American Experiment (99 page)

Chase and his Senate and congressional friends had ample time to prepare their counterattack. On January 24 Washington’s
National Era
blazoned forth with their
“APPEAL OF THE INDEPENDENT DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES
.”

“We arraign this bill,” the appeal proclaimed, “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.…”

This hyperbole set the tone for the whole manifesto. It offered little reasoned historical or legal analysis, or even a convincing attack on slavery, but rather paraded a series of horribles that would result from the bill: all unorganized territory would be open to slavery, territorial settlement would be slowed up, the transcontinental railroad would be sidetracked, the homestead law vitiated, the whole country placed under the “yoke of a slaveholding despotism.” Again and again the address returned to its main charge: the bill was a diabolical conspiracy against freedom, a plot contrived by a servile demagogue truckling to the South for the sake of his presidential ambitions. “Shall a plot against humanity and Democracy, so monstrous, and so dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world, be permitted to succeed?”

Editors and preachers and merchants had already been thundering against the assault on the Missouri Compromise; now the sheer force of this address, printed also in the New York
Times
and other newspapers, set off detonations across the North. Never mind the rhetorical absolutes in the address, the exaggerations and distortions, the conspiracy theory—its transcending moral conviction, its timeliness, and above all its reverberating call for the defense of liberty struck home to men and women determined, whatever their specific position on slavery, that this barbaric insult to freedom not be extended to “free soil.” Horace Greeley in New York, Samuel Bowles in Massachusetts, Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, Theodore Parker in Boston, Horace White in Chicago, were only the most noted of those who used the occasion to hurl their own thunderbolts from press and pulpit.

Still underestimating the power of this moral tempest, Douglas predicted that the “storm will soon spend its fury.” It did not, because of its own intensity, because the bill lacerated the public as it wended its way
through Senate and House, and because Douglas and his supporters, as well as the antislavery men and their allies, fought the congressional battle so furiously that the issue could not die. Douglas spent most of his time superbly managing the bill, but his angry speeches, laced with epithets, bristled in the press accounts. Greeley, fearing that the bill would “suffocate the moral force of liberty and equality within the young republic,” in Jeter Isely’s words, blasted the measure in a series of brilliant editorials—and watched his
Weekly
pick up another 35,000 readers nationwide during the first six months of 1854. The
Tribune’s
opposition could be expected; more significant was the spectacle of leading Democratic papers of Free-Soil tendencies—William Cullen Bryant’s New York
Evening Post
, the Rochester
Union
, Buffalo
Republic
, Cleveland
Leader
, and others—almost overnight turning against the Democratic party leadership.

Would this wave of indignation pass over the North and then subside, like so many moral protests in the past? Or would it take form in some new and lasting political constellation? Looking back later, some historians saw an entire new movement and party spring to life as people mobilized against the Nebraska bill. Few did mobilize at the time, however. The editorial thunderbolts did not descend on people neatly arrayed in the Democratic and Whig parties. In the absence of strong party ideology or organization, Americans were perceiving and acting as members of a variety of subcultures.

They were divided not only over slavery but also over temperance, women’s rights, keeping the Sabbath, prison reform, free land, tariffs, immigration, schools, banks, foreign policy, foreign relations. People’s origins caused other divisions: natives and newcomers often hated one another, immigrants from the British Isles and continental Europe were wary of one another; German Catholics looked down on Irish Catholics; Irish resented Germans; and some Irish disdained other Irish.

The single most powerful antagonism in the early 1850s was native American hostility toward the newcomers who had been arriving each year by the hundreds of thousands—hostility toward their religion, their speech, their drinking, their very foreignness. And the fastest-growing party in the north was the Know-Nothing (or American) party, whose stated program was “Anti-Romanism, Anti-Bedinism, Anti-Pope’s Toeism, Anti-Nunneryism, Anti-Winking Virginism, Anti-Jesuitism, and Anti-the-Whole-Sacerdotal-Hierarchism with all its humbugging mummeries.…”

Cutting through this welter of distrusts and conflicting concerns were
three dynamic forces that dominated the politics of slavery. One was abolitionism, rooted in New England preaching and writing and the Yankee diaspora into western New York and Ohio and the northwestern states, an abolitionism often expressed in a strident anti-southernism. The second was the defense and protection of slavery, often reflected in a militant anti-northernism. The third was an “anti-niggerism,” shared extensively by some Whigs and many Democrats and probably by most Know-Nothings—and even by some abolitionists, though it was hard for militant abolitionists to accept this fact. Not everyone who wanted to free the slaves was pro-black; millions of Americans were against slavery and also against “niggers,” because they saw the former as a moral wrong and the latter as a threat. This attitude was most clearly reflected in Free-Soilism. Many Free-Soilers strenuously resisted the Nebraska bill and its threat of allowing slavery onto free soil because they did not want blacks to invade “white” territory, put their children into white schools, and compete for while jobs. They did not want blacks next to them, slave or free.

These dominant groups defended their views in the name of liberty or freedom. Nativists wanted to pursue their lives and their work free of brawling, pushing, competitive Irishmen and Germans. Slave owners proclaimed their liberty to take their bondsmen into the new territories. Homesteaders wished to move into a Nebraska free of “niggerism.” Abolitionists continued to view slavery as the supreme affront to the whole ideal of liberty. Thus liberty as a value still served as a source of intellectual and political confusion rather than as a guide to coherent political action.

This disarray posed a severe problem for serious politicians. They could not operate within the bounds of neatly polarized conflict. They had to win state and local elections against rivals who could easily outdemagogue them in the emotional politics of the early fifties. They had to calculate in terms of possible coalitions, political balance sheets, electoral margins. They had to deal with Americans as they were—with millions of persons not logically arrayed in rational ideological combat but intent on immediate daily needs of survival and betterment and self-esteem, some alienated from politics or apathetic toward it, parochial in outlook, variously cursing Catholics, blacks, Southerners, Northerners, abolitionists, slave owners.

It would take, not a single event like the Nebraska bill, but a series of powerful hammerblows over a number of years before this jumble of attitudes could be heated and pounded into a viable political movement or party. For a time, as Americans turned against the Democratic party because of Nebraska, and the Whig because of its weakness and timidity, people were in a state of political confusion. Many nevertheless stayed with Whiggism or the Democracy. Others joined the Know-Nothings, either as
a way station to some other political destination or as a place to settle down. Some met in “anti-Nebraska” meetings and simply formed anti-Nebraska groups. Some met and talked about organizing new Independent or People’s parties. Some pressed for a new Fusion party to embrace abolitionists, Know-Nothings, Conscience Whigs, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, and anyone else available for a coalition.

In Ripon, Wisconsin, fusionists proposed that merging anti-Nebraska groups adopt the name “Republican”; a plea was sent to the
Tribune
that it adorn its masthead with a Republican banner, but Greeley hedged. Thirty congressmen, meeting at Mrs. Cratchett’s boardinghouse in Washington, discussed a new party to stop slavery expansion. “Republican,” they thought, would make a good name for such a party. Meetings in Jackson, Michigan, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, held almost simultaneously, debated the need for a new party and agreed that “Republican,” evoking memories of Jefferson and popular rights, would be a fine name for a party designed to attract a large variety of people.

But all these efforts would atomize rather than mobilize protest unless events brought more hammerblows—and events did. In Washington the Senate battle raged on, as Douglas pleaded, demanded, goaded, orated, his sharp sentences going “straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, crashing and tearing,” Carl Schurz wrote. As Douglas, the Southerners, and the White House mobilized all their influence, including party patronage, the anti-Nebraska forces lost battle after battle, including the final Senate roll call, when the bill passed 37 to 14. In the House, where the Administration applied whip and spur, and Douglas made his presence known, the tall, gaunt, shrill-voiced Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia applied his rapier-like logic and command of facts to win a closer victory for the measure, 113 aye to 100 nay. Each major event on the Hill, and especially the final roll calls, produced outbursts of delight, rage, threats, recriminations, and dire predictions among hundreds of editors, preachers, and politicians in the country.

The bill had hardly passed the House, in late May 1854, when the moral dimension of the issue was illuminated in Boston. Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old slave and leader of his people on a Virginia plantation, had escaped by boarding a ship bound for Boston, been tracked down by his master, put in chains in a Boston jail, and subjected to the provisions of the Fugitive Act. This provided for not a jury trial but a summary hearing before a commissioner who could dispatch the fugitive back into slavery. While Burns awaited his hearing, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker whipped up a Faneuil Hall crowd to a pitch of indignation. A mob tried to free Burns, only to be beaten off. By the time the commissioner ordered
Burns returned to his master Boston was an armed camp, filled with cavalry, artillery, Marines, and police, and with outraged Bostonians and hundreds of protesters from Worcester and other towns. Church bells pealed and thousands watched in helpless fury as the trembling slave, his face scarred and a piece of bone projecting from a broken hand, was taken by cavalry and foot soldiers through flag-draped streets to his Virginia-bound ship. This was only the latest in a series of horrifying fugitive-slave recaptures, which in some cases had ended in the rescue of the runaway. But it was in the far-off territory itself that shocking events now would galvanize the nation and precipitate a transformation of party politics and ultimately of the American political system.

“Come on, then, Gentlemen of the slave States,” William H. Seward of New York had cried out on the Senate floor shortly after the Nebraska bill passed the House. “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”

It was certain from the start of the Nebraska debate that the Kansas part of the territory would be a combat zone. To publicize Kansas as an arcadia for homesteaders and planters alike, and then to legislate that the people in the territory would decide the burning issue of slavery on the basis of squatter sovereignty, was to thrust two gamecocks into a rain barrel. Escalation began as soon as slavery men heard that the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society was sending Yankees into Kansas in order to convert it into a free state, and when antislavery men heard that Missouri planters were dispatching “border ruffians” into Kansas with the opposite purpose. Each side exaggerated the satanic purpose and effectiveness of the other.

Each side exploited its own advantages. When a territorial delegate was to be elected, hundreds of Missourians crossed the boundary in buck-boards and wagons, on horseback and on foot, to pick an anti-free-stater as delegate. Proslavery men proceeded to organize a proslavery legislature, which promptly passed anti-antislavery legislation, including penalties for antislavery agitation. Antislavery colonists held their own convention, declared the proslavery legislature illegal, asked admission to the Union as a free state, and later met in convention to frame the free-state Topeka constitution. By the end of 1855 Kansas had two governments—and two sides each arming itself rapidly, the antislavery men with “Beecher’s Bibles,” considered more practical in combat than the Good
Book. As the last snows melted on the prairies in the spring, Kansas was headed for a showdown.

Then came the sack of Lawrence. Proslavery men had long considered the town a hotbed of abolitionism; armed with indictments against free-state leaders and two Lawrence newspapers—the
Herald of Freedom
and the
Kansas Free State
—sheriffs men and “border ruffians” occupied the town. Spoiling for a fight, furious at finding the leaders gone and the populace unresisting, the invaders threw printing presses into the river and bombarded the Free State Hotel into rubble. One man angered by the nonresistance to this invasion was John Brown, on his way to Lawrence with his small troop of Liberty Guards when he heard about the sacking. He resolved to take the drastic action that the cowardly antislavery people refused to take. Selecting a small band from his Liberty Guards, including several of his sons, exhorting them to “fight fire with fire,” he led them to the houses of proslavery men and, while wives and children watched, dragged the victims out and hacked them to death with cutlasses. With the fifth murder Brown stopped; he had avenged the killing of six free-state men during Kansas’ months of violence, including the one man who had died at Lawrence.