The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (26 page)

Douglas also agreed, at the last moment, to divide the land in two, to create two territories instead of one. That, in turn, further convinced Free-Soilers that at least one territory was earmarked for slavery. As a final concession, Douglas also assented to another word change. To say the Missouri Compromise was “inoperative” wouldn’t do. His Southern co-authors demanded that it be declared “void.”
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Map of Kansas-Nebraska Act

On January 23, this more drastic version of the bill went before the Senate. The following day all hell broke loose. Two Ohio Free-Soilers, Salmon P. Chase and Joshua Giddings, published an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” They lambasted the proposal as a conspiracy by the Slave Power to expand its influence and further dominate the free states. They also branded the bill as a “gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from the vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and to convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”
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Within days, hundreds of others joined Chase and Giddings in flaying Douglas and his much-amended creation. Anti-Nebraska meetings became everyday news from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Springfield, Illinois. Fiery speeches became commonplace. Abraham Lincoln was just the most memorable of the scores of men who took to the podium. Many castigated the Slave Power for not living up to a sacred agreement. Many blasted Douglas for forcing free laborers to compete with slave labor. Dozens burned Douglas in effigy. Thus the long, nasty battle began.

On January 30, Douglas took the floor in behalf of the Kansas-Nebraska bill. From his remarks, no one in the Senate gallery would have realized that he had lost control of the measure. He spoke as if he were in charge, as if the bill were entirely his own creation, as if he were its sole author. And for the next five weeks, he totally dominated the Senate.

Overall, Douglas had an easy time of it in the Senate. Despite the “Appeal” and the uproar across the North, he had more than enough senators on his side. The only Deep South senator he had to worry about was Sam Houston of Texas. The hero of the Texas Revolution had always been sympathetic to the rights of Indians. At least twice in his life, he had lived as a Cherokee. He also thought it was stupid to provoke free-soilers by reneging on a sacred promise. But every other Deep South senator would vote with Douglas. So, too, would doughface senators like William Gwin and John Weller. Thus, after Houston and others had their say, Douglas had votes to spare. The bill passed easily, 37 to 14.
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The House, however, was a different matter. As in the Senate, Douglas could count on all but one or two of the slave-state representatives. Only one, Atchison’s enemy, Thomas Hart Benton, was certain to put up a fight. More unexpected was the resistance of Representative John S. Millson of Virginia. A states’ rights Democrat of the “strictest sort,” Millson opposed squatter sovereignty because it violated common-property doctrine. The argument was simple. If the federal government was just an agent of the states, Congress could not delegate to a territory a power it did not possess. The only power it could delegate “was the power, indeed the obligation, to protect slaveowners in their property rights.” Fortunately for Douglas, none of Millson’s compatriots were so consistent. In their desire to get rid of the Missouri Compromise, they ignored common-property doctrine.
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The problem in the House lay in the numbers. There, free-state representatives outnumbered slave-state representatives by nearly two to one. Douglas thus had to get a substantial number of Northerners to vote with the South. He had just one advantage. Northern members of his own party had always been more sympathetic to the South than Northern Whigs, and he had more Northern Democrats to work with than any previous Democratic leader. His party had scored smashing victories in state after state in the 1852 elections, and as a result ninety-three Northern Democrats now sat in the House, nearly forty more than at the time of the California statehood bill. He needed them. He needed every edge he could get.

As it was, Douglas had to work months to whip Northern Democrats into line, to get the necessary majority to repeal the Missouri Compromise and open the northern half of the Louisiana Purchase to the possibility of slavery. Douglas argued that the possibility was remote—indeed, nonexistent—and that all he was doing was giving the South a fig leaf. He grossly underestimated the opposition and treated with contempt all those who disagreed with him. To his angry opponents the Missouri Compromise was not a trivial matter. It was a sacred compact. Initially, it had benefited the South. Now, just as it was about to benefit the free states, the South wanted to renege on the bargain. It was a breach of faith on the South’s part.

These sentiments, Douglas predicted, would dissipate in a few weeks. He was dead wrong. Even erstwhile supporters joined the revolt. Some feared that Kansas-Nebraska would upset the settlement of 1850, which allegedly had put the slavery question to rest. Others regarded it as a violation of a sacred covenant. Over the objections of Douglas’s friends, the Connecticut Democratic convention officially went on record against the bill and the Pennsylvania Democratic convention refused to endorse the bill. In Chicago, Douglas’s friends called a rally and found it jammed with the bill’s enemies. Resolutions in support of the bill and the Little Giant were hooted down. Even the Chicago
Democratic Press
turned on Douglas and accused him of committing an unpardonable political error.
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To prevail in the House, Douglas somehow had to get twenty-seven Northern Democrats to vote with the South. He was tireless. He spent nearly every waking moment trying to line up additional votes. Not all of these potential recruits, however, responded to his herculean efforts. The news from back home convinced many that Douglas’s bill was a political disaster and that the storm over Kansas-Nebraska would destroy all before it. The last thing they wanted to do was confront the onslaught. So on March 21, many of them threw their support behind a parliamentary maneuver that buried the bill beneath fifty other bills.
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Douglas thus needed help just to bring Kansas-Nebraska up for a vote in the House of Representatives. He got it from the Pierce administration and its control of federal patronage. The president pulled out all the stops, sending Cabinet members to work the halls of Congress, dangling jobs before hesitant Democrats, threatening to cut Free-Soilers off from the spoils, while the administration’s official newspaper promised men who supported the measure that they would be “sustained by every means within the power of the party.”
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The favors were generally small ones. William Marcy Tweed of New York obtained the right to replace a postmaster in his district. Several other New York congressmen received hefty shipbuilding contracts for their districts. An Ohio congressman got a courthouse appointment, a Philadelphia congressman a printing contract for his newspaper, a Milwaukee congressman a lucrative order to publish government mail contracts. But such favors added up. For Massachusetts Democrats, Pierce’s attorney general, Caleb Cushing, calculated the dollar value. If they decided to enhance their power in state politics by joining forces with the Free-Soilers, they would gain a mere “$75,000” in state jobs; if they sided with the administration and the South, they would gain “$1,000,000 per annum” in federal patronage.
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In the end the combination of presidential pressure, federal patronage, and Douglas’s hard work paid off. By early May, most of the bills that preceded Kansas-Nebraska on the House agenda were set aside, one by one. Then, on May 8, the last eighteen were laid aside, and William Richardson, who carried the torch for Douglas in the House, moved to substitute the Senate version of the bill, which had passed in early March, for the measure before the House.
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Three weeks of stormy debate then followed. Douglas worked alongside Richardson, whipping dissident Democrats into line. Indeed, in the eyes of many, the two men from Illinois behaved like dictatorial, insolent “slave-drivers.” Finally, on May 22, they had more than the twenty-seven Northern Democrats they needed. They had forty-four, roughly half the Northern wing of the party. Kansas-Nebraska thus passed the House, 113 to 100.
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Back in Illinois, Douglas and Richardson’s supporters greeted the victory with a 113-gun salute. Douglas was quick to take the credit. “I passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself,” he later boasted. “I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy in both houses. The speeches were nothing. It was the marshaling and directing of men, and guarding from attacks, and with a ceaseless vigilance preventing surprise.”
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The forty-four Northern Democrats who made Douglas’s victory possible never received the honors that he did. On the contrary, some of them paid dearly for supporting the Atchison-Phillips-Dixon creation.

So, too, did their party. In the fall elections following the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Democrats lost thirty of the forty-four districts that these men represented, sometimes by just a few percentage points, sometimes by landslide margins. One Indiana incumbent got just 45 percent of the vote, another 44 percent. In Wisconsin, John B. Macy saw his public support plummet from 55 percent of the total vote in 1852 to 39 percent in 1854. Of the party’s replacement candidates, most also lost by huge margins. Tweed’s replacement in New York’s Fifth District, running in a four-man race, finished third with 25 percent of the vote. In Ohio’s Ninth District, Frederick Green’s replacement in a two-man race won only 40 percent of the vote.

What happened in Green’s district was symptomatic. The district had long been a Democratic stronghold. The party had won 92 percent of the vote there in 1850 and 74 percent in 1852. Now, in trying to defend Green’s “treasonous” record, they got trounced. They lost over half their previous support. Across the North, Democrats experienced the same travail. They saw one safe seat after another go over to the opposition. Entering the 1854 election holding ninety-three Northern seats, they emerged with only twenty-two seats. The total losses were staggering.
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Douglas refused to accept the blame for this debacle. It was not Kansas-Nebraska, he argued, that led to his party’s demise. It was the rise of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant fervor. Nearly three million immigrants had poured into the United States since 1845, totaling about 13 percent of the nation’s population, and the vast majority had settled in the North. Well over one million of these newcomers were Catholic Irish. Not only were the Irish poor and desperate, but their church had long been anathema in Protestant circles. Hundreds of thousands of Northerners had learned at their mother’s knee about the “whore of Babylon,” the Spanish Inquisition, the Gunpowder Plot, and the “awful disclosures of Maria Monk.” For years Protestants had attacked convents and fought with Catholic workers on the streets of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. And for years most Northern Whigs had catered to Protestant animosity and helped drive Catholic newcomers into the Democratic Party.

In 1852 these new Democrats made a difference. They undoubtedly helped Franklin Pierce win the presidency and tipped the balance in scores of races for congressman, assemblyman, and alderman. And some of the Democrats they helped elect, like Mike Walsh of New York, were not only pro-slavery but blatantly so.

Whig strategists, moreover, were distraught. They knew that the Irish vote, growing by the thousands every day, had to be nullified or the Whig organization would be destroyed at the polls. Some Whigs wanted to compete against the Democrats for Irish support. Others wanted to make it harder for the Irish to vote, called for a residency requirement of twenty-one years for naturalization, and launched a drive to make the Whig Party into a nativist party.

Hence by the time of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, hundreds of thousands of Northern voters now indiscriminately blamed the “Irish menace” and “popery” on the Northern Democracy. Douglas thus had a point in blaming his party’s losses on nativism. But hundreds of thousands of Northern voters also indiscriminately blamed the Northern wing of his party, doughfaces and Free-Soilers alike, for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Not a single Northern Whig, not a single Northern Free-Soiler, had voted for the bill. Only Northern Democrats.

Who could miss that fact? Nearly every critic blamed Douglas and his followers. He could have traveled home to Chicago, as he himself admitted, by the light of his own burning effigies. Some of his critics spoke about the moral evils of slavery. More railed about the possible expansion of slavery and Southern power. Douglas, as usual, underestimated their resentment.

In this general tumult, ninety-three Democratic House seats were at risk in the fall of 1854. Democrats faced not just the old familiar Whigs and Free-Soilers. Also confronting them were newcomers and old foes who ran under new labels and sometimes two labels at the same time. The nativists usually called themselves Know-Nothings, while the opponents of the Kansas-Nebraska Act often called themselves Anti-Nebraska men or Republicans. Democrats lost some seats to men who ran as Know-Nothings, some to men who ran as Anti-Nebraska men, and many to men who had a foot in both camps. In addition, several seats were lost because the local Democratic Party split in two and ran two men for the same office.
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