Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (35 page)

Gaining popular strength as blood was spilled in Kansas, the Republicans took a page from the old Whig playbook and chose the Pathfinder, John C. Frémont, the celebrated western explorer and high priest of Manifest Destiny who had led the way to California, as its 1856 standard-bearer. Like the Whig generals before him, Frémont was a military man with no political experience, although his father-in-law, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the most powerful men in Congress. The Pathfinder’s campaign slogan was simple: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont.”

The Know-Nothings or American Nativists, also bolstered by the Kansas debacle, sent up former president Millard Fillmore. Pledging secession if the Republican Frémont was elected, southern Democrats forced preservation of the Union to the forefront of the election. Their threat carried some weight. With only 45 percent of the popular vote, Buchanan was elected as Frémont (33 percent) and Fillmore (22 percent) split the rest of the vote. The last of the Democratic heirs to Andrew Jackson, Buchanan was perhaps the weakest, most ineffectual of all the prewar presidents. Inaugurated in 1857, James Buchanan was the last president born in the eighteenth century, the oldest president at his inauguration (until Ronald Reagan in 1981), and the nation’s only bachelor president. (That distinction has inspired a century and a half of speculation. Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who is openly gay, once described Buchanan as the nation’s only homosexual president. Buchanan’s orphaned niece, Harriet Lane, then in her twenties, served as his official hostess and there were also whispers of a relationship between them, as well as speculation about Buchanan’s frequent visits to a well-known widow, Mrs. Rose Greenhow, who lived across the street from the White House and was arrested during the Civil War as a Confederate spy. But no evidence of Buchanan’s sexual preferences has ever been offered.) Though Buchanan pledged noninterference and popular sovereignty, it was too late for these empty slogans.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

R
OBERT
E
. LEE,
in a letter to his wife Mary Custis Lee (December 1856):

In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly interested in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are stronger for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially, and physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race, and I hope, will prepare and lead them to better things. [Emphasis added.]

This letter was written some four years before Robert E. Lee (1807–70) was appointed to lead the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia in April 1861. Lee had just completed three years as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was serving in Texas. He was the son of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, a famed Revolutionary War hero. His mother, Ann Carter Lee, came from the most prominent family in Virginia, and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, was a descendant of Martha Custis Washington. They were part of the Virginia slaveholding aristocracy, and during the war, their home and property in Arlington, Virginia, would be confiscated by the federal government and eventually provide the land for Arlington National Cemetery.

What was the difference between a man named Dred Scott and a mule?

Buchanan hoped the Supreme Court could settle the burning questions of slavery in the territories and reconciliation between North and South. He publicly expressed his hope that the Court would remove the burden of a solution from Congress and himself in his inaugural address on March 4, 1857. The slavery question, he said, “belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled.” But Buchanan was suffering from a terminal case of wishful thinking—or he was seriously deluded. Two days later, the Supreme Court altered the future of the debate and of the nation.

Instead of solving the problem, the court’s ruling threw gasoline on a smoldering fire. Any hopes of judicial or legislative settlement to the questions were lost in the Dred Scott decision.

The ruling came in a case brought on behalf of Dred Scott; the case was a legal odyssey that began 1834 when Dr. John Emerson joined the army as a surgeon. Emerson spent several years at a number of posts, including Illinois, Wisconsin Territory, and his home state of Missouri. During all of these moves, Dr. Emerson had been accompanied by his personal servant, Dred Scott, a slave. Emerson died in 1846, and with the help of a sympathetic lawyer, Scott sued for his freedom, claiming that because he had lived in territories where slavery was illegal (Illinois barred slavery under the Northwest Ordinance; Wisconsin under the Missouri Compromise), he was legally free. A St. Louis county court accepted Scott’s position, but the Missouri supreme court overruled this decision and remanded Scott, his wife, and their child to slavery. On appeal, the case finally went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the chief justice was Roger Taney, an eighty-year-old former slave owner and states’ rights advocate who had been appointed by President Andrew Jackson after serving as Jackson’s attorney general. He had taken the seat of John Marshall.

The Court split along regional and party lines, although Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania joined the majority. Letters later revealed that he had done so at the request of President Buchanan, who interfered to prevent a purely sectional decision. While each justice wrote an opinion, it was Taney’s ruling that stood as the majority decision. False in some parts, in others illogical, Taney’s ruling contained three principal points, all of them death blows to antislavery hopes. Free or slave, said Taney, blacks were not citizens; therefore, Scott had no standing before the court. Negroes, he wrote, “are so inferior that they had no rights which a white man was bound to respect.”

Taney could have stopped there, but he went much further. Scott had never ceased to be a slave and therefore was not a citizen, but property of his owner, no different from a mule or a horse. This led to his final and most damaging conclusion. Because slaves were property, and property was protected by the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, Taney argued that Congress had no right to deprive citizens of their property—including slaves—anywhere within the United States. In his judgment, only a state could prohibit slavery within its boundaries. With one sweeping decision, Taney had obliterated the entire legislative history of compromises that restricted slavery, from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 to the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850.

Southerners, overjoyed by the ruling, wanted to go another step. Armed with the force of Taney’s decision, southerners were poised to question the constitutionality of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade itself and any laws that proscribed slavery. Conciliatory northerners thought that the Court had given its approval to the notion of popular sovereignty, allowing the states to set their own slavery policy.

But instead of giving slavery a new lease on life and destroying the Republican Party, the decision produced two unexpected results. It further split the Democrats between North and South, and it strengthened the Republicans, politically and morally. Rather than accepting Taney’s decision as a defeat for their position opposing slavery’s spread, Republicans grew more defiant. In the North and in border states, many people who had been fence-sitters on the slavery question were driven into the Republican camp. The situation got uglier when prominent Republicans charged that President Buchanan knew in advance of the Court’s ruling and had conspired with Taney to extend slavery by this decision, a conspiracy theory that won popular approval in the North and advanced the Republican cause and which later evidence would show to be completely true.

A
MERICAN
V
OICES

C
HIEF
J
USTICE ROGER B. TANEY,
from
Dred Scott v. Sandford
(March 6, 1857):

The right of property in a slave is distinctly and expressly affirmed in the Constitution. The right to traffic in it, like an ordinary article of merchandise and property, was guaranteed to the citizens of the United States, in every State that might desire it, for twenty years. And the Government in express terms is pledged to protect it in all future time, if the slave escapes from his owner. . . . And no word can be found in the Constitution which gives Congress a greater power over slave property, or which entitles property of that kind to less protection than property of any other description. The only power conferred is the power coupled with the duty of guarding and protecting the owner in his rights.

What did Lincoln and Douglas debate?

A year after the decision in
Dred Scott v. Sandford,
two men stood on a platform with Taney’s ruling hanging over their heads like a black cloud. One of them was the dapper, short, but powerfully robust Little Giant, Stephen Douglas. As he stood in the Illinois summer sun, Douglas must have known that he was one of the most powerful and well-known men in America, but that he was fighting for his political life and perhaps the future of the nation. Unable to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1852 and 1856, Douglas kept alive his hopes of making a run in 1860, believing that he could hold the Union together by a conciliatory approach to the South that would accept a moderate form of slavery through “popular sovereignty.” But before he could run for president in 1860, Douglas had to hold on to his Senate seat.

His Republican opponent seemed unimpressive. A former one-term representative, at six feet, four inches in height, Abraham Lincoln may have towered over Douglas, but he lacked the senator’s stature and clout. But Douglas was not fooled. As he commented to a friend, “He is the strong man of the party—full of wit, facts, dates—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd.”

Born in 1809 in Kentucky, Lincoln was the son of an illiterate pioneer farmer. At age seven, Lincoln moved with his family to Indiana, and in 1830, the Lincolns settled in southern Illinois. Upon leaving his family home, Lincoln went to New Orleans and returned to Illinois to manage a general store in New Salem. He led a detachment of Illinois militia in the Black Hawk War, but as he liked to say, fought nothing but mosquitoes. At twenty-five, Lincoln won a seat in the Illinois legislature while studying for the bar, and he became a lawyer in 1836. A Whig, Lincoln graduated to Congress in 1846 for a single term marked by his partisan opposition to “Polk’s war” in Mexico. Although he lost his seat and returned to Springfield to build his legal practice, he joined the Republican Party in 1856 and was prominent enough to win 110 votes for a vice presidential nomination at the first Republican national convention. In 1858, after delivering his “House Divided” speech to a state Republican convention in Springfield, he was the unanimous choice of the Illinois Republicans to oppose Douglas.

Feeling that his chances would be improved by head-to-head confrontation, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates at various spots around the state. With much to lose, Douglas agreed to seven such meetings. Even though the nation had plunged into a depression in 1857 after a panic in the stock market, and there were other questions of national importance, it was clear that Lincoln and Douglas would battle over one question: their views on slavery.

Each man had a simple plan of attack. Douglas would make Lincoln look like a raving abolitionist; Lincoln would depict Douglas as pro-slavery and a defender of the Dred Scott decision. In fact, Lincoln and Douglas were not far apart in their views, but their ambitions exaggerated their differences and their attacks on each other forced them into dangerous corners. Douglas was not afraid of race baiting to paint Lincoln as a radical who favored racial mixing.

This attack forced Lincoln more than once into adopting conservative language that seemed to contradict some of the opinions he had stated earlier. He opposed slavery, but wouldn’t force the states where it existed to surrender their rights. Lincoln stated that slavery would die gradually, but, when pressed, guessed it would take one hundred years to happen. And while he argued, in the words of the Constitution, that “all men are created equal,” he balked at the notion of allowing blacks the vote, jury duty, intermarriage, or even citizenship. Lincoln said, “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the races which I believe will for ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

These debates paired off two men of great intellect, presence, wit, speaking ability, and political instincts. A crucial moment came when Lincoln asked Douglas if the people of a territory could exclude slavery before the territory became a state. This sprang a costly trap on Douglas. He answered that the people had the power to introduce or exclude slavery, no matter what the Supreme Court said. This was a roundabout denunciation of the Dred Scott ruling and it probably gave Douglas a temporary victory. Douglas retained his Senate seat when the Democrats maintained control of the Illinois legislature, which then selected the state’s senator. But in the long run, he had shot himself in the foot. Southern Democrats would never support a man for president who equivocated about Dred Scott.