As to the possibilities of gradual emancipation, which he favored, Olmsted wrote that in Cuba every slave has the right of buying his own freedom, at a price which does not depend on the selfish exaction of his master, but is either a fixed price or is determined in each case by disinterested appraisers. "The consequence is that emancipations are continually going on, and the free people of color are becoming enlightened, cultivated, and wealthy. In no part of the United States do they occupy the high position which they enjoy in Cuba." So much for the despised Spanish-American.

From a still different standpoint—that of the non-slaveholding Southern white—the system was reviewed and scathingly judged in Helper's The Impending Crisis. But that, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, was not merely a book, but an event, and as such is to be mentioned in its place among events. The general survey of the slave system in itself need not here be carried further. As to its essential character and basal principle, no truer word was ever spoken than that which Mrs. Stowe puts in the mouth of the slaveholder St. Clare:

"The short of the matter is, cousin, on this abstract question of slavery there can, as I think, be but one opinion. Planters, who have money to make by it,—clergymen, who have planters to please,—politicians, who want to rule by it,—may warp and bend language and ethics to a degree that shall astonish the world at their ingenuity; they can press Nature and the Bible, and nobody knows what else, into the service; but, after all, neither they nor the world believe in it one particle the more. It comes from the devil, that's the short of it,—and to my mind, it's a pretty respectable specimen of what he can do in his own line. You seem to wonder; but if you will get me fairly at it, I'll make a clean breast of it. This cursed business, accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong,—because I know how, and can do it,—therefore I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set Quashy to doing. Because I don't like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is."

St. Clare goes on to say that "for pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women and not savage beasts, many of us do not and dare not—we would scorn to—use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands." In truth, a compilation of the slave laws was one of the most convincing arguments against the whole system.

This book is characterized by Charles G. Ames,—whose long life of noble service to humanity included earnest work among the anti-slavery pioneers: "To my mind, the heaviest blow, though probably not the most telling one, ever struck against our slave system as a system was the compilation and publication of Stroud's Slave Laws—a codification from the statute-books of the Southern States of their own barbarous methods of legislation, made necessary for the protection of the peculiar institution. All the recent sentimental defenses of it, as gentle, humane, and patriarchal, seem utterly to ignore the rugged facts, which Lawyer Stroud's book made as plain as the stratification of the rocks to the eye of the geologist."

In its actual administration, the system was in a measure softened and humanized. It was more humane in the border than in the cotton and sugar States, and it was generally better when a plantation was managed by its owner than when left to an overseer,—as the plantation of Fanny Kemble's husband had been left. But in one respect its disastrous effect was everywhere felt. By associating manual labor with the stigma of servitude, it bred, in free men, a strong disrelish for work,—a most demoralizing and ruinous influence. Inefficiency and degradation were the marks of the non-slaveholding whites. The master class missed the wholesome regimen of toil. Nature is never more beneficent than when she lays on man the imperative command "Thou shalt work." Of all ways of evading it the worst is to shift the burden to another man. In being driven to do other men's work as well as his own the negro found some compensation, but his enslaver paid a constant and heavy penalty.



CHAPTER XIII

THE STRUGGLE FOR KANSAS

The foremost politician of the Northwest, in the early '50s, was Stephen A. Douglas, United States senator from Illinois. He was a native of Vermont, and had early gone West and pushed his fortunes with energy, audacity, and shrewdness. He was an effective, popular speaker; and his short and stout frame and large head had won for him the nickname of "The Little Giant." He was a leader in the Democratic party, and a prominent Presidential candidate, but never identified with any great political principle or broad policy. He was chairman of the Senate committee on Territories, and early in the session of 1853-4 he introduced a bill for the organization of a vast section hitherto known as "the Platte country," a part of the Louisiana purchase, lying next to the western tier of States, and stretching from Indian Territory to Canada; all of which was now to constitute the Territory of Nebraska, or, as it was soon divided, the two Territories of Nebraska and Kansas. This region had as yet been scarcely touched by permanent settlers, but it was the next step in the great onward march toward the Pacific. It lay north of the line of 36 degrees 30 minutes, above which it had been declared by the compromise act of 1820 slavery should never be extended. Douglas incorporated in his "Kansas-Nebraska" bill, a clause declaring that the prohibition of slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, by the act of 1820, had been "superseded by the principles of the legislation of 1850," and was "inoperative and void." Later he added the explanatory clause: "It being the true intent and meaning of this act, not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States." On its face, this was a proposal to withdraw the congressional prohibition of slavery in the Northwestern territory, and remand the question to the territorial population. But the latent purpose to distinctly favor slavery was proved when Senator Chase moved an additional clause: "Under which (the Constitution) the people of the Territory, through their appropriate representatives, may, if they see fit, prohibit the existence of slavery therein"; and Douglas and his followers, in defiance of consistency, instantly threw this out. The meaning of the whole business was unmistakable; under the pretext of "popular sovereignty,"—Douglas's favorite watchword—the bars were thrown down and slavery was invited to enter.

The proposal took the country completely by surprise. The South was not asking for any such advantage as was offered, but was prompt to accept it. This of course Douglas had expected, and in this lay his personal gain as a Presidential candidate. But he had utterly misjudged the temper of the North. The general acquiescence in the compromise of 1850 might seem to indicate a weariness or indifference as to the slavery question. But just as in 1820 and in 1850, again there sprung up a wide and deep hostility to any extension of slavery, and now the old restraints on that hostility were gone, and its sources were newly filled. For now Clay and Webster were dead, and the case itself offered no room for compromise; no offset was possible. And the anti-slavery feeling had strengthened immensely throughout the North. Under the stimulus of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the inhumanity of the system had made the deepest impression on the popular imagination and conscience. To this system it was now proposed to throw open all the fair and fertile Northwest, in effect from the Mississippi to the Pacific. The North awoke like a giant from sleep. The old party organizations went down in the shock; a new party came instantly to birth; and the last triumph of slavery in Congress gave the signal for a six-years' campaign, ending in the triumph of the Republicans and the appeal of the South to revolution.

The debate in Congress was hot through the winter and spring of 1854. In the Senate, Seward and Sumner and Chase had been reinforced by such allies as Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Hamilton Fish of New York, Solomon Foot of Vermont, and William P. Fessenden of Maine. The supporters of the bill, with such leaders as Douglas and Cass from the North and Mason and Benjamin from the South, proved finally to number three-fourths of the Senate. In the House, party lines were completely broken, and the division was almost equal,—the bill passed by 113 to 110. Its supporters included all the Southern and just half of the Northern Democrats, and two-thirds of the few Southern Whigs. Its opponents were all the Northern and a third of the Southern Whigs, with half of the Northern Democrats and the four Free-Soilers in the House.

The bill finally passed on the 25th of May, 1854, and there instantly began a hot battle for the congressional election. On the very next morning,—so Henry Wilson relates,—a meeting of about twenty members of the House was held; among their leaders were Israel Washburn, Jr., of Maine, and Edward Dickinson and Thomas D. Eliot of Massachusetts; and it was agreed that the best hope lay not in the Whig organization, but in a new party, for which the name "Republican" was chosen; and of which this occasion might now be considered the birth and christening. It came to its earliest maturity in Michigan, where the Whigs and Free Soilers united in the new party and carried the autumn election. But in most Northern States there was political confusion, heightened by the sudden appearance of the "American" party. This was the political development of the "Know-nothing" secret society, which came into existence the year before, on the basis of the exclusion of recent immigrants from political power. Its special animus was hostility to the Irish Catholics, and in various parts of the country it had for a year or two a mushroom growth. In Massachusetts, where the Whigs clung obstinately to their tradition and their social prestige, and the Republican party was at first only a continuance of the Free Soil, the Know-nothings won in 1854 a sweeping victory, carrying the State by almost two to one and electing all the members of Congress. That shrewd politician, Henry Wilson, contributed to the result; was elected to the United States Senate; and led the anti-slavery element which controlled the American party in Massachusetts and a year or two later divided its national organization. In other States, the term "anti-Nebraska" was the basis of a temporary union, such as in Ohio had a majority of 70,000. In New York the influence of Greeley, Seward, and Weed prolonged the Whig organization as an anti-Nebraska party. The roster of the new Congress was a jumble of Democrats, Whigs, Republicans, Americans, and anti-Nebraskans. But the general result was clear; Douglas's bill had turned an overwhelming administration majority into a minority of the popular vote; and the political revolution had carried the House in the first engagement. The result crystallized a year later, when an obstinate battle of many weeks for the House speakership ended in the election of Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts.

The immediate practical effect of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was to throw the political destiny of those Territories into the hands of the future settlers. There were men at the North who were prompt to see and seize the opportunity. In February, 1854, three months before the bill became law, the New England Emigrant Aid Society was incorporated in Massachusetts. Its originator was Eli Thayer of Worcester, and among its active promoters was Edward Everett Hale. In the following July it sent to Kansas a colony of twenty-four, speedily followed by another of seventy, which founded the town of Lawrence. Other colonies followed from various Northern States, and other settlements were made. The natural westward movement of an active population seeking new homes and personal betterment was augmented and stimulated by a propaganda of freedom. Whittier gave the colonists a marching song:

We cross the prairies as of old Our fathers crossed the sea, To make the West as they the East The home of liberty.

A counter movement was started from the South. Missouri was its natural base. But Missouri furnished the material and leadership for another kind of crusade. The rough and lawless element of a border community was brought out in its worst character by the appeal to champion the cause of slavery. Men high in political life were ready to utilize such forces. The first settlers of Lawrence, before they had time to raise their houses, were visited by a ruffianly mob from Missouri, who tried by threats and show of force to drive them from the Territory, but failed. When in November the first election was held for Territorial delegate to Congress, there was a systematic invasion by bands of Missourians, who captured the polling-places and elected their candidate by 3000 votes; though it was afterward proved that there were only half that number of voters resident in Kansas.

In 1855 the first Territorial Legislature was elected by a similar invasion of armed men, which chose the entire body. A foremost leader in these operations was United States Senator Atchison of Missouri. President Pierce's administration recognized the usurping faction. It sent a succession of governors—Reeder, Shannon, Geary, Walker (the last was sent by President Buchanan)—who, with the exception of the incompetent and worthless Shannon, were by the inexorable facts of the situation won to the side of the Free-State men, and accordingly lost favor and their office. Meantime the usurping Legislature had enacted an extraordinary code of laws. By these statutes, decoying a slave from his master was punishable by death or hard labor for ten years; the circulation of writings inciting to revolt was made a capital offense; and the assertion by speech, writing, or the circulation of any book or paper, that slavery was not lawful in the Territory, was punishable by two years' hard labor.

It was not in the blood of free men to submit to such usurpation and tyranny. In the autumn of 1855 the Free State party held a convention, adopted a State constitution, and petitioned for admission to the Union. They elected State officers with Charles S. Robinson as Governor. This organization had really no legal standing; in form it was revolutionary. But the Free State party were not only resolute, but adroit. They had no mind to actively rebel against the United States Government, or come into collision with its forces. Governor Robinson, their foremost leader, was a man of New England birth, who had served a profitable apprenticeship in the settlement of California, and learned a lesson amid the complications of Federal authority and pioneer exigencies. Counseled by him and men of like mind, the Free State party, while maintaining the form of a State government, and disavowing the Territorial Legislature as fraudulent, always deferred to any express mandate of Federal authority. The Federal troops in the Territory were commanded by Colonel Sumner, afterward a distinguished commander in the Union army, and Governor Robinson (The Kansas Conflict), credits him with a loyal and generally successful purpose to preserve order and peace. In the mixed population there was much bad blood, many threats, and occasional violence, but no general conflict. The "border ruffians" were often insulting, and some murders were committed, but the Free State men kept steadily on the defensive, though there was among them a faction which favored more aggressive measures.

At last, a Free-State man was wantonly murdered; then an eye-witness of the murder was got away on an apparently trumped-up charge; this was followed by a bloodless rescue and the witness was carried off to Lawrence. Then a sheriff with his posse went to Lawrence to arrest one of the rescuers. In the night the sheriff was fired at and wounded. He retreated; and immediately afterward a formidable demonstration was made against the town of Lawrence. The situation was peculiar. Many of the Free-State men were armed; contributions had been openly taken in the North for this purpose, and "Sharpe's rifles" was one of the familiar words of the day. But this policy was fixed—to disown and disobey the authority of the Territorial Legislature, but never to oppose or resist a United States official. In this way, says Robinson, the entire odium of all oppressive proceedings was fixed on the Federal administration; "the more outrages the people could get the government to perpetrate upon them the more victories they would gain, and this simply because the field of battle embraced the entire country, and the chief victories at this stage were to be moral, political, and national."

The Territorial authorities were bent on breaking down, if possible, the passive resistance of the Free-State men. Indictments were found, by a Federal grand jury, against a number of members of the Free-State government for "constructive treason," and they were put under arrest. Indictments were also found against two printing offices in Lawrence, and the principal hotel in the town. A large force of Missourians, led by a United States marshal, advanced on the town. The inhabitants protested, but agreed to respect the United States authority. The hotel and the two printing offices were accordingly destroyed. A considerable amount of lawless pillaging was done, and Governor Robinson's house was burned. Then the force was withdrawn.

The Free-State leaders, as Robinson states, were in no wise cast down by the course of events. Their actual losses had not been great; the temporary confinement of a few of their men did not seriously disturb them; and they considered that by their self-restraint and non-resistance they had put their enemies thoroughly in the wrong, and gained a most valuable vantage-ground for the ensuing Presidential and congressional elections—an estimate which the result fully justified.

But in their party were some spirits to whom these peaceful tactics were distasteful. Chief in this number was John Brown—little known to the world at large till a later time. He and his family of sons had made their homes in Kansas, impelled partly by the hostility to slavery which in him was a master passion. He was a man personally upright and kindly, of only moderate interest and capacity for the ordinary practical affairs of life, given to brooding on public events and ideal causes, and viewing them with a fanatic's narrowness and a fanatic's absorption. He was a belated Puritan, and his natural place would have been with Cromwell's Ironsides. His ideas were largely influenced by his reading of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament. Of the modern State and the duties of the modern citizen he had no rational idea. Following the Old Testament analogy, he conceived of the slaveholders as the enemies of God—like the Canaanites; and he came to imagine for himself a mission like one of the Hebrew leaders. His favorite hero seems to have been Gideon, and to assail and overcome the Midianites, a handful against a host, became his dream.

How the peaceful tactics of the Free-State party suited his temper may be easily guessed, and four days after the attack on Lawrence (which was May 20, 1856), he acted on a plan of his own. At the head of a small group of men, including two of his sons and a son-in-law, he went at night down Pottawatomie creek, stopping at three houses. The men who lived in them were well-known pro-slavery men; they seem to have been rough characters; their most specific offense (according to Mr. Sanborn, Brown's biographer and eulogist), was the driving from his home by violent threats an inoffensive old man. John Brown and his party went down the creek, called at one after the other of three houses; took five men away from their wives and children; and deliberately shot one and hacked the others to death with swords.

Mr. Sanborn's defense of this act is: "Brown long foresaw the deadly conflict with the slave power which culminated in the Civil War, and was eager to begin it, that it might be the sooner over." He begins his chapter on "The Pottawatomie Executions": "The story of John Brown will mean little to those who do not believe that God governs the world, and that he makes his will known in advance to certain chosen men and women, who perform it consciously or unconsciously. Of such prophetic heaven-appointed men, John Brown was the most conspicuous in our time, and his life must be construed in the light of that fact." He also declares that the "execution" of these five men was an offset to the killing of five Free-State men by various persons during the preceding twelve-month, and that it was calculated to strike wholesome terror into evil-doers. The ethics, theology, and statesmanship of this defense are possible only to one bent on making Brown a hero at any cost.

The natural result of the Pottawatomie "executions,"—in which John Brown's complicity was for a time concealed—was a series of retaliations on both sides, and a state of affairs far more anarchic than Kansas had known before. This lasted through the summer of 1856. The general impression on the country was to strengthen the opposition to the usurpation of the Territorial Legislature, and to the administration which sustained it. In September there came a crisis. Another and graver attack on Lawrence was threatened, and this time a vigorous resistance was probable. But a new and able governor, John W. Geary of Pennsylvania, had been dispatched by President Pierce, with imperative instructions to pacify the Territory, as a pressing political necessity. Geary met Robinson—the treason prisoners had already been released—and as the two men had been near each other in the California troubles and thus had the advantage of a mutual acquaintance, an understanding was soon reached; Geary called off the dogs of war, and a time of quiet followed.



CHAPTER XIV

"FREMONT AND FREEDOM"

The Congress of 1855-6, divided between an administration Senate and an opposition House, accomplished little but talk. One chapter of this talk had a notable sequel. Charles Sumner, in an elaborate and powerful oration in the Senate, denounced slavery, "the sum of all villainies," and bitterly satirized one of its prominent defenders, Senator Butler of South Carolina. He compared Butler to Don Quixote, enamored of slavery as was the knight of his Dulcinea, and unconscious that instead of a peerless lady she was but a wanton. The response to the speech was made by a nephew of Senator Butler and member of the House, Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina. He entered the Senate chamber during a recess, accompanied and guarded by a friend and fellow member, Lawrence Keitt; approached Sumner as he sat writing at his desk, and without words felled him to the ground with a heavy cane, and beat him about the head till he was insensible. Sumner, a man of fine physique, was for a long time an invalid from the assault, and was unable for years to resume his place in the Senate.

It was not so much the individual act of Brooks as its treatment by his party and section that gave the deepest significance to the deed and produced the most lasting effect. A friendly magistrate sentenced Brooks to a nominal fine and so forestalled further prosecution. His party friends in Congress left all public rebuke of the deed to Republicans. A motion to expel Brooks and Keitt from the House failed of the necessary two-thirds vote. They resigned, and were promptly and triumphantly re-elected. Noisy applause of the attack came from all parts of the South, with a stack of canes marked "Hit him again." That better class of Southerners by whom the assault was felt, as one of them expressed it long afterward, "like a blow in the face," made no demonstration. So far from losing caste, as a gentleman or a public man, Brooks not only kept his place in society, but was honored a few months later with a public banquet, at which such men as Butler and Toombs and Mason joined in the laudations, and gave a background to the scene by free threats of disunion if the Republicans elected their President.

This treatment of Brooks made an impression at the North far beyond the first hot indignation at his brutal outrage. The condonation and applause of that outrage was taken as sure evidence of a barbaric state of opinion, the natural accompaniment of slavery. What made the matter worse was that the assault had a technical justification under the code of honor which it was Brooks's pride as a Southern gentleman to observe. The code called on a man who had given offense by his words to meet the offended man in a duel, and if he refused, he was fairly subject to public disgrace or even physical chastisement. Such a theory and practice, and the sentiments associated with it, stamped slavery with a heavier condemnation than orator or novelist could frame.

This one week in May, 1856, was dark with omens of impending catastrophe. On May 20 Lawrence was devastated; on the 22d, Sumner was assaulted; and on the 24th took place the Pottawatomie massacre. A shadow as of impending doom was reflected in Mrs. Stowe's second anti-slavery novel, Dred, which appeared about this time. While lacking the inspiration and power of Uncle Tom's Cabin, it had in the main a similar tone of humanity, sympathy and fairness. Again the better element of the Southern whites was portrayed, in the benevolent slave-holder Clayton; the brave Methodist preacher, Father Dickson; and the book's heroine, Nina Gordon. There were realistic and graphic pictures of the negro at his best, in Old Tiff and Milly. The sophistries and time-serving of ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity. But the book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his plans, and the pitiful wrongs he sought to redress, veiled from the Northern reader the suggestion of other dangers and tragedies to which the Southern reader was keenly alive. As we read the book now, the glimpses of coming terror and disaster in Dred's visions seem like a presage of the war which in truth was only four years away.

But the prevailing temper of the time was as yet little clouded by any such forebodings. It was a great wave of popular enthusiasm, sane, resolute, and hopeful, which moved forward in the first Presidential campaign of the Republican party in 1856. The convention met at Philadelphia in June. Its temper was well described in a letter from Samuel Bowles to his paper, the Springfield Republican,—which which from moderate anti-slavery Whig had become ardently Republican when the Missouri compromise was repealed.[1]

"Certainly we never saw a political convention in which there was so much soul as in that at Philadelphia. It was politics with a heart and a conscience in it. Cincinnati (the Democratic convention) gathered the remains of a once powerful national party and contributed to its further sectionalization and destruction. Philadelphia called together the heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, to establish a broader and juster nationality. Such a fusion of contradictory elements was never witnessed in this country before since the times of the Revolution. Nor could it happen now save under a great emergency, and from a controlling necessity. Such a combination of the material and mental forces of the republic as was represented in the Philadelphia convention, and united in its enthusiastic and harmonious results, has more power than any political combination ever formed before in this country, and cannot in the nature of things be long kept in the background. There is no law more certain than that which will throw such a union of the moral strength, intellectual activity, and youthful energy of the nation into supremacy, and that right speedily. It may be delayed for a season, but its course is onward and its victory is certain."

The declaration of principles dealt wholly with the slavery issue. It asserted that under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Declaration and the ordinance of 1787, slavery had no right to exist in any of the national Territories. It called on Congress to prohibit in the Territories "the twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy." It dwelt with great emphasis on the wrongs of the Kansas settlers; the establishment of a Territorial Legislature by a fraudulent vote; its outrageous statute-book; the sustaining of the usurpation by the Federal government; the resulting disorder and violence. Congress was asked to admit Kansas to the Union under its Free State organization. Nothing was said as to the fugitive slave law. There was an express disclaimer of any interference with slavery in the States. The doctrine of the party was embodied in a phrase which became one of its mottoes: "Freedom national, slavery sectional."

For its Presidential candidate the convention passed by all the well-known political leaders, and chose Col. John C. Fremont of California. Fremont, after a scientific and military education, had distinguished himself by a series of brilliant exploring expeditions in the farthest Northwest, marked by scientific achievement and stirring adventure. Arriving in California at the outbreak of hostilities with Mexico, he rallied and led the American settlers and drove the Mexicans from the territory. He took a leading part in organizing the State, and establishing freedom in its Constitution; and was elected to the United States Senate as a Free-Soil Democrat. His term as Senator was too brief to win eminence, but his career as a whole had been singularly various and distinguished. He was young; he had manly beauty, and a rare personal fascination. His brilliant and charming wife won favor for him. Even his name gave aid to the cause, and "Fremont and freedom" became the rallying cry of the campaign.

But Fremont's personality was an altogether minor element in the strength with which the Republican party first took the field, and won, not yet the country, but the strongholds of the North. The new party gave expression and effect to the anti-slavery sentiment which had become so deep and wide. It was wholly dissociated from the extremists who had shocked and alarmed the conservatism of the country; and Garrison and Phillips had only impatience and scorn for its principles and measures. Its leadership included many men experienced in congressional and administrative life, men like Seward and Sumner and Chase and Wade and Fessenden and Banks, who had matched themselves against the best leaders of the South and the South's Northern allies. It brought together the best of the old Whig, Democratic, and Free Soil parties. In its rank and file it gathered on the whole the best conscience and intelligence of the North. After the election the Springfield Republican pointed out that the party's success had been exactly along the geographical lines of an efficient free-school system, and it had been defeated where public schools were deficient, as in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and the solid South.

The immediate and burning issue of the campaign was Kansas. Whatever the exact right and wrong of its local broils, there was no question of the broad facts—the fraudulent election of the Legislature, the character of its statute-book, and its support by President Pierce's administration. It was the wrongs of the Kansas settlers far more than the wrongs of the Southern slaves on which the Republican speakers and newspapers dwelt. In truth the animus of the party was quite as much the resentment by the North of Southern political aggression as it was regard for the slaves or thought of their future condition. The policy of excluding slavery from the Territories, and thus naturally from the new States, tended ultimately to its discouragement and probable extinction where it already existed. But any such result appeared very remote.

The opposition to the Republican party was weighty in numbers, but inharmonious and with no definite creed. The Democratic platform was an equivocation. It declared for "non-interference by Congress with slavery in State or Territory." But this left it an open question whether any one could "interfere." Could the people of a Territory exclude slavery if they wished? Or did the Constitution protect it there, as Calhoun and his followers claimed? An ambiguity was left which permitted Calhoun men and Douglas men to act together against the common foe.

The Democratic candidate was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. He was one of those men, decent and respectable, who go through a life of office-seeking and office-holding without a particle of real leadership, and are forgotten the moment they leave the stage unless circumstance throws them into a place so responsible as to reveal their glaring incompetence. He had escaped the odium which Pierce and Douglas had incurred, through his absence as Minister to England. There he had distinguished himself chiefly by his part in a conference at Ostend, in 1854,—incited by President Pierce and his Secretary of State, William L. Marcy of New York,—where he had met Mason of Virginia and Soule of Louisiana, ministers respectively to France and Spain; and they had issued a joint manifesto, declaring that the possession of Cuba was necessary to the peace and security of the United States, and the island should be obtained from Spain, with her consent if possible but without it if necessary. This became a recognized article in the Democratic and Southern policy. The Republican platform of 1856 denounced the Ostend manifesto, as the doctrine that "might makes right," "the highwayman's plea." It was left for a latter-day Republican to give to the same doctrine the politer name of "international eminent domain."

The American or Know-nothing party nominated ex-President Fillmore and adopted a platform inclining toward the Southern position. There was a secession of a Northern element, which nominated Banks, but he declined and supported Fremont. All the opponents of the Republican party laid stress on its sectional character. Both its candidates (for vice-president, William L. Dayton of New Jersey), were from the North; its creed aimed solely at the restriction of the South's peculiar institution; south of Mason and Dixon's line, it had an electoral ticket in four States only—Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky—and cast hardly 1000 votes. But the South itself had so completely ostracized even the most moderate anti-slavery sentiment that free political action was impossible. Thus, Professor Hedrick of the University of North Carolina said in reply to a question that he favored Fremont for President; and being denounced for this by a newspaper, he wrote to it a letter, saying in a modest and straightforward way that he had made no attempt to propagate his views, but he did desire to see the slaves free. The students burned him in effigy; the college authorities forced him to resign; a mob attacked him and he was driven from the State. It was in the same State that a college professor's right to free speech on a burning social question was vindicated by his students, his colleagues, and the community, in 1903, and that Trinity College became a leader in courageous and progressive sentiment on the questions of the hour. Few were the men bold enough even to try the question of personal independence in 1856. The suppression of free speech was in itself one of the strongest possible arguments for the Republican cause. The liberty of white men was at stake.

Conservatism, apprehension, timidity, in various phases, told against the new party and its candidate. Northern commerce was largely bound up with Southern interests. The threat of disunion weighed with some; Grant, in his memoirs, says it was this that led him to vote for Buchanan. Others shrank from trusting the helm in a tempest to hands as untried as Fremont's. The mob who hated "niggers" swelled the opposition vote. Taking advantage of the Know-nothing feeling, the fiction was persistently circulated that Fremont was a Catholic. The disorder in Kansas was pacified by the dispatch of a new Governor, Geary, to reassure the North. Finally, money was spent on a scale unknown before to defeat the Republican party,—itself in the stage of poverty and virtue,—and spent probably with decisive effect in the critical October election in Pennsylvania.

Against these disadvantages the young party made head gallantly. It fired the youth of the North with an ardor unknown since the early days of the republic. It inspired the poets of the people. Great crowds sang the strains of the Marseillaise, with the refrain:

Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Fremont and victory!

The older heads were satisfied by the moderation and wisdom of the party's principles. The reasonable element among the Abolitionists hailed this first great popular advance, and allied themselves with it. Whittier was the chief minstrel of the campaign. Of those to whom "the Union" had been the talismanic word, that part which cared for nothing better than the Union as it was, with slavery and freedom mixed, supported Buchanan or Fillmore. The part that loved the Union as a means to justice and freedom were for Fremont.

The October elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana showed that the first Presidential battle was lost. November confirmed that verdict. New England, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and the Northwest, had been outweighed by the South and its allies, and Buchanan was the next President. But never was defeat met with better courage or higher hopes for the next encounter. Some unknown poet gave the battle-song:

Beneath thy skies, November, Thy skies of cloud and rain, Around our blazing camp-fires We close our ranks again. Then sound again the bugle! Call the battle roll anew! If months have well nigh won the field What may not four years do?

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: A word should be said as to the frequency with which the Springfield Republican is quoted in this work. The author wrote an earlier book, The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles, (Century Co.)—the founder of the Republican. As the background of his life, a careful study was made of the political events during his years of editorial activity, 1844-77. The original matter for this was largely drawn from the files of the Republican. In studying the whole ground afresh for the present history, advantage was taken of this material, and further citations were drawn from the same paper. The interpretation of current events by an independent and sagacious newspaper yields invaluable material for the historian; and my study of the Republican, from the repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854 to the present, has heightened my respect for the breadth, sobriety, and moral insight with which it judged the questions of the day.]



CHAPTER XV

THREE TYPICAL SOUTHERNERS

In the group of leaders of public sentiment in the '30s and '40s, as sketched in Chapter V, some of the foremost—Clay, Webster, and Birney—were influential in both sections of the country. But in the next decade the division is clear between the leaders of the South and of the North. Let us glance at two separate groups.

Jefferson Davis was in many ways a typical Southerner. He was a sincere, able, and high-minded man. The guiding aim of his public life was to serve the community as he understood its interests. Personal ambition seemingly influenced him no more than is to be expected in any strong man; and, whatever his faults of judgment or temper, it does not appear that he ever knowingly sacrificed the public good to his own profit or aggrandizement. But he was devoted to a social system and a political theory which bound his final allegiance to his State and his section. After a cadetship at West Point and a brief term of military service, he lived for eight years, 1837-45, on a Mississippi plantation, in joint ownership and control with an older brother. In these early years, and in the seclusion of a plantation, his theories crystallized and his mental habits grew. The circumstances of such life fostered in Southern politicians the tendency to logical and symmetrical theories, to which they tenaciously held, unmodified by the regard for experience which is bred from free and various contact with the large world of affairs. Davis fully accepted the theory of State sovereignty which won general favor in the South. In this view the States were independent powers, which had formed with each other by the Constitution a compact, a business arrangement, a kind of limited partnership. If the compact was broken in any of its articles, or if its working proved at any time to be unsatisfactory and injurious, the partners could withdraw at will. This theory found more or less support among the various utterances and practices of the framers of the Constitution and founders of the government. In truth, they had as a body no consistent and exact theory of the Federal bond. Later circumstances led their descendants to incline to a stronger or a looser tie, according to their different interests and sentiments. The institution of slavery so strongly differentiated the Southern communities from their Northern neighbors, that they naturally magnified their local rights and favored the view which justified them in the last resort in renouncing the authority of the Union if it should come to be exercised against their industrial system. State sovereignty was the creed, and the slavery interest was the motive.

To a man living like Davis on his own plantation, the relation of master and slave seemed a fundamental condition of the social order. Not only his livelihood rested on it, but through this relation his practical faculties found their field; his conscience was exercised in the right management and care of his slaves; there was a true sentiment of protection on his side and loyalty on theirs. His neighbors and friends were situated like himself. The incidental mischiefs of the system, the abuses by bad masters, the ignorance and low morality of the slaves,—these things they regarded, let us say, as an upright and benevolent manufacturer to-day regards the miseries of sweatshops and the sufferings of unemployed labor. Such things were bad, very bad, but they were the accidents and not the essentials of the industrial system. They resented the strictures of their critics; they were apprehensive of the growing hostility in the North to their institutions; if the national partnership was to last they must have their rights under it; and one of those rights was an equal share in the national domain.

Davis entered into active politics when he was elected to Congress in 1844. Repudiation was then in favor in Mississippi, and he opposed and denounced it. He supported the Mexican War in the most practical way, by taking command of a volunteer regiment from Mississippi. He served with distinguished gallantry, and was severely wounded at Buena Vista. After the war he entered the United States Senate. He supported the compromise of 1850, regarding it as substantially a continuance of the truce between the sections, and not now sympathizing with those who threatened disunion. Later, President Pierce made him Secretary of War; in the Cabinet he was the leading spirit; and this, with a weak President, meant large power and responsibility. He showed the extent of his partisanship by supporting with the full power of the administration the Territorial government imposed on Kansas by a palpably fraudulent vote.

In 1856 he returned to the Senate, and came to be recognized as the foremost champion of the Southern interest. He was not a leader in any such sense as Jefferson or Clay or Calhoun; but he was a representative man, thoroughly trusted by his associates, their most effective spokesman, and going by conviction in the midstream of the dominant tendency. He had that degree of ambition which is natural and normal in a strong man. He was an effective and elegant orator. When secession came he was not its originator, but one of a set of men—on the whole the most considerate and influential men of the Gulf and cotton States—who took the responsibility of leading their section into revolution, in the interest of slavery.

In this typical Southern leader, as in his class, were blended the elements of a disposition and will that would halt before no barrier to its claim of mastery. A slaveholder, accustomed to supremacy over his fellowmen as their natural superior; a planter, habituated to the practical exercise of such supremacy over hundreds of dependents; a member of an aristocracy, the political masters of their section, and long the dominant force in the nation; a theorist, wedded to the dogma of State sovereignty, and convinced of the superiority of Southern civilization; the self-confident and self-asserting temper bred by such conditions—here was a union of forces that would push its cause against all opposition, at the cost if need be of disunion, of war, of all obstacles and all perils.

By a natural exaggeration, at a later time the President of the Confederacy was regarded at the North as the very embodiment of its cause. To the unmeasured hostility on this account was added the opprobrium of deeds in which he had no part. He was charged for a time with complicity in the murder of Lincoln. He was branded with responsibility for the miseries in Andersonville and the other prison-pens in the war,—but without a particle of evidence. Admiration was yielded by the North to Stonewall Jackson even in his life-time; there was early recognition of Lee's magnanimous acceptance of defeat; but the bitterest odium was long visited upon Davis. It was heightened by the tenacity with which his intense nature clung to "the lost cause" as a sentiment, after the reality was hopelessly buried. The South itself gave its highest favor to Lee, its most effective defender, and a man of singularly impressive character; while Davis's mistakes of administration, and his reserved and over-sensitive temper chilled a little the recognition of his disinterested and loyal service. But in the retrospect of history he stands out as an honorable and pathetic figure. The single warping influence of his whole career was the mistake he shared with millions of his countrymen,—the acceptance and exaltation of slavery. He was faithful to his convictions; he was free from covetousness and meanness; and in his personality there were high and fine elements of manhood. "A very intense man and a very lovable man" was the judgment of one who was his intimate associate through the war.

"Love of power was so much weaker in him than love of his theories that when Congress passed laws enlarging his prerogatives he wrote long messages declining them on constitutional grounds." A friend described him as "a game-cock—with just a little strut." Said one who stood in close relations with him: "He was so sensitive to criticism and even to questioning that I have passed months of intimate official association with him without venturing to ask him a question." Pure in his personal morals, but never having made a religious profession, under the responsibilities of the Presidency he turned for support to religion, and was confirmed in the Episcopal Church. Under imprisonment, indignities, obloquy, long seclusion with the memories of a ruined cause, he bore himself with manly fortitude and dignity. Schooled by inexorable reality, he finally acquiesced in the established order, and his last public words were of fidelity and faith for the new America.

Before the war, Robert Toombs of Georgia played some such part to the Northern imagination as Phillips or Sumner to the Southern. He was regarded as the typical fire-eater and braggart. He was currently reported to have boasted that he would yet call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill monument. But in truth this ogre was made of much the same human clay as the Massachusetts Abolitionists. He is well pictured, together with Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, in Trent's Southern Statesmen of the Old Regime,—a book admirable in its spirit and its historic fidelity. Both Toombs and Stephens represented, as compared with Davis, the more moderate sentiment of the South, until they parted company with each other on the question of secession. Trent prefaces the companion portraits with a sketch of the typical Georgian; his State, like the other Gulf States, less civilized and orderly than Virginia and South Carolina, less critical and more enthusiastic; the Georgian, "the southern Yankee," "loving success, strength, straightforwardness, and the solid virtues generally, neither is he averse to the showy ones; but above all he loves virtue in action." Among Southerners, says Trent, the Georgian is nearest to a normal American. Toombs inherited property; grew up like other Southern boys of the prosperous class; rode and hunted and studied a little in the interims. As a lawyer, he would not take a case unless satisfied of its justice. He was of robust physique, vigorous intellect, and high spirits; and he was happy in his family life.

Stephens worked his way up from poverty, and never lost an active sympathy with the struggling. He helped more than fifty young men to get an education. He was of a slight and fragile frame, and had much physical suffering, which he bore with indomitable courage. His conscientiousness was almost morbid. His temperament was melancholy, and his life was lonely. In early life he was twice in love, but poverty forbade his marriage. He was a clear and logical thinker, much given to refined exposition of constitutional theories, but deficient in large culture and philosophy. He held the doctrine of State sovereignty, but from first to last he opposed secession as against the true interest of the States. At the beginning of his career he was active in opposing the vigilance committees organized to harry anti-slavery men. He supported the annexation of Texas, though objecting to doing it in the interest of slavery,—slavery, he said, was a domestic matter, which the Federal government had no call to take care of. He and Toombs generally stood together, as Whigs and Unionists. They opposed the Mexican War, on the ground that the Union was not to be extended by force; neither, they both said later, was it to be maintained by force. But they opposed the exclusion of slavery from the Territories by the Wilmot proviso; and in the debate Stephens declared that the morality of slavery stood "upon a basis as firm as the Bible," and as long as Christianity lasted it could never be considered an offense against the divine laws. The two men did yeoman's service in carrying through the 1850 compromise, and afterward in persuading Georgia not to take part in the Nashville convention—a disunionist scheme which proved abortive. They, with Howell Cobb, held Georgia for the compromise and for the Union, and thus fixed the pivotal point of Southern politics for the next decade. They became leaders in the Constitutional Union party, which, in Georgia, succeeded the Whig. They made vigorous and successful fights against the Know-nothing folly. They accepted the gains which came to the South through Douglas's breaking down of the Missouri compromise, and, a little later, the Dred Scott decision of the Supreme Court; but they diverged from Davis, by not favoring the active intervention of Congress to protect slavery in the Territories. Toombs was accused of abetting Brooks's attack on Sumner, which he disclaimed; but he found nothing to hinder his taking part in a banquet in Brooks's honor a few months later, and on this most ill-omened occasion he joined in the threats of disunion if Fremont should be elected. But still the catastrophe lingered, and seemed improbable. Stephens left Congress in 1858. Two years more, and secession became a burning question; Stephens and Toombs took opposite sides, but, the issue decided, they both made common cause with their State. Toombs served in the Confederate Cabinet and Army. Stephens, vice-president of the Confederacy, seven years after the close of the war again became a member of the House; an attenuated figure, confined to a wheel-chair, but still vital and vigorous; respected by all; his presence a visible symbol of the spanning of "the bloody chasm."



CHAPTER XVI

SOME NORTHERN LEADERS

Turning now to the North, the principal leaders in its political life have already been mentioned, except Lincoln, whose star had not yet risen; but it is worth while to glance at some of those who, apart from Congress and public office, were molding public sentiment. Perhaps the man of the widest influence on public opinion was Horace Greeley. Through his New York Tribune he reached an immense audience, to a great part of whom the paper was a kind of political Bible. His words struck home by their common sense, passion, and close sympathy with the common people. A graduate of the farm and printing office, he was in close touch with the free, plain, toiling, American people, and in no man had they a better representative or a more effective advocate. There was in him something of John Bright's sturdy manhood, direct speech and devotion to human rights; something, too, of Franklin's homely shrewdness,—though little of Franklin's large philosophy or serenity. He was at first a Henry Clay Whig, and always a zealous protectionist; then in alliance with the anti-slavery element in the party, and soon the leading Republican editor. He was a lover of peace, in active sympathy with social reforms, sometimes betrayed into extravagances, but generally guarded by his common sense against extremists and impracticables. His limitations were a want of large culture, a very uncertain judgment in estimating men, and a temperament liable to such sudden ebb and flow that he fell sometimes into rashness and sometimes into panic. But he was disinterested and great-hearted. Other men broadened the Tribune's scope; its editorial tone was for its audience persuasive and convincing; and the Tribune was one of the great educational influences of the country. Beside it stood the New York Times, edited by Henry J. Raymond, an advocate of moderate anti-slavery and Republican principles, with less of masterful leadership than the Tribune, but sometimes better balanced; and the Herald, under the elder James Gordon Bennett, devoted to news and money-making, and pandering to Southern interests.

The clergy at the South were by this time generally united in the defense of slavery. At the North, there was great variety among them. Many ministers ignored slavery as apart from their province. Many spoke of it occasionally as a sin, but regarded it as little concerned with that daily life of their people which was their main concern. A few treated it as a great national wrong, speaking such denunciation as the Hebrew prophets gave to the national sins of their people; and of these some were driven from their pulpits. A few expressed open sympathy or apology for slavery,—such as Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, and Bishop Hopkins, of Vermont.

The foremost preacher in America was Henry Ward Beecher. He was above all things a preacher,—charged with a great spiritual message; of extraordinary and various eloquence, dramatic, inspiring, thrilling; impelled and sometimes controlled by a wonderful imagination. He was taking a leading part in transforming the popular belief. Theology has radically altered under two influences,—the new view of facts given by science, and a higher ethical and spiritual feeling. It was under the ethical and spiritual impulse that Beecher so altered the emphasis of the traditional theology, so dwelt on the love of God, on Christ's character as the revelation of God, on the opportunities and incitements of daily life, on all the hopeful and joyful aspects of existence,—that in the minds of his hearers the harsher elements, not only of Calvinism, but of the whole traditional orthodoxy, melted as imperceptibly and steadily as icebergs melt when they drift southward. He always avoided any avowed or precipitate break with the old system of dogma,—partly from a personal sentiment associated with the faith of the fathers; partly from an instinctive preference of practical and emotional over intellectual methods; and partly from a studied regard to the most effective results,—a shrewdness which tempered his impetuosity.

In these stirring days Beecher began to take active part in political discussion,—rarely in his pulpit, but as an occasional speaker at political meetings, or as a writer in the New York Independent. His ground was that of moderate anti-slavery and Republicanism. Shut off on the political platform from the highest flights of his pulpit oratory, he yet had large scope for his ideality, his common sense, his rich and abounding humor, his marvelous range of illustration from all things in earth and heaven. As the public questions of the day came still closer home to the business and bosoms of men, he dealt with them more freely in his preaching, though never to the subordination of the personal religious life as the paramount interest. One scene in his church comes vividly to mind; after the sermon, he stated the case of a little slave girl, allowed to come North on the chance of her being ransomed; and after a few moving words, he set her beside him—a beautiful, unconscious child—and money rained into the contribution boxes till in a few minutes the amount was raised, and the great congregation joined in a triumphant closing hymn.

Of a different type was Theodore Parker. He stood in his pulpit, the embodiment of courageous attack on every falsehood and abuse as it appeared to the lofty and luminous mind of the preacher. With his prophecy there mingled no expediency. He spoke the truth as he saw it, and let consequences take care of themselves. For a generation, the Unitarian ministers had denied the doctrine of the Trinity, but they held the founder of Christianity in such reverence that they would scarcely define his divine or semi-divine nature. Parker spoke frankly of Jesus as a man, and a man liable to imperfections and mistakes, while he honored him as the greatest leader of humanity. The Unitarians,—their intellectual radicalism kept well in check by the conservatism natural to their social and ecclesiastical traditions,—had held to a decided supernaturalism. Parker put religion on a purely natural basis, and sent home to men's consciousness the ideas of God and immortal life. His sermons were iconoclastic, but his prayers were full of reverence, aspiration, and tenderness. He was ostracized by most of the Unitarian churches, and dreaded by the orthodox, but he was a power in Boston and in America. He attacked social wrongs as fearlessly as he discussed theology. Against slavery he struck as with a battle ax. He was not greatly concerned with constitutions or tolerant of compromises. When a fugitive slave was seized in Boston, Parker took active part in a project of rescue. He roused the conscience of New England and the North. He died at fifty, just before the Civil War, consumed by his own fire.

The fable of the traveler who clung the closer to his cloak when the wind tried to strip it off but cast it aside when addressed by the sun's genial warmth, had an illustration in the many who surrendered their prejudice and selfishness, not at the bidding of the stormy reformers, but touched by the serene light of Emerson. Emerson's specific influence on slavery or any other social problem is hard to measure, for his power was thrown on the illumination and inspiration of the individual man. But in the large view his was an incomparable influence in diffusing that temper of mingled courage and sweetness, the idealist's vision and the soldier's valor, which is the world's best help and hope. He spoke out against slavery whenever he saw that his word was needed; he vindicated the right of the Abolitionists to free speech, whether they spoke wisely or not; and in some of his poems, as the "Concord Ode," and "Boston Hymn," he thrillingly invoked the best of the Puritan and Revolutionary temper to right the wrongs of the present. It was said of him that he gave to the war for the Union, "not one son, but a thousand." But he also gave watchwords that will long outlast the issues of the war and our issues of to-day. The homely yet soaring idealism of the true American will always answer to the word, "Hitch your wagon to a star."

The group of writers who gave brilliancy to this period have already been cited as champions of freedom. Most effective in his advocacy was Whittier, who, in early days, took active part in politics as a Free Soiler, and afterward did greater service by the lyrics of freedom, which like his songs of labor and poems of home life and religion, went to the heart of the common people as no other American voice has done. One who reads Whittier to-day may be allowed to wish that he had known the sunny as well as the shady side of Southern life; and that, as in a later poem he softened his fierce criticism on Webster, so he had celebrated the virtues and graces of his white countrymen below the Potomac and the Ohio, as well as the wrongs of his black countrymen. Lowell, usually a scholarly poet, spoke to the common people nobly for peace and freedom in the Biglow Papers. In 1857 the Atlantic Monthly was started under his editorship, the organ at once of the highest literary ability of New England, and of pronounced anti-slavery and Republican sentiment. After he gave up the editorship in 1862, he wrote at intervals of a few years the second series of Biglow Papers, and his "Commemoration Ode" was the noblest literary monument of the triumph of Union and freedom.

Longfellow's main vocation was away from the turmoils of the hour. He interpreted to America the art, the culture, the legends of Europe and the Middle Ages; he found the poetry in the early soil of America, as in "Hiawatha" and "Evangeline." He was not deaf to the wrongs of the slave, and gave to them some touching poems. But his finest contribution to the national idea was the apostrophe to the Union which crowns "The Building of the Ship." It was written in 1849, in the stress of the struggle over California, and it may well last as long as the nation lasts. The poem is an idyl of the ship-building folk and the sea; the consummation is the bridal of the captain and the builder's daughter, and the launching of the ship, christened "The Union"—emblem of the wife's and husband's voyage begun together on the sea of life; then,—

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rang, what hammers beat, In what forge and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the wave and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee. Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, Are all with thee,—are all with thee!



CHAPTER XVII

DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON

Under Buchanan's administration, 1857-61, three events befell which were like wedges riving farther and farther apart the national unity. They were the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court, the Lecompton constitution in Kansas, and John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry.

President Buchanan declared in his inaugural that the people of a Territory had a right to shape their institutions in their own way, but as to how far that right extended before they organized as a State, the United States Supreme Court was the proper arbiter. Two days after the inaugural, the Supreme Court announced its decision, in a case made up expressly to test the status of slavery in the Territories. Suit was brought before it to obtain freedom for Dred Scott, who being held as a slave in Missouri had been taken by his master to reside for a time in Illinois, and afterward at Fort Snelling in unorganized territory north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, and so free under the Missouri compromise. It was claimed that by being taken upon free soil, in State or Territory, he became free. The court, in an elaborate opinion delivered by Chief-Justice Taney, dismissed the case for want of jurisdiction, on the ground that no person of slave descent or African blood could be a citizen of the United States or be entitled to sue in its courts. The court affirmed that the sweeping language of the Declaration, that "all men are born free," had no application to negroes, because at that time they were generally regarded "as so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The case being thus thrown out of court, all further discussion of its merits was superfluous—a mere obiter dictum, without legal force. Nevertheless, the court through its chief-justice went on to pronounce upon the plaintiff's claim and declare it baseless; on the ground that inasmuch as a slave was lawful property, and the Constitution decreed that no man should be deprived of his property without due process of law, therefore an act of Congress declaring in effect that when carried beyond a certain line a slave was lost to his master, was unconstitutional and void. Thus the court set aside as invalid the exclusion of slavery from the Territories by Congress. As to the effect of a slave's residence in a free State by his master's act, followed by a return to a slave State,—the court held that this question belonged properly to the Missouri courts, which had decided against the slave's claim.

Two of the justices, McLean and Curtis (Northern Whigs), dissented emphatically from the decision. Justice Curtis pointed out, as to the alleged incapacity of the negro for citizenship at the era of the Constitution, that at that period free negroes had the right of suffrage in five of the thirteen States. As to the argument against depriving a man of his property, the contention of the Republicans was that slaves were property, not by the common usage of mankind, but only by local law, and that when a slaveholder moved into a Territory he did not carry with him that local law by which alone a man could be held as a chattel. But the authoritative voice of the highest court in the land had proclaimed these amazing propositions,—that the guarantee of freedom to the Northwest, which the nation had accepted for a third of a century, was invalid, and that no person with negro blood had any civil rights as a citizen of the United States.

When, forty years later, a law of Congress establishing an equitable income tax was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and a Democratic national convention protested against that decision, the Republican papers of the day denounced the protest as hardly less than treason. But the Republicans of an earlier day were not so reverential toward the Supreme Court as an infallible authority. Could the court as a finality outlaw the negro from the common rights of man, and prevent Congress from establishing freedom in the national domain? Not so thought the men who led the Republican party and the sentiment of the North. The New York Legislature, for example, promptly enacted that African descent should not disqualify from State citizenship; that any slave brought into the State by his master became free, and any attempt to hold him was a penal offense. It passed a resolution declaring that the Supreme Court had lost the confidence and respect of the people. Lincoln said in his dry way that the Republican party did not propose to declare Dred Scott a free man (by the way, he was soon manumitted by his former master's daughter)—but neither did they propose to accept the court's decision as a political rule binding the voters, or Congress, or the President; and they intended so to oppose it as to have it reversed if possible, and a new judicial rule established. Seward was very outspoken. He said a year later, in the Senate, "The people of the United States never can and never will accept principles so unconstitutional, so abhorrent. Never, never! Let the court recede. Whether it recede or not, we shall reorganize the court, and thus reform its political sentiment and practices, and bring them in harmony with the Constitution and the laws of Nature."

The court's decision, obiter dictum and all, extended only to the power of Congress over the Territories. What a Territorial Legislature might do by way of excluding slavery had not been passed on; and Douglas thus found room for his doctrine of "popular sovereignty." But as to just what that meant, he was adroitly non-committal, till the more adroit Lincoln in the joint debate in 1858 drew from him the statement that a Territorial Legislature might by "unfriendly legislation" practically exclude slavery—a committal which ended his favor from the South.

But meanwhile attention was focused on a different and more concrete question. Buchanan began his administration with an effort to pacify Kansas, by sending a new governor, Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, with strong pledges from the President that the people should have fair dealing. But the situation was badly complicated. The Legislature had provided for a convention to frame a State Constitution. This was to be elected on the basis of a census taken by the county officials. But the Free State men having never recognized this Territorial Legislature, and having kept up the form of a State government of their own, there were no officials to take the census and register the votes in fifteen out of the thirty-four counties, and the registration was confined to the part of the Territory lying convenient for invasion from Missouri. Under these circumstances the Free State party resisted all Governor Walker's appeals to take part in the election, and the convention was chosen by a small vote. It met at Lecompton, and drew up a constitution. One article provided for the exclusion of free negroes, and another forbade any amendment for seven years. One section affirmed ownership of slaves as an inviolable right of property, and forbade any adverse legislation; and this section alone of the Constitution was submitted to the popular vote. A vote of the people was ordered, as between "constitution with slavery" and "constitution without slavery." The Free State men scouted the whole proceeding, and refused to vote. So, by the form of a popular election, the "constitution with slavery" was adopted.

The administration now gave its whole strength to the admission by Congress of Kansas with the Lecompton constitution. The same election that made Buchanan President had made the House as well as the Senate Democratic. But it was no longer the disciplined and docile Democracy of old. The proposal to admit a State under a constitution of which only a single article had been submitted to even the form of a popular vote, was too obnoxious for any but the most unflinching partisans. It was impossible to a leader whose watchword was "popular sovereignty."

Douglas broke squarely with the administration, and acted with the Republicans against the bill. He came in close touch with their leaders, and his open accession to their party seemed probable. Meanwhile in the Democratic party he had a small following in Congress and a large following among the people. The struggle in Congress over the Lecompton bill was obstinate. Senator Crittenden of Kentucky,—belonging nominally to the remnant of the American party, which sheltered some of the moderate Southerners, and himself one of their best leaders—proposed a bill submitting the entire Constitution to a direct popular vote. This was defeated in the Senate, but passed by the House, with the support of the Republicans. A committee of conference sought for some agreement, and found a singular one: a bill proposed by and named from Mr. English, a Douglas Democrat from Illinois. It provided that the Constitution should be submitted to a popular vote; if accepted, Kansas was at once to become a State and receive an immense land grant; if rejected, it was to remain a Territory until it had the population requisite for one representative in the House,—93,340,—and get no land grant. The combination of a bribe and a threat gave an almost grotesque air to the proposition. Party lines were broken in the vote; Douglas and a part of his associates joined with the bulk of the Republicans in opposing the bill; but enough of both sides saw in it the best they could get, to win a majority in both houses, and the English bill became law, in April, 1858.

In the previous summer, the assurances of Governor Walker and the advice of sagacious politicians like Henry Wilson had induced the Free State men to give up their separate organization and take part in the election of the Territorial Legislature. They carried the election by two to one. But again fraud was attempted. From a hamlet with eleven houses was sent in a return of 1624 votes,—the names, it was found, copied in alphabetical order from a Cincinnati directory; and from another district an equally dishonest return was made; and the two would have changed the majority in the Legislature. This catastrophe was averted by the firmness of Walker, who threw out the fraudulent returns. In this he was vainly opposed by the Territorial chief justice, a servile partisan. After this the President turned against Walker and in the following December drove him into resignation. He protested in an indignant letter that the President had betrayed and deserted him, and that his policy had saved the Territory from civil war and brought the entire people together for the first time in a peaceable election.

Indeed the troubles of Kansas were practically ended. The people rejected the Lecompton constitution and its land grant by a heavy majority. They framed and ratified a Constitution of their own at Wyandotte, and came into the Union as a free State when secession had left the Republicans in full control of Congress in the winter of 1860-1.

The accession of Kansas to the Free States was full of significance. It was fresh evidence that in the actual settlement of the new country the inevitable preponderance lay with free labor. Its industrial advantage could not be overborne by a hostile national administration, nor by the inroads of aggressive and lawless neighbors. The management of their affairs by the Free State settlers was a great vindication of the methods of peace. The guerrilla warfare undertaken by Brown and his party had won no real advantage. The decisive triumph came from the habitual self-control of the Free State men, their steady refusal to resist the Federal authority, and the sympathy they thus won from the peaceful North, turning at last the scales of Congressional authority in their favor. Thus far, peace and freedom moved hand in hand.

The tide in the country was running strongly with the Republicans. The alliance with Douglas failed, because his price was the Senatorship from Illinois, and the Republicans of that State were "willing to take him on probation, but not to make him the head of the church." They named Abraham Lincoln as their candidate for the Senatorship, and these two men held a series of joint debates which fixed the attention of the country; with the result that Lincoln won the popular majority, but Douglas the Legislature and the Senatorship. In the country at large, the Republicans made such gains, in this election of 1858, that they won the control of the National House. The Whigs were defunct, the Americans were a dwindling fraction; the "Constitutional Union" party held a number who sought peace above all things; but the great mass divided between the Republicans and the Democrats. Douglas, the most dextrous of rope-dancers, had regained his place as the foremost man in his old party. The Republicans held firmly to their constitutional principles; but the depth of the antagonism of the two industrial systems grew ever more apparent. Lincoln had declared: "A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved, I do not expect the house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." Seward, too, had said: "The United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slave-holding or entirely a free-labor nation." Between the two systems there was an "irrepressible conflict." But he added that he desired and expected the triumph of freedom "not otherwise than through the action of the several States, co-operating with the Federal Government, and all acting in conformity with their respective constitutions." Yet over these utterances of Lincoln and Seward some conservatives in the party shook their heads, as liable to be misinterpreted and to needlessly alarm the South. But men more radical than Lincoln and Seward were coming to the front. Sumner was silenced for the time, but among the leaders of Massachusetts now appeared John A. Andrew, her future war Governor, large-brained and large-hearted. In this year, 1858, at the State convention of which he was president, he said, "I believe in the Republican party because I believe that slavery, the servitude of humanity, has no business to exist anywhere; because it has no business to exist and no right to be supported where the sun shines or grass grows or water runs."

One of the sensations of the time was a book, dated 1857, which showed a rift in the solid South. It was The Impending Crisis, by Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian by long descent, birth, and residence; the son of "a merciful slave-holder"; writing at the age of twenty-seven. His standpoint was that of the non-slave-holding Southern white. "Yankee wives"—so he begins—"have written the most popular anti-slavery literature of the day. Against this I have nothing to say; it is all well enough for women to give the pictures of slavery; men should give the facts." His method is largely the comparison of the industrial progress of the two sections, and his chief arsenal is the United States census. North and South started, he says, with the establishment of the government and the North's abolition of slavery, with advantage in soil, climate, rivers, harbors, minerals, forests, etc., on the side of the South, but in sixty years she has been completely outstripped. He brackets Virginia and New York; at the start, Virginia had twice the population of New York; now New York's population doubles Virginia's. Virginia's exports have been about stationary at $3,000,000; New York's have risen from $2,500,000 to $87,000,000. New York almost trebles Virginia in valuation, even including slaves. So he compares North Carolina and Massachusetts; the empty port of Beaufort and the teeming one of Boston; the northern State with a production from manufactures, mines, and mechanic arts double the whole cotton crop of the South. So he compares South Carolina and Pennsylvania. Again: Sail down the Ohio, and you will find the lands on the right bank worth double and treble those on the left bank,—slavery makes all the difference. The hay crop of the free States is worth more in dollars and cents than all the cotton, tobacco, rice, hay, and hemp, in the slave States. The marble and free-stone quarries in New England yield more wealth than all the subterranean deposits in the slave States. And so for many pages he goes on piling Pelion upon Ossa with his figures. He pictures the South's economic dependence: "In infancy we are swaddled in Northern muslin; in childhood we are humored with Northern gewgaws; in youth, we are instructed out of Northern books; at the age of maturity, we sow our wild oats on Northern soil.... In the decline of life we remedy our sight with Northern spectacles, and support our infirmities with Northern canes; in old age we are drugged with Northern physic; and finally, when we die, our inanimate bodies, shrouded in Northern cambric, are stretched upon the bier, borne to the grave in a Northern carriage, entombed with Northern spade, and memorized with a Northern slab!"

Land in the Northern States averages $28.07 an acre in value, and in the Southern States it is $5.34. The difference measures the robbery committed on a community of 10,000,000 by the 350,000 slave-holders. These "chevaliers of the lash" he arraigns with a rhetoric compared to which Sumner's and Phillip's words were pale. The slave-holders are worse, he declares, than thieves, for they steal from all. They are worse than common murderers, for they issue to themselves licenses to murder; the slave who resists may be killed. He is for no half-measures,—he avows himself a free-soiler, an emancipationist, an abolitionist, a colonizationist. "The liberation of five millions of 'poor white trash,' from the second degree of slavery, and of three millions of miserable kidnapped negroes from the first degree, cannot be accomplished too soon." The process is simple and easy; emancipation will be followed by such an instant rise in all values and in general prosperity that the slave-owners themselves will be recouped. Let each of these, he says, give to each slave his freedom and $60 in money; half that sum will transport him to Liberia, whither all should go. He foresees the tempest which his book will arouse. "What are you going to do about it? Something dreadful as a matter of course? Perhaps you will dissolve the Union. Do it, if you dare! Our motto, and we would have you understand it, is the abolition of slavery and the perpetuation of the American Union. If by any means you do succeed in your treasonable attempt to take the South out of the Union to-day, we will bring her back to-morrow,—if she goes away with you, she will return without you." In his closing paragraph he predicts the election to the Presidency in 1860 of some anti-slavery Southerner, of the type of Cassius M. Clay, or James G. Birney, and in 1864, of a Northerner like Seward or Sumner. And he thus concludes: "Furthermore, if in these or in any other similar cases the oligarchy do not quietly submit to the will of a constitutional majority of the people, as expressed at the ballot-box, the first battle between freedom and slavery will be fought at home—and may God defend the right!"

The book raised a tempest of denunciation. The more it was denounced the more it was read. It was easily "the best-selling book" of the time. The concrete reply of the party criticised was first to drive Helper out of North Carolina. Next his book was condemned in a resolution proposed at the opening of Congress in 1859-60, and aimed especially at John Sherman, of Ohio, the Republican candidate for speaker, who had signed a qualified recommendation of the book. After a long contest the Republicans dropped Sherman for Pennington, of New Jersey, whom they elected. The Impending Crisis was a portent and an impulse of the coming catastrophe.



CHAPTER XVIII

JOHN BROWN

About this time there was a revival of activity in the slave trade between Africa and Cuba. The American Government had always acted half-heartedly in its co-operation with the British Government for the suppression of this traffic. Now it happened that some British cruisers in the West Indies stopped and examined some vessels under the American flag, suspected of being slavers. This was resented by the American Government, which sent war ships to the scene and took the British Government to task. In Congress both parties joined in denunciation of British aggression. The right of search, exercised by England for the reclamation of her seamen from American vessels, had been one of the grounds of war in 1812. It had been left unmentioned in the treaty of peace, but England had silently relinquished the practice. Now, at the demand of the United States, she expressly relinquished the right of search in the case of supposed slave ships under the American flag, unless the result should justify the suspicion. Thus the honor of the Stars and Stripes was vindicated,—and the flag was made a great convenience to slavers. The administration, however, bestirred itself toward doing its own share in the work of sea-police, and several slave ships were captured. The crew of one of these were acquitted, by a Charleston jury, against the clearest evidence. There was some open talk in the Southern papers of legalizing the traffic. But the trade was destined to a discouraging check a year or two later, when President Lincoln signed the first death warrant of the captain of a slaver.

After the Kansas troubles had subsided, John Brown sought some way to make a direct attack on slavery. For many years he had brooded on the matter, in the light of his reading of the Old Testament, and he felt himself called to assail it as the Jewish heroes assailed the enemies of Jehovah and his people. As early as 1847 he had disclosed to Frederick Douglass, during a visit to Brown's home in Springfield, Mass., a plan for freeing the slaves. He did not contemplate a general insurrection and slaughter. But he proposed to establish a fugitive refuge in the chain of mountains stretching from the border of New York toward the Gulf. "These mountains," he said, "are the basis of my plan. God has given the strength of the hills to freedom; they were placed here for the emancipation of the negro race; they are full of natural forts, where one man for defense will be equal to one hundred for attack; they are full also of good hiding-places, where large numbers of brave men could be concealed, and baffle and elude pursuit for a long time.... The true object to be sought is, first of all, to destroy the money-value of slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure. My plan, then, is to take at first about twenty-five picked men, and begin on a small scale; supply them arms and ammunition, and post them in squads of five on a line of twenty-five miles. The most persuasive and judicious of them shall then go down to the fields from time to time, as opportunity offers, and induce the slaves to join them, seeking and selecting the most restless and daring."

It was substantially this plan to which Brown now returned, and he sought aid among those men at the East who had backed the Free State cause in Kansas. He was not known to them, as he has been presented to the reader, as the chief actor in the Pottawatomie massacre, but as a bold guerrilla chief, who had lost a son in the Kansas strife. Even so, he was a recognized dissenter from the peace policy which had finally won success for freedom in the Territory. But there were men in the anti-slavery ranks who were impatient of the whole policy of peace, and the impressive personality of Brown won some of these to active support of his project. Among them were Theodore Parker, Gerritt Smith, Dr. S. G. Howe, George L. Stearns, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Franklin B. Sanborn, who formed a secret committee to forward this plan. They were not informed of its details, but knew its general scope. To a considerable number Brown was known as a hero of past fights and not averse to fresh ones. He visited Concord, where he spoke at a public meeting, and made a great impression on Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau. Alcott made a pen-picture of him. "I think him equal to anything he dares,—the man to do the deed, if it must be done, and with the martyr's temper and purpose. Nature obviously was deeply intent in the making of him. He is of imposing appearance personally,—tall, with square shoulders and standing; eyes of deep gray, and couchant, as if ready to spring at the least rustling, dauntless yet kindly; his hair shooting backward from low down on his forehead; nose trenchant and Romanesque; set lips, his voice suppressed yet metallic, suggesting deep reserves; decided mouth; the countenance and frame charged with power throughout."

Emerson, from his own observation and from hearsay, drew his spiritual portrait: "For himself, Brown is so transparent that all men see him through. He is a man to make friends wherever on earth courage and integrity are esteemed,—the rarest of heroes, a pure idealist, with no by-ends of his own. Many of us have seen him, and everyone who has heard him speak has been impressed alike by his simple, artless goodness and his sublime courage. He joins that perfect Puritan faith which brought his ancestor to Plymouth Rock, with his grandfather's ardor in the Revolution. He believes in two articles—two instruments, shall I say?—the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in a conversation here concerning them: 'Better that a whole generation of men, women, and children should pass away by a violent death, than that one word of either should be violated in this country.'... He grew up a religious and manly person, in severe poverty; a fair specimen of the best stock of New England, having that force of thought and that sense of right which are the warp and woof of greatness.... Thus was formed a romantic character, absolutely without any vulgar trait; living to ideal ends, without any mixture of self-indulgence or compromise, such as lowers the value of benevolent and thoughtful men we know; abstemious, refusing luxuries, not sourly and reproachfully, but simply as unfit for his habit; quiet and gentle as a child, in the house. And as happens usually to men of romantic character, his fortunes were romantic."

But the romance in this portrait is due quite as much to the imagination of the artist as to the character of the subject. Emerson seems to have entirely overlooked in his estimate of Brown that he had no rational idea of the moral obligations of the citizen to the civil government and to the peace of society; and that his conscience in its apparent simplicity was really in dire confusion. The sentence he quotes from Brown's conversation has its practical commentary in Brown's acts. He was as ready to take the sword, to redress what he considered a breach of the Golden Rule or the Declaration of Independence, as if mankind had not for thousands of years and with infinite cost been building up institutions for the peaceful settlement of difficulties. In Kansas he saw in the political struggle simply an issue to be tried out by force between good men and bad men; and he made himself executioner of a group of men he considered bad, thereby plunging into a series of murders utterly repugnant to his natural humanity. He afterward justified the deed, without avowing his own part in it, which was not fully known till twenty years later. After Harper's Ferry, the Springfield Republican (which judged him very favorably), speaking partly from personal knowledge gained during his residence in Springfield, said: "He is so constituted that when he gets possessed of an idea he carries it out with unflinching fidelity to all its logical consequences, as they seem to him, hesitating at no absurdity and deterred by no unpleasant consequences to himself personally. He is a Presbyterian in his faith, and feels that it is for this very purpose that God has reared him up."