So Brown shook off his timid advisers and raised more money.
James Redpath admired the older man and when Redpath published The Roving Editor, his book about slavery, he dedicated it to Brown. “You, Old Hero! believe that the slave should be aided and urged to insurrection, and hence do I lay this tribute at your feet. . . . You went to Kansas, when the troubles broke out there—not to ‘settle’ or ‘speculate’—or from idle curiosity: but for one stern, solitary purpose—to have a shot at the South.”
UPSTATE NEW YORK shimmers in October. The oaks and maples are bright with color on crisp, clear days, although on October 25, 1858, it had been raining all afternoon. The lights in Rochester’s Corinthian Hall weren’t working, and the gas lamps were sputtering. By evening, though, the rain was just an annoying drizzle, not enough to keep the thousand or so people from lining the street outside the building, the same one where the Fox sisters had communed with the dead just a decade earlier. Corinthian Hall had hosted Jenny Lind, the Nightingale who had sung her Swedish folk tunes there, P. T. Barnum, and Frederick Douglass, who had asked his now-famous question, “What, to the Slave, is the Fourth of July?”
It was a perfect setting for Senator William Seward, come to rally support for the Republican Party—especially since he intended to run for president in 1860. That was no secret.
The gas lamps continued to flicker, and at first, it was hard to see Seward. But the people in the hall knew just who he was—the most famous man in America, the newspapers had claimed, even if that may not have been quite true. Doubtless he hoped it was. And bad press was still press. An antislavery man (no matter what his critics alleged about his commitment to the cause), Seward had spoken so fervently against the Dred Scott decision that Chief Justice Taney vowed that if Seward were ever elected president, Taney wouldn’t administer the oath of office.
Yet Seward needed to bolster his credentials among antislavery activists, for if he wished to defeat the Democrats, he would need to lure Gerrit Smith’s Liberty people into the Republican ranks. He did not want to split the antislavery vote. So here he was in Rochester stumping for Edwin D. Morgan as governor. Morgan had to run a tough fight against a running Democrat as well as against Smith himself. Of course, Smith’s nomination for governor was largely symbolic; he didn’t expect to win. But he might be a spoiler, and if he was, and continued to be, and if he attracted more Republicans to his more radical point of view, then Seward might not be hanging his hat in the White House after all.
That damp night at Corinthian Hall, Seward spoke for almost ninety minutes. “Our country is a theatre which exhibits, in full operation, two radically different political systems; the one resting on the basis of servile or slave labor, the other on the basis of voluntary labor of freemen,” he told his audience. Pacing back and forth, and poking the air with his unlit cigar, Seward explained that “hitherto, the two systems have existed in different States, but side by side within the American Union. This has happened because the Union is a confederation of States. But in another aspect the United States constitute only one nation,” he continued. “Increase of population, which is filling the States out to their very borders, together with a new and extended net-work of railroads and other avenues, and an internal commerce which daily becomes more intimate, is rapidly bringing the States into a higher and more perfect social unity or consolidation.”
One nation: that was Seward’s theme. By combining the idea of “higher laws” with the idea of a “more perfect social unity,” he provided a definition of the Republican Party. It was “a party of one idea; but that is a noble one—an idea that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of equality—the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.”
Yet because the Republicans represented a national party founded on the principle of equality, they could not help but come into conflict with those who did not believe in nationhood or equality. The time had come, moreover, for a collision, the inevitable collision between antagonistic systems. “Shall I tell you what this collision means?” Seward asked, his cigar still unlit. “They who think that it is accidental, unnecessary, the work of interested or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation.”
“Irrepressible conflict”: that was the phrase, the prophecy, the slogan that would catch fire. Perhaps Seward guessed how volatile those two words would be though he later said he hadn’t anticipated the backlash. He continued to speak. The failure to “apprehend this great truth, induces many unsuccessful attempts at final compromise between the slave and free States,” he declared, “and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.”
Compromise did not exist, for it could not; or, if it could exist, it would have to be a real one. As it stood, there were no grounds for real compromise, not between “opposing and enduring forces.” Make no mistake, Seward continued, the Democrats were the slave party, and they would extend slavery west, south, and, most terrifyingly, north. He grimly outlined a future of bondage: “By the action of the President and the Senate, using their treaty-making power, they will annex foreign slave-holding states. Thus relatively increasing the number of slave states, they will allow no amendment to the Constitution prejudicial to their interest; and so, having permanently established their power, they expect the Federal judiciary to nullify all state laws which shall interfere with internal or foreign commerce in slaves. When the free states shall be sufficiently demoralized to tolerate these designs, they reasonably conclude that slavery will be accepted by those states themselves.”
The country must become free—or, as Seward warned, “Boston and New York [would] become once more markets for trade in the bodies and souls of men.” The danger was clear and imminent. Only the Republican Party could save New York and Boston and Vermont and Maine from bondage by defeating Democrats once and for all.
The fearmongering, articulate, well-wrought speech concluded portentously, “I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.”
SEWARD’S AUDIENCE MAY have stomped its feet and clapped loudly when he finished speaking, and Morgan may have won the race for governor, but nationwide, there was little applause when Seward’s speech hit the papers. In New York, the Democratic Herald said Seward was as delirious as the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher or the radical Reverend Theodore Parker. The Albany Atlas & Argus complained that the hypocritical Seward had held out a flag of truce while declaring war. The Washington Union shuddered at Seward’s vision of the “plantations of our Southern states . . . cultivated by free labor—meaning free negro labor—such as that is in vogue in Jamaica,” which would invariably lead to “decay, waste, and desolation.” In the South, the headline of a Richmond paper blasted Seward, declaring, “Roguery Overreaches Itself.” It went on to say that both Seward in the North and “his co-workers in the South” were spewing venom at each other and damaging themselves far more than their enemy, whoever that was.
What offended and frightened most was the notion of an irrepressible conflict, which actually was not a new idea. Abraham Lincoln had suggested something similar in his “house divided” speech, and before that, Horace Greeley had been editorializing in the Tribune that “We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two,” he concluded, “conflict is inevitable.” But Seward’s phrase “irrepressible conflict” struck a chord. Oddly, though, Seward seemed to have learned little from the well-publicized debates of Abraham Lincoln, who, having been taken to task for the “house divided” speech, had explicitly vowed to protect slavery where it already existed. Lincoln knew he had to appeal to southern a
s well as northern Illinois—to Little Egypt and to Chicago. Rather, when speaking in upstate New York at a main stop on the Underground Railroad, Seward was trying to prove to Gerrit Smith’s radicals that his antislavery position was real, even more real than they may have thought. He therefore vilified the Democrats in much the same way that the fire-eaters and certain Southern Democrats vilified Republicans: each party, to the other, was a band of extremists bent on perverting the entire way of life of a region. Southerners believed that the North would emancipate the slaves and, in the bargain, replace Southern governments with an autocratic, centralized, and bourgeois Yankee monster.
The wonder is not the predictable responses to Seward’s speech. The wonder is that while many people in the North and the South could analyze with clarity the sectional division rocking the country and could even forecast what might happen as a result of the deepening rift, they seemed not to be listening to themselves. Both sides understood the differences dividing them, but by calling them “enduring,” they consequently had rightly to regard compromise as appeasement—that is, submission to a hated enemy. To the South, the flouting of the Fugitive Slave Act showed Southerners that the North would disregard laws—even the Constitution—when it so chose and in support of a nebulous and discretionary idea called a higher law; and besides, hadn’t Garrison called the Constitution a covenant with death and then ground it under his heel? How could Northerners be trusted to be Americans? For their part, Northerners disdained those “doughfaces” (their term for Southern sympathizers) in the White House, Pierce and Buchanan, who made no secret of their partiality to Southern demands for extending slavery, no matter if that meant now and then turning a blind eye to guerrillas or filibusterers or even the very popular sovereignty that Buchanan, for one, had said he endorsed. Who, then, could be trusted?
And both sides took refuge in the vernacular of the Revolutionary War: America was special, its founding was special, its mission was special, its democracy was special, its Declaration of Independence had declared the importance of life and liberty. Both sides saw their side as representing self-government and freedom; both sides saw themselves incarnating that same desire that animated the revolutions, abroad, of 1848. Both sides indulged in apocalyptic rhetoric, perhaps without realizing they would help bring about a very bloody future.
The Republican aim was surer than that of the failed Whigs or of the Democrats, and they commanded more authority than the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings. Republicans targeted slavery. That was their abiding issue, and that issue changed everything. It provided moral force. And in any event the Democrats were reeling from their own irrepressible conflict, the rift between Stephen Douglas, whose denunciation of Buchanan and Lecompton had alienated Southerners such as Jefferson Davis. Machiavellian though he may have been, a shrewd political operator though he was, and despite his unreflective racism, Douglas did believe in pure popular sovereignty as a matter of democratic principle. For him, it harked back to Thomas Jefferson, and he placed it at Jefferson’s feet. The people should decide. It was that simple. What Douglas failed to see—and this was his personal flaw as well as the moral pitfall of nineteenth-century America—was that popular sovereignty would eventually mean nothing if voters could cast a ballot about whether or not to buy and sell other people. And the moral issue aside, if one can essentially vote on who is allowed to vote, there also can be a legitimate vote to eliminate popular sovereignty: popular sovereignty is therefore moot if it declares its own undoing—it declares that the population is not sovereign. Lincoln understood this self-contradiction. It foreshadows his argument against secession: there would be no end to secession if secession were “legal”: that is, any dissatisfied group could secede from the larger group, ad infinitum and to a logical absurdity, and hence secession too would declare the end of itself.
Then there was William Seward, poking the air with his unlit cigar. Addressing the staunch antislavery men and women of Rochester and beyond, he made himself a target even for somewhat moderate Southerners, such as Toombs, for whom irreparable conflicts foretold disunion. So while some Seward enthusiasts claimed that in Rochester he clinched the Republican nomination for president, just the opposite seems true. The New York Times speculated that after Rochester, Seward’s name struck terror into the heart of the South.
Yet one might reasonably ask whose name would spark more fear, more dread, more dismay, more hysteria: that of William Seward or of Old John Brown?
IN AUGUST 1859, almost a year after Seward’s speech, John Brown invited Frederick Douglass to meet with him at an abandoned quarry in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, about fifty miles north of the quiet village of Harpers Ferry and not far from where, under the alias of John Smith, Brown was hiding out in a rented farmhouse. On the day he met Douglass, Brown carried fishing tackle, though he had no intention of fishing, and he wore a scruffy old hat. Douglass thought Brown looked as raggedy as that hat but was impressed at Brown’s plans, eagerly outlined in full, for a raid on Harpers Ferry. Another man, named Shields Green (sometimes called “Emperor”), a fugitive slave who had come with Douglass, stood by and listened too: Brown was planning to strike the federal arsenal and then distribute its weapons to the nearby slaves and free blacks who would rush to his side—he assumed they would—and then all of them together would launch guerrilla raids against slaveholders in Tennessee and the Deep South, sowing terror and freeing slaves along the way.
To succeed, Brown very much needed Douglass or at least his approval, which would go a long way in the black community. Douglass would not sign on. “I told him, and these were my words,” Douglass would recall, “that all his arguments, and all his descriptions of the place, convinced me that he was going into a perfect steel-trap, and that once in he would never get out alive.” Yet the two men talked for two days. Brown didn’t give up and neither did Douglass, who warned Brown that Virginia would “blow him and his hostages sky-high rather than he hold Harper’s Ferry an hour.” And, of course, Brown’s plan endangered the entire black community, which, after the raid, would surely suffer horrific reprisals in the South. Years later, though, Douglass wondered whether it was cowardice or prudence that had protected him from Brown’s fierce courage and his folly, his addiction to violence and his self-destructive but in many ways good political sense.
Shields Green said he would join Old Brown.
Sunday, October 16, 1859, was the day scheduled for Brown’s Armageddon. By that Sunday, though, Brown had recruited only twenty-one men, including three of his sons and five blacks, but they managed to seize ten slaves, their owner, and several horses. Armed with their pikes as well as rifles and wearing long gray shawls, they then stormed the federal armory building. But rather than strike quickly and escape to the Virginia hills, Brown and his gang hovered nearby for thirty-six hours. He didn’t have an exit strategy.
That was a tremendous blunder. Alerted of the attack, a local militia quickly cut off any escape routes, forcing Brown and his men, including two of his sons, to barricade themselves within a small firehouse in the armory yard. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. “Jeb” Stuart rode into town with a company of one hundred marines, under a flag of truce, and Stuart delivered a note from Lee, which offered Brown a chance to surrender unconditionally. Two thousand onlookers—news of the raid had traveled fast—waited for the reply. The parley took a long time, according to Stuart, because Brown wanted free passage out of Harpers Ferry for himself and his men and without that—which he was not going to get—Brown refused to give up.
Waving his cap, Lieutenant Stuart ordered his squadron forward. They slammed the door of the firehouse with sledgehammers, and when the door didn’t budge, the soldiers took a battering ram to it. One of Brown’s raiders, having fled the armory, was shot, his dead body used for target practice by snipers encircling the area. Spectators cheered. Inside, Brown, who had been stabbed with a decorative dress sword, lay wounded on the ground. Stuart snatched Brown’s bowie kn
ife. Governor Henry Wise, who had arrived on the scene, leaned over the bloody man, who introduced himself with resonant dignity. “My name is John Brown,” he said.
In all, seventeen people had died, including two of Brown’s sons, two slaves, the slave owner, a marine, and three residents of Harpers Ferry. Brown and seven of his men were taken prisoner, though Jeb Stuart told his mother had he been in charge, his saber would have saved Virginia the cost of Brown’s trial.
News of the raid shocked the country. “Some sort of insurrection, an armed gang getting possession of the United States Armory; railroad trains stopped, x + y hundred fugitive slaves under arms, government troops, marines, and other forces sent on,” George Templeton Strong chronicled the rumors. “Seems to have been a fight this morning (and the rebellion quashed, of course), but the whole transaction is as yet most obscure, and our reports probably much exaggerated.”
Prosecuted almost immediately in a Virginia court even though Brown had assaulted federal property, Brown was given a speedy trial. Governor Wise told the Virginia legislature that Brown had confessed that he had intended to arm slaves, who would then turn on the slaveholders—and that once word got out, he would be joined by whites and free blacks from every state in the union. He might have been deluded, but he was bold and he was sincere, and, like many Southerners, Governor Wise ungrudgingly pronounced Brown the gamest man he had ever met. Brown thanked Wise for the compliment. Perhaps had everything been different, Ralph Waldo Emerson wondered, men such as Governor Wise and Captain Brown would have been friends.
Of the conspirators, John Brown was tried first. The trial began on Wednesday, October 26, a year after Seward’s speech. More than six hundred spectators jammed into the courthouse to watch the proceedings while they nibbled peanuts and tossed the shells on the floor. The prosecutor showed up drunk. He was replaced. Because of his injuries, Brown lay on his back on a cot. Yet the trial wasn’t a farce. Brown refused to plead insanity, and the defense argued against the charge of treason on the grounds that “no man is guilty of treason unless he be a citizen of the state against which the treason so alleged has been committed,” and Brown was a citizen of New York. The defense also argued that Brown had intended only to liberate slaves, not kill slave owners.
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