Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  16 “strong negro or mongrel empire”: Quoted in Eric H. Walther, The Fire-Eaters (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 107; see also Leonard L. Richards, The California Gold Rush and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 120–21; and Samuel Flagg Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, vol. 2 (New York: Knopf, 1956), 338.

  16 it would be good: See Philip Foner, A History of Cuba, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 10–33.

  17 “every fool declared”: Thomas William Wilson, An Authentic Narrative of the Piratical Descents upon Cuba Made by Hordes from the United States (Havana, 1851), 14.

  17 “we find him in hostile array”: “The Invasion of Cuba,” The Southern Quarterly Review 21 (January 1852), 32

  18 “The annexation of Cuba”: Quoted in Tom Chaffin, “Filibustering and U.S. Nationalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995), 94.

  18 “López was not particularly interested”: Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom (New York: Da Capo, 1998), 213.

  19 “You have my best wishes”: Quoted in U. R. Brooks, ed., Stories of the Confederacy (Columbia, S.C.: State Company, 1912), 312.

  20 “We should remember”: Quoted in Chaffin, “Filibustering and U.S. Nationalism,” 89.

  21 “I feel it in my finger ends”: James Buchanan, The Works of James Buchanan, vol. 8, ed. John Bassett Moore (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1909), 362.

  21 “Cuba Is Free”: Quoted in the fine, comprehensive Tom Chaffin, Fatal Glory: Narciso López and the First Clandestine American War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 37.

  21 “I possess absolute power”: Quoted in Walther, The Fire-Eaters, 97.

  22 “the honor of the Government”: Quoted in Chaffin, Fatal Glory, 171.

  22 “If it be a crime”: Quoted in Brooks, Stories of the Confederacy, 288.

  23 “If the evidence”: Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 106.

  24 like dogs: See Louis Schlesinger, “The Personal Narrative of Louis Schlesinger, of Adventures in Cuba and Ceuta,” The United States Democratic Review 31 (September 1852), 567.

  24 “When I was attacked”: Quoted in Robert Granville Caldwell, The Lopez Excursions to Cuba, 1848–1851 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1915), 105.

  24 “He had not courage”: Wilson, An Authentic Narrative of the Piratical Descents upon Cuba Made by Hordes from the United States, 24.

  25 “the infant nation”: Quoted in the excellent Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 123.

  27 “twenty years”: James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, vol. 3, ed. Henry Gilpin (Washington, D.C.: Langtree & O’Sullivan, 1840), 1427.

  27 “Great prudence and caution”: Quoted in Bemis, John Quincy Adams and the Union, vol. 2, 350.

  28 “preserve free white labor”: Quoted in Charles Going, David Wilmot, Free Soiler: A Biography of the Great Advocate of the Wilmot Proviso (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1924), 174.

  28 “The day that balance”: CG, 29th Congress, 2nd Session, Feb. 19, 1847, 454.

  29 “If you seek to”: CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session, Dec. 13, 1849, 28.

  29 “so furious, so bloody”: Henry Clay, Speech of the Hon. Henry Clay, of Kentucky on Taking Up His Compromise Resolutions (New York: Springer and Townsend, 1850), 32.

  29 “years of piecemeal concessions”: Quoted in Martin Duberman, 1807–1886 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 165.

  29 “The fever of party spirit”: Philip Hone, The Diary of Philip Hone, ed. Allan Nevins, vol. 2 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 885.

  29 “If it will save the Union”: Thaddeus Stevens, The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 118.

  30 “The slave trade”: Quoted in Fawn Brodie, Thaddeus Stevens: Scourge of the South (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 108.

  30 “The most majestic champion”: David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis, America Before the Civil War, 1848–1861, completed and edited by Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: HarperCollins, 1976), 98.

  30 “has no compromise to offer”: CG, 31st Congress, 1st Session, March 4, 1850, 455.

  30 It was therefore a measure: Merrill Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 458.

  30 “sentiment, dear to every true”: Quoted in Fergus M. Bordewich, America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 130–31.

  31 “The south does not like the north”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Address to the Citizens of Concord on the Fugitive Slave Law, 3 May 1851,” in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843–1871, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001), 272.

  31 “head like a wise macaw”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams, in Novels, ed. Ernest Samuels and Jayne N. Samuels (New York: Library of America, 1983), 814.

  32 “We make fables”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 48.

  32 “The law of God is supreme”: Orestes A. Brownson, “The Higher Law,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review, January 1851, 55.

  32 “Mr. Seward had no right”: Ibid., 86.

  32 “doctrines were to be endorsed”: “Washington Correspondence,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette (March 16, 1850), 2.

  32 “sent me to bed”: Quoted in Holman Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict: The Crisis and Compromise of 1850 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964), 85–86.

  32 In Georgia, a newspaper: The Georgia Telegraph, March 26, 1850, 2.

  33 “Who are they who venture”: Quoted in Allan Nevins, Ordeal of the Union: Fruits of Manifest Destiny, 1847–1852, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 301.

  33 “A Kentuckian kneels only to God”: Quoted in Caldwell, The Lopez Expeditions to Cuba, 103.

  33 “I hate to see the poor creatures”: Quoted in Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, 1832–1858, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Library of America, 1989), 360.

  33 “A people capable of originating”: Quoted in Martin Delany, Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 201.

  34 “There is no effectual remedy”: J. F. H. Claiborne, The Life and Correspondence of John A. Quitman, vol. 2 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1860), 44.

  34 “The burning of powder”: Quoted in Hamilton, Prologue to Conflict, 167

  35 “and show our good citizenship”: Quoted in the excellent Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 26.

  35 “Let the men who would execute”: Philip Foner, History of Black Americans, vol. 3 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975), 20.

  35 “I don’t respect this law”: Jermain W. Loguen, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman: A Narrative of Real Life (Syracuse, N.Y.: J. G. K. Truair & Co., 1859), 393.

  36 “glorious, a holy mission”: Lucy Holcombe Pickens, The Free Flag of Cuba; or the Martyrdom of Lopez (New York: DeWitt & Davenport, 1854); reprinted with an introduction by Orville Vernon Burton and Georgeanne B. Burton (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002), 118.

  36 Under the pseudonym: See Georganne B. Burton and Orville Vernon Burton, “Lucy Holcombe Pickens, Southern Writer,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 103 (October 2002), 298.

  36 “Don’t say Filibusters!”: Pickens, The Free Flag of Cuba, 108.

  37 Joining the campaign: See, e.g., the discussion of the filibusterers and Cuba; see also Chaffin, Fatal Glory, and Caldwell, The Lopez Excursions to Cuba, as well as the very good Basil Rauch, American Interest in Cuba, 1848–1855 (New York: Colum
bia University Press, 1948).

  37 “ ‘The revolution in Cuba’ proposes”: Quoted in Tom Chaffin, “ ‘Sons of Washington’: Narciso López, Filibustering, and U.S. Nationalism, 1848–1851,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (Spring 1995), 90–91.

  37 “to keep in check”: Martin Delany, Blake: or; The Huts of America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 184.

  CHAPTER 2: WHO AIN’T A SLAVE?

  39 “In the midst of a world”: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Rationale of Spiritualism: Being Two Extemporaneous Lectures Delivered at Dodworth’s Hall, December 5, 1858 (New York: T. J. Ellinwood, 1859), 7.

  40 When Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre: See the excellent Rebecca Solnit, “The Annihilation of Time and Space,” New England Review 24 (Winter 2003), 5–19.

  40 Formerly a jewel case manufacturer: See Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989).

  41 “By manufacturing you thus”: Quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 184.

  42 “They have no heart”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, in The Collected Novels: The Blithedale Romance, ed. Millicent Bell (New York: Library of America, 1983), 693.

  43 “Thought would preside”: Henry Sams, Autobiography of Brook Farm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 6.

  43 “We should have”: Ibid., 8.

  43 “No sagacious man”: Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance, 755.

  43 “authority from above”: Ibid., 678.

  44 “This Fugitive Law”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, May 8, 1851, Centenary Editions of the Work of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1843–1853 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), vol. 16, 431, ed. Thomas Woodson et al.

  44 “We are rapidly preparing”: Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860, ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 248.

  45 “Who ain’t a slave”: Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Library of America College Editions, 2000), 28.

  45 “Let America add Mexico to Texas”: Ibid., 91.

  45 “We can’t afford”: Ibid., 465.

  45 “I feel prouder”: Ibid., 580.

  46 “in fighting a fish”: Ibid., 145.

  46 “ ‘Vengeance on a dumb brute’ ”: Ibid., 197.

  46 “Is there no other way”: Ibid., 572.

  46 “the incompetence of mere unaided virtue”: Ibid., 222.

  46 “If man will strike”: Ibid., 197.

  47 “So you’re the little woman”: See Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), vii.

  47 “irresistible cause”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 158; see also George Orwell, All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays, compiled by George Packer (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 252.

  47 “Let us hope”: Quoted in Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, 255.

  47 “heart’s blood”: Quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 231.

  48 “I have felt all along”: Quoted in Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life, 255.

  48 even the Christian slave: For a fine discussion, see Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life.

  48 “When I thought”: William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 70

  49 “It is a melancholy exemplification”: “Southern Slavery and Its Assailants: The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” DeBow’s Review (November 1853), 487–88.

  49 “what becomes of her modesty”: Quoted in Thomas W. Higginson, “Woman and Her Wishes,” The Una (Boston: Robert F. Walcutt, 1853), 22.

  49 “It does seem to me”: Nathaniel Hawthorne to Sophia Hawthorne, March 18, 1856, in Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1853–1856, ed. Thomas Woodson et al., vol. 17 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 457.

  49 “If it should prevail”: Quoted in Higginson, “Woman and Her Wishes,” 25.

  50 “The anti-slavery movement”: Ibid., 25.

  50 “Of course, in a novel”: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in Three Novels (New York: Library of America, 1982), 185.

  50 “would grace one of the tallest trees”: CG, 30th Congress, 1st Session, April 20, 1848, 502.

  51 “the spirit of a Martyr”: Elizabeth Peabody to Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, March 20 [1848], The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, NYPL, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

  51 “A partisan cannot be”: Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, Life of Horace Mann (Boston: Walker, Fuller and Company, 1865), 285.

  52 “No man in the country”: Quoted in Josephine Pacheco, The Pearl: A Failed Slave Escape on the Potomac (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 147.

  52 “Believing that the extinction”: “Thoughts of the Week,” National Era, April 27, 1848, 66.

  53 “I feel in this case”: Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 270–71.

  53 “get the principles on record”: Quoted in ibid., 269.

  53 The convictions of Drayton and Sayres: See, e.g., Mann, Life of Horace Mann, 400; also David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960), 221.

  53 “I shall be abused”: Quoted in Richard C. Rohrs, “Anti-slavery Politics and the Pearl Incident of 1848,” The Historian 56 (Summer 1994), 722.

  54 And what had happened: See John H. Painter, “The Fugitives of the Pearl,” The Journal of Negro History 1, no. 3 (June 1916), 243–64.

  54 “knew how he could transmute”: Horace Mann, Slavery: Letters and Speeches (Boston: B. B. Mussey & Co., 1853), 511.

  55 “A thousand—fifteen hundred”: William Beecher and Samuel Scoville, A Biography of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Charles Webster, 1988), 293.

  55 “were, under God, secured”: William Parker, “The Freedman’s Story, Part I,” The Atlantic Monthly 17 (February 1866), 154.

  56 “in liberating every one”: Ibid., 160.

  56 Carrying arrest warrants: For fine accounts of the Christiana resistance, see Jonathan Katz, Resistance at Christiana: The Fugitive Slave Rebellion, Christiana, Pennsylvania, September 11, 1851, A Documentary Account (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1974); see also Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  56 “I am the United States marshal”: Parker, “The Freedman’s Story, Part II,” 283.

  56 “Leader, what do you say”: Ibid., 285.

  56 “at the risk of our own lives”: Ibid., 160.

  57 “take all this from a nigger”: Ibid., 286.

  57 “How many times”: Ibid., 280.

  57 “All you colored people”: Ibid., 290.

  CHAPTER 3: ONE AGGRESSES

  58 “talent for silence”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 2, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 106.

  58 Disgusted: Horace Mann’s letters to his wife, Mary Mann, July–August 1852, Mann Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society.

  59 “just an average man”: Quoted in Brenda Wineapple, Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 256–57.

  59 “a thorough, unmitigated”: Quoted in ibid., 262.

  59 “If the Federal Government”: Franklin Pierce, inaugural address, in James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897), 198.

  60 “It is not to be disguised”: Ibid., 201.

  60 “General Pierce is not the equal”: “Cuba! The Philosophy of the Ostende Correspondence,” Democratic Review 35 (June 1855), 457.

  60 “What possible interest”: “The Cuban Question—Importa
nt Letter from Mr. Everett,” The New York Times, Sept. 22, 1853, 3.

  61 “only required having his stomach”: “Recollections of an Old Stager,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 58 (January 1874), 254.

  62 “wanton injury”: CG, 33rd Congress, 1st Session, Exec. Doc. 76, March 15, 1854, 2.

  63 “to detach that island”: Henry B. Learned, “William L. March,” in American Secretaries of State, vol. 6, ed. Samuel Flagg Bemis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), 193–95.

  63 “Judge Mason can scarcely”: Don Piatt, “Cuba and the Ostend Manifesto,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 40 (May 1870), 901.

  64 “It is said that the collision”: Boston Daily Atlas, March 9, 1855, quoted in Amos Aschbach Ettinger, The Mission to Spain of Pierre Soulé, 1853–1855: A Study in the Cuban Diplomacy of the United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1932), 403.

  64 “Your money or your life”: Quoted in Frederick Moore Binder, James Buchanan and the American Empire (Selinsgrove, Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 1994), 216.

  65 “higher and a more solemn obligation”: Quoted in Robert Walter Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 421.

  66 “The Nebraska question”: Quoted in Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 54.

  66 “this momentous question”: Thomas Jefferson to John Holmes, April 22, 1820, Library of Congress.

  66 “slaveholding despotism”: Quoted in Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 418.

  66 “the pure unadulterated representatives”: Quoted in Allan Nevins, The Ordeal of the Union, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947), 114.

  67 “the old policy”: Quoted in Robert D. Samson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003), 223.

  67 “abolition party”: Stephen A. Douglas, The Nebraska Question, Comprising Speeches in the United States Senate (New York: Redfield, 1854), 46.

  67 “this cruel attempt”: M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 124.