Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (41 page)

Perhaps the Lord took pity. The depression of 1857–58 turned out to be milder and shorter than expected. California gold came east in large quantities during the fall and winter. Banks in New York resumed specie payments by December 1857, and those elsewhere followed suit during the next few months. The stock market rebounded in the spring of 1858. Factories reopened, railroad construction resumed its rapid pace, and unemployment declined. By early 1859 recovery was almost complete. Trade unions, which had all but disappeared under impact of the depression, revived in 1859 and began a series of strikes to recoup predepression wages. In February 1860 the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, went out in what became the largest strike in American history to that time, eventually involving 20,000 workers in the New England shoe industry.

The political effects of the depression may have equaled its economic consequences. It took time, however, for political crosscurrents to settle into a pattern that benefited Republicans. The initial tendency to blame banks for the panic seemed to give Democrats an opportunity to capitalize on their traditional anti-bank posture. They did reap some political profits in the Old Northwest. But elsewhere the issue had lost much of its old partisan salience because Democrats had become almost as pro-bank as the opposition. Republicans of Whig origin pointed the finger of blame at the absence of a national bank to ride herd over

48
. Quoted in James L. Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrine,"
JAH
, 70 (1983), 49.

49
. Timothy L. Smith,
Revivalism and Social Reform: American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War
(New York, 1957), ch. 4.

irresponsible practices of state banks. Several Republicans called for revival of something like the Second Bank of the United States from the grave in which Andrew Jackson had buried it two decades earlier. Democratic tariff policies also came under indictment from Whiggish Republicans.

Although no modern historian has attributed the depression of 1857–58 to low tariffs, Horace Greeley and his fellow protectionists did so. The Walker Tariff enacted by Democrats in 1846 had remained in effect until 1857. It had been mildly protectionist with average duties of about 20 percent, the lowest since 1824. Another Democratic tariff passed in March 1857 lowered duties still further and enlarged the free list. The depression began a few months later. Greeley not surprisingly saw a causal connection. "No truth of mathematics," intoned the
New York Tribune
, "is more clearly demonstrable than that the ruin about us is fundamentally attributable to the destruction of the Protective Tariff."
⁵⁰

Republicans made tariff revision one of their priorities, especially in Pennsylvania, where recovery of the iron industry lagged behind other sectors. The argument that the lower 1857 duties had enabled British industry to undersell American railroad iron carried great weight among workers as well as ironmasters. Indeed, Republicans pitched their strongest tariff appeals to labor, which had more votes than management. "We demand that American laborers shall be protected against the pauper labor of Europe," they declared. A higher tariff would "give employment to thousands of mechanics, artisans, laborers, who have languished for months in unwilling idleness." Such arguments seemed to work, for in the 1858 elections Republicans scored large gains in Pennsylvania industrial districts.
⁵¹

The tariff issue provides an illustration of how political fallout from the depression exacerbated sectional tensions. In each of three congressional sessions between the Panic and the election of 1860, a coalition of Republicans and protectionist Democrats tried to adjust the 1857 duties slightly upward. Every time an almost solid South combined with half or more of the northern Democrats to defeat them. With an economy

50
.
New York Tribune
, Oct. 22, 1857, quoted in Philip S. Foner,
Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict
(Chapel Hill, 1941), 142n.

51
.
Lebanon
(Pa.)
Courier
, quoted in Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism,"
loc. cit
., 53;
New York Tribune
, quoted in Van Vleck,
Panic of
1857, 104;
Tribune Almanac
, 1859, pp. 52–53.

based on the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods, southerners had little interest in raising the prices of what they bought in order to subsidize profits and wages in the North. Thus Congress remained, in the view of one bitter Republican, "shamelessly prostituted, in a base subserviency to the Slave Power." A Pennsylvanian discerned a logical connection between the South's support for the Lecompton constitution and its opposition to tariff adjustment: "popular rights disregarded in Kansas; free industry destroyed in the States."
⁵²

Sectional alignments were even more clear on three land-grant measures of the 1850s: a homestead act, a Pacific railroad act, and grants to states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges. The idea of using the federal government's vast patrimony of land for these purposes had been around for a decade or more. All three measures took on added impetus from the depression of 1857–58. Free land would help farmers ruined by the Panic get a new start. According to the theories of labor reformer George Henry Evans, homesteads would also give unemployed workingmen an opportunity to begin new lives as independent landowners and raise the wages of laborers who remained behind. Construction of a transcontinental railroad would tap the wealth of the West, bind the country together, provide employment, and increase the prosperity of all regions. Agricultural and mechanical colleges would make higher education available to farmers and skilled working-men. All three measures reflected the Whig ideology of a harmony of interests between capital and labor, which would benefit mutually from economic growth and improved education. Along with a tariff to protect American workers and entrepreneurs, these land-grant measures became the new Republican free-labor version of Henry Clay's venerable American System. Republicans could count on more northern Democratic support for the land bills than for the tariff, especially from Douglas Democrats in the Old Northwest.

But most southerners opposed these measures. The homestead act would fill up the West with Yankee settlers hostile to slavery. "Better for us," thundered a Mississippian, "that these territories should remain a waste, a howling wilderness, trod only by red hunters than be so settled."
⁵³
Southerners also had little interest in using the public lands to

52
. Foner,
Business and Slavery
, 141; Huston, "A Political Response to Industrialism,"
loc. cit
., 53.

53
.
Columbus
(Miss.)
Democrat
, quoted in Avery O. Craven, An
Historian and the Civil War
(Chicago, 1964), 38.

establish schools most of whose students would be Yankees. Nor did they have much stake in the construction of a Pacific railroad with an expected eastern terminus at St. Louis or Chicago. Southern senators provided most of the votes in 1858 to postpone consideration of all three bills. At the next session of Congress a series of amendments to the railroad bill whittled it down to a meaningless provision for preliminary bids. In February 1859 Republicans and two-thirds of the northern Democrats in the House passed a homestead act. Vice-President Breck-inridge of Kentucky broke a tie vote in the Senate to defeat it. But enough northern Democrats joined Republicans in both Senate and House to pass the land-grant college act. Buchanan paid his debts to southern Democrats by vetoing it.

A somewhat different path led to a similar outcome in the first session of the 36th Congress (1859–60), elected in 1858 and containing more Republicans than its predecessor. Disagreement over a northern
vs
. a southern route once again killed the Pacific railroad bill. The South also continued to block passage of a land-grant college act over Buchanan's veto. But a homestead act reached the president's desk. The House had passed it by a vote in which 114 of the 115 Ayes came from northern members and 64 of the 65 Nays from southern members. After much parliamentary maneuvering the Senate passed a modified version of the bill. A conference committee worked out a compromise, but Buchanan vetoed it as expected. Southern opposition in the Senate blocked an attempt to pass it over his veto.
⁵⁴

The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860. During the effort to pass the homestead bill in 1859, Republicans tangled with Democrats over another measure that would also become an issue in 1860—the annexation of Cuba. Manifest Destiny was a cause that united most Democrats across sectional lines. Whatever they thought of slavery in Kansas, they agreed on the desirability of annexing Cuba with its 400,000 slaves. Both Douglas and Buchanan spoke in glowing terms of Cuba; the signs seemed to point to a rapprochement of warring Democratic factions, with Cuba as the glue to piece them together. In his December 1858 message to Congress,

54
. This account of the fate of these three measures in the 35th and the 36th Congress has been drawn mainly from Roy F. Nichols,
The Disruption of American Democracy
(New York, 1948), 192, 231–33; and from Nevins,
Emergence
, I, 444–55, II, 188–95.

Buchanan called for new negotiations with Spain to purchase Cuba. Senator John Slidell of Louisiana introduced a bill to appropriate $30 million for a down payment. The foreign relations committee approved it in February 1859. For the next two weeks the $30 million bill was the main topic of Senate debate. Republicans rang all the changes of the slave power conspiracy, prompting southerners to reply in kind while northern Democrats kept a low profile. Republican strategy was to delay the bill until adjournment on March 4, 1859. At the same time they hoped to bring the homestead bill, already passed by the House, to a vote. Democrats refused to allow this unless Republicans permitted a vote on Cuba. The question, said the irreverent Ben Wade of Ohio, was "shall we give niggers to the niggerless, or land to the landless?"
⁵⁵
In the end the Senate did neither, so each party prepared to take the issues to the voters in 1860.

Meanwhile a clash between Douglas and southern Democrats over the issue of a federal slave code for territories had reopened the party's Lecompton wounds. The Senate Democratic caucus fired the first round by removing Douglas from his chairmanship of the committee on territories. Then on February 23, 1859, southern senators lashed out at Douglas in language usually reserved for Black Republicans. The Little Giant's sin was an assertion that he would never vote for a slave code to enforce bondage in a territory against the will of a majority living there. Popular sovereignty, said Jefferson Davis, who led the attack on Douglas, was "full of heresy." A refusal to override it would make Congress "faithless to the trust they hold at the hands of the people of the States." "We are not . . . to be cheated," the Mississippian declared, by men who "seek to build up a political reputation by catering to the prejudice of a majority to exclude the property of a minority." For such men, said Davis as he looked Douglas in the eye, the South had nothing but "scorn and indignation."
⁵⁶

This debate registered the rise in rhetorical temperature during the late 1850s. Southern aggressiveness was bolstered by self-confidence growing out of the Panic of 1857. The depression fell lightly on the South. Cotton and tobacco prices dipped only briefly before returning to their high pre-Panic levels. The South's export economy seemed insulated from domestic downturns. This produced a good deal of boasting below the Potomac, along with expressions of mock solicitude for

55
.
CG
, 35 Cong., 2 Sess., 1354.

56
.
Ibid
., 1247, 1248, 1255, 1257.

the suffering of unemployed wage slaves in the North. "Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?" asked James Hammond of South Carolina in his celebrated King Cotton speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858. "When the abuse of credit had destroyed credit and annihilated confidence; when thousands of the strongest commercial houses in the world were coming down . . . when you came to a dead lock, and revolutions were threatened, what brought you up? . . . We have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of cotton just at the moment to save you from destruction. . . . We have sold it for $65,000,000, and saved you." Slavery demonstrated the superiority of southern civilization, continued Hammond. "In all social systems there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . It constitutes the very mudsill of society. . . . Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. . . . Your whole hireling class of manual laborers and 'operatives,' as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated . . . yours are hired by the day, not cared for, and scantily compensated."
⁵⁷