Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  Nevertheless, as a matter of political expediency, free-soil leaders in several states formed alliances with the Know Nothings in 1854 and 1855. In some cases they did so with the intention of taking over the movement in order to channel it in an antislavery direction. Massachusetts provided the clearest example of this. In that state the issues of the Mexican War and Wilmot Proviso had reshuffled political alignments so that a coalition of Free Soilers (including Conscience Whigs) and Democrats had gained control of the legislature from 1850 to 1852. The coalition elected Charles Sumner to the Senate and proposed or passed a number of reforms: a mechanic's lien law, a ten-hour law for laborers, general banking and incorporation laws, prohibition legislation, and re-apportionment of the legislature to shift some power from Boston (with its Cotton Whigs and its large Irish vote) to central and western Massachusetts. The conservative Whig and Boston vote narrowly defeated re-apportionment in a referendum in 1853. This provided the main spark for the Know-Nothing fire of 1854 that swept out of western Massachusetts

  42. Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 641; Hans L. Trefousse, The RadicalRepublicans: Lincoln's Vanguard for Racial Justice (New York, 1969), 86; Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 269; Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 171.

  43. Liberator, Nov. 10, 1854; Dana quoted in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, FreeMen: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 234, and in Trefousse, The Radical Republicans, 85.

  44. Quoted in Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 233, and in Sewell, Ballots forFreedom, 267.

  and kindled the whole state, electing the governor, an overwhelming majority of the legislature, and all of the congressmen. The Whig establishment was traumatized by this conflagration. "I no more suspected the impending result," wrote a Whig journalist, "than I looked for an earthquake which would level the State House and reduce Fa-neuil Hall to a heap of ruins."45

  Free Soil/Republican leaders like Charles Francis Adams and Charles Sumner were taken equally by surprise. But that was not true of all free soilers. Indeed one of them, Henry Wilson, had much to do with the outcome. Like many of the younger Know-Nothing voters, Wilson had been an apprentice and journeyman shoemaker in his youth. The "Natick Cobbler," as he was called, became a shoe manufacturer, went into politics as a Whig, and in 1848 helped found the Free Soil party. In 1854 the new Republican party nominated Wilson for governor. Whigs, Democrats, and Know Nothings also nominated candidates. Shrewdly perceiving that the nativist frenzy would overwhelm the other parties, Wilson joined the Know-Nothing movement in the hope of controlling it. Some free soilers expressed disgust with this strategy. "When the freedom of an empire is at issue," wrote one of them, "Wilson runs off to chase a paddy!"46 Wilson remained on the ticket as Republican candidate but came in a distant fourth, having persuaded most of his free-soil followers to vote Know Nothing.

  There was method in Wilson's apparent madness, as a choleric Cotton Whig recognized. The Know Nothings, he wrote, "have been controlled by the most desperate sort of Free Soil adventurers. Henry Wilson and Anson Burlingame have ruled the hour. . . . Our members of Congress are one and all of the ultra-agitation Anti-Slavery Stamp."47 The Know-Nothing legislature elected Wilson to the Senate, where he did nothing for nativism but much for the antislavery cause. The only nativist laws passed by this legislature were a literacy qualification for voting and a measure disbanding several Irish militia companies—and the latter was in part an antislavery gesture, since these companies had provided much of the manpower that returned Anthony Burns to bondage.48 The legislature also enacted a new personal liberty law and a

  45. Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 493.

  46. Edward L. Pierce to Horace Mann, Jan. 18, 1855, quoted in ibid., 592.

  47. Robert C. Winthrop to John P. Kennedy, Jan. 3, 1855, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 343.

  48. The legislatures of Connecticut and Rhode Island also enacted literacy qualifications for voting. Only some 4 or 5 percent of adults in these states were illiterate—but most of them were Irish immigrants. Know Nothings with Republican support subsequently passed a law requiring naturalized citizens in Massachusetts to wait two years after naturalization before they could vote. This requirement was repealed during the Civil War. In 1850 Republican legislatures in New York and Michigan passed voter registration laws designed to curb illegal voting, measures aimed in part at practices attributed to big-city Democratic machines and Irish voters. Joel H. Silbey, The Partisan Imperative: The Dynamics of American Politics Before the Civil War (New York, 1985), 141–54; Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827–1861 (Princeton, 1971), 285–87.

  bill forbidding racial segregation in public schools—the first such law ever passed. In addition, these Know-Nothing lawmakers passed a series of reform measures that earned them an ironic reputation as one of the most progressive legislatures in the state's history: abolition of imprisonment for debt, a married women's property act, creation of an insurance commission, compulsory vaccination of school children, expansion of the power of juries, and homestead exemption from seizure for debt.49

  Republicans and Know-Nothings had succeeded in breaking down the Whigs and weakening the Democrats in most parts of the North. But in 1855 it remained uncertain which of these two new parties would emerge as the principal alternative to the Democrats. In about half of the states, Republicans had become the second major party. In the other half the American party, as the Know Nothings now named their political arm, seemed to prevail. But a development of great significance occurred in 1855. The center of nativist gravity began to shift southward. While the Know Nothings added Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and California to the state governments they controlled, they also won elections in Maryland and Kentucky, gained control of the Tennessee legislature, polled at least 45 percent of the votes in five other southern states, and did better in the South as a whole than the Whigs had done since 1848.

  In much of the South the American party was essentially the Whig party under a new name. To be sure, a tradition of nativism existed in the South despite the relatively small number of immigrants and Catholics there. This nativism undergirded the American party in Maryland, Louisiana, Missouri, and to some degree in Kentucky—states that contained cities with large immigrant populations. "Citizens of New Orleans!!" proclaimed a political handbill of 1854. "You have an important duty to perform tomorrow in the election of a District Attorney. . . .

  49. Baum, The Civil War Party System, 27–31.

  Father Mullen and the Jesuits can no longer rule this city. . . . The Irish are . . . making our elections scenes of violence and fraud. . . . Americans! Shall we be ruled by Irish and Germans?"50 Nativist riots and election-day violence figured more prominently in southern cities than in the North. In Baltimore various gangs such as the Plug Uglies and Blood Tubs became notorious enforcers of Know-Nothing dominance at the ballot box. Ethnic political riots killed four people in New Orleans, ten in St. Louis, seventeen in Baltimore, and at least twenty-two in Louisville during the mid-1850s. In some areas of the upper South, especially Maryland, the American party appealed equally to Democrats and Whigs. But elsewhere in the South it drew mainly from former Whigs who preferred the political company of nativists to that of Democrats. And the Know Nothings' nationalism became a unionist counterweight to the increasingly sectionalist Democrats.51

  The slavery issue soon split the Know Nothings along sectional lines. At the first national council of the American party, in June 1855 at Philadelphia, Henry Wilson led a bolt of most northern delegates when southerners and northern conservatives passed a plank endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. From this time forth the party wasted away in the North while it grew stronger in the South. The logical place for antis-lavery Know Nothings to go was into the Republican party, which stood ready to receive them if it could do so without sanctioning nativism. Abraham Lincoln voiced the Republican dilemma in this matter. "Of their principles,"
Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, "I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy." Nevertheless, in central Illinois the Know Nothings "are mostly my old political and personal friends." Without them "there is not sufficient materials to combat the Nebraska

  50. Overdyke, The Know-Nothing Party in the South, 21–22, 24.

  51. Ibid., passim; Baker, Ambivalent Americans, passim; James H. Broussard, "Some Determinants of Know-Nothing Electoral Strength in the South," Louisiana History, 7 (1966), 5–20.

  democracy." Lincoln was willing "to 'fuse' with anybody I can fuse on ground which I think is right." The only hope of carrying Illinois was to "get the elements of this organization" on our own terms after "Know-Nothingism has . . . entirely tumbled to pieces."52

  In Ohio, Salmon P. Chase showed how this might be done. After winning all of the congressional districts in 1854, the Ohio anti-Nebraska coalition looked forward to electing Chase governor in the state elections of 1855. But could they do it without Know-Nothing support? Militant free soilers like Joshua Giddings thought so. The nativists, he said, were "unjust, illiberal, and un-American. We will never unite with such a party, in any compact whatever." Chase seemed to agree. "I cannot proscribe men on account of their birth," he wrote. "I cannot make religious faith a political test." He therefore recognized in January 1855 that the strength of "the Know-Knothing movement . . . may make the election of a man in my position impossible."53

  But Chase's ambition soon caused him to waffle. He privately expressed a willingness to work with antislavery Know Nothings if he could do so without "sacrificing principle." "It seems to me you have said enough against the Kns, and had better hold up," he told a journalistic ally in February 1855. "My idea is to fight nobody who does not fight us." We might acknowledge "that there was some ground for the uprising of the people against papal influences & organized foreignism" so long as we insist on "the importance of keeping the anti-slavery idea paramount."54 In effect, Chase wanted Republicans to spurn nativist policies while recognizing nativism as a cultural impulse. In particular, he was willing to make a gesture toward anti-Catholicism but not to alienate Protestant immigrants, especially the large German vote, whose support Republicans wanted and needed. This shading toward anti-Romanism but away from a generalized nativism became a way for Republicans

  52. Lincoln to Owen Lovejoy, Aug. 11, 1855, Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855, CWL, II, 316, 323.

  53. Giddings quoted in William E. Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism, and the Formation of the Republican Party in Ohio," Ohio History, 93 (1984), 11; Chase quoted in Trefousse, Radical Republicans, 84, and in Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 207.

  54. Chase to E. S. Hamlin, Nov. 21, 1854, Feb. 9, Jan. 22, 1855, quoted in Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 206, 208, and in Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism," 10.

  to absorb some Know Nothings without feeling that they were "sacrificing principle."

  Chase managed to walk this tightrope without falling. The conservative Know Nothings nominated a separate ticket in Ohio. Radical free soilers threatened to do the same if Chase made any concessions to the nativists. The Republican state convention nominated Chase on an an-tislavery platform that, in the candidate's words, did not "contain a squint toward Knism." The nominees for other state offices, however, were men of Know-Nothing background—though Chase considered them "honest men . . . sincerely opposed to slavery" who "adhere but slightly to their order." Proclaiming that "there is nothing before the people but the vital issue of slavery," Chase privately predicted that Know Nothing-ism would "gracefully give itself up to die."55

  Perhaps. In any case, the main ethnocultural issue in the campaign was anti-black racism injected by the Democrats, who rapidly perfected the technique of tarring "Black Republicans" with the brush of Negro equality. Labeling the Chase candidacy "Sambo's State Ticket," Ohio Democrats proclaimed that Republicans intended to sacrifice "the interests of more than twenty millions of people . . . to those of three millions of blacks." The Republican policy of limiting the expansion of slavery would inevitably become a program of emancipation, which would let loose "three to five millions of uncivilized, degraded, and savage men . . . to roam the country" and take bread from the mouths of white laboring men.56

  Chase survived these onslaughts and won the governorship with 49 percent of the vote to 43 percent for the Democrats and 8 percent for the separate American ticket. Though they could not have won without Know-Nothing support, Republicans came to power in Ohio committed to an antislavery platform and not bound by promises to nativists. They demonstrated this political legerdemain once again in the prolonged battle over the speakership of the national House of Representatives that convened in December 1855.

  The chaos of parties at the opening of this Congress reflected the devastation wrought by the 1854–55 elections. Most estimates counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 Republican congressmen, 80 Democrats, and 50 Americans. Of the last, thirty-one came from slave

  55. Gienapp, "Chase, Nativism," 22, 24, 26.

  56. Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 220.

  states and a half-dozen of the rest were conservatives on the slavery question. Of the Democrats, only twenty-three came from free states and a few of these were uncomfortable in the traces with southern colleagues. Of the Republicans (not all of whom yet acknowledged that label), perhaps two-thirds had at least a nominal connection with Know-Nothingism, though half or more of these placed a higher priority on antislavery than on nativism. One of the latter was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a onetime Democrat and then a Know Nothing who like his colleague Henry Wilson in the Senate now wanted to harness the Know-Nothing cart to the Republican horse. The Republicans nominated Banks for speaker, but in ballot after ballot during two increasingly tense months Banks fell short of the 118 votes needed for election. The process, however, crystallized his supporters as Republicans, and when the House on February 2, 1856, finally changed the rules to allow a plurality to prevail, Banks won the speakership with 103 votes on the 133rd ballot. If any one moment marked the birth of the Republican party, this was it.

  What made possible this remarkable eclipse of Know Nothings and surge of Republicans to become the North's majority party within less than two years? Part of the answer lay in a dramatic decline of immigration, which during the years after 1854 fell to less than half of the level it had attained in the first half of the decade. But the main reason could be expressed in two words: Bleeding Kansas. Events in that far-off territory convinced most northerners that the slave power was after all a much greater threat to republican liberty than the Pope was.

  5

  The Crime Against Kansas

  I

  Having lost the battle in Congress for a free Kansas, antislavery men determined to wage the war on the prairie itself. "Since there is no escaping your challenge," William H. Seward told southern senators on May 25, 1854, "I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right."1 In Massachusetts the erstwhile conservative Amos Lawrence was chief financial backer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, formed in the summer of 1854 to promote free-soil settlement of Kansas. Few New Englanders actually went there, but the company did provide aid to farmers from midwestern states who began to trickle into Kansas. Lawrence's role was reflected in the name of
the town that became headquarters of the free-state forces in the territory.

  At the outset, however, Missourians from just across the border were stronger in numbers than the free soilers and at least equal in determination. "We are playing for a mighty stake," Senator David Atchison of Missouri assured Virginia's Robert M. T. Hunter. "The game must be played boldly. . . . If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean, if we fail we lose Missouri Arkansas Texas and all the territories." Fifteen years earlier Missourians had harried and burned the Mormons out of

  1. CG, 33 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 769.

  the state; Atchison was confident of their ability to give free soilers the same treatment in Kansas. "We are organizing," he told Jefferson Davis. "We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to 'Mormonize' the Abolitionists."2

  Atchison did his best to fulfill this promise. When Andrew Reeder, a Pennsylvania Democrat, arrived in Kansas as territorial governor in the fall of 1854 he called an election for a delegate to Congress. This became the first of many Kansas elections in which the normal rowdiness of frontier politics was magnified a hundredfold by the contest over slavery. In November 1854, Atchison and other prominent Missourians led an invasion of "border ruffians" into Kansas to swell the vote for the proslavery candidate. Derided as "Pukes" by northern-born settlers, many of these lank, unshaven, unwashed, hard-drinking Missourians had little material interest in slavery but even less love for "those long-faced, sanctimonious Yankees" devoted to "sickly sycophantic love for the nigger."3 The border ruffians won the first round. Casting more than 1,700 ballots that a subsequent congressional committee found to be fraudulent, they elected a proslavery delegate to Congress.

  They probably could have won in a fair election. Governor Reeder took a census in preparation for the next election (of a territorial legislature) in March 1855. Of 8,501 bona fide residents (including 242 slaves), 2,905 were legal voters, of whom three-fifths had come from Missouri and other slave states. Nevertheless Atchison wanted to make sure of victory. "Mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him," the senator's lieutenant in Missouri exhorted a crowd at St. Joseph. "To those having qualms of conscience . . . the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your lives and property are in danger. . . . Enter every election district in Kansas . . . and vote at the point of a