Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Young Gorsuch opened fire, but the balls passed through Parker’s hat, just grazing his scalp. “How many times each party fired,” it was later said, “it is impossible to tell.” Edward Gorsuch fell to the ground with a bullet in his chest. He lay in a pool of blood. He was the boldest of the lot, said Parker, for he’d stood firm while Kline turned tail, leaped over a fence, and disappeared. Dickinson Gorsuch died a few days later from his wounds.

  The telegraph wired news of the fracas across the country. “Awful Loss of Life in an Attempt to Capture Fugitive Slaves,” ran the headline of the Baltimore Sun two days later; it was afterward changed to “The Christiana Outrage.” Parker’s black neighbors were indicted for levying war against the government, even though they were not themselves considered citizens of that government or allowed to vote in it. Parker and several others took off for Canada.

  En route, while riding the rails, Parker met a white man who, not recognizing the fugitive, said that he thought this man Parker a brave man. “All you colored people should look at it as we people look at our brave men, and do as we do. You see Parker was not fighting for a country, nor for praise. He was fighting for freedom: he only wanted liberty, as other men do.”

  (3)

  ONE AGGRESSES

  James Buchanan had not forgotten Cuba.

  Once something caught his fancy, James Buchanan could not let go, and Cuba had undoubtedly caught his fancy. It was time to purchase from Spain that pesky and rich Caribbean island, he surmised from his perch in London, where he was serving as consul under President Franklin Pierce.

  In the fall of 1852, Pierce, a friend of Hawthorne and a New Hampshire Democrat, had been elected to the presidency in a landslide by winning over 80 percent of the electoral vote. As the straight Jacksonian he was, Pierce had campaigned foursquare for states’ rights and unfettered territorial expansion, helped purge the Democratic Party in New Hampshire of Free Soilers, and he backed the Compromise of 1850. As a good politician, however, he fell prudently silent—he had a “talent for silence,” said the New York diarist George Templeton Strong—on the incendiary Fugitive Slave Act once the Democrats had nominated him at their national convention in Baltimore in June. (Disgusted, Horace Mann concluded that the convention had been a sham in which the slavery faction of the party had succeeded in picking and embracing a Southern-sympathizing candidate as party unifier.) Pierce won the nomination with 282 votes on the forty-ninth ballot. When he received the news by telegram, his wife fainted.

  A genial person short on specific talent, the handsome Pierce was to the Whigs of New England something of a joke: “just an average man—such as are found in every considerable town in the U.S.—of popular manners & convivial habits, but as a statesman, an orator, or even a lawyer, of no account at all.” Disliked by antislavery activists, even moderate ones such as Mann, who called Pierce “a thorough, unmitigated, irredeemable pro-slavery man,” he’d been a brigadier general under Winfield Scott during the Mexican War but had been mocked there too as the hero of many a hard-fought bottle, Whigs joked, referring to Pierce’s taste for strong drink. But Pierce pleased the Young America Democrats such as John O’Sullivan, and he pleased Southerners, and even that once mighty Whig Daniel Webster had voted for him.

  Pierce’s inauguration took place just ten weeks after an awful train accident in which his youngest surviving child, eleven-year-old Benjamin, was killed right before Pierce’s eyes. His other two children, both boys, had already died, one at four years old of typhus and the other in infancy. It was not an auspicious or happy beginning for the president. Yet he took the oath of office in his own way, “affirming” rather than “swearing,” his allegiance, presumably on religious grounds. A strict Congregationalist, he was also a strict constructionist in all things, beginning with the Bible and ending with the Constitution. “If the Federal Government will confine itself to the exercise of powers clearly granted by the Constitution,” he declared in his inaugural address, “it can hardly happen that its action upon any question should endanger the institutions of the States or interfere with their right to manage matters strictly domestic according to the will of their own people.”

  That meant the Northern abolitionists and antislavery activists ought not to bother the South—or slavery—and that Pierce as president believed that enforcing the Constitution also meant enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act.

  Reciting his inaugural address without notes before fifteen thousand people, Pierce also spoke of America’s manifest destiny—its need and its right to acquire territory. “It is not to be disguised that our attitude as a nation and our position on the globe render the acquisition of certain possessions not within our jurisdiction eminently important for our protection, if not in the future essential for the preservation of the rights of commerce and the peace of the world.”

  Pierce was evidently thinking of Cuba.

  GOOD-NATUREDLY CONSCIOUS OF his good looks, Pierce liked to be liked. In his early White House days, he often appeared clad in a cherry-colored silk dressing gown, as if a host at a salon. But his vanity left him pliable and weak. Even his most reliable supporters sometimes balked. “General Pierce is not the equal of Calhoun in intellect and learning, or of Jackson in intuitive comprehension,” said The United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

  Yet he was a solid Democrat and an expansionist, and he’d made Cuba a campaign subject. In Washington, General Gideon Johnson Pillow, a Tennessee soldier put on trial for insubordination during the Mexican War by Winfield Scott, whom Pierce had just defeated for the presidency, was pushing for a military takeover of Cuba. (Later, during the Civil War, while commanding a Tennessee brigade, Pillow hid behind a tree during the battle at Stones River.) The rationale for seizing the island had stayed the same as it had been: if Spain were to emancipate Cuban slaves (the new Spanish governor in Cuba had announced he might just do that), then the United States would be justified in taking over the island to protect the South from the slave insurrections it feared emancipation in Cuba might set off in America. Pierce also worried that France and England might join together to prevent the United States from legally purchasing Cuba in order to curb American development. Even moderate newspapers such as The New York Times had been suspicious: “What possible interest has Great Britain in preventing the United States from acquiring Cuba,” it asked, “—except that of checking their growth and putting limits upon their territorial expansion?”

  Pierce turned to his foreign ministers, those men, as the New-York Evening Post quipped, who could be out of the country for four years without being missed. First of all, there was James Buchanan himself, sent to Great Britain probably because Pierce wanted him out of the way; Buchanan had for a very long time been eyeing the presidency. But Buchanan abroad was a problem. Never comfortable around people, Buchanan had immediately touched off a diplomatic ruckus by not wearing full court dress at a royal dinner. Instead, he’d rather ostentatiously clad himself as a statesman of the people, in the people’s dress: black coat, white waistcoat, black pantaloons, cravat, dress boots, a three-cornered hat, all dignified, of course, but not the regalia of monarchs.

  Pierce’s minister to France was John Y. Mason, who owned a plantation and slaves in Virginia and was known to be something of a hedonist. He “only required having his stomach full of oysters and his hands full of cards to be perfectly happy,” joked Thomas Hart Benton. Formerly a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and a secretary of the navy under John Tyler and James Polk, Mason could be tractable. Though fond of finery, unlike Buchanan—he preferred to wear a blue coat trimmed with gold lace topping his white breeches—he stood before a bedecked Louis Napoleon in the plain black of the American republican, just as Pierce’s secretary of state, William L. Marcy, had in this case ordered him to do.

  Pierre Soulé, the minister to Spain, was the most controversial and complex of the three appointees. Born in the French Pyrenees in 1801, he had studied for four years in a Jesuit seminary, the
n trained as a lawyer in Paris—after, that is, spending a year as a shepherd in Navarre, where he hid from the Bourbons. They had rightly suspected him of conspiring to depose Charles X, and in 1823, he was arrested, tried, and convicted. He left France, escaped to England, and eventually landed by way of Haiti in New Orleans, where much of the population spoke his native language. By working as a gardener at the Dominican monastery in Bardstown, Kentucky, he perfected his English so well that after a subsequent—and lucrative—career as a criminal attorney in New Orleans, Soulé was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he was considered one of the best orators in the country. Like Mason, he was one of the most extreme, vituperative, and proslavery expansionists in Congress. To Pierre Soulé, a Cuban filibustering mission was an expression of freedom.

  His detractors and admirers considered Soulé superficial, arrogant, brilliant, melancholic, impetuous, proud, and relentlessly vain—a character sprung from the pages of Alexandre Dumas, who was his friend for a while. Not surprisingly, then, as soon as Soulé landed in Madrid in his velvet embroidered coat, he was associated with scandal: two duels, one with the French minister to Spain; an alleged flirtation with the queen; and the claim that he intended to bring down the monarchy. He had also supported López and the annexation of Cuba—positions that did not endear him to the Spanish.

  The Spanish continued to be wary not just of Soulé—whose diplomacy was far from diplomatic—but also of Pierce and his entire administration. Remembering the expeditions of Narciso López and on the lookout for arms smuggled into Havana harbor, they boarded a U.S. steamer, the Black Warrior, to search for weapons, claiming it had violated port regulations. This was just the pretext Pierce needed. The seizure of the Black Warrior was a “wanton injury,” Pierce declared, and he demanded an indemnity of $300,000. He also warned Congress that he would not “hesitate to use the authority and means which Congress may grant to insure the observance of our just rights.” John Slidell, also of Louisiana, proposed a suspension of all neutrality laws, and the ever ready John Quitman began arming for another invasion.

  Then the Pierce administration changed course. Likely, the profilibusters in Pierce’s cabinet, such as Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, realized that the free blacks of Cuba would fight—and there were more and more of them. Buchanan, meanwhile, still wanted to purchase Cuba and hoped to pressure Spain by getting the support of European bondholders, who could urge Spain to sell the island in order to pay its creditors. Ready to listen, Pierce restrained the filibusters by publicly reaffirming the neutrality laws but opted to send a special commission to Madrid to carry out instructions earlier sent to Soulé by Secretary of State William L. Marcy, who had authorized the purchase of Cuba for as much as $130 million and, failing that, “to detach that island from the Spanish dominion and from all dependence on any European power.”

  What did “detach” mean?

  Britain and France were more concerned about the Crimea than about Cuba. That did not reassure U.S. expansionists, who feared that Spain might liberate the slaves or that Britain might somehow force Spain to emancipate them and turn Cuba into another Haiti, right on America’s doorstep. Cuba was an obsession, a mystery, a menace, a prize. Pierce too was fixated on Cuba, and Marcy suggested that the three ministers, Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé, meet in early October in Ostend (in present-day Belgium), the place chosen as one where there would be little publicity and few spies.

  Mason represented the hope of a Southern Confederacy, Soulé represented Manifest Destiny, and Buchanan wanted to be president. Together, they would try to map out foreign policy. But if Soulé was involved, there could be trouble. With his gift for back-stabbing, he had been suspected of helping foment the (failed) republican insurrection in Madrid that August. Several newspapers demanded that Pierce recall him, which he refused to do, and by fall, the publicity, all of it bad, convinced the three ministers to leave Ostend for the quieter Aix-la-Chapelle in Prussia. It was there, in October, that Soulé and Buchanan and, to a degree, Mason composed the belligerent document. “Judge Mason can scarcely be held accountable,” wrote the antislavery Democrat Donn Piatt. “It depended very much whether it was before or after dinner that he signed the paper.”

  The so-called Ostend Manifesto, later considered by historians as calamitous, sanctioned the use of force. It recommended that the United States purchase Cuba and, if unable to accomplish that, to consider whether Cuba then threatened national security. “Should this question be answered in the affirmative,” the ministers blustered, “then by every law human and divine, we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain, if we possess the power.” The implication was clear: there might be war. “Self-preservation is the first law of nature, with states as well as individuals.” Somehow Soulé had pushed Buchanan, which was not hard to do, in the direction of a martial solution, for Buchanan was a Southern sympathizer, his eye still firmly fixed on the White House.

  When news of the Ostend Manifesto leaked—it was apparently intended as an internal memorandum—Horace Greeley in the Tribune called it “The Manifesto of the Brigands.” He was not alone. “It is said that the collision of wits produces wisdom,” sniggered The Boston Daily Atlas, “but this collision of Buchanan, Mason, and Soulé has proved nothing but blank stupidity and hopeless nonsense, and irreconcilable inconsistency, and dreary columns of mere common-place.” If nothing except annexation, by any means, could save the United States from disunion, death, revolution, and so-called Africanization, as the manifesto suggested, then what was Pierce doing? Even the sympathetic United States Magazine and Democratic Review found the manifesto hasty, rambling, abrupt, and inconclusive. Marcy coolly renounced it and snubbed Soulé, whom he never much liked anyway. He was now able to settle the Black Warrior affair with Spain without much fuss; Soulé was recalled in early 1855, and in relief, Spain offered to compensate the owners of the ship. Pierce distanced himself from Ostend; no military takeover for him—he knew the North would not tolerate it. Already the general feeling was that the three ministers at Ostend had gone too far: they were called buccaneers, highwaymen—and filibusterers who, in the words of the New York Herald, said to Spain, “Your money or your life.” Their aggression too had been a form of “higher law.”

  Unfazed, Soulé predicted that no Democrat would win the 1856 nomination for president without backing the outrageous Ostend doctrine.

  JOHN O’SULLIVAN LIKED controversy. And grateful that Pierce had appointed him minister to Portugal, he began shilling for the Kansas-Nebraska bill, another Pierce administration fiasco with far-reaching and bloody results.

  Introduced in January 1854 by Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas (partly because he, as chairman of the Committee on Territories, maneuvered the building of the transcontinental railroad through his state and partly because he could promise land to white settlers), the Kansas-Nebraska bill was intended to organize territorial governments in the regions acquired by the Louisiana Purchase, which included the huge Nebraska territory and Kansas. The bill also allowed the inhabitants of the territory to hold a referendum on slavery.

  To Douglas, this referendum was a compromise measure that would squelch any fight over slavery—which he considered a nuisance anyway—by simply letting people in the territory vote slavery up or down. And a compromise it was, to a degree. By permitting slavery in the territories previously considered untouchable, the Kansas-Nebraska bill triggered a deadly controversy, for the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had prohibited all slavery in the Louisiana Territory above 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude. But in exchange for the support of Jefferson Davis and Missouri’s foulmouthed proslavery senator David Rice Atchison, along with Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, a defender of Southern rights, Douglas had agreed to include that territory in his referendum. Where slavery had once been forbidden, it could now be sanctioned by vote. But Douglas said he was appealing to a “higher and a more solemn obligation”—that of the “great fundamental principle of Democracy and free institutions which lie a
t the basis of our creed, and gives every political community the right to govern itself in obedience to the Constitution of the country.”

  And so the Pierce administration acquiesced to the naked repeal of the Missouri Compromise, but no one is quite sure why or whether, for instance, anyone bullied the president on the Sunday that several senators, including Douglas, gained entrance to the White House—no small thing, for Pierce typically refused meetings on the Sabbath. Whatever happened, the bill infuriated the North, which well understood that it threatened to make Kansas a slave state. And Secretary of State Marcy knew that the bill meant, at the very least, no more Cuban sprees; the addition of Cuba to the roster of Southern slave states would be unthinkable if Kansas was a slave state. Meanwhile, antislavery Democrats were angry enough to leave the party. “The Nebraska question,” Marcy concluded, “has sadly shattered our party in all the free states and deprived it of that strength which was needed and could have been much more profitably used for the acquisition of Cuba.” It didn’t matter, for the Pierce administration had launched the Ostend fiasco and destroyed whatever opportunity there may have been for that acquisition.

  In the North, the Nebraska bill rang the fire bell that Jefferson had ominously heard so many years before, after the Missouri Compromise, when he contemplated slavery and its extension: “this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” The National Era said the Nebraska bill would yoke the nation to a “slaveholding despotism.” And so when Charles Sumner condemned the bill as a slaveholders’ plot, Douglas retorted that Senator Sumner represented “the pure unadulterated representatives of Abolitionism, Free Soilism, and Niggerism.”

  William Seward, the passionate and savvy antislavery senator from New York, tried to outmaneuver Douglas by urging Southern Whigs to demand total repeal of the Compromise. But since the Conscience Whigs of the North deplored the bill, Southern Whigs, whose interests were now regional, felt forced to back it in opposition. Not all Southerners were happy about that, for they felt the bill would reignite the slavery issue and not to their advantage. Certainly Northerners would allege that the Southern slavocracy still wielded power, and westerners would grow more and more suspicious of Southern designs on western land. Plus, the party was in tatters anyway, and the nativist element within its ranks was growing stronger.