All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  Brown boasted: Villard, John Brown, 432–37.

  Feeling secure: Renehan, The Secret Six, 199–200; Villard, John Brown, 437–38; Anderson, A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, 38.

  Brown sent: Renehan, The Secret Six, 201–2; Boteler, “Recollections of the John Brown Raid,” 407; Villard, John Brown, 439–44.

  Oliver Brown: Villard, John Brown, 446–48.

  Before midnight: Boteler, “Recollections of the John Brown Raid,” 409; Villard, John Brown, 450–55; Renehan, The Secret Six, 204; “Senate Select Committee Report on the Harper’s Ferry Invasion,” 40.

  Through his self-control: Headley, The Life of Oliver Cromwell, 245, 249, 250, 254.

  Brown had lost: Sanborn, Life and Letters, 561–72.

  The nation’s press: “The Virginia Rebellion. The Trial of the Insurgents,” New York Times, October 28, 1859; Villard, John Brown, 487–88, 496; Sanborn, Life and Letters, 588; Wise, The End of an Era, 130–31.

  Judge Parker: Villard, John Brown, 498–99.

  Over the next month John Brown: Sanborn, Life and Letters, 598–99.

  “Brown had his arms tied”: Mary Anna Jackson, Life and Letters of General Thomas J. Jackson (Stonewall Jackson) (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1892), 130–31.

  “So perish”: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:97.

  Standing about thirty feet: Terry Alford, Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 81–82.

  As John Brown left: Sanborn, Life and Letters, 620.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: WITCH HUNT

  John Brown’s initial legacy: Villard, John Brown, 467; Redpath, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown, 270; “The Exposure of the Nigger-Worshipping Insurrectionists,” New York Herald, October 28, 1859.

  Seward was on a Grand Tour: “The ‘Irrepressible Conflict,’ ” New York Herald, October 19, 1859; “Most Important Disclosures,” New York Herald, October 27, 1859; “What is Treason?—Who are Traitors?,” New York Herald, October 29, 1859.

  On November 18: New York Democratic Vigilant Association, Rise and Progress of the Bloody Outbreak at Harper’s Ferry (New York: John F. Trow, 1859), 10, 17.

  Seward was traveling: Stahr, Seward, 180; Seward, Seward at Washington as Senator and Secretary of State, 440.

  Frederick Douglass: Douglass, Life and Times, 391–97.

  Gerrit Smith: “Gerrit Smith and the Harpers Ferry Outlook,” New York Herald, October 31, 1859; Renehan, The Secret Six, 224; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 341.

  Upon hearing that Brown’s letters: Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 187–92.

  The day Sanborn came back: Renehan, The Secret Six, 227–29; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 342–43.

  Higginson was infuriated: Renehan, The Secret Six, 227–29; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 343.

  Theodore Parker: Parker, Collected Works, 165; Renehan, The Secret Six, 232–33.

  On the morning of Brown’s hanging: Frank Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1907), 198–201.

  At two in the afternoon: Henry David Thoreau, Political Writings, ed., Nancy L. Rosenblum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133; Reynolds, John Brown, Abolitionist, 366; James Redpath, ed., Echoes of Harper’s Ferry (Boston: Thayer & Eldridge, 1860), 437–54.

  Virginia governor Henry A. Wise’s: Forney, Anecdotes of Public Men, 1:144; Clement Eaton, “Henry A. Wise and the Virginia Fire Eaters of 1856,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21, no. 4 (March 1935): 495–512; Villard, John Brown, 504; Trodd and Stauffer, eds., Meteor of War, 267, 257; Governor’s Message (Richmond, Va.: William F. Ritchie, 1859), 29.

  Edmund Ruffin: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:102; Peter Wallenstein, “Incendiaries All: Southern Politics and the Harpers Ferry Raid,” in His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid, Paul Finkelman, ed. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 166.

  Wise’s handling: Stauffer and Trodd, eds., The Tribunal, 308–10.

  The Southern reaction: Virginia Mason, The Public Life and Diplomatic Correspondence of James M. Mason (New York: Neale Publishing, 1906), 148; Villard, John Brown, 566.

  Brown’s sanctification: Wise, The End of an Era, 133–34.

  The logic of disunion: Henry D. Capers, The Life and Times of C.G. Memminger (Richmond: Everett Waddey, 1893), 239–74; Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:111.

  A great fear: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:106–12, 122; William Asbury Christian, Richmond, Her Past and Present (Richmond: L.H. Jenkins, 1912), 204.

  On December 5: Holst, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, 70; Potter, The Impending Crisis, 386.

  The day after Republicans unified: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 16; Potter, The Impending Crisis, 387.

  Listening to Clark: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 21.

  Congressman Laurence Keitt: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 24.

  This brought Thaddeus Stevens: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 24.

  Hinton Helper: David Brown, “Attacking Slavery from Within: The Making of ‘The Impending Crisis of the South,’ The Journal of Southern History 70, no. 3 (August 2004): 541–76.

  Helper unapologetically called: Hinton Rowan Helper, The Impending Crisis: How to Meet It (New York: Burdick Brothers, 1857), 111-23.

  The Impending Crisis: “The Opening of Congress—The Vital Question of the Day,” New York Herald, December 8, 1859.

  Roger Pryor: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 30; Sherman, Recollections of Forty Years in the Senate and Cabinet, 172, 83–84.

  The New York Tribune: “Helper’s Crisis,” New York Tribune, December 27, 1859.

  Over a biblical forty days and nights: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:120.

  The game of smearing: Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, 461.

  “The meanest slave”: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 202–7.

  After Lovejoy finished: Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 2:439.

  On the day Lovejoy defended free speech: Michael Kent Curtis, “The 1859 Crisis over Hinton Helper’s Book, The Impending Crisis: Free Speech, Slavery, and Some Light on the Meaning of the First Section of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chicago Kent Law Review 68, no. 3 (June 1998): 1141–67.

  On the same day the House: Trodd and Stauffer, eds., Meteor of War, 260.

  After Stearns testified: Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, 209–10.

  As the House was embroiled: “Great Speech of Senator Douglas,” New York Times, January 24, 1860.

  In his first statement on Harpers Ferry: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 553.

  Harpers Ferry: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 554–59.

  Douglas’s proposal: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 393, 404, 407; William Garrett, Reminiscences of Public Men in Alabama: For Thirty Years (Atlanta: Plantation Publishing, 1872), 693.

  The day after Pennington’s election: Holst, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, 114–15; CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 658.

  Douglas had already announced: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 411; Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, 461.

  Again, on February 29: Henry B. Stanton, Random Recollections (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1887), 213.

  Seward ended with a pastoral vision: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 910–14.

  “His speech”: “Mr. Seward’s Speech,” New York Times, March 1, 1860.

  “So calm in temper”: “The Speech of Mr. Seward,” New York Tribune, March 1, 1860.

  Immediately upon Seward finishing: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 915.

  Then Jefferson Davis rose: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 916–17; “The Presidential Contest: ‘Glittering and Sounding Generalities,’ ” New York Times, October 30, 1856.
/>   Seward was confident: Stanton, Random Recollections, 213.

  Seward’s tone: F.I. Herriott, “The Conference in the Deutsches Haus Chicago, May 14–15, 1860, A Study of Some of the Preliminaries of the National Republican Convention of 1860,” Transactions, Illinois State Historical Society, 1928 (Springfield: Phillips Bros., 1928), 116.

  CHAPTER THIRTY: RIGHT MAKES MIGHT

  They had last seen each other: Henry Villard, “Recollections of Lincoln,” The Atlantic Monthly 93 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 168.

  Lincoln’s invitation: Whitney, Life on the Circuit with Lincoln, 375.

  Just hours after he encountered Villard: CW, 3:496–97.

  Lincoln refused to act: CW, 3:503.

  The next day he observed the election: “Abraham Lincoln in Kansas,” Kansas Historical Society, https://www.kshs.org/kansapedia/abraham-lincoln-in-kansas/12132; “Hon. A. Lincoln,” Illinois State Journal, December 10, 1859; Gilbert Tracy, ed., Uncollected Letters of Abraham Lincoln (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 134–35.

  Once he was back home: CW, 3:511.

  Jesse Fell: Morehouse, The Life of Jesse W. Fell, 59–60.

  The conflict was a struggle: King, Lincoln’s Manager David Davis, 128; White, The Life of Lyman Trumbull, 149.

  On December 16: Nathaniel Niles to Abraham Lincoln, Letter, December 16, 1859, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0215400.

  Wentworth and Judd: “The Sedgwick Street Humbug,” Chicago Press and Tribune, April 2, 1859.

  Lincoln was already enmeshed: CW, 2:428–29.

  Judd, close to Trumbull: King, Lincoln’s Manager David Davis, 128–29; CW, 3:390.

  In November 1859: Norman Judd to Abraham Lincoln, Letter, December 1, 1859, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0209800.

  That same day Judd wrote Trumbull: Don E. Fehrenbacher, “The Judd-Wentworth Feud,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 45, no. 3 (Autumn 1952): 197–211; Thomas J. Pickett, “A Group of Country Editors Champion Mr. Lincoln,” Intimate Memories of Lincoln, Rufus Rockwell Wilson, ed. (Elmira, Ill.: Primavera Press, 1945), 193–94.

  After he returned from his Kansas trip: CW, 3:505, 507–8.

  Wentworth slyly asked Lincoln: Norman B. Judd to Abraham Lincoln, Letter, February 21, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0240800; David Davis to Abraham Lincoln, Letter, February 21, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/resource/mal.0239600; Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness, 150–51.

  “I know”: Herndon, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, 370.

  The Chicago Press and Tribune reported: “The Lincoln-Douglas Debates,” Chicago Press and Tribune, January 10, 1860; “Mr. Lincoln and the Presidency,” Illinois State Journal, January 14, 1860; Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, 136, 141.

  On the last week of January: Wilson, Davis, and Wilson, eds., Herndon’s Informants, 247; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 1:581; Baringer, Lincoln’s Rise to Power, 142–43.

  Almost all of those in this caucus: Hollister, Life of Schuyler Colfax, 143; Frederic Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900). 1:528–30.

  About two weeks after the secret: Browning, Diary, 394–95.

  Lincoln was alarmed: CW, 3:517.

  A week later, on February 16: “The Presidency—Abraham Lincoln,” Chicago Press and Tribune, February 16, 1860; Burlingame, Abraham Lincoln, 1:581.

  On February 22: CW, 3:509; Koerner, Memoirs, 2:80.

  Between law cases: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 204, 51–53.

  “The finished speech”: Rankin, Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, 245; Herndon, Herndon’s Life of Lincoln, 367.

  Bryant had closely followed: CW, 2:346–47; John Drury, Old Illinois Houses (Chicago: Chicago Daily News, 1948), 152–54.

  According to George H. Putnam: Parke Godwin, Life and Works of William Cullen Bryant (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 2:124; Gilbert H. Muller, Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant: Their Civil War (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 257.

  Salmon P. Chase: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 83; Rice, Recollections, 298.

  Lincoln arrived in the city: Villard, John Brown, 519; Thomas Wallace Knox, The Life and Work of Henry Ward Beecher (Hartford, Conn.: Park Publishing, 1887), 158.

  On the morning of February 27: Wilson, Intimate Memories, 250–51.

  Lincoln’s handler: Louis DeCaro, Jr., Freedom’s Dawn: The Last Days of John Brown in Virginia (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 123.

  Lincoln was escorted: Wilson, Intimate Memories, 251.

  Once Lincoln entered: Mary Panzer, Mathew Brady (New York: Phaidon, 2001), 59.

  At eight in the evening: Muller, Abraham Lincoln and William Cullen Bryant, 15.

  The audience applauded: Wayne Whipple, The Story-Life of Lincoln: A Biography Composed of Five Hundred True Stories (Philadelphia: John C. Winston, 1908), 308; Gilbert H. Muller, William Cullen Bryant: Poet of America (Albany: State University Press of New York, 2008), 257.

  Lincoln’s hair: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 108–14; Henry M. Field, The Life of David Dudley Field (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1898), 123; Noah Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of Slavery (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 186.

  Finally, unapologetically: CW, 3:522–50.

  The crowd that had been taken aback: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 146.

  Noah Brooks: Brooks, Abraham Lincoln and the Downfall of Slavery, 187.

  After a celebratory dinner: Holzer, Lincoln at Cooper Union, 157.

  On his way to visit his son: CW, 4:7.

  The Chicago Press and Tribune beat: Illinois State Journal, March 8, 1860; Bancroft, The Life of William H. Seward, 1:531.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: WALPURGISNACHT

  James Sheahan: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 733–34; Sheahan, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas, 528.

  “There will be no serious”: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:206.

  The optimistic signs: Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy, 278–80; Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 411–13; “The Jeff. Davis Correspondence,” New York Times, September 20, 1863; Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 743–44; Douglas R. Egerton, Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), 58.

  Before the convention: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 421; Freehling, The Road to Disunion, 2:296.

  In his biography of Douglas: Sheahan, The Life of Stephen A. Douglas, 1.

  But even as Sheahan’s hagiography: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 423–24; Austin L. Venable, “The Conflict Between the Douglas and Yancey Forces in the Charleston Convention,” The Journal of Southern History 8, no. 2 (May 1942): 237.

  Nothing Douglas could say: William J. Cooper, ed., Jefferson Davis: Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2004), 175–76.

  Douglas had ceaselessly attempted: “Editorial,” New York Tribune, April 14, 1860.

  Davis returned to the issue: CG, 36th Congress, 1st Session, 424–26.

  But no one was letting it go: Phillips, ed., The Correspondence of Robert Toombs, Alexander H. Stephens, and Howell Cobb, 450.

  Buchanan had issued a statement: Klein, Buchanan, 341; Davis, Essential Writings, 175–76; Milton, The Eve pf Conflict, 416–19.

  The team that had secured: Klein, President James Buchanan, 341; Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 419; Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:206.

  At a Faneuil Hall rally: John M. Belohlavek, Broken Glass: Caleb Cushing and the Shattering of the Union (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005), 302–3, 309; Richard Taylor, Destruction and Reconstruction: Personal Experiences of the Late War (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 4.

  Charleston had been designated: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 748; “The Democratic Party,” Charleston Mercury, April 16, 1860.

  Douglas urged: Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:204; Rhodes, History o
f the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 2:441.

  Murat Halstead: Murat Halstead, Caucuses of 1860: A History of the National Political Conventions (Columbus, Ohio: Follett, Foster, 1860), 6.

  “Imagine a crowded barroom”: New York Herald, April 26, 1860.

  A cloud of dread: Klein, President James Buchanan, 337–38; Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln, 2:197–99; “The Covode Investigation,” 8.

  “The reception: “Gossip from Charleston,” New York Times, April 27, 1860; “Charleston Convention,” New York Herald, April 23, 1860.

  Yet at the same time the disclosure: “Our Special Washington Despatch,” New York Herald, April 23, 1860; “Charleston Convention,” New York Times, April 23, 1860; “From Charleston,” New York, Tribune, April 24, 1860.

  More than three thousand delegates: Halstead, Caucuses of 1860, 5.

  On April 23: Ibid., 23.

  The senatorial claque: Milton, The Eve of Conflict, 432; Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy, 296–97.

  “ ‘Bubble, bubble”: New York Herald, April 26, 1860.

  On April 27: Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy, 298.

  Jefferson Davis: Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 2:445; “Charleston Convention,” New York Times, April 27, 1860.

  The Charleston convention: Halstead, Caucuses of 1860, 32.

  Both resolutions: Ibid., 68.

  Faced with splitting the convention: Venable, “The Conflict Between the Douglas and Yancey Forces in the Charleston Convention,” 238–39; Halstead, Caucuses of 1860, 68–69.

  Henry B. Payne: Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas, 754.

  Yancey’s motive: Eric H. Walther, William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 14–17.

  In 1838: John Witherspoon DuBose, The Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey (Birmingham, Ala.: Roberts & Son, 1892), 73–74, 141–43.

  From 1848: Chauncey Samuel Boucher, “South Carolina and the South on the Eve of Secession, 1852 to 1860,” Washington University Studies 6, no. 2 (April 1919): 131.

  In anticipation of the election year: DuBose, the Life and Times of William Lowndes Yancey, 440–42.

  Finally, he bid farewell: Proceedings of the Conventions at Charleston and Baltimore (Washington: National Democratic Executive Committee, 1860), 66–78.