slavery. As new states and territories joined the nation, debate over whether they should be admitted as "slave states" was furious. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 (which secretary of state and future president John Quincy Adams perceptively called the "title page to a great tragic volume"), the Compromise of 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 were all engineered in the hopes of satisfying both sides, but these legislative efforts ultimately failed. Abolitionists continued to rage against the enslavement of blacks, while Southern states felt that the balance of power in Congress between slave and non-slave states was being gradually eroded. The Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857) further heightened tensions between the North and South. During the first half of the nineteenth century, political parties evolved in accordance with patterns of ethnicity, religion, region, and economic class. Leading political parties included the Jeffersonian (National) Republicans, who favored high tariffs and the institution of a national bank; the Whigs, a party that grew out of the National Republican Party and several smaller political factions; and the Jacksonian Democrats--named after party giant Andrew Jackson--who held sway from 1829 to the dawn of the Civil War. The issue of slavery, however, finally caused the Democrats, traditionally a coalition of various economic and ethnic groups, to splinter. The two groups each fielded a candidate for the 1860 presidential election, but the anti-slavery Republicans of the North were able to push Abraham Lincoln to the presidency despite the fact that he won only 39 percent of thepopular vote (and only two counties in all of the South). His election further convinced the South that separation from the Union was necessary. American law and interpretations of justice underwent dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. American law was based in large measure on English...
