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This chapter focuses on the empowerment of the federal judiciary from the Compromise of 1850 (admitting California into the Union as a free state and unofficially signifying the beginning of the political crisis leading to the Civil War) to the Compromise of 1877 (settling the disputed 1876 presidential election between Samuel J. Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes and representing the formal end of Reconstruction). The chapter asks why judicial institution building was pursued, how it was accomplished, and what it achieved within the context of mid-nineteenth century American politics. It examines the role of Republicans in Civil War and Reconstruction era institution building and how it resulted in a significant expansion of federal judicial power. It also considers the four stages in which the substantial empowerment of the judiciary occurred during the period, including the consolidation of a Republican-friendly Supreme Court through ameliorative reforms aimed at specific problems of judicial performance.

This chapter highlights the role Free Soil Party politicians like Salmon Chase and John P. Hale played in heated debates over the Compromise of 1850 and then Free Soilers’ efforts to rouse opposition to new legislation. Targeting the Fugitive Slave Act especially, political abolitionists in the Free Soil Party worked to ensure continued attention to the Slave Power’s control over both major parties. Simultaneously, in several northern states, Free Soil managers experimented with coalition politics, often collaborating with Democrats at the state level but with mixed results. While these coalitions typically ended in disillusionment, Massachusetts Free Soilers succeeded in electing Charles Sumner to the United States Senate, where he would become perhaps the most noted antislavery firebrand in national politics. The immediate results of the presidential election of 1852 proved deeply disappointing, seemingly signalling national consensus on the recent sectional compromise, but Free Soilers remained confident that as old issues differentiating the major parties receded into the background, impending new slavery controversies would force the partisan reorganization political abolitionists had long sought.

This chapter begins with Everett’s return to the U.S. and service as president of Harvard College, and follows his thoughts and actions relative to slavery, race, reform, and the Union through 1852. Highlights and revealing moments in this period include his moves towards potentially admitting Harvard’s first African-American student, Everett’s eulogy for fallen antislavery statesman John Quincy Adams, correspondence with Free Soil Party leaders in the presidential election year of 1848 in relation to a possible vice presidential nomination, and the debates leading to the Compromise of 1850. Everett was deeply uncomfortable with the Fugitive Slave Act as part of that Compromise, but soon thereafter fought on the battlefields of memory to vindicate the Compromise and especially its proponent Daniel Webster.

This chapter examines the role of “faithful” Northern Democrats, dubbed “doughfaces”—those who remained loyal to the regular organization and the Southern leadership in the 1848 elections—in the political crises of the 1850s. The expansion of slavery into new territories had been a polarizing issue since the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, and the situation was exacerbated by aggressive territorial expansion under slave-owning presidents Thomas Jefferson, John Tyler, and James Polk. Northerners grew to oppose the “Slave Power” and the spread of the “peculiar institution.” This chapter first discusses the convening of the Thirty-First Congress in December 1849 before turning to a number of Northern Democrats who played important roles in the slavery debates, including Stephen Douglas, Henry Clay, Jesse Bright, and Daniel Dickinson. It also considers the death of the Omnibus Bill of 1850 in Congress, along with the adoption of the Compromise of 1850 and its consequences for Northern Democrats.

This chapter focuses on Stephen A. Douglas, described by one newspaper correspondent as “very short in stature, but of such physical proportions, aside from this lack, as instantly to attract the attention of a stranger.” The Illinois Democrat had “a very large head, connected with broad and powerfully-built shoulders by a short, full neck; a chest sufficiently roomy to contain the lungs of a giant, and a pair of short, dumpy legs.” Yet Douglas's leadership and sociability in Washington helped solidify him as the “Little Giant,” a nickname used to describe his “marvelous ability” in contrast with his physical stature. After Douglas successfully ushered through the various provisions making up the Compromise of 1850, his political career took off.

Fillmore was the last Whig to be president. Though he is the only Whig president who had a history of serving the party beforehand, he compromised party principles to ensure enactment and enforcement of the Compromise of 1850. He established several precedents that Lincoln later would follow in opposing secession and ordering federal troops to put down treacherous resistance throughout the South. Fillmore helped to bury the Whig Party once and for all.

This chapter examines how Northern Democratic leaders sought to achieve “harmony, union, and victory” at the state level in the wake of the Compromise of 1850. Following their legislative victory, leading Northern Democrats acted immediately to unite the disparate factions of the party behind the Compromise of 1850, as well as position themselves for the presidential election of 1852. Northern Democrats like Stephen Douglas worked to convince voters of the “finality” of the measures, both to please the South and to achieve ever-elusive party harmony. In Congress, Northern Democrats also treated slavery as case closed and maintained an optimistic attitude about the future of the Northern Democracy. It would take more than positive thinking, however, to overcome Northern antislavery sentiment and bring “harmony” to the Northern Democracy. This chapter focuses on state politics in Indiana, New York, and Pennsylvania where Northern Democratic leaders tried to forge consensuses and discipline dissenters while positioning themselves for the 1852 presidential election.

The U.S.-Mexican War propelled Stephen Douglas and Jefferson Davis to the pinnacles of power but triggered a new round of sectional conflict that shook the Democratic Party to its core. Davis’s celebrated military service won him a seat in the U.S. Senate, where he fought to protect slaveholders’ property rights throughout the nation’s massive new western domain. Douglas joined him in the Senate as the self-appointed spokesman for a vast western constituency stretching from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. As they attempted to govern the Mexican Cession and the Oregon Territory, Davis and Douglas grappled with portentous questions about democracy, property rights, and the Union. Douglas embraced popular sovereignty as a means to preserve white men’s self-government, but Davis denounced it as a cloaked free soil doctrine and demanded positive federal protection for property in human beings. Their conflict escalated until Douglas helped broker the Compromise of 1850. Douglas hailed the compromise as a permanent basis for sectional peace, while Davis’s dogged resistance to the measure briefly upended his career.

This chapter examines the reorganization of the federal judiciary from the beginning of Thomas Jefferson's second term as president in 1805 until just prior to the Compromise of 1850. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the government faced a new set of challenges, many of which were the result of the vast territorial expansion. Territorial expansion and the politics of statehood admission intertwined with judicial reform attempts focused primarily on arranging states in circuits and ensuring regional geographic representation on the Supreme Court. The chapter considers the four stages in which the history of judicial institution building unfolded in the eras of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy: the Judiciary Act of 1807, the stalemate over the National Republicans' attempts to extend the circuit system to the West in the mid-1820s, the Whigs' failed consolidation plan of 1835, and the triumph of reform in the Judiciary Act of 1837.

Chapter forty-eight examines Hodge’s politics and his tripartite commitment to God’s sovereignty, property rights and the need for religion to be tied to political action for the good of the nation. Through an examination of Hodge’s Repertory review of Moses Stuart’s Conscience and the Constitution, one finds that Hodge had a firm commitment to believing that humanity’s common moral sense would bind the nation together. This belief was unsettled by the Civil War. Hodge also shifted political party allegiances during this life from the Whig party to the Republican party, but he always considered himself a Federalist at heart.

This chapter discusses the advent of a uniquely American-centered historical discourse framed around self-elevation and destiny, and reflected through the lens of the American and Haitian Revolutions. Not only had issues of slavery and freedom reached boiling point by the 1850s but this moment represented great possibility for abolitionist forces even as restrictive legislation such as the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act, and the Dred Scott decision became law. Black writers integrated themselves more fully into the language of nationhood, a project that began in the early republic, in which they affirmed their belief in the core civil and human rights to which all members of a nation were entitled. As the nation invoked the memory of the American Revolution, black people argued for their centrality in the founding drama.

Chapter 6 considers the presidential election of 1848, the Compromise of 1850, and the election of 1852. During these years the friendship of Buchanan and King first intensified, then cooled, as each man took a separate path to political power. In 1852 the Democratic Party refused to place Buchanan and King on the same ticket, because the pair had become too closely associated together to balance its growing sectional and ideological divisions. Instead, the Democracy chose the dark horse Franklin Pierce for president and then selected King as his running mate to pacify Buchanan and his supporters. King’s precipitous decline in health, followed by his death in April 1853, ended the decades-long political and personal friendship with Buchanan. In response, Buchanan prepared for another round of exile abroad, this time as American minister to England.

This chapter tells the story of a genuine war hero in the mold of Presidents George Washington, Andrew Jackson, and William Henry Harrison. Zachary Taylor was selected as the Whig candidate for president because, like Harrison, he was a former general. Unfortunately for the Whigs, who elected only these two presidents, Taylor's term in office lasted only sixteen months. Taylor was most obviously a Whig in his aversion to the use of the presidential veto, which he had often denounced “as a tool of presidential tyranny.” Notwithstanding his opposition to the use of the veto, he was more than happy to threaten a veto of the Compromise of 1850, and believed in the use of the veto against constitutionally suspect legislation.

This chapter examines Edwin M. Stanton's politics and legal practice. It begins by considering Henry Clay's Senate compromise measure for California's admission to the Union; his solution consisted of admitting free California and abolishing the slave trade in the national capital to satisfy the antislavery element in the North, while giving Southerners an enhanced law for the recapture of fugitive slaves; the final version of the compromise included the two new territories of Utah and New Mexico, which could decide whether they wanted to come in as slave or free when they applied for statehood. The rest of this chapter discusses the positions of Stanton and Salmon P. Chase regarding the Compromise of 1850; Stanton's refusal to run for political office or for the Ohio Supreme Court; his practice of law involving corporations and railroads; his encounter with the wealthy Hutchison family of Pittsburgh; and his marriage to Ellen Hutchison in 1856.

This chapter describes the increasingly bold efforts by local abolitionists to challenge slavery and the slave trade in Washington, as well as the attempts by local white leaders to protect slavery and discourage black migration to the city. Washington served as a central stage in the growing national drama over slavery. Despite Congress’s attempt to squelch public debate with the “gag rule,” the question of slavery in the nation’s capital would not die. Frustrated abolitionists, unable to overcome what they called the “Slave Power,” went “underground” to help Washington-area slaves escape to freedom. As more and more enslaved people “absconded” (the term often used in advertisements for fugitives), city leaders struggled to preserve the peculiar institution by capturing and punishing runaways. With the nation tilting ominously toward civil war, slavery’s opponents and its defenders placed Washington on the front lines of the struggle over human bondage in America. The chapter culminates with the emancipation of D.C.’s 3,100 enslaved people in April 1862, more than eight months before the Emancipation Proclamation.

This chapter begins with biographical sketches of David Rice Atchison of Missouri and Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina. The chapter also discusses the elections of Atchison, Butler, Hunter and Mason to the United States Senate, their political allegiance to Calhoun and advocacy of slavery’s expansion westward. It concludes with Calhoun’s opposition to the Compromise package of 1850 and his death one month before its passage.