A Disease in the Public Mind (34 page)

Out of the wreckage of the Whigs and Know-Nothings rose a new political party, the Republicans. The name was an ironic revival of Thomas Jefferson's 1790s party, which had opposed the supposedly aristocratic, potentially tyrannical Federalists, followers of George Washington and John Adams. The name Republican still had some of its old populist aura, even though most of the Jeffersonian Republicans' political descendants were now members of the only national party left somewhat united, the Democrats.

The Republicans concocted a slogan: “Free Soil for Free Men.” This banner helped them attract the small Free Soil Party, which had begun as a protest movement against compromises backed by both Whigs and Democrats.
The slogan also echoed the demand of the Kansas antislavery settlers—a state without blacks, either enslaved or free. By not explicitly saying “free white men,” the Republicans managed to attract abolitionist-leaning voters in the Midwest and New England who were committed to opposing the mythical machinations of The Slave Power.

Ex-Whig Abraham Lincoln joined the Republicans warily at first, but soon found himself a convinced convert. The party's opposition to the extension of slavery made it a congenial political home for the prairie lawyer, who detested the peculiar institution. It also supported other Whig policies Lincoln liked, such as the creation of a transcontinental railroad. Unfortunately, the new party's appeal to Southerners was close to zero, and southern Democrats reinforced this disadvantage by nicknaming them “Black Republicans.”
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In the U.S. Senate, the furor over Kansas had raised tempers to a white-hot level. A new antislavery champion had risen there: Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts. Six feet two and as handsome as he was arrogant, he made no secret of his contempt for the South and things southern. In mid-May 1856, when South Carolina's aging Senator Andrew P. Butler tried to defend the South's right to take slaves into Kansas, Sumner replied with a political and personal denunciation that matched in dark ferocity anything produced by Cotton Mather and other New England preachers of the seventeenth century.

Sumner described Butler as a man who had chosen a mistress who was ugly to others, but was “always lovely to him—I mean the harlot, slavery.” Butler had a speech impediment, which caused him to speak haltingly, especially when excited. Sumner sneered at the way the senator “with incoherent phrases, discharged the loose expectoration of his speech” on the people of Kansas. “He cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.” Sumner proceeded to climax this performance by imitating Butler for several minutes.

If the Southerners had asked northern fellow senators to disown this abuse, Sumner's congressional career might have been over. But southern
anger was by this time as difficult to control as abolitionist moral superiority. Three days later, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Senator Butler, strolled into the Senate and smashed Sumner over the head with a gutta-percha cane until it broke. The beating inflicted near-fatal injuries that left Sumner an invalid for the next four years.

Northern outrage was universal. In the South, Brooks was inundated with congratulations and replacement canes. The story of the attack was flashed around the nation by telegraph and supposedly made John Brown decide to slaughter those unarmed Southerners on Pottawatomie Creek. Brown needed no such inspiration for those crimes.
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The atmosphere of escalating hatred was reflected in the nation's newspapers. James Gordon Bennett, editor of the country's largest paper, the
New York Herald
, blamed the abolitionists for the turmoil, and wrote editorials denouncing the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher and other clergymen for “their scandalous political sermons.” Bennett was equally savage toward his fellow newspapermen. He called Horace Greeley, editor of the antislavery
New York Tribune
, “a nigger worshipper” and “Massa Greeley.”

The
Tribune
's leader returned the compliment in kind, calling Bennett and the
Herald
a collection of “nigger drivers.” That repulsive word, now banned from civilized usage, was in circulation everywhere.

Both papers, along with many other dailies in New York and other cities, practiced a tradition that makes today's editors and reporters wince to recall. The reporters saw themselves as entitled to embellish stories with imaginary facts and quotations. The custom was known as “faking it.” Although James Gordon Bennett insisted his paper was independent of any and all politicians and attacked members of both parties, he seldom questioned the facts in a story, as long as it made lively reading. Greeley's antislavery
Tribune
was equally careless.

The champion in the faking game was the
New York Sun.
At one point the paper stood the metropolis on its ear by announcing the discovery of new planets and stars, supposedly reported from the
Edinburgh Journal of
Science.
A new telescope had revealed these wonders; it was so powerful that astronomers could see the moon as clearly as if it were a hundred yards away. The stories continued for several days, while the
Sun's
circulation soared to record heights. Only after a reporter told a drinking friend that the whole thing was a hoax did the
Sun
admit it had made up the story to divert the public mind from “that bitter apple of discord, slavery.”

The daily circulation of Greeley's
Tribune
did not come close to matching Bennett's
Herald.
But the
Weekly Tribune
had over 200,000 readers nationwide, making it the most influential paper in the nation. It was read throughout the Yankee Midwest, where Theodore Weld and his followers had left a legacy of antislavery sentiments. It was commonly said that the
Tribune
was second only to the Bible all through the West.

Greeley infuriated Bennett by sending reporters into the South to describe the worst aspects of slavery. One vivid story portrayed a dialogue between a slave and a would-be buyer at a slave auction. A male slave was trying to persuade the white man to buy him, his wife, and two children.

“Look at me, Masr. Am prime rice planter; sho you won't find a better man den me . . . Do carpenter work too, a little. I be good servent, Masr. Molly, my wife, too . . . Fus rate rice hand. Mos' as good as me. Stan' out, Molly, let the gen'lemu see.”

Molly stepped out and her husband praised her. “Good arm, dat, mas'r. She do a heap of work mo. Let good Mas'er see your teeth. All reg'lar.” He ordered his seven-year-old son, Israel, to step out and “show the gen'lman how spry you be.”

Next he displayed his three-year-old daughter, Vandy. “Make prime girl by and by. Better buy us, Mas'er. We fus'rate bargain.”

The story closed with the reporter's acid words, “The benevolent gentleman . . . bought someone else.”

Along with stories that had the ring of probable truth in them, such as this one, the
Tribune
subscribed totally to the myth of The Slave Power: It pictured southern plantations as nothing less than “Negro harems.” It claimed there was scarcely one southern president who “has failed to leave . . . mulatto children.” Southerners regularly hired blacks from slave owners “for
purposes of prostitution.” In a typical southern city, every night “ebony hued divinities” strolled to “the office of a colonel on one street, a doctor in another, a lawyer in another.” Such obsessive dissipation redoubled the average Southerners scorn of daily labor. The South had fewer religious people and fewer churches than the North. In every conceivable way, the region was a thousand years behind the North in respect to civilization. It was a barrier to America's progress in every imaginable way, morally, economically, politically.
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Soon it became dangerous to read the
Tribune
publicly in the South. The
Herald
, on the other hand, was read everywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. A reporter for the
Springfield Republican
, one of the many lesser papers that followed the
Tribune
's Slave Power lead, claimed to be amused by the way the
Herald
was “devoured at its earliest arrival here . . . and what is worse, to see the simplicity of these southern fellows, who seem to pin their whole faith in it.”

•      •      •

In this atmosphere, the Republicans held their first national convention in Philadelphia. They bypassed Abraham Lincoln and a far more outspoken antislavery politician, Senator William Seward of New York. The party nominated John C. Fremont, an army officer who had won fame as an explorer of the West and had been a leader in the conquest of California during the War with Mexico. He was married to the daughter of former senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, one of the chief proponents of Manifest Destiny. The choice underscored the new party's uneasiness about the abolitionists in their ranks. They wanted a standard-bearer who had little or no connection to these unpopular radicals.

The Democrats met a few weeks later and declined to renominate Franklin Pierce for a second term—the first time a sitting president suffered such a humiliation. They also declined to support Senator Stephen A. Douglas. The after-shocks of the Kansas-Nebraska Act had decimated northern Democrats in the 1854 congressional elections. The nominee was James Buchanan, who had been ambassador to Britain since 1853, leaving him unstained, in theory, by the sectional hatred raging in Kansas.

The election went to Buchanan, who polled 1,838,569 votes. The political unknown Fremont won 1,345, 264 ballots, almost all from nonslaveholding states. Ex-President Millard Fillmore, backed by remnants of the Know-Nothings and Whigs, won 874,354—evidence that a hefty portion of the electorate was confused and uncertain about the direction in which the United States should move. Buchanan was the first president since 1828 to win an election without carrying a majority of free states along with the slave states.

As the possibility of a purely sectional party explicitly hostile to slavery acquired flesh in the North, not a few politicians in many parts of the South began talking disunion. There were panicky rumors of slave insurrections. Whites feared that blacks who could read the newspapers or who overheard their worried masters' conversations at dinner tables would see the possibility of freedom on the horizon and grow rebellious. Thomas Jefferson's nightmare was still alive in the southern public mind.
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On December 2, 1856, a month after Buchanan's election, lame duck President Franklin Pierce sent his last message to Congress. It featured a furious attack on the agitators who had ruined his first and now only term—the abolitionists. He saw the presidential election as a repudiation of their doctrines, and he characterized them as people who threatened the “liberty, peace and greatness of the Republic” by organizing “mere geographical parties” and “marshalling in hostile array the different sections of the country.” He declared “schemes of this nature” could not be popular in any part of America if they were not “disguised” and encouraged “by an excited state of the public mind.”

Under the shelter of America's liberty, some individuals were “pretending to seek only to prevent the spread of the institution of slavery,” Pierce continued. In reality they were “inflamed with the desire to change the domestic institutions of existing states.” To accomplish this, they were devoting themselves to “the odious task . . . of calumniating with indiscriminate invective not only the citizens of the particular states with whose laws they find fault, but all others of their fellow citizens throughout the country who do not participate with them in their assaults upon the Constitution.”

The abolitionists' object, Pierce insisted, was nothing less than “revolutionary.” They knew their attempt to change the relative condition of the white and the black races in the slave holding states could only be accomplished “through burning cities and ravaged fields and slaughtered populations . . . all that is most terrible in [a] civil and servile war.”
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Like most statements of outgoing presidents, this warning was largely ignored. One of the few readers who found it significant was far away from Washington, DC, on the plains of Texas. After three years as West Point's superintendent, Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee had become second in command of a cavalry regiment, responsible for keeping peace between Indians and settlers in the wild country north of San Antonio. He missed his family at “dear Arlington.” As Christmas 1856 approached, he wrote a wistful letter to his wife. “Though absent, my heart will be in the midst of you.”

Colonel Lee welcomed James Buchanan's election as president. “I hope he will be able to extinguish fanaticism north and south, cultivate love for the country and the Union, and restore harmony between the different sections,” he wrote. Not long after he mailed this letter, a package of newspapers arrived from his wife. In one of them was a copy of President Pierce's message to Congress. Lee was stirred by his former commander in chief's words. In another letter to his wife, he said the warning of a possible “Civil & Servile” war was “truthfully and faithfully expressed.”

Lee was no believer in slavery as a positive good. “In this enlightened age, there are few . . . but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral & political evil in any country.” But he thought the blacks were “immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially and physically.” The Colonel admitted he did not expect slavery to disappear soon. “How long their subjugation may be necessary is known and ordered by a wise Merciful Providence . . . Although the Abolitionist must know this & must see he has neither the right or power of operating except by moral means and suasion. . . . If he means well to the slave, he must not create angry feelings in the Master. . . . Still I fear he will persevere in his evil course. Is it not
strange that the descendants of those pilgrim fathers who crossed the Atlantic to preserve their own freedom, have always proved themselves intolerant of the spiritual liberty of others?”
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