“Public opinion, on any subject, always has a ‘central idea,’ from which all its minor thoughts radiate,” Lincoln told the Republican crowd. “That ‘central idea’ in our political public opinion, at the beginning was, and until recently has continued to be, ‘the equality of men.’ And although it was always submitted patiently to whatever of inequality there seemed to be as matter of actual necessity, its constant working has been a steady progress towards the practical equality of all men.”
Lincoln described the campaign as an early battle in a war for that idea. “The late Presidential election was a struggle, by one party, to discard that central idea, and to substitute for it the opposite idea that slavery is right, in the abstract, the workings of which, as a central idea, may be the perpetuity of human slavery, and its extension to all countries and colors.”
He explained how the word “equality” was being twisted on behalf of slavery, by its advocates and for Buchanan. “Less than a year ago, the Richmond Enquirer, an avowed advocate of slavery, regardless of color, in order to favor his views, invented the phrase, ‘State equality,’ and now the President, in his Message, adopts the Enquirer’s catch-phrase, telling us the people ‘have asserted the constitutional equality of each and all of the States of the Union as States.’ The President flatters himself that the new central idea is completely inaugurated; and so, indeed, it is, so far as the mere fact of a Presidential election can inaugurate it. To us it is left to know that the majority of the people have not yet declared for it, and to hope that they never will.”
“State equality” was the latest rhetorical permutation of the doctrine of John C. Calhoun that the South must always be equal in political power to the North in order to preserve and extend slavery. It was a nonnegotiable demand for the rule of the minority—the rule of slaveholders—over the government. Lincoln appealed to the implicit majority of 1856 to become an even more conscious and focused public opinion to overthrow the tyranny of the minority. “All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But, in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore. Can we not come together, for the future?”
Lincoln returned to his critique of Fitzhugh’s proslavery ideological tract, The Sociology for the South, or The Failure of Free Society, to urge that antislavery men rise above factionalism. “Let every one who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not, and shall not be, a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he has done only what he thought best—let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones. Let past differences, as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old ‘central ideas’ of the Republic. We can do it.”
For the Republicans after their first national campaign Lincoln offered more than a strategy combining principle and pragmatism. He cut through the rhetoric not only of the proslavery Calhounites, but also that of Douglas’s vapid popular sovereignty. “We shall again be able not to declare, that ‘all States as States, are equal,’ nor yet that ‘all citizens as citizens are equal,’ but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that ‘all men are created equal.’ ”
Lincoln could not know that in his ringing peroration he was arguing against the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court that would soon deepen the lines of political battle he had laid out. But even if he did not know the exact shape of events to come his mind was racing toward them. On the eve of Buchanan’s inauguration, he wrote a note for himself, drawing a map of how far the recent campaign had gone and charting where the politics would go. At the campaign’s start he avoided mentioning the charged word “Republican,” but as its end openly called the “Republican organization” an “army,” and committed himself to the “work,” as he called it, from which he could not “turn away.”
Upon those men who are, in sentiment, opposed to the spread, and nationalization of slavery, rests the task of preventing it. The Republican organization is the embodiment of that sentiment; though, as Fragment yet, it by no means embraces all the individuals holding that sentiment. The party is newly formed; and in forming, old party ties had to be broken, and the attractions of party pride, and influential leaders were wholly wanting. In spite of old differences, prejudices, and animosities, its members were drawn together by a paramount common danger. They formed and maneuvered in the face of the disciplined enemy, and in the teeth of all his persistent misrepresentations. Of course, they fell far short of gathering in all of their own. And yet, a year ago, they stood up, an army over thirteen hundred thousand strong. That army is, today, the best hope of the nation, and of the world. Their work is before them; and from which they may not guiltlessly turn away.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE WHITE MAN
Pennsylvania was the reason James Buchanan was president. It had sustained his long career; it was why he became the Democratic nominee; and it was the only Northern state that gave him a majority, a mere 1,211 votes. Pennsylvania had tipped the scales for him. The Keystone State was the foundation on which he stood to embark on his mission as national savior. Restoring harmony and destroying the Republican Party were for him one and the same end. “The great object of my administration will be, if possible, to destroy the dangerous slavery agitation at the North, and to destroy sectional parties,” he wrote a month after his election to his friend John Y. Mason, an ardent proslavery Virginian, who as minister to France had collaborated with Buchanan on the ill-fated Ostend Manifesto. Even before taking office, he contemplated himself triumphant over his enemies.
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney
The Sage of Wheatland, a habitually disappointed secondary character, was now the cynosure of power. Political pilgrims came and went to his Lancaster home seeking his blessing. He was the victor whose task it was to dispense the spoils. He felt put upon by job seekers and banished them from visiting. Operating in secrecy in a vain attempt to shield himself from the pressure, he was nearly overcome as faction battled faction, clique attacked clique, and ambition clashed with ambition.
Buchanan had always been a semidetached political figure who removed himself from the heat of conflict, letting others do his fighting on his behalf, resentful when he was passed over, and complacent when he advanced. He was not particularly grateful for the sacrifice others made for him; nor was he much interested in their motives or needs. Once they became dependent on his position he expected them to work for his next one. He believed his part mainly involved displaying his distinguished personage. When others would not do whatever he wished would gain him whatever office he wanted he would often throw fits threatening to quit. His prima donna scenes usually occurred on a quadrennial basis. “Should there be even the appearance of a serious division in Penna., I shall make my bow and retire,” he wrote in 1841 about the presidential race he was painstakingly planning to make in three years. He operated on the force of passive aggression.
Buchanan had never been a master of Pennsylvania politics, but he had survived them. Now finally ascended to his long sought after Olympus, he myopically lost sight of the foothills. His local enemies were beneath him, but they had not dispersed. Buchanan’s failure to reward his most faithful servants gave them the opportunity to overwhelm and humiliate him. At last he was president-elect, and as his first act he lost control in Pennsylvania.
John W. Forney, above all others in Buchanan’s entourage, had acted as his constant promoter, defender, and handler. He was as impetuous and colorful as Buchanan was stodgy and dull. Born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Forney became the owner and editor of the Lancaster Intelligencer in 1840 at the age of twenty. His great and persistent cause was the political fortune of James Buchanan. From the Intelligencer he rained arrows on any critic. After wielding his pen at the Washington Union for Pierce, he returned to his natural home to assist Buchanan in his campaign. As the c
hairman of the Democratic State Committee, Forney was a whirlwind of organization, directing the publication of newspaper articles and pamphlets, sending speakers to every corner, and speaking himself to the point of exhaustion. He parked his wife and five children at Wheatland for the duration. Time and again, the beneficent Buchanan promised him his heart’s desire—editorship of the Washington Union as the voice of the administration and a lucrative government printing contract. Governor Henry Wise, of Virginia, protested. Jefferson Davis was said to be “mad as fury.” Forney was unreliable and irascible, and he had violently opposed Senator Robert M.T. Hunter of Virginia (and the F Street Mess) for the cabinet. “Against him we shall wage war to the knife and the knife to the hilt,” Forney wrote. Under Southern pressure Buchanan denied the prize to his most loyal follower. In his letter to Wise, Buchanan paid Forney a tribute: “Of all men in this State, it is admitted he did the most to secure the Triumph of our ticket both at the State and Electoral election.” But he rejected him anyway.
An enraged and alcohol-fueled Forney insisted that Buchanan compensate his loss with either a cabinet post or endorse him for the open U.S. Senate seat. Southerners protested against giving him a cabinet appointment. Buchanan had wanted to award the Senate seat either to his friend Judge Jeremiah Black or his other friend Congressman J. Glancy Jones, but he reluctantly agreed that Forney was owed it since he could not name the temperamental journalist to the cabinet, which would also close off appointing anyone else from Pennsylvania. Buchanan’s formal nod enabled Forney to shove aside the former congressman Henry D. Foster, a popular figure from western Pennsylvania, who before the intervention had the nomination wrapped up. But the nomination delivered at the Democratic convention did not guarantee that the Senate seat would be delivered. Buchanan had never exercised much influence within the legislature and he did not use the enormous patronage that would soon be at his fingertips. His enemies instantly filled the vacuum.
Simon Cameron, known as “The Great Winnebago Chief” for gaining a fortune as the federal commissioner settling the claims of the tribe and “The Czar of Pennsylvania” for his ownership of banks, railroads, factories, and newspapers, had once been a Democrat and an ally of Buchanan. He had succeeded him in the U.S. Senate in 1845, but drifted to become a Know Nothing and by 1856 was a Republican. Cameron was ruthless, wily, and corrupt. He believed in winning either through battering or buying those in his way. Buchanan loathed Cameron and blamed him for denying him the Democratic presidential nomination in 1848. “Cameron,” he wrote, “after having betrayed me at the Baltimore convention, has been moving heaven and earth to destroy me.”
Thaddeus Stevens loathed Buchanan, but only hated Cameron. He had denounced him for bribery after Cameron won the Know Nothing nomination for the U.S. Senate seat in 1855 in a caucus in which he got one more vote than the number of people present. But now that Cameron was a Republican, Stevens backed him for this Senate seat. When the vote was taken three Democratic legislators defected to hand it to Cameron. “My God, what a scene of public corruption and wholesale bribery it was,” cried Forney.
The Democratic caucus accused Cameron of using “corrupt and unlawful means.” Howell Cobb, of Georgia, whom Buchanan appointed secretary of the treasury, lamented, “Simon Cameron, an abolitionist, was elected. . . . It is a hard blow not only upon Forney but upon Mr. Buchanan and the democratic party. I have never felt more deeply a result than I do this.” “To him,” the New York Tribune wrote about Forney, “more than any other fifty men in the State, is Mr. Buchanan indebted for the vote of Pennsylvania . . . instead of saving him, as he could have done with his boundless patronage, he left him to carry the crushing weight his interference provoked without using his vast power to sustain him. Thus was Col. Forney defeated—thus was Mr. Buchanan defied on the very threshold of his power.” “Thus Forney lost the third position he had reason to expect from the Buchanan administration, and both he and Buchanan were profoundly mortified and humiliated by the action of the Legislature,” wrote Alexander K. McClure, the Pennsylvania politico.
Buchanan cast around for substitutes to offer Forney, naval officer of Philadelphia or the consulship at Liverpool, which he declined. Instead he bought a newspaper, the Philadelphia Press, to establish his independence. In front of “a large company,” Buchanan went out of his way to demean Forney, “So, sir,” mocked Buchanan, “I find you are trying to make a cabinet for me.” The fiasco “opened a chasm between us,” Forney recalled, and launched his odyssey of alienation from his patron. “We were all trying to make J.B. President twenty-five years before we got him in, and a pretty mess we made of it,” he wrote. “Buchanan had a great many enemies in his own State. He had none of the ways of making people like him.” He was, Forney concluded, “cold and formal,” and “never awakened real affection.”
Embarrassed by his show of political ineptitude, Buchanan was anxious to engage in backstage string pulling before the start of his presidency to settle the central issue of slavery. If he were able to have others do it for him, it would be a spectacular coup. He would not have to perform the messy and inevitably dirty work during his presidency. He would enter as a statesman to mount an unblemished white marble pedestal.
The anticipation of Buchanan’s arrival in Washington aroused no great expectations that he would be able to tamp down the conflict. After dithering over his cabinet he filled it with Southerners—from Virginia, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Mississippi—and a proslavery Democrat, Isaac Toucey, from Connecticut; the doughface Lewis Cass of Michigan (who was largely incapable of performing the job of secretary of state); and his friend from Pennsylvania Jeremiah Black (who was by contrast highly competent). To Buchanan, these appointments occupied the center and moderate ground, situated against abolitionists and fire-eaters alike, exemplified by complacent Howell “Fatty” Cobb, owner of one thousand slaves. But his unveiled cabinet did little to soothe tensions.
Washington still seethed. Duff Green, the old Jacksonian turncoat who had defected to Calhoun and made a fortune in railroads and real estate in Georgia, was in close touch with the Southern powers-that-be in the capital, the F Street Mess and their acolytes. He warned they were “dissatisfied and hostile,” and “Calhoun in his grave was no less potent than in his senatorial chair.” On February 17, Edmund Ruffin, the Virginia fire-eater, after dining at the F Street Mess, wrote in his diary that Buchanan had “very little of the respect or the confidence of the men from the South by whose support alone he was sustained and elected. I anticipate for him a reign that will bring him but little of either pleasure or honor.”
Virginia Clay, wife of Senator Clement Clay of Alabama and mistress of Jefferson Davis, among the fashionable ladies of the capital, wrote her father at the approaching dawn of President Buchanan: “Everything is excitement and confusion. I tell you Fusion reigns in truth, and Southern blood is at boiling temperature all over the city, and with good cause, too. Old Giddings, Thurlow Weed, Sumner, Seward, Chase (who is here for a few days prior to his inauguration) are daily taunting and insulting all whom they dare . . . there is a Black Republican at every corner of our political fence, and if ever the gap is down we are gone. I wish you could be here to witness the scenes daily enacted in the halls of Congress, to hear the hot taunts of defiance hurled into the very teeth of the Northerners by our goaded but spirited patriots.” Late at night during a snowstorm, a “mysterious visitor” wrapped in a large overcoat and hat appeared at the Clay door. Throwing off his coat he revealed himself to be President Franklin Pierce. “ ‘Lock that door, Clay!’ he said, almost pathetically, ‘and don’t let a soul know I’m here!’ ” The fugitive president on his way out of office could not wait to leave. “ ‘Ah, my dear friends!’ said Mr. Pierce, leaning forward in his arm-chair and warming his hands as he spoke; ‘I am so tired of the shackles of Presidential life that I can scarcely endure it!’ ”
The Southerners’ sense that the walls were closing in on them, even though a De
mocratic president was about to take the oath of office, was matched by the dread of the antislavery Northerners that they walked in the shadow of Sumner. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts painted the grim scene for the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. “He told me I could form no idea of the state of things in Washington. As he passes through the streets in the evening, he says the air is filled with yells and curses from the oyster shops and gambling saloons, the burden of which is all manner of threatened violence to Seward and Sumner and Wilson and Burlingame. While he was making his last speech, the Southern members tried to insult him in every way. One of them actually brandished his cane as if about to strike him, but he ignored the presence of him and his cane, and went on with his speech. He says he never leaves his room to go into the Senate without thinking whether he has left everything arranged as he should wish if he were never to return to it alive.”
One man appeared to have a reputation above suspicion. “Who doubts the integrity or the learning of the distinguished Chief Justice? If we cannot trust the power there, where, in Heaven’s name, shall we repose it?” asked Samuel Phelps, who had been a Whig senator from Vermont. Breaking with the precedent that only posthumous Supreme Court justices should be memorialized with official busts, Seward proposed a bill to honor the living Roger Taney.
Taney was yet another breathing relic of the age of Jackson. He had been Jackson’s attorney general, a member of his Kitchen Cabinet, who, in the Bank War against the “money power,” ordered the withdrawal of federal funds from the Second Bank of the United States, an act that destroyed it. In a triumphal gesture, Jackson nominated Taney to be secretary of the treasury, and the Senate rejected it. So, in a defiant gesture, Jackson appointed him to the Supreme Court. Opposed by the triumvirate of Clay, Webster, and Calhoun to his elevation as chief justice, Taney was nonetheless approved. He replaced John Marshall and his broad federalism with strict constructionism. Yet on commercial issues he ruled for states’ regulation of corporations and deferred on certain national economic issues to the federal government. As attorney general and chief justice, however, his decisions were consistently proslavery. In 1832 he advised Jackson that “the African race” was “a separate and degraded people,” never to be “included by the term citizens,” and never to be allowed to claim the natural rights of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. In the 1843 case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, he more than upheld the federal fugitive slave law, but also insisted that the Constitution made its enforcement a positive duty of the states.
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