Authors: Bruce Chadwick
Weed lobbied the editors of the pro–American Party newspapers and convinced several to leave the Americans and embrace the Republican banner. A typical example was the small
Hornellsville National American
paper. The editor, announcing the switch in loyalty, asked his readers, “Shall he cast his vote where it can do no possible good, or will he give it where it will tell most in favor of freedom and of a pure franchise?” He wrote that the American Party advocates should think of the slavery issue, and not just the party that opposes it.
526
The Republicans had much less success in trying to bring abolitionists from the new People’s Ticket into their party. They had “made war upon the Republican Party,” charged Weed.
527
Finally, two weeks prior to the election, Weed and his lieutenants tried to arrange a convention at which the People’s Ticket, the American Party, and the Republicans would all merge into one party that would serve as an umbrella organization for all the antislavery, anti-Democrat groups, to be called the Union Party. The small groups refused to attend and the effort failed (during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln did the same thing, with great success).
528
Weed’s political machine supported Morgan, as did his newspapers. Horace Greeley, who had split with Weed and Seward in 1854, backed Morgan in his
New York Tribune
. Seward decided to end his vacation and stump up and down the state for Morgan because Morgan had to win, and by a big plurality, in order for Seward to become president in 1860. The senator realized that his support and personal campaigning would help Morgan. He had enormous political influence and he knew it, as did everyone else. Abolitionist leader Wendell Phillips wrote of him, “Seward is a power in the state…his position decides that of millions.” Getting Morgan elected would prove that and establish Seward as an unbeatable candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
529
Seward had more support from the people in New York and other Northern states than ever for his antislavery policies in 1858. Throughout the year, he had received letters from many Americans around the country applauding his stand on slavery and denouncing the administration’s. Wrote Cornelius Baker in a typical note, “If there were the least spark of humanity left in the powers that be, the African slave trade would be abolished.”
530
In another, F. F. Brown wrote that when the senators are called upon to show their hand for or against freedom, “you will then be heard before the nation.”
531
So, on the evening of October 25 at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall, with every seat filled and many more people standing in the side aisles and at the rear of the hall, a drizzle still falling outside, William Henry Seward rose from his seat and walked the few steps across the stage to the podium to a crescendo of applause. He had an unlit cigar in his hand so he could jab the air with it to make his point, as he always did.
This time he did not slowly build toward his theme, as was his usual custom. He began with a vituperative attack on the Democrats and slavery, like an angry gladiator, telling the cheering crowd that Southerners would not only continue the slavery of the black man, but would enslave the white man, too—if they could. He looked out at a crowd of mostly white men and women, sprinkled with some black freedmen, and quickly moved to one of his lifelong beliefs, that the slave system demeans the white worker as well as the slave and is destructive to mankind. He jabbed the air with his cigar and told the crowd, “The slave system is not only intolerable, unjust, and inhuman towards the laborer, whom, only because he is a laborer, it loads down with chains and converts into merchandise, but is scarcely less severe upon the freedman, to whom, only because he is a laborer from necessity, it denies facilities for employment, and whom it expels from the community because it cannot enslave and convert him into merchandise also.”
He told the crowd that the slave system would wreck America. “It is necessarily improvident and ruinous because, as a general truth, communities prosper and flourish or droop and decline in just the degree that they practice or neglect to practice the primary duties of justice and humanity,” he said, adding that they were “incompatible” and that “they never have permanently existed together in one country, and they never can.”
Seward explained that most of the countries in the world had outlawed slavery by 1858 because not only was it immoral, but they found that the paid labor and slave labor systems could not function together in a society. Americans, he said, would soon discover the same thing; the nation was on a collision course.
And then, about one-third of the way into his speech, he tried out his new two-word phrase, “irrepressible conflict,” to define his theme, that he assumed would merely highlight his remarks, nothing more.
It is, he said of slavery in America, “an
irrepressible conflict
between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation or entirely a free labor nation. Either the cotton and rice fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye fields and wheat fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free states and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.” The crowd roared at his new phrase.
The Democrats had become the nation’s controlling party and had established a detestable record on slavery that would continue if they were not turned out of office. Seward charged that: 1. they would defeat any efforts to outlaw slavery in any of the new territories and permit them to come into the Union as slave states; 2. a Democratic president, with consent of the Democratic Senate, would annex numerous slaveholding foreign countries in Central and South America to increase the empire; 3. the Supreme Court, appointed by the Democrats, would nullify any antislavery laws passed by the states; and 4. eventually the Democrats would force now free states to accept slavery within their boundaries.
If that happens, Seward vowed, voice rising, he would leave the country. “I shall never be a denizen of a state where men and women are reared as cattle, and bought and sold as merchandise. When that evil day shall come, and all further effort at resistance shall be impossible, then, if there shall be no better hope for redemption than I can now foresee, I shall say with [Benjamin] Franklin, while looking abroad over the whole earth for a new and more congenial home, ‘Where liberty dwells, there is my country.’”
He did not think that he exaggerated in outlining his fears, Seward told the crowd, because “the Democratic Party is inextricably committed to the designs of the slaveholders.”
Seward then launched into a history of the opposition to show, he said, that “the history of the Democratic Party commits it to the policy of slavery.” Two-thirds of the party consisted of Democrats from the Southern states, he noted, giving the slaveholders a constant majority within party ranks and the power to make the Democrats from the Northern states do their bidding. As an example, he cited President Martin Van Buren, of New York, the first Democratic president from a non-slave state. He said that the Southern Democrats forced the president to accept the existence of slavery in the District of Columbia in 1836. The Democrats insisted upon the admission of Texas into the Union as a slave state in 1845, Seward contended, and forced the nation to accept slavery in the territories of Utah and New Mexico, won in the Mexican War of 1846, as part of the Compromise of 1850. The Democrats deliberately ordered the Fugitive Slave Act as part of the Compromise. Finally, in 1856, when Seward claimed that the residents of Kansas wanted to bring their territory into the Union as a free state, President Buchanan and the Democrats backed efforts by a slaveholding group to ram a slave constitution down the throats of its citizens.
Charging that the Democrats had a “dark record,” Seward then set off one more verbal explosion—his belief that the Democrats would soon bring back the African slave trade, overrunning the United States with Africans in chains. How to stop all of this? Defeat the Democrats and turn them out of power. He roared, “It is high time for the friends of freedom to rush to the rescue of the Constitution.”
The senator spoke for nearly ninety minutes that evening to the captivated and increasingly angry crowd in Corinthian Hall. As he moved toward his conclusion, he added yet another bombshell to his “irrepressible conflict” scenario. Seward looked out at the crowd and said defiantly, “I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backwards.”
And then he predicted that the only solution to the slavery problem was “to confound and overthrow, by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the Constitution and Freedom forever.”
532
The crowd erupted in wild applause and foot stomping that lasted many minutes. People in attendance banged their chairs on the floor, slammed their hands against the backs of those next to them in triumph and shouted for the downfall of the hated Democrats.
The “irrepressible conflict” speech, plus a similar speech he delivered in Rome, New York, four days later, in which, a reporter said, he “was greeted by enthusiastic cheers, long continued and often repeated,” caused a national uproar.
533
What Seward had done, the highly agitated Republicans said, was to finally define the feelings of everyone in the country who was opposed to slavery and could foresee, like Seward, how the evils of the slave trade would destroy the United States. The outraged Democrats charged that what Seward had really done was, in no uncertain terms, call for a Civil War that would divide and destroy the nation.
The Republicans said that Seward had predicted an unmistakable future if slavery was not halted and the Democrats howled that he had predicted an unmistakable calamity if Southerners did not do what the Northerners (and Seward) ordered. If the United States had been two camps prior to the Rochester speech, for and against slavery, they were now ready to take up arms and attack each other over the issue of slavery.
Those in Corinthian Hall were inspired by the speech. One man in the audience that night gushed in a letter to a Rochester newspaper a week later that Seward was the “champion of freedom” and described him as a knight of the Round Table. “There he stood, [patriotism’s] calm and eloquent advocate, true to his mission—undaunted by the wrath of tyrants. I have long been acquainted with Mr. Seward, and have always found every emotion of his heart to be generous and noble. He will always be found on the side of the oppressed; a despiser of aristocracy and a hater of tyrants.”
534
Just as with his “higher law” speech, many Americans wanted copies of the Rochester oration. Hundreds wrote to him personally, and thousands more wrote the Republican Party, telling him they would be honored just to read it.
535
One of Seward’s advisers, George Baker, was thrilled by the Rochester oration. He sent copies of it to dozens of newspapers and told Seward that he should reproduce the speech in a pamphlet and publish thousands of copies, reminding him that it was “the keynote for the future contest [the presidency].”
536
The speech, Baker added, was “destined to save the Republican Party from self destruction and the country from the [evils] of slavery.” He said of Southerners that “it was going to make the heathens rage more than any speech you ever made.” Even former friend Greeley admired it, writing that “the speech will be pondered by every thoughtful man in the land.”
537
Seward’s oratory was roundly lambasted in the South. Seward was called “wicked,” “malicious,” “the chief black Republican,” and even “treasonous.” His critics all said the same thing: the bombastic Seward was trying to create an irrepressible conflict where, they said, no conflict of any kind existed.
538
The
Little Rock (Ark.) State Gazette
called Seward “an unscrupulous politician.” Vice President Breckinridge, who was from Kentucky, accused Seward of “trying to turf over a volcano.”
539
No one expressed the Democratic and Southern bitterness better, and with more anger, than President James Buchanan. He cried that the Republicans lacked convictions and that he was a “politician and not a statesman,” and said that he used the speech to set a policy for the Republicans that none of them wanted except him. “He thus aroused passions, probably without so intending, which it was beyond his power afterwards to control. He raised a storm which, like others of whom we read in history, he wanted both the courage and the power to quell.”
540
Buchanan added that because Seward was certain to be the Republican nominee in 1860, all of his speeches carried great weight. His views were “reckless fancies,” said the president. “[Southerners] believed or affected to believe that the people of the North, in order to avoid the dreaded alternative of having slavery restored among themselves, and have their rye fields and wheat fields cultivated by slave labor, would put forth all their efforts to cut up slavery by the roots in the southern states.”
541
The Republicans scoffed at Buchanan’s complaints, but some, such as
New York Times
editor Henry Raymond, understood why Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” idea stirred such feelings among slaveholders and “made his name an object of so much terror to the South.”
542