United States Presidential Election, 1860 - Historical Background

Historical Background

The origins of the American Civil War lay in the complex issues of slavery, competing understandings of federalism, party politics, expansionism, sectionalism, tariffs, and economics. After the Mexican-American War, the issue of slavery in the new territories led to the Compromise of 1850. While the compromise averted an immediate political crisis, it did not permanently resolve the issue of The Slave Power (the power of slaveholders to control the national government).

Amid the emergence of increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies in national politics, the collapse of the old Second Party System in the 1850s hampered efforts of the politicians to reach yet another compromise. The result was the Kansas–Nebraska Act, which alienated Northerners and Southerners alike. With the rise of the Republican Party, which appealed to both Northeast and Western states, the industrializing North and agrarian Midwest became committed to the economic ethos of free-labor industrial capitalism. The Kansas–Nebraska Act created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, opening new lands for settlement, and had the effect of repealing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 by allowing settlers in those territories to determine through Popular Sovereignty whether they would allow slavery within each territory. The act was designed by Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. The initial purpose of the Kansas Nebraska Act was to open up many thousands of new farms and make feasible a Midwestern Transcontinental Railroad. It became problematic when popular sovereignty was written into the proposal so that the voters of the moment would decide whether slavery would be allowed. The result was that pro and anti-slavery elements flooded into Kansas with the goal of voting slavery up or down, leading to a bloody civil war there. Douglas hoped popular sovereignty would enable democracy to triumph, so he would not have to take a side on the issue of slavery. A wave of indignation erupted across the North as anti-slavery elements cried betrayal, for Kansas had been officially closed to slavery since the Missouri Compromise and that Compromise was now repealed because of popular sovereignty. Opponents denounced the law as a triumph of the hated "slave power" that is the political power of the rich slave owners, who would buy up the best lands in Kansas leaving ordinary men with the leftovers. The new Republican party which was created in opposition to the act aimed to stop the expansion of slavery and soon emerged as the dominant political party in the North.