When Jackson died he bequeathed his papers to Blair as the executor of his literary estate. But Blair served as more than the curator; he felt entitled to judge who was entitled to a claim of the Jacksonian political legacy. In his New York speech, Blair presented a history of Jackson’s disillusion with a number of the pretenders to his creed. Blair put Douglas in the list of “the elements of that spurious Democracy which General Jackson’s intuitive sagacity foresaw would be the offspring of the political embraces of Calhoun, Tyler, and Polk.” Douglas had worshipped Jackson as his hero since he was a boy. It was his formative political experience. He had traveled in a pilgrimage of a group of Democrats in 1844 to pay his respects to the failing Jackson at the Hermitage at Nashville. Upon “convulsively shaking the aged veteran’s hand,” he was described as “speechless.” In January 1853, Douglas delivered the speech to dedicate the statue of Jackson in Lafayette Park, his hat lifted in a permanent salute to the nearby White House that Douglas wished to inhabit. But now Blair relegated him to the category of “traitor.”
The walls were closing in on Douglas, the swinging scythe lowering. The inexorable fateful date of the Democratic National Convention, June 2, 1856, could not be avoided. His presidential campaign, well plotted on paper, had flopped in reality. His effort to unite the hostile factions of New York behind him failed. His support in the Northwest states, his home base, crumbled. His backing in the South never materialized. Residual sentiment for Pierce shut him out in New England. Douglas was always a gambler, and he threw the dice on the final breakdown of Pierce and the collapse of the inert but artificially rejuvenated candidacy of James Buchanan. Safely exiled as minister to England and therefore untouched by the administration’s downfall, Buchanan had been preserved through a kind of diplomatic mummification.
Pierce’s vacuum set nearly everybody within the party scrambling, finger-pointing at would-be culprits and seeking “Anybody But Pierce.” Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, who had switched from the Whig to the Democratic Party, blamed the Kansas crisis on Pierce’s “fickleness, weakness, folly and vacillations.” Douglas’s original sin in the eyes of “the most influential men from the North,” Stephens wrote, was that his candidacy “defeated Buchanan and caused Pierce an outsider to be taken up,” which had created “the almost death struggle before us.” Douglas could not be forgiven for the political warfare he had set in motion out of his own ambition; nor could he remove the blot of his disastrous campaign of 1852.
Douglas’s room for maneuver for the nomination was rapidly contracting. The party whose nomination he sought was disintegrating in great part from his efforts to gain that prize. The Democrats had lost control of the House of Representatives to the anti-Nebraska coalition drawn from the defection of antislavery Democrats. Douglas was already a rump Northern Democrat. Enemies North and South were determined to deprive him of the nomination. His borrowed principle of popular sovereignty was exposed as a transparent veil for the Ruffians in Kansas. He sought to ascend as a new Jackson, but Blair stripped him of Old Hickory’s aura. Between debilitating bouts of the alcoholism that would eventually kill him, Douglas lashed out in the Senate against “the black Republicans,” trying to play to the gallery of his party. But he was even gasping for breath in Illinois.
The only way for Douglas to maintain control of the Illinois Democratic Party was to purge it. At the Democratic state convention on May 1, the first order of business was a resolution declaring Senator Lyman Trumbull “a recreant traitor, the representative of fusion, who held his seat in opposition to the Democracy of Illinois, which passed unanimously, amid much enthusiasm and excitement,” reported the Quincy Daily Whig. “Next a resolution declaring Douglas the true representative of the Democratic party, &c, was passed by acclamation.” But one of Douglas’s closest allies on the scene, Congressman Thomas L. Harris, wrote him that Douglas’s men at the state convention “came near botching the whole business.” Until this moment Trumbull had been uncertain about joining the Republicans and hesitant about participating in its upcoming convention on May 29. He was wary of the Whigs on the one hand and of abolitionists on the other. But being purged resolved his dilemma. The cleansing of Trumbull was the decisive sign to antislavery Democrats that they should follow him out of the party. Douglas’s purification movement was a reduction. He had to weaken the party in order to save himself. Those eliminated had nowhere to turn but to a new party, even if some still insisted on calling themselves Democrats.
“Doing Him Honor,” read the headline on the Illinois State Journal, the newspaper closely associated with Lincoln, who, with Herndon, often wrote editorials. “The Douglas Democracy in the late Convention, passed a resolution denouncing Senator Trumbull, in the most savage terms. The people of the State, who believe that the Constitution was formed for some other and higher object than only to extend negro slavery, will be glad of this. Trumbull, by his manly and high-toned course in the U.S. Senate, never stood higher in the public estimation than he does at the present time. His failure to receive the endorsement of the slavery propagandists and Douglas fuglemen, will entitle him still more to the confidence of all conservative and freedom loving people of the State and of the United States. Denunciations from such a source are in an eminent degree honorable, and Senator Trumbull will be gratified, to have received them.”
“An Evil Genius” headlined the editorial on Douglas’s presidential candidacy in the New York Times of May 3.
Before Mr. Douglas began his manipulations upon the party, two years and more ago, it had just emerged from one of its most brilliant campaigns. . . . Opposition was paralyzed, and even discredited. . . . Then began the services of Mr. Douglas to the party, upon which his claims are rested. . . . By what conjuration, what mighty magic, the little enchanter has contributed thus to cover his triumphant friends with shame and disaster, some may be bold enough to inquire. . . . The canvass of 1852 had taught his party how to triumph; he has taught it how to secure defeat, and demands as reward the symbols reserved for victorious leaders. . . . Should his resumption meet no repulse, the fact will class with the curiosities of history. Mr. Douglas is the evil genius of his party . . . he has made a certain busy cunning (with which he happens to be unsparingly gifted) a successful tributary to his ambition. A truculent audacity of language and manner have disguised this low grade of intellectual elevation, and even passed him off upon the unobservant as a man of the most candid purposes, and the most courageous mode of advancing them. . . . In the indulgence of this conscienceless thirst for public attention and discussion, economy of principle and prosperity of party seem to be equally immaterial.
The high-pitched hostility toward Douglas emanating from the Times, along with other Republican newspapers, came partly from their concern that he might well emerge as the Democratic nominee.
By mid-May, Douglas established his headquarters in the convention city of Cincinnati at the best hotel, Burnet House, where a New York financier, Edward C. West, picked up the tab for Douglas’s contingent and provided a freely flowing bar. The pro-Douglas newspapers in town were hard at work. The Cincinnati Enquirer advanced the Douglas-inspired notion of a Pierce-Douglas convention alliance of convenience to thwart Buchanan while the Cincinnati Gazette sought to discredit Buchanan’s supporters as “weak-backed and weak-kneed syllabub politicians.” Meanwhile, the pro-Republican Cincinnati Commercial anticipated Douglas’s candidacy with coruscating pieces flowing from the acidic pen of Murat Halstead, the newspaper’s part-owner, chief editorialist, and political correspondent. On “The Honorable Mister Douglas,” he wrote: “An exposed political empyric; a dishonest truckler for unsound popularity; a false pretender to notions of honor, and a foul-mouthed bully self-convicted of cowardice, though a coat of whitewash a foot in thickness would not cause him to pass for a gentleman, it cannot be denied that he will make a most admirable candidate. We hold up multitudinous hands for his nomination. The party should take him—certify him—swear he is what he professes t
o be. It will not be the first time that an ill-conditioned ape has been exalted to a deity—probably not the last.”
In Washington, on May 18, Toombs staged a large dinner party at his house to help promote Douglas’s candidacy. He invited former congressman John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, who leaned to Douglas, his real estate partner. Senator Lewis Cass, of Michigan, who had been the Democratic nominee in 1848, and now supported Buchanan, was there. So was Howell Cobb, along with the entire Georgia delegation, which had stopped in the capital on the way to the convention. But Cobb also backed Buchanan. Douglas was not making much progress in prying people away, though he hoped that by combining forces with Pierce at the convention to create a stalemate he might produce a political miracle. Douglas’s nerves were more on edge than usual; for more than the nomination struggle was coming to a climax.
Newspapers across the country were emblazoned with screaming headlines of the impending final clash in Kansas. Indictments in hand, the U.S. marshal had begun wholesale arrests of free state leaders. On May 15, the proslavery Lecompton Union newspaper reported: “Large companies from all sections of the Territory are gathering to Douglas County, in obedience to the proclamation of the United States Marshal. . . . Rebels should be treated as rebels. The people of Lawrence have a great deal to answer for before they can receive quarter.” Ruffians were joined by hundreds of newly arrived Southerners under the command of “Major” Jefferson Buford, an Alabama slaveholder, who generously footed their expenses. The militias, calling themselves the “Red Shirts” and “Kickapoo Rangers,” swelled around the presence of Senator Atchison near Lecompton, armed with guns and four cannon dispensed from federal arsenals. Deputized on the spot by the U.S. marshal as his posse, the ragtag army of about eight hundred men rallied under two flags. One was red, inscribed “Southern Rights,” with a verse underneath, “Let Yankees tremble, abolitionists fall, Our motto is, Give Southern rights to all.” Another, a black flag, was inscribed with the inscription, “South Carolina Minute Men,” above a coiled snake, the symbol of the revolutionary Gadsden flag. “Blood for Blood! Let us purge ourselves of all abolition emissaries,” exclaimed the proslavery newspaper, the Squatter Sovereign, published in the town of Atchison.
On May 19, the New York Tribune published dispatches from the front lines of Kansas that “show the operation of ‘We shall subdue you’ in full blast,” an intimidating threat attributed to Douglas. “We must respond through the ballot box,” the paper editorialized. The approaching national election loomed as a reckoning.
As Charles Sumner carefully prepared his speech on Kansas to be delivered before the Senate in Washington on May 19, he had a sense of foreboding. “The session will not pass without the Senate chamber’s becoming the scene of some unparalleled outrage,” he wrote a friend in Boston earlier in the year.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE HARLOT SLAVERY
In this dark midnight hour,” as Stephen A. Douglas steamrolled the Nebraska Act through the Senate in 1854, Sumner pledged, “I struggle against it as against death.” He was being informed of the events on the ground in Kansas by a constant stream of letters and reports from free state settlers and the chief organizers of the New England Emigrant Aid Society, including its founder, Eli Thayer, who wrote Sumner he would be in the Senate gallery to hear him deliver his speech, “to do us justice.”
Margaret Garner and her children, sketch by Thomas Satterwhite Noble
The authors of the Kansas debacle had in fact sought to subdue Sumner—Douglas and the members of the F Street Mess, including Andrew P. Butler and James M. Mason, the sponsor of the Fugitive Slave Act, among others. Douglas charged that he had “stolen” his Senate seat through “larceny” and tarred him as one of the soiled “black Republicans.” Butler humiliated him for sexual naïveté and luridly suggested he lusted after young black women. Mason insulted him for his “vapid, vulgar declamation,” the speech “of a fanatic, one whose reason is dethroned.” They denigrated his manner of speaking, his education, and his scholarship. They derided his state of Massachusetts as a bastion of racism no different from any Southern state except for its hypocrisy. They assaulted Sumner’s character, his dignity, and his patriotism. They called him “a serpent,” “a filthy reptile,” “a leper,” and “a maniac.” Sumner prepared to vindicate himself, his ideals and heritage. He would expose their pretention, duplicity, and shabbiness. He would unmask their gentility as a disguise for a society rooted in violence, sexual predation, and speculation in human property. He would reveal their presumption to claim the American tradition and the values of Western civilization as little more than a deceitful and thinly transparent cover for slavery.
Sumner scorned the Southern aristocratic manner as the pretentious affectation of well-heeled barbarians. His disdain for them was exceeded only by his contempt for Douglas and his “vulgar swagger.” “Douglas,” he said, “in private life is a brutal vulgar man without delicacy or scholarship; he is filthy in his person; he always looks as if he needed clean linen and should be put under a shower bath.”
But any speculative search for Sumner’s motives in the deliverance of his speech should look no farther than the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, whom he had cited in his 1850 speech against the Fugitive Slave Act as the original authority on resisting unjust laws against liberty. Winthrop’s sermon in 1630 had been engraved on Sumner’s soul: “We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, ‘may the Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.”
No less than George Washington had paraphrased these words after winning the Revolution in his farewell letter to the army in 1783 to challenge Americans with their responsibility to make a new nation: “This is the time of their political probation, this is the moment when the eyes of the whole World are turned upon them, this is the moment to establish or ruin their national Character forever.”
Stepping to the well of the Senate on May 19, 1856, to deliver his speech on “The Crime Against Kansas” and surveying the array of notables among the packed galleries, Sumner felt “the eyes of the whole world” upon him as he decried the “hundred eyes” of the Slave Power.
“Notwithstanding the heat, with the thermometer at ninety, nearly all the senators were in their seats, and galleries and lobbies and doorways were crowded with a compact mass of spectators, even the anteroom being opened to ladies after their own gallery had been filled,” wrote Charles Sumner’s biographer, Edward L. Pierce. “Every journalist’s desk was occupied. The members of the House were present in large numbers,—[Joshua] Giddings conspicuous among the Republicans, and [Alexander] Stephens among the Southern leaders. Delegates from the South, on their way to the Democratic national convention soon to meet at Cincinnati, went that morning to the Capitol to witness the novelty of an abolition spectacle. Veteran politicians not in public life—as Francis P. Blair, Sr., Thurlow Weed, and Robert J. Walker, the former senator from Mississippi and Polk’s Secretary of the Treasury—were observed in the throng. While the scene was well fitted to inspire the speaker, there was a pervading sense in the audience that violence and bloodshed were imminent in Kansas.” Surveying the packed chamber, Douglas remarked, “There are too many people here.”
Sumner would speak all day but did not finish that night and so spoke through the next day as well. He began with an appeal to American citizenship as a natural right, undefined in the Constitution until the Fourteenth Amendment. Just as in the case of Roberts v. the City of Boston challenging school segregation, in which he had introduced the idea of “equality before the law,” and in his speech o
n “Freedom National, Slavery Sectional,” arguing that slavery had no justification as a federally created institution, he invoked the inherent rights of citizenship, which would not be defined in the Constitution until passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Summoning from ancient history the cry against tyranny, “I am a Roman citizen,” Sumner raised the cry, “I am an American citizen,” against “Tyrannical Usurpation” in Kansas.
Sumner explained at length constitutional, historical, and political issues, but his most recurrent metaphor used to describe the Slave Power was sexual. “The wickedness which I now begin to expose is immeasurably aggravated by the motive which prompted it. Not in any common lust for power did this uncommon tragedy have its origin. It is the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery, and it may be clearly traced to a depraved desire for a new Slave State, hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government.” His choice of sexual metaphor—of rape—was not chosen lightly but to shock into recognition of the actual conditions of slavery’s submission and oppression—lust, rape, illegitimacy, and prostitution. Now the Slave Power was the rapist, Kansas the virginal victim.
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