Busy in the Cause: Iowa, the Free-State Struggle in the West, and the Prelude to the Civil War

1. Uncertainty Rising

1 Uncertainty Rising I Political compromise on the national level was becoming impossible by the late 1840s. Though holding onto its national power, the South felt its slavery system increasingly threatened by rising antislavery sentiments in the North. Conversely, the North saw the levers of national government firmly in the hands of the “slave power.” While the American Antislavery Society under William Lloyd Garrison’s leadership had poked and prodded slavery’s protectors since 1830, challenging the “peculiar institution ” by trying to change public sentiment, a broader force against slavery was emerging. A series of religious revivals began in the early 1800s and reached its peak in the 1840s. They aimed to awaken spiritual life and promote conversion and individual rebirth, and they subsequently became known as the Second Great Awakening. The northern form of these revivals linked the personal religious conversion of participants to a spirit of applied Christianity for improving the health of society. Movements born of these religious beliefs fostered reforms to end unsanitary, abusive, and dehumanizing conditions in prisons, almshouses, and asylums and to reduce liquor use and its ills. But these efforts became politically overshadowed with the movement to abolish the greatest iniquity of all, slavery. 2 . . Uncertainty Rising Gradually northern evangelicals shifted discussion of the slavery issue from political and economic arguments to a struggle against evil. Though many Lutheran, Catholic, and other churches shrank from abolitionists’ condemnation of slaveholders as innate sinners and unworthy of church membership, evangelical Protestant churches—Congregational, antislavery Presbyterian, Wesleyan Methodist, Quakers, and others—did not. These groups and missionary organizations, such as the American Missionary Association (AMA) and the mainly Congregational American Missionary Association, pushed hard against what they saw as the moral bankruptcy of proslavery political power and against slavery’s practitioners.1 Discomfited slavery defenders, seeing their lives and personal liberty challenged by such northern interference, denounced their attackers as religious fanatics and cried disunion. As each side incited the other, the political extremes of both gained power. Amicable conversation withered as fewer congressmen crossed the aisle in debates, deliberations, and votes, and the rising rancor over slavery poisoned their chances to resolve differences mutually. Howls of abolitionism, secession, and disunion and the northern states’ nullification of fugitive slave law enforcement fueled political disputes. Naturally, any congressional discussions of westward expansion and opening new territories to settlement raised questions of what to do about slavery. Debates over the annexation of Texas in 1844 and in 1848 had added fuel to the disagreement over the status of slavery. Also Congressman David Wilmot offered a controversial proviso to the 1846 appropriations bill that would have prevented slavery in any territory acquired in the Mexican-American War (1846– 1848) or thereafter. The bill passed the House but failed in the Senate, which southerners dominated, exacerbating north-south relations. Slavery’s protectors judged Wilmot’s act as an insult while slavery’s detractors saw the southerners’ ability to block the bill as visible proof that the South controlled the nation’s Uncertainty Rising . . 3 destiny. Feelings were running high when in 1850 a series of five measures moved through Congress to deal with slavery issues in the western territories. Since the 1830s when the Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson and the Whig Party led by Henry Clay and others replaced the Federalist and Republican Parties dating from the nation’s creation , a system of competitive parties had emerged in what had previously been one-party states. But now this system of national parties also was in trouble as the closely divided parties were unable to contain the debate over the slavery issue and the massive influx of Irish Catholic immigrants that proved frightening to Democratic and Whig Protestant voters. The various compromise measures debated in 1850 represented congressional efforts to resolve questions of slavery that were straining national party alignments and causing regional divisions to reassert themselves.2 The resulting Compromise of 1850, crafted by Kentucky senator Henry Clay (Whig) and largely brought to passage by Illinois Democratic senator Stephen Douglas, defused the worsening north-south strife over slavery in the territories.3 The most controversial element of the compromise, one of particular concern to border slave states, was a new Fugitive Slave Act that exacerbated northern fears of slave power control.4 The act strengthened the enforcement of fugitive slave laws by giving local authorities the power to enlist local citizens in capturing runaway slaves. It also...