more pro-slavery. This could not continue long without beginning to decrease its Northern vote, but this effect did not become plainly visible until after 1852. The efforts of the Whig party to ignore the great question alienated its anti-slavery members in the North, while they did not satisfy its Southern members. The Whig losses were not at first heavy, but, as the electoral vote of each state is determined by the barest plurality of the popular vote, they were enough to defeat the party almost everywhere in the presidential election of 1852. The Whigs Election of 1852. nominated General Winfield Scott and the Democrats Franklin Pierce; and Pierce carried all but four of the thirty-one states, and was elected, receiving 254 out of the 296 electoral votes. This revelation of hopeless weakness was the downfall of the Whig party; it maintained its organization for four years longer, but the life had gone out of it. The future was with the Free Soil party, though it had polled but few votes in 1852.
207. During the administration of Taylor (and Vice-President Millard Fillmore, who succeeded him) Clay, Webster, Changes in Leadership. Calhoun, Polk and Taylor were removed by death, and there was a steady drift of other political leaders out of public life. New men were pushing in everywhere, and in both sections they showed the prevailing tendency to disunion. The best of them were unprecedentedly radical. Charles Sumner, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase came into the Senate, bringing the first accession of recognized force and ability to the antislavery feeling in that body. The new Southern men, such as Jefferson Davis, and the Democratic recruits from the Southern Whig party, such as Alexander H. Stephens, were ready to take the ground on which Calhoun had always insisted—that Congress was bound not merely to the negative duty of not attacking slavery in the Territories, but to the positive duty of protecting it. This, if it should become the general Southern position, was Certain to destroy the notion of “squatter sovereignty,” and thus to split the Democratic party, which was almost the last national ligament that now held the two fragments of the Union together.
208. The social disintegration was as rapid. Northern men travelling in the South were naturally looked upon with Social Divergence. increasing suspicion, and were made to feel that they were on a soil alien in sympathies. Some of the worst phases of democracy were called into play in the South; and, in some sections, law openly yielded supremacy to popular passion in the cases of suspected Abolitionists. Southern conventions, on all sorts of subjects, became common; and in these meetings, permeated by a dawning sense of Southern nationality, hardly any proposition looking to Southern independence of the North was met with disfavour.
209. Calhoun, in his last and greatest speech, called attention to the manner in which one tie after another was snapping. Progress of Disunion. But he ignored the real peril of the situation—its dangerous facts: that the South was steadily growing weaker in comparison with the North, and more unable to secure a wider area for the slave system; that it was therefore being steadily forced into demanding active Congressional protection for slavery in the Territories; that the North would never submit to this; and that the South must submit or bring about a collision by attempting to secede.
210. Anti-slavery feeling in the North was stimulated by the manner in which the Fugitive Slave Law was enforced Fugitive Slave Law. immediately after 1850. The chase after fugitive slaves was prosecuted in many cases with circumstances of revolting brutality, and features of the slave system which had been tacitly looked upon as fictitious were brought home to the heart of the free states. (See Fugitive Slave Laws.) The added feeling showed its force when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by Congress Kansas-Nebraska Act. (1854). It organized the two new Territories of Kansas and Nebraska. Both of them were for ever free soil by the terms of the Missouri Compromise (q.v.). But the success of the notion of squatter sovereignty in holding the Democratic party together while destroying the Whig party had intoxicated Stephen A. Douglas (q.v.), and other Northern Democrats; and they now applied the doctrine to these Territories. They did not desire “to vote slavery up or down,” but left the decision to the people of the two Territories and the essential feature of the Missouri Compromise was specifically repealed.
211. This was the grossest political blunder in American history. The status of slavery had been settled, by the Constitution or by the compromises of 1820 and 1850, on every square foot of American soil; right or wrong, the settlement was made. The Kansas-Nebraska Act took a great mass of territory out of the settlement and flung it into the arena as a prize for which the sections were to struggle. The first result of the act was to throw parties into chaos. An American or “Know-Nothing” The “American Party.” (q.v.) party, a secret oath-bound organization, pledged to oppose the influence or power of foreign-born citizens, had been formed to take the place of the defunct Whig party. It had been quite successful in state elections for a time, and was now beginning to have larger aspirations. It, like the Whig party, intended to ignore slavery, but, after a few years of life, the questions complicated with slavery entered its organization and divided it also. Even in 1854 many of its leaders in the North were forced to take position against the Kansas-Nebraska Act, while hosts of others joined in the opposition without any party organization. No American party ever rose so swiftly as this latter; The Republican Party. with no other party name than the awkward title of “Anti-Nebraska men,” it carried the Congressional elections of 1854 at the North, forced many of the former Know-Nothing leaders into union with it, and controlled the House of Representatives of the Congress which met in 1855. The Democratic party, which had been practically the only party since 1852, had now to face the latest and strongest of its broad-constructionist opponents, one which with the nationalizing features of the Federalist and Whig parties combined democratic feelings and methods, and, above all, had a democratic purpose at bottom. It acknowledged, at first, no purpose aimed at slavery, only an intention to exclude slavery from the Territories; but, under such principles, it was the only party which was potentially an anti-slavery party, the only party to which the enslaved labourer of the South could look with the faintest hope of aid in reaching the status of a man. The new party had grasped the function which belonged of right to its great opponent, and it seized with it its opponent's original title. The name Democrat had quite taken the place of that first used—Republican—but the latter had never passed out of popular remembrance and liking at the North. The new party took quick and skilful advantage of this by assuming the old name (see Republican Party), and early in 1856 the two great parties of the present—Democratic and Republican—were drawn up against one another.
212. The foreign relations of the United States during
Pierce's term of office were overshadowed by the domestic
Koszta Case.
difficulties, but were of importance. In the Koszta
case (1853) national protection had been afforded
on foreign soil to a person who had only taken the
preliminary steps to naturalization (see Marcy, W. L.).
Japan had been opened to American intercourse and commerce
Japan.
(1854). But the question of slavery was more
and more thrusting itself even into foreign relations.
A great Southern republic, to be founded at first by the slave
states, but to take in gradually the whole territory around the
Gulf of Mexico and include the West Indies, was soon to be a
pretty general ambition among slave-holders, and its first
phases appeared during Pierce's administration. Efforts were
begun to obtain Cuba from Spain; and the three leading
Ostend Manifesto;
Filibustering.
American ministers abroad, meeting at Ostend,
united in declaring the possession of Cuba to be
essential to the well-being of the United States Filibuster
(1854). (See Buchanan, James.) “Filibustering”
expeditions against Cuba or the smaller South American states,
intended so to revolutionize them as to lay a basis for an
