Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (22 page)

It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. … It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” [Loud applause.] No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.
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Perhaps it is worth saying, in Douglas’s defense, that the Little Giant did not believe that slavery was actually right, nor did Lincoln in 1858 believe that it was wrong enough to justify direct intervention in the affairs of states where it was already domesticated, or that natural equality immediately translated into civil equality.
Natural
rights were permanent, common, and intuitive, and defined the person as a human being;
civil
rights were bestowed by communities and could be changed, altered, revoked, or bestowed as a community saw fit, without that in any way impairing the essential humanity of the individuals involved. “Society,” as even one New England abolitionist wrote, “in forming its institutions and organizations has a right to with-hold [voting rights] from any person or class of persons who it believes cannot exercise it understandingly.”
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Natural rights, however, were not the gift of “society.” They were possessed equally by all human beings simply by virtue of being human, and for Lincoln in 1858, black people were certainly the equals of whites in terms of their natural humanity. That made slavery a wrong that should be contained wherever there was opportunity to contain it.

For Douglas, black people were so far from being the equals of whites in any sense, natural or civil, that the misfortune of their enslavement was simply not worth antagonizing half the Union, especially when opening up half the continent was at stake. For Douglas, the question about slavery was not natural rights but workaday politics—
shall we let this quarrel over inferior beings wreck the Union?
For the time being, that was the basic outlook of most Illinoisans.

Douglas Democrats won the majority of the Illinois legislative seats on election day, November 2, and since the Illinois legislature was still the legal forum for electing the state’s U.S. senators, it was the legislature and not the popular vote of the people of Illinois that on January 5 sent Douglas back to Washington.

Lincoln tried to put as jolly a face on the situation as he could. On his way home on election night, “the path” he walked “had been worn hog-backed & was slippering. My foot slipped from under me, knocking the other one out of the way, but I recovered myself & lit square: and I said to myself, ‘It’s a slip and not a fall.’” And that would be how he would try to understand his defeat—a slip and not a fall. In his bleaker moments, though, he could not help seeing this defeat as being of a piece with all his other political disappointments. “I have no regrets for having… resolutely made the struggle,” he wrote to Salmon Chase of Ohio, the one Republican worthy who had come to Illinois to campaign for Lincoln in 1858—although “I would have preferred success.”
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Yet his loss really was a significant one. By forcing out into the open the inconsistencies of the popular sovereignty dogma, Lincoln had made it impossible both for anti-slavery Republicans to see Douglas as an ally and for pro-slavery Southerners to see him as a friend to slavery’s unlimited expansion. Incidentally, he had also made himself a national figure, with results that people were already beginning to speculate upon.

When James Buchanan became president in 1856 it was fervently hoped that he would have the political tools necessary to put the slavery agitation to rest. Buchanan had to his credit almost forty years of experience in Congress, the cabinet, and most recently in diplomatic service. Although he was a Pennsylvanian by birth and a Northern Democrat by conviction, he nevertheless sympathized with the South’s ever-mounting demands for reassurance, and the hope that he would be able to please everyone was the single most important factor in his victory over the fatally divided Whigs. “This question of domestic slavery is the weak point in our institutions,” Buchanan admitted as early as 1836. That meant it was all the more important for him to show it the loftiest respect: “Touch this question of slavery seriously—let
it once be made manifest to the people of the South that they cannot live with us, except in a state of continual apprehension and alarm for their wives and their children, for all that is near and dear to them upon the earth,—and the Union is from that moment dissolved.”
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This pervasive anxiety not to provoke Southerners guaranteed that Buchanan’s skills as a diplomat would serve to hobble rather than help him. Anxious to obtain peace in Kansas, Buchanan allowed himself to be intimidated by the violence of Southern threats of disunion; once intimidated by the Southerners in his cabinet and in Congress, he grew spiteful and resentful when Northern Democrats—especially Stephen A. Douglas—balked at his proposals to concede virtually every demand made by the South.

Settling the bloody mess in Kansas was Buchanan’s first chore. He was assisted—or so he thought—in dictating a settlement by the
Dred Scott
decision, which apparently relieved Washington of any responsibility to see that Kansas would choose slavery or freedom. However, Kansas insisted on making trouble for him anyway. The old territorial governor under President Pierce, John W. Geary, had brought a measure of peace to Kansas by the end of 1856, but the rest of the territorial government was still split between two rival legislatures, each claiming to be the legal voice of the people of Kansas. One of these was the “official” legislature, a pro-slavery body elected by fraud in 1855 and sitting in the town of Lecompton; the other was a free-soil assembly, sitting in Topeka.

On February 19, 1857, just before Buchanan’s inauguration, the Lecompton legislature, anticipating that the new president would probably appoint a new territorial governor, decided to get the jump on the appointment process. The Lecomptonites authorized the election of a constitutional convention that would draw up a state constitution for Kansas, a constitution that would then be submitted to Congress for its approval and for the admission of Kansas to the Union. Geary vetoed the convention bill, rightly accusing the pro-slavery legislature of attempting to stampede a rush to statehood on pro-slavery terms. The Lecompton legislature overrode Geary’s veto, however, and as soon as James Buchanan was inaugurated as president, Buchanan fired him.

Buchanan replaced Geary with a Mississippian, Robert J. Walker, which delighted the pro-slavery elements in Kansas. But Walker was no pro-slavery fire-eater. A friend of Stephen A. Douglas, Walker was convinced that slavery had no practical future in Kansas and that the territory ought to be admitted as a free state. Walker’s appointment only fed the determination of the Lecompton legislature to nail together a pro-slavery state constitution as quickly as possible, and in November 1857 a constitutional convention approved a document that had something in it to offend nearly everyone.
In addition to protecting the 200 slaves then in Kansas, the Lecompton Constitution placed restrictions on the chartering of banks, banned free blacks from the state, and prohibited any amendments to the constitution for seven years. As a sop to the idea of popular sovereignty, the new constitution allowed for the calling of a public referendum, but only on the question of whether new slaves could be brought into Kansas, which effectively guaranteed Kansas’s admission as a slave state no matter what. Even more amazing was President Buchanan’s response to the Lecompton constitution. Browbeaten by Southern congressional delegations and the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan decided to endorse the Lecompton constitution and recommended it favorably in his first annual presidential message (his State of the Union address, as it would be called now) to Congress on December 8, 1857.

“This message,” complained the unhappy Buchanan afterward, gave rise to exactly the opposite of what he had hoped: “a long, exciting, and occasionally violent debate in both Houses of Congress, between the anti-slavery members and their opponents, which lasted for three months,” in which “slavery was denounced in every form which could exasperate the Southern people, and render it odious to the people of the North; whilst on the other hand, many of the speeches of Southern members displayed characteristic violence.”
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In the light of the repeated electoral frauds in the Lecompton legislature and the refusal of the constitutional convention to submit the entire constitution for popular approval in Kansas, any congressional acceptance of the Lecompton Constitution was tantamount to repudiating the heart of popular sovereignty, as well as virtually admitting Kansas as a slave state. Stephen Douglas, righteous in his wrath against Buchanan, took his political life into his own hands and assailed the Lecompton Constitution on the floor of the Senate as a mockery of the popular sovereignty principle. When Buchanan threatened to bring down party discipline on him with all the wrath of an Andrew Jackson, Douglas belligerently replied, “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”
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Furthermore, free-soil Kansans boycotted the initial referendum on Lecompton on December 21, then joined in a second referendum on January 4 where they defeated it by a clear majority. But Buchanan had committed himself to the Lecompton constitution: he accepted the resignation of the disgusted Governor Walker in December and proceeded to pull every political string a president can conceivably pull, twisting approval of the Lecompton constitution out of the Senate on March 23, 1858 by a 33–25 vote, and then out of the House on April 1—but only after another full-scale donnybrook on the floor of the House that pitted two dozen congressmen against each other.

Unhappily for Buchanan, the House bill contained an amendment that the Senate version lacked, and the whole question was now thrown into a House-Senate conference committee for resolution. At the urging of William H. English of Indiana, one of the three House conferees, a compromise was devised that accepted Lecompton and the statehood of Kansas—provided that the Lecompton constitution was resubmitted to the people of Kansas for a federally supervised election. Douglas, however, mistrusted Lecompton no matter who supervised an election; and his enemies in Congress foolishly persuaded Buchanan that anything that Douglas opposed was the perfect thing for the president to support. The English attachment passed both House and Senate on April 30, 1858. Accordingly, the Lecompton constitution went back to the voters of Kansas for a third time, and to the hideous embarrassment of Buchanan, the voters of Kansas turned out on August 30 and rejected Lecompton by a vote of 11,812 to 1,926.
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Buchanan had lost one of the most vicious political struggles in the history of Congress, Southern Democrats had seriously damaged the patience of their Northern counterparts, and Buchanan loyalists in the North were unseated wholesale by upstart Republicans in the 1858 congressional elections. In the state elections a year later, Republicans seized control of the legislatures and governorships of the New England states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa. To add insult to injury, Douglas successfully won reelection to the Senate after a grueling campaign against the new rising Republican star of Illinois, Lincoln. In fact, almost the only Northern Democrats who survived Northern anger over Lecompton were anti-administration Douglasites.

Buchanan’s troubles had only begun, and they were now about to be worsened by one of the weirdest episodes in the history of American politics. Few people outside Kansas knew anything about John Brown, and those within Kansas knew him only as the anti-slavery fanatic who had taken his own private revenge on the pro-slavery cause in the murders at Pottawatomie in May 1856. Brown raged against slavery with all the ill-controlled violence of his being. If Brown was a fanatic, he was also something of a visionary: profoundly moved by the injustice of slavery, a champion of the political equality of blacks, willing to break any man-made law in the interest of obeying a higher law of justice and right. “He was always an enigma,” wrote one anti-slavery journalist who met Brown in 1856, “a strange compound of enthusiasm and cold, methodic stolidity,—a volcano beneath a mountain of snow.”
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Unfortunately for Brown, the temporary peace that Governor Geary brought to Kansas after the Pottawatomie massacre dried up most of the excitement Brown had derived from butchering hapless slaveholders. He took little interest in the debate
over the Lecompton Constitution, and instead he began to cast around for more substantial opportunities to wreak havoc on what he perceived as the satanic minions of the slave aristocracy. In December 1858 he participated in another raid, this time on Fort Scott, which liberated a free-state prisoner and killed a shopkeeper. Brown then raided into Missouri, liberating eleven Missouri slaves whom he then transported to Canada. But Brown got no thanks among the free-staters in Kansas, since his raids only drew the wrath of pro-slavery thugs down on their heads. “I consider it my duty to draw the scene of excitement to some other part of the country,” Brown announced, and once he deposited his fugitives in Canada in March 1859, he gave no more thought to Kansas.
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Instead, Brown’s eye fell upon Virginia. Between January 1857 and June 1859, Brown began recruiting volunteers and money for a guerilla raid into the Old Dominion. Brown’s plan was to liberate as many slaves as he could find or who would flock to him, establish himself in a stronghold in the western Virginia mountains, and from there engulf all of the South in a massive slave insurrection. The initial object of the raid would be the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, on the upper Potomac River, where Brown would be able to seize the arms he would need to defend himself in the Virginia mountains. Listened to dispassionately, Brown’s scheme was bizarre to say the least, and Frederick Douglass, who had known Brown since 1847, tried to talk him out of it, down to almost the last minute. “My discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence,” Douglass said, reporting that he attempted to convince Brown in his last meeting with him that Harpers Ferry was “a perfect steel trap and that once in he would never get out alive.”
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