Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  As for the Democrats, they too were splitting, with many Northerners preferring to leave the slavery issue alone since they believed white migrants would populate the West and (they hoped) render the issue of slavery moot. Free labor for free men. Keep the Free Soil status quo. Believing as he did in the manifest perpetuation and extension of the Union, O’Sullivan argued that “the old policy of congressional intervention in this matter of slavery in new Territories ought to and must be abandoned, no sane and candid man who is not a disunionist for the sake of abolitionism can now deny. Establish that principle, and there is clearly and at once an end of the Union. The non-intervention principle is the only alternative.” Let Kansans decide their future for themselves. O’Sullivan reasoned that the cold, raw, dry climate of Kansas and Nebraska wouldn’t support slavery anyway. Better to focus instead on an annexed Cuba, where slavery would be profitable. So the extension of slavery didn’t really bother O’Sullivan; nor did, evidently, the fact of slavery itself.

  In this he was not alone. To him and to Douglas, it was the “abolition party” stirring up another “political tornado of fanaticism” that made for all the trouble.

  Other Democrats violently disagreed. Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton, no abolitionist but a longtime opponent of the extension of slavery, condemned the bill, and the lifelong Democrat and influential editor William Cullen Bryant called it disgraceful. The prescient George Bancroft, also a Democrat, told Secretary of State Marcy that “this cruel attempt to conquer Kansas into slavery is the worst thing ever projected in our history. Pierce will be handed over to contempt; for posterity will find for him no apology but in the feebleness of his intellect.” And two antislavery men from Ohio, Salmon Chase and the evangelical Joshua Giddings, composed an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States,” which ran in the National Era. It called the Kansas-Nebraska bill a “gross violation of a sacred pledge [the Missouri Compromise].”

  The bill passed in May 1854 with Pierce’s blessing. He signed it into law on the thirtieth of that month.

  EXPECTING A FIGHT, the energetic Stephen Douglas went home to Illinois to defend the bill to his constituents. In Chicago in the fall of 1854, the Little Giant was shouted down by a furious crowd at North Market Hall. Never a retiring man, Douglas lost his temper, and after midnight finally burst out, before stalking off the stage, “It is now Sunday morning; I’ll go to church and you may go to hell!”

  What the intemperate Douglas had not yet grasped was that the Kansas-Nebraska Act had pushed settlers—indeed, the entire country—into polarized and aggressive positions, each side insulted, stigmatized, and experiencing the kind of paranoia that leads, almost inevitably, to the rifle and the bowie knife. And what gave form and then meaning to their outbursts was the irrepressible issue of slavery. Abraham Lincoln understood this. And he understood the stakes.

  In Illinois, most people knew or would soon know about Lincoln’s background, which wholly personified the twice-told American tale of the self-made man. This story, in fact, lay at the moral heart of Lincoln’s political philosophy. For to him, “self-made” meant the “right to rise” in this world, to achieve or make something from nothing, and to keep and enjoy the fruits of one’s labor. Born in 1809 into poverty, his mother dead of the “milk sickness” when he was nine, and the son of a restless father, young Abe Lincoln, six foot four in stocking feet, had read at night by the fire, etched out his thoughts on the back of a shovel, and in his early years worked as a farmer, rail-splitter, surveyor, ferryman, postmaster, and storekeeper, whatever he could, to better himself. By the age of twenty-eight he was an avid student of Blackstone’s Commentaries and Aesop’s Fables as well as a skillful lawyer and a formidable Whig leader in the Illinois House of Representatives.

  Now forty-four years of age, Lincoln had been out of politics for five years, working diligently and successfully at his law practice. But the Kansas-Nebraska Act seemed to galvanize him—he was thunderstruck and stunned, he said—and with Senator Stephen Douglas back on the Illinois stump defending his unpopular position, Lincoln took to the road. In fact, the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 actually began in the fall of 1854, with the issues of slavery, compromise, racism, and the Declaration of Independence passed back and forth by each orator in a kind of relay race of rhetoric. Douglas’s speeches had been articulate, persuasive, and fluent even if he often boiled with indignation and hurled the occasional sarcastic epithet, particularly about abolitionists, for which he became known. Lincoln too was articulate, persuasive, and down-home. His pants were often too short, his humor often of the barnyard and the field; yet he was logical, well prepared, often mesmerizing. With perfectly pitched self-confidence and an eye to the ballot box, he ratcheted up the argument. Standing very tall in his broadcloth coat, he was an eloquent Ichabod Crane on a backwoods stump, wielding a moral cudgel.

  On September 26 and then again on October 4, at an Illinois State Fair brimming with pigs and pies, the former one-term congressman delivered by candlelight a three-hour address that’s rightly considered his first major speech. In a high, reedy voice, Lincoln spoke from a written text and immediately claimed that he had no intention of questioning the existing state of slavery, just its extension, and he did so by adverting to the basic right of slavery, which he said he considered a monstrous injustice, albeit constitutional. “When the white man governs himself that is self-government,” Lincoln explained; “but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal;’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Yet Lincoln judiciously distinguished himself from the abolitionists. He adhered to the laws that allowed slavery and, moreover, he would not know how to rid the country of the institution anyway. But, as he insisted, the political will of the nation, “a universal feeling, whether well- or ill-founded,” could and should not be disregarded. Laws are made by people. Whether well or ill founded, they are the laws. Lincoln was walking a fine line, of course, between moral truths and the law. And he knew it.

  For the general sentiment in antebellum America did not list toward abolition, nor in fact did Lincoln. He did not advocate immediate emancipation (a constitutional impossibility anyway) or political or social equality with blacks. As Frederick Douglass later declared, “viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent.” But from his own ground—moral indignation at the defeat of Clay’s compromise—he was plain-spoken, direct, pragmatic, and careful. Arguing against the extension of slavery, he agreed that the Nebraska territory should be available for free white people. “Slave States are places for poor white people to remove FROM; not to remove TO. New free states are the places for poor people to go to and better their condition.” This brand of freedom—the freedom to better one’s (white) condition—lay at the heart of his argument. It was also freedom, he averred, as defined in the Declaration of Independence. Thus Lincoln defined freedom for white people as a basic right. Yet he also declared that freedom should exist for black people too as a moral right. Regarding humans as property is a flat contradiction, impossible, unjust, absurd. This he could not say quite as directly, but he did parse the notion of compromise on which, as he explained, the nation was founded. That compromise had to do with slavery—slavery was necessary, he quickly reasoned, because it already existed, but not as a right and certainly not a moral right. “Necessity drove them [the fathers of the republic] so far, and farther, they would not go.” A compromise, then, occurs when both sides yield something because they have to; that was true of the Constitution, the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850. And underlying these compromises was a faith in moral progress—that is, his conviction that slavery would eventually perish from the globe.

  Until then, there must be compromise. “Ask us not to repeal,
for nothing, what you paid for in the first instance.” It was Lincoln the rational lawyer now speaking. “If you wish for a thing again, pay again. That is the principle of the compromises of ’50, if indeed they had any principles beyond their specific terms—It was the system of equivalents.” But this was only half the story. To repeal the Missouri Compromise would imperil the country. “Is it not probable that the contest will come to blows, and bloodshed?” Lincoln prophetically asked. “And if this fight would begin, is it likely to take a very peaceful, Union-saving turn? Will not the first drop of blood so shed, be the real knell of the Union?” The lawyer turned apocalyptic soothsayer seemed to know the answer.

  “For who after this will ever trust in a national compromise?” he wanted to know.

  “The spirit of mutual concession—that spirit which first gave us the constitution, and which has thrice saved the Union—we shall have strangled and cast from us forever. And what shall we have in lieu of it? The South flushed with triumph and tempted to excesses; the North, betrayed, as they believe, brooding on wrong and burning for revenge. One side will provoke; the other resent. This one will taunt, the other defy; one aggresses, the other retaliates.”

  Only a middle ground would save the nation, but the center would not hold.

  SOOTHSAYERS WITH RATIONAL gifts were few in number. More prevalent were the hotheads who dreamed of freedom, who equated filibustering expeditions with freedom, or for whom freedom came, as it did in California, in the form of golden nuggets; often they saw themselves as freedom fighters in the mold of Europe’s revolutionary heroes, men such as Italy’s Giuseppe Mazzini and Hungary’s Louis Kossuth. Discounting his own absolutist tendencies, Melville’s Captain Ahab had dreamed of a world without evil, and Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, wearing her scarlet letter, had dreamed of freedom for women. Margaret Fuller told women they could be sea captains, if they would—even before Seneca Falls, when women declared and demanded and petitioned for their civil rights. As slaves, William Parker and Frederick Douglass knew the meaning of freedom, and they knew it could not be won without a fight.

  In Boston, on the evening of May 26, 1854, a cadre of black and white men tried to spring the jailed fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, and whisk him to freedom. The police resisted with swords and billy clubs, and the rescuers, also armed, fired at least two shots. The men guarding Burns may have fired as well. A twenty-four-year-old teamster, come to help the police, was killed that night, and the U.S. marshal in Boston called for federal troops.

  The next day, vacillating antislavery people waffled no more. “We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs,” said Amos Lawrence, a wealthy textile manufacturer, “& waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” Yet less than a week later, with thousands of troops on horseback patrolling the city’s cobblestones and someone hanging a small coffin, the word “Liberty” painted on it, from State Street, Anthony Burns, escorted by a martial entourage—the soldiers’ bayonets fixed, their swords drawn—was taken to the Boston wharf, where the U.S. cutter Morris blankly waited to take him back south.

  In Concord, Massachusetts, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wife covered the front gate of the Emerson home with black bunting, and the otherwise reclusive Henry David Thoreau, who was anxiously awaiting the publication of Walden, went to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting on July 4 in Framingham to protest. The picnic area was crowded with over six hundred people despite the scorching heat. The platform was decorated with two white flags labeled “Kansas” and “Nebraska.” The renowned editor of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison, burned a copy of the Fugitive Slave Act, but when the bespectacled and bald-headed newspaperman torched the Constitution, some members of the audience jeered while others, still louder, cheered. Famously, Garrison denounced the founding document as a “covenant with death and an agreement with hell.” As his copy wrinkled in flames, he added, “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!”

  Lank, lean, and formidably eloquent, the former slave Sojourner Truth took to the platform to remind her audience, “The white people owed the colored race a big debt, and if they paid it all back, they wouldn’t have anything left for seed. All they could do was to repent, and have the debt forgiven them.” Then Thoreau delivered what Horace Greeley called a “higher-law speech.” The violation of the moral law, said Thoreau, makes for defiance: “Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principle?” the author asked. “ . . . My thoughts are murder to the State, and involuntarily go plotting against her.”

  IN 1854, AT the age of twenty-two, the Scottish-born blowhard James Redpath traveled to the South, partly on foot and partly by railroad and steamer. Redpath had already left Michigan, where his immigrant family had settled, and gone to New York, where he had found work with Greeley’s Tribune, but peripatetic and exuberant, he needed to see slavery with his own eyes. In particular he wished to hear what the slaves said about their own condition.

  From Virginia and Georgia and North Carolina, Redpath dispatched a series of graphic antislavery letters to abolitionist newspapers. And during his travels, convinced that rational arguments could never appeal to the Southerner, who was obliged to believe his or her system was right—that wrong was actually right, as their churches told them—Redpath decided that the abolitionist’s duty was to appeal to the slaveholder’s fear. “Let us teach, urge, encourage insurrections,” he wrote, “and the South will soon abandon her haughty attitude of aggression. Then it will be time to advocate schemes of compensation; then it will be time to ascertain whether or not the Constitution gives us the power to abolish slavery everywhere.”

  Though readying himself for the insurrection soon to be promised by John Brown, Redpath knew that no slave insurrection was imminent, not in the South anyway, and he wanted to go where the action was. A romantic individualist, young and idealistic, itching for a fight and buoyed by the spirit of reform in the air, he headed to Missouri, which, as one scholar noted, was a place for young men determined to make history, not watch it from afar. In St. Louis, he joined the staff of the Daily Missouri Democrat in the midst of what amounted to a civil war, which he later admitted he’d wanted to foment all along.

  In March 1855, just after the Ostend Manifesto was bruited in the press as a ridiculous attempt to extend slavery, heavily armed Missourians, or “border ruffians” as they were called, crossed from Missouri into Kansas to fight the antislavery homesteaders being sent to the territory by the New England emigrant aid societies. Do-good settlers with a Bible in one hand and a rifle in the other, sneered Stephen Douglas. Douglas wasn’t entirely wrong. Through organizations such as the well-financed Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, initially chartered to colonize the West in order to make money, it wasn’t long before these Yankee land-speculating companies were labeled Free Soil usurpers come to rob Missouri folk. Besides, what were Yankees anyway, if not abolitionists? Countered the Yankees, with equal hyperbole, what were Missourians but backwoods slave owners?

  Cold, hungry, and beleaguered, many of the emigrants from the East crossing into Kansas soon turned their wagons around to go back. But with men such as David Atchison inciting Missourians “to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district,” gritty settlers continued to flood the territory. Hostile and wary, they nonetheless aimed to make the place their home. And many of them were abolitionists who knew how much hostility they faced. For to Missourians, if Kansas became a free state, Missouri would be bound by free states to its west as well as to its north and its east. “I say let the Indians have it [Nebraska] forever,” fumed Missouri state senator Claiborne Fox Jackson. “They are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damned sight.”

  After hundreds of Missourians—“full of whiskey and resentment,” said one eminent historian, succumbing to the name-calling of both sides—poured into Kansas for the day in order to vote, a proslavery majority swiftly elected a proslavery legislature. (The Kans
as-Nebraska Act had not stipulated residency requirements for voters.) In turn, the new legislature passed the so-called Bogus Laws forbidding antislavery talk of any kind. They also mandated ten years’ hard labor, if not the death penalty, to anyone caught helping fugitive slaves. When free-staters countered by setting up their own legislature in Topeka, the violence escalated. “The territory was covered with guerillas, gangs of highwaymen, horse-thieves, and house-breakers from Missouri, Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina,” Redpath reported.

  In May 1856, a gang of riled-up proslavery men mobbed the Free Soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, burned the hotel, sacked the governor’s house, and demolished two antislavery newspaper offices. In retaliation, the abolitionist crusader John Brown rounded up two of his sons—he had sired twenty children—along with his son-in-law and two other men and rode out to Pottawatomie County where they dragged five settlers from their cabins at midnight and hacked them with cavalry broadswords. Brown evidently did not participate in the attack, except to shoot an unconscious man to make sure he was dead.

  In the Senate chamber that same May, Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner inveighed for two days against the sacking of Lawrence, verbally drubbing colleagues such as South Carolina’s Andrew Butler, a man with chalk white hair and genteel manners. (Sumner said Butler had chosen a mistress, that harlot slavery, to cherish and adore, and belittled Butler as Stephen Douglas’s Sancho Panza.) Two days later, on May 22, Senator Butler’s less dignified protégé, Congressman Preston Brooks, avenged the honor of his slandered cousin and their state when he entered the Senate chamber, sauntered over to the wooden desk where Sumner sat writing, and whacked him senseless with a gutta-percha cane while some of his colleagues egged him on. It took Sumner more than three years to recover and return to the Senate, and emotionally he never recovered at all.