Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (78 page)

In an average day, 3,000 Americans take up smoking. Most of them are kids under 18.

DRAWING THE LINE

If California were admitted as a free state, it would also upset the tradition set by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, banning slavery in the new territories north of latitude 36°30’, but permitting it below that line. (Missouri is above the line, but the compromise allowed it to enter the Union as a slave state.) Technically this rule only applied to territories that were part of the Louisiana Purchase, and California wasn’t part of the Louisiana Purchase.

But Southerners wanted the line to apply anyway, which would have made slavery legal in southern California. They were furious when President Taylor supported the admission of the entire territory as a free state. When these so-called “diehard” Southerners threatened to secede because of it, Taylor, a retired Army general, responded by promising to personally lead the Army against any state that tried to secede.

WAR POSTPONED

California’s admission never led to civil war, of course, if for no other reason than that Taylor died from indigestion barely a year into his presidency. His successor, Vice President Millard Fillmore (also a Whig), was willing to compromise. With Fillmore’s encouragement, Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky pushed through Congress the Compromise of 1850, consisting of five measures:

1. A new Fugitive Slave Law got the federal government more directly involved in the capture and return of slaves who escaped into free states.

2. Buying and selling slaves was abolished within the city limits of Washington, D.C. (People in D.C. could still
own
slaves, they just couldn’t buy or sell them there.)

3. California was admitted as a free state, ending the equal balance of slave and free states in the Union.

4. The territory east of California was divided into the Utah and New Mexico territories, with their final status as free or slave territories intentionally left vague. It was still possible that either Utah or New Mexico or both might choose to become slave states, and meanwhile, both slaveholders and opponents of slavery were free to settle in these territories.

Technically speaking, there are only 46 states in the U.S. Kentucky, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are commonwealths.

5. The border between Texas (a slave state) and Mexico was formalized.

ONE STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK

The Compromise of 1850 was intended to cool passions between the North and the South, and it worked…for a while. But as time passed, two of the five provisions in the compromise made things even worse than they already were.

The Fugitive Slave Act compelled federal marshals to assist in capturing slaves even if they opposed slavery. The marshals faced fines of up to $1,000—a lot of money in the 1850s—if they failed to do so. If a slave escaped while in their custody,
they
were liable for the full value of the slave. And for the first time, anyone who assisted a slave trying to escape could be fined and even jailed for up to six months. Fugitive slaves were denied a trial by jury and were not allowed to testify on their own behalf.

The Fugitive Slave Act was supposed to help Southern slave owners, but what it really did was turn many Northerners even more vehemently against slavery.

SQUATTER SOVEREIGNTY

But what really inflamed passions was the unresolved status of the Utah and New Mexico territories, and the admission of California as a free state on the grounds that that was what Californians wanted. Letting citizens of a territory organize themselves as they saw fit sounds reasonable enough, but “popular sovereignty,” as its supporters called it (opponents called it “squatter sovereignty”), proved to be very problematic.

Popular sovereignty undermined an important premise of the Missouri Compromise, which was that
Congress
, not the people, had the power to ban slavery in the territories. If California, New Mexico, and Utah could decide for themselves, didn’t that mean that
all
new territories would have that right?

THE KANSAS-NEBRASKA ACT

Tensions escalated dramatically in 1854, when Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois introduced legislation opening much of what was then known as “Indian Territory” to white settlement, which had previously been banned from the region.

Called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the legislation carved two new territories—Kansas and Nebraska—from land previously used to relocate Native American tribes that had been forcibly moved from their ancestral lands east of the Mississippi River.

Both Kansas and Nebraska were part of the Louisiana Purchase. Both were entirely above the latitude 36°30' line, and according to the Missouri Compromise that meant that slavery was outlawed. But Douglas was determined to apply the principle of popular sovereignty to the new territories, giving settlers the right to decide the slavery question for themselves.

Douglas wasn’t motivated by a desire to expand slavery—he wanted to get a northern transcontinental railroad built from Chicago (in his home state) to the Pacific. Running the tracks through Nebraska made the most sense, but to do that he needed to set up a new territory, and to do
that
he needed the support of the South. They weren’t about to let another free territory evolve into another free state, so Douglas appeased them by applying the principle of popular sovereignty.

THEM’S FIGHTIN’ WORDS

Initially Douglas had only wanted to organize one territory—Nebraska. But Southerners had insisted on two, so Douglas proposed organizing both Nebraska and Kansas, applying the principle of popular sovereignty to both. Even that wasn’t enough: Southerners in Congress wanted the language of the bill to specifically repeal the Missouri Compromise.

Douglas resisted at first, but then he and the Southerners, all Democrats, agreed to let President Franklin Pierce, also a Democrat, decide. Pierce sided with the South.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated Northerners, who for more than 30 years had viewed the 36°30' line as sacred. The act “took us by surprise,” an Illinois Whig named Abraham Lincoln wrote later. “We were thunderstruck and stunned.” But Douglas rammed the bill through both houses of Congress and in May 1854, President Pierce signed it into law.

Theodore Roosevelt was the most prolific presidential author, having written 40 books.

What followed in the Kansas Territory was four years of violent turmoil, as both sides of the slavery issue rushed settlers into Kansas to try to claim the territory for their side. On May 21, 1856, pro-slavery raiders sacked the town of Lawrence; three days later, a Connecticut abolitionist named John Brown retaliated and attacked some pro-slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek, killing five. By the end of the year more than 200 people had been killed in this mini civil war.

THE PARTY’S OVER

There were several other casualties of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. President Pierce was one of them—he became so hated that the Democrats didn’t even bother to nominate him for a second term. He just served out the rest of his first term and then went home.

The Whig Party was another casualty. Already damaged by the fight over the Compromise of 1850, it collapsed completely when anti-slavery Conscience Whigs bolted the party. By the end of 1854, the party—literally—was over.

So where did the Conscience Whigs go? Many of them joined with other anti-slavery elements to form a brand-new party that made its priority the opposition to slavery in new territories. Drawing its inspiration from the Jeffersonian Republicans, the party named itself the “Republican Party.”

THE ELECTION OF 1856

One other thing destroyed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act was Stephen A. Douglas’s bid for the presidency in 1856. The struggle over his act had generated so much controversy that the Democrats passed on his candidacy and instead nominated former Secretary of State James Buchanan. What made Buchanan such an attractive candidate? According to historian David Herbert Donald, he “had the inestimable blessing of having been out of the country, as minister of Great Britain, during the controversy over the Kansas-Nebraska Act.”

The Republicans nominated former California senator John C. Fremont as their candidate. Buchanan won, but Fremont made an impressive showing, winning 11 states.

Buzz
,
hiss
, and
meow
are examples of
onomatopoeia
—words that mimic sounds.

GREAT SCOTT

Just two days after Buchanan was inaugurated as president, the Supreme Court handed down its infamous Dred Scott decision. Years earlier, Scott, a slave, had been taken by his owner, a U.S. Army surgeon, to live in Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, both of which outlawed slavery. Scott sued for his freedom, arguing that living where slavery was banned had made him a free man.

The Supreme Court disagreed, finding that as a Negro, Scott was not an American citizen to begin with and thus had no right to sue in federal court. And even if he did, the chief justice argued,
any
laws excluding slavery from U.S. territories were unconstitutional, because they violated the Fifth Amendment by depriving slave owners of their property without due process of law. “The right of property in a slave,” he wrote, “is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution.”

Suddenly, it seemed as if every state in the Union might become a slave state.

THE FREEPORT FUMBLE

For many Americans the Dred Scott decision was the final straw. It seemed impossible that the North and the South could remain together as a country much longer. Even Abraham Lincoln observed (in a debate with Stephen A. Douglas the following year): “This government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

Lincoln was challenging Douglas for his seat in the U.S. Senate, and it was during the second of their seven debates that Douglas ruined his last chance to win the presidency. In Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, 1858, Lincoln challenged Douglas to reconcile popular sovereignty with the Dred Scott decision: If anti-slavery laws were unconstitutional, how were anti-slavery settlers supposed to ban slavery?

Douglas replied that if settlers refused to legislate a local “slave code” (local regulations that protected the rights of slave owners), slave owners would not bring their slaves into the territory because their property rights were not guaranteed.

Douglas’s “Freeport Doctrine,” as it became known, did little to appease Northerners and it cost him nearly all of his support in the South. He still managed to win the 1860 Democratic nomination for president, but Southern Democrats were so angry with him that, rather than support him, they split off from the party and nominated their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge.

First subject ever photographed by
National Geographic
: The city of Lhasa, Tibet, in 1905.

AND THE WINNER IS…

Abraham Lincoln, who’d just lost the race for Senate, became the Republican nominee for president. The Republican Party was barely six years old, but slavery was such a powerful issue—and Douglas’s “Freeport Doctrine” such a huge blunder—that Douglas and Breckinridge split the Democratic vote…and Lincoln, a brand-new Republican, won.

But “it was ominous,” David Herbert Donald writes, “that Lincoln had received
not a single vote
in 10 of the Southern states.”

Lincoln was elected president on November 6, 1860; barely a month later, South Carolina seceded from the Union, and by the time Lincoln was sworn into office on March 4, 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had also seceded. The first shots of the Civil War were just five weeks away.

With the secession of the Southern states (and all of the Southern Democrats), the Republican Party was left in full control of the federal government. As the Civil War dragged on year after year, it seemed that Lincoln’s reelection was doomed and that General George McClellan, a Northern Democrat running as a peace candidate, would defeat him. But the tide of the war eventually turned in the North’s favor, and in 1864 Lincoln was reelected with 55% of the popular vote. The Civil War finally ended on April 9, 1865; Lincoln was assassinated five days later.

THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICANS

Victory in the Civil War ushered in an era of Republican domination that lasted until the Great Depression of the early 1930s: of the 18 presidential elections held between 1860 and 1932, the Republicans won 14.

Born in an era of terrible crisis that threatened to destroy the Union, the Republican Party managed to save the Union and, in the process, established itself in very short order as one of the great political parties in American history.

That’s how America’s major political parties, the Democratic
and the Republican, began. A lot has changed in the last
100
years…but that’s another story. Stay tuned
.

What is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution? Treason.

SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND

“It was twenty years ago today” begins a record album that was released in 1967 and will still be celebrated many years from now. It wasn’t actually the first pop concept record, its songs aren’t necessarily the Beatles’ best, and its supposed theme really isn’t one…so why do people consider it one of the greatest albums ever made?