All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Lincoln did not stop at his sociological inventory of the source of mulattoes through “home production.” He used the Dred Scott decision as no one had yet done. Lincoln spoke about the rape culture of slavery. He unmasked the unexamined sexual consequence of Taney’s decision. “Dred Scott, his wife and two daughters were all involved in the suit. We desired the court to have held that they were citizens so far at least as to entitle them to a hearing as to whether they were free or not; and then, also, that they were in fact and in law really free. Could we have had our way, the chances of these black girls, ever mixing their blood with that of white people, would have been diminished at least to the extent that it could not have been without their consent. But Judge Douglas is delighted to have them decided to be slaves, and not human enough to have a hearing, even if they were free, and thus left subject to the forced concubinage of their masters, and liable to become the mothers of mulattoes in spite of themselves—the very state of case that produces nine tenths of all the mulattoes—all the mixing of blood in the nation.”

  Lincoln’s speech was not tightly organized with every subject arranged in its proper place. He returned to issues he had already dealt with in order to inject a new idea as if it just occurred to him. He even wandered off into a discussion of colonization.

  His poetic description of the imprisonment of the slave vindicated the humanity of the captive from Taney’s dehumanizing words. Lincoln again took up that theme to answer Douglas’s demeaning of the “Black Republican Party.” “The Republicans,” said Lincoln, “inculcate, with whatever of ability they can, that the negro is a man; that his bondage is cruelly wrong, and that the field of his oppression ought not to be enlarged. The Democrats deny his manhood; deny, or dwarf to insignificance, the wrong of his bondage; so far as possible, crush all sympathy for him, and cultivate and excite hatred and disgust against him; compliment themselves as Union-savers for doing so; and call the indefinite outspreading of his bondage ‘a sacred right of self-government.’ ”

  The Illinois State Register, Douglas’s newspaper, observed that “black republicans” present at Lincoln’s speech looked “woebegone.” Douglas, it reported, “did not know or care whether Mr. Lincoln had any opinion at all or not.” Would “a single individual” who heard both speeches be “willing to supersede Judge Douglas with Mr. Lincoln?” When Lincoln argued for black equality “all right thinking men” must regard him as “contemptible.” On Lincoln’s conjecture about the possible rape of Dred Scott’s daughters, “Comment is unnecessary.” Lincoln’s understanding of the founders and the Declaration of Independence was “idle ranting of insane fanaticism.” It was madness to think that they believed the “universally acknowledge inferior . . . to be their equal.” Lincoln had reduced “a band of patriots” to “a band of hypocrites.” Lincoln’s claim that the condition of blacks was worse than ever, the Register blamed on antislavery agitators. “The white man, in self defense, was forced to impose restrictions upon the negro.” The oppression of the slave was “wholly attributable to Mr. Lincoln and his associates.”

  Lincoln’s imagery in the part of his speech about the imprisoned slave was not abstract to him. Just weeks before he had intervened to rescue a black man held captive behind an iron door in a bolted cell to be sold as a slave. He had not mentioned the incident in his speech.

  In Springfield, Lincoln was intimately familiar with the free black community, frequenting a black barber, the Haitian-born William de Fleurville, also known as Florville, but commonly called “Billy the Barber,” whom he first met in New Salem and helped bring along to Springfield, sending his friends to him as clients to cut their hair, and representing him when he bought property. (“Billy the Barber” would be one of Lincoln’s pallbearers.) In early 1855, a free black woman named Polly Mack, who had been married to one of Florville’s barbers, appeared at the office of Lincoln & Herndon with a tale of woe. Her son, John Shelby, had hired himself as a hand on a steamboat on the Mississippi, as Lincoln had done years ago, but when he reached New Orleans without “free papers” he was arrested under the black code and fined. By then his boat had left. Unable to pay his fine he was to be sold into slavery to defray his expenses. He had no means to escape.

  The case was a perversely refracted version of Dred Scott. Through a series of unfortunate circumstances, the free black from a free state would become a slave. Shelby had made the mistake of landing in New Orleans during a scare in the aftermath of the presidential campaign that free blacks would incite slaves to run away or revolt. The New Orleans Times Picayune called “free negroes” an “evil,” a “plague and a pest,” who would be a source of “mischief to the slave population.”

  Learning of the imminent danger to John Shelby, Lincoln was “very much moved,” according to one of Lincoln’s early biographers Josiah G. Holland. Lincoln appealed to Governor William Bissell, whom he been instrumental in electing as the first Republican in the office, but Bissell told him he had no legal authority over the matter in another state. Lincoln appealed to the governor of Louisiana, who also rejected his request. Lincoln returned to Bissell to see if anything could be done and again he was denied. “Lincoln rose from his chair, hat in hand,” Herndon recalled, “and exclaimed with some emphasis: ‘By God, Governor, I’ll make the ground in this country too hot for the foot of a slave, whether you have the legal power to secure the release of this boy or not.’ ”

  But there was someone in New Orleans who had a connection to Lincoln, Benjamin Jonas, the brother of Abraham Jonas, “one of my most valued friends.” Abraham Jonas was indeed Lincoln’s closest and most prominent Jewish friend. Their careers ran parallel and intersected. Jonas was born into a Jewish family in Portsmouth, England, and emigrated to the United States in 1819, settling in Cincinnati, where he founded its first synagogue. After his wife and daughter died suddenly he moved to Kentucky, where he opened a general store, was elected to the state legislature, and was a friend and ally of Henry Clay. Seeking opportunity in the West, he moved again in 1842 to Quincy, Illinois, and studied the law under Orville Hickman Browning. As a lawyer and a Whig, he entered into Lincoln’s circle. Gustave Koerner, the German leader, attorney, and later governor, described Jonas as “perhaps the best debater and the best politician on the Whig side.” Jonas was the leading Whig in Quincy, serving as the town postmaster through patronage appointment. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was enacted, he recruited Lincoln to come to Quincy to support the local Whig candidate for the Congress and to speak against Douglas “while the little giant is here.” In 1856, Jonas was listed along with Lincoln as a Republican presidential elector.

  Abraham Jonas

  Abraham Jonas’s brother Benjamin was a lawyer living in New Orleans, who assumed the role of Lincoln’s agent. Communicating with him, Lincoln discovered the price for Shelby’s release and told him to “charge the expense incurred to him.” “Lincoln drew up a subscription-list, which I circulated,” Herndon wrote, “collecting funds enough to purchase the young man’s liberty.” They raised only $19. Lincoln provided the rest himself. He sent $69.30 to Benjamin Jonas in New Orleans, who acknowledged receipt in a letter dated June 4, “in the matter of the colored boy John Shelby.” He informed Lincoln, “I should never have ventured to trouble you, had not the boy mentioned your name, as that of one, who would take an interest in his behalf.” It was Lincoln’s name that was the key to his freedom.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE WIZARD OF MISSISSIPPI

  Buchanan assumed that the troubles in Kansas were a thing of the past, as he told a small group of friends and neighbors gathered at Wheatland with an air of blithe confidence: “Peace has been restored to Kansas. . . . We shall hear no more of bleeding Kansas,” he promised. “. . . this Kansas question is one of the most absurd of all Proteus-like forms which abolition fanaticism has ever assumed to divide and distract the country.” He would soon have the power to wave away the distraction with his appointment of a new governor.


  Robert J. Walker

  The parade of presidentially appointed territorial governors in Kansas had been a record of squalid betrayal. The first, Andrew Reeder, a regular Democrat and railroad lawyer from Pennsylvania, arrived with complacent benign intentions and a generous spirit to the proslavery forces, and left in the disguise of a hobo on the run from an arrest warrant issued by the proslavery legislature for his efforts to stop the violence and fraudulent elections. The second, Wilson Shannon, the former Democratic governor of Ohio, entered delivering warm greetings to the proslavery camp and departed a hapless figure hated on all sides after the sacking of Lawrence, with the free state leadership fleeing charges of treason, and John Brown hacking men to death. “Poor man!” wrote Sara Robinson, the wife of the free state governor Charles Robinson. “He feared for his own safety. He was despised by both parties, and a curse to himself. There was a look of utter weariness, of inability to do anything, of incapacity to know what to do.”

  The next governor, John W. Geary, on his way into Kansas by chance encountered Shannon on his way out. “The ex-governor was greatly agitated,” recalled Geary’s assistant, John H. Gihon. “He had fled in haste and terror from the territory, and seemed still to be laboring under an apprehension for his personal safety. His description of Kansas was suggestive of everything that is frightful and horrible. Its condition was deplorable in the extreme. The whole territory was in a state of insurrection, and a destructive civil war was devastating the country. Murder ran rampant, and the roads were everywhere strewn with the bodies of slaughtered men. No language can exaggerate the awful picture that was drawn; and a man of less nerve than Governor Geary, believing it not too highly colored, would instantly have taken the backward track, rather than rush upon the dangers so eloquently and fearfully portrayed.”

  Geary was not a man to be easily intimidated. Six feet six inches tall, he was a Mexican War hero wounded ten times leading troops into battle, joined the Gold Rush to San Francisco, and as the city’s first mayor as well as its judge he was law and order personified. He came to Kansas a partisan Democrat devoted to popular sovereignty, suspicious of the free state men, and as governor he did not hesitate to deploy federal troops to end the running battles, invasions, and guerrilla warfare.

  Geary’s peace, however, was short-lived. His crisis came soon after Buchanan was elected. The proslavery Kansas legislature, elected by means that the previous governors and an investigating congressional committee had declared the product of force and fraud, and dubbed the “bogus legislature” by the competing free state one, moved to establish an undemocratic process by which Kansas would enter the Union as a slave state. It was obvious that the free state forces were a clear majority growing in numbers and that the proslavery camp believed they must not be permitted to express their will. In the proslavery capital of Lecompton, John Calhoun, the surveyor general and head of the federal land office, originally from Springfield, Illinois, held sway. He owed his appointment under Pierce to Douglas, who thought he would be his man on the ground to do his bidding. Calhoun built his own empire, controlling virtually all the patronage of hundreds of positions, and gathering around him a rough gang that coordinated with the Ruffian militias. He worked in tandem with Chief Justice Samuel Lecompte and Judge Sterling G. Cato, who ran the kangaroo courts, and a motley group of sheriffs, who suppressed opposition.

  On February 15, 1857, Geary vetoed a bill of the Lecompton legislature that would create a census for election of delegates to a constitutional convention but would deny a referendum. “The crowning act of the legislature was the passage, near the close of its session, of what is called the ‘Census Bill,’ ” wrote Gihon, Geary’s assistant. “This was the most infamous scheme to rob thousands of freemen of their right of the elective franchise, that has ever been devised in this or any other country. The bill was created with much care and cunning, by certain prominent United States senators at Washington, and sent to Lecompton. . . . The census takers and judges of election are the sheriffs and other officers appointed by the pro-slavery party, and bound to its interests.”

  The legislature overrode his veto. Geary called it the “felon legislature,” and tried to oust Chief Justice Lecompte as “utterly disqualified for the impartial discharge of his duties,” but Pierce kept him in office. Judge Cato promptly arrested seven members of the free state legislature. Geary’s intelligence was accurate that the members of the Lecompton cabal were in communication with Southern leaders in Washington. Since Buchanan’s election Calhoun and the others received guidance from Senator Slidell and Jacob Thompson (soon to be named to Buchanan’s cabinet).

  Calhoun traveled to Washington, where Secretary of War Jefferson Davis enabled him to gain Pierce’s ear. Pierce denied Geary command of federal troops in Kansas and withheld funds, even his salary, on the claim that the appropriations from the Treasury were depleted. Calhoun’s deputy physically attacked Geary’s assistant and spat upon Geary at a public meeting before pulling out his pistol and being shot dead in a fracas. Geary, threatened with assassination, announced his resignation to take effect on March 4, the day of Buchanan’s inauguration.

  The free state convention meeting at Topeka on March 10 declared a boycott of the forthcoming election of delegates. It castigated the constitutional convention as “a creature of fraud,” the Lecompton assembly unauthorized to “pass an enabling act,” and “the whole machinery pertaining to the election in the hands of pretended officers not elected by the people.” That same day Geary fled the territory packing two pistols. He surfaced within the week in St. Louis, where he gave an interview to the antislavery Missouri Democrat. “In our humble opinion,” he said, “the Kansas question has never worn the ominous aspect and the colossal proportions which it is now beginning to assume. It is impossible to conceive that the people of the North will acquiesce in the final triumph of a system of fraud, violence, and ruthless tyranny—equally impossible to conceive that the slavery extensions will forego their purposes; and therefore the prompt and vigorous intervention of the President is demanded by the most serious consideration.”

  Geary traveled to Washington to brief the new president and his cabinet, but Buchanan had scant interest in his warnings. Kansas seemed to him far away, peripheral and an artificially stirred up commotion. Just as he believed that the controversy over slavery would be swept away in a single stroke with the Dred Scott decision he felt certain that “Bleeding Kansas” would be transformed into a fair and pleasant land with his appointment of the right man as governor. He had already named Geary’s successor, “who only waited the consent of his wife to accept,” according to the New York Evening Post.

  Robert J. Walker was overqualified for the position. The one job for which he was not overqualified but suited was president. By experience, temperament, and judgment he was perhaps the only Democrat on the national scene at the time fit to maneuver through the difficult times ahead. While both the reactive and fussy Buchanan and the inert and fumbling Lewis Cass, whom Buchanan appointed secretary of state, had compiled more distinguished résumés, Walker’s record outshined them in comparison. In politics and government Walker’s intellect, skill, and ruthlessness were renowned. He was a sharp tactician and a far-seeing strategist, expedient and visionary. Maker of presidents and creator of empires, no one could claim to have accomplished more. Barely five feet tall, weighing about one hundred pounds and suffering from lung disorders, he was universally acknowledged as a dynamo.

  The New York Times correspondent in Washington, reporting on Walker’s appointment, called him “a thinking machine . . . his power, industry, and discrimination, keen insight into the motives of men, and laudable ambition to stand well before the country cannot be questioned. I urged in conversation today with a gentleman who stands high in Mr. Buchanan’s confidence, his identification with the ultra-Southern interests, as an objection to his appointment. ‘You do not know,’ said he, ‘of whom you are talking.’ I predict that if Mr. Walker goes to
Kansas, he will unravel the whole Atchison web, and pave the way for the admission of Kansas as a free State in such a manner that the mouths of those who have hitherto sympathized with border ruffianism will be effectually and forever stopped.”

  After conferring with Walker, Seward wrote his son on March 30, 1857, “Mr. Robert J. Walker and his secretary, Mr. F.P. Stanton, are uncommon men, independent, self-seeking, and quietly ambitious. They don’t mean to play parts subordinate and ministering to the ambition of Cass, Buchanan, Marcy, Douglas, or other aspirants, as their predecessors have, but to establish a power of their own. Walker sees his way through the Governorship of Kansas to the Senate, and through the Senate to the Presidency.”