by Alan Axelrod
In the end, the Constitution was all but silent on slavery, and when it did speak, it spoke both ambiguously and ambivalently, implying that slavery was an evil, yet also protecting it—in those states that did not outlaw it. These were all in the South or along the border between South and North, places where plantations were a form of agribusiness, enterprises that did not merely furnish food for subsistence or local consumption, but cultivated crops for widespread domestic sale and export—chiefly cotton, rice, and indigo dyestuffs. All of these were labor-intensive crops, and the cheapest form of labor was that of slaves. Economic conditions and matters of climate ensured that slavery in the United States would be regional. By protecting slavery wherever it existed, the Constitution unwittingly fostered a deepening divide between South and North, slave states and free states.
As moral objections to slavery—an abolition movement—developed in the North, the South feared that this more populous and more generally prosperous region, if it ever gained control of the federal government, would amend the Constitution to abolish slavery, an institution central to the Southern economy and way of life. The South’s only legal defense against abolition was to block passage of any anti-slavery legislation in the Senate, where federal representation was independent of population. There, whether large or small, each state had two senators. Thus, as the nation grew following the American Revolution, the addition of each new state became an event of utmost anxiety over which way the new state would tip the balance—toward preserving slavery in the United States or toward abolishing it. The prospect of a civil war was never very remote, and it was renewed each time a US territory petitioned for statehood.
In 1836, Texas, home to many slave owners, won its independence from Mexico. Since 1821, the United States had been balanced between slave and free states, and there was great reluctance to upset this equilibrium. Congress therefore repeatedly put off the petitions of Texas for annexation and eventual statehood. Instead, Congress remained impassive while an independent Texas continued to exist as a republic. When France and Britain showed interest in colonizing that republic, however, Congress was at last moved to action. Texas was annexed to the United States in 1845 and, at the end of that year, was admitted as a state, bringing the slave/free ratio to 15:14.
The annexation and statehood of Texas triggered a US-Mexican War (1846–48). During the war’s first year, Congress was eager to bring the conflict to a quick end and therefore debated a bill to appropriate $2 million to compensate Mexico for what the lawmakers euphemistically termed “territorial adjustments.” Seizing opportunity where he saw it, Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot, an ardent abolitionist, introduced an amendment to the proposed appropriation legislation. Called the Wilmot Proviso, it would have barred (had it been enacted) the introduction of slavery into any territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War. Everyone knew that this potentially represented several new states, the addition of which would suddenly throw the slave/free balance significantly in favor of the North. The Wilmot Proviso therefore prompted Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina to propose four resolutions:
1. That all territories, including those acquired as a result of the war, be regarded as the common and joint property of the states.
2. That Congress, acting as agent for the states, could make no law depriving any state of its rights with regard to any territory.
3. That enacting any national law regarding slavery would violate the Constitution and the doctrine of states’ rights.
4. That the people have the right to form their state governments as they wish.
Calhoun warned that failing to accept his resolutions would upset the balance between the demands of the North and the South and would therefore inevitably mean civil war. Wilmot’s provocative Proviso and Calhoun’s even more provocative resolutions set into motion a three-year debate on how to shore up the existing Missouri Compromise. Enacted in 1820 in response to Missouri’s request to be admitted to the Union as a slave state, the Missouri Compromise granted that request but also split off Maine from Massachusetts and admitted it as a free state, thereby maintaining the slave/free balance. As part of the compromise, Congress also passed legislation drawing a line across the former Louisiana Territory, establishing a boundary between free and slave regions that would apply to the creation of future states. In 1850, two years after the war with Mexico ended, California, formerly a possession of Mexico, was admitted into the Union directly, without going through an interim territorial status. Southerners objected, assuming (correctly) that California would vote itself free. So, to stave off the civil war Calhoun had warned of, Senators Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts worked out a new compromise. California was to be admitted as a free state, but the people in the other territories acquired as a result of the Mexican War would be given “popular sovereignty,” voting themselves as either “free” or “slave,” without interference from the federal government. To appease the South further, Congress passed a strong fugitive slave law, forbidding anyone to aid or harbor escaped slaves. To sweeten the deal even more, the federal government agreed to assume debts Texas (admitted as a slave state in 1845) incurred before it was annexed to the United States.
In 1854, when the territories of Nebraska and Kansas applied for statehood, Congress repealed the Missouri Compromise and passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This extended “popular sovereignty”—the right of citizens of a territory to vote themselves free or slave when they became a state—beyond territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War, and it erased the 1820 boundary between free and slave territories. A majority of Nebraskans clearly favored admission into the Union as a free state, but the balance was much closer in Kansas, and the antislavery and pro-slavery factions erupted into a guerrilla civil war so deadly that the territory was dubbed “Bleeding Kansas.”
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Charles Sumner was Boston-born, the son of a Harvard-educated lawyer who was not only an early abolitionist, but a pioneering advocate of racially integrated public schools and an opponent of laws barring marriage between the races. Under his father’s influence, young Charles grew up hating slavery. He became a lawyer and a Harvard lecturer on law, earned a reputation as a powerful abolitionist orator, and helped found the Free Soil Party, an important precursor of the Republican Party. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, senators were elected by state legislatures, not by the people. Running on the Free Soil ticket, Sumner won election to the US Senate by a single vote of the Massachusetts General Court (which functioned as the state’s legislature) on April 24, 1851.
On May 19, 1856, with Kansas awash in blood, Sumner began to deliver on the floor of the Senate the first part of a speech so long that it had to be carried over into the next day. Known as the “Crime against Kansas” speech, it argued for immediate admission of Kansas as a free state, and it contained an especially incendiary condemnation of so-called “Slave Power,” meaning the disproportionate influence slave owners exercised on government and public policy. The speech framed “Slave Power” in especially violent, even sexually charged terms, speaking of a “lust for power” and the “rape of a virgin Territory,” which was being forcibly compelled into “the hateful embrace of slavery.” The result of such a “depraved desire,” Sumner argued, would be the birth a “new Slave State, hideous offspring of … crime.”
Then Sumner made the speech personal, calling out Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He “has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight with sentiments of honor and courage,” Sumner declaimed. “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery.”
South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, a committed champion of slavery, was Andrew Butler’s cousin. Outraged by Sumner’s words, he consulted his fellow South Carolina congressman Laurence M. Ke
itt on the etiquette of dueling, for he intended to challenge Sumner. But no, Keitt advised. Duels were properly fought between gentlemen of equal social standing. The offensive vulgarity of Sumner’s speech had already revealed the Bostonian as no gentleman. Keitt advised instead that the appropriate response for such as Charles Sumner was to administer a beating with that symbol of true gentlemanly status, the walking stick.
And so the fury of Preston Brooks was channeled through a code of chivalry that both he and Keitt believed worthy of Southern gentlemen. Two days after the speech, Brooks entered the Senate chamber in the company of Keitt and Henry A. Edmundson, a congressman from Virginia. The Senate was in session, but the chamber was nearly empty. The trio scanned the galleries, anxious to ensure that no ladies were present to witness the violent retribution about to be meted out. It was, after all, unseemly for a Southern gentleman to cane a man in the presence of the fairer sex.
Brooks was a tall man, thirty-seven years old. He had attended South Carolina College—today the University of South Carolina—but had been expelled because he threatened local police officers with shooting. Later, in 1840, he actually did fight a duel, with Louis T. Wigfall, a future senator from Texas. Wigfall shot his challenger in the hip, which was why Brooks was obliged to walk with the aid of a cane. In contrast to Brooks, Sumner appeared older and frailer than his forty-five years. He certainly had no interest in duels, but was passionate about art and architecture, having traveled as a young man throughout Europe. In Paris in his late twenties, he fell in love with the treasures of the Louvre, the works of Leonardo and Raphael touching his mind, he wrote in his journal on January 19, 1838, “like a rich strain of music.” It is surprising that a man of such refined sensibilities could have written so fiery a speech.
Brooks did not approach Sumner with stealth. On the contrary, with his witnesses in tow, he confronted him openly at his Senate desk.
“Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” he said in a low, calm voice. “It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” With that, the beating commenced.
A number of senators and others attempted to intervene, but Edmundson interposed himself and blocked them. Keitt brandished his own cane at those who approached, and then he drew a pistol.
“Let them alone, God damn you,” he menaced. “Let them alone!”
Among the senators who tried to stop the beating was John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. A born peacemaker, he would, on December 18, 1860, offer before the Senate a set of six constitutional amendments designed to protect slavery while simultaneously limiting its spread. It was a desperate, last-ditch attempt to avert civil war, but the so-called Crittenden Compromise never had a chance. For Crittenden’s sons, the Civil War proved literally to be a conflict of brother against brother. One son resigned his commission as lieutenant colonel in the US Army to join the Confederate army. Another, who had been a member of a pro-Confederate Kentucky militia, joined the Union army, as did a third Crittenden boy. One grandson enlisted in the Confederate forces, while another graduated from the US Naval Academy and became an officer in the Union navy.
But these were things yet to come. Right now, Crittenden pleaded with Brooks not to kill Charles Sumner. Keitt responded by pointing his pistol at Crittenden, prompting Georgia Senator Robert Toombs to admonish Keitt that he must not attack a man who was not party to the dispute. (As for what Brooks was doing to Sumner, however, Toombs would later express his full approval.)
At length, New York Senator Edwin Morgan and New York Representative Ambrose Murray—who had brought with him Senate Sergeant at Arms Dunning R. McNair and a youthful Senate page—restrained Brooks. Spent by his exertions, the South Carolinian departed the chamber without a word. He left behind the bloody form of Charles Sumner, writhing on the bloodsoaked Senate floor along with the shattered remains of Brooks’s cane, which had broken into several pieces, some of which were greedily gathered up by Representative Edmundson. He presented the piece with the gold head to the House sergeant at arms, and it lives today in the collection of Boston’s Old State House Museum. Edmundson apparently distributed other pieces of the cane to a variety of Southern lawmakers, who fashioned rings out of them and wore them in public on neck chains. Brooks claimed that his Southern legislative colleagues fairly begged him for pieces of the walking stick “as sacred relics,” like fragments of the True Cross.
As Sumner slowly came to, the page and the sergeant at arms helped him to his feet and guided him to the Senate cloakroom. A physician was summoned and stitched the worst of his open wounds. Speaker of the House Nathaniel P. Banks and Henry Wilson, his fellow Massachusetts senator, accompanied Sumner on a carriage ride to his Washington apartment. But his recovery proved to be slow and agonizing. When he failed to appear in the Senate, Southerners condemned him as a coward, but the Massachusetts General Court reelected him in November 1856. No matter that his chair in the chamber was vacant. The state legislators believed it a fittingly shameful monument to Southern barbarism. Sumner did try to return in 1857, but remained at his seat only a few hours. He traveled to Europe, and, in 1858, underwent a painful spinal treatment—burning the skin along the spinal cord—administered by a Paris physician. It was 1859 before he finally returned to the Senate, and when he made his first major speech, on June 4, 1860, during the election that brought Lincoln into the White House, it was devoted to the “Barbarism of Slavery.” If anything, the oration was even harsher than the speech that had provoked the 1856 attack.
If Preston Brooks had intended to beat abolition out of Charles Sumner, his efforts were in vain. The genteel Bostonian lover of Raphael and Leonardo emerged from his ordeal not just a charter member of the newly formed Republican Party, the party of Lincoln, but a member of its most extreme wing, a Radical Republican, adamantly opposed to any further attempt at compromise with the South. Sumner’s radical conversion reflected the hardening divide in the nation itself. The caning of Charles Sumner marked the tipping point that sent the United States hurtling toward war.
* * *
As guerrilla fighting raged in Kansas, talk of compromise was heard less and less everywhere in America. Then, on March 6, 1857, a decision of the United States Supreme Court made compromise constitutionally impossible. That day, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, native of the slaveholding state of Maryland, handed down the court’s decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a fugitive Missouri slave who had belonged to Dr. John Emerson of St. Louis. An army surgeon, Emerson was transferred first to Illinois and then to Wisconsin Territory, and he took Scott with him to each of these posts. After Emerson’s death in 1846, Scott returned to St. Louis, where he sued Emerson’s widow for his freedom, arguing that he was now a citizen of Missouri, having been made free by virtue of his terms of residence in Illinois, where slavery was banned by the Northwest Ordinance, and in Wisconsin Territory, where the provisions of the Missouri Compromise (since repealed, but in force at the time) made slavery illegal. After a Missouri state court ruled against Scott, his lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The high court’s antislavery Northern justices, predictably, sided with Scott, whereas the proslavery Southerners, the court’s majority, upheld the Missouri court’s decision. Taney wrote the decision, which held that neither free blacks nor enslaved blacks were citizens of the United States and, therefore, had no standing to sue in federal court. This alone would have settled the case, but Taney, intending the case to be a landmark slavery ruling, ruled further that the Illinois law banning slavery had no force on Scott once he returned to Missouri, a slave state, and that the law obtaining in Wisconsin was likewise without force, because the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. It violated (Taney ruled) the Fifth Amendment, which barred the government from depriving an individual of “life, liberty, or property” without due process of law.
The Dred Scott decision galvanized the Northern abolitionist movement, but also did much more. The caning of Se
nator Sumter took the issue of slavery out of the realm of orderly legislative argument and beyond the rule of law. The brutality in the Senate chamber was scaled up in the ugly violence that pervaded Kansas. Both the caning and Bleeding Kansas implied that there would be no compromise on slavery and, therefore, no alternative to civil war. The Dred Scott decision implied nothing. It forthrightly declared that there could be no compromise. By defining slavery as an issue of property, a Fifth Amendment issue, the decision mandated that slavery had to be protected in all the states, regardless of whether or not a given state permitted slavery. As abolitionists saw it, if the Constitution universally protected the rights of slave holders as long as slavery existed, then, universally, slavery had to be abolished. That would require a constitutional amendment, something the South would never accept—not without a fight, not without a war.
2
March 4, 1861
“Black Lincoln” Is Inaugurated
Why it’s significant. Southern champions of slavery believed that, by electing Abraham Lincoln president in 1860, Northerners declared their intention to abolish the institution on which the Southern economy and way of life so heavily relied. That belief was enough to start a secession movement, which ultimately resulted in the creation of the eleven Confederate States of America. At his inauguration, Lincoln tried to stem the secessionist tide with a straightforward pledge that he had neither the “lawful right” nor the “inclination” to “interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” But he also proclaimed his belief that the Constitution held the “Union of these States [to be] perpetual.” Accordingly, he also pledged, “to the extent of my ability,” to do “as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me” by ensuring “that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States.” After South Carolina became the first state to secede on December 20, 1860, Lincoln’s feckless predecessor, James Buchanan, had reportedly exclaimed, “I am the last President of the United States!” Lincoln was not so resigned. He would demonstrate that the extent of his ability included the power to restore the Union, and to do so with iron and with blood. He would take the nation to war.
