A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror

by Larry Schweikart

  Even had this angry resistance not appeared, there remained many practical problems with the law. Enforcement was expensive; Boston spent five thousand dollars to apprehend and return one slave, and after that it never enforced the law again. Part of the expense came from the unflagging efforts of the Underground Railroad, a system of friendly shelters aiding slaves’ escape attempts. Begun sometime around 1842, the railroad involved (it was claimed) some three thousand operators who assisted more than fifty thousand fugitives out of slavery in the decade before the Civil War. One must be skeptical about the numbers ascribed to the Underground Railroad because it was in the interest of both sides—obviously for different reasons—to inflate the influence of the network.86 Census data, for example, does not support the large numbers of escaped slaves in the North, and there is reason to think that much of the undocumented “success” of the Underground Railroad was fueled by a desire of radicals after the fact to have associated themselves with such a heroic undertaking.

  Far more important than citizen revolts or daring liberation of slaves in Northern jails was the publication, beginning in 1851, of a serial work of fiction in the Washington-based National Era. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author, and the daughter of abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, saw her serial take hold of the popular imagination like nothing else in American literary history. Compiled and published as Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the best seller sold 300,000 copies in only a few months, eventually selling more than 3 million in America and 3.5 million more abroad.87 Stowe never visited a plantation, and probably only glimpsed slaves in passing near Kentucky or Maryland, and her portrayal of slavery was designed to paint it in the harshest light. Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramatized the plight of a slave, Uncle Tom, and his family, who worked for benign but financially troubled Arthur Shelby. Shelby had to put the slaves up for sale, leading to the escape of the slave maid, Eliza, who with her son, ultimately crossed the half-frozen Ohio River as the bloodhounds chased her. Uncle Tom, one of the lead characters, was “sold down the river” to a hard life in the fields, and was beaten to death by the evil slave driver, Simon Legree. Even in death, Tom, in Christ-like fashion, forgives Legree and his overseers.

  The novel had every effect for which Stowe hoped, and probably more. As historian David Potter aptly put it, “Men who had remained unmoved by real fugitives wept for Tom under the lash and cheered for Eliza with the bloodhounds on her track.”88 Or as Jeffrey Hummel put the equation, “For every four votes that [Franklin] Pierce received from free states in 1852, one copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was sold.”89

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin quickly made it to the theater, which gave it an even wider audience, and by the time the war came, Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe with the famous line, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”90 Compared to whatever tremors the initial resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law produced, Stowe’s book generated a seismic shock. The South, reveling in its apparent moral victory less than two years earlier, found the pendulum swinging against it again, with the new momentum coming from developments beyond American shores.

  Franklin Pierce and Foreign Intrigue

  Millard Fillmore’s brief presidency hobbled to its conclusion as the Democrats gained massively in the off-term elections of 1850. Ohio’s antislavery Whig Ben Wade, reminiscing about John Tyler’s virtual defection from Whig policies and then Fillmore’s inability to implement the Whig agenda, exclaimed, “God save us from Whig Vice Presidents.”91 Democrats sensed their old power returning. Holding two thirds of the House, they hoped to recapture the White House in 1852, which would be critical to the appointment of federal judges. They hewed to the maxim of finding a northern man of southern principles, specifically Franklin Pierce, a Vermont lawyer and ardent expansionist.92

  Having attained the rank of brigadier general in the Mexican War, Pierce could not be successfully flanked by another Whig soldier, such as the eventual nominee, Winfield Scott. His friendship with his fellow Bowdoin alumnus, writer Nathaniel Hawthorne, paid dividends when Hawthorne agreed to ink Pierce’s campaign biography. Hawthorne, of course, omitted any mention of Pierce’s drinking problem, producing a thoroughly romanticized and unrealistic book.93

  Pierce hardly needed Hawthorne’s assistance to defeat Scott, whose antislavery stance was too abrasive. Winning a commanding 254 electoral votes to Scott’s 42, with a 300,000-vote popular victory, Pierce dominated the Southern balloting. Free-Soiler John Hale had tallied only half of Van Buren’s total four years earlier, but still the direction of the popular vote continued to work against the Democrats. Soon a majority of Americans would be voting for other opposition parties. The 1852 election essentially finished the Whigs, who had become little more than me-too Democrats on the central issue of the day.

  Pierce inherited a swirling plot (some of it scarcely concealed) to acquire Cuba for further slavery expansion. Mississippi’s Senator Jefferson Davis brazenly announced, “Cuba must be ours.”94 Albert Brown, the other Mississippi senator, went further, urging the acquisition of Central American states: “Yes, I want these Countries for the spread of slavery. I would spread the blessings of slavery, like a religion of our Divine Master,” and publicly even declared that he would extend slavery into the North, though adding, “I would not force it on them.”95 Brown’s words terrified Northerners, suggesting the “slave power” had no intention of ceasing its expansion, even into free states.96

  Pierce appointed Davis secretary of war and made Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts manifest destiny man, attorney general. Far from distancing himself from expansionist fervor, Pierce fell in behind it. Davis, seeking a Southern transcontinental railroad route that would benefit the cotton South, sought to acquire a strip of land in northwest Mexico along what is modern-day Arizona. The forty-five thousand square miles ostensibly lay in territory governed by popular sovereignty, but the South was willing to trade a small strip of land that potentially could be free soil for Davis’s railroad. Senator James Gadsden, a Democrat from South Carolina, persuaded Mexican president Santa Anna, back in office yet again, to sell the acreage for $10 million. Santa Anna had already spent nearly all the reparations given Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo five years earlier—much of it on fancy uniforms for his military—and now needed more money to outfit his army. As a result, the Gadsden Purchase became law in 1853.

  Meanwhile, American ministers to a conference in Belgium nearly provoked an international incident over Cuba in 1854. For some time, American adventurers had been slipping onto the island, plaguing the Spanish. Overtures to Spain by the U.S. government to purchase Cuba for $130 million were rejected, but Spain’s ability to control the island remained questionable. During a meeting of ministers from England, France, Spain, and the United States in Ostend, Belgium, warnings were heard that a slave revolt might soon occur in Cuba, leading American ministers to draft a confidential memorandum suggesting that if the island became too destabilized, the United States should simply take Cuba from Spain. Word of this Ostend Manifesto reached the public, forcing Pierce to repudiate it. He also cracked down on plans by rogue politicians like former Mississippi governor John A. Quitman to finance and plan the insertion of American soldiers of fortune into Cuba. (Quitman had been inspired by Tennessean William Walker’s failed 1855 takeover of Nicaragua.)97 Taken together, Pierce’s actions dealt the coup de grâce to manifest destiny, and later expansionists would not even use the term.

  Southern Triumph in Kansas

  Despite smarting from the stiff resistance engendered by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Southerners in 1854 could claim victory. Despite several near riots over the Fugitive Slave Act, it remained the law of the land, and Stowe’s book could not change that. Meanwhile, the South was about to receive a major windfall. An innocuous proposal to build a transcontinental railroad commanded little sectional interest. In fact, it promised to open vast new territory to slavery and accelerate the momentum toward war.

  Since the 1840s,
dreamers imagined railroads that would connect California with states east of the Mississippi. Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who produced one of the first of the transcontinental plans in 1844, argued for a privately constructed railroad whose expenses were offset by grants of public lands.98 By 1852 the idea had attracted Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrat senator with presidential aspirations, who rightly saw that the transcontinental would make Chicago the trade hub of the entire middle United States. With little controversy the congressional delegations from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois introduced a bill to organize a Nebraska Territory, the northern part of the old Louisiana Purchase, and, once again, illegally erase Indian claims to lands there.99

  Suddenly, the South woke up. Since the Northwest Ordinance and Missouri Compromise, the understanding was that for every free state added to the Union, there would be a new slave state. Now a proposal was on the table that would soon add at least one new free state, with no sectional balance (the state would be free because the proposed Nebraska territory lay north of the Missouri Compromise 36-degree 30-minute line). In order to appease (and court) his concerned Southern Democrat brethren, Douglas therefore recrafted the Nebraska bill. The new law, the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, assuaged the South by revoking the thirty-three-year-old 36/30 Missouri Compromise line and replacing its restriction of slavery with popular sovereignty—a vote on slavery by the people of the territory. In one stroke of the pen, Douglas abolished a thirty-year covenant and opened the entire Lousiana Purchase to slavery!100

  Although the idea seems outrageous today—and was inflammatory at the time—from Stephen Douglas’s narrow viewpoint it seemed like an astute political move. Douglas reasoned that, when all was said and done, the Great Plains territories would undoubtedly vote for free soil (cotton won’t grow in Nebraska). In the meantime, however, Douglas would have given the South a fresh chance at the Louisiana Territory, keeping it on his side for the upcoming presidential election. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas naively believed, would win him more political friends than enemies and gain his home state a Chicago railroad empire in the process.

  Douglas sooned learned he was horribly mistaken about the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After its passage, a contagion swept the country every bit as strong as the one sparked by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Free-Soilers, now including many Northern Democrats, arose in furious protest. The Democrats shattered over Kansas-Nebraska.

  Meanwhile, the stunned Douglas, who had raised the whole territorial tar baby as a means to obtain a railroad and the presidency, succeeded only in fracturing his own party and starting a national crisis.101

  The pendulum appeared to have swung the South’s way again with the potential for new slave states in the territory of Louisiana Purchase, sans the Missouri Compromise line. Instead, the South soon found itself with yet another hollow victory. The ink had scarcely dried on the Kansas-Nebraska Act than Northern Democrats sustained massive defeats. Of ninety-one free-state House seats held by the Democrats in 1852, only twenty-five were still in the party’s hands at the end of the elections, and none of the last sixty-six seats were ever recovered before the war.

  Before the appointed Kansas territorial governor arrived, various self-defense associations and vigilante groups had sprung up in Missouri—and as far away as New York—in a strategy by both sides to pack Kansas with voters who would advance the agenda of the group sponsoring them. The Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, and others like it, was established to fund “settlers” (armed with new Sharp repeating rifles) as they moved to Kansas. Families soon followed the men into the territory, a prospect that hardly diminished suspicions of proslavery Kansans. Images of armies of hirelings and riffraff, recruited from all over the North to “preach abolitionism, and dig underground Rail-roads,” consumed the Southern imagination.102 The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed virtually any “resident” to vote, meaning that whichever side could insert enough voters would control the state constitutional convention. Thousands of proslavery men, known as Border Ruffians or “pukes” (because of their affinity for hard liquor and its aftereffects) crossed the border from Missouri. The were led by one of the state’s senators, David Atchison, who vowed to “kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district.” And they elected a proslavery majority to the convention.103 Most real settlers, in fact, were largely indifferent to slavery, and were more concerned with establishing legal title to their lands.

  Missouri had a particularly acute interest in seeing that Kansas did not become a free-soil state. Starting about a hundred miles above St. Louis, a massive belt of slavery stretched across the state, producing a strip in which 15 percent of the population or more was made up of slaves lying along more than three-fourths of the border with Kansas. If Kansas became a free-soil state, it would create a free zone below a slave belt for the first time in American history.104

  The proslavery legislature, meeting at Lecompton, enacted draconian laws, including making it a felony to even question publicly the right to have slaves. Unwilling to accept what they saw as a fraudulent constitutional convention, free-soil forces held their own convention at Topeka in the fall of 1855, and they went so far as to prematurely name their own senators! Now the tragic absurdity of the “house divided” surely became apparent to even the most dedicated moderates, for not only was the nation split in two, but Kansas, the first test of Douglas’s popular sovereignty, divided into two bitterly hostile and irreconcilable camps with two constitutional conventions, two capitals, and two sets of senators! Proslavery and free-soil forces took up arms, each viewing the government, constitution, and laws of the other as illegitimate and deceitfully gained. And if there were not already enough guns in Kansas, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation supplied rifles in boxes marked “Bibles,” gaining the sobriquet Beecher’s Bibles. Beecher’s followers were not alone: men and arms flowed into Kansas from North and South. Bloodshed could not be avoided; it began in the fall of 1855.

  A great deal of mythology, perpetuated by pamphleteers from both sides, created ominous-sounding phrases to describe actions that, in other times, might constitute little more than disturbing the peace. For example, there was the “sack of Lawrence,” where in 1856 proslavery forces overturned some printing presses and fired a few cannon balls—ineffectively—at the Free States Hotel in Lawrence. Soon, however, enough, real violence ensued. Bleeding Kansas became the locus of gun battles, often involving out-of-state mercenaries, while local law enforcement officials—even when they honestly attempted to maintain order—stood by helplessly, lacking sufficient numbers to make arrests or keep the peace.

  Half a continent away, another episode of violence occurred, but in a wholly different—and unexpected—context. The day before the “sack” occurred, Senator Charles Sumner delivered a major vitriolic speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” His attacks ranged far beyond the issues of slavery and Kansas, vilifying both Stephen Douglas and Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in highly personal and caustic terms. Employing strong sexual imagery, Sumner referred to the “rape” of “virgin territory,” a “depraved longing” for new slave territory, “the harlot, slavery,” which was the “mistress” of Senator Butler. No one stepped up to defend Douglas, and, given his recent reception among the southern Democrats, he probably did not expect any champions. Butler, on the other hand, was an old man with a speech impediment, and the attacks were unfair and downright mean.

  Congressman Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler’s and a fellow South Carolinian, thought the line of honor had been crossed. Since Sumner would not consent to a duel, Brooks determined to teach him a lesson. Marching up to the senator’s seat, Brooks spoke harshly to Sumner, then proceeded to use his large cane to bash the senator repeatedly, eventually breaking the cane over Sumner’s head. The attack left Sumner with such psychological damage that he could not function for two years, and according to Northern pamphleteers, Brooks had nearly killed the senator. The South labeled Brooks a hero, and
“Brooks canes” suddenly came into vogue. The city of Charleston presented him with a new walking stick inscribed hit him again! Northerners, on the other hand, kept Sumner’s seat vacant, but the real symbolism was all too well understood. If a powerful white man could be caned on the Senate floor, what chance did a field slave have against more cruel beatings? It reinforced the abolitionists’ claim that in a society that tolerated slavery anywhere, no free person’s rights were safe, regardless of color.

  Meanwhile, back in Kansas, violence escalated further when John Brown, a member of a free-soil volunteer group in Kansas, led seven others (including four of his sons) on a vigilante-style assassination of proslavery men. Using their broadswords, Brown’s avengers hunted along Pottawatomie Creek, killing and mutilating five men and boys in what was termed the Pottawatomie massacre.

  Northern propagandists, who were usually more adept than their Southern colleagues, quickly gained the high ground, going so far as to argue that Brown had not actually killed anyone. One paper claimed the murders had been the work of Comanches.105 Taken together, the sack of Lawrence, the caning of Senator Butler, and the Pottawatomie massacre revealed the growing power of the press to inflame, distort, and propagandize for ideological purposes. It was a final irony that the institution of the partisan press, which the Jacksonians had invented to ensure their elections by gagging debate on slavery, now played a pivotal role in accelerating the coming conflict.

  The Demise of the Whigs

  Whatever remained of the southern Whigs withered away after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Whigs had always been a party tied to the American system but unwilling to take a stand on the major moral issue of the day, and that was its downfall. Yet in failing to address slavery, how did the Whigs significantly differ from the Democrats? Major differences over the tariff, a national bank, and land sales did not separate the two parties as much as has been assumed in the past. Those issues, although important on one level, were completely irrelevant on the higher plane where the national debate now moved.