Slavery, Realignment, and the Republican Party (1854–1861)
Slavery, Realignment, and the Republican Party (1854–1861)
In just seven years, the second party system shattered and a new one took its place, organized squarely around slavery. The Whig Party collapsed, a wholly new Republican Party rose to challenge the spread of slavery, and the nation slid toward disunion. This chapter follows the realignment that produced the parties we still know today—and the crisis that broke the Union apart.
6.1The act that broke the partiesIn 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which allowed settlers in those territories to decide for…6.2The new Republican PartyThe Republican Party of the 1850s was a Northern, free-labor party. It did not, at first, call for abolishing slavery where it already…6.3Bleeding Kansas and mounting violenceKansas became a battleground. Pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers poured in, each determined to control the territory's future, and rival…6.4Dred Scott and a hardening divideIn 1857 the Supreme Court tried to settle the slavery question by force of law and instead inflamed it. In Dred Scott v. Sandford, Chief…6.51860: a nation splits at the ballot boxThe election of 1860 fractured along sectional lines. The Democratic Party split in two, running separate Northern and Southern candidates…6.6SecessionBeginning with South Carolina in December 1860, seven Deep South states seceded before Lincoln even took office, declaring their…6.7Meanwhile, elsewhere (1854–1861)As the United States fractured, other nations were being built. In Europe, movements to unify Italy and Germany gathered force, soon to…