Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  True to the omen of the eclipse, it was at this point that the entire doctrine of popular sovereignty began to come unraveled.

  When Stephen Douglas spoke of popular sovereignty, it was clear that he imagined a peaceful territory filling up gradually with contented white settlers (and evicting, if necessary, any contented Indian inhabitants); eventually there would be enough white settlers on hand to justify an application for statehood and the writing of a state constitution. “The true intent and meaning of this act [is] not to legislate slavery into any territory or state, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.” Beyond that, no one—especially not in Washington—had any business second-guessing the popular will. If a territory, declared Douglas, “wants a slave-State constitution she has a right to it… I do not care whether it is voted down or voted up.”44

  It seems never to have occurred to Douglas before Kansas-Nebraska that popular sovereignty might also mean that if a majority of anti-slavery settlers could camp in Kansas or Nebraska before any equal numbers of slaveholding settlers (or vice versa), that simple majority would determine the slave or free status of the territory and its future status as a state. Douglas also ignored the possibility that there might be other ways, not necessarily gradual and painless, of achieving majorities.

  This, of course, is precisely what happened in the new Kansas Territory. Antislavery New Englanders organized a New England Emigrant Aid Society in the summer of 1854 to send trains of armed anti-slavery Northerners to Kansas; in Missouri, bands of armed pro-slavery whites crossed over the border into Kansas to claim it for slavery. In the process, both sides learned yet another way of creating majorities, namely, by killing off one’s opponents, and so a fiery sparkle of violent clashes and raids between pro-slavery and anti-slavery emigrants danced along the creeks and rivers of the new territory. And by the time a territorial governor, Andrew Reeder, had been dispatched by Congress to supervise a preliminary territorial election, the Missourians had developed yet another variation on popular sovereignty—sending “border ruffians” over into Kansas on voting days to cast illegal ballots.45

  The situation only grew worse in the spring of 1855, when Governor Reeder called for elections to create a territorial legislature for Kansas. The “border ruffians” crossed over in droves to vote for pro-slavery candidates for the legislature, and when the balloting was over and some 5,400 votes for pro-slavery candidates had materialized from the 3,000 eligible white male voters of the Kansas Territory, it was clear that the election had been stolen. The beleaguered Governor Reeder was too intimidated by the “border ruffian” gangs to invalidate the election, and the new legislature, ignoring Reeder’s vetoes, enacted a territorial slave code so severe that even verbal disagreement with slavery was classified as a felony. President Pierce, still staked to popular sovereignty, refused to take any action.46

  The angered free-soil settlers at once feared for the worst from their new legislature, and so they armed and fortified the free-soil town of Lawrence. They also organized a rival anti-slavery legislature and wrote a free-state constitution. In May 1856 the reckless and arrogant pro-slavery legislature responded by equipping a small pro-slavery army that sacked and burned Lawrence. “Gentlemen,” boasted one of the pro-slavery leaders, “this is the happiest day of my life. I determined to make the fanatics bow before me in the dust… and I have done it—by God, I have done it.”47 Overall, two hundred people were killed in clashes between pro-slavery and antislavery factions in Kansas before President Pierce finally sent in John White Geary, a former army officer, as territorial governor. A more skilful arbitrator than Reeder, Geary was at last able to bring a measure of peace to what had become known to the rest of the country as “Bleeding Kansas.”48

  What happened in Kansas was disturbing evidence that Douglas’s fix-it of popular sovereignty was no help whatsoever in sorting out the complex problem of allowing the expansion of slavery into the territories. Far from bringing peace, popular sovereignty in Kansas had only brought Americans two of the most spectacular scenes of violence they had ever witnessed outside of outright war. One of them occurred in Kansas itself. A Connecticut-born abolitionist named John Brown, a man with the selfless benevolence of the evangelicals wrought into a fiery determination to crush slavery, became convinced from the reports he had heard that five anti-slavery men had died in the sack of Lawrence. Brown had moved to Kansas only in 1855, but already he had been elected captain of a free-state militia company. Seeking an eye for an eye after the sack of Lawrence, Brown, with four of his sons and two neighbors, went on a murderous rampage along Pottawatomie Creek on May 24, 1856. They dragged five pro-slavery farmers from their beds and from the arms of their wives and deliberately hacked them to death with old surplus artillery broadswords that Brown had thoughtfully bought up and brought from Ohio. “God is my judge,” Brown explained with an eerie self-assurance. “It was absolutely necessary as a measure of self-defence, and for the defence of others.”49

  The second event happened almost at the same time as Brown’s raid, but it took place on the floor of the United States Senate. On May 19, 1856, the anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, rose and delivered what turned out to be a two-day diatribe: “The Crime Against Kansas.” The principal burden of Sumner’s complaint was directed at the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, which he portrayed in the most livid terms as the anteroom to civil war. The attack on Lawrence amounted to “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous off-spring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government.” The ultimate meaning of the “rape” of Lawrence was the evidence it afforded that “the horrors of intestine feud” were being planned “not only in this distant Territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon, threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with, the mutterings of civil war.”50

  This was far from the first time the elegant but pompous Sumner had thrown rhetorical caution to the winds in attacking slavery. The Southern poet William Grayson lampooned Sumner in Augustan couplets as the “supple Sumner, with the Negro cause,” playing “the sly game for office and applause.”

  What though he blast the fortunes of the state

  With fierce dissension and enduring hate?

  He makes the speech, his rhetoric displays,

  Trims the neat trope, and points the sparkling phrase

  With well-turned period, fosters civil strife,

  And barters for a phrase a nation’s life.51

  But “The Crime Against Kansas” had been prepared by Sumner with unusually knife-edged care, and in the body of his speech, Sumner took time to unleash some particularly nasty personal insults at a number of Southern senators, including Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler, Sumner declared in some of the most virulently personal language used on the Senate floor, “has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight… the harlot, Slavery.” Butler was full of “incoherent phrases, discharged from the loose expectoration of his speech… He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder”—which was a particularly cruel play on the mild stroke that had affected Butler’s speech.

  Two days after Sumner finished his speech, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler’s, entered the almost empty Senate chamber and found Sumner alone at his desk, franking copies of the speech for free distribution by mail. “Mr. Sumner, I have heard your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible,” Brooks said, “and I feel it my duty to tell you that you have libeled my State and slandered a relative who i
s aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.” Brooks then raised a gold-headed gutta-percha cane he had carried for precisely this purpose and began beating Sumner over the head, giving him “about 30 first rate stripes.” Sumner, pinned into place by his desk, sank under the rain of blows until Brooks’s cane broke and Brooks could only hit him with the butt end of it.

  Sumner tore himself free and was rescued by New York congressman Edwin B. Morgan, but his injuries would keep him out of political life for three years. This act of wanton violence on the floor of Congress appalled the Northern states fully as much as Brown’s Raid appalled the South with its equally wanton barbarism. The House of Representatives opened an inquiry into the assault, but in the end Brooks paid only a $300 fine.52

  Both incidents were testimony to the fact that popular sovereignty, the great guarantee of the Compromise of 1850, would breed only violence, not peace. Assuming that the passage of six years had made neither the Wilmot Proviso nor Calhoun’s “common property” doctrine any more appealing than they had been in 1850 as a way of dealing with the extension of slavery in the territories, the last possible option in Congress might be a return to some form of the Missouri Compromise.

  Congress was not to have any further say in the matter.

  DRED SCOTT AND THE SLAVE POWER

  Kansas was a double misfortune for Stephen Douglas. The Little Giant believed with all his heart that popular sovereignty was the golden key that locked up the peaceful settlement of the territories, and he had made promises to both North and South about the settlement that Kansas had shown he could not keep. Now Northerners distrusted him as the man who had carelessly torn down the old safeguard of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slavery into Kansas, and Southerners mistrusted him because the uncertainty over Kansas’s future was preventing Kansas from entering the ranks of the slave states.

  Douglas’s reputation suffered less in the wake of Bleeding Kansas than did the reputations of the two national political parties. The Whigs had gone into the election of 1852 in poor shape to begin with. Both of their most recent presidents, Harrison and Taylor, had died in office, and in 1852 their two greatest standard-bearers, Clay and Webster, died as well. For some of the Southern Whigs, of course, those deaths could not have come sooner. Southern Whigs were especially bitter over Taylor, a slave owner and Southerner who had betrayed both slave owners and Southerners by advocating the free-state admission of California and New Mexico. So even though the Whigs still had a sitting president in 1852 in the person of Millard Fillmore, the Southern Whigs refused to allow Fillmore’s nomination and held the Whig presidential convention hostage over the course of fifty-two ballots until a Virginian, Winfield Scott, was nominated. But Scott balked at wholeheartedly endorsing the Compromise, and the Southern Whigs promptly deserted. Scott carried only two of the slave states (Kentucky and Tennessee) in the 1852 election; Whig representation in the House of Representatives slipped mutely down to less than a third.53

  The controversy over Kansas-Nebraska finished off what little fellow feeling remained between Northern and Southern Whigs, and most of the Northern Whigs wandered off to experiment with a series of short-lived anti-Nebraska “fusion” coalitions or bitter-end anti-immigrant hate groups such as the American Party (or “Know-Nothings,” a name they earned from their pledge to respond, when questioned about their political loyalties, “I know nothing”). Although some of the most prominent Whigs, such as William Henry Seward of New York, openly spurned the Know-Nothings and curried the political favor of the immigrant population, other Whigs found the Know-Nothing hatred for foreigners and immigrants a perfectly congenial match to their own brand of nationalism. “Every intelligent man knows full well that our country has suffered much from the too-great indulgence of foreigners, ignorant of our institutions & that their power for evil ought to be abridged,” grumbled the Ohio Whig senator “Bluff Ben” Wade.

  The Know-Nothings were poorly organized to function as a national political party, and their opinions were fatally divided over the slavery issue. Eventually both nativist Whigs and anti-slavery Know-Nothings would be compelled to find their way to a new free-soil party where Know-Nothing nativism could be tempered by the more moderate strains of Whig nationalism and both absorbed into the more volatile issue of slavery. It did not take long for such a new party to emerge. In May 1854 a group of thirty Northern ex-Whig and anti-Nebraska Democratic congressmen met in Washington to issue a call for a new party that would unite all the “fusion” and anti-Nebraska groups, and in July a state convention in Jackson, Michigan, nominated the first slate of candidates to run under the banner of the new Republican Party.54

  The core of the new party was the remnants of what had once been the mainstream Northern Whigs—Seward of New York, Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan. Like the old Whigs, the new Republicans saw themselves as the party of an enterprising white middle class whose prosperity depended on keeping the American economy dynamic and market-oriented. “The interests of the country and its wealth are wrapped up in property in a very great degree,” said William Pitt Fessenden, who quietly parted from the Whigs for the Republicans in 1856. It was simply a matter of the common good that “men should be incited in every way to accumulate,”

  because as much as they accumulate by their industry they add to the national wealth … and the prosperity of our country in a very great part is owing to the fact that our institutions leave the path of wealth, as of honor, open to all men, and encourage all men, whatever may be their situations in life, however they may start, to better their condition and to accumulate wealth, because the more they accumulate it the more the nation has of wealth.55

  They resented the overly mighty power of Southern planters and Southern Democrats in Washington, believing that Democratic opposition to banks, tariffs, and “internal improvements” was little more than a strategy to starve Northern industry. They also opposed Southern plans to expand slavery into the western territories because the plantation system would discourage small-scale entrepreneurs and commercial farmers from taking the risks of competition with slave agriculture. They also had one more fear: should the territories be closed off to free settlement, the “mechanics” who tended Northern factories would clog Northern cities and become a permanent—and dangerous—urban underclass who owned no property of their own and who had no real hope of access to it. So, in addition to the old project of Henry Clay’s “American System,” Republicans proposed to head off the problem of working-class poverty and the class conflict Leonidas Spratt had prophesied in 1855 by selling off public lands in the territories as homesteads at cheap prices, so that even the poorest urban worker could, after diligent working and saving, hope to find new life and new economic opportunity beyond the Mississippi. Governmental power would thus come to the rescue of liberty.56

  This, of course, is what frightened the Republicans about Kansas-Nebraska. Mobility, development, and economic self-transformation were entirely absent from the slave South, they argued; slaves had no real liberty to become anything other than a slave, and the great slave moguls used the bogeyman of race and the provision of cheap, nontaxed imports to buy off the potential resentments of nonslaveholding whites and keep them in a state of permanent dependence. Now Douglas and the Democrats seemed bent upon using popular sovereignty as a cheap trick to open the territories to slavery and turn off the safety valve of opportunity that would eliminate conflict in Northern industry. For the Republicans, slavery was no longer an economic system but a deadly conspiracy, a conscious “Slave Power” that had possessed the soul of the Democratic Party and was determined to seize the territories and turn them into nurseries for slavery.57

  The Republicans were not the first to accuse the South of hatching a “Slave Power” conspiracy. Salmon Chase claimed in 1854 that the entire Kansas-Nebraska bill was “part and parcel of an atrocious plot” to create in the territories “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by
masters and slaves.” No one made better use of the accusation than the Republicans, and in short order the Republicans attracted Chase and the most anti-slavery of the Northern Democrats to their banner. Whatever the ethnic and cultural baggage carried into the new party from the nativists among the old Whigs or from the various cranky “fusion” and Know-Nothing groups who lined up behind the Republicans, it was clearly dwarfed by the central position that economic opposition to slavery and the extension of slavery into the territories came to have for the Republicans.

  The great danger in this was that by the mid-1850s, an anti-slavery party was most likely to be an almost entirely Northern party, devoted to expressing Northern opinions and representing Northern interests. The Whigs had at least been a national party that labored to reduce sectional strife by inducing its Northern and Southern members to cooperate and compromise in the service of larger national goals. But the time for compromises between Northerners and Southerners was fast slipping away, and the Republicans had as their goal the abolition of an institution that Southerners regarded as non-negotiable. And with the death of the Whigs, one of the principal means for binding the sections of the fragile Union disappeared.