1858 (4 page)

The Lecompton Constitution had a tangled history. Nearly two-thirds of Kansas’s territorial residents were against slavery, but proslavery forces managed to elect a majority of the state legislature; that body authorized a special convention that drew up a constitution that authorized slavery for Kansas. In a referendum in which both sides charged poll fraud, the pro-slavery constitution passed handily. Buchanan sent the constitution to the House and Senate in December, supported it, and asked the body to ratify it right away to put it out of his mind.
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His presumption that both the Senate and House of Representatives would pass the bill without much debate was typical of his thinking. To him, passage of a bill or the ruling of a court ended a matter once and for all and any further discussion was a waste of time. He had said much the same thing about the controversial Fugitive Slave Act. “All slaves in free states or territories can be brought back and protected by the Constitution and federal government,” he said simply, never understanding why there was such an intense national debate over that bill.
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He assured people that all was well with Kansas, even though his own governor there, James Denver, wrote on the final day of 1857 that events in Kansas “must lead to bloodshed, anarchy, and confusion.”
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Buchanan was determined to get his way on the Kansas slavery constitution, using all of his presidential clout to shove slavery to the political back burner and move on. That not only included traditional behind-the-scenes political arm twisting, but firing people working for senators and congressmen who were going to vote against Lecompton and awarding jobs, domestic and foreign, to those who would. “I’ll carry Lecompton or die,” he vowed.
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At the same time Buchanan sent the Kansas constitution to Congress, he told friends and political brokers that he did not understand why slavery in Kansas caused such a public uproar. The president, in fact, wondered “whether the peace and quiet of the whole country are not of greater importance than the mere temporary triumph of either of the political parties in Kansas.”
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He thought most Americans agreed with him. “The public is tired…ad nauseum on the Kansas agitation.”
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And in his annual message, in which he discussed Kansas, he told Congress that “Kansas has for some years occupied too much of the public attention. It is high time this should be directed to far more important issues.”
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Few agreed with the president. The Kansas question had become a litmus test for politicians, North and South. Northern Republicans were furious with the president for trying to force slavery upon the territory’s residents. “Poor Kansas!” wailed Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner. “I am pained by the trials and sorrows of this territory and my indignation overflows when I see the president and cabinet lending themselves to the cruel work.”
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Sumner added that advocating slavery in the territory was “unutterably wicked.” Even state political leaders criticized Buchanan’s plan. Illinois’s Republican leader Abraham Lincoln called it “the most exquisite farce ever enacted.”
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To the Republicans, the slaveholders in Kansas were the secondary villains in the dispute. The primary villain was President Buchanan. The radical Republicans flayed him. “[Buchanan] is the meanest man that has ever occupied the presidential chair, in having violated all of the pledges he has ever made, and that he is the greatest despot we have ever had,” said Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Buchanan’s home state of Pennsylvania.
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Republican governors, too, pounded the president over Kansas. “I will never consent to the doctrine that a majority can enslave a minority rightfully and that it is no objection to the admission of a state into the union that her fundamental acts, her Constitution, provides for such enslavement,” said Ohio’s governor Salmon Chase.
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The Democrats that Buchanan had to count on to carry the Kansas Constitution in the vote in both houses of Congress were not as numerous as they had been. The success of the Republicans in the elections of 1855, 1856, and 1857 had decreased the number of Democrats in the House from ninety-three to fifty-three, and twenty-two of them were from Northern states and were reluctant to approve a slave constitution. The Democratic margin in the Senate was also slender.
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Buchanan not only ignored his critics, but, incredibly, stopped reading the newspapers to avoid them, telling a friend on January 11, 1858, that “I do not read the press, simply because it distresses me.”
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And so, on the first day of 1858, the year that would become one of the most critical in American history and put America on the road to a Civil War, a happy President James Buchanan nursed his glass of champagne and greeted his many important guests at the White House, leaning a little to the side, squinting a bit as he peered at them, trying very hard to smile, and every once in a while pulling his shirt collar ever higher.

Chapter Two

On February 8, 1858, Jefferson Davis, the immaculately dressed, slender, well-spoken senator from Mississippi, stood in the chamber of the United States Senate and rose to his full height of six feet one to applaud the proslavery Lecompton Constitution. The constitution would admit the Kansas Territory as a new slave state. Davis told his attentive audience in the Senate and in the public galleries above the chamber that it was an example of a constitution that recognized the right of the people to authorize slavery if they so desired. He denounced the Northerners trying to vote it down, and said with passionate conviction that their heated arguments were not “the means by which fraternity is to be preserved, or this Union rendered perpetual.”
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The Lecompton Constitution had become the most heated political issue in the country and had a complicated history. Voters in that territory elected delegates to a constitutional convention in the summer of 1857, but only people who had lived in Kansas for three months and paid their taxes could vote for delegates. Thousands who did not want to pay taxes saw it as a trap and did not cast their ballots; thousands more lied about residency. Voter fraud was rampant. Census takers reported eleven families in Oxford County, but 1,828 proslavery votes were cast there; McGee County, with fourteen residents, cast 1,226 votes. The entire Republican Party boycotted the election and denounced the proslavery delegates who were chosen.

The proslavery constitution was passed, but the territorial governor insisted that it be voted on in a referendum by all the people of Kansas with both proslavery and antislavery clauses. The antislavery clause, however, also provided that slaves already in Kansas could remain. Many feared that owners would sneak in many more slaves before the constitution could take effect, making them legal too. The constitution also barred any changes in the slavery law for at least seven years. President Buchanan said the referendum was a good idea. The proslavery clause carried by the lopsided margin of 6,143 to 599, with charges of voter fraud by the antislavery forces.

The Kansas voters’ choice in the Lecompton referendum:

The territorial governor quit in disgust, criticizing the president for interference, and the newly elected Kansas legislature then ordered another public referendum on the constitution in early January 1858. Its leaders insisted that this referendum, sponsored by the territorial legislature, would override the constitutional convention referendum. This time residents could vote yes or no on the entire constitution and also on a proslavery clause. In this referendum, most of the piqued proslavery people stayed home and the antislavery people defeated the whole package, 10,226 against the constitution to just 138 for it with slavery and only 24 for it without slavery. The proslavery forces argued that it did not count because they boycotted it. As an example, the heavy antislavery vote included counties such as Marshall, Franklin, Anderson, and Calhoun, where not a single vote was cast for the slavery version at all.
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Ignoring the January vote, Buchanan insisted that Congress had to approve the proslavery constitution that he had formally submitted in his annual message at the end of December. Republicans argued that they could vote it down in favor of the January legislative referendum. Tension over the divided territory was everywhere. Members of the territorial legislature issued a joint statement in which they “believed the peace of [Kansas] is in imminent danger.” Members of the constitutional convention charged that the legislators were not “true Kansans” and that their actions would tear apart Kansas and the Union. They soon had proof of that when a man was killed in yet another dispute at Fort Scott, Kansas, during the last week of 1857. On the last day of the year, Acting Governor Denver begged both sides to stop the violence and resolve the issue peacefully.
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The people who resided in Kansas and were just trying to make a living there were angry at everybody. William Tecumseh Sherman, a former army officer who was struggling to make ends meet as a farmer in Kansas—and doing badly at it—lamented that “Kansas has been settled by the lawyers and politicians, instead of farmers and mechanics.”
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The debate over the new Kansas constitution, on and off the floors of the House and Senate underneath the half-finished dome of the Capitol building, was long and bitter, as many had predicted.
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Stephen Douglas, the “Little Giant,” the short, rotund, loquacious Illinois senator whose 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act had permitted slavery in the territory pending resident approval, now opposed the proslavery constitution, as did other Northern Democrats and the Republicans, especially New York Senator William Seward, the champion of the Republican antislavery radicals. The Southern Democrats, led by Davis, favored it. Arguments had raged throughout the winter. The nation’s newspapers covered all of them. Northern papers generally denounced the slavery constitution while most of the Southern papers, particularly the most vociferous states’ rights journals, such as Robert Rhett’s
Charleston Mercury
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Northerners saw the Kansas constitution as a test over “slave power,” a term used often by senators and congressmen, North and South, to describe the legislative stranglehold that Southerners who supported slavery always seemed to have over bills in Congress. In the debates, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina even taunted the Republicans that the Southerners held the upper hand on any and all issues concerning slavery.
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The fashionably dressed, handsome Jefferson Davis cut quite a figure in the Senate in the early days of the Lecompton debates, just as he had in Congress since his arrival in 1846. He was a refined, well-read man who impressed all. A friend wrote that the sophisticated senator “carried himself with such an air of conscious strength and ease and purpose…to cause a stranger to turn and look at him.”
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