lay north of latitude
36°30’ in a district from which slavery had been
excluded by the Missouri Compromise. Under pres-
sure from the Southerners, led by Senator David R.
Atchison of Missouri, Douglas agreed first to divide
the region into two territories, Kansas and Nebraska,
and then—a fateful concession—to repeal the part of
the Missouri Compromise that excluded slavery from
land north of 36°30’. Whether the new territories
should become slave or free, he argued, should be left
to the decision of the settlers in accordance with the
democratic principle of popular sovereignty. The fact
that he might advance his presidential ambitions by
making concessions to the South must have influenced
Douglas too, as must the local political situation in
Missouri, where slaveholders feared being “sur-
rounded” on three sides by free states.
Douglas’s miscalculation of northern sentiment
was monumental. It was one thing to apply popular
sovereignty to the new territories in the Southwest,
but quite another to apply it to a region that had been
part of the United States for half a century and free
soil for thirty-four years. Word that the area was to be
opened to slavery caused an indignant outcry; many
moderate opponents of slavery were radicalized. A
group of abolitionist congressmen issued what they
called their “Appeal of the Independent Democrats”
(actually, all were Free Soilers and Whigs) denounc-
ing the Kansas-Nebraska bill as “a gross violation of a
sacred pledge” and calling for a campaign of letter
writing, petitions, and public meetings to prevent its
passage. The unanimity and force of the northern
public’s reaction was like nothing in America since
the days of the Stamp Act and the Intolerable Acts.
But protests could not defeat the bill. Southerners
in both houses backed it regardless of party. Douglas, at
his best when under attack, pushed it with all his power.
The authors of the “Appeal,” he charged, were “the
pure unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism,
Free Soilism, [and] Niggerism.” President Pierce added
whatever force the administration could muster. As a
result, the northern Democrats split and the Kansas-
Nebraska Actwas passed late in May 1854. In this
manner the nation took the greatest single step in its
march toward the abyss of secession and civil war.
The repeal of the Missouri Compromise struck
the North like a slap in the face—at once shameful
and challenging. Presumably the question of slavery in
the territories had been settled forever; now, seem-
ingly without justification, it had been reopened. On
May 24, two days after the Kansas-Nebraska bill
passed the House of Representatives, Anthony Burns,
a slave who had escaped from Virginia by stowing
away on a ship, was arrested in Boston. Massachusetts
abolitionists brought suit against Burns’s former mas-
ter, charging false arrest. They also organized a protest
meeting at which they inflamed the crowd into attack-
ing the courthouse where Burns was being held. The
mob broke into the building and a guard was killed,
but federal marshals drove off the attackers.
President Pierce ordered the Boston district
attorney to “incur any expense” to enforce the law.
He also sent a federal ship to Boston to carry Burns
back to Virginia. Thus Burns was returned to his
master, but it required two companies of soldiers
and 1,000 police and marines to get him aboard
ship. As the grim parade marched past buildings fes-
tooned with black crepe, the crowd screamed
“Kidnappers! Kidnappers!” at the soldiers. Estimates
of the cost of returning this single slave to his owner
ran as high as $100,000. A few months later, north-
ern sympathizers bought Burns his freedom—for a
few hundred dollars.
In previous cases Boston’s conservative leaders,
Whig to a man, had tended to hold back; after the Burns
incident, they were thoroughly radicalized. “We went to
bed one night old fashioned.. .Whigs,” one of them
explained, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”The Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska
Actatwww.myhistorylab.comKnow-Nothings, Republicans, and
the Demise of the Two-Party System
There were ninety-one free-state Democrats in the
House of Representatives when the Kansas-Nebraska
Act was passed, only twenty-five after the next elec-
tion. With the Whig party already moribund, dissi-
dents flocked to two new parties.
One was the American party, or Know-Nothing
party, so called because it grew out of a secret society
whose members used the password “I don’t know.” The
Know-Nothings were primarily nativists—immigration
was soaring in the early 1850s, and the influx of poor
foreigners was causing genuine social problems. Crime
was on the rise in the cities along with drunkenness and
other “diseases of poverty.”
Several emotion-charged issues related to the fact
that a large percentage of the immigrants were Irish
and German Catholics also troubled the Know-
Nothings. Questions such as public financing ofSeetheMap