The American Yawp — Chapter Twelve: The National Crisis
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

Slavery had divided American politics for decades, and by the 1850s the divisions looked impossible to heal. Abraham Lincoln later said that slavery was "somehow the cause" of the coming war. When gold was discovered in California in 1849, thousands rushed west from across America and around the world, and California's request to join the Union as a free state threatened the balance between free and slave states.

Congress answered with the Compromise of 1850. California entered as a free state, while the New Mexico and Utah territories could decide about slavery themselves, an idea called popular sovereignty. The compromise also included a harsh new Fugitive Slave Law, which let the federal government force ordinary citizens to help capture people escaping from slavery. Many Northerners were outraged.

The 1850s also changed who Americans were. Between 1820 and 1860, millions of Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants arrived seeking work and opportunity. By the Civil War, nearly one in eight Americans had been born outside the country. Many native-born workers resented the newcomers, and anger against immigrants grew. At the same time, more and more Northerners came to believe that free wage labor was a better economic system than slavery.

New voices sharpened the conflict. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom's Cabin, an antislavery novel that became one of the best-selling books in American history. The novel follows Eliza, who escapes from slavery with her young son, and Tom, an enslaved man who suffers for refusing to betray others. The book helped millions of Northerners see slavery's cruelty. Proslavery Southerners answered boldly. In 1858, Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina declared, "Cotton is king," arguing that the world economy depended on slave-grown cotton. American cotton — the South's great export — had risen from 150,000 bales in 1815 to more than 4.5 million bales in 1859, each bale a heavy bundle bound for foreign mills.

In 1854, Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act through Congress to organize the western territories and win support for a railroad. The act let settlers decide about slavery by popular sovereignty, which served to overturn the Missouri Compromise's ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ line. Outraged Northerners formed a new antislavery party, the Republicans. Settlers rushed into Kansas, where proslavery and antislavery forces fought in a violent struggle called "Bleeding Kansas."

The crisis deepened. In 1857, the Supreme Court decided Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens and that Congress could not ban slavery in the territories. Many Northerners now believed the federal government served slavery everywhere. In 1859, the abolitionist John Brown attacked the federal weapons arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, hoping to start a revolt of enslaved people. Brown was captured and executed, but many Northerners praised him while Southerners called him a murderer.

In 1860 the Democratic Party split, and the Republicans' nomination went to Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois lawyer who had opposed the Mexican War as a congressman and now opposed slavery's expansion. Lincoln won the presidency in November 1860 without carrying a single Southern state. Southern states began to leave the Union. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina voted to secede and issued a declaration saying the federal government had failed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. Other Southern states followed. The sectional crisis had become a national crisis, and Americans faced the terrible question of whether their nation could survive.