Authors: Doris Kearns Goodwin
In Republican circles, Chase’s gubernatorial election had earned him such tremendous prestige that he was convinced he was destined for the presidency. Writing to a friend just ten days after his Ohio victory, Chase suggested that his success in uniting liberal nativists with antislavery German-Americans demonstrated the key to Republican victory in the future. Where Republicans challenged the Know Nothing Party, as they did in Massachusetts, they found defeat. Chase seemed to feel that he was now entitled to the Republican presidential nomination in 1856.
Chase had journeyed to Francis Blair’s country home in Maryland the previous December for the legendary Christmas conclave called to organize the Republican Party on a national basis. Francis Blair, the patriarch of the Blair family, wielded great power in party politics because of his old ties to the Democratic Party and his newfound antislavery views. Chase arrived to find Sumner in attendance, along with his old friend Gamaliel Bailey, the abolitionist editor of
The National Era;
New York congressman Preston King; and Massachusetts politician Nathaniel Banks. Seward had been invited, but, uncertain of how he would proceed on a national scale, he had sent Blair a note “approving of his activity, but declining his invitation.” After an elegant dinner, served, ironically, by Blair’s household slaves, the group sat down to discuss the future of the Republican Party.
At Chase’s suggestion, the gathering agreed to hold an organizational meeting the following month in Pittsburgh. Inevitably, the conversation turned to potential candidates for the upcoming presidential election. Blair’s suggestion of John Charles Frémont, the celebrated explorer who had played a central role in the conquest of California during the Mexican War, met with general approval. The discussion undoubtedly disappointed Chase, who believed up to the moment of Frémont’s nomination at the Philadelphia convention on June 19 that “if the unvarnished wishes of the people” prevailed, he would be chosen.
Chase’s certainty was insufficient to mobilize the wrangling elements at the convention in support of his candidacy. Not only had he neglected to appoint a manager, but he failed to unite his own state behind him on the first ballot. The questionable deals he had made to secure his Senate seat eight years earlier had created permanent enemies within his home state. “I know that if Ohio had united on you instead of dividing her votes between [ John] McLean & Fremont & you,” Chase’s friend Hiram Barney wrote, “your nomination would have been a matter of necessity; or if a tithe of the pains which were taken to urge Fremont had been employed for your nomination, it would have been accomplished.”
Before the convention met, Seward had greater reason for hope than Chase, for clearly, he was the first choice of Republican voters and politicians. Weed kept him from running, however, insisting that the party was not yet sufficiently organized to win a national election. Better to wait four years than to be tarred with failure.
While the Republican Convention was in progress, Lincoln was staying at the American House in Urbana, Illinois, attending court. He was in high spirits, recalled Henry Whitney, having engaged in one of the practical jokes of which he was so fond. He had hidden the loud and annoying gong that summoned his fellow boarders to dinner. When the loss was discovered, Whitney entered the dining room and saw Lincoln sitting “awkwardly in a chair tilted up after his fashion, looking amused, silly and guilty.” When Judge Davis told him he must put it back, Lincoln took the gong from its hiding place and returned it, “after which he bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time.”
Within a day or two, the merry prankster received word that in the balloting for vice president, he had received 110 votes, second only to the eventual nominee, William Dayton of New Jersey. “Davis and I were greatly excited,” Whitney recalled. Lincoln did not take it seriously at first, remarking only that “there’s another great man in Massachusetts named Lincoln, and I reckon it’s him.” His casual response aside, it is probable that this unexpected event stimulated Lincoln’s aspiration for higher office.
Unlike Seward, Chase, and Lincoln in 1856, Edward Bates refused to desert the divided and much-diminished Whig Party. While he joined with Republicans in vigorous opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the sacred Missouri Compromise, he feared that the Republican focus on slavery would lead to an irreparable divide between North and South. After some indecision, he agreed to preside over the shrunken Whig National Convention of July 1856. The Whigs gathered in Baltimore and ultimately decided to support Millard Fillmore for president. Fillmore ran as a member of the American Party (a more palatable title for the old Know Nothing Party) on a platform that denounced both Republicans and Democrats for agitating the slavery issue at the risk of the nation’s peace.
Though not a fanatical nativist, Bates considered the American Party, with its emphasis on issues other than slavery and a support base drawn from all sections of the country, the best hope for preserving the Union. “I am neither North nor South,” he said in a final plea before the convention, “I repudiate political geography…. I am a man believing in making laws and then whether the law is exactly to my liking or not, enforcing it—whether it be to catch a runaway slave and bring him back to his master or to quell a riot in a disordered territory.”
The general election resulted in a three-way race between the Republican Frémont, the Southern-leaning Democrat James Buchanan, and American Party candidate Millard Fillmore. When the votes were counted, Weed’s advice to Seward proved correct. Though the Republican Party showed considerable strength throughout the North in its first national effort, winning eleven states, the South threw its strength behind Democrat James Buchanan, who emerged the victor. In addition to his overwhelming strength in the South, Buchanan captured four Northern states—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—the states destined to be the battleground in the 1860 election. Fillmore and the American Party captured only tiny Maryland.
A
S THE DAY
of Buchanan’s inauguration approached, the Supreme Court was drafting a decision in the case of
Dred Scott v. Sandford,
which had originated in Missouri eleven years earlier. Scott, a slave, was suing for his freedom on the grounds that his master, an army doctor, had removed him for several years to military bases in both the free state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory before returning to the slave state of Missouri. The case wound its way through state and federal courts until it finally reached the Supreme Court for argument in 1856, with Francis Blair’s son, Montgomery, representing Dred Scott and the celebrated Reverdy Johnson from the slave state of Maryland representing Scott’s owners. The court was headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, “an uncompromising supporter of the South and slavery and an implacable foe of racial equality, the Republican Party, and the antislavery movement.”
Seward was among the thousands of spectators gathered at the Capitol on March 4, 1857, to witness James Buchanan’s inauguration. “Bright skies and a deliciously bland atmosphere” relieved the blustery weather of the previous two days. In his inaugural address, Buchanan conceded that a “difference of opinion” had arisen over the question of extending slavery into the territories. However, this vital question, which had figured in the formation of the Republican Party, was not a political issue, he claimed, but “a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A decision in the
Dred Scott
case bearing on this very issue was pending before that august body. To that decision, Buchanan pledged: “I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.” All evidence suggests that Buchanan was already aware of the substance of the decision.
Two days later, on March 6, the historic decision was read by the seventy-nine-year-old Taney in the old Supreme Court chamber, one flight below the Senate. The 7–2 decision was breathtaking in its scope and consequences. The Court ruled that blacks “are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution.” Therefore, Scott had no standing in federal court. This should have decided the case, but Taney went further. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had been intended to apply to blacks, he said. Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” But the Chief Justice did not stop even there; he went on to say that Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade slavery in the territories by such legislation as the Missouri Compromise, for slaves were private property protected by the Constitution. In other words, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. The act itself, of course, had already been repealed by the Nebraska Act, meaning that the Court was pronouncing on an issue that was not before it.
One of the justices later asserted that Taney had “become convinced that it was practicable for the Court to quiet all agitation on the question of slavery in the territories by affirming that Congress had no constitutional power to prohibit its introduction.” But the fierce sectional conflict of the age, the question that had given birth to the Republican Party, could not be quieted by a divided judicial fiat. The
Dred Scott
case, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter later said, was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted wounds.”
Initially, the decision appeared to be a stunning victory for the South. For more than a decade, the
Richmond Enquirer
proclaimed, antislavery forces had claimed for the federal government the right of prescribing the boundaries of slavery in the territories. Now the territorial prize for which the two sides had “often wrestled in the halls of Congress, has been awarded at last, by the proper umpire, to those who have justly won it.” The decision of the Supreme Court, “the accredited interpreter of the Constitution and arbiter of disagreements between the several States,” the
Enquirer
continued, has destroyed
“the foundation
of the theory upon which their warfare has been waged against the institutions of the South.” Antislavery men were staggered, the
Enquirer
claimed, left “nonplused and bewildered, confounded and confused.”
“Sheer blasphemy,” Republicans responded. The ruling was “entitled to just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington bar-room.” The
New York Tribune
argued that the Supreme Court had forfeited its stature as “an impartial judicial body,” and predicted that its attempt to derail the Republican Party, which had come so close to victory in the previous presidential election, would fail. “Judge Taney can do many things,” Frederick Douglass observed, “but he cannot…change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.” Frances Seward hoped that the blatantly unethical decision would galvanize the national will of the North. It “has aroused many to the encroachments of the slave power,” she happily reported to Sumner.
The furor broke yet another bond of union by involving the Supreme Court, the common guarantor of both North and South, in sectional conflict. Dred Scott was sold to a Mr. Taylor Blow, who promptly freed him. He would die within a year, a free man whose name would leave a deeper mark on American history than those of the justices who had consigned him to slavery.
Speaking in Springfield, Lincoln attacked the decision in characteristic fashion, not by castigating the Court but by meticulously exposing flaws of logic. The Chief Justice, Lincoln said, “insists at great length that negroes were no part of the people who made, or for whom was made, the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution.” Yet in at least five states, black voters acted on the ratification of the Constitution and were among the “We the People” by whom the Constitution was ordained and established. The founders, he acknowledged, did not “declare all men equal
in all respects.
They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity.” But they did declare all men “equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’…They meant simply to declare the
right,
so the
enforcement
of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit.”
S
EWARD, TOO,
would condemn the
Dred Scott
decision in a sensational oration on the Senate floor, accusing the administration of having engaged in a corrupt conspiracy with the Supreme Court. “The day of inauguration came,” Seward said. The innocent crowd gathered for the ceremony were “unaware of the import of the whisperings carried on between the President and the Chief Justice.” While the Chief Justice looked on and the members of the Senate watched in silence, Seward continued, President Buchanan proclaimed his complete support for the forthcoming, and supposedly yet unknown, Supreme Court ruling on the status of blacks under the Constitution. When “the pageant ended,” Seward cried scornfully, “the judges, without even exchanging their silken robes for courtiers’ gowns, paid their salutations to the President, in the Executive palace. Doubtlessly the President received them as graciously as Charles I did the judges who had, at his instance, subverted the statues of English liberty.”
While Seward’s charges were echoed and acclaimed throughout the North, they provoked a violent reaction in the South and within the administration. President Buchanan was so enraged by the conspiracy charge that he forbade Seward access to the White House. Chief Justice Taney was even more infuriated, declaring later that if Seward had become president in 1861, he would “have refused to administer to him the official oath, and thereby proclaim to the nation that he would not administer that oath to such a man.”