5/7/2023 0 Comments Hue and cry in slaverySimilarly, southern Democrats sought stronger federal protection of slavery in all federal territories, making them a sectional faction-a conviction that eventually led to their bolting from the first national Democratic Convention in 1860. After all, the Republican Party stood with the abolitionists against slavery, which made them a sectional (northern) party due to their anti-southern slave interest. What could be more American, more democratic, than what he called "the sacred right of self-government"?! He believed that this also positioned him as the only truly national candidate for the presidency. Stephen Douglas (1813–1861) believed that his "popular sovereignty" policy, enshrined in the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act see Lesson Plan Three in this unit, ( The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854), solved the slavery controversy by removing it from national discussion and placing it in the hands of the territorial settlers themselves. He eventually considered Lincoln the savior of both the Union and black Americans. During the Civil War, he was perhaps Lincoln's most famous loyal opposition, urging him at every stage of the conflict to do more for emancipation and to arm the freedmen. That said, after Lincoln's election, Douglass did toy with the idea of accepting southern secession so that renegade runs into the South ("the John Brown way") could spur the liberation of fugitive slaves, who would no longer be returned from the North. "I hold that in the Union," Douglass wrote in 1855, "this very thing of restoring to the slave his long-lost rights, can better be accomplished than it can possibly be accomplished outside of the Union." Douglass acknowledged the constitutional compromises with slavery, at least in its application, but he viewed it as a document that "leaned toward freedom." He argued that a pro-liberty interpretation of the Constitution committed the federal government to no more concessions to the southern slaveholding interest. They eventually parted ways when he rejected Garrison's pro-slavery view of the Constitution. "I have need to be all on fire," he once remarked, "for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." Despite his militant abolitionism, he was a pacifist who did not believe politics or any coercion could achieve God's purposes on earth.įrederick Douglass (1818–1895) was an escaped slave who joined William Lloyd Garrison as an abolition speaker and journalist. He employed an inflammatory rhetoric that made rebuke rather than persuasion the hallmark of his appeals to the nation's conscience. Constitution was more hindrance than help in the cause of emancipation because it tolerated slavery in southern states and called it "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." By 1844, Garrison and his American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed disunion so free states would not have to enforce the federal fugitive slave law and no longer have to work with slaveholding states. But his association with Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lundy brought a greater urgency and fervor to Garrison's abolitionism. He began as a moderate abolitionist, arguing for gradual emancipation and somewhat open to colonization of black Americans. William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) was an abolitionist orator and editor of The Liberator. What follows are brief descriptions of the key figures (and their related political parties) leading up to the 1860 presidential election:
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