Page 356 - American Stories, A History of the United States

American literature also became sectionalized during the 1840s and 1850s. South-
ern men of letters, including such notable figures as novelist William Gilmore Simms 14.1
and Edgar Allan Poe, wrote proslavery polemics. Popular novelists produced a flood
of “plantation romances” that glorified southern civilization and sneered at that of the
North. The notion that planter “cavaliers” were superior to money-grubbing Yankees 14.2
was the message that most Southerners derived from the homegrown literature they
read. In the North, prominent men of letters—Emerson, Thoreau, James Russell
Lowell, and Herman Melville—expressed antislavery sentiments in prose and poetry, 14.3
particularly after the outbreak of the Mexican-American War.
Literary abolitionism climaxed in 1852 when Harriet Beecher Stowe published
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an enormously successful novel (it sold more than 300,000 copies
in one year) that fixed in the northern mind the image of the slaveholder as a brutal
Simon Legree. Much of its emotional impact came from its portrayal of slavery as a
threat to the family and the Cult of Domesticity. When the saintly Uncle Tom was sold
away from his adoring wife and children, Northerners shuddered with horror, and
some Southerners felt a twinge of conscience.
Southern defensiveness gradually hardened into cultural and economic national-
ism. Southern schools banished northern textbooks in favor of those with a pro southern
slant; young men of the planter class were induced to stay in the South for higher edu-
cation rather than go North to universities (as had been the custom); and a movement
developed to encourage southern industry and commerce to reduce dependence on the
North. Almost without exception, prominent southern educators and intellectuals of Quick Check
the late 1850s rallied behind southern sectionalism, and many even endorsed the idea What aspects of American culture
of an independent southern nation. became sectionalized in the 1850s?

The Dred Scott Case
When James Buchanan was inaugurated on March 4, 1857, the dispute over the legal
status of slavery in the territories was an open door through which sectional fears and
hatreds could enter the political arena. Buchanan hoped to close that door by encour-
aging the Supreme Court to resolve the constitutional issue once and for all.
The Court was about to render its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford.
Dred Scott was a Missouri slave who sued for his freedom on the grounds that he had
lived for years in an area where the Missouri Compromise had outlawed slavery. The
Court could have decided the issue on the narrow ground that a slave was not a citi-
zen and therefore had no right to sue in federal courts. But President-elect Buchanan
encouraged the Court to render a broader decision.
On March 6, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney announced that the majority had ruled
against Scott. Taney argued that no African American—slave or free—could be a citizen
of the United States. But the real bombshell was the ruling that Dred Scott would not have
won his case even if he had been a legal plaintiff. His residence in the Wisconsin Territory
established no right to freedom because Congress had no power to prohibit slavery there.
The Missouri Compromise was thus unconstitutional and so, implicitly, was the plank
in the Republican platform that called for excluding slavery from all federal territories.
In the North, and especially among Republicans, the Court’s verdict was viewed as the
latest diabolical act of the “slave-power conspiracy.” Circumstantial evidence supported
the charge that the decision was a political maneuver. Five of the six judges who voted in
the majority were proslavery Southerners. Their resolution of the territorial issue was close
to the extreme southern-rights position John C. Calhoun had advocated in 1850.
Republicans denounced the decision as “a wicked and false judgment,” “the great-
est crime in the annals of the republic.” But they stopped short of openly defying the
Court’s authority. Instead, they argued on narrow technical grounds that the decision
as written was not binding on Congress, which could still enact a ban on slavery in the Quick Check
territories. The decision actually helped the Republicans build support; it lent credence What did chief justice Taney argue in
to their claim that an aggressive slave power was dominating all branches of the federal his opinion, and what impact did this
government and attempting to use the Constitution to achieve its own ends. have on American sectionalism?
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