Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  Mindful of his political future, Seward directed the debate about Cuba away from the issue of slavery. Wouldn’t the government incur a huge fiscal debt if the Cuban appropriations bill was passed, he wanted to know? He also attempted to undermine Buchanan by playing to the Senate’s sense of its autonomy. Did the question of Cuba and its possible statehood even fall under executive jurisdiction? Wasn’t the executive wading into congressional waters?

  Yet to Seward the most important issue was, in fact, slavery: “The Senate is the propagandist of slave labor,” he cried in frustration. Benjamin Wade, Republican senator from Ohio, was even more outspoken. Rising to his feet, Wade summarized the discussion in the ugly invective of the day. “Shall we give niggers to the niggerless,” he asked, “or land to the landless?”

  Audacious, aggressive, and often eloquent, Robert Toombs of Georgia stood up, his long black hair streaked with gray. In his youth, he had studied for a brief time at Franklin College in Athens (now the University of Georgia), but at heart he was a gambler who preferred cards to books. And though he never earned a degree, he’d also been enrolled at Union College in Schenectady, New York, where Seward had studied. An intelligent and often short-tempered man who had been teased as a runt when a boy, Toombs had been elected to the House of Representatives four times. Now a senator, he joined fellow Georgians Howell Cobb and Alexander Stephens to form part of a formidable Southern triumvirate. Loyal to Georgia and to the South, he also loved the Union and tried to prevent factionalism. He had even lectured at the Tremont Temple in Boston, where he wooed a crowd that had come to hiss him for his proslavery views. He’d pointed out that the Declaration of Independence, drafted while slavery was a fact of American life, did not emancipate anyone. Besides, as Toombs smoothly explained, African peoples were inferior to whites—and in the South, they were better treated than many whites in the North and elsewhere. “The injustice and despotism of England toward Ireland has produced more separation of Irish families and sundered more domestic ties within the last ten years than African slavery has effected since its introduction into the United States,” Toombs reminded a Boston audience, which likely included a large number of Irish immigrants.

  He had spoken in Boston, yes, but he had no use for the likes of Sumner, whose brutal caning he had approved of. And Toombs hated William Seward. “He may go tell foolish old men and spinsters and old maids in New York that he has done a thriving business in freeing negroes,” Toombs jeered, “but he has never freed one. He has never sacrificed one acre of land to liberty—not one inch—and he never will. These are not the people to do it.”

  Personal insults notwithstanding, Democratic politicians knew that the issue of Cuba might unify the Democratic Party in the upcoming presidential election of 1860 by bringing together North and South on a single, popular issue; it could revive disheartened Democrats in the wake of the acrimonious Lecompton debates; it might even mollify Southern fire-eaters, who were already speaking, yet again, of secession. Surely a foreign war, if it came to that, would prevent the Union from breaking apart. But Toombs was right that the Republicans wanted to replace the Cuba bill with a homestead bill as a delaying tactic, and as a result, both came to naught. “The social intercourse between North and South, or rather between Dems. and Reps.,” Toombs told Alexander Stephens, “seems almost to have ceased and all sides seem sullen and ill-natured.”

  Toombs was not finished. He did not denounce Douglas, and he very much wanted to unite the Democrats, who were falling asunder. “If you will stand with me,” Toombs beseeched the Democrats of Georgia, “we shall conquer faction in North and South, and shall save the country from the curse of being ruled by the combination now calling itself the opposition. We shall leave the country to our children as we found it—united, strong, prosperous and happy.”

  And enslaved.

  (6)

  REVOLUTIONS NEVER GO BACKWARD

  Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man?” shouted William Lloyd Garrison.

  “A man! a man!” five hundred voices yelled back.

  The mostly white audience that had gathered at the large building covered in salt-weathered shingles wasn’t referring to Abraham Lincoln or Stephen Douglas but to that other Douglass, the one who spelled his name differently from the Illinois senator’s, the handsome black man with the large head who had just finished speaking. The throng of antislavery enthusiasts had come to Nantucket Island for the annual convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.

  That was in the summer of 1841, when Frederick Douglass was still in his twenties and lived in the whaling port of New Bedford with his wife and family. Virtually unknown and shaking with nervousness, he spoke with such feeling of his life as a slave that he held the audience and the bespectacled William Lloyd Garrison spellbound. Afterward, John A. Collins, the executive director of the Anti-Slavery Society, asked Douglass to work for the group as a lecturer. Douglass consented and was such an enormous stump success that Yankee naysayers doubted whether the man could have really been a slave. “Better have a little of the plantation manner of speech than not,” one man advised Douglass, “ ’tis not best that you seem too learned.”

  Four years later, in the spring of 1845, Douglass published a stirring account of how he, Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, born a slave in Talbot County, Maryland, to a black mother and a white man whom he had never known, had escaped from bondage to remake himself as Frederick Douglass, man of freedom and conviction. Told with a verbal dexterity unparalleled except, perhaps, by the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was an international sensation. Ironically, however, it exposed Douglass to the threat of recapture. He took off for England, where his lectures helped him earn enough money to purchase his freedom on his return.

  Settling in the abolition-minded Rochester, New York, in 1847, within the year Douglass was speaking at the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls. He also started his own newspaper, The North Star (later renamed Frederick Douglass’ Paper), with its masthead announcing “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren.” But he broke with Garrison when in 1854 Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, calling it a pact made with the devil. For Garrison shunned violence. Not Douglass. He neither spurned the Constitution nor rejected violence as a means of securing liberty, though he preferred a politics of intervention.

  Disillusioned with the Republican Party, which, as he said, “refuses to oppose slavery where it is, and opposes it only where it is not,” Douglass joined with the philanthropist Gerrit Smith and the rump of the Liberty Party (which later merged with the Radical Abolition Party). With its headquarters near Rochester, the Liberty Party had originally been formed in 1840 and looked to U.S. history for its precedents and found in men such as John Quincy Adams (with whom Smith had corresponded) an argument for abolition. Adams had said, for instance, that if the Constitution granted Congress and the president the right to exercise war powers as they saw fit, they could then abolish slavery if they defined slavery as a state of war. And Gerrit Smith believed it was a state of war.

  With the success of his book, his newspaper, and with his sure command of himself, Douglass was soon the most famous ex-slave in America. And an amazing orator, fearless and proud. “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?” Douglass trenchantly asked in 1852. “To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

  The other Douglas, the senator from Illinois, had invoked Frederick Douglass’s name t
o manipulate his audience during his debates with Lincoln. “Why, they brought Fred Douglass to Freeport when I was addressing a meeting there in a carriage driven by a white owner, the negro sitting inside with the white lady and her daughter,” the Little Giant sniped. “Shame,” replied the Jonesboro audience. They knew what Douglas meant: do you really think your wife and child ought to ride in a carriage with a black man, while you are reduced to driving the carriage? If so, vote for Lincoln.

  OPPRESSION MAKES A wise man mad, Frederick Douglass explained—mad enough to dispense with reason, with argument, and believe that only violence would end the oppression. “We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake,” he said. A storm, a whirlwind, an earthquake: one of Douglass’s most devoted subscribers, a white man, some say mad, wanted more than anything to rain an apocalypse down on slavery. The abolitionist and freedom fighter who hadn’t yet begun to fight with swords and guns—though he would before long—was named John Brown.

  Possessed like Melville’s Ahab with one besetting idea, the elimination of slavery, John Brown glowed with “that religious elevation,” an acquaintance recalled, “which is itself a kind of refinement,—the quality one may see expressed in many a venerable Quaker face at yearly meeting.” When speaking of Brown, the Yankee abolitionist Wendell Phillips called him “a strange, resolute, repulsive, iron-willed, inexorable old man. He stands like a solitary rock in a more mobile society, a fiery nature, and a cold temper, and a cool head,—a volcano beneath a covering of snow.”

  Eloquent and shrewd, he had already been lionized far in excess of his dubious accomplishments, which included a so-called battle at Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1856 against proslavery men from Missouri that resulted in the town’s being burned to the ground and the death of one of his sons. Brown was undaunted; he was a Puritan of the old school. Just under six feet tall, with the lines etched on his face making him look hard and sculptural, he would be compared to Oliver Cromwell and Jesus Christ. To Henry David Thoreau, Brown was “a transcendentalist above all.”

  Perhaps so. He certainly adhered to higher laws. A longtime abolitionist who had presumably vowed to fight slavery after the murder of the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy eighteen years earlier, in 1855 Brown joined five of his sons in what became known as Bleeding Kansas. It was he who stood up at a public meeting, early on, and declared the Negro the equal of any white person there. But according to one observer, he didn’t much like discussion. “Talk is a national institution,” Brown reportedly said, “but it does no good for the slave.” Instead, border ruffians in Kansas would learn to fear him. As one supporter noted, Old Brown “swallows a Missourian whole, and says grace after the meal”; that was the kind of accolade abolitionists accorded “Weird John Brown” (as Melville would call him). His hatred of slavery was hard, deep, bloody, and unmerciful.

  When Abraham Lincoln’s secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay, in later years belittled Brown’s speech as coarse, Brown’s admirers complained. There were by then many champions of Brown’s prose, his mission, his dedication to a righteous cause. These same enthusiasts had turned a blind eye to Brown’s role in the 1857 massacre near Pottawatomie Creek, when five proslavery settlers were dragged out of their homes around midnight and butchered with broadswords. “Lynch-law is terrible always,” rationalized a supporter; “but Kansas was the seat of guerilla warfare, and this was its sternest phase.” Other people, less enamored of Brown, called him a madman, a fanatic, a rabble-rouser, and an idiot.

  Born in Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, John Brown was a self-taught antislavery evangelist who had been a tanner, a postmaster, a farmer, a shepherd, a successful wool merchant, an unsuccessful wool merchant, and after Lovejoy’s death an abolitionist who talked easily and with passion of the cause, which even at this early date included an armed force acting in the heart of the South. Henry Highland Garnet, the black Presbyterian clergyman who supported black emigration, and Jermain Wesley Loguen, the black clergyman in Syracuse who claimed to have helped usher 1,500 slaves to freedom, both lowered their voice when they mentioned Brown, afraid they would be overheard. They suggested Douglass meet him. Brown was living with his family in an unostentatious wooden house on a back street in Springfield, Massachusetts. When Douglass arrived in 1848, he noticed that the inside of the house was as plain as its outside: nothing pretentious or fancy. As Douglass later recalled, there was nothing pretentious or fancy about Brown either. He was “lean, strong, and sinewy, of the best New England mould, built for times of trouble, fitted to grapple with the flintiest hardships.” Douglass ate with the Browns: beef soup, cabbage, and potatoes, all served on an unvarnished pine table.

  “Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom,” Douglass remembered Brown as saying. “Even if the worst came, he could but be killed; and he had no better use for his life than to lay it down in the cause of the slave.” The next year, 1849, Brown relocated his family to North Elba, near Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains of New York on the land (known as Timbucto) that Gerrit Smith had given to the black community. Brown hoped to help make Timbucto a self-sustaining black settlement. But the deteriorating situation in Kansas was a magnet for Brown, who followed his sons there in 1855, supposedly to homestead. The call to action, to right the country’s wrongs, and to eradicate slavery all beckoned. After the Pottawatomie massacre in 1856—likely Douglass knew of it—Brown confided to Douglass that he intended to open a corridor through Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York to enable slaves to flee to Canada. It would be a corridor not unlike that of the Underground Railroad but more militant; squadrons of armed men, posted five miles apart, would guard the route. The guards would subsist on the land, avoid violence except in self-defense, and raid the slaveholders’ so-called property, thus freeing the slaves.

  Brown also dreamed of a separate black state in the Allegheny Mountains, a country within a country (not unlike Brigham Young’s). As recalled by Douglass, however, the plan was shapeless. During his stay at the Douglass home in Rochester in 1858, Brown composed the constitution for the new state using a piece of board for a desk. He gave Douglass a copy of the “Provisional Constitution and Ordinances for the People of the United States,” which Douglass held on to for the rest of his life.

  Though Brown insisted that he pay Douglass rent, he couldn’t afford it. For months he’d been reaching out to prominent individuals in the black community such as James N. Gloucester in New York and John Jones in Chicago—and the famed Harriet Tubman. (W. E. B. DuBois said about Tubman that she was the woman who, “like some dark ghost,” guided more than three hundred fugitive slaves to freedom.) He didn’t raise as much cash as he had hoped, but several prominent men did volunteer to back him, for his effect was mesmeric: “Napoleon himself had no more blind and trusting confidence in his own destiny and resources,” said one of the men who heard Brown speak. And when Brown lectured in Concord, Massachusetts, he convinced Bronson Alcott of his courage and conviction: “I think him equal to anything he dares,” said Alcott, “the man to do the deed if it must be done, and with the martyr’s temper and purpose.” The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher said that Brown spoke bullets.

  “The Beechers of our age are only useful in proportion as they prepare the way for the John Browns,” James Redpath said. Among Brown’s converts and recruits was the radical Concord schoolteacher Franklin Sanborn, whose students included two of Alcott’s daughters and two of Henry James’s brothers. There were the abolitionist Thomas Higginson, who had recently given up his pulpit for abolition and Kansas, and the self-made financier George Luther Stearns, who had made a fortune in lead pipes. And there was the mercurial, large-hearted Gerrit Smith, on whose land the Brown family lived. The Reverend Theodore Parker, ailing from congenital tuberculosis, joined the group, as did the Byronic Samuel Gridley Howe, the founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, who, in younger days, had fought the Turks in Greece. These men—Sanborn, Higginson, Stearns, Smith, Par
ker, and Howe—formed a clandestine group soon widely known as the “Secret Six.” They were to help finance Brown and to ignite, so they initially hoped, an insurrection that would eradicate slavery once and for all.

  Since Congress had passed the Lecompton compromise and Kansas seemed no longer the battle’s frontier, Brown decided to take his war elsewhere—to Virginia, to attack the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry. The raid would set off a rebellion of huge proportions, fugitives and free slaves rushing to his side, all of them armed with revolvers purchased by Stearns and the pikes forged by New England smithies. The Secret Six were privy to Brown’s plans, which were nearly foiled when another recruit, the Englishman Hugh Forbes, turned against Brown. A volatile idealist who had fought alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, Forbes parted with Brown when Brown did not pay him, he said, for writing an important tactical handbook on guerrilla warfare. Anyway, Forbes had also wanted to replace Brown as head of the undertaking, which would never have happened.

  Hurt and angry, Forbes leaked news of Brown’s plan to Senator William Seward, who later said the whole thing was too wild to believe. Forbes also spilled information to Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, who would disingenuously deny that he knew anything of the plans. Pretending to abandon his scheme to attack in Virginia, Brown headed to Kansas, alienated many of the Free Soil Kansans, and was said to be insane. Meanwhile, the Six decided that the raid should be delayed, and many of the handpicked black abolitionists whose support Brown had enlisted were hesitating. Kansas voters had defeated the Lecompton constitution once and for all in August 1858 and seemed to defeat Brown’s cause along with it.