Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
But this party, too, was soon to founder on the issue of slavery. Many Northern Know Nothings were also antislavery, and finally the anti-Nebraska cause proved more compelling, of more import, than resistance to foreign immigration. The split between the party’s Northern and Southern factions would diminish its strength, though the nativist feelings that had fueled its birth would continue to influence the political climate even after the party itself collapsed and died.
With the Whigs disappearing and the Democrats under Southern domination, all those opposed to the extension of slavery found their new home in what eventually became the Republican Party, comprised of “conscience Whigs,” “independent Democrats,” and antislavery Know Nothings. In state after state, new coalitions with different names came into being—the Fusion Party, the People’s Party, the Anti-Nebraska Party. In Ripon, Wisconsin, an 1854 gathering of antislavery men proposed the name “Republican Party,” and other state conventions soon followed suit.
In Illinois, Lincoln held back, still hoping that the Whig Party could become the antislavery party. In New York, Seward hesitated as well, finding it difficult to sever friendships and relationships built over three decades. Salmon Chase, however, was unhindered by past loyalties. He was ready to commit himself wholeheartedly to the task of forging a new party under the Republican banner. He had always been willing to move on when new political arrangements offered richer prospects for himself and the cause. Beginning as a Whig, he had joined the Liberty Party. He had abandoned that party for the Free-Soilers and then had gone to the Senate as an independent Democrat. Now, with his Senate term coming to an end, and with little chance of being nominated by the Democrats for a second term, he was happy to become a Republican.
In Ohio, as in New York and Illinois, the new movement was complicated by the strength of nativist sentiment. A delicate balance would be required to court the old Know Nothings without forfeiting support in the immigrant German-American community, which was passionate in its hatred of slavery. Chase accomplished this feat by running for governor on a Republican platform endorsing no specific Know Nothing proposals, but including eight Know Nothing candidates for all the important offices on the statewide ticket.
It was a hard-fought canvass, and the indefatigable Chase left nothing to chance. Traveling by railroad, horseback, hand car, canoe, and open wagon, he spoke at fifty-seven different places in forty-nine counties. Campaigning in the sparsely settled sections of Ohio proved to be an adventure. To reach the town of Delphos, he wrote Kate, he was driven along the railroad tracks “on a hand car” operated by two men who “placed themselves at the cranks.” Though the stars provided light, “it was rather dangerous for who could tell but we might meet a train or perhaps another hand car.”
Chase’s strenuous work paid off, making him the first Republican governor of a major state. “The anxiety of the last few days is over,” Sumner wrote from Boston. “At last I breathe freely!” Reading the news under the telegraphic band at breakfast, the Massachusetts senator could barely contain his excitement, predicting that his friend’s victory would do more than anything else for the antislavery cause.
In New York, Seward faced a more difficult challenge than Chase in trying to placate the Know Nothings, who had never forgiven his proposal to extend state funds to Catholic schools. Indeed, they were determined to defeat Seward for reelection to the Senate in 1855. Facing the enmity of both the Know Nothings and the proslavery “cotton Whigs,” he concluded that he could not risk moving to a new, untested party.
Seward’s only hope for reelection lay in Weed’s ability to cobble together an antislavery majority from among the various discordant elements in the state legislature. In the weeks before the legislature was set to convene, Weed entertained the members in alphabetical groups, angling for every possible vote, including a few Know Nothings who might put their antislavery principles above their anti-Catholic sentiments. At one of these lavish dinners, the story is told, three or four Know Nothings on a special tour of Weed’s house confronted a portrait of Weed’s good friend New York’s bishop John Hughes. The stratagem would be doomed if the identity of the man in the portrait was known, so they were told that it was George Washington in his Continental robes, presented to Weed’s father by Washington himself!
Working without rest, Weed somehow stitched together enough votes to reelect Seward to a second term in the Senate. “I snatch a minute from the pressure of solicitations of lobby men, and congratulations of newly-made friends, to express, not so much my deep, and deepened gratitude to you,” Seward wrote Weed, “as my amazement at the magnitude and complexity of the dangers through which you have conducted our shattered bark.” In Auburn, a great celebration followed the news of Seward’s reelection. “I have never known such a season of rejoicing,” Frances happily reported to her son Augustus. “They are firing 700 cannons here—a salute of 300 was given in Albany as soon as the vote was made known.”
Once Seward was securely positioned for six additional years in the Senate, he and Weed were liberated to join the Republican Party. Two state conventions, one Whig, one Republican, were convened in Syracuse in late September 1855. When Seward was asked by a friend which to attend, he replied that it didn’t matter. Delegates would enter through two doors, but exit through one. The Whig delegates assembled first and adopted a strong antislavery platform. Then, led by Weed, they marched into the adjoining hall, where the Republicans greeted them with thunderous applause. From the remnants of dissolving parties, a new Republican Party had been born in the state of New York.
“I am so happy that you and I are at last on the same platform and in the same political pew,” Sumner told Seward. That October, Seward announced his allegiance to the Republican Party in a rousing speech that traced the history of the growth of the slave power, illustrating the constant march to acquire new slave states and thereby ensure for slaveholders the balance of power in the Congress. “What, then, is wanted?” he asked. “Nothing but organization.” The task before the new Republican Party was to consolidate its strength until it gained control of the Congress and secured the power to forbid the extension of slavery in the territories.
I
N EARLY
1856, Lincoln decided that Illinois should follow New York and Ohio in organizing the various anti-Nebraska elements into the new Republican Party. Through his efforts, the call went out for an anti-Nebraska state convention to be held on May 29, 1856. Lincoln proceeded carefully in the weeks leading to the convention, recognizing the complexities of reconciling the disparate opponents of the Nebraska bill into a unified party. Despite the success of Weed and Chase in their respective states, Lincoln worried that the convention call would attract only the more radical elements of the coalition, providing too narrow a base for a viable new party.
Dramatic events in Kansas helped rally support for Lincoln’s cause. A guerrilla war had broken out between Northern emigrants desiring to make Kansas a free state under the “popular sovereignty” provision of the Nebraska Act, and so-called “border ruffians,” who crossed the river from Missouri and cast illicit votes to make Kansas a slave state. During the debate over the Nebraska Act, Seward had told the slave states that the North would “engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” In the South, the
Charleston Mercury
responded: “When the North presents a sectional issue, and tenders battle upon it, she must meet it, or abide all the consequences of a victory easily won, by a remorseless and eager foe.” As the violence spiraled, “Bleeding Kansas” became a new rallying cry for the antislavery forces. Kansas was not merely a contest between settlers but a war between North and South.
Moderate antislavery sentiment was further aroused when shocking news from Washington reached Illinois the week before the convention. On the Senate floor, South Carolina’s Preston Brooks had savagely bludgeoned Charles Sumner in return for Sumner’s incendiary antislavery speech. Sumner had begun unremarkably enough, presenting familiar arguments, laced with literary and historical references, against admitting Kansas as a slave state. The mood of the Senate chamber instantly shifted, however, when Sumner launched into a vituperative attack directed particularly against two of his fellow senators, Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He likened Butler to the aging, feeble Don Quixote, who imagined himself “a chivalrous knight,” sentimentally devoted to his beloved “harlot, Slavery…who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him.” Riding forth by Butler’s side, Douglas was “the squire of Slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.”
In the days before delivering the speech, Sumner had read a draft to Frances Seward. She strongly advised him to remove the personal attacks, including a reference to Butler’s slight paralysis that slurred his speech. In this instance Sumner did not heed her advice; when he finished speaking, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan characterized the speech as “the most un-American and unpatriotic that ever grated on the ears of the members of this high body—as I hope never to hear again here or elsewhere.”
Two days later, Butler’s young cousin Congressman Preston Brooks entered the Senate chamber armed with a heavy cane. Walking up to Sumner, who was writing at his desk, Brooks reportedly said, “You have libelled South Carolina and my relative, and I have come to punish you.” Before Sumner could speak, Brooks brought the cane down upon his head, cudgeling him repeatedly as Sumner futilely tried to rise from his desk. Covered with blood, Sumner fell unconscious and was carried from the floor.
News of the brutal assault, which left Sumner with severe injuries to his brain and spinal cord and kept him out of the Senate for three years, galvanized antislavery sentiment in the North. “Knots of men” on street corners pronounced it “a gross outrage on an American Senator and on freedom of speech,” reported the
Boston Daily Evening Transcript.
Even the moderate supporters of the Nebraska bill “expressed themselves as never so much aroused before by the slave power.” Mass public meetings, so crowded that thousands were unable to gain entrance, convened in cities and towns to protest the caning. Truly to
“see
the slave aggression,” one of Sumner’s supporters wrote, the North had first to see “one of its best men Butchered in Congress.” Other antislavery men had been assaulted, the
New York Tribune
observed, “but the knocking-down and beating to bloody blindness and unconsciousness of an American Senator while writing at his desk in the Senate Chamber is a novel illustration of the ferocious Southern spirit.” The beating reached into the people’s hearts and minds, which political events rarely touch, the historian William Gienapp has argued. It “proved a powerful stimulus in driving moderates and conservatives into the Republican party.”
If Sumner became a hero in the North, Brooks was equally lionized in the South, where the press almost universally applauded the assault. The
Richmond Enquirer
spoke for many when it pronounced the act “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence.” Celebratory gatherings were held everywhere, and in Columbia, South Carolina, the governor presented Brooks with a silver goblet and walking stick in honor of his good work.
More ominous still was the reaction of the distinguished
Richmond Whig,
a professed opponent of extremism on sectional issues.
“We are rejoiced at this,”
the
Whig
proclaimed. “The only regret we feel is, that Mr. Brooks did not employ a horsewhip or a cowhide upon his slanderous back, instead of a cane.
We trust the ball may be kept in motion. Seward and others should catch it next.”
The
Petersburg [Virginia] Intelligencer
sounded a similar theme. “If thrashing is the only remedy by which the foul conduct of the Abolitionists can be controlled…
it will be very well to give Seward a double dose at least every other day
until it operates freely on his political bowels…his adroit demagoguism and damnable doctrines are infinitely more dangerous to the country than the coarse blackguardism of the perjured wretch, Sumner.” The antipodal reactions of North and South, David Donald notes, made it “apparent that something dangerous was happening to the American Union when the two sections no longer spoke the same language, but employed rival sets of clichés to describe the Brooks-Sumner affair.”
With emotions running high in Illinois, “all shades of antislavery opinion” flocked to the Bloomington convention—“old-line Whigs, bolting Democrats, Free-Soilers, Know Nothings, and abolitionists.” Lincoln’s fears were put to rest. Every faction seemed willing to concede something to create a party that all could stand behind.
The adopted platform united disparate factions on the issue of slavery extension without giving in to the bigoted views of the Know Nothings. Lincoln then delivered a powerful speech, full of “fire and energy and force,” that further fortified the jarring factions into a united front. “That is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois,” state auditor Jesse Dubois said, “and puts Lincoln on the track for the presidency.” So enthralled were those in the audience that reporters cast aside their pens so as to concentrate on what Lincoln said, and the unrecorded speech has become known to history as the famous “Lost Speech.” Lincoln was now the acknowledged leader of the new Republican Party in Illinois.
B
Y THE LATE SPRING
of 1856, branches of the Republican Party had already been organized in at least twenty-two states and the District of Columbia, a remarkable beginning for a new party, giving hope to the leaders that this time, with the Whig Party all but dissolved and the Democratic Party split in two, they stood a solid chance in the presidential election. On June 17, when energized Republicans assembled in Philadelphia for their first national convention, both Seward and Chase had their hearts set on the nomination.