All the Powers of Earth
Page 83
My sister Marcia has been an effervescent presence and staunch support for our whole family. Her husband, Stan Selinger, provides a touch of magic just when it’s needed. My stepbrother, Anthony Miller, who is as concerned about the fate of the country as anyone I know, has been constantly encouraging.
To my invincible wife, Jackie, not least for being elected for the sixth time as Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in the District of Columbia, my best reader, best everything. To our sons, Max and Paul, and Paul’s wife, Alison, for their energy and engagement.
This volume is dedicated to our oldest friends in Washington, John Ritch and Christina Ritch, chieftains of what we call the tribe. John’s storied career—West Point, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency—made him a savant on foreign affairs, the environment, and art. Nobody who is acquainted with Christina’s charm and style is surprised to learn that when she was nine years old living with her parents on a U.S. army base in Germany she drew the smile and greeting of “Little Darlin’ ” from then GI Elvis Presley. We have shared our lives together, weathered a literal hurricane as well as proverbial ones, snowbound and sunny birthdays, enjoyed the close relations of our children out of whose circle developed a marriage, mourned the loss of loved ones and mutual dear friends, and raised our glasses in the celebration of triumphs. From Washington to London, from Tuscany to Vienna, New York to Paris, and back again, the moveable feast goes on.
My thanks to the entire terrific team at Simon & Schuster who have made this book possible: its designer, Lewelin Polanco; production editor Lisa Healy and production manager Beth Maglione. I am also grateful for the efforts of Julia Prosser, deputy director of publicity, to bring my work to a broad audience of readers.
More from this Series
A Self-Made Man
Book 1
Wrestling With His Angel
Book 2
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© RALPH ALSWANG
SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL is the acclaimed author of A Self-Made Man, and Wrestling With His Angel, volumes one and two of his five-volume biography, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln. He is the former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and senior adviser to Hillary Clinton. He has been a national staff reporter for The Washington Post and Washington editor and writer for The New Yorker. His books include the bestselling The Clinton Wars, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and The Permanent Campaign. Born and raised in Illinois, he lives in Washington, D.C.
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Sidney-Blumenthal
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ALSO BY SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL
Wrestling With His Angel: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1849–1856
A Self-Made Man: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1809–1849
The Strange Death of Republican America
How Bush Rules
The Clinton Wars
This Town (play)
Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War
The Reagan Legacy (Editor with Thomas Byrne Edsall)
Our Long National Daydream: A Pageant of the Reagan Years
The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power
The Permanent Campaign
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NOTES
CHAPTER ONE: THINGS FALL APART
Most importantly, this new compromise: William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 191; Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 222–36.
Jefferson’s nightmare hung over the Senate: Sidney Blumenthal, Wrestling With His Angel, 1849–1856, The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 56–66.
Lincoln the “Proviso Man”: Roy Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press) 1:439–40. Hereinafter CW.
For Lincoln’s criticism of the war: Blumenthal, Wrestling with His Angel, 1.
On March 1, 1853: CW, 2:191.
In a time of peace and prosperity: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1852), 12.
Pierce recited his inaugural address: Franklin Pierce, “Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1853, in Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, eds., The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25816; Paul F. Boller, Presidential Anecdotes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 116.
Southern senators welcomed Franklin Pierce: Maunsell B. Field, Memories of Many Men (New York: Harper, 1874), 162.
Jane Appleton Pierce: Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce: Young Hickory of the Granite Hills (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931), 86–87.
Even before Pierce arrived in Washington: Jonathan R.T. Davidson and Kathryn M. Connor, “The Impairment of Presidents Pierce and Coolidge After Traumatic Bereavement,” Comprehensive Psychiatry 49 (2008): 413–15.
Pierce’s effortless ascent: Field, Memories of Many Men, 162.
From the beginning: Larry Gara, The Presidency of Franklin Pierce (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.
Within a year of Pierce’s: John Robert Irelan, History of the Life, Administration, and Times of Franklin Pierce, Fourteenth President of the United States (Chicago: Fairbanks & Palmer), 246.
CHAPTER TWO: VAULTING AMBITION
Even before Pierce’s inauguration: George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (New York: Octagon, 1963), 95.
The first territorial governor: William E. Connelley, A Standard History of Kansas and Kansans (Chicago: Lewis Publishing, 1918), 1:366–72.
The first election in the territory: House of Representatives, Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas (Washington, D.C.: Cornelius Wendell, 1856), 3–68.
Reeder’s replacement as territorial governor: William Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, by Missouri and Her Allies (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), 117–18, 149.
Abraham Lincoln feared: CW, 2:321.
Despite two invasions: Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, 122, 131; Leverett Wilson Spring, Kansas, the Prelude to the War for the Union (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 66, 84; John N. Holloway, History of Kansas (Lafayette, Ind.: James, Emmons, 1868), 188, 190.
In late November 1855: Spring, Kansas, 87–91; Holloway, History of Kansas, 215–27.
The Ruffians descended on Lawrence: James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York: Macmillan, 1892–1927), 2:105; Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1874), 2:474.
In February, Lincoln attended a meeting: William Henry Herndon, Herndon’s Lincoln: The True Story of a Great Life (Springfield, Ill.: Herndon’s Lincoln Publishing, 1888), 379.
Under Douglas’s exalted: Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas, 67.
CHAPTER THREE: THE SPIRIT OF VIOLENCE
“Who names Douglas”: “The Prophet on the Nebraska Question,” New York Times, May 23, 1854.
“I could then travel”: Political Debates Between Lincoln and Douglas (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1897), 55.
Still, Douglas believed the leadership: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 212–18.
When the 34th Congress reconvened: Ibid., 209, 219.
“our little grog drinking”: William E. Dodd, Jefferson Davis, Philadelphi
a, G.W. Jacobs, 1907, 190.
Douglas’s description of Massachusetts: Stephen A. Douglas, “Affairs of Kansas,” Report No. 34, in The Reports of the Committees of the Senate of the United States for the First Session of the Thirty-Fourth Congress (Washington, D.C.: A.O.P. Nicholson, 1856), 1–10.
Douglas seized upon the gambling metaphor: Congressional Globe, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 639.
The New York Tribune reported: “Kansas in the Senate,” New York Tribune, March 12, 1856, reprinted in Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1856; Congressional Globe, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 639 (hereinafter CG); Brie Anna Swenson Arnold, “ ‘Competition for the Virgin Soil of Kansas’: Gendered and Sexualized Discourse About the Kansas Crisis in Northern Popular Print and Political Culture, 1854–1860” (diss., University of Minnesota, 2008, ProQuest), 186.
Two days later: Horace White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 48.
The Whig candidate: Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 463; CW, 2:306.
Reading further portions: CG, 34st Congress, 1st Session, 200–206.
“Why do you not reprove”: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 654–58.
The following week: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 495.
Douglas built to a crescendo: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 280–88.
Calmly and deliberately: Gideon Welles, Lincoln and Seward (New York: Sheldon, 1874), 23, 10.
Seward wore the badges: Frederick W. Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State, 1846–1861 (New York: Derby & Miller, 1891), 246.
At Syracuse: De Alva Stanwood Alexander, A Political History of the State of New York (New York: Henry Holt, 1906), 2:211–13; William H. Seward, “The Dangers of Extending Slavery,” in Republican Campaign Documents of 1856 (Washington, D.C.: Lewis Clephane, 1857), 173–82.
Back in Washington: Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State, 269.
On April 9: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 399–405.
To Douglas’s intense displeasure: Albert Gallatin Riddle, The Life of Benjamin F. Wade (Cleveland: W.W. Williams, 1886), 136–45, 197.
Then Senator Henry Wilson: Elias Nason and Thomas Russell, The Life and Public Services of Henry Wilson (Boston: B.B. Russell, 1876), 66.
But if Wilson was not: CG, 34th Congress, 1st Session, 384–94.
But Stowe also noticed: Rhodes, History of the United States, 2:128–29; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 499.
CHAPTER FOUR: WAR TO THE KNIFE
When the 34th Congress arrived: William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 240–48.
The majority members: Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel, Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009), 92.
“The second month of spring”: Sara T.L. Robinson, Kansas: Its Interior and Exterior Life (Boston: Crosby, 1856), 196–98.
Two days after the investigators: Margaret L. Wood, Memorial of S.N. Wood (Kansas City: Hudson Kimberly, 1892), 56; Holloway, History of Kansas, 305.
Jones arrested six: Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, 254; Holloway, History of Kansas, 317.
Jones’s deputies raided: Holloway, History of Kansas, 308; Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), 102; John Sherman, John Sherman’s Recollection of Forty Years in the Senate and Cabinet (Chicago: Werner, 1895), 1:129.
On May 5: Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, 269; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator of Kansas, and Martyr of Virginia (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891), 232.
Judge Lecompte: Frank W. Blackmar, ed., Kansas: A Cyclopedia of State History (Chicago: Standard Publishing, 1912), 2:42.
John Calhoun: Richard Lawrence Miller, Lincoln and His World (Mechanicsburg, Penn.: Stackpole Books, 2006–2014), 1:215–20; John Carroll Power, History of the Early Settlers of Sangamon County, Illinois (Springfield, Ill.: Edwin A. Wilson, 1876), 168; Jack Henderson, “A Border Ruffian’s Recollection of Kansas,” Arkansas City, Kansas Traveler, March 5, 1879; CW, 2:229; Miller, Lincoln and His World, 1:115; Phillips, The Conquest of Kansas, 149–50.
Former governor Reeder: “Governor Reeder’s Escape from Kansas,” Transactions of the Kansas State Historical Society, Volume 3, Diary of Gov. A.H. Reeder (Topeka: Kansas Publishing, 1886), 205–6; Report of the Special Committee Appointed to Investigate the Troubles in Kansas, 66.
On May 7: “Governor Reeder’s Escape from Kansas,” 206; Charles Robinson, The Kansas Conflict (Lawrence: Journal Publishing Company, 1898), 262.
Reeder fled disguised: “Governor Reeder’s Escape from Kansas,” 222.
Robinson escaped from Lawrence: Sherman, John Sherman’s Recollection of Forty Years in the Senate and Cabinet, 129; Hermann von Holst, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States: 1854–1856 (Chicago: Callaghan, 1885), 297.
When Reeder eluded arrest: Holloway, History of Kansas, 320–22.
The fog of impending violence: Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 2:478–79; Miller, Lincoln and His World, 4:139–40; “The Herbert Trial,” New York Times, July 14, 1856.
When Horace Greeley: Don C. Seitz, Horace Greeley, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1926, 170-1; “Latest Intelligence: Brutal Assaults of Rust upon Horace Greeley,” New York Times, January 30, 1856.
“The tyranny of the slave oligarchy”: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1898), 3:438–39; David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 279).
CHAPTER FIVE: THE PURITAN AS PROPHET
Since Charles Sumner was elected: Charles Francis Adams, Charles Francis Adams, 1835–1915, An Autobiography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916), 60–61.
Neither Seward nor Lincoln: James Greenleaf Whittier, “To C.S.,” in The Poetical Works of James Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 146; Hugh McCulloch, Men and Measures of Half a Century: Sketches and Comments (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889), 233–34; Frederic Bancroft, ed., Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 39; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 271; Shelby M. Collum, Fifty Years of Public Service (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1911), 152.
Sumner took painstaking care: John Weiss, Life and Correspondence of Theodore Parker (New York: D. Appleton, 1864), 2:111.
Sumner was absorbed: Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875), 3:275.
Sumner’s exalted oratory: Bancroft, ed., Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, 3:30.
In the Washington of the 1850s: Eron Rowland, Varina Howell: Wife of Jefferson Davis (Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing, 1927), 1:314; “Sumner’s Unhappy Marriage,” New York Times, October 19, 1884.
Sumner’s ostracism: Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1870), 2:1, 4; Walter G. Shotwell, Life of Charles Sumner (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1910), 205.
In an age when oratory: D.A. Harsha, The Life of Charles Sumner: With Choice Specimens of His Eloquence (New York: H. Dayton, 1858), 155–58.
Despite his immersion: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 281.
Sumner was one: C. Edwards Lester, Life and Public Services of Charles Sumner (New York: United States Publishing, 1874), 49.
The Puritan as prophet: Charles Sumner, Orations and Speeches, 1845–1850 (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields, 1850), 2:256.
Sumner’s background: Anne-Marie Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 1811–1851 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 1–2.
Sumner’s roots: Edward L. Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893), 1:15; Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and th
e American Enlightenment, 17–18; Elias Nason, The Life and Times of Charles Sumner (Boston: B.B. Russell, 1874), 11–13.
The Federalist Party: Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 1:2; Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 22–29, 74.
Charles Sumner always considered: Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 94, 17–18; Sumner, Works, 3:85.
One of the beneficiaries: Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805–1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 1:224, 240, 495, 499–500.
A month later, on September 17: Ibid., 1:519, 2:29.
Charles Sumner was one of the poorer: Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 27; Shotwell, Life of Charles Sumner, 18–26; Moorfield Storey, Charles Sumner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 10, 14–15; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 82–83.
Sumner fell under: Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 139–43; Edward D. Jervey and C. Harold Huber, “The Creole Affair,” The Journal of Negro History 65, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 196–211; William Ellery Channing, The Duty of the Free States (Boston: William Crosby, 1842), 8.
Sumner steeped himself in antislavery literature: Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston: Allen & Ticknor, 1833), 228; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 131; Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 2:196, 203–4.
In 1845: Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 2:342, 348–53.
At the traditional post-oration dinner: Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 110–11; Pierce, Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, 3:101–2.
The censure of Sumner’s: Taylor, Young Charles Sumner and the American Enlightenment, 276–77.
Sumner began meeting: Ibid., 201; Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, 140; Sumner, Works, 1:149.