The Caning

by Stephen Puleo

  The North was incensed, believing the Douglas-sponsored legislation recklessly and unnecessarily destroyed the delicate compromises on slavery that had existed since the nation's founding, and worse, opened vast new territories to slavery's expansion. When his bill was introduced, opponents held raucous public protest meetings throughout the North—three thousand attended one in Boston's Faneuil Hall and more than five thousand gathered in New York's City Hall Park. The Northern press vilified Douglas, and Northern clergy were unified in their exhortations against the bill.

  While Douglas knew the legislation would spark acrimonious debate, he had both convictions and politics in mind when he proposed it and pushed for its passage. He believed strongly in the principle of popular sovereignty (self-rule by the citizenry), and he predicted that the residents of Kansas would choose to prohibit slavery, even though, he maintained, they had the right to allow it (similar to the way residents of California had petitioned Congress for admittance as a free state in 1850). On the political side, Douglas had ambitions to become president and would need the support of Southern Democrats to do so. He also sought a northern route for an envisioned transcontinental railroad, and hoped that its eastern terminus would be Chicago, in his home state, while Southerners favored St. Louis as the easternmost point. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 was Douglas's offer of tribute to the South for these political goals.

  But Douglas never imagined the fury he would unleash, and the explosive hostility across the North distressed him. At mass meetings and rallies, speakers urged his removal from office, and in several places he was hanged in effigy. Never one to resist the pull of gallows humor—in this case literally—Douglas half-joked and half-lamented that he could have traveled the entire route between Washington, D.C., and his home in Illinois by the light of his own burning effigies. During debate on the bill, Charles Sumner said Douglas would suffer regardless of the outcome. “If he does not succeed in his plot, he will be kicked by the South; if he does, his brains will be dashed out at the North,” he wrote. When Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in May 1854, the Albany Evening Journal wrote: “The crime is committed. The work of Monroe, Madison, and Jefferson is undone…we have seen the North crouch lower and lower each year under the whip of the slave driver.”

  Those who opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories—disillusioned Northern Whigs, Free-Soilers, and some Northern Democrats—even formed a new political party, “Republicans,” who vowed to repeal the Kansas-Nebraska Act. “At last there seems to be an awakening of the North,” Senator Charles Sumner declared. “Good!” Douglas asserted otherwise, saying the formation of such a party would mean “civil war, servile war, and disunion.”

  Predictably, Southern response to Kansas-Nebraska was much different, sometimes hailed, sometimes greeted with indifference, and occasionally even decried by those who thought it did not go far enough, the latter group insisting instead that Congress should simply permit slavery in the new territories without a popular vote. The more consistent and moderate view, expressed by the Messenger of Macon, Georgia, said the Kansas-Nebraska bill was “simply an effort to resist encroachments upon our rights, and establish the just principle of non-intervention.”

  South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks chided the North for its hostility to the bill and its hypocrisy on the slavery question, pointing out that wealthy Northern textile magnates had become rich by transforming slave-picked Southern cotton into “thread, and wearing apparel, and umbrellas, and sun shades.” It was hard to take seriously the North's pontifications against Kansas-Nebraska and slavery, Brooks declared, considering that, without slavery, millions in the North would face “bankruptcy, and ruin, and inutterable miseries…thousands who now live in contentment and comfort would beg for bread.”

  ——

  Almost immediately after the passage of Kansas-Nebraska, both antislavery Northerners and proslavery Southerners began the competition to win these regions for their sides. Nebraska was too far north to yield productive cotton, rice, or tobacco crops and, thus, it did not entice slave-owners, nor was there much doubt that its residents would reject slavery. But Kansas—whose soil and weather were not conducive to producing cotton but might allow for the growth of hemp and tobacco—quickly became the center of the sectional storm, a battleground between stalwart proslavery and fervent antislavery forces, and, unavoidably, the symbol of the country's very future.

  The South was desperate to extend slavery and presumed Kansas was destined for slavery, especially after California was admitted as a free state as part of the Compromise of 1850, altering the national balance to sixteen free states and fifteen slave states. In addition, slave-owning Missourians feared that a free state on their western border would harbor escaped slaves. One Missouri newspaper even warned that “abolitionists would settle in Kansas and run off with our slaves.”

  Nor were these fears unfounded. The Massachusetts legislature had recently chartered the New England Emigrant Aid Company, incorporated under the guidance of founder Eli Thayer and treasurer and trustee Amos Lawrence. The company was established to send settlers with antislavery sentiments into the Kansas territory in an effort to secure its admission to the Union as a free state. Upon their arrival in Kansas, company volunteers established residences; helped to build homes, schools, churches, and mills; cleared land and planted crops; and secured reduced transportation fares for other emigrants traveling west.

  Residents of the South in its entirety and Missouri in particular were outraged by what they perceived as long-distance interference. Missouri Senator David Rice Atchison urged his constituents to cross Missouri's western border and engage in illegal interstate voting. He said it was the most effective way slavery proponents could counteract antislavery emissaries, “fanatics and demagogues,” who had arrived in Kansas from the East and were pouring money into an effort to “abolitionize Kansas.” Atchison challenged his constituents: “What is your duty, when you reside within one day's journey of the Territory, and when your peace, quiet, and property depend on your action?” Atchison said he could send as many as five thousand men to cross the border into Kansas, “enough to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.” Atchison supporter and proslavery activist Benjamin Franklin Stringfellow spoke just as bluntly to his western Missouri brethren: “I advise you, one and all, to enter every election district in Kansas…and vote at the point of the bowie-knife and revolver.”

  Nor would Missouri provide the only proslavery firepower. Atchison also sent out an appeal to other slave-owners to relocate their slaves to Kansas and urged armed men from the slave states to travel to the territory and fight for slavery. Troops arrived from Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee; the Montgomery, Alabama, Journal noted that the South “stood ready at any moment to supply any balance of voters which may be necessary.” Southern women gave up their jewels to help fund the cause, and several Southern railroads offered free passage to those willing to travel to Kansas. A proslavery committee in Abbeville, South Carolina, offered $200 to every “suitable person” who would emigrate to the divided territory. Another publication appealed urgently to Southerners: “Do not delay; come as individuals, come in companies, come by thousands.”

  * * *

  The roiling on the plains reached a climax on May 30, 1855, when Kansas held its territorial elections.

  Emboldened by the rhetoric of their elected officials, and supported by like-thinking people across the South, proslavery Missourians by the thousands, armed and ready for violence, crossed the border. Although only 1,500 men were registered to vote in Kansas, more than 6,000 ballots were cast, many of them by proslavery “border ruffians” from adjacent Missouri who flooded into Kansas to vote. They terrorized the few polling officials who dared to try to stop the outrage, and elected a bogus proslavery legislature that passed stringent laws protecting slavery in Kansas.

  Known as the “black laws,” they blatantly disregard
ed the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (one historian called them the most egregious violations of civil rights in American history) and mandated severe punishment for antislavery activity: two to five years of hard labor for anyone possessing an abolitionist publication and five years of hard labor for writers or publishers of antislavery writings. The laws also mandated the death penalty for those who induced slaves to revolt. “We now have laws more efficient to protect slave-property than any State in the Union,” boasted Stringfellow.

  The black laws proved so extreme as to be virtually unenforceable, but they created an atmosphere of violence and may-hem. Antislavery settler E. P. Brown was attacked by a crowd of border ruffians near Leavenworth, hacked with knives and a hatchet, and left at his cabin door. He died in his wife's arms and she went into shock. Proslavery men shaved the head of and tarred and feathered a Leavenworth lawyer named Phillips who had spoken out against the election frauds, and later shot him dead in his home. Thomas Barber, a free-state Kansan who lived ten miles outside of Lawrence, bled to death after he and his brothers were attacked and shot by a band of fifteen Missourians. In her letter to Charles Sumner, Lydia Hall described the impact of these episodes: “The cowardly murders…and the thousand nameless indignities offered in the same spirit have burnt deep into the hearts of our people.”

  In August 1855, opponents of slavery in Kansas known as “Free-Soilers” organized their own Free State convention to challenge the bogus legislature. A month later, Free-Soilers selected antislavery candidates, voted to oppose the black laws, and formed a committee for counting votes during elections. The convention passed a resolution stating that Free-Soilers would resist, with force if necessary, the “tyrannical enactments” of the proslavery legislature. The Free-Soilers drew up a constitution that prohibited slavery in Kansas, but at the same time also barred free blacks from the territory—they wanted Kansas free and white. They submitted the Topeka constitution to the territory's voters, who approved it by an overwhelming majority. The Topeka Free-Soil government then asked Congress to admit Kansas as a free state.

  Kansas now had two competing legislatures: one allowing slavery, the other against. President Franklin Pierce threw his support behind the proslavery legislature and asked Congress to admit Kansas to the Union as a slave state. Advocates of slavery in Kansas were exultant and opponents mortified. A despondent Horace Greeley editorialized in his antislavery paper, the New York Tribune: “The Border Ruffians have been raised entirely off their feet by Pierce's extraordinary messages, which they regard as a complete endorsement of all their past outrages, and an incitement to persevere in their diabolical work.”

  Perhaps more foreboding were the words of militant abolitionist John Brown, who had arrived in Kansas by this time: “We hear that Franklin Pierce means to crush the men of Kansas. I do not know how well he may succeed; but I think he may find his hands full before it is over.”

  Throughout the winter months of 1856, despite frigid temperatures and brutal storms, antislavery men posted sentries in Lawrence to stand guard against possible attacks, but the weather temporarily dissuaded wide-scale bloodshed. With spring approaching, however, Kansas Free-Soilers expected fresh outbreaks of violence and additional armed incursions from the western counties of Missouri. “We are expecting open warfare, eventually,” predicted Lydia Hall.

  Indeed, as the weather warmed, more violence ensued across eastern Kansas territory, with shootings and hangings of anti-slavery men by proslavery forces. George Washington Brown, editor of the Herald of Freedom newspaper, was one of seven free-state leaders arrested in the spring of 1856, charged with high treason and held prisoner by federal troops near Lecompton. Proslavery leaders viewed Lawrence, the free-state capital, as a viper's nest of traitors, and their claims were bolstered when a judge, responding to President Pierce's proslavery stance, ordered a grand jury to indict members of the Free-Soil legislature for treason. A federal marshal claimed that rebels in Lawrence had interfered with the execution of the indictments. He called for “law-abiding citizens of the territory” to assemble for an attack on the town.

  TWO

  OMENS OF WAR

  “My heart is sick,” Charles Sumner despaired to a fellow abolitionist as the Senate began its debate over Kansas in March 1856, weeks before his Kansas speech. The violence on the prairie and in the towns of Kansas epitomized the monumental clash of differences between North and South. Sumner knew full well that the geographic center of the American continent also represented the center of the country's ongoing and increasingly bitter debate over slavery.

  Sumner, whose long-held beliefs, writings, and speeches had cast him as the country's most eloquent and powerful antislavery voice, had paid close attention to the escalating violence in Kansas. He despised the proslavery forces who poured across the border from Missouri, describing them as uncivilized barbarians who were incapable of self-control, yet he sympathized with Emigrant Aid Company itinerants and other free-state sympathizers who had ventured to and settled in Kansas.

  He heard from them frequently; they viewed Sumner as their savior. Hannah Ropes and Lydia Hall were not alone in pleading with him for assistance. For months in early 1856, Sumner's mail had been full of urgent letters about the ominous developments in Kansas, as antislavery settlers asked his help in recognizing the free-state government. As Sumner's correspondents told the story, the settlers in the remote frontier area were industrious, peaceable Northerners who had formed—as Sumner would later describe, perhaps naively—“an association of sincere benevolence…whose only fortifications are hotels, school-houses, and churches; whose only weapons are sawmills, tools, and books; whose mission is peace and good will.” On the other hand, because the South was determined to create a new slave state once Kansas was admitted to the Union, Southern instigators had banded together “murderous robbers from Missouri” and “hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization,”

  In short, Sumner believed that a brutal and repressive proslavery government had been set up in Kansas with the endorsement of President Pierce—whose support disgusted Sumner—prompting Free-Soilers to establish their own government in Topeka. He feared for their safety and the future of the country. And he personally was appalled at a federal government predisposed to slavery. “The course of the Administration seems diabolic,” he exclaimed in February 1856. “I have not been able to go near the Presdt.” He also despaired that the turn of events in Kansas and the proslavery sentiments expressed in Washington had demoralized antislavery forces in Congress. “In the House, we are weak, in the Senate powerless,” he wrote.

  In March, as the Thirty-Fourth Congress began its debate on Kansas, Sumner summed up his feelings about Washington to a fellow abolitionist: “Truly—truly—this is a Godless place.” In light of what appeared to be the forces of official Washington arrayed against a free Kansas, Sumner likely did not disagree when Henry P. Waters wrote to him from Topeka expressing “little reliance” on the government's ability to protect him and his neighbors. Sumner described the situation with far more urgency. Events in Kansas, he concluded, had caused the country to “shake with the first throes of civil war.”

  Sumner knew hours of debate lay ahead. “You will hear nothing but Kansas from this time forever,” he communicated to his friend, Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker, in late February. Later he acknowledged that he was confident Kansas eventually would be a free state, but he expected the upcoming passion play in Washington to produce debate in which “truth will be mocked and reviled.”

  In Sumner's view, the perversion of the truth started almost immediately. Rather than Congress offering relief to Kansas settlers for the outrages taking place in the territory, Southern fire-eaters (the Northern term for proslavery extremists) and Northern Democrats had outflanked Northern antislavery law-makers by reducing the early debate to a critique of the Emigrant Aid Company. Were its members interfering unjustifiably in territorial affairs? If so, what shou
ld Congress do?

  The Senate's Committee on Territories, chaired by Stephen Douglas, issued its Affairs of Kansas report on March 12, and devoted several pages to criticism of the Emigrant Aid Company for interfering in the internal affairs of Kansas and escalating the level of violence in the territory. The committee likened the interference of a Massachusetts company in Kansas—merely due to its “repugnance to domestic slavery”—to France or England doing the same thing in “Brazil or Cuba or in fifteen [slave] States of this Union.” Similarly, the report argued, if one state could so blatantly influence the sovereignty of another simply because it disagreed with its laws and policy, then could not the United States interfere with “serfdom in Russia or polygamy in Turkey or any other obnoxious institution in any part of the world?” And what of foreign despots who viewed American democracy as despicably as some Massachusetts citizens viewed domestic slavery? Would they have the right to engage in a “common crusade” against America?

  Sumner decried the report and the committee's strained logic, objected to the assault on the Emigrant Aid Company, and urged the North to hold protest meetings on a scale with those held two years earlier to protest the Kansas-Nebraska Act. He argued that the “slave oligarchy” would stoop to anything and stop at nothing to win the fight for Kansas; indeed, it had “staked its power in the national government” upon the territory's admittance to the union as a slave state. He implored Northerners to settle their past differences and rally together to prevent such an atrocity. “Union to save Kansas, and Union to save ourselves, should be the watchword,” he declared.