CHAPTER SEVEN
A VOICE FROM THE GRAVE
On Christmas Day 1855 Charles Sumner drove north from Washington to the Silver Spring house in Maryland of Francis P. Blair. It was for more than a holiday dinner. The gathering marked the true founding of the Republican Party.
Francis Preston Blair
From the moment that Douglas had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act a host of disparate protest groups had proliferated. One of the first consisted of thirty opponents, mostly Whigs, congregating on March 20, 1854, in a schoolhouse in Ripon, Wisconsin, who called themselves the Republican Party. Several thousand met at Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854, under the banner of the Republican Party. All sorts of Free Soilers, Democrats, Whigs, and even some Know Nothings who called themselves Know Somethings rallied in anti-Nebraska groups adopting the Republican identification. In Springfield, Illinois, after Abraham Lincoln delivered a galvanizing speech against the Nebraska bill on October 4, a small group of local abolitionists asked him to lead their new Republican Party, but Lincoln demurred, still thinking of himself as a Whig. In Ohio, in 1855, Salmon P. Chase was elected the first Republican governor. New state parties emerged from New York to Indiana, but there was no national party; nor was there a common platform or even general agreement on how to handle the Know Nothings.
Even before his election as governor, Chase was planning a campaign for president as the head of a party that did not yet exist. Imbued with a high sense of morality ingrained from being raised by his uncle who was the Episcopal bishop of Ohio, he had faced down proslavery mobs, earned the reputation of “attorney general of fugitive slaves,” and laced his noble rhetoric with theological fervor. An image of dignity and assuredness, Chase’s brilliant mind had charted constitutional arguments for a practical antislavery politics to set it apart from Garrison’s radical abolitionism that cast the wrath of God on the framers as the source of evil and anything less than immediate emancipation as a pact with the devil. Chase’s political odyssey was a map of antislavery politics. Beginning as a proper Whig lawyer in Cincinnati, he became a Democrat, left it for the tiny abolitionist Liberty Party, but felt confined by its rigid sectarianism, and founded the broader Free Soil Party, which he somehow saw as a vehicle for capturing and transforming the Democratic Party. Chase’s profound and original insights into the law that framed the most important issues redefined the antislavery movement. But he carried a fatal flaw. He could not clearly read human nature and grasp the motives of others. His formidable intellect was connected to a nervous system that sometimes made his maneuvers seem clumsy and obvious. He had difficulty adjusting his public persona, burdened by a self-conscious vanity that made him avoid wearing glasses onstage, which made him seem condescending as he squinted at his audiences and spoke profundities. He was both visionary and myopic. His resolve to right the ultimate wrong was now matched by his monumental determination to become president. Chase tied his firm convictions and sharp tactics together with his certain belief that he was the best man—not simply the best man for the job, but also the best man of all men. His transparent self-esteem had the effect of putting his limitless ambition on constant parade. He began running for president in 1855 and would never stop plotting how to achieve it until his death in 1873.
“Good! Good! Good!” Sumner wrote Chase upon his narrow victory in winning the governorship of Ohio. In the fall elections of 1855 the old political lines were dissolving, but the new ones were still unformed. Old Whigs clung to the hulk of their sinking party, Democrats suddenly showed unexpected strength in Pennsylvania, anti-immigrant Know Nothings divided into warring factions, an antislavery one calling itself Know Somethings, and faded in some places but surged elsewhere. Chase was not a Know Nothing, but he trafficked with Know Nothings. He had beaten an Old Whig turned Know Nothing, Jacob Brinkerhoff, to gain the Republican nomination, and in private letters he disdained the nativist movement. But he was only able to cobble together the new Ohio Republican Party by giving the Know Nothings half the slots on the ballot. Before his election he worried that he would lose “on both sides, on American because not a member of the [nativist] order and on the naturalized because of the Know-Nothings on the ticket.” Now, proposing himself as a presidential candidate he offered that unstable mixture as the foundation for a new party, dubbing it “the Ohio Plan.”
Chase and his political agents circulated letters to Republican state chairmen and a few other influential men to seek interest in a preliminary gathering. By initiating the call, Chase hoped to preempt potential rivals such as Seward and Senator John P. Hale In his letter to Hale, Chase wrote that other Republicans were already suggesting him for the party nomination. He also sent a letter to Francis P. Blair, who masked his own plans. Chase had already offered himself “if necessary” as co-counsel in the Dred Scott case to his son Montgomery Blair, who was serving as the lawyer for the slave testing whether living in a free state gave him the right to sue for his freedom. Chase had consistently argued that point in cases on behalf of fugitive slaves since 1837, one of which Harriet Beecher Stowe transformed into a subplot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Chase was not the sole person who had approached Blair about joining the Republican movement. On June 19, 1855, Lewis Clephane, the business manager of The National Era, the antislavery newspaper in Washington, formed “a small club” called the Republican Association of Washington, and issued a platform signed by four others. The National Era had published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, partly on Chase’s initial suggestion that Stowe might write something for the paper. Its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, had been Chase’s close friend and fellow antislavery crusader from Cincinnati, editor of a newspaper whose printing press was destroyed three times by proslavery mobs, even before Bailey and Chase had campaigned for the Liberty Party. Both were religiously motivated, but believed in political action, not just moral suasion. Bailey had moved to the capital to edit The National Era with Chase’s encouragement. “In those days,” recalled Clephane, “it was a crime to be called a Republican, and every man who was then known as a Republican was denounced as an Abolitionist.” Stigmatized and minuscule, the Republican Association of Washington decided to offer its presidency to the most formidable man they knew.
Francis Preston Blair, sixty-five years old, diminutive, bald, and skeletal, his jutting front teeth lending him a cadaverous look, presented himself as a country gentleman retired from the tumult of politics and devoted to riding his carriage between his mansion on Lafayette Park facing the White House and Silver Spring estate. None of his political acuity, however, had left him.
Blair had been recruited as a young man from Kentucky to edit the Washington Globe as President Andrew Jackson’s political voice and became a trusted member of his Kitchen Cabinet, fighting Jackson’s battles with his sharp pen against nullification and “the money power,” against states’ rights and privilege. Purged from the Globe under Polk at the instigation of Calhoun, Blair supported the presidential candidacy of Martin Van Buren in 1848 when he ran on the Free Soil ticket. Four years later, Van Buren backed Pierce, but Blair did not. His sons Montgomery and Francis Jr., protégés of Thomas Hart Benton, as though in an extended family, were deeply engaged in Missouri politics of which Montgomery’s advocacy of the Dred Scott case was their latest project. Blair Sr. was hardly a relic, but as razor sharp as ever, still in possession of the thunder and lightning he let loose for Jackson, and enraged at the old enemies whose nefarious influence he detected in the current crisis. Jackson was dead; Blair was very much alive.
Since the passage of the Nebraska Act, Blair had been pulling wires for an independent presidential candidate. He quietly floated the idea of a Benton candidacy in late 1854, but Benton “kicked over the pail of milk,” according to Blair, when he decided to battle his mortal enemy Senator David Rice Atchison for the Senate seat and conceded to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Blair turned his attention to Senator Sam Houston of Texas, who Blair wrote to Van Buren was “unstaine
d.” But Houston could not be corralled, flirted with the Know Nothings, and responded to Blair’s go-betweens with noncommittal ambiguity. By late 1855, Blair began secretly plotting for the candidacy of Senator John C. Frémont of California, a military hero and Western explorer who happened to be Benton’s son-in-law.
Blair arranged with the Republican Association that he would be elected its president but decline the honor in a letter explaining his reasons for supporting the organization that was published in newspapers across the country and circulated as a pamphlet. “This letter had a powerful effect upon the Democratic Party and caused many of them to desert their old party ties and unite with the Republican Party,” Clephane recalled. Blair carried with him more than the musty mantle of Jackson as an ancient artifact, but acted as translator of the Jacksonian creed into the present. He personified its inner history, the keeper of the flame. Its battles were not over; nor had he mellowed with wealth, comfort, and age.
Blair’s letter of December 1, 1855, redefined the Democratic tradition for the new movement. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise, he argued, was nothing less than a new version of nullification. “Yet nothing is clearer in the history of our Government than that this phrase, giving power to Congress ‘to make regulations respecting the Territories,’ was meant to give it the power to exclude slavery from them.” Blair wrested Thomas Jefferson for the Republicans, reviewing the history of his authorship of the Northwest Ordinance prohibiting slavery in Western territories, and read out Stephen A. Douglas for abandoning the true Democratic legacy to “embrace Mr. Calhoun’s doctrine.” Despite John C. Calhoun’s death five years ago, his concept that a state had the power to nullify federal law remained gospel among Southerners. Blair had not ceased railing against it. Now Blair denounced Douglas’s unholy alliance and betrayal
This repeal was the adoption of Mr. Calhoun’s nullifying doctrine in extenso. The power of Congress to make laws excluding slavery forever from its Territories, as such, was denied, and all the Territories were opened to slavery, on the ground of the “inalienable right” of every citizen “to move into any of the Territories with his property, of whatever kind or description”; and the law of squatter sovereignty was superadded, and substituted for the sovereignty of the United States over the public domain. Thus fell, supported by the coalition effected between the Whigs and Democrats of the South, under the pressure and through the intrigues of the Nullifiers, Mr. Jefferson’s noble principle, endeared to the country both for its moral grandeur and political wisdom. It is the first thought uttered in the Declaration of Independence; and to the denunciation of the king of Great Britain for the crime of bringing slavery to our shores, the original draft adds, as the deepest aggravation, that “he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce.”
Blair placed Douglas in league against both Jefferson and Jackson. “The Administration has staked itself on the support of the party of privilege—of class interest—which makes it a unit. It confides in the success which has crowned the oligarchy everywhere in the Old World, and secured its triumphs on the maxim, ‘Divide and conquer.’ The Whigs and Democrats of the South are a combination, to carry into the next Presidency some candidate absolute in maintaining the repealing clause of the Kansas bill, which nullifies the principles of the Ordinance, the provisions of the Constitution made to give them effect, and all the Compromises which have been made in pursuance of them, with the sanction of all sections of the Union.” Blair confidently summoned a future Jackson to the presidency. “Mr. Atchison’s attempt by an armed force to carry out the nullification plotted of the caucus which gave birth to the Kansas bill will, like the attempt of his prototype, Mr. Calhoun, to give effect to South Carolina nullification, be paralyzed by the frown of an indignant nation, made potent by as honest and firm Executive. And there will end the career of those gentlemen who arrogate to themselves the exclusive tutelage of the Democracy of the country, as ended that of Mr. Calhoun and his proselytes, who took the peculiar charge of the ‘State Rights’ party.”
“FRANCIS P. BLAIR TURNED BLACK REPUBLICAN” read the headline in the Washington Union. “We have been reluctant to credit the rumor that for several days has represented Francis P. Blair, esq., as a convert to black republicanism . . . the blackest treason to a party on which he reposed for years with all the upholding power of its great champion, Andrew Jackson.” “Mr. Blair was prepared for this, as a matter of course,” the New York Times reported, “and he knew perfectly well what kind of epithets would be heaped upon his head by many of his former political associates; and he will not be dismayed by the Union’s attempt to annihilate him.”
Blair’s fierce argument was finely honed to stigmatize Douglas among Northern Democrats, invoke the household gods of Jefferson and Jackson for the Republicans, avoid the more radical abolitionist demands, and establish the broadest platform for the broadest possible coalition.
His letter set the stage for Christmas at Silver Spring. Only Blair had the authority to convene the select company, and he possessed decades more political experience at the center of power than any of those he invited. He wanted to see the array of men reveal themselves around his table. Sumner and Chase came, as well as Gamaliel Bailey, Nathaniel Banks, and Congressman Preston King of New York. Seward was invited, but he demurred because, as he explained to Thurlow Weed, he was wary of Chase’s alliance with the Know Nothings.
The dinner party to create the political party not only brought certain key people together but also laid bare their tensions. While King agreed with Chase that a new Republican Party should adopt Chase’s Ohio Plan regarding the Know Nothings, Bailey, who was Chase’s oldest and closest friend, called the Know Nothings “detestable” and said, “I cannot go with you into any organization with Republicans and Know Nothings.” Sumner was also openly against the Know Nothings. “Ourselves children of the Pilgrims of a former generation, let us not turn from the Pilgrims of the present,” he told a crowd in Boston on November 2. Those at the dinner agreed that the first matter at hand was to elect Banks as Speaker of the House, which was accomplished in February 1856. Among the guests, only Chase held presidential aspirations for himself. But Blair raised the possibility of Frémont, whom he had secretly met with in August 1855 as a first step and to whom Banks was confidentially committed. Chase didn’t appear to grasp that Blair’s suggestion would doom his ambition; nor was he informed of the background of Blair’s intrigue. A week later, at Blair’s urging, Preston King called on Seward, who had been conspicuously absent. Delegations from all the Northern states were prepared to participate in a convention based on the Ohio Plan, except New York, King told him, and without New York there could be no true national party. Seward replied that he “disavowed all connection or sympathy with such a combination” with Know Nothings, and that he would only support a candidate for president “distinctly on grounds other than, and different from ‘Know Nothingism.’ ” Momentum for the new party gathered without consensus.
The year 1856 opened in Boston with the “lords of the loom” choreographing a public lashing of Sumner. William Appleton and Nathan Appleton, the quintessential Cotton Whigs, cousins living on Beacon Hill, were at the center of a complex web of economic and social networks consisting of dozens of directorships of industries, banks, and cultural institutions. Both had served as Whig congressmen. Now they invited Senator Robert Toombs of Georgia, who owned or controlled more than one thousand slaves, to speak on January 26 at the Tremont Temple. Toombs had been a Whig, but with the dissolution of the party was drifting toward the Democrats and supporting Douglas for the nomination. His speech was a pointed rebuttal of everything Sumner represented. The framers were not antislavery, the Constitution not antislavery, nor could the Congress prohibit slavery in the territories. Slavery was moral, just, and noble, reflecting “a higher civilization.” “No stronger evidence of what progress society may make with domestic slavery can b
e desired, than that which the present condition of the slaveholding States presents.” The Appletons led the crowd in giving Toombs three cheers. But a voice shouted out from the back of the hall, “When will Charles Sumner be allowed to speak in the South?”
The palpable sense of disquiet permeating politics, apparent in forums for slavery even at Faneuil Hall, was the consequence of rising uncertainty over the emergence of the Republican Party, the discrediting of the Pierce administration, and fear that control over events was slipping away. Yet events unexpectedly began to fall into place for the Republicans.
After Blair’s Christmas summit, Clephane circulated a call for a Republican National Convention. Five governors promptly signed it. The organizing convention took place at Pittsburgh on February 22, 1856. Blair presided as its president. He was depicted as reluctantly drawn back into politics, yet somehow he managed to be at its center and to have his goals achieved. Henry J. Raymond, the editor of the New York Times and a Seward protégé, wrote the single plank of the platform urging that “constitutional means” be implemented against the extension of slavery. Horace Greeley supported the cautious but unifying approach, which carefully avoided mention of the Fugitive Slave Act. While some radical abolitionists like Owen Lovejoy of Illinois enthusiastically participated in the new party, others denounced it as impure. “There is not a single warm and living position, taken by the Republican party,” Frederick Douglass wrote, “except freedom for Kansas.” Meanwhile, the Know Nothing (or American Party) convention held on the same day at Philadelphia splintered with the antislavery faction walking out. Its internal contradictions began to resolve the question for Republicans of an open alliance. On April 29, Blair sent a letter to a meeting in New York of antislavery Democrats to urge them to join the Republicans. It was published as a pamphlet entitled A Voice from the Grave of Jackson! “To use a homely phrase,” he said, “ ‘the Democracy has sold out’ to Mr. Calhoun’s nullifying party.”
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