This Great Struggle (5 page)

To line up the southern votes he needed in order to get his bill through Congress, Douglas had to include language repealing the Missouri Compromise and opening the new territories to slavery under popular sovereignty. His Kansas-Nebraska Act set up a large Nebraska Territory on the northern plains and a smaller Kansas Territory, directly west of slaveholding Missouri. The status of slavery in these territories was now to be determined by popular sovereignty, the vote of their inhabitants at some unspecified time in the future. The separation of the smaller Kansas Territory directly west of Missouri was clearly meant to invite proslavery settlers to claim the territory as a future slave state.

Douglas grimly predicted that the bill would create a political storm in the North but introduced it anyway. He was right about the storm. Indeed, he had no idea. The outrage in the North gave birth to the Republican Party. The country was ripe for a new party. The Whig Party, always a loose coalition of interest groups, had finally all but disintegrated in the first few years of the decade, largely as a result of the tensions placed on political unity by southern Whigs claiming to be the staunchest defenders of slavery while northern Whigs presented themselves to voters as the principled opponents of the South’s “Peculiar Institution.” With the Whig Party’s demise, almost half the American electorate was in search of a new political home.

The new Republican Party also incorporated diverse political elements. That portion of northern Whig voters who did indeed oppose slavery flocked to the new party, as did free-soil, or “Anti-Nebraska,” Democrats, as well as members of the old Free Soil Party. They were a disparate lot. Some favored high tariffs, others low. Some backed a national bank, others hard money. Some were abolitionists who believed in racial equality, others were racists who wanted to limit the spread of slavery only so that the territories would be exclusively a white man’s country. Yet there was an adhesive that bound the seemingly conflicting elements of the party: they all came together on a platform that called for no further spread of slavery. They could not prevent the passage of Douglas’s bill, but they now provided a major free-soil party that was strong enough to carry the North in elections and might, in a few years, be able to put together enough northern electoral votes to choose a president.

BLEEDING KANSAS AND THE LINCOLN–DOUGLAS DEBATES

Implementation of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act proved even more problematic than its passage. Proslavery Missourians determined to see Kansas become another slave state by fair means or foul. Thousands of them, heavily armed and threatening, flocked across the Kansas line on the territory’s first election day, casting fraudulent ballots and intimidating antislavery and free-soil voters with threats of beatings, whippings, or worse. So effective were these Missouri “Border Ruffians” that the proslavery side won in a landslide that numbered several times more votes than there were eligible voters in the territory. The Pierce administration nevertheless certified the obviously fraudulent results and officially recognized the new proslavery government of Kansas, with its capital at Lecompton. Free-state settlers, along with the large majority of new Kansans who cared nothing for slavery one way or the other but disliked election fraud, held an unauthorized revote and elected a rival, antislavery government with a large majority of the territory’s legal voters. Pierce denounced the free-state government as illegitimate and threatened its adherents with dire punishment. It appeared as though slavery would triumph in Kansas.

In May 1856 proslavery militia destroyed the free-state Kansas capital at Lawrence. Several days later, a small band of antislavery militia, led by hardcore abolitionist John Brown, retaliated with a stealthy nocturnal raid on the proslavery settlement of Pottawatomie Creek, where they killed several men in cold blood who had previously been threatening death to free-staters (i.e., settlers like Brown and his large family who favored turning the Kansas Territory into a free state). The details of the killings were disputed, but Americans were shocked by the news. Slavery advocates had previously murdered several abolitionists, both in Kansas and elsewhere in the country, but they were outraged that an abolitionist had finally reciprocated.

Almost simultaneously in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas,” tacitly likening the attempt to make Kansas a slave state to the crime of rape. Sumner named names, especially that of aged, proslavery South Carolina Senator Pierce Butler, who was absent that day because of illness. Two days later Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brookes of South Carolina, entered the Senate chamber and attacked Sumner with a loaded cane, leaving the Massachusetts senator lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Sumner barely survived and was unable to return to his Senate seat for several years, during which time his constituents reelected him, leaving his empty chair in the Senate as a silent witness against the brutality of the slave power.

Meanwhile the election campaign of 1856 was in full swing. The Democrats passed over their most prominent figure, Douglas, because of his notoriety in both sections of the country on the issue of slavery. Instead, they chose aged political cipher James Buchanan, a man whose nickname, “Old Public Functionary,” neatly summarized his career. His chief qualification for office, aside from the fact that having been out of the country the past four years as an ambassador in Europe he had had little chance to make controversial statements on slavery, was that he was, like Pierce, another “northern man of southern principles.” The Republicans chose Mexican War veteran John C. Freémont, political heir of the powerful Missouri Benton family. His qualifications to govern, in terms either of experience or of temperament, were highly questionable, but he was famous and had announced a free-soil position.

Some southern political leaders threatened to have their states secede from the Union on the election of Freémont or any “black Republican,” as they contemptuously called all members of the party. Their threats were not put to the test that year, as Buchanan edged out Freémont, but Republicans noted with hope and their opponents with apprehension that if Freémont could have carried Pennsylvania—a probable Republican state had not its native son been the Democratic candidate—and either Illinois or Indiana— both thoroughly winnable states for the Republicans—Freémont would have won the election after all. The outcome might be different in another four years.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, violence escalated between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, with the Missouri Border Ruffians mixing in. Skirmishes took place between rival militias as the press began to refer to the territory as “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown won recognition among antislavery circles for leading his free-state militia in several of the skirmishes. Slave-state guerrillas killed one of Brown’s sons. A number of additional deaths occurred before the federal government finally restored a reasonable degree of order in the territory.

James Buchanan came into office in March 1857 devoutly wishing that all abolitionists would go away and stop making trouble. He saw what he thought was a chance to make that happen in a case then before the Supreme Court. Slave Dred Scott had sued for his freedom on the basis that his owner, an army doctor, had brought him to the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Rabidly proslavery chief justice Roger B. Taney had lined up a majority of justices to support a narrow decision dismissing Scott’s case on the grounds that, as a black man, he was not a citizen and therefore had no standing to sue. Buchanan secretly convinced Taney to broaden his decision into the nation’s first great piece of judicial legislation, a sweeping decree meant to establish once and for all the legality of slavery throughout the territories. Taney obliged, striking down as unconstitutional all restrictions on slavery, including the venerable Missouri Compromise. No one, Taney announced, had the right to prevent slaveholders from taking their slaves into any of the territories of the United States. Contrary to Buchanan’s hopes, however, the court’s decree did not end all debate of the issue of slavery.

The unabated virulence of the issue of slavery became immediately obvious when Buchanan tried to secure admittance of Kansas as a slave state on the basis of a constitution drawn up by the blatantly fraudulent proslavery territorial government headquartered in Lecompton. Douglas, though he cared nothing about slavery, denounced this action as a travesty on popular sovereignty and majority rule. A bitter division sprang up within the Democratic Party between the followers of Douglas and those of Buchanan.

Increasingly it seemed that almost no action in national politics could escape the slavery controversy. The House of Representatives went through a long deadlock unable to elect a speaker as the result of a book written by an obscure North Carolinian. Hinton Rowan Helper was no friend of African Americans, but he was a foe of slavery because he saw how it degraded non-slaveholding southern whites. In his 1857 book
The Impending Crisis at the South
, Helper attacked the system of slavery and exhorted his fellow non-slaveholding southern whites to vote it out of existence. Slaveholding southerners were furious—and seriously frightened. Nonslaveholders were the majority in the South, and if they ever gave up their commitment to maintaining slavery as the best way of maintaining white supremacy, the institution would be in serious trouble. Slaveholders’ rage multiplied when they learned that the Republican Party, eager to win a hearing among the common folk of the South, had printed and distributed a condensed version of Helper’s book and that a number of Republican politicians had signed a statement endorsing it. Among them was Ohio Republican John Sherman, the party’s candidate for Speaker of the House. Proslavery House members kept that body in turmoil for months and finally succeeded in blocking Sherman’s election. The House chose a compromise candidate instead.

In 1858, as for the past half dozen years since the deaths of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, Stephen A. Douglas was the most prominent political figure in the United States. In political terms, “the Little Giant” towered over even the president of the United States, with whom he was now in the bitterest of political feuds because of his opposition to Buchanan’s cherished Lecompton constitution in Kansas. Douglas was up for reelection to the U.S. Senate that year, and Republican newspapers on the East Coast, notably Horace Greeley’s influential
New York Tribune
, began to call for the Illinois Republicans to give Douglas their nomination. Prairie State Republicans were appalled and none more so than Abraham Lincoln. A successful Springfield lawyer, Lincoln had come out of political retirement in 1854. No longer simply a Whig Party hack intent on bringing home the bacon for his district, Lincoln, though still ambitious, now had a cause to which to devote his political efforts, and that cause was fighting slavery. In eloquent speeches he made clear that Douglas’s policy of not caring whether the people voted slavery up or voted it down was not good enough for the Republican Party and not good enough for the United States.

Lincoln won the Illinois Republican nomination for the Senate. His acceptance speech, given in Springfield on June 16, 1858, set the tone for the campaign. “‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’” Lincoln said, quoting the twelfth chapter of the Gospel According to Matthew:

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall— but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.
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Lincoln’s contest with Douglas was a David-and-Goliath battle that pitted the five-foot-four-inch Little Giant against the gangly six-foot-four-inch but politically relatively unknown Lincoln. Reluctantly Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates, to be held in venues throughout the state. The debates brought out more clearly than ever the issues that divided the country. Douglas race-baited Lincoln relentlessly, accusing him, in the coarsest of terms, of a belief in racial equality that would have been very unpopular in much of that state. He put Lincoln so badly on the defensive in one down-state venue that the lanky Republican actually did deny a belief in the social equality of the races but came back to assert that an African American had as much right to freedom as any man present, including himself or Douglas. Lincoln took the offensive reminding voters again and again that Douglas’s belief in democracy was not a sufficient moral absolute and that the same moral law that gave any men the right to govern themselves also gave black men and women the right to own themselves.

Despite a strong performance in the debates, Lincoln lost the election, largely because the state of Illinois had not been redistricted lately, leading to the underrepresentation of Republicans in the legislature. In those days before the Seventeenth Amendment, state legislatures still elected U.S. senators, thus guarding the sovereignty of the states. Since Republicans were underrepresented in the Illinois legislature, they were unable to elect Lincoln despite the slightly higher number of Republican ballots that Illinois voters had cast. Still, the lanky Springfield Republican had made a name and a national reputation for himself.

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AND THE WAR CAME

JOHN BROWN’S HARPERS FERRY RAID AND THE ELECTION OF 1860

T
hroughout the decade of the 1850s, the momentum seemed to shift constantly back and forth between politics and practical action, between the men in frock coats and other men who would not hesitate at all to dirty their hands in any number of ways. John Brown was one such man. He had perpetrated the Pottawatomie killings in Kansas back in 1856. He had also led antislavery militia in battle there against their proslavery opponents. After Kansas had grown quiet, Brown had led armed raids into Missouri, liberating a handful of slaves and appropriating their owners’ horses as well as punishment for the crime of slaveholding and further support for the cause of freedom. Thereafter he had taken his family to live in a racially mixed upstate New York community, an extreme rarity at that time, specifically for the purpose of showing his solidarity with African Americans.