Progress in

humanity, education, and

literature

valley to the seaports on the Atlantic coast and much of the trade that once went down the Mississippi to New Orleans now began to follow the railroads to New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. This weakened the ties which had connected the Middle West with the South and helped to bind the East and the West more firmly together.

The progress of our country in the fifties was not limited to industry and commerce. In fact, advancement was even more conspicuous in what we may call the higher life of the people. Orphan children, the aged poor, the insane, and the inmates of the prisons were better cared for than ever before. In the northern states, public schools for the education of the children of all the people were well established by 1860. Congress had made large grants of land to the new states in the West to help them support free schools. In the South the public school system was not so well developed, but there were many good academies and colleges in that section. The ten years immediately preceding the Civil War have been well called the "golden age" of American literature. At that time Bryant, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell, Hawthorne, and Emerson were doing their best work.

REFERENCES.

Garrison, Westward Extension; Smith, Parties and Slavery; Burgess, The Middle Period; Bassett, A Short History of the United States; Schouler, History of the United States, Vol. V; McMaster, History of the People of the United States, Vol. VIII; Rhodes, History of the United States, Vol. I; Siebert, History of the Underground Railroad.

TOPICAL READINGS.

1. The Election of 1848. Garrison, Westward Extension, 269-284. 2. The Slavery Issue in 1849. Garrison, Westward Extension, 294-314. 3. Clay, the Compromiser. Rhodes, History of the United States,

I, 120-127.

4. Calhoun's Last Speech. Rhodes, History of the United States, I, 127-130.

5. Webster and His Seventh of March Speech. Rhodes, History of the United States, I, 137-161.

6. Seward Opposes the Compromise. Rhodes, History of the United States, I, 162-168.

7. The Fugitive Slave Law. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, VIII, 44-48.

8. On the Underground Railroad. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 80-83.

9. The Story of the Christiana Riot. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 84-87.

10. The Death of Uncle Tom. Hart, American History Told by Contemporaries, IV, 62-65.

11. The Era of Railroad Building. Smith, Parties and Slavery, 59-74. 12. Improvements in Agriculture. Thompson, History of the United States, 216-225.

13. Important Agricultural Crops. Thompson, History of the United States, 226-229.

14. The Merchant Marine. Thompson, History of the United States, 236-239.

ILLUSTRATIVE LITERATURE.

Poems: Longfellow, Lowell, and Whittier wrote antislavery poems during this period. Find as many of them as you can.

Stories: Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Kelly, Rhoda of the Undergrounds; Trowbridge, Cudjo's Cave; Adams, The Sable Cloud; Hungerford, The Old Plantation; Ingraham, The Sunny South.

Biographies: Schurz, Henry Clay; Von Holst, John C. Calhoun; Lodge, Daniel Webster; Lothrop, William H. Seward; McLaughlin, Lewis Cass; Hart, Salmon P. Chase.

QUESTIONS AND SUGGESTIONS.

1. Trace upon a map the line of 36° 30′ across the continent to the Pacific. How much of California is north of this line?

2. What evidence do you find in this chapter that the Union was in danger in 1850?

3. If you had been living in 1850 would you have favored or opposed the compromise of that year? Which section really gained more by this compromise?

4. Was it wrong to disobey the fugitive slave law? Give reasons for your answer.

5. Have you any ancestors who came from either Ireland or Germany about 1850? If so, why did they come to America?

6. What was the first through line of railroad to connect the East and the Middle West? What important railroads connect those sections now?

Douglas

reopens the slavery controversy

Why Douglas took this step

CHAPTER XX

SLAVERY DIVIDES THE UNION

The Quarrel Over Slavery Renewed.-In less than four years after the statesmen of the country declared that they had finally settled the slavery controversy by the Compromise of 1850 the quarrel over slavery in the territories blazed up even more fiercely than before. The rich corn and wheat

lands west of Missouri and Iowa were beginning to attract settlers, and it became necessary to organize territorial governments in the vast expanse of Indian country. Accordingly, early in 1854 Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, introduced into the Senate a bill to create the territories of Kansas and Nebraska.

Both Kansas and Nebraska were north of 36° 30', in a region from which slavery had been excluded by the Missouri Compromise. Great therefore was the surprise

and greater still the wrath of the people of the North when they learned that the Kansas-Nebraska bill proposed the repeal of the Compromise of 1820 and left it to the settlers in Kansas and Nebraska to decide whether these territories should grow into free states or slave states. Senator Douglas said that the right of the people of a territory to make their own

laws about slavery had been recognized in the Compromise of 1850. Douglas was ambitious to get the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election, and with that end in view he was eager to win the favor of the Democrats in both sections of the country. He knew that the slaveholders in the South wanted more slave territory. They were so anxious to buy Cuba at this time that some of them went so far as to declare that it would be right for the United States to take that island by force if Spain persisted in refusing to sell it to us. Under these circumstances Douglas hoped that he would gain favor in the South by opening new territory in the West to slaveholding settlers, and he thought that the Democrats in the North could not seriously object to his doctrine of "popular sovereignty," because that simply meant letting the people of a territory manage their own government in their own way.

Kansas

The antislavery men in Congress opposed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill with all their might. They showed that it would open all the unorganized territory of the country The passage to slavery and called it a bold scheme against American liberty. of the Senator Chase of Ohio, who led the free soil men, appealed to Nebraska the Senate to defeat the hated bill because it was "a violation bill of the plighted faith and solemn compact which our fathers made, and which we, their sons, are bound by every sacred tie of obligation sacredly to maintain." But in spite of everything that the friends of freedom could do, Douglas persuaded Congress to pass his measure and it became a law in 1854.

this act

Judged by its consequences the Kansas-Nebraska Act was one of the most important laws in our history. It stirred up strife between the North and the South as nothing else ever The consedid. The slaveholders were delighted with it. The anti- quences of slavery men were indignant that slave labor was given an opportunity to compete with free labor on the prairies of the West. The Kansas-Nebraska Act led to civil strife in Kansas, destroyed the Whig party, created the Republican party, and in the end brought about the downfall of the Democrats. Its passage in 1854 marks the beginning of seven years of bitter sectional strife which led straight to the outbreak of a great Civil War between the North and the South in 1861.

The Struggle for Kansas.-The first effect of the passage

Both sections send settlers to Kansas

of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to transfer the quarrel over slavery from the halls of Congress to the plains of Kansas. As the people in that territory were to decide the slavery question for themselves it was clear that the section which sent the most settlers to Kansas would win the state. The race for its possession began as soon as the act was passed. At first the South was confident of victory in this race. Kansas lay directly west of the slave state of Missouri, and many Missourians promptly moved into it. At the same time a multitude of free soil men from the North poured into the new territory. An

Rival

governments in that territory

Emigrant Aid Society was formed in New England to encourage free state people to go to Kansas and to supply them with money to help them on their way.

Under these circumstances a clash between the rival factions in Kansas was sure to come. When the first election was held hundreds of armed men from Missouri came into Kansas, seized the voting places, and elected a legislature which promptly passed laws to establish and protect slavery in the territory. The settlers from the free states refused to recognize a government which had been set up by violence and fraud, and presently they held a meeting of their own, drew up a constitution forbidding slavery, and asked Congress to admit