Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  2. Atchison to Hunter, quoted in James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1969), 81; Atchison to Davis, Sept. 24, 1854, quoted in William E. Gienapp, "The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1980, pp. 570–71.

  3. The stereotypes of each other held by Yankees and Pukes are analyzed in Michael Fellman, "Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854–1856," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds., Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge, 1979), 287–307; quotation from p. 300. The phrase "border ruffians" was coined by Horace Greeley but proudly adopted by the Missourians.

  Bowie knife or revolver!" Taking a leave from the Senate, Atchison again led a band of border ruffians into Kansas. "There are eleven hundred men coming over from Platte County to vote," he told his followers, "and if that ain't enough we can send five thousand—enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory."4 Five thousand was about the number that came—4,908 according to a congressional investigation—and cast illegal ballots to elect a territorial legislature composed of thirty-six proslavery men and three free soilers. "Missourians have nobly defended our rights," stated an Alabama newspaper. "All hail!" declared the proslavery Leavenworth Herald. "Come on, Southern men! Bring your slaves and fill up the Territory. Kansas is saved."5

  Governor Reeder was appalled by these proceedings. He had come to Kansas sympathetic toward slavery, but the Missourians' threats against his life if he interfered with their activities converted him to the other side. He ordered new elections in one-third of the districts. Free-soil candidates won most of them, but when the legislature met in July 1855 it contemptuously seated the original proslavery victors. Reeder had meanwhile gone to Washington, where he pleaded with Pierce to repudiate this burlesque. But the president was swayed by arguments of Atchison, Douglas, and other Democrats that the Emigrant Aid Company had provoked the problem and Republican newspapers had blown it out of proportion. Atchison also persuaded Pierce to replace Reeder with someone more pliable, who turned out to be Wilson Shannon from Ohio. One of Shannon's first responsibilities was to enforce a slave code enacted by the legislature that imposed a fine and imprisonment for expressing opinions against slavery, authorized the death penalty for encouraging slave revolts or helping slaves to escape, required all voters to take an oath to uphold these laws, and retroactively legalized the border ruffian ballots by requiring no prior residence in Kansas in order to vote.6

  Free-soil Kansans—who by the fall of 1855 outnumbered bona fide

  4. John Stringfellow quoted by Alice Nichols, Bleeding Kansas (New York, 1954), 26, from a report of his speech in the proslavery Leavenworth Herald; Atchison's words reported in testimony before a congressional committee by Dr. G. A. Butler, a settler from Tennessee, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 385.

  5. Jacksonville (Ala.) Republican, quoted in Rawley, Race and Politics, 89; Leavenworth Herald, quoted in Nichols, Bleeding Kansas, 29.

  6. Nevins, Ordeal, II, 384–90; Jay Monaghan, Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (New York, 1955), 17–30; Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce (2nd ed., Philadelphia, 1958), 407–18.

  proslavery settlers—had no intention of obeying these laws or of recognizing the "bogus legislature" that had passed them. Northern settlers armed themselves with new Sharps breechloading rifles sent from New England. Free soilers organized politically and called a convention to meet at Topeka in October. They drew up a free-state constitution and called elections for a new legislature and governor. Proslavery voters of course boycotted these elections. By January 1856 Kansas had two territorial governments: the official one at Lecompton and an unofficial one at Topeka representing a majority of actual residents.

  Partisans of both sides in the territory were walking arsenals; it was only a matter of time until a shooting war broke out. The murder of a free-soil settler by a proslavery man in November 1855 set off a series of incidents that seemed likely to start the war. Some 1,500 Missourians crossed the border to march on the free-soil stronghold of Lawrence, where 1,000 men waited to receive them with Sharps rifles and a howitzer. Federal troops stood by idly because they had received no orders from the inert Pierce administration. Governor Shannon went to Lawrence and persuaded both sides to disband their forces. With Atchison's help he managed to prod the reluctant Missourians homeward. "If you attack Lawrence now," Atchison told them, "you attack as a mob, and what would be the result? You could cause the election of an abolition President, and the ruin of the Democratic party. Wait a little. You cannot now destroy these people without losing more than you would gain."7

  This reasoning hardly encouraged prospects for a permanent peace. A severe winter did more than anything else to keep things quiet for the next few months. But violence sprouted with the dandelions in the spring of 1856. The annual migration of settlers promised to increase the free-state majority. The proslavery response called for bravado. "Blood for Blood!" blazoned the Atchison Squatter Sovereign. "Let us purge ourselves of all abolition emissaries . . . and give distinct notice that all who do not leave immediately for the East, will leave for eternity!"8 Proslavery Judge Samuel Lecompte instructed a grand jury to indict members of the free-state government for treason. Since many of these men lived in Lawrence, the attempt to arrest them provided another opportunity for Missourians, now deputized as a posse, to attack this bastion of Yankee abolitionists. Dragging along five cannon, they laid

  7. Nevins, Ordeal, II, 411.

  8. Ibid., 433.

  siege to the town on May 21. Not wishing to place themselves in further contempt of law, free-state leaders decided against resistance. The "posse" of some 800 men thereupon poured into Lawrence, demolished its two newspaper offices, burned the hotel and the home of the elected free-soil governor, and plundered shops and houses.

  All of this occurred against the backdrop of a national debate about Kansas. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress introduced bills for the admission of Kansas as a state—the former under the Topeka free-state constitution, the latter after an election of a new constitutional convention to be administered by the Lecompton territorial government. Southerners viewed this matter as crucial to their future. "The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor," wrote Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina in March 1856. "The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue. If Kansas becomes a hireling [i.e. free] State, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missouri . . . [and] abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkansas; so with upper Texas."9

  Since Republicans controlled the House, and Democrats the Senate, neither party's Kansas bill could become law. Both parties focused on the propaganda value of the issue looking toward the presidential election. Republicans gained more from this strategy because Democratic support of proslavery excesses in Kansas offered a ready-made opportunity to dramatize yet another slave-power attack on northern rights. Blessed with an able corps of young antislavery reporters on the scene in Kansas, whose zeal sometimes exceeded their accuracy, the burgeoning galaxy of Republican newspapers exploited Bleeding Kansas for all it was worth.

  Southerners continued to give them plenty to exploit. Hard on the heels of the "Sack of Lawrence" came shocking news from the U. S. Capitol itself. All spring Charles Sumner had been storing up wrath toward what he considered "The Crime Against Kansas"—the title of a two-day address he delivered to crowded Senate galleries May 19–20. "I shall make the most thorough and complete speech of my life," Sumner informed Salmon P. Chase a few days before the address. "My soul is wrung by this outrage, & I shall pour it forth." So he did, with more passion than good taste. "Murderous robbers from Missouri," Sumner declared, "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization" had committed a "rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful
embrace of slavery." Sumner singled out members

  9. Ibid., 427.

  of the F Street Mess for specific attack, including South Carolina's Andrew P. Butler, who had "discharged the loose expectoration of his speech" in demanding the disarming of free-state men in Kansas. Butler's home state with "its shameful imbecility from Slavery" had sent to the Senate in his person a "Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who . . . though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery."10

  Sumner's speech produced an uproar—in the Senate, where several Democrats rebuked him, and in the press, where even Republican praise was tempered by reservations about the rhetoric. The only thing that prevented some southerner from challenging Sumner to a duel was the knowledge that he would refuse. Besides, dueling was for social equals; someone as low as this Yankee blackguard deserved a horsewhipping—or a caning. So felt Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew Butler. Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the nearly empty Senate chamber after adjournment and approached the desk where Sumner was writing letters. Your speech, he told the senator, "is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine." As Sumner started to rise, the frenzied Brooks beat him over the head thirty times or more with a gold-headed cane as Sumner, his legs trapped under the bolted-down desk, finally wrenched it loose from the floor and collapsed with his head covered by blood.11

  This incident incensed even those Yankees who had little use for Sumner. "Bleeding Sumner" joined Bleeding Kansas as a symbol of the slave power's iniquities. The South, declared one newspaper, "cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder." "Has it come to this," asked William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, "that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?"12

  10. Sumner to Chase, May 15, 1856, Chase Papers, Library of Congress; The Works of Charles Sumner, 12 vols. (Boston, 1873), IV, 125–48.

  11. David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 289–97.

  12. Cincinnati Gazette, May 24, 1856; New York Evening Post, May 23, 1856, quoted in William E. Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner: The Caning of Charles Sumner and the Rise of the Republican Party," CWH, 25 (1979), 230, 232.

  Adding insult to injury, the South lionized Brooks as a hero. Although some southerners regretted the affair for its galvanizing effect on the North, public approval of Brooks's act far outweighed qualms. Newspapers in his own state expressed pride that Brooks had "stood forth so nobly in defense of . . . the honor of South Carolinians." The Richmond Enquirer pronounced "the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence. The vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves. . . . They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! . . . The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission."13 A Louisiana planter and former army officer, Braxton Bragg, wrote that the House should pass a vote of thanks to Brooks. "You can reach the sensibilities of such dogs" as Sumner, wrote Bragg, "only through their heads and a big stick." Brooks himself boasted that "every Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts." When the House voted 121 to 95 to expel him, southern opposition prevented the necessary two-thirds majority. Brooks resigned anyway and returned home to seek vindication by reelection. South Carolinians feted him and sent him back to Washington with triumphant unanimity. From all over the South, Brooks received dozens of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as "Hit Him Again" and "Use Knock-Down Arguments."14

  This southern response outraged northern moderates even more than the caning had done. "It was not the attack itself (horrible as that was) that excited me," wrote an old-line Whig who thereafter voted Republican, "but the tone of the Southern Press, & the approbation, apparently, of the whole Southern People." A Boston conservative who had previously defended the South now "must in sorrow concede a lower civilization than I would ever before believe, tho' [Theodore] Parker, & those called extreme, have often & calmly insisted upon this very fact, while I have warmly denied it." Republican organizers reported that

  13. Charleston Courier, Aug. 29, 1856, quoted in Avery O. Craven, The Growth ofSouthern Nationalism 1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 233; Richmond Enquirer, June 9, 1856, quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 222.

  14. Bragg quoted in Donald, Sumner, 305; Brooks quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 221; the mottoes on the canes quoted in John Hope Franklin, The Militant South 1800–1861 (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 54–55.

  they had "never before seen anything at all like the present state of deep, determined, & desperate feelings of hatred, & hostility to the further extension of slavery, & its political power."15

  Brooks's only punishment was a $300 fine levied by a district court. Sumner's injuries, complicated by a post-traumatic syndrome that turned psychogenic neurosis into physical debility, kept him away from the Senate most of the time for the next four years.16 During that time the Massachusetts legislature reelected him as a symbolic rebuke to the "barbarism of slavery." A good many Yankees wanted to go beyond such passive protest. "If the South appeal to the rod of the slave for argument with the North," wrote a New York clergyman in his diary, "no way is left for the North, but to strike back, or be slaves."17 Out in Kansas lived a fifty-six-year-old abolitionist who also believed in this Old Testament injunction of an eye for an eye. Indeed, John Brown looked much like the Biblical warrior who slew his enemies with the jawbone of an ass—though Brown favored more up-to-date weapons like rifles, and, on one infamous occasion, broadswords.

  The father of twenty children, Brown had enjoyed little success over the years in his various business and farming enterprises. In 1855 he joined six of his sons and a son-in-law who had taken up claims in Kansas. A zealot on the subject of slavery with an almost mesmeric influence over many of his associates, Brown enlisted in a free-state military company (which included his sons) for service in the guerrilla conflict that was spreading during the spring of 1856. On their way to help defend Lawrence against the Missourians in May, this company learned that the unresisting town had been pillaged. The news threw Brown into a rage at the proslavery forces and contempt for the failure of Lawrence men to fight. That was no way to make Kansas free, he told his men. We must "fight fire with fire," must "strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people." When further word reached Brown's party of the caning of Sumner in Washington, Brown "went crazy—crazy," according to witnesses. "Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights," Brown declared. He reckoned that proslavery men had murdered at least five free-soilers in Kansas since the troubles began. Brown conceived of a "radical, retaliatory measure" against "the slave hounds" of his own neighborhood near Pottawatomie

  15. All quotations from Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 231, 234, 235.

  16. See the thorough and persuasive analysis in Donald, Sumner, 312–47.

  17. Henry Dana Ward quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 232.

  Creek—none of whom had anything to do with those murders. With four of his sons and three other men, Brown abducted five proslavery settlers from their cabins on the night of May 24–25 and coolly split open their skulls with broadswords. An eye for an eye.18

  This shocking massacre went unpunished by legal process. Federal officials did manage to arrest two of Brown's sons who had not taken part in the affair, while proslavery bands burned the Brown homesteads. The twin traumas of Lawrence and Pottawatomie escalated the bushwhacking war in Kansas. One of Brown's sons was among some two hundred men killed in this conflict. Considering the
mselves soldiers in a holy war, Brown and his other sons somehow evaded capture and were never indicted for the Pottawatomie killings. And despite strenuous efforts by the U.S. army to contain this violence, the troops were too few to keep up with the hit and run raids that characterized the fighting.

  As news of the Pottawatomie massacre traveled eastward, a legend grew among antislavery people that Brown was not involved or that if he was he had acted in self-defense.19 Not surprisingly, Republican newspapers preferred to dwell on the "barbarism" of border ruffians and Preston Brooks rather than on the barbarism of a free-state fighter. In any event, the Pottawatomie massacre was soon eclipsed by stories of other "battles" under headlines in many newspapers featuring "The Civil War in Kansas." More than anything else, that civil war shaped the context for the presidential election of 1856.

  II

  It was by no means certain when the year opened that the Republicans would become the North's second major party. The American party

  18. Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown (New York, 1970), 126–37; quotations from 128–29, 133, based on later testimony by men in Brown's military company. A substantial part of the huge historical literature on John Brown focuses on the Pottawatomie massacre. Although some contemporaries denied Brown's role in the affair, historians accept it while disagreeing about motives and details. The account here is based on that in Oates's biography, the most recent and reasonable analysis of the massacre. Fuller details with a different slant on many matters can be found in James C. Malin, John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-six (Philadelphia, 1942), a frustrating book because of its sprawling, structureless format, but based on an astonishing amount of research in Kansas history.