Conservative winds blew into the United States during the 1850s. Calls for the political inclusion of women and northern free blacks were ignored or rejected. A Nativist Movement developed as an influx of poor Irish Catholics arriving in the United States. Slaveholders struck back at the prospect of millions of free blacks in various ways. Congress voted for a stronger fugitive slave law. The Dred Scott case denied the rights of citizenship to all blacks. Democrats also called for the federal protection of slavery in the western territories. Yet, in spite of all of this, slaves seemed to sense different possibilities, including emancipation and a new order of life.
By 1860, both slaveholders and slaves interpreted political events in similar ways. Both groups.....
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