Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  To them, Kansans had rightly elected a proslavery body, pure and simple, and Walker should be removed. But the citizens of Kansas clearly preferred a free state; that much was clear to Stephen Douglas, who vehemently reminded Democrats that any attempt to jam a proslavery legislature down the throat of Kansans would push their party directly into the arms of the Republicans. And it would gut the entire notion of popular sovereignty. He too was livid. “By God, sir, I made Mr. James Buchanan,” he reportedly said, “and by God, sir, I will unmake him.”

  Regardless, by November 1857 the proslavery delegates had indeed drafted a constitution guaranteeing the right of private property (meaning slaves). Though scorned by one Kansas newspaper as “broken-down political hacks, demagogues, fire-eaters, perjurers, ruffians, ballot-box stuffers, and loafers,” the delegates were savvy enough to try to send the constitution, known as the Lecompton constitution, to Congress as quickly as possible—without a popular vote ratifying it—so that Kansas could be promptly admitted to the Union as a slave state.

  When moderate delegates to the convention were offended, a compromise was reached. Voters would not be allowed to vote on the constitution with or without slavery; rather they could vote on whether new slaves might be imported. That is, voters could approve the constitution with the provision for importing slaves or vote for the constitution without the provision. It was, of course, a false choice. Voters could not vote to accept or reject the proslavery constitution, which Buchanan had promised Walker they would be able to do and which cut to the heart of popular sovereignty. Moreover, there was no option for voting against slavery per se; as one Kansan noted, he could choose to take his arsenic with bread and butter or without bread and butter.

  Convinced that popular sovereignty, never mind the future of the Democratic Party, was at stake, a feisty Walker argued that Lecompton had been a swindle and that any attempt of the administration to support it would lead to more violence. (“Cuba! Cuba! (and Porto Rico, if possible) should be the countersign of your administration, and it will close in a blaze of glory,” he advised Buchanan.) Buchanan wasn’t budging, particularly since members of his cabinet, such as Secretary of the Treasury Howell Cobb and Attorney General Jeremiah Black, were in favor of Lecompton. The eminent Democrat George Bancroft begged Buchanan to avert disaster and walk away from Lecompton. Honor your pledge to Walker for free and fair elections by the people. Buchanan refused.

  Walker tendered his resignation, which Buchanan readily accepted in December, and Buchanan announced that he endorsed Lecompton. In so doing, he split the Democrats along virulent Northern and Southern lines. Unfazed, Buchanan denounced the free-staters, sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress to push it through “naked,” as he said, which meant without amendments, and he defined Kansas as much of a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.

  “The fractious cabal of fire-eaters, which has so much more power than it deserves, has made up its mind to disunion or the Lecompton Constitution,” noted George Templeton Strong in his diary. “I doubt if the North can submit to the latter.”

  Strong was right; the North could not. Though Buchanan lobbied, promising jobs, cash, building contracts, and, it was later alleged, even prostitutes to recalcitrant congressmen, with Douglas and Northern Democrats now working against him, Buchanan lost the vote in the House.

  Democrats, such as Walker, believed that popular sovereignty returned to the people a right, inalienable, to choose how they wanted to live, a choice not administered by banks or factory owners or operatives in Washington (though it may have been) but a choice founded on the very principle of democracy. This too was the position of Stephen Douglas, who irreparably broke with Buchanan, whom he never much liked. In Congress, the Republicans challenging Buchanan believed more in the elimination of slavery than in popular sovereignty, for theirs was moral passion based on their sense of human dignity, and this was to them the higher law. But here popular sovereignty would have worked; had all eligible Kansans been able to choose, they would have voted against slavery.

  Harder to understand are the Southern intransigents such as the prominent publisher James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow, a literary and idealistic man devoted to all things Southern who deplored what he considered the South’s economic backwardness. He believed slavery to be good for the economy—and good for the slave. The DeBows of the time were aggrieved and outraged and proud, all the more so because they regarded themselves as occupying a minority position—and, perhaps, they knew that slavery and its perpetuation was a morally untenable one. Popular sovereignty portended the elimination of slavery, and they could not give it up even if that meant abandoning their democratic principles. The former filibusterer from Mississippi, Congressman John Quitman, threatened secession if Kansas were to become a free state. “I am sick to death of compromises,” he’d said, “and will not bend an inch.”

  Then there were men such as the wizened Georgian Alexander Hamilton Stephens, a former Whig and firm believer in what he considered the higher law of slavery; he’d backed the Lecompton constitution even though he knew it to be a fraud. This son of a Georgia schoolteacher was a scholarly, often dyspeptic, and moralistic man who as a frail youth, born in 1812, was initially headed for the ministry. Studying law instead, he joined the Whigs in 1834, and by 1843, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. He greatly admired Clay, Webster, and Edmund Burke, and though he was a powerful leader and deft parliamentarian, he was rebuffed by fellow Southerners when he coauthored a resolution insisting the war with Mexico not be waged over slavery. Called a traitor to the South, Stephens was subsequently in a brawl with a fellow Georgian, who slashed him with a knife.

  In 1854, as floor manager in the House, Stephens helped push through the Kansas-Nebraska bill but, breaking with Douglas, he fought hard for Lecompton, almost as if he had to prove his loyalty to the South. Caught between Southern extremists and antislavery Republicans, or so he felt, at the height of his career, in 1859, Stephens retired from Congress in disgust, gloomily telling a friend, “When I am on one of two trains coming in opposite directions on a single track, both engines at high speed, and both engineers drunk, I get off at the first station.”

  Whigs turned Republican such as William Seward and even Horace Greeley temporarily allied themselves with Stephen Douglas; these were Free Soil, antislavery Northern men who had reviled the Little Giant for his role in passing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. At present their goals were the same even if their purposes differed. Douglas argued for popular sovereignty, the rest against slavery. The fire-eaters and the Buchanan administration remained stubbornly unmovable, and Congress was deadlocked.

  William English, Democrat of Indiana, proposed another referendum: Kansans could vote on whether or not they would accept or reject the Lecompton constitution. If they approved Lecompton and slavery, they would be granted statehood immediately as well as a federal land grant (reduced from the initial request of twenty-three million acres to four million). This was a shabby bribe of no real consequence, for Congress would also give the same amount of land to Minnesota when it joined the Union. But the bribe satisfied the Democrats.

  However, if Kansans voted against Lecompton and slavery, they could not apply for statehood again until the population reached 93,000.

  All parties accepted the expedient proposal except Stephen Douglas, who denounced the compromise as unfair. He stood his ground for democracy.

  The Senate and House passed the English bill. In August the people of Kansas overwhelmingly voted to reject Lecompton.

  Kansas remained a territory until 1861, when it entered the Union with an antislavery constitution.

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  SOVEREIGNTY

  The date had been set: September 1, 1858. The city braced itself. When the day finally came, it was clear and crisp, technically still summer, and in the morning there was a prayer of thanks offered within the lovely neo-Gothic Trinity Church in lower Manhattan, where worshippers entered through the large bronze
doors and squeezed into the pews. The bells rang over and over, and a procession of more than fifteen thousand men and women marched the four miles from the Battery to Fifth Avenue and the Crystal Palace at 42nd Street to listen to the lawyer David Dudley Field praise his brother Cyrus—although anyone standing in the back of the giant hall could barely hear him. Still, many of them knew by heart what he was saying: how a series of steps and missteps, of snapped wires and of reconfigurations, of financing and finagling and the shouldering of ridicule finally led to this grand moment, this wonderful celebration of the laying of the transatlantic cable.

  For barely a month before, on the twenty-ninth of July, two large ships, one American and one British, each carrying half the amount of cable needed to cross the Atlantic, had met at the ocean’s midpoint. Field explained to those who could hear him what had happened next. “The end of the cable which the U.S.S. Niagara bore was carried to the Agamemnon and there spliced to the end of hers,” he told his happy audience. “It was then lowered into the sea, and the ships moved, each towards its own country, at first creeping slowly till the cable had sunk far down, and then faster, to a speed of five or six miles an hour.”

  This moment was a dream come true for Cyrus Field, who had made so much money in the paper business that he was able to realize his ambition, that of laying a cable across the Atlantic and connecting the United States to Great Britain. And now, after several failed attempts, it had actually happened, and his name was written in bold letters on huge signs and placed next to those of Benjamin Franklin and Robert Fulton, Samuel Morse and Eli Whitney: American geniuses, all of them. In upstate New York, Senator William Henry Seward attended a rally in his hometown of Auburn, where he said that from now on the country would cry, “American Mind, American Opinions, American Systems, shall rule throughout the earth,” and that he could see “despotic systems of oppression and slavery, of infidelity and paganism, in the progress of thick coming centuries, disappearing, and mankind in all nations, becoming all free.” The “Age of Progress,” proclaimed the signs on the lampposts in New York City. The papers were jubilant, reporting that “two continents have been penetrated to their remotest extremities by an electric thrill . . . ‘THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH CABLE HAS BEEN LAID!’ ” Messages between Ireland and Newfoundland pulsed back and forth. “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth, peace, good will to men,” Queen Victoria congratulated President Buchanan, who replied with sangfroid that this feat was more glorious—and far more useful—than any success on the field of battle.

  Extra ferryboats were shuttling the crowds to Manhattan from Brooklyn, and the trains from New Jersey and Long Island were crammed. Ships and scows in the harbor raised colorful flags, and the Stars and Stripes flapped from windows of the telegraph offices on Wall Street. After the sun set, a torchlight parade lit up Broadway as far as the eye could see, and candles and colored lanterns cast a saffron glow along the crooked streets downtown. A wagon drawn by several horses carried a section of the magical cable; in fact, sections of the surplus cable had been selling for as much as $360 a mile—that is, before Charles Tiffany purchased the entire leftover stock to cut into four-inch pieces. Every American could have a bit of it, for a price. Capped with a brass ferrule, the cable came with a certificate of authenticity signed by Field himself; soon you could buy watch fobs and earrings made from the cable or a brass snuff-box with a segment of the cable inserted into the lid, which was engraved with the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack.

  A candle glowed from every window of Barnum’s Museum, and you could hear the kettle drums beating from inside, where a band played long into the night. The city had been celebrating since the middle of August, when cannon were booming every day, it seemed, and extra editions of newspapers sold on every corner. There were extra broadsides, extra policemen, and more Roman candles than ever. The fireworks set the cupola of City Hall ablaze and nearly burned the place to the ground, the statue of Justice fell to the flames, and George Templeton Strong noted the furor in his sidelong way: “Yesterday’s Herald said that the cable (or perhaps Cyrus W. Field, uncertain which) is undoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelation with one foot on sea and one foot on land, proclaiming Time is no longer.”

  New York wasn’t the only city wrapping itself in flags and fire. In San Francisco, 120 little girls, representing each state, each territory, and the many European nations, wore white dresses trimmed with blue ribbons and rode through the streets in vans. They were followed by the Knickerbocker Fire Company and then the fire companies from Stockton, Sacramento, and Solana. A wagon outfitted to resemble a small boat hauled a coiled rope of cable on its ersatz deck, and a team of ten oxen hauled another wagon made to look like one of the prairie schooners that conveyed emigrants to Kansas. On its side was a banner. “Give us a Pacific Railroad,” it said. “Don’t wait for the Wagon.”

  “There is no such thing as impossible now,” declared the Savannah Morning News.

  Yet the cruel fact was that the telegraphic signal had been in the last few days growing fainter and fainter. The cable’s insulation was giving way under the pressure of voltages far too high. Soon it was almost impossible to hear any messages, and not three weeks later, on September 18, there was no sound at all.

  Charles Tiffany decided to sell his leftover cable souvenirs to a Vermont farmer.

  THE THIRTY-TWO STATES in the Union certainly weren’t united, at least not about matters of tariffs or internal improvements or immigration or Pacific railroads or religion. And in addition to Kansas and Nebraska and slavery, there was the territory of Utah to contend with.

  This was the territory increasingly settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as Mormons, which had been founded by a charismatic young man from upstate New York. Joseph Smith claimed to have discovered golden plates on a hillside near Palmyra, New York, to which he’d been directed by an angel calling himself Moroni. In 1830 he translated and published a religious text, the Book of Mormon, which purportedly the prophet Mormon had transcribed in the fourth century from the recoded tales of the prophets themselves.

  Smith had been for a very long time subject to visions of brightness and glory so common in upstate New York that the area was dubbed “burned-over.” The term referred to the religious revivals in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys. In camp meetings William Miller had preached that the Second Coming (the Advent) would occur in the spring of 1843 and that those who followed him, the Millerites, who soon numbered one million people, would ascend to heaven a year later. In Adams, New York, Charles Grandison Finney, after seeing a brilliant light in his office, had undergone a conversion to what was called New School Presbyterianism. As a revivalist Finney spoke emotionally about the individual’s moral responsibility and one’s ability to distinguish between good and evil. In Oneida, John Humphrey Noyes founded a utopian community, based on free love, in 1848. Of course there were also the cities Hydesville and Rochester, where the Fox sisters had first heard those spirit rappings, and Seneca Falls, where dedication to a different kind of conviction was yielding controversial results: Amelia Jenks Bloomer had published the temperance and women’s rights paper The Lily from Seneca Falls in 1849, and the next year she was showing a new outfit for women, a short skirt worn over trousers and called “bloomers,” which would revolutionize women’s clothing.

  Joseph Smith too sprang from burned-over soil and the revivals that promised direct revelation and a new Kingdom of God on earth. The prophet Mormon was telling Smith and his followers that Christ would come to America, that Christ was God, and that the prophet Nephi had migrated to the Americas in 600 B.C. with his light-skinned Nephites and the darker Lamanites. Since Native Americans were also descended from the original prophets, the Mormons were to bring the Book to them too.

  Having organized the Church of Christ of Latter-day Saints and having named himself its main prophet and leader, Smith said he’d been instructed to build a New Jerusalem in the beckoning We
st and among the Indian tribes who dwelled there. After another revelation, Smith rounded up his worshippers—he’d inspired a number of disciples—and left New York for Ohio. In Kirtland, now a suburb of Cleveland, Smith and his Latter-day Saints built a church, trained apostles, and dispatched missionaries abroad. He also organized a central bank, the Kirtland Safety Society, which intended to issue its own currency.

  Such religious and economic apostasy, to say nothing of their reputed abolitionism, their tolerance of Native Americans, and their growing population—they numbered about ten thousand, a large voting bloc—infuriated the local citizenry, who wanted to be rid of this strange group of people in their midst, people who in addition did not drink or smoke. There were skirmishes, there was violence, Mormons were killed, Smith was tarred and feathered and nearly castrated.

  Mormons had also settled in Jackson County, Missouri, and near Independence, where Smith, taking no chances, had organized a secret militia, the Sons of Dan, or Danites, or, as they were popularly called, the “Destroying Angels.” Although Mormons later denied their existence, it seems that these guerrilla bands stole from and even murdered non-Mormons. Or perhaps they were simply defending the faithful. There were accusations and assassinations on both sides. One group of irate Missourians, for instance, rode into a Mormon farming community and killed at least seventeen Mormon men and young boys. By 1838, Lilburn W. Boggs, the governor of Missouri, was fed up, and he ordered the Mormons out of Missouri. If they stayed, they faced execution because, as Boggs declared, “They instituted among themselves a government of their own, independent of and in opposition to the government of this state.”

  Arrested and detained, Smith managed to bribe his way out of jail and catch up with his peripatetic followers, led by a man named Brigham Young. The group built a new church in Commerce, Illinois, which Smith renamed Nauvoo the Beautiful, and in 1840, the more lenient Illinois state legislature granted the Mormons a liberal charter for the new city.