Answer 1
Answer: Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln received only 39 percent of the popular vote in the four-way contest of 1860, but carried the North to win an electoral majority to become president. Certain of a minority status, the states of the Deep South seceded to form a confederacy. When most compromises were dismissed by northerners as concessions, outgoing President Buchanan did nothing. Intent upon protection of federal property at Fort Sumter, Lincoln's attempt at reprovisioning the garrison led to a southern attack and the beginning of war.
Answer 2
Answer: Lincoln charged Douglas with being part of a Democratic conspiracy to extend slavery, an institution Lincoln wished to set on a course of ultimate extinction by preventing its expansion to new territories. Although Lincoln did not believe in racial equality, he advocated respect and protection of natural rights for blacks. Douglas adopted a more racist tone and indifferent attitude toward slavery, but insisted it could not exist in a territory without favorable local legislation. Douglas won the 1858 Senate race in Illinois, but lost southern support for the presidency in 1860.
Answer 3
Answer: Northerners valued free labor and government action to achieve economic progress and a moral society. They viewed southerners as unfree, backward, and immoral. Southerners valued states' rights and aspired to a genteel, ordered society guided by the aristocratic code of the gentleman planter and slaveholder. They viewed northerners as greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moonstruck theorists. Northerners feared the southerners wished to deny opportunities for free labor and southerners feared northerners would destroy their way of life.
Answer 4
Answer: The settlement of Kansas exposed the flaws of the concept of popular sovereignty in dealing with the slavery issue. Fearful of inundation by New England emigrants, Missouri residents crossed into Kansas to ensure election, by fraudulent means, of a proslavery territorial legislature. When proslavery settlers ransacked the free-state capital of Lawrence, abolitionist John Brown exacted revenge with a massacre at Pottawatomie Creek. The violence of Bleeding Kansas extended to Congress as Preston Brooks caned Charles Sumner for an intemperate antislavery speech.
Answer 5
Answer: Economic prosperity and standardization of political procedures diminished party differences, and loyalty, by the 1850s. The Whig party disintegrated because of its inability to cope with the slavery issue. The Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, hoped to please everyone with such measures as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and ended by pleasing no one. The short-lived Know-Nothings represented a cyclical nativist reaction. The Republicans opposed expansion of slavery to the new territories and steadily won influence in the North.
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