Resources to Understand Lesson
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Presidents of 1860 - Present Day
14.1: Growing Tensions Over Slavery
- Section Focus Question: How did the question of admission of new states to the Union fuel the debate over slavery and states’ rights?
- Slavery and the Mexican-American War
- The Wilmot Proviso
- Between 1820 and 1848, four new slaveholding states and four new free states were admitted to the Union.
- This maintained the balance between free and slaveholding states, with 15 of each.
- However, territory gained by the Mexican-American War threatened to destroy the balance.
- Wilmot Proviso: Representative David Wilmot of Pennsylvania proposed that Congress should ban slavery in all territory that might become part of the US as a result of the Mexican-American War.
- The provision passed in the House but failed in the Senate.
- Many supporters of slavery viewed it as an attack on slavery by the North.
- An Antislavery Party
- Popular Sovereignty: meant that people in the territory or state would vote directly on issues, rather than having their elected representatives decide.
- In August 1848, antislavery Whigs and Democrats joined forces to form a new party, which they called the Free-Soil
- Martin Van Buren: Former Democratic President lost
- General Zachary Taylor: Hero of the Mexican-American War won
- A Bitter Debate
- Secede: withdraw
- There were other issues dividing the North and South
- Northerners wanted the slave trade to be abolished in D.C.
- Southerners wanted northerners to catch people who had escaped from slavery
- Fugitives: runaway enslaved people
- Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, Missouri Compromise
- South Carolina Senator John C. Calhoun proposed there were only two ways to preserve the South’s way of life
- constitutional amendment to protect states; rights
- Session
- Massachusetts Senator Daniel Webster - called for an end to the bitter sectionalism that was dividing the nation.
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