The United States and Its People

Both sides resorted to violence. In early 1856 a band of proslavery supporters rode into Lawarence, threw printing presses into the river, set the hotel on fire, and killed one man. Three nights later, John Brown, an antislavery activist, led a small band into a proslavery area. They dragged from their homes five men who had had nothing to do with the attack on Lawrence and hacked them to death. The fighting between proslavery and antislavery groups raged for weeks, at the cost of more than 200 lives. Only the arrival of the United States Army created an uneasy peace in what people were now calling "bleeding Kansas."

The case of Dred Scott v. Sandford reached the Supreme Court in March 1857. By a vote of seven to two, the Court ruled that black people - either free or enslaved - were not citizens of the United States and, therefore did not have the right to sue in a federal court. Dred Scott thus would have to remain enslaved, subject to the laws of the state of Missouri...Southerners rejoiced at the Dred Scott decision, which opened all territories to slavery. The North was outraged at the decision. The Republican party had dedicated itself to preventing the extension of slavery. Now, it seemed, slavery could be extended throughout the territories.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed May 1854. It did away with the Missouri Compromise line, since the territories could opt to allow slavery north of the 36°30'. Many northerners denounced the act. They were outraged that a restriction on the extension of slavery had been repealed.

After the Act went into effect, both proslavery and antislavery people raced to settle the Kansas Territory. Many of these "settlers" stayed just along enough to vote for the territory's new legislature, which would decide whether slavery would be allowed. "we are playing for a mighty stake," a southern senator said. "If we win, we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean."

The fugitive Slave Law, the part of the Compromise of 1850 that provided for the return of escaped slaves, proved to be almost universally hated in the North.  1851, for example, a group of southern slave-catchers, hired to track down escaped slaves, arrived in Syracuse, New York.  Citing the new law, they asked federal marshals to seize Jerry McHenry, who they claimed was an escaped slave.  People in Syracuse were shocked to see a man in chains marched through the streets to the federal courthouse.  Led by abolitionist  ministers, a crowd of more than 2,000 mobbed the courthouse and took McHenry from the Marshals.  Ralph Waldo Emerson proclaimed the Fugitive Slave Law 'a law which no man can obey... without the loss of self-respect.'  Some northern states passed 'personal liberty laws' that denied state help to federal marshals attempting to capture escaped slaves.  Southerners were outraged at the North's resistance to the law.  They saw this resistance as a breach of the Compromise of 1850 and feared that abolitionists were gaining control of the North.