The Americans: A History

The Kansas-Nebraska Act inflamed opinions in both the North and South. Although popular sovereignty seemed a logical way of decided the fundamental issue of slavery in the territories, events showed that it did not work. One crucial question remained: When should settlers decided about slavery? Should they do so before the territory had an official government, after, or when the territory became a state? The question was never really settled. Instead, a minor war broke out in Kansas.

In 1858, Stephen A. Douglas, a leading Democrat, ran for reelection to the United States Senate. Everyone thought that if he was elected, Douglas would run for President in 1860. Therefore, the Republican party hoped it could stop him now. Republicans in Illinois chose Abraham Lincoln to challenge Douglas.

Although short and stocky, Douglas was called the Little Giant by his admirers. He dressed in the latest fashion, including a colorful vest…By contrast, Abraham Lincoln was extremely tall and thin. He seemed even taller because of his stove-pipe hat, in which he kept his notes and other pieces of paper. He appeared plain and even awkward as he stood solemnly  addressing the crowds. His clothes were far from fashionable and were usually rumpled. He often slept in them because he traveled in a regular railway car. When speaking, Lincoln talked in direct and plain language.

While neither man wanted slavery in the territories, they disagreed as to how to keep it out. In the course of the debates, each candidate tried to distort the veiws of the other. Lincoln tried to make Douglas look like a defender of slavery and of the Dred Scott decision. Neither charge was true. In turn, Douglas tried to show that Lincoln was an abolitionist. That charge was also not true.

Lincoln said, 'I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.' At the same time, he insisted that slavery was a moral, social, and political wrong and hoped it would eventually disappear where it existed in the South. He confessed that he had no idea how or when this would happen. However, he stressed again and again that the moral wrong of slavery should not be allowed to spread.

Douglas immediately retorted with an answer that became known as the Freeport Doctrine. He acknowledged that slavery could not exist without laws to support it - laws dealing with runaways, the sale of slaves, and the like. If the people of a territory refused to pass such laws, Douglas said, slavery could not exist in practice, not matter what the Supreme Court said about the theory of the matter. Douglas convinced many Illinois voters who simply wanted to keep slavery out of the territories. As a result, he won the senatorial election.

Douglas won the senatorial election. His Freeport Doctrine cost him most of his support in the South, however. Many Southerners had considered the Dred Scott decision a major victory. Now they heard Douglas saying that settlers could easily get around it.

A number of dramatic incidents grealty inflamed Northern opinion about both slavery and the South.  Early in 1851 a black man named Frederick Wilkins was working quietly as a waiter in a Boston coffeehouse.  Suddenly he was seized by a Virginia slave catcher who knew him as Shadrach, a runaway slave.  While Wilkins was being held for return to Virginia, a crowd of African Americans burst into the courthouse and led him away to safety. ... Several years later, federal troops lined the streets of Boston as a fugitive slave named Anthony Burns was marched from the courthouse to a ship waiting to carry him back to Virginia.  A gigantic crowd of fifty thousand people hissed and shouted in protest.