A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (57 page)

Southern Triumph in Kansas

Despite smarting from the stiff resistance engendered by
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, Southerners in 1854 could claim victory. Despite several near riots over the Fugitive Slave Act, it remained the law of the land, and Stowe’s book could not change that. Meanwhile, the South was about to receive a major windfall. An innocuous proposal to build a transcontinental railroad commanded little sectional interest. In fact, it promised to open vast new territory to slavery and accelerate the momentum toward war.

Since the 1840s, dreamers imagined railroads that would connect California with states east of the Mississippi. Asa Whitney, a New York merchant who produced one of the first of the transcontinental plans in 1844, argued for a privately constructed railroad whose expenses were offset by grants of public lands.
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By 1852 the idea had attracted Stephen Douglas, the Illinois Democrat senator with presidential aspirations, who rightly saw that the transcontinental would make Chicago the trade hub of the entire middle United States. With little controversy the congressional delegations from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois introduced a bill to organize a Nebraska Territory, the northern part of the old Louisiana Purchase, and, once again, illegally erase Indian claims to lands there.
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Suddenly, the South woke up. Since the Northwest Ordinance and Missouri Compromise, the understanding was that for every free state added to the Union, there would be a new slave state. Now a proposal was on the table that would soon add at least one new free state, with no sectional balance (the state would be free because the proposed Nebraska territory lay north of the Missouri Compromise 36-degree 30-minute line). In order to appease (and court) his concerned Southern Democrat brethren, Douglas therefore recrafted the Nebraska bill. The new law, the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, assuaged the South by revoking the thirty-three-year-old 36/30 Missouri Compromise line and replacing its restriction of slavery with popular sovereignty—a vote on slavery by the people of the territory. In one stroke of the pen, Douglas abolished a thirty-year covenant and opened the entire Lousiana Purchase to slavery!
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Although the idea seems outrageous today—and was inflammatory at the time—from Stephen Douglas’s narrow viewpoint it seemed like an astute political move. Douglas reasoned that, when all was said and done, the Great Plains territories would undoubtedly vote for free soil (cotton won’t grow in Nebraska). In the meantime, however, Douglas would have given the South a fresh chance at the Louisiana Territory, keeping it on his side for the upcoming presidential election. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas naively believed, would win him more political friends than enemies and gain his home state a Chicago railroad empire in the process.

Douglas sooned learned he was horribly mistaken about the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After its passage, a contagion swept the country every bit as strong as the one sparked by
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Free-Soilers, now including many Northern Democrats, arose in furious protest. The Democrats shattered over Kansas-Nebraska.

Meanwhile, the stunned Douglas, who had raised the whole territorial tar baby as a means to obtain a railroad and the presidency, succeeded only in fracturing his own party and starting a national crisis.
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The pendulum appeared to have swung the South’s way again with the potential for new slave states in the territory of Louisiana Purchase, sans the Missouri Compromise line. Instead, the South soon found itself with yet another hollow victory. The ink had scarcely dried on the Kansas-Nebraska Act than Northern Democrats sustained massive defeats. Of ninety-one free-state House seats held by the Democrats in 1852, only twenty-five were still in the party’s hands at the end of the elections, and none of the last sixty-six seats were ever recovered before the war.

Before the appointed Kansas territorial governor arrived, various self-defense associations and vigilante groups had sprung up in Missouri—and as far away as New York—in a strategy by both sides to pack Kansas with voters who would advance the agenda of the group sponsoring them. The Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society, and others like it, was established to fund “settlers” (armed with new Sharp repeating rifles) as they moved to Kansas. Families soon followed the men into the territory, a prospect that hardly diminished suspicions of proslavery Kansans. Images of armies of hirelings and riffraff, recruited from all over the North to “preach abolitionism, and dig underground Rail-roads,” consumed the Southern imagination.
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The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed virtually any “resident” to vote, meaning that whichever side could insert enough voters would control the state constitutional convention. Thousands of proslavery men, known as Border Ruffians or “pukes” (because of their affinity for hard liquor and its aftereffects) crossed the border from Missouri. The were led by one of the state’s senators, David Atchison, who vowed to “kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district.” And they elected a proslavery majority to the convention.
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Most real settlers, in fact, were largely indifferent to slavery, and were more concerned with establishing legal title to their lands.

Missouri had a particularly acute interest in seeing that Kansas did not become a free-soil state. Starting about a hundred miles above St. Louis, a massive belt of slavery stretched across the state, producing a strip in which 15 percent of the population or more was made up of slaves lying along more than three-fourths of the border with Kansas. If Kansas became a free-soil state, it would create a free zone
below
a slave belt for the first time in American history.
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The proslavery legislature, meeting at Lecompton, enacted draconian laws, including making it a felony to even question publicly the right to have slaves. Unwilling to accept what they saw as a fraudulent constitutional convention, free-soil forces held their own convention at Topeka in the fall of 1855, and they went so far as to prematurely name their own senators! Now the tragic absurdity of the “house divided” surely became apparent to even the most dedicated moderates, for not only was the nation split in two, but Kansas, the first test of Douglas’s popular sovereignty, divided into two bitterly hostile and irreconcilable camps with two constitutional conventions, two capitals, and two sets of senators! Proslavery and free-soil forces took up arms, each viewing the government, constitution, and laws of the other as illegitimate and deceitfully gained. And if there were not already enough guns in Kansas, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s congregation supplied rifles in boxes marked “Bibles,” gaining the sobriquet Beecher’s Bibles. Beecher’s followers were not alone: men and arms flowed into Kansas from North and South. Bloodshed could not be avoided; it began in the fall of 1855.

A great deal of mythology, perpetuated by pamphleteers from both sides, created ominous-sounding phrases to describe actions that, in other times, might constitute little more than disturbing the peace. For example, there was the “sack of Lawrence,” where in 1856 proslavery forces overturned some printing presses and fired a few cannon balls—ineffectively—at the Free States Hotel in Lawrence. Soon, however, enough, real violence ensued. Bleeding Kansas became the locus of gun battles, often involving out-of-state mercenaries, while local law enforcement officials—even when they honestly attempted to maintain order—stood by helplessly, lacking sufficient numbers to make arrests or keep the peace.

Half a continent away, another episode of violence occurred, but in a wholly different—and unexpected—context. The day before the “sack” occurred, Senator Charles Sumner delivered a major vitriolic speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas.” His attacks ranged far beyond the issues of slavery and Kansas, vilifying both Stephen Douglas and Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in highly personal and caustic terms. Employing strong sexual imagery, Sumner referred to the “rape” of “virgin territory,” a “depraved longing” for new slave territory, “the harlot, slavery,” which was the “mistress” of Senator Butler. No one stepped up to defend Douglas, and, given his recent reception among the southern Democrats, he probably did not expect any champions. Butler, on the other hand, was an old man with a speech impediment, and the attacks were unfair and downright mean.

Congressman Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler’s and a fellow South Carolinian, thought the line of honor had been crossed. Since Sumner would not consent to a duel, Brooks determined to teach him a lesson. Marching up to the senator’s seat, Brooks spoke harshly to Sumner, then proceeded to use his large cane to bash the senator repeatedly, eventually breaking the cane over Sumner’s head. The attack left Sumner with such psychological damage that he could not function for two years, and according to Northern pamphleteers, Brooks had nearly killed the senator. The South labeled Brooks a hero, and “Brooks canes” suddenly came into vogue. The city of Charleston presented him with a new walking stick inscribed
hit him again
! Northerners, on the other hand, kept Sumner’s seat vacant, but the real symbolism was all too well understood. If a powerful white man could be caned on the Senate floor, what chance did a field slave have against more cruel beatings? It reinforced the abolitionists’ claim that in a society that tolerated slavery anywhere, no free person’s rights were safe, regardless of color.

Meanwhile, back in Kansas, violence escalated further when John Brown, a member of a free-soil volunteer group in Kansas, led seven others (including four of his sons) on a vigilante-style assassination of proslavery men. Using their broadswords, Brown’s avengers hunted along Pottawatomie Creek, killing and mutilating five men and boys in what was termed the Pottawatomie massacre.

Northern propagandists, who were usually more adept than their Southern colleagues, quickly gained the high ground, going so far as to argue that Brown had not actually killed anyone. One paper claimed the murders had been the work of Comanches.
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Taken together, the sack of Lawrence, the caning of Senator Butler, and the Pottawatomie massacre revealed the growing power of the press to inflame, distort, and propagandize for ideological purposes. It was a final irony that the institution of the partisan press, which the Jacksonians had invented to ensure their elections by gagging debate on slavery, now played a pivotal role in accelerating the coming conflict.

The Demise of the Whigs

Whatever remained of the southern Whigs withered away after the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Whigs had always been a party tied to the American system but unwilling to take a stand on the major moral issue of the day, and that was its downfall. Yet in failing to address slavery, how did the Whigs significantly differ from the Democrats? Major differences over the tariff, a national bank, and land sales did not separate the two parties as much as has been assumed in the past. Those issues, although important on one level, were completely irrelevant on the higher plane where the national debate now moved.

As the Democrats grew stronger in the South, the Whigs, rather than growing stronger in the North, slipped quietly into history. Scott’s 1852 campaign had shown some signs of a northern dominance by polling larger majorities in some northern states than Taylor had in 1848. Yet the Whigs disintegrated. Two new parties dismembered them. One, the American Party, arose out of negative reaction to an influx of Irish and German Catholic immigrants. The American Party tapped into the anti-immigrant perceptions that still burned within large segments of the country. Based largely in local lodges, where secrecy was the byword, the party became known as the Know-Nothings for the members’ reply when asked about their organization, “I know nothing.” A strong anti-Masonic element also infused the Know-Nothings.

Know-Nothings shocked the Democrats by scoring important successes in the 1854 elections, sweeping virtually every office in Massachusetts with 63 percent of the vote. Know-Nothings also harvested numerous votes in New York, and for a moment appeared to be the wave of the future. Fillmore himself decided in 1854 to infiltrate the Know-Nothings, deeming the Whigs hopeless.

Like the Whigs, however, the Know-Nothings were stillborn. They failed to see that slavery constituted a far greater threat to their constituents than did foreign “conspiracies.” The fatal weakness of the Know-Nothing Party was that it alienated the very immigrants who were staunchly opposed to slavery, and thus, rather than creating a new alliance, fragmented already collapsing Whig coalitions. When their national convention met, the Know-Nothings split along sectional lines, and that was that. Abraham Lincoln perceived that a fundamental difference in principle existed between antislavery and nativism, between the new Republican Party and the Know-Nothings, asking “How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” He warned, “When the Know-Nothings get control, [the Declaration] will read, ‘All men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.’”
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A second party, however, picking up the old Liberty Party and Free-Soil banners, sought to unite people of all stripes who opposed slavery under a single standard. Originally called the Anti-Nebraska Party, the new Republican Party bore in like a laser on the issue of slavery in the territories. Horace Greeley said that the Kansas-Nebraska Act created more free-soilers and abolitionists in two months than Garrison had in twenty years, and the new party’s rapid growth far outstripped earlier variants like the Liberty Party. Foremost among the new leaders was Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, a former Liberty Party man who won the gubernatorial election as a Republican in Ohio in 1855. Along with William H. Seward, Chase provided the intellectual foundation of the new party.

Republicans recognized that every other issue in some way touched on slavery, and rather than ignore it or straddle it—as both the Democrats and Whigs had done—they would attack it head on, elevating it to the top of their masthead. Although they adopted mainstays of the Whig Party, including support for internal improvements, tariffs, and a national bank, the Republicans recast these in light of the expansion of slavery into the territories. Railroads and internal improvements? That Whig issue now took on an unmistakable free-soil tinge, for if railroads were built, what crops would they bring to market—slave cotton, or free wheat? Tariffs? If Southerners paid more for their goods, were they not already profiting from an inhumane system? And should not Northern industry, which supported free labor, enjoy an advantage? Perhaps the national bank had no strong sectional overtones, but no matter. Slavery dominated almost every debate. Southerners had even raised the issue of reopening the slave trade.