The Civil War

After Zachary Taylor's sudden death, Millard Fillmore became President. He did not like slavery, but he thought the compromise law was fair to both sides. He hoped it would settle the question of slavery and hold the Union together. Largely because of his influence, Congress passed the Compromise of 1850, which admitted California into the Union as a free state in return for the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. This compromise made many people in the North more apposed to slavery than ever. Because Fillmore signed this law, many Whigs in the North turned against him. As a result, he was not nominated by the Whig party for re-election, and before long the whole party began to fall apart. Fillmore was the last Whig President.

During Franklin Pierce's presidency, Senator Stephen Douglas wanted to build a railroad from Chicago to the Pacific. To do so, he proposed a law called the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which would do away with the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Compromise had drawn a line across America, outlawing slavery in all lands north of that line. The Kansas-Nebraska Act would allow each territory to decide for itself whether or not to have slavery, no matter how far north it was. Many men knew that the Kansas-Nebraska Act would cause trouble between the North and the South. Somehow Pierce did not seem to understand this; he pushed the law through Congress. Men from the South rushed into Kansas so they could vote for slavery. Men from the North rushed in to vote against it. The fighting was so bitter that the new territory was often called Bleeding Kansas. A new antislavery party, the Republican party, was formed. The northerners in Pierce's own Democratic party would not nominate him for a second term.

The Democratic party didn't want to take any strong stand on slavery one way or the other. They hoped this wouldn't anger anybody, either in the North or the South, and would help them win votes. Nobody was quite sure just where James Buchanan stood on slavery, so the Democrats made him their candidate. It was a close election, but he won. Two days into his term in office, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision, which said that slavery had to be legal in all U.S. territories not yet made into states. Buchanan agreed. He didn't like slavery, but he thought that under the Constitution the Union had no right to stop it. He hoped the Dred Scott decision would end the argument. Instead, it only made matters worse, and he was not nominated for re-election.

When Abraham Lincoln won the election of 1860, one southern state after another seceded from the Union. Buchanan wanted with all his heart to hold the Union together, but he was not sure what to do. He did not believe that any state had the right to secede. At the same time, he did not believe the Union had the right to force a state to stay in the Union. Also, he was hopeful that if he did nothing, the states that had left the Union would rejoin. And so he did nothing. A few weeks after Lincoln took office, the Civil War began. Buchanan finally made up his mind: the North must back Lincoln no matter what the price.

Abraham Lincoln was opposed to the threat of slavery. More than that, he wanted to help the poor of any race. "New free states," he said, "are places for poor people to go and better their condition." Several of the border states had not yet decided whether to secede or stay. Lincoln wanted to hold onto those states if he could. Also, there were a number of people in the North who did not believe the Union or slavery was worth fighting about. Lincoln knew that if he started a war himself, many of these people would not support it. However, his determination to save the Union never wavered. Lincoln's great gift was his ability to make the common people understand in believe in what he was doing. His purpose was to save the Union because to him it was not just a group of states that had gotten together to form a government. If it were destroyed, it would mean that free men were not able to govern themselves.

In the past, Lincoln had not believed that under the Constitution the federal government had the right to simply declare an end to slavery. Yet what good would it do to hold the Union together by force if slavery, which had caused the war in the first place, was not ended? Finally, he said, "the moment came when I felt that slavery must die that the nation might live." The Emancipation Proclamation did not actually free any slaves at all. It applied only to the rebel states where Lincoln had no power to enforce it. It did, however, make clear one important reason for the war, and it won sympathy for the North throughout the civilized world. In this way it contributed to the North's final victory.

Lincoln was easily elected to a second term. He never wanted revenge upon the South. Instead, he said, "Blood cannot restore blood, and government should not act for revenge." He only wanted to restore the Union as quickly and as peacefully as possible. In his second inaugural address, he said how he believed the nation should act: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." This was his dream. It was not to be. Perhaps John Wilkes Booth believed he was helping the South, but in reality Lincoln's death hurt the South a great deal. Had Lincoln lived, he might have brought the South back into the Union with the least possible bloodshed and bitterness. Without Lincoln, some of the worst men, both North and South, came into power.