Introduction

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Introduction
North-South divisions deepened in the 1850s with the Compromise of 1850’s new fugitive slave law and the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin. In an attempt to distract attention from the sectional conflict and spurred by manifest destiny, a search for new markets, and a desire to spread democracy throughout the globe, the Young America movement guided American forays into Nicaragua, Mexico, and Japan as well as the negotiation of a treaty with Britain regarding a future canal across the Central American isthmus. But when American ministers produced the Ostend Manifesto proposing taking Cuba from Spain, many northerners saw it as a "slaveholders' plot." A leading voice for the Young America movement was Stephen Douglass, who based his politics in expansion and popular sovereignty; while he opposed slavery's expansion he did not see it as a moral issue. Hence he was the architect of the Compromise of 1850 and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which positioned the United States on the road to civil war. The act caused another realignment in national politics, for reaction to it split the Whigs into the American (or "Know-Nothing") and Republican parties; the Republicans also drew Free-Soilers, "Conscience" Whigs, and "Anti-Nebraska" Democrats. Meanwhile, abolitionists and defenders of slavery fought for control of Kansas, sometimes erupting into armed skirmishes. The tensions were exacerbated by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott ruling and its accompanying declaration of the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, and by John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia. The election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860 on a platform that included the exclusion of slavery from the territories led six southern states to secede out of fear of northern economic and political domination and the threat to slavery that it promised. They justified their action via states’ rights and a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution. President Buchanan claimed he had no legal power to oppose them.

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