Civil War

Historian Kenneth Stauff wrote, “The year 1857…marked the high tide of the proslavery south’s national political power. It has the sympathy of the Buchanan administration. It controlled the Supreme Court. It dominated the democratic majorities in both houses of congress.” The significance of this quote is that many events happened to trigger the Civil War; the most important events happening in the 1850’s. In 1855 there was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1857 there was the Dred Scott case. In 1859 there was the John Brown raid. All of these events were subconsciously in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. All of these events ask the question, were the actions morally right?

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 is part of the Compromise of 1850. It’s the federal law that made white Northerners to return escaped black slaves back to their owners in the South. This act made many white northerners, abolitionists and antislavery supporters mad. People wanted to stay out of the slavery battle and this act forced them to choose a side. This act affected many people including Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was an abolitionist and author. She wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in response to the Fugitive Slave Act. She felt the public shouldn’t be sheltered to what went on in a slave’s life. Some people ignored the fact that slaves were treated horribly because they only saw them as property. Uncle Tom’s Cabin shined a light onto their cruel, abusive lives. Although this book made people feel sympathetic towards slave, it also made working-class whites aggressive towards slaves because they now felt that African Americans were competition in the working world. Because of this book people thought she fuelled this war. Even President Lincoln said, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”

Five years after the Fugitive Slave Act in 1855 another event that fired the Civil War was the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This act stated that through popular sovereignty these territories could decide for themselves if they wanted to be a slave territories or not. Some people believed this wouldn’t have been a problem if border ruffians, who were Missouri settlers who came to Kansas to vote for slavery, hadn’t been involved. They were not needed since for every ten men in Kansas there was six Southerners. Due to this event, proslavery forces passed a series of laws against antislavery supporters. They forbade antislavery men to serve on juries, and also announced the death penalty to anyone who helped any fugitive slaves. Kansas, which was declared an antislavery state, established a government in 1855. New England and New York worried about Kansas’s antislavery settlers because of the new laws so they sent rifles to them. Southerners were furious about this so they organized a mission with three hundred young men. In Lawrence, Kansas on May 21,