Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (34 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
• Texas, also unrestricted as to slavery, had its boundaries set and received $10 million for the land that would become New Mexico;
• The slave trade (but not slavery itself) was abolished in the District of Columbia;
• A new Fugitive Slave Act provided federal jurisdiction to assist slave owners in the recovery of escaped slaves.
It was the last of these bills that provoked the most controversy, since it gave slave owners enormous powers to call on federal help in recovering escaped slaves. Under the law, no black person was safe. Only an affidavit was needed to prove ownership. Commissioners were granted great powers—thoroughly unconstitutional in modern light—to make arrests. Even the expenses of capturing and returning a fugitive slave were to be borne by the federal government. Although the burden of proof was on the accused fugitives, they were not entitled to a jury trial and couldn’t defend themselves. And citizens who concealed, aided, or rescued fugitives were subject to harsh fines and imprisonment.
Suddenly free blacks, many of whom thought they had been safely established for years in northern towns, were subject to seizure and transport back to the South. Angry mobs in several cities bolted at the law with violent protests. In Boston, seat of abolitionist activity, William and Ellen Craft, who gained fame when they escaped through a ruse that involved Ellen posing as the male owner of William, were defended and hidden from slave catchers. When federal marshals snatched a fugitive named Shadrach, a mob of angry blacks overwhelmed the marshals and sent Shadrach to Montreal. Outraged by this defiance of federal law, President Fillmore sent troops to Boston to remove a seventeen-year-old captured slave named Thomas Sims.
Resistance grew elsewhere. In Syracuse, New York, a large group of mixed race broke into a jail and grabbed William McHenry, known as Jerry, from his captors, spiriting him off to Canada. And in Christiana, Pennsylvania, a Quaker town that openly welcomed fugitives, troops again were called out after some escaped slaves shot and killed an owner and then escaped to Canada. President Fillmore sent marines after these slaves, but Canada refused to extradite them. In the South, these were viewed as affronts to what was considered their owners’ property and honor. New anger was spilling over into renewed threats of the Union’s dissolution.
Why was
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
the most important and controversial American novel of its time?
The number of blacks actually captured and sent south under the Fugitive Slave Act was relatively small, perhaps three hundred. But the law did produce another, unintended effect. Calling the law a “nightmare abomination,” a young woman decided to write a novel that shook the conscience of America and the world.
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
is certainly not the great American novel. It is far from the best-selling American novel. But for a long time it was surely the most significant American novel.
Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter, sister, and wife of Protestant clergymen. Her father, the Reverend Lyman Beecher, was a Calvinist minister who took the family to Cincinnati, where he headed a new seminary. There Harriet Beecher met and married Calvin Stowe, a professor of biblical literature. The seminary was a center of abolitionist sentiment, and a trip to nearby Kentucky provided the young woman with her only firsthand glimpse of slavery. In 1850, her husband took a teaching job at Bowdoin College in Maine, and there, after putting her children to bed at night, Stowe followed her family’s urgings to write about the evils of slavery.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly
first appeared in serial form in the
National Era
, an abolitionist journal. In 1852 a Boston publisher brought out the book in its complete form. Simplistic and overly melodramatic, the novel was also deeply affecting. The plot attempted to depict the lives of slaves and slaveholders through three primary characters: Eliza, a slave who wants to keep her child who is about to be sold off, and sets off in search of the Underground Railroad; Eva, the angelic but sickly daughter of a New Orleans plantation owner; and Uncle Tom, the noble slave sold to a series of owners, but who retains his dignity through all the degradations he suffers in hopes of being reunited with his family. That family, living together in Tom’s idealized cabin on a Kentucky farm, represented the humanity of slaves, depicting them as husbands and wives, parents and children, in stark counterpoint to the common image of slaves as mere drudges.
Many of the book’s characters were simply caricatures calculated to jolt tears from even the most heartless. But the book contained unforgettable images and scenes, perhaps the most famous of which was the picture of the barefoot Eliza, her child in her arms, leaping from one ice floe to another across the frozen Ohio River to escape a ruthless slave trader. There was the cherubic child Eva, trying to bring out the good in everyone in a weepy death scene; the vicious plantation owner, Simon Legree—pointedly written as a transplanted Yankee—vainly trying to break the will and spirit of Tom; and Uncle Tom himself, resilient and saintly, the novel’s Christlike central character, beaten by Legree but refusing to submit to overseeing the other slaves.
The reaction of the public—North, South, and worldwide—was astonishing. Sales reached 300,000 copies within a year. Foreign translations were published throughout Europe, and sales soon afterward exceeded 1.5 million copies worldwide, a staggering number of books for the mid-nineteenth century, when there were no paperbacks or big bookstore chains. A dramatic version played on stages around the world, making Stowe one of the most famous women in the world, although not necessarily wealthy; pirated editions were commonplace. The theatrical presentation also spawned a brand of popular minstrel entertainments called Tom Shows, which provided the basis for the use of Uncle Tom as a derisive epithet for a black man viewed by other blacks as a shuffling lackey to whites.
In a time when slavery was discussed with dry legalisms and code words like “states’ rights” and “popular sovereignty,” this book personalized the question of slavery as no amount of abolitionist literature or congressional debate had. For the first time, thousands of whites got some taste of slavery’s human suffering. In the South, there was outraged indignation. Yet even there the book sold out. Stowe was criticized as naive or a liar. In one infamous incident, she received an anonymous parcel containing the ear of a disobedient slave. Faced with the charge that the book was deceitful, Stowe answered with
A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, which provided documentation that every incident in the novel had actually happened.
In 1862, Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe and reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman that wrote the book that made this great war.” The copies sold can be counted, but the emotional impact can’t be calculated so easily. It is safe to say that no other literary work since 1776, when Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
incited a wave of pro-independence fervor, had the political impact of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.
What forced the Republicans to start a new political party?
After Polk left the White House, America was cursed by a string of presidents who were at best mediocre and at worst ineffectual or incompetent. Polk’s successor in the White House, Zachary Taylor, had enormous battlefield experience but was ill prepared for the political wars of his administration. Before he had a chance to grow in office, he died of cholera in 1850 and was succeeded by Vice President Millard Fillmore (1800–74). Overshadowed by the congressional giants of his time—Webster, Clay, and Calhoun—Fillmore made little impact in his abbreviated administration other than by winning passage of the Compromise of 1850 and dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to open trade and diplomatic relations with Japan, a further extension of the Manifest Destiny mood that had spilled past the California coast to overseas expansionism.
The campaign of 1852 brought another ineffectual leader to the White House in Franklin Pierce (1804–69), and his election was symptomatic of the country’s problems. The two major parties, Whig and Democrat, were fracturing over slavery and other sectional conflicts. Having once been a significant third-party factor, the Free Soil Party, which had opposed the Compromise of 1850, was leaderless. Looking for the battle-hero charm to work once more, the Whigs put up General Winfield Scott, the commander during the Mexican War. But this time the charm had worn out. A northern Democrat taking a southern stand, Pierce outpolled Scott easily, but in his attempts to appease southern Democrats, he lost northern support and any hope of holding the middle ground against the two ends.
The election results meant political chaos. The Whigs were in a tailspin, no longer led by Clay and Webster, the two congressional masters who once gave the party its strength. Northern Democrats, rapidly outnumbered by the growing ranks of southerners in their party, were being pushed out. Out of the chaos came a new alliance. A series of meetings, the first occurring in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854, resulted in the birth of a new party known as the Republicans. A group of thirty congressmen adopted this party label on May 9, 1854. Although the Republicans made antislavery claims that attracted former Free Soilers and other antislavery groups, the party’s opposition to extending slavery beyond its existing boundaries came from economic and political reasoning rather than from moral outrage. Essentially, the party appealed to the free, white workingman. Its basic tenet was that the American West must be open to free, white labor. Not only were the Republicans opposed to slaves in the West; they wanted all blacks kept out. This was hardly the ringing message of morality that we tend to associate with the antislavery movement, but it was a message that appealed to many in the North. In 1854 the Republicans won 100 seats in Congress. Just six years after the party was born, it would put its first president into the White House.
In 1854, Dorothy and Toto wouldn’t have recognized Kansas. The next battlefield in the free-slave conflict, the Kansas Territory was where the debate moved from harsh rhetoric to bloodshed in what might be called the first fighting of the Civil War. At the heart of the hostilities was the long-debated question of whether slavery should be extended into new territory. Convinced that the North was trying to overwhelm them economically and politically, southerners believed the answer to the question was new slave territory. Behind that question, however, were old-fashioned greed and political ambition.
In 1854, Stephen Douglas (1813–61), the Democratic senator from Illinois who had pushed through the Compromise of 1850, wanted to organize new territory in the West that would become Kansas and Nebraska. His motive was simple: he was a director of the Illinois Central Railroad and a land speculator. The new territory would open the way for railroad development, with Chicago as its terminus. But Kansas would lie above the line marking slavery’s boundary under the Missouri Compromise and would have to be free. To win approval for the new territory, Douglas bargained with southern Democrats who would not vote for a new free territory. Looking to a presidential run in 1856, for which he would need southern support, Douglas offered a solution. To win over southerners, he agreed to support repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which had governed new territories for thirty-four years. With Douglas and his southern Democratic allies, the Kansas-Nebraska Act did just that in May 1854.
The betrayal of the Missouri Compromise just about killed the Democratic Party in the North. With opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act as their cornerstone, the Republican Party mushroomed. Another new party also profited from Douglas’s bargain with the South. Born of fierce opposition to the waves of immigrants entering America, they were called Nativists, and an ugly racist streak lay beneath their dislike of foreigners and Catholics. Initially a secret society that preached the twin virtues of white Protestantism and defensive nationalism, they were called the Know-Nothings because they always answered, “I don’t know” when asked about their party. Their message struck home in the mid-1850s, and they became a powerful splinter party force, capturing a substantial number of Congressional seats and state legislatures.
With the Kansas-Nebraska Act calling for “popular sovereignty” in the territories, Kansas was flooded with groups from both sides of the slavery issue. Northerners opposed to slavery’s expansion attempted to transport antislavery settlers to Kansas to ensure that the territory would eventually vote against slavery. Enraged by this interference from the New England “foreigners,” thousands of Missourians called Border Ruffians poured across the line into Kansas to tip the balance in favor of slavery in the territory. In an illegal and rigged election, the pro-slave Ruffians won, but antislavery forces refused to concede defeat and set up a provisional free state government in Topeka.
President Pierce denounced this government, giving the pro-slave forces justification for an offensive. And the first blow in the Civil War was struck in May 1856 when the town of Lawrence, established as an antislavery center, was sacked by pro-slave forces. Three days later in retaliation, a fanatical abolitionist named John Brown attacked a pro-slavery town on Pottawatomie Creek, slaughtering five settlers in the night. These attacks brought Kansas to a state of chaos. By October 1856, some 200 people had died in the fighting in Bloody Kansas and President Pierce’s mishandling of the Kansas fighting left him without support.
The political disarray produced another weak president in James Buchanan (1791–1868). Ignoring the ineffectual Pierce, the Democrats turned to Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan, a Democratic Party loyalist whose chief political asset seemed to be that he was minister to England during the Kansas furor, and couldn’t be blamed for it. In fact, he said little during the campaign, prompting one Republican senator to say that there was no such person as Buchanan—that “he was dead of lockjaw.”
