Walker’s rise had been unbroken, and he could see his path finally to the top. His large ambitions had been more than matched by his self-confidence and ability. He was born into a prominent Pennsylvania family, his father a judge on the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. After graduating near the top of his class at the University of Pennsylvania, Walker studied the law, and became a leading corporate attorney in Pittsburgh. He married Mary Bache, the great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, the granddaughter of Alexander J. Dallas, secretary of the treasury under President James Madison, and the niece of George M. Dallas, the mayor of Philadelphia and U.S. senator, who would become Polk’s vice president. Walker used his Pennsylvania connections to become chairman of the state Democratic Party and supported Andrew Jackson for president in 1824. Jackson did not win, but Walker was established as the “original Jackson man” in the state. Despite his entrenched social position, political preeminence, and financial security, he had a streak for adventure.
Walker moved to the Southern frontier town of Natchez, Mississippi, following his older brother Duncan to set up the lucrative law firm of Walker and Walker in order to take advantage of the gold rush in real estate and slaves. Walker befriended the lords of the plantations, banks, and railroads, such as Joseph Davis, of Natchez, the master of a new fortune and older brother of Jefferson Davis. When fifteen thousand square miles of fertile territory grabbed from the Choctaw tribe were about to be auctioned to the public, Walker organized a real estate syndicate of two hundred of the leading men to control the price and divvy up the land, a grouping that became the dominant power of Mississippi with Walker at its head.
Walker’s initial political mentor in Mississippi, U.S. senator George Poindexter, president pro tempore of the Senate, had been Jackson’s mainstay, but in the battle over nullification and states’ rights Poindexter aligned against him and with Vice President John C. Calhoun. As chairman of the Committee on Private Land Claims, Poindexter launched an investigation into the corruption surrounding the sale of the Choctaw land. Walker’s allies divided that land into new counties chartered to elect state legislators, who voted to oust Poindexter. In his place the new U.S. senator elected in 1836 was R.J. Walker, dubbed “The Wizard of Mississippi,” “the first of modern bosses.” His first speech was against emancipation in the District of Columbia. “Our peculiar institution,” he said, “will yield only at the point of the bayonet.” He was a close adviser of the new president, Martin Van Buren.
Under Walker’s guidance a tower of financial speculation was built in Mississippi. The state borrowed more than the already astronomical sum of $10 million to loan to members of his syndicate and other wealthy planters on the security of mortgages and derivatives based on the price of slaves. Walker himself plunged into the pool to profit from the market manipulation. The Panic of 1837 nearly wiped them all out. Walker advised the legislature to repudiate the debt. Personally, he relied on credit from President Van Buren, who did not recover politically from the economic depression. The Whig landslide of 1840 deterred Walker from the inner councils of power only for a brief month, the length of William Henry Harrison’s tenure before dying of pneumonia and the elevation of his vice president, John Tyler, a states’ rights Democrat from Virginia. Walker quickly proclaimed the legitimacy of Tyler to accede to the presidency in the first instance of an incumbent’s death, and Tyler adopted him as a friend, adviser, and his floor leader in the Senate.
Walker stridently demanded the annexation of Texas. He was speculating in Texas bonds, land, and slaves, along with others in the close circle of Tyler’s advisers and cabinet members. In February 1844, after the Democratic Party of Kentucky contrived to nominate him for vice president, Walker replied by publishing his “Letter” in favor of annexation intended to sway uncertain Northern voters. He sounded the false alarm against England seizing Texas and argued the bizarre theory that the territory would serve as a “safety-valve” for slavery, drawing slave owners out of the South into Texas, from where, after slavery failed there through bankruptcy, the planters would wander into Mexico along with all their slaves, who would somehow be gradually emancipated, eliding the fact that Mexico abolished slavery in 1829. His “Letter” was widely circulated and highly effective in moving public opinion for annexation.
Walker played kingmaker at the Democratic convention of 1844, thwarting the return of his former creditor Van Buren by pushing through the two-thirds rule required for nomination and crowning James K. Polk for president and George M. Dallas, his wife’s uncle, for vice president. Polk asked him to be attorney general, but Walker said he would prefer to be secretary of the treasury. Within the cabinet he was first among equals, overshadowing the secretary of state, James Buchanan, who he essentially turned into his clerk. Walker devised a bold new tariff and handled the financing of the Mexican War without a deficit. With the back of his hand still moving pieces in Mississippi he installed Jefferson Davis, his old friend’s younger brother, into a congressional seat.
After the Polk administration, Walker settled into Washington in the familiar backstage role of lobbyist, attorney, and investor exploiting his contacts from California to England. One of his protégés, Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s secretary of war, modeled himself on Walker’s example as the power behind the throne. Walker turned down Pierce’s offer of minister to China as a ticket to obscurity. During Buchanan’s 1856 campaign he participated in the chief Wall Street fundraising group called the New York Hotel Committee. An alliance of Wall Street financiers and politicos, lower South politicians, including Jefferson Davis, and Douglas pressed the president-elect to appoint Walker secretary of state. He would be the premier of the administration, the great expansionist of empire southward into the Caribbean, inevitably a slave empire, piling wealth upon wealth, tightening the bond of the banks of the North with the plantations of the South, the vision of “Young America” and ultimate Manifest Destiny. Buchanan was wary of giving Walker preeminence to surpass him again. He would be president of his own administration. After he assembled his cabinet he decided there was a place for Walker’s gifts.
When Buchanan appeared on his doorstep to ask him to go to Kansas, Walker was neither surprised nor eager. He made Buchanan play the supplicant. The president twice begged him in person and wrote him an importuning letter. “The last person whom the President sent to me on this subject, to urge me to go, was Judge Douglas,” Walker recalled. “You must go, Bob,” Douglas said. “I feel intensely on this. The whole success of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in that Territory is to a great extent dependent on your consenting to go. I beg it of you.”
Douglas desperately needed Kansas to be settled on a basis that would be perceived as vindicating his idea of popular sovereignty. He had been dealt a defeat with Dred Scott, but as he pointed out it was a judicial decision that required the federal government and the states to enforce. The proof for him rested on the practical resolution in Kansas. In his June 12 speech on Dred Scott, Douglas also gave wishful credence to the rigged constitutional convention, which he “believed to be just and fair in all its objects and provisions.” Looking forward through a rosy lens, he declared, “The Kansas question being settled peacefully and satisfactorily . . . slavery agitation should be banished from the halls of Congress and cease to be an exciting element in our political struggle.”
Walker was Douglas’s deus ex machina. The “Wizard” and the “Little Giant” had a happy relationship. Walker had turned down the presidency of the Illinois Central Railroad on Douglas’s advice because it came from a business group connected to rival politicians in Illinois. Once Douglas sorted out the ownership of the railroad, Walker was chosen to negotiate a European loan. Then he proposed Walker for secretary of state. Douglas was apparently unworried that he might be a rival for the presidential nomination. First, Walker could solve Douglas’s immediate crisis, which would clear his path to an easy reelection and then the nomination.
Walker’s condition of taking the job was “perfe
ct concurrence between the Presidency and myself upon the policy,” and that policy was “that the constitution itself should be submitted to the vote of the people.” Walker told Buchanan that his wife’s opposition to his going was the final obstacle to be overcome, so Buchanan paid her a visit with Walker perched beside her. The president impressed her, Walker said, with the “peculiar reasons why I was the person, who more than all others . . . might perhaps save the country by preventing this impending revolution, and securing the peaceable settlement of that question.” Mr. and Mrs. Walker both agreed to accept his flattery and the position. After Walker wrote out his inaugural address Buchanan came to his house again to review it and give his stamp of approval. He modified “only a single sentence.” Walker had won the guarantees he sought. He believed he would prevail. His prospect ran from the plains to the presidency. “Mr. Walker,” stated Harper’s Weekly, “may be regarded as the foster-father of Texas; may he be equally fortunate with Kansas . . . what reward would be too high for such a man?”
Walker had his own strategic imperatives. He could see far into the future. Kansas was the royal road to a new Manifest Destiny. Even if it were admitted as a free state Walker saw how its existence could augment the power of the slave states. The success of democracy in Kansas would be the beginning of a new burst of imperialism.
“I should have preferred that a majority of the people of Kansas would have made it a slave state,” he stated. “I never disguised my opinions upon this subject, and I especially reiterated the opinion that I was thus in favor of maintaining the equilibrium of the government by giving the south a majority in the Senate, while the north would always necessarily have a majority in the House of Representatives, which opinion I have entertained ever since the Missouri compromise, avowing it at that time and on a great many public occasions ever since, especially in my efforts to make two slave states out of Florida, and six slave states out of Texas.”
Walker said “the only plan” was to bring in Kansas as a “democratic State,” in which the free state Democrats would somehow join with “the pro-slavery party” against “the violent portion of the Republicans.” Then Kansas would support the larger objectives of the slave states for empire, always Walker’s lodestar.
In a letter to Buchanan on June 28, Walker explained “we must have a slave state out of the south-western Indian Territory, and then a calm will follow; Cuba be acquired with the acquiescence of the North; and your administration, having in reality settled the slavery question, be regarded in all time to come as a re-signing and re-sealing of the Constitution. . . . I shall be pleased soon to hear from you. Cuba! Cuba! (and Porto Rico, if possible) should be the countersign of your administration, and it will close in a blaze of glory.”
Frederick P. Stanton, Walker’s deputy, arrived in Kansas before the new governor, in early May. He was a former Democratic congressman from Tennessee, proslavery as a matter of course, but committed to a fair process. Like Shannon and Geary before them, Stanton and Walker were convinced that the free state men were the source of the trouble. Stanton came to Lawrence to tell them they must accept the laws of the “bogus legislature.” “Never, never!” they shouted. He recited to them from Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha: “I am weary of your quarrels, Weary of your wars and bloodshed, Weary of your prayers for vengeance . . .”
On his way west, Walker stopped in Chicago to confer with Douglas, show him the text of his inaugural address with Buchanan’s handwriting on it, and receive his encouragement. Arriving in Kansas, he delivered his speech at Lecompton on May 27 to a roughneck proslavery crowd, telling them his views “express the opinion of the President.” While he denounced “the treason and fanaticism of abolition,” he declared that “in no contingency will Congress admit Kansas as a slave state or free state, unless a majority of the people shall first have fairly and freely decided this question for themselves by a direct vote on the adoption of the Constitution, excluding all fraud or violence.” He compounded this anathema with the heresy that there was a natural “isothermal line” that made cold climates like Kansas inhospitable to slavery.
That evening John Calhoun held a banquet for Walker where the whiskey flowed freely. Calhoun’s deputy, A.L. Maclean, rose to deliver a toast. “And do you come here to rule over us?—you, a miserable pigmy like you? You come here with ears erect, but you will leave with your tail between your legs. Walker, we have unmade governors before; and by God, I tell you, sir, we can unmake them again!”
The Lecompton legislature conducted a skewed census, gerrymandered the districts, and arranged polling only for proslavery towns. Walker came before the free state convention on June 8 to urge them to participate. He promised that if the constitution was not submitted to a referendum of the actual settlers he would join in their opposition and so would the president. But they decided to protest the fraud. Districts with thousands of voters were effectively disenfranchised. The proslavery sheriffs and judges took no census in nineteen counties and prepared no lists of voters in fourteen. Not a single free state candidate ran in the election on June 15. Only about 2,200 voters cast ballots in an electorate of eligible voters of perhaps 30,000 total and 9,251 on the registry. The proslavery convention was elected.
Walker’s attempt at evenhandedness marked him as a betrayer of the South. Judge Thomas W. Thomas of Georgia wrote his friend Congressman Alexander Stephens on June 15, “I have just read Walker’s inaugural in Kansas and if the document I have seen is genuine it is clear Buchanan has turned traitor. I have read and reread, I have thought over and turned the thing in my mind every way, and there is no way to escape the damned spectre. It stands there and glares upon us. We are betrayed.” Judge Thomas chaired a Georgia State Democratic Convention that demanded Walker’s removal.
Stephens wrote Howell Cobb, of Georgia, now the secretary of the treasury, who replied on June 17, “From what you write and what I see in the papers I fear that Walker’s inaugural address is to do us harm in the South.” Cobb began slowly moving within the cabinet against Walker.
Congressman Robert Toombs, of Georgia, closely aligned with Stephens, wrote on July 11, “Was there ever such folly as this Walker has been playing in Kansas? Everything was quiet, going on smoothly, to some decision and determination, and the country was quite indifferent what that should be, when he puts in, and merely to give himself consequence and to seem to settle what was rapidly settling itself, raises the devil all over the South. And this is not the worst of it. Buchanan intends to sustain him, and thereby ruin himself and his administration. . . . His ‘isothermal’ and ‘thermometrical’ arguments and follies I suppose simply means that Kansas is too cold for ‘niggers.’ ”
Senator Jefferson Davis condemned his early mentor as treacherous and chaired a Mississippi State Democratic Convention that issued a denunciation. The Richmond South, a new fire-eating newspaper, editorialized that Walker had “delivered Kansas into the hands of the abolitionists.” An editorial in the Richmond Enquirer stating that Walker had “abused” his authority and “perfidiously violated instructions” called for his dismissal. Tellingly, the editorial was reprinted in the Washington Union, the administration’s mouthpiece, on June 27.
Despite the gale of criticism, Buchanan wrote Walker on July 12 not to back down. “The point on which your and our success depends is the submission of the constitution to the people of Kansas. . . . On the question of submitting the constitution to the bona fide resident settlers of Kansas, I am willing to stand or fall. In sustaining such a principle we cannot fall. It is the principle of the Kansas-Nebraska bill; the principle of popular sovereignty, and the principle at the foundation of all popular government. . . . Should you answer the resolution of the latter (Mississippi), I would advise you to make the great principle of the submission of the constitution to the bona fide residents of Kansas conspicuously prominent. On this you will be irresistible.”
Walker pledged he would not bend, writing Buchanan on July 20 that he might repl
y to the attacks. “If these most unmerited attacks upon me and my policy by the extremists of the South should continue, I cannot speak with entire confidence of the result, although my efforts shall be unrelaxed up to the last moment, inasmuch as I believe the existence of this government may depend upon the peaceful and proper adjustment of this question. It may be necessary for me to answer the southern ultras in a published address; if so, it will be made upon my own responsibility, and the administration will be answerable for it in no respect.”
Congressman Laurence M. Keitt, of South Carolina, Preston Brooks’s accomplice in the caning of Charles Sumner, wrote a letter on August 3 to the State Rights Democrats holding a banquet in his honor. He denounced “treacherous concession, and huckstering compromises.” He described Walker as “a man of broken fortunes and sullied name: a needy adventurer. . . . What was his first act? To debauch Kansas from allegiance to the South, and deliver her into the hands of Free Soil fanatics. . . . If the cause of the South is lost in Kansas, it is lost through the base betrayal of a perjured minion of federal appointment.” He ended with a stirring call. “The South must maintain her rights, though she turn a deaf ear to the appealing shrieks of shivering Cabinets, of hysterical Presidents, and dissolving parties. . . . There should be no dissension in the Southern camp, and I trust there will be none, when the hour arrives in which loyalty to party will be treason to the South.”
By the end of July, the Southern members of the cabinet had reached a consensus against Walker along with two Northerners, Attorney General Jeremiah Black and Secretary of State Lewis Cass. Cobb, Stephens, and Toombs were in constant communication with each other about the Georgia State Democratic Convention that condemned Walker, whose strings they pulled and strategy they dictated. On July 31, Cass sent Buchanan a letter, undoubtedly at the behest of the cabinet directorate warning him that Walker’s ambition threatened him. “We all fear that Governor Walker is endeavoring to make a record for the future, but while we hope otherwise, we are satisfied that, in any contingency, your record will be found fully satisfactory. The plan which you have adopted is the only true plan.” On August 2, Cass forwarded a letter to Buchanan from Toombs threatening to quit the party if he didn’t dismiss Walker.
All the Powers of Earth Page 41
