Douglas wheeled on Trumbull to accuse him of appearing in the Senate under fraudulent pretenses. “I desire now to say a word upon another point. I understand that my colleague has told the Senate, as being a matter very material to this issue, that he comes here as a Democrat, having always been a Democrat. Sir, that fact will be news to the Democracy of Illinois. I undertake to assert there is not a Democrat in Illinois who will not say that such a statement is a libel upon the Democracy of that state. I undertake to say that there is not a man here . . .”
But before Douglas could continue his tirade, Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky interrupted him mid-sentence calling him to order. Crittenden claimed the mantle of Henry Clay, the legacy of the border state statesman. He had been Fillmore’s attorney general and drifted from stalwart conservative Old Whig to the nativist Know Nothing Party, which was popular in Kentucky. “I really think this debate is transcending all the rules of decorum which have been usually observed in the Senate,” Crittenden chided Douglas. He requested that Douglas stop accusing other senators of “libel” and instead show “respect.” Douglas replied that he would “keep myself within the rules; but I should have been better satisfied if the Senator from Kentucky, when the Black Republicans were denouncing us in coarse terms the other day, had arrested them for a want of courtesy towards the friends of the Constitution.” Having suggested Sumner hang for treason, Douglas demanded the imprisonment of “Black Republicans” for failing to show “respect” to him.
“I do not know to what the gentleman alludes,” Crittenden replied. Douglas pointed an accusing finger at Trumbull, guilty of “the most vulgar and coarse of all partisan assaults ever made on the Democratic side of the house by a senator on the other side.” Crittenden again tried to dampen Douglas’s rancor, explaining that he had called Douglas to order “with reluctance, exceeding reluctance,” warning him of his “personal language,” “whatever his passion may have prompted,” and appealing to him as a “distinguished senator,” with the “eyes of the public” upon “this body.” Crittenden admonished him, “We are not here for the purpose of personal encounter or personal vituperation. Questions of a personal character may be settled elsewhere. The floor of the Senate is not the place to settle them. . . . This is a matter on which I cannot be misunderstood.”
But Crittenden’s appeal to courtesy only incited Douglas to lash out at Trumbull’s “political character,” which “would be deemed by the Illinois Democracy a libel on them.” Then he struck out at Crittenden. “I am better capable of judging than the Senator from Kentucky. I do not regard him as good authority on the character of the Illinois Democracy,” he said. To prove his point, Douglas made another assault on Trumbull. “How can a man who was elected as an Abolition-Know-Nothing, come here and claim to be a Democrat, in good standing with the Democracy of Illinois?” That, he said, “means a Black Republican. My colleague is the head and front of Black Republicanism in Illinois in opposition to Democracy.”
An affronted Crittenden replied, “I cannot fail to think there was some purpose of a personal application in those reproaches and denunciations which it has pleased him, in the heroism of his eloquence. . . . I repel every denunciation of that sort, so far as it was aimed at, or was intended to embrace me, or those with whom I am associated. I repel it with scorn—utter scorn.” Douglas replied that he “distinctly said” he was discussing Illinois, where “every Know Nothing lodge adopted the abolition creed, and those were the ‘miserable’ factions by which my colleague was brought into power here.”
Trumbull leaped to his feet to refute Douglas’s “totally untrue” charges. “I am not to be driven into the defense of either Abolitionism or Know Nothingism. I have nothing to do with them.”
“I said he received every Abolition and every Know Nothing vote in the legislature,” Douglas shot back. “Does he deny the statement? He dare not.” On he went, “I say, it will be news to the people of Illinois to hear that he is a Democratic Senator in the Senate of the United States.” Then, charging Trumbull with attempting “to mislead the country as to the state of parties in Illinois,” he said, “I will not occupy the attention of the Senate further,” and would save “what strength I may have” to reply “to the champions of Black Republicanism, of whom, it seems, my colleague has become the chief.” He would “avoid as far as possible personal controversy.”
Trumbull was incredulous. It was “extraordinary to me,” he said, that after Douglas had insulted him he “should sit down with a declaration that he intends to avoid all personal matters. . . . Why did he provoke the controversy?” Again, Douglas accused him of being the candidate of “the Know Nothing and Abolition parties.” Again, Trumbull repelled his accusation. “I shall never permit him, here or elsewhere to make an assault on me personally, without meeting it with the best power that God has given me, feeble though it be.”
Now Douglas wheeled on Sumner for committing “a gross libel.” But Sumner insisted that the facts upheld his version of the incident. “The Senator has alluded to facts,” said Sumner. “I answer on facts.” Then the former Harvard professor made a classical reference. “Now, as to the character of the address—the senator has chosen to revive that ancient matter. He had better go, perhaps to the siege of Troy and revive that again.”
“Why do you not reprove your agitators on that side of the chamber,” Douglas replied, “who have been going back to the siege of Troy ever since the Nebraska bill was passed?” Finally, Douglas declared himself the victim in the fracas. “I am not the one who has disturbed the repose of the Senate.”
The rattled Senate adjourned.
The following week, on March 17, Douglas filed his statehood bill for Kansas. The election there, he insisted, was completely legitimate, the so-called “bogus legislature” was indeed the true government, and it should conduct its election of delegates to a convention to write a state constitution. In fact, the “bogus legislature” had already adopted the Missouri constitution, which protected slavery.
On March 20, Douglas took to the Senate floor to resume his diatribes. Trumbull, he charged, was guilty of “innuendo of unfairness,” and had invented “personal issues with myself for the purpose of diverting public attention from the great questions involved in this contest between the Democracy and allied forces of northern Know Nothingism and Abolitionism.”
Douglas flung his newly coined and racially charged phrases to tar the Republicans—the “Black Republican Party,” “Black Republicanism,” and the “Black Republican camp.” The free state men in Kansas, he added, were “an invading army from a foreign State”—“that things should be called by their right names—that revolution should be checked—that rebellion should be suppressed.”
The fundamental issue, Douglas said, was between his position, which “affirms the principles of non-intervention from without, and self-government within . . . while the other insists that the domestic affairs and internal concerns of the Territories may be controlled by associations and corporations from abroad. . . . They have succeeded by this system of foreign interference in producing violence, and bloodshed, and rebellion in Kansas.” He accused the “agents” of “mischievous schemes of foreign interference” to be operating with secret “political designs,” until “all disguise was thrown aside, and the purpose of the company openly avowed, to abolitionize Kansas, with the view of erecting a cordon of free States as a perpetual barrier against the formation and admission of any more slave States.” Douglas warned, “My opinion is that, from the signs of the times, and in view of all that is passing around us, as well as at a distance, there will be very little difficulty in arresting the traitors—and that, too, without going all the way to Kansas to find them!” Those “traitors” were in the chamber of the Senate. The Congressional Globe recorded: (“Laughter.”) But it was not laughter of derision but agreement.
Douglas built to a crescendo. “This Government has shown itself the most powerful of any on earth in all respects
except one. It has shown itself equal to foreign war or to domestic defense—equal to any emergency that may arise in the exercise of its high functions in all things except the power to hang a traitor!” He appealed to a higher authority: “I trust in God that the time is not near at hand, and that it may never come, when it will be the imperative duty of those charged with the faithful execution of the law to execute that power.” But he proclaimed his resolve that “if treason against the United States shall be consummated, far be it from my purpose to express the wish that the penalty of the law may not fall upon the traitor’s head!” Off with Trumbull’s head! Off with Sumner’s!
Calmly and deliberately, Senator William Henry Seward of New York rose to oppose the admission of Kansas on the basis of the proslavery “bogus legislature” and to introduce a substitute based instead on the antislavery Topeka Constitution. Douglas’s histrionics hardly ruffled him. At his residence in Washington, Seward hosted dinner parties with an eclectic group of guests, occasionally including Douglas, featuring fine wine, good cigars, and indiscreet gossip. At his home in Auburn, New York, he and his wife, Frances, a highly educated woman and abolitionist, ran a station of the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves. They also helped secretly fund Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, the The North Star. Above all, Seward was central within his party, its consummate politician. He had launched his career in the conspiracy-minded Anti-Masonic Party of upstate New York, a region that was also the seedbed of abolitionism, the evangelical Great Awakening, and Mormonism. Protégé and biographer of John Quincy Adams during the former president’s last phase as an antislavery crusader in the House of Representatives, Seward possessed the adroit political skills his hero lacked. Along with his alter ego with whom he bonded in the Anti-Masonic campaign, Thurlow Weed, editor and publisher of the Albany Evening Journal, Seward was the maker of New York’s Whig Party. Weed often operated from luxurious rooms at the Astor House on Broadway, padding like a large feline through politics with an acute sixth sense, listening, purring, and sniffing. “I once heard Seward declare,” recalled Gideon Welles, Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, “that ‘Seward is Weed and Weed is Seward. What I do, Weed approves. What he says, I endorse. We are one.’ ” Together they were “the firm,” as Horace Greeley, one of their early creations, called them. Greeley, however, fell out with “the firm” when they failed to slate him for lieutenant governor in favor of Henry J. Raymond, editor of the New York Times, that newspaper and its editor also among their inventions—both the Times and Raymond. Raymond was a reliable partner, unlike the mercurial Greeley, given to unpredictable bouts of grandiosity, hysteria, and sudden enthusiasms, and who would never forgive Seward for being passed over.
The history of “the firm” charted the rise and fall of the Whig Party. After Weed was instrumental in electing Seward governor of New York in 1838, the two men acted as prime movers behind every Whig presidential candidate. William Henry Harrison’s nomination and election in 1840 signaled their mastery of New York politics and emergence as national power brokers. Henry Clay’s candidacy in 1844, however, fell just short from defections in New York to the radical antislavery Liberty Party and local nativists who despised Seward.
Seward wore the badges and scars of his vast and varied experience, was both respected and despised, sometimes considered too radical and sometimes too crafty, clear in his purposes and ruthless in his tactics, appealing to a “higher law” than the Constitution against slavery even as he bid for control of the patronage at the New York Custom House. He was charged at the same time with holding dangerous principles and having none. Henry Clay said of him, after Seward abandoned the marked Clay for the unblemished military hero Zachary Taylor in 1848, “Mr. Seward is man of no convictions.” Like Clay, Seward had his beliefs, but was also adroit, sometimes too adroit. He was ironically coming to resemble Clay, who never reached the presidency, burdened with his past. An army of followers mobilized in Seward’s wake, but a phalanx of enemies, some former acolytes like the irascible Greeley, tracked after him. After the 1852 debacle, the Whig Party no longer functioned as a working organism. Seward and Weed tried to breathe life into the corpse, but the body had expired. “How strange the mutations of politics,” Seward wrote his wife.
William Henry Seward, painting by Henry Inman
At Syracuse, on September 28, 1855, Weed choreographed a convention for the merger of a breakaway faction of Softs and the remnant of the Whigs into a new Republican Party. Greeley gave it a name; Raymond sat as a delegate. Seward consecrated the party in a speech delivered on October 12 at the State House at Albany. He excoriated “the privileged class” of slaveholders in control of the government. “The President of the United States is reduced to the position of a deputy of the privileged class,” he declared. Slavery would end, he prophesied, but the method was uncertain. “Slavery is not, and never can be, perpetual. It will be overthrown either peacefully or lawfully under this Constitution, or it will work the subversion of the Constitution, together with its own overthrow. Then the slaveholders would perish in the struggle.” Now Seward bade farewell to the Whig Party that had been his life’s work, reduced to a ruin.
Shall we report ourselves the Whig party? Where is it? “Gentle shepherd, tell me where?” Four years ago, it was a strong and vigorous party, honorable for energy, noble achievements, and still more for noble enterprises. In 1852, it was united and consolidated, and moved by panics and fears to emulate the Democratic Party in its practiced subserviency to the privileged class, and it yielded in spite of your remonstrances and mine. The privileged class, who had debauched it, abandoned it, because they knew that it could not vie with its rival in the humiliating service it proffered them; and now there is neither Whig party nor Whig south of the Potomac. . . . We have maintained it here, and in its purity, until the aiders and abettors of the privileged class, in retaliation, have wounded it on all sides, and it is now manifestly no longer able to maintain and carry forward, alone and unaided, the great revolution that it inaugurated. . . . Any party, when reduced so low, must ultimately dwindle and dwarf into a mere faction. Let, then, the Whig party pass. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it. Let it march out of the field, therefore, with all the honors.
Neither “true Democrats” nor “true Whigs” should raise “a stained banner, upon the other.” It was time for a new organization. “Its banner is untorn in former battles, and unsullied by past errors. That is the party for us.”
Back in Washington Seward was dismayed at the disarray. After attending an anti-Nebraska congressional caucus on March 12, 1856, he wrote Weed, “I came away with feelings of my own, sad and unhopeful. . . . It is manifest that here, the tone of anti-slavery feeling is becoming daily more and more modified, under the pressure of the ‘Know-Nothing’ influences. . . . I feel as if I was already half demoralized.” But, he observed, Kansas “may present an issue on which we can rally the party,” though he had no strategy.
Seward’s downcast letter to Weed was written the day after Douglas introduced his report on Kansas. The anti-Nebraska men had dissolved into squabbling, divided among antislavery Whigs, dissident Democrats, Free Soilers, and Know Nothings, and if left to their own devices might have endlessly emphasized their sectarian differences. But Douglas could not leave them alone. His ambition was impatient. He was intent on justifying what he had done in Kansas in order to advance his presidential campaign. His will to power forced upon his scattered adversaries new political realities they lacked the ability to create themselves. While the inchoate and nascent Republican movement had no acknowledged national leader, Douglas filled the vacuum, hectoring his opponents into common cause. The more he tarred them as “Black Republicans,” the more he galvanized them into becoming Republicans; the more he insisted on popular sovereignty as the means to take slavery off the agenda, the more he made slavery the unavoidable issue; the more he insisted on his unassailable correctness on Kansas, the more his position became
contestable.
On April 9, Seward proposed admitting Kansas as a state based on the antislavery Topeka Constitution. His speech before the Senate was a carefully prepared brief, placing responsibility for the violence on the Border Ruffians, citing incident after incident, quotation after quotation, to prove his case. He compared Pierce to George III for imposing a tyranny and described his offenses in the style of the Declaration of Independence. He proclaimed the Topeka Constitution a “revolution” against “usurpation and tyranny,” “a remedy peaceful and simple.” And he dismissed Douglas’s doctrine: “Shall we confess that the proclamation of popular sovereignty was not merely a failure, but was a pretense and a fraud?” He finished with a dark vision of civil war. “Do you look through this incipient war quite to the end, and see there peace, quiet, and harmony, on the subject of slavery? . . . But if disunion could ever come, it would come in the form of a secession of the slaveholding States.” Then “the slaveholding power” would “have fastened his grappling irons upon the fountains of the Missouri and the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Then that power would either be intolerably supreme in this Republic, or it would strike for independence or exclusive domination.” Then the “free States and slave States” would be “divided and warring with each other.” Then, when “we have forgotten moral right . . . we shall have become reckless of the obligations of Eternal Justice, and faithless to the interests of universal freedom.”
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