Buchanan Administration - Domestic Issues
Domestic Issues
By the 1850s the issue of slavery had divided the United States into two ideologically separate societies. Americans in the North had grown increasingly opposed to any further expansion of the nation's "peculiar institution." Northerners objected to slavery on both moral and economic grounds: some believed that slavery was wrong; others felt that the presence of slave labor provided an unfair advantage against free men competing in the labor market. Southerners, even those who did not own slaves, had grown to feel more and more strongly that slavery was an integral element of their regional identity. To take away slavery was to take away the South's independence.
Both sections saw the fate of the new western territories, and in particular Kansas, as the key to the future of slavery. Northerners wanted slavery to be banned in the federal territories; southerners wanted to expand slavery into the West. If the...
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