Perry’s opening of Japan was a triumph of American power and a turning point in American foreign policy. Although he never once threatened Japan with military force, this was not necessary. The threat was implicit in the four gunboats bristling with huge cannons among his nine-ship flotilla. Ever since then the United States has wielded “gunboat diplomacy” to assert its interests in ever more disputed places around the world.
As American power expanded abroad, the two-party political system collapsed at home. In 1854 the Whig Party dissolved after twenty-two years of vigorous existence as virtually all of its leaders and followers abandoned that political vessel for others, like the Free Soil, American, Liberty, and Republican Parties. Abraham Lincoln was among the loyal Whigs who suffered a political identity crisis after the party’s demise. To his old friend Joshua Speed he explained,
You inquire where I now stand. That is a disputed point. I think I am a Whig, but others say there are no Whigs, and that I am an Abolitionist. When I was at Washington, I voted for the Wilmot Proviso as good as forty times, and I never heard of anyone attempting to unwhig me for that. I now do no more than oppose the extension of slavery. I am not a Know Nothing, that is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.17
A new party soon emerged to serve as the vehicle for Lincoln’s beliefs.
The Republican Party proverbially rose phoenix-like from the Whig Party’s carcass.18 With Whigs as their core, Republicans also enticed Free Soilers, Know Nothings, and moderate Democrats. Use of the “Republican” label to designate the new party was first proposed at a meeting in Ripon, Wisconsin, in February 1854, was approved by a group of like-minded congressmen in Washington in May, and was adopted by a state convention in Michigan on July 6. Within months Republican Parties mushroomed in all the northern states. Philosophically, the Republican Party was the latest incarnation of the Federalist Party that Alexander Hamilton formed in the early 1790s to battle Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party over just what kind of nation America would become. For diverse reasons, the Federalist Party died as a national force during the first decade of the nineteenth century, then was reincarnated in the mid-1820s as the National Democrats and in the early 1830s as the Whigs. Each version advocated a national bank, protective tariff, and internal improvements as policies and celebrated enterprise, creativity, free labor, education, and equality before the law for all. In addition, the Republicans called for a homestead act that gave away western public lands to settlers, a transcontinental railroad, and land-grant colleges that promoted higher education and agrarian improvements. Like Alexander Hamilton, their intellectual and political progenitor, Republicans insisted that these policies would promote a virtuous cycle of economic development that provided a higher standard of living and quality of life for more Americans.
The Republicans advocated not abolishing slavery but preventing its extension to new territories in hope that it would eventually die a natural death. They believed that would happen as the North’s free-labor system widened the economic chasm between the regions and more impoverished southern whites recognized and struggled against the reality that slavery shackled them as well as blacks. Republicans at once accepted and lamented that the Constitution legalized slavery. Yet they also pointed to the Constitution’s clauses that empowered Congress to outlaw the international slave trade and to limit or outright abolish slavery in federal lands, like the District of Columbia and the western territories. Most Republicans cared far more about the fate of white workers than black slaves. Henry Carey, a Pennsylvania economist, was the intellectual powerhouse behind the Republican Party platform. He justified each of these policies in his books: The Harmony of Interests: Agricultural, Manufacturing, and Commercial and The Slave Trade, Foreign and Domestic, both published in 1856, The Principles of Social Science, in 1858, and Financial Crises: Their Causes and Effects, in 1863.
During the 1856 convention the Republican Party’s political giants were William Seward of New York and Salmon Chase of Ohio. Yet the delegates spurned them and instead chose a popular hero as their presidential candidate. John Frémont was renowned for his exploring expeditions across the West and role in conquering California. Most Republicans hoped that Frémont’s image could carry him to the White House much as two other heroes, Whig candidates William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor, had beaten their more prosaic Democratic Party rivals in the respective elections of 1840 and 1848. But Frémont had some crucial flaws as a person and thus as a leader—he was mercurial, pompous, overbearing, hardheaded, and not noted for his intellect.19 Nonetheless, most Republicans enthusiastically chanted the campaign slogan of “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!”
Abraham Lincoln was gratified to receive 110 votes for the vice presidential slot, although eventually William Dayton of New Jersey won it. From then until the election, Lincoln campaigned tirelessly for Frémont and other Republicans. As he gave speeches around Illinois, his toughest challenge was refuting the charge that the Republicans were abolitionists who would break up the United States into free and slave countries.
Like a judo master, Lincoln took that charge and threw it back against slavocrats by citing and expounding key tenets of the Declaration of Independence. He argued that Republicans upheld and Democrats violated the document’s letter and spirit. America’s founders believed “that all men are created equal” and enjoyed rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thus a black woman has the “natural right to eat the bread that she earns with her own hands without asking leave of anyone else” and in that “she is my equal, and the equal of all others.” An essential difference split the political parties: “The Republicans inculcate . . . that the Negro is a man, that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. Democrats deny his manhood; deny or dwarf to insignificance the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage ‘a sacred right of self-government.’”20 The United States was founded on the Declaration of Independence, and anyone who rejected the values and aspirations of this document rejected America.
Once again a third party siphoned votes from the latest party grounded in Hamiltonian principles and policies. The American, or Know Nothing, Party nominated Millard Fillmore as its presidential candidate. Although the Republican and American party platforms overlapped, they did not ally but instead fought for the votes of many of the same constituents.
The Democrats faced a dilemma in choosing their presidential candidate, as their two most prominent leaders—President Franklin Pierce and Senator Stephen Douglas—were tainted by the northern uproar over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the slavocrat takeover of Kansas, and worsening violence. The party settled on James Buchanan, who like Pierce was a “doughface” sympathetic to slavocrat interests but had avoided the Kansas political tar baby.
Although three men ran for the presidency, there were only two genuine races—Frémont versus Buchanan in the North, and Fillmore versus Buchanan in the South. In the popular vote, Buchanan received 1,838,169 votes, or 45.34 percent, Frémont a respectable 1,341,264, or 33.09 percent, and Fillmore 872,534, or 22.57 percent. This translated into 174 electoral votes for Buchanan, 114 for Frémont, and 8 for Fillmore. The eleven states that Frémont won were all in the upper North; his vote counts faded the closer they were cast to Dixie. In the South, Frémont’s name appeared on ballots in only four states, where he got less than 1 percent of the vote. Yet had Fillmore been Frémont’s running mate
rather than his rival they would have won by a landslide.21 Instead, the winner was the man who is generally rated among the worst presidents in American history.
5
Dred Scott and Harpers Ferry
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
I know and you know that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows that revolutions never go backward.
WILLIAM SEWARD
The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one or even one hundred defeats.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to slavery—it is through the ballot box—the peaceful method provided by the Constitution.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
James Buchanan took the oath as president of the United States on March 4, 1857. He had an impressive resume, having graduated from Dickinson College; passed the law exam and opened a practice in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1812; served two terms in Pennsylvania’s legislature; been elected in 1820 to Congress for the first of five terms in the House of Representatives; been appointed by President Jackson to be minister to Russia in 1831; been elected to the Senate in 1833, where he stayed until President Polk tapped him to be his secretary of state; and been appointed by President Pierce to be minister to Britain. Along the way he revealed his ambitions in his failed attempts to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 1844, 1848, and 1852. He was a stout sixty-six years old when he entered the White House and remains the only “confirmed bachelor” to serve as president. Politically he was a Jacksonian Democrat and described himself as “a northern man with southern principles.” These appear to have been the only principles that guided him. He was among those countless persons whose essential mediocrity, incompetence, and venality lurk behind worldly achievements, natty attire, and chatty familiarity.1
His administration was among the more corrupt in American history.2 A House of Representatives investigation uncovered massive and widespread kickbacks for contracts, votes, and offices. The president himself shamelessly wielded public resources to enrich his private fortune and political power. The worst miscreant, however, was Secretary of War John Floyd, a Mississippi slavocrat who not only juggled books and personnel to extract a fortune in public resources and divvy it up among himself and his cronies, but as the Confederacy was forming, passed crucial intelligence to the rebels and dispersed American military forces to prevent them from reacting promptly against the rebellion.
With such massive and shameless malfeasance the president and his men became known as the “Buccaneers.” Yet Buchanan and his coterie got away with all that without any of them being prosecuted, let alone serving time. Congress turned a deaf ear to any allegations of wrongdoing. This was partly because Democrats controlled the Senate by 37 to 23 and the House by 128 to 92 Republicans and 14 Whigs. But more importantly, Congress and the nation faced a series of crises that overshadowed any scandals.
The first controversy to rock the nation during Buchanan’s presidency came not from his administration but from the Supreme Court, and a mere two days after he took office. After the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, no act incensed morally sensitive Americans more than the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.3 Dred Scott was a slave who accompanied his master, army surgeon John Emerson, first to Fort Armstrong, at Rock Island, Illinois, then to Fort Snelling in Wisconsin Territory. In all, Scott spent three years in free states or territories. After his master died, Scott became the property of Emerson’s wife, Eliza. In April 1846 Scott filed for emancipation in Missouri’s court system on the grounds that, according to the state’s law, a master who took his slaves into free territory automatically emancipated them. He won his case in the lower court but lost in the superior court when Eliza appealed. Meanwhile Eliza remarried and moved to Massachusetts with her husband, Calvin Chafee, leaving Scott in the hands of her brother John Sanford. In 1853 Scott appealed Missouri’s decision to the federal circuit court, which accepted it, although in designating the case Scott v. Sandford, the court misspelled one of the principal’s names. When these judges ruled against him, Scott once again appealed. The opposing lawyers argued the case before the Supreme Court in February 1856. The justices did not get around to reaching a decision for another year.
In Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court, like the three lower courts, pondered questions with potentially revolutionary constitutional, political, and moral answers. Had Scott’s years of residence in a free state freed him? Even if he were free, as a black man was Scott a citizen with the right to sue in a federal court? Had Congress acted unconstitutionally when it passed the 1787 Northwest Ordinance forbidding slavery in the Northwest Territory and the 1820 Missouri Compromise forbidding slavery above 36°30´ north latitude?
The Supreme Court’s 1851 Strader v. Graham decision provided a powerful precedent that had already guided the decisions of Missouri’s superior court and the federal circuit court. This case involved two Kentucky slaves who escaped to Ohio. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that the “once free, always free” doctrine was unconstitutional and the law of the state from which slaves escaped determined their fate. Thus federal courts had no jurisdiction over such cases and a slave state’s laws could trump a free state’s laws. At first Taney and a majority mulled using Strader v. Graham to dismiss the Dred Scott case, then changed their mind. The chief justice and his fellow slavocrats on the court saw the Dred Scott case as a powerful weapon by which to advance their cause.
The justices ruled seven to two against the plaintiff. Chief Justice Taney was eighty when he read this crucial decision on March 6, 1857, and his age showed. Yet, while his voice quavered and waned, his words could not have been more striking in their impact. He began by asserting slavocracy’s “once a slave, always a slave” doctrine and attacking the concept of “once free, always free.” Slaves by definition had no rights and thus could not sue. He could have ended his case there but instead asserted a broader opinion that he hoped would imbed slavocracy forever in the nation’s legal foundations. Turning a blind eye to the Constitution’s “diversity of citizenship” clause, he insisted that the framers intended that even free blacks could not be federal citizens. Each state or territory had the sole right to determine the question of slavery for itself. He repudiated the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and 1820 Missouri Compromise by ruling that Congress had no power to restrict slavery in any way, anywhere. Slaves were property and thus their masters were protected by the Fifth Amendment’s clause that prevented anyone from being deprived of his or her property without due legal process. Finally, Taney argued that these legal principles were embedded in the loftiest morality, since blacks were “altogether unfit to associate with the white race . . . and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” This permitted any black to be “justly and lawfully . . . reduced to slavery for his benefit.”4
The Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision had revolutionary implications. Blacks, whether slave or free, were not and never could be citizens. Congress could not impose any restrictions on slavery. Only the states and territories could determine whether slavery was legal. Thus, theoretically, slavery could be extended or reestablished anywhere.
As slavocrats and most Democrats cheered, Republicans and abolitionists harshly condemned the Dred Scott decision. Abraham Lincoln was among countless people who excoriated Taney’s court for grounding their decision in the ideology of slavocracy rather than decades of legal and political precedents. The first session of Congress under the Constitution reaffirmed the 1787 Northwest Ordinance that forbade slavery in that territory. In 1808 Congress passed a bill outlawing the importation of slaves. The 1820 M
issouri Compromise was grounded on these precedents. None of the framers then living denied the constitutionality of these laws. The Constitution’s institutions are rooted in and shaped by the Declaration of Independence’s values that “all men are created equal” and “liberty and justice for all.” Lincoln was appalled by the “obvious violence” that Taney and the six other justices had inflected on “the plain unmistakable language of the Declaration”; in doing so they had shamelessly violated the nation’s founding document to the point where, “if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not recognize it.”5
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 9
