America Aflame (27 page)

The debates drew interest not only from the locals but also from well beyond the state. The
New York Times
, a Republican newspaper, noted that Illinois was “the most interesting political battle-ground in the Union.” Few in Illinois would disagree. The debates attracted huge throngs, aided by the coincidence of the contests with lay-by time on the farm. At the first debate in Ottawa, some eighty miles southwest of Chicago, ten thousand people turned up, though the town contained a population of less than nine thousand.
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Douglas hammered on the Lincoln-as-radical theme. Lincoln's “House Divided” speech provided fodder for Douglas's charge that Republicans and Lincoln would sacrifice the Union to destroy slavery. Once emancipation occurred, Douglas asserted, freed slaves would flood Illinois to “cover your prairies with black settlements” and “turn this beautiful state into a free negro colony.” He was not above more primitive race baiting. Warming up the crowd at the debate in Freeport, Douglas related that he had spotted Frederick Douglass a while earlier on the edge of the gathering in a “carriage—and a magnificent one it was … a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box-seat, whilst Fred Douglass and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver.” While laughter rippled through the crowd, a Lincoln backer yelled out, “What of it?” Douglas replied, “All I have to say is if you, Black Republicans, think that the negro ought to ride in a carriage with your wife, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.”
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The charges threw Lincoln on the defensive. He initially tried to match Douglas's racial views and reassure his audiences that there would be no black republic in Illinois or anywhere else on his watch. Lincoln also argued that Republicans, not Democrats, would keep the territories white, since, in the wake of the Dred Scott decision, popular sovereignty could no longer guarantee that protection. But Douglas replied that the people of a territory could exclude slavery prior to the formation of a state constitution simply by not enacting legislation to protect it. By doing nothing, the territory's inhabitants complied with the letter of
Dred Scott
while at the same time effectively excluding slaveholders. Since slavery could not exist anywhere without specific protective legislation, that would discourage slaveholders from bringing their chattel into the territory.

This so-called Freeport Doctrine undercut Lincoln's attempt to connect Douglas to an alleged Slave Power conspiracy. But Douglas's response did longer-term damage to his political future and that of the Democratic Party. It widened the breach between himself and President Buchanan, who believed that the Dred Scott decision killed popular sovereignty. It further isolated Douglas and like-minded northern Democrats from the Buchanan administration, and from southern Democrats.

In the meantime, Douglas was having the best of the debates. At the fourth debate, in Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln encountered a mocking banner raised by Democrats, captioned “Negro Equality,” depicting a white man beside a black woman with a mulatto boy in the background. Though Lincoln's supporters ripped down the banner before the debate began, he felt obliged to address his views on race again: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.” He based his position on the belief that “there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”
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Did Lincoln really believe what he said at Charleston, or was it merely a question of tailoring the message to suit the crowd? It was not unusual for politicians conducting statewide campaigns to say different things at different venues, even to the point of appearing to contradict themselves. Few voters in downstate Illinois knew what Lincoln or Douglas had said in Chicago, and vice versa. In Chicago, Lincoln had expressed a general belief in black equality. But he had always expressed ambivalence about the ability of blacks and whites to live together in peace and harmony. Abraham Lincoln held the sensibilities of a nineteenth-century white man. What distinguished him, however, was that he believed deeply in the humanity of African Americans and in their equality before God.

Lincoln responding to Stephen A. Douglas (seated to his right) during their debate at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858. Douglas repeatedly used race- baiting as a tactic, especially in this debate. Lincoln responded here by denying he favored social and political equality for blacks. (Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum)

It was not until the fifth debate, at Galesburg in the more friendly environs of northern Illinois, that Lincoln took to the offensive and presented his differences with Douglas in moral terms. “I confess myself as belonging to that class in the country that believes slavery to be a moral and political wrong.… I believe that slavery is wrong, and in a policy springing from that belief that looks to the prevention of the enlargement of that wrong, and that looks at some time to there being an end of that wrong. The other sentiment is that it is not wrong, and the policy springing from it that there is no wrong in its becoming bigger, and that there never will be any end of it. There is the difference between Judge Douglas and his friends and the Republican party.”
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Unlike Douglas, Lincoln also believed that America's sacred founding documents were inclusive of all races. Changing the tone of the debate from expressions of racial orthodoxy to the meaning and legacy of America's democratic experiment, Lincoln elevated the dialogue and deepened the importance of the contest. He challenged Douglas directly on the origins of the republic, a subject under much discussion during these troubling years. Though most of these probings concluded predictably with one side or the other claiming that it best represented the nation's birthright, the exercise involved an important definition, or redefinition of America for this second generation.

Lincoln was unequivocal on that legacy. “The entire records of the world, from the date of the Declaration of Independence up to within three years ago, may be searched in vain for one single affirmation, from one single man, that the negro was not included in the Declaration of Independence.” He squared that view with his earlier statements endorsing social and political racial inequality by explaining that “the inferior races” were equal in their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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Lincoln placed his differences with Douglas into this broader moral context so his listeners might understand the high stakes involved, that the slavery issue was not merely a political question like, say, the tariff or the transcontinental railroad but a test of America's democratic and religious ideals: “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.” In these few sentences, Lincoln related how the slavery issue connected to principles that transcended both time and space. He linked the anti-slavery cause to the nation's democratic legacy and its global mission.
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Lincoln held a universal perspective on the American experiment. His immersion in the writings of the founding generation, the abortive revolutions of 1848, and the anguish of America's friends over the nation's struggle with slavery convinced him that more was at stake than the integrity of the Union. After the election of James Buchanan, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend wondering if the event signaled a campaign to extend slavery to the territories. If that were the case, Tocqueville worried, then Europeans would view it as “one of the greatest crimes that men can commit against the general cause of humanity.” Several months later, after Dred Scott and Lecompton, Tocqueville prayed for the integrity of the Union, identifying America with the cause “of liberty across the world.”
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Lincoln not only identified the cause of the Republican Party with the forces of liberty and freedom all over the world but also framed the debate as a contest between good and evil. Evangelical rhetoric had pervaded political discourse at least since the early 1840s. But coming on the heels of a national religious revival, Lincoln's assertion reinforced the perception that the nation was approaching a battle that could determine the future of mankind for eternity: “As I view the contest, it is not less than a contest for the advancement of the kingdom of Heaven or the kingdom of Satan.” The difficulty with raising the stakes so high was that it threatened to polarize the electorate so that one side or the other could find the results of a democratic election totally unacceptable. For how do you compromise with evil?
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The revival that began in the despair and disorder of New York City in the winter of 1857–58 now gave way to a broader revival. To save the Union and what it stood for in the world, Lincoln implied, it might be necessary to destroy it, to have it reborn in a form more consonant with its sacred founding documents and the sainted men who framed them.

CHAPTER 7

THE BOATMAN

ISAAC SMITH BOUGHT A FARM
in Maryland. It was good land in this country of gently rolling hills. Perhaps Smith would grow corn, oats, wheat, and carve out a small patch for tobacco. That is what his neighbors did in this part of Maryland, so different from the plantation agriculture of the Eastern Shore where Frederick Douglass spent his early days. Only Smith was not a farmer. He was not even Isaac Smith. His name was John Brown.

Peace in Kansas had left Brown out of work but not out of ideas. The growing belief in the North of a Slave Power conspiracy inspired the patriarch to look up some of his old friends back east. He had nurtured a plan of liberation for a decade, waiting for the right time to implement it. God told him this was that time.

Not God but Frederick Douglass visited John Brown. They sat on a rock, and the white man unfolded his plan before the incredulous black man. Twenty-two men would seize the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and liberate Virginia's slaves. Brown wanted Douglass to join his righteous army. “I want you for a special purpose,” Brown informed his guest. “When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I want you to help hive them.” Douglass liked neither his purported role as some black Queen Bee nor the plan. He urged Brown to revisit his idea of creating a mountain enclave for runaway slaves. When the white man demurred, Douglass thanked his host, quit the rock, and left Brown to his own devices.
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Brown financed the purchase of the farm and his small “army” with funds from some of New England's leading white abolitionists, known as the “Secret Six.” Their support for Brown, though, was hardly clandestine. In the South, their names would become synonyms for perfidy: Gerrit Smith, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Stearns, Franklin Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe—all from prominent New England families and most with close ties to evangelical Protestantism. These were more than armchair revolutionaries. They had defied the law by harboring escaped slaves and believed in the concept of righteous violence.

Although Frederick Douglass declined the role of accomplice, fellow black abolitionist Harriet Tubman proved more receptive to the plot. Tubman, like Douglass a native of Maryland's Eastern Shore, had become a legendary liberator by the late 1850s. After escaping from bondage in 1849, Tubman served as a powerful voice for abolition and women's rights. Her fame derived less from what she said than from what she did. At great personal peril, she ventured back into the South nearly a dozen times during the 1850s to spirit out slaves through the Underground Railroad. From 1852 until the beginning of the Civil War, Tubman made one, sometimes two trips a year into Maryland or Virginia to rescue ten or more slaves at a time. In an era when one slave could reveal a plot in exchange for a privilege, the volume of Tubman's nocturnal raids, and the fact that all of her charges (and herself) made it safely to freedom, were incredible.
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Tubman's feats proved to Brown that a vast slave population awaited the opportunity to liberate themselves and join the army of freedom. Brown determined to provide that opportunity and sought Tubman's help. She offered detailed information on the topography of western Virginia and agreed to enlist black recruits from Canada. Tubman proved much more successful in the first endeavor than in the second. Former slaves were willing to help their fellows in bondage but did not relish martyrdom as a probable consequence of such actions. Still, Brown was ecstatic at Tubman's endorsement and assistance. He wrote, “I am succeeding to all appearance beyond my expectation.… Harriet Tubman hooked on … at once. He is the most of a man naturally, that I ever met with.” Brown did not confuse Tubman's gender; her actions and bravery seemed so masculine to nineteenth-century men that Brown un-self-consciously referred to her in this manner. Brown was not the only abolitionist who made this allusion. Thomas Wentworth Higginson simply called her “Moses.”
3

More than a Moses was necessary to pull off Brown's harebrained scheme. The secrecy of his operation was no more secure than the identities of his white abolitionist benefactors. He left a detailed paper trail at his Maryland farm. His small band (now down to eighteen men) departed for Virginia with only one day's rations. While the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry was a logical target if one hoped to secure arms, it was not an ideal location from which to foment a slave rebellion. Situated in the northwestern part of Virginia, a region of small slaveholdings, Harpers Ferry lay a considerable distance from the main centers of plantation slavery in Southside Virginia where, nearly a generation earlier, Nat Turner launched his bloody but futile rebellion. Although Brown and his band would take the arsenal with deceptive ease, nary a slave rallied to their banner. But the United States Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee did, putting an inglorious end to the plot.
4

Governor Henry A. Wise charged Brown with treason against the state of Virginia, a curious accusation since Brown was not a resident of Virginia and owed no allegiance to the state. The wounded warrior, carried into court on a stretcher, maintained a stoic defiance throughout the brief trial, at the end of which he was allowed to make a five-minute speech. His was the eloquence of a man just short of the gallows and long convinced of his righteousness. Brown's brief statement emphasized the basic contradiction between slavery and America's democratic Christianity. Men who loved God and who believed God loved them could not allow the institution to exist:

This Court acknowledges, too, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed, which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done … in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.
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On December 1, 1859, John Brown wrote his last words before the escort came to his cramped cell: “I … am now quite certain that the crime of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.” Still suffering from his wounds, he slowly mounted the scaffold, ramrod straight. As he ascended he could look above and through the now-barren trees of impending winter to a church steeple. The bells were tolling.
6

The bells tolled in New England, too. John Brown accomplished more in death than in life. He did not cause the nation to disintegrate or the bloody civil war that followed. But his death illuminated the growing estrangement of North and South perhaps more than any other previous incident, coming as it did on top of an accumulation of perceived wrongs, insults, and aggressions from both sides. George Templeton Strong, who, like many of his fellow northerners, condemned the raid but recognized the controlling influence of Brown's legacy, wrote in his diary: “Old John Brown was hanged this morning; justly, say I, but his name may be a word of power for the next half century.” Strong underestimated that legacy. Sixty years later, in his poem “John Brown,” Edwin Arlington Robinson has the old man vowing, “I shall have more to say when I am dead.”
7

Most northerners denounced the deed even as they admired Brown's stoicism. His martyrdom did not create a groundswell for the abolitionist cause; nor did it provide a boost for the Republican Party. Northerners recoiled from the raid's implications: a slave insurrection and disunion.
Harper's Weekly,
a new and influential nonpartisan magazine, editorialized that “though the leading Republican politicians and papers may and do repudiate the acts of Brown and his associates, it is likely that a large section of the people of this country will hold them responsible for what has happened.”
8

Abraham Lincoln recognized the danger in just such an association, particularly after authorities discovered the cache of correspondence between Brown and various white and black New England abolitionists, some with ties to the Republican Party. Lincoln's opposition to Brown's Raid derived not from political expediency but from his genuine regard for the rule of law and his concern that such acts, however well intentioned, could set back the anti-slavery cause. He explained that Brown's plot was “wrong for two reasons. It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil.” Lincoln admired Brown's “great courage [and] rare unselfishness” but diagnosed the old man as “insane,” concluding with the wry comment that the raid was “an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate.”
9

African Americans living in the North held a different perspective. For many, the idea that a white person would give up his life and the lives of his sons for their cause was a novel thought. White anti-slavery martyrs existed, such as Elijah Lovejoy, but these individuals used words; Brown took action and carried the fight to the South, and gave his life for that effort. Harriet Tubman, who knew about bravery, noted, “When I think how he gave up his life for our people, and how he never flinched, but was so brave to the end, it's clear to me it wasn't mortal man, it was God in him.”
10

Southerners dismissed northern disclaimers as self-serving. They read about the church bells tolling all over New England at the hour of Brown's execution. They recalled William H. Seward's comment about an “irrepressible conflict” and how that suddenly sprang to life in western Virginia. They saw the widely broadcast comments of prominent abolitionists whom they had come to invest with considerably more influence than they actually enjoyed—part of the process of each section believing the worst about the other and convincing themselves that the worst was the norm.

The event confirmed for southerners that the Republican Party was “organized on the basis of making war” against the South. Others mocked the demonstrations of piety and moral outrage, especially in New England, a region “built up and sustained by the products of negro slave labor.” The solemn processions of mourning and the tableaux depicting the martyred Brown doubtless broke the cold, gray monotony of a Boston December. “It is a pity that they haven't a witch or two to drown or burn, by way of variety.”
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That the Slave Power had created a martyr, abolitionists did not doubt. Some southerners agreed. A Kentucky editor predicted that “if old John Brown is executed, there will be thousands to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood; relics of the martyr will be paraded throughout the North.” Though the journalist overestimated the procession, several prominent northern writers compared John Brown's execution with the crucifixion. Ralph Waldo Emerson predicted that Brown would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Thoreau, on the day of Brown's execution, wrote, “Some 1800 years ago Christ was crucified; this morning … Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.”
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Such expressions of grief gave heart to southern disunionists. Since the Jackson administration, a small but expanding group of southern leaders dreamed of a unified region. The moderation of the Upper South, the discipline of party, and the influence of southern politicians in the federal government muted nationalist movements in the South. John C. Calhoun labored long and hard during the 1830s and 1840s to develop a regional unity that transcended party, to little avail. Occasionally, southerners came together in commercial conventions to lessen their dependence on northern trade, manufacturing, and finance. But concerted political efforts floundered. The flashpoints of the 1850s all seemed to break the South's way—the Fugitive Slave Law, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and Dred Scott. Yet the region had little to show for these “triumphs.”

Brown's Raid was another matter: a bold if farcical invasion of the South compounded by an outpouring of grief and invective from the North. Perhaps southerners could see now the true beliefs of their adversaries. A South Carolina editor enthused, “Never before, since the Declaration of Independence, has the South been more united in sentiment.” “Recent events have wrought almost a complete revolution in the sentiments, the thoughts, the hopes, of the oldest and steadiest conservatives in all the southern states,” the
Richmond Whig
rejoiced. The
Whig
counted “thousands upon … thousands of men in our midst who, a month ago, scoffed at the idea of a dissolution of the Union as a madman's dream, but who now hold the opinion that its days are numbered, its glory perished.”
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Southerners now had their own version of the Slave Power conspiracy. The
Charleston Mercury
, ever in the forefront of disunion sentiment, admitted that Brown's insurrection “has been silly and abortive.” But, the editor claimed, the raid was a small part of a “wide-spread scheme … maturing at the North for insurrections throughout the South.” It was clear to the
Mercury
that “the great source of the evil is that we are under one government with these people.” John Brown's Raid provided southern extremists with a patina of credibility. After more than a decade of preaching that the sky was falling, here was an overt act that seemed to corroborate their predictions.
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