12.1 California, Kansas, and the Struggle over Enslavement
Of all the places one might look to understand how enslavement could break the Union apart, Kansas and California would seem to be among the least likely. Up until 1854, Kansas did not even exist. It was little more than 50 million acres of…
12.2 Kansas and Political Antislavery
Whatever advantage proslavery forces may have gained in Kansas was almost immediately contested by those who were just as determined to keep enslavement out of the territory. They had been roused across the Northeast and Midwest by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which they detested, and…
12.3 Slaveholder Imperialism
The paramilitary efforts to claim Kansas for slavery were part of a larger project of what might be called slaveholder imperialism, or slavery expansionism, which was based mainly in the lower Mississippi Valley. There the slave regime was most recently established, and the class…
12.4 New Waves of European Immigrants
Large population migrations moving in westerly and northwesterly directions had been a fact of Atlantic life since the late fifteenth century. But while the African slave trade was officially closed in 1808, the volume of free immigration to the United States grew steadily during…
12.5 Pushing the Boundaries of Democracy
There were, however, new efforts to expand the democracy that had been established during the 1820s and 1830s. And, as is often the case, the pressure for change came from those who had been on the margins or on the outside of the political…
12.6 Testing Slavery’s Boundaries
The brutal repression that followed Nat Turner’s failed rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831 (discussed in Chapter 10) seemed to close the slave unrest that had ebbed and flowed for a half century since the early days of the American Revolution. But if…
12.7 Kansas Explodes
Nowhere did the question of slavery’s future in the United States play out more ominously during the 1850s than on the rolling plains of eastern Kansas. It was not because fugitive enslaved people began to flock to Kansas or because big enslavers and committed…
12.8 Slavery Everywhere?
James Buchanan thought he had outflanked Stephen Douglas because he had known of a pending ruling of the Court in a case called Scott v. Sandford even before he was inaugurated president on March 4, 1857. That decision was made public two days later,…
Active reading
After each section, name the central change, the people or institutions driving it, and the consequence the chapter emphasizes.
Answer each chapter objective in one sentence, in your own words. If you cannot, mark that section and return to it rather than guessing.
Track comparisons across sections: empire and locality, war and politics, freedom and coercion, and reform versus reaction. Use short anchor phrases from the source, not copied passages.
