The conflict over slavery split both major political parties along sectional lines. Hoping to unify their party, the Whigs ran another war hero, General Winfield Scott, as their presidential candidate in 1852. Among the Democrats, southerners demanded a candidate who embraced Calhoun’s constitutional argument that all territories were open to slavery. However, northern and midwestern Democrats stood behind the three leading candidates — Lewis Cass of Michigan, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, and James Buchanan of Pennsylvania — who advocated popular sovereignty. Ultimately, the party settled on Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a congenial man who was sympathetic to the South. As the Whig Party fragmented over slavery, Pierce swept to victory.

Proslavery Initiatives As president, Pierce pursued an expansionist foreign policy. To assist northern merchants, who wanted a commercial empire, he negotiated a trade-opening treaty with Japan. To mollify southern expansionists, who desired a plantation empire, he sought extensive Mexican lands south of the Rio Grande. Ultimately, Pierce settled for a smaller slice of land — the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, now part of Arizona and New Mexico — that opened the way for his negotiator, James Gadsden, to build a transcontinental rail line from New Orleans to Los Angeles.

Pierce’s most controversial initiatives came in the Caribbean and Central America. Southern expansionists had long urged Cuban slave owners to declare independence from Spain and join the United States. To assist the expansionists and the American traders who still supplied enslaved Africans to Cuba, Pierce threatened war with Spain and covertly supported filibustering (private military) expeditions to Cuba. When Secretary of State William L. Marcy arranged in 1854 for American diplomats in Europe to compose the Ostend Manifesto, which urged Pierce to seize Cuba, northern Democrats denounced these aggressive initiatives and scuttled the planters’ dreams of American expansion into the Caribbean.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act The Caribbean was a sideshow. The main stage was the trans-Mississippi west, where a major controversy in 1854 destroyed the Whig Party and sent the Union spinning toward disaster. The Missouri Compromise prohibited new slave states in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36°30’, so southern senators had long prevented the creation of new territories there. It remained Permanent Indian Territory. Now Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois wanted to open it up, allowing a transcontinental railroad to link Chicago to California. Douglas proposed to extinguish Native American rights on the Great Plains and create a large free territory called Nebraska.

Southern politicians opposed Douglas’s initiative. They hoped to extend slavery throughout the Louisiana Purchase and to have a southern city — New Orleans, Memphis, or St. Louis — as the eastern terminus of a transcontinental railroad. To win their support, Douglas amended his bill so that it explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise and organized the region on the basis of popular sovereignty. He also agreed to the formation of two territories, Nebraska and Kansas, raising the prospect that settlers in the southern one, Kansas, would choose slavery. Knowing the revised bill would “raise a hell of a storm” in the North, Douglas argued that Kansas was not suited to plantation agriculture and would become a free state. After weeks of bitter debate, the Senate passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. As 1,600 petitions opposing the bill flooded the House of Representatives, the measure barely squeaked through.

The Republican and American Parties The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was a disaster for the American political system. It finished off the Whig Party: “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative Union Whigs & and waked up stark mad abolitionists,” cotton textile magnate Amos Lawrence lamented. And it crippled the Democracy, because “anti-Nebraska Democrats” denounced the act as “part of a great scheme for extending and perpetuating supremacy of the slave power.” In 1854, they joined ex-Whigs, Free-Soilers, and abolitionists to form a new Republican Party.

The new party was a coalition of “strange, discordant and even hostile elements,” one Republican observed. However, all its members opposed slavery, which, they argued, drove down the wages of free workers and degraded the dignity of manual labor. Like Thomas Jefferson, Republicans praised a society based on “the middling classes who own the soil and work it with their own hands.” Abraham Lincoln, an ex-Whig from Illinois, conveyed the new party’s vision of social mobility. “There is no permanent class of hired laborers among us,” he declared, ignoring the growing social divisions in the industrializing North and Midwest. Lincoln and his fellow Republicans envisioned a society of independent farmers, artisans, and proprietors, and they celebrated middle-class values: domesticity and respectability, religious commitment, and capitalist enterprise.

The Republicans faced strong competition from the American, or Know-Nothing, Party, which had its origins in the anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movements of the 1840s (see “Immigration and Cultural Conflict” in Chapter 9). In 1850, these nativist societies banded together as the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner; the following year, they formed the American Party. When questioned, the party’s secrecy-conscious members often replied, “I know nothing,” hence the nickname. The American (or Know-Nothing) Party program was far from secret, however: party supporters wanted to mobilize native-born Protestants against the “alien menace” of Irish and German Catholics, prohibit further immigration, and institute literacy tests for voting. Northern members of the party had a strong antislavery outlook. In 1854, voters elected dozens of American Party candidates to the House of Representatives and gave the party control of the state governments of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The emergence of a Protestant-based nativist party to replace the Whigs became a real possibility.

Bleeding Kansas Meanwhile, thousands of settlers rushed into the Kansas Territory, putting Douglas’s concept of popular sovereignty to the test. On the side of slavery, Missouri senator David R. Atchison encouraged residents of his state to cross temporarily into Kansas to vote in crucial elections there. Opposing Atchison was the abolitionist New England Emigrant Aid Society, which dispatched free-soilers to Kansas. In 1855, the Pierce administration accepted the legitimacy of a proslavery legislature in Lecompton, Kansas, which had been elected with aid from border-crossing Missourians. However, the majority of Kansas residents favored free soil and refused allegiance to the Lecompton government.

In 1856, both sides turned to violence, prompting Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to label the territory “Bleeding Kansas.” A proslavery force, seven hundred strong, looted and burned the free-soil town of Lawrence. The attack enraged John Brown, a fifty-six-year-old abolitionist from New York and Ohio, who commanded a free-state militia. Brown was a complex man with a record of failed businesses, but he had an intellectual and moral intensity that won the trust of influential people. Avenging the sack of Lawrence, Brown and his followers murdered five proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie. Abolitionists must “fight fire with fire” and “strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people,” Brown declared. The attack on Lawrence and the Pottawatomie killings started a guerrilla war in Kansas that took nearly two hundred lives.