Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction
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This pervasive anxiety not to provoke Southerners guaranteed that Buchanan’s skills as a diplomat would serve to hobble rather than help him. Anxious to obtain peace in Kansas, Buchanan allowed himself to be intimidated by the violence of Southern threats of disunion; once intimidated by the Southerners in his cabinet and in Congress, he grew spiteful and resentful when Northern Democrats—especially Stephen A. Douglas—balked at his proposals to concede virtually every demand made by the South.
Settling the bloody mess in Kansas was Buchanan’s first chore. He was assisted—or so he thought—in dictating a settlement by the Dred Scott decision, which apparently relieved Washington of any responsibility to see that Kansas would choose slavery or freedom. However, Kansas insisted on making trouble for him anyway. The old territorial governor under President Pierce, John W. Geary, had brought a measure of peace to Kansas by the end of 1856, but the rest of the territorial government was still split between two rival legislatures, each claiming to be the legal voice of the people of Kansas. One of these was the “official” legislature, a pro-slavery body elected by fraud in 1855 and sitting in the town of Lecompton; the other was a free-soil assembly, sitting in Topeka.
On February 19, 1857, just before Buchanan’s inauguration, the Lecompton legislature, anticipating that the new president would probably appoint a new territorial governor, decided to get the jump on the appointment process. The Lecomptonites authorized the election of a constitutional convention that would draw up a state constitution for Kansas, a constitution that would then be submitted to Congress for its approval and for the admission of Kansas to the Union. Geary vetoed the convention bill, rightly accusing the pro-slavery legislature of attempting to stampede a rush to statehood on pro-slavery terms. The Lecompton legislature overrode Geary’s veto, however, and as soon as James Buchanan was inaugurated as president, Buchanan fired him.
Buchanan replaced Geary with a Mississippian, Robert J. Walker, which delighted the pro-slavery elements in Kansas. But Walker was no pro-slavery fire-eater. A friend of Stephen A. Douglas, Walker was convinced that slavery had no practical future in Kansas and that the territory ought to be admitted as a free state. Walker’s appointment only fed the determination of the Lecompton legislature to nail together a pro-slavery state constitution as quickly as possible, and in November 1857 a constitutional convention approved a document that had something in it to offend nearly everyone. In addition to protecting the 200 slaves then in Kansas, the Lecompton Constitution placed restrictions on the chartering of banks, banned free blacks from the state, and prohibited any amendments to the constitution for seven years. As a sop to the idea of popular sovereignty, the new constitution allowed for the calling of a public referendum, but only on the question of whether new slaves could be brought into Kansas, which effectively guaranteed Kansas’s admission as a slave state no matter what. Even more amazing was President Buchanan’s response to the Lecompton constitution. Browbeaten by Southern congressional delegations and the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan decided to endorse the Lecompton constitution and recommended it favorably in his first annual presidential message (his State of the Union address, as it would be called now) to Congress on December 8, 1857.
“This message,” complained the unhappy Buchanan afterward, gave rise to exactly the opposite of what he had hoped: “a long, exciting, and occasionally violent debate in both Houses of Congress, between the anti-slavery members and their opponents, which lasted for three months,” in which “slavery was denounced in every form which could exasperate the Southern people, and render it odious to the people of the North; whilst on the other hand, many of the speeches of Southern members displayed characteristic violence.”45
In the light of the repeated electoral frauds in the Lecompton legislature and the refusal of the constitutional convention to submit the entire constitution for popular approval in Kansas, any congressional acceptance of the Lecompton Constitution was tantamount to repudiating the heart of popular sovereignty, as well as virtually admitting Kansas as a slave state. Stephen Douglas, righteous in his wrath against Buchanan, took his political life into his own hands and assailed the Lecompton Constitution on the floor of the Senate as a mockery of the popular sovereignty principle. When Buchanan threatened to bring down party discipline on him with all the wrath of an Andrew Jackson, Douglas belligerently replied, “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”46
Furthermore, free-soil Kansans boycotted the initial referendum on Lecompton on December 21, then joined in a second referendum on January 4 where they defeated it by a clear majority. But Buchanan had committed himself to the Lecompton constitution: he accepted the resignation of the disgusted Governor Walker in December and proceeded to pull every political string a president can conceivably pull, twisting approval of the Lecompton constitution out of the Senate on March 23, 1858 by a 33–25 vote, and then out of the House on April 1—but only after another full-scale donnybrook on the floor of the House that pitted two dozen congressmen against each other.
Unhappily for Buchanan, the House bill contained an amendment that the Senate version lacked, and the whole question was now thrown into a House-Senate conference committee for resolution. At the urging of William H. English of Indiana, one of the three House conferees, a compromise was devised that accepted Lecompton and the statehood of Kansas—provided that the Lecompton constitution was resubmitted to the people of Kansas for a federally supervised election. Douglas, however, mistrusted Lecompton no matter who supervised an election; and his enemies in Congress foolishly persuaded Buchanan that anything that Douglas opposed was the perfect thing for the president to support. The English attachment passed both House and Senate on April 30, 1858. Accordingly, the Lecompton constitution went back to the voters of Kansas for a third time, and to the hideous embarrassment of Buchanan, the voters of Kansas turned out on August 30 and rejected Lecompton by a vote of 11,812 to 1,926.47
Buchanan had lost one of the most vicious political struggles in the history of Congress, Southern Democrats had seriously damaged the patience of their Northern counterparts, and Buchanan loyalists in the North were unseated wholesale by upstart Republicans in the 1858 congressional elections. In the state elections a year later, Republicans seized control of the legislatures and governorships of the New England states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa. To add insult to injury, Douglas successfully won reelection to the Senate after a grueling campaign against the new rising Republican star of Illinois, Lincoln. In fact, almost the only Northern Democrats who survived Northern anger over Lecompton were anti-administration Douglasites.
Buchanan’s troubles had only begun, and they were now about to be worsened by one of the weirdest episodes in the history of American politics. Few people outside Kansas knew anything about John Brown, and those within Kansas knew him only as the anti-slavery fanatic who had taken his own private revenge on the pro-slavery cause in the murders at Pottawatomie in May 1856. Brown raged against slavery with all the ill-controlled violence of his being. If Brown was a fanatic, he was also something of a visionary: profoundly moved by the injustice of slavery, a champion of the political equality of blacks, willing to break any man-made law in the interest of obeying a higher law of justice and right. “He was always an enigma,” wrote one anti-slavery journalist who met Brown in 1856, “a strange compound of enthusiasm and cold, methodic stolidity,—a volcano beneath a mountain of snow.”48
Unfortunately for Brown, the temporary peace that Governor Geary brought to Kansas after the Pottawatomie massacre dried up most of the excitement Brown had derived from butchering hapless slaveholders. He took little interest in the debate over the Lecompton Constitution, and instead he began to cast around for more substantial opportunities to wreak havoc on what he perceived as the satanic minions of the slave aristocracy. In December 1858 he participated in another raid, this time on Fort Scott, which liberated a free-state prisoner and killed a shopkeeper. Brow
n then raided into Missouri, liberating eleven Missouri slaves whom he then transported to Canada. But Brown got no thanks among the free-staters in Kansas, since his raids only drew the wrath of pro-slavery thugs down on their heads. “I consider it my duty to draw the scene of excitement to some other part of the country,” Brown announced, and once he deposited his fugitives in Canada in March 1859, he gave no more thought to Kansas.49
Instead, Brown’s eye fell upon Virginia. Between January 1857 and June 1859, Brown began recruiting volunteers and money for a guerilla raid into the Old Dominion. Brown’s plan was to liberate as many slaves as he could find or who would flock to him, establish himself in a stronghold in the western Virginia mountains, and from there engulf all of the South in a massive slave insurrection. The initial object of the raid would be the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, on the upper Potomac River, where Brown would be able to seize the arms he would need to defend himself in the Virginia mountains. Listened to dispassionately, Brown’s scheme was bizarre to say the least, and Frederick Douglass, who had known Brown since 1847, tried to talk him out of it, down to almost the last minute. “My discretion or my cowardice made me proof against the dear old man’s eloquence,” Douglass said, reporting that he attempted to convince Brown in his last meeting with him that Harpers Ferry was “a perfect steel trap and that once in he would never get out alive.”50
Brown had made up his mind, however, and by mid-October he had managed to recruit and train twenty-two fighters, some of them free blacks, such as Dangerfield Newby, who hoped to liberate their families still in slavery. More significant, Brown had traded in on his reputation as a hero of anti-slavery militancy to approach prominent Eastern abolitionists such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, George Luther Stearns, Franklin B. Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and Samuel Gridley Howe, and easily hypnotized them with his fire-and-brimstone eloquence into giving him the money he needed to finance the attack on Harpers Ferry. “God has honored comparatively but a very small part of mankind with any possible chance for such mighty & soul-satisfying rewards,” he assured Franklin Sanborn. “I expect to effect a mighty conquest even though it be like the last victory of Sampson.”51
Early in the morning of October 17, 1859, Brown and his followers descended upon the Harpers Ferry arsenal, disposed of its two guards, captured the Baltimore & Ohio railroad bridge over the Potomac, and sent squads out to gather up slave recruits. Instead of an army of slave volunteers, two companies of Virginia militia arrived to pin Brown down in the arsenal and begin picking off his men. By midafternoon, Brown and his beleaguered band were barricaded into the arsenal’s brick firehouse. The next morning, a detachment of U.S. Marines under a lieutenant colonel of cavalry named Robert E. Lee assaulted the firehouse and captured or killed all of Brown’s remaining men.52
It might have been best for the emotional well-being of the entire country had Brown himself died in the assault, but he was only wounded and captured, and subsequently he was put on trial for treason, murder, and insurrection against the Commonwealth of Virginia. The trial gave Brown what he had always really wanted, a public pulpit, and what he revealed about the nature of his plot, the identities of the people who had backed it, and the cold fury with which he was prepared to execute it sent a shiver of horror down the back of the South. As Frederick Douglass wrote afterward, “With the Allegheny mountains for his pulpit, the country for his church, and the whole civilized world for his audience, John Brown was a thousand times more powerful as a preacher than as a warrior.”53
It could only have conjured up nightmares of Nat Turner, of slave rebellion, of wholesale race war, to listen to Brown’s description of his planned insurrection, especially since it was evident that he had absolutely no regrets about what he had done or what he had planned to do. “I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible,” Brown said at his sentencing, “which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. … I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right.” If the court found that sufficient grounds for his execution, then he embraced the verdict with the fervor of a Christian martyr. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.” Brown’s trial lasted seven days, during which he behaved himself with amazing composure. He was declared guilty on November 2, 1859, and hanged on December 2 in Charlestown. His last words, written on a slip of paper and handed to a jail guard, Hiram O’Bannon, hung like dark thunderclouds over the American horizon: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”54
Brown’s raid caused an eruption in the South. Although Southern leaders publicly congratulated their slaves on their reluctance to rally to Brown’s banner, the behavior of Southern whites showed something entirely different from confidence. “Never has the country been so excited before,” wrote one Georgian in December 1859. “There was great feeling in 1820, but not like the present. The South is deeply stirred.” Governor Andrew Barry Moore of Alabama called for passage of a bill that organized volunteer military units in every Alabama county, authorized borrowing $200,000 to buy weapons, and established scholarships for young Alabama males to attend military schools. Slave codes were toughened, slave patrols were reinstated, and violence against blacks multiplied. White Northerners were particularly suspect, since travelers and strangers from the North could easily turn out to be emissaries of some future John Brown. Nonslaveholding white Southerners were also the target of suspicion. It had not escaped the notice of the planters and their friends in the Southern state capitals that Brown had chosen western Virginia for his raid, a region of comparatively few slaves but full of resentful white yeomen. It was even more disturbing to learn that the Harpers Ferry townspeople and even the militia had been less than enthusiastic in attacking Brown (the Virginia militia had, in fact, declined Lieutenant Colonel Lee’s invitation to make the final assault on Brown). “Watch Harpers Ferry people,” Virginia governor Henry Wise warned his agents in mid-November, and at Brown’s hanging, Wise ordered the local commander to “let no crowd be near enough to the prisoner to hear any speech he may attempt.”55
The ultimate message of John Brown for Southerners was the lesson of distrust for the North, for Brown’s raid was seized upon as argument-clinching proof that the North was only awaiting its opportunity to destroy the South by force, and the discovery of Brown’s private correspondence in his temporary headquarters in Maryland underscored how much support Brown had enjoyed from prominent Northern abolitionists. Northern reactions to Brown’s execution only served to redouble Southern accusations about the real intentions of Northerners. “This mad attempt of a handful of vulgar cut-throats,” wrote Robert Lewis Dabney, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North.”56
Although Lincoln and other Republicans hastened to wash their hands of any association with Brown, across the North Brown’s steadfast and unrelenting courage at his trial dimmed the idiocy of his raid and allowed him to emerge as a hero, and abolitionism as heroic. In Chicago, church bells were tolled at the hour of Brown’s execution, Albany fired a 100-gun salute, immense memorial meetings were organized in Philadelphia and New York, and in Boston William Lloyd Garrison praised Brown as a model fit for repeated imitation. “Was John Brown justified in his attempt?” Garrison asked enthusiastically. “Yes, if Washington was in his… If men are justified in striking a blow for freedom, when the question is one of a threepenny tax on tea, then, I say, they are a thousand times more justified, when it is to save fathers, mothers, wives and children from the slave-coffle and the auction-
block, and to restore to them their God-given rights.” Garrison was a pacifist by conviction, “yet, as a peace man—an ‘ultra’ peace man—I am prepared to say ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’”57 No wonder the South saw Brown’s raid as sinister proof that the Union was turning into an embrace with destruction.
The primary casualty of Harpers Ferry was, ironically, the Democratic Party. Persuaded that no Northerners were to be trusted after Harpers Ferry, Southern Democrats now began to demand that their voice have the preponderant weight in determining Democratic policy. Addressing the Virginia legislature in January 1860, Christopher Memminger announced that the South must secure four guarantees in the next election for its continued safety—an equal share for the South of all the Western territories, the disbanding of all anti-slavery societies, the repeal of any laws that obstructed the capture of fugitive slaves, and a ban against any amendment of the Constitution respecting slavery—while others such as Jefferson Davis of Mississippi added to that demands for a national slave code that would prevent interference by a territorial legislature “whether by direct legislation or legislation of an indirect and unfriendly nature… the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common Territories.”58 They fully expected the next Democratic national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, to make these demands part of its national platform.