America Aflame

by David Goldfield

  Regrettably, such a display of poor taste was no longer unusual in the United States Senate. But South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, Butler’s cousin, moved to defend his family’s honor. The day after the sack of Lawrence, he entered a mostly empty Senate chamber—the Senate was not in session that day—and found Senator Sumner writing at his desk. Brooks carried a gutta-percha cane, and he struck Sumner some thirty blows to the head and shoulders in less than half a minute, as the Massachusetts senator could not get up from his seat to defend himself. Several lawmakers heard the commotion, but Brooks’s colleague South Carolina representative Lawrence Keitt prevented them from coming to the senator’s aid. The attack severely wounded Sumner. His seat in the Senate chamber stood empty for three years while he recovered; mute testimony to the wages of violence.

  First “Bleeding Kansas,” and now “Bleeding Sumner.” To read the accounts of the incident in northern and southern newspapers was to measure the distance between two sides of an escalating conflict. The only question that seemed to remain was how far the breech would widen before the nation would crack. Horace Greeley and the New York Tribune fed the northern perception that the hallowed halls of Congress had now become an extension of Kansas, that the civil war in that territory had crossed a continent and spilled its blood on the nation’s capital. The issue was no longer merely the extension of slavery in the territories but the enslavement of all Americans to the dictates of the Slave Power: “No meaner exhibition of Southern cowardice—generally miscalled Southern chivalry—was ever witnessed.… The reasons for the absence of collision between North and South—collision of sentiment and person—which existed a few years back, have ceased; and as the South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color … that Democracy is a delusion and a lie.”21

  Historians have written volumes about the concept of Southern Honor, about how the public image of a man required satisfaction if abused by a man of equal stature. Northerners cherished the concept of honor as well, though it may not have been as evident in their more urban, cosmopolitan society. If they perceived unwonted assaults on their liberties and leaders, however, they would act to uphold their honor, as decent men should.

  Southerners swaggered to line up in support of Brooks. Sumner, they felt, was overdue for a severe chastisement. They showered Brooks with new canes, and, though the vote in the House of Representatives to expel him fell short of the required two-thirds majority, he resigned anyway and his constituents reelected him in a landslide, a further insult to Sumner’s defenders. A newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, Brooks’s district, captured the sentiment in the Lower South: “Some say he [Sumner] received fifty stripes, yet we very much doubt if the Captain cared to exceed the legal number of thirty-nine, usually applied to scamps.… We feel that our Representative did exactly right; and we are sure his people will commend him highly for it.… [W]e have borne insult long enough, and now let the conflict come if it must.”22

  Georgia’s Alexander Stephens had always lamented the loss of decorum and civility in Washington. But the northern reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act radicalized him and his constituents. His bemused endorsement of Brooks’s actions and the stifling of free speech in democracy’s forum indicated how far he had gone down the sectional road in just two years. “Brooks whipped Sumner the other day,” he noted nonchalantly. “I have no objection to the liberty of speech when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.” It was as if Sumner had behaved like a fractious slave and received an appropriate punishment, a connection that inflamed northern public opinion. Stephens’s bemusement was palpable: “The Yankees seem greatly excited about the Sumner flogging. They are afraid the practice may become general & many of [their] heads already feel sore.”23

  One northerner determined to take the battle directly to the slaveholders. In 1848, Frederick Douglass received an invitation to visit a white man in Springfield, Massachusetts, known for his anti-slavery views. Douglass had met a number of such men since he had left bondage, but this person was different. In what he said and in how he looked, this man was a breed apart from the middle-class reformers Douglass had encountered, or from any other human being for that matter. The meeting so captivated Douglass that he set his impressions down immediately, describing the man, who stood “straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive.… His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray, and closely trimmed, and grew low on his forehead.… His eyes … were full of light and fire.”24

  Douglass sat down at a spare pine table, and the man’s wife and children waited on them. The white man looked older than his years, “lean, strong, and sinewy,… built for times of trouble.” What particularly struck Douglass was the ease with which the white man conversed with him, as an equal without affect or condescension. The white man unveiled a scheme to establish a black state in the Appalachian Mountains comprised of escaped slaves protected from recapture by an armed militia. How and when slaves would rise up and make their way to the mountains remained unclear, but the white man was convinced that a sign or a prophet would trigger the exodus. What Douglass thought of the plan remains unknown, but the man impressed him as a committed anti-slavery warrior willing to give his life to free his fellow man. They would meet again.25

  Kansas stirred the white man’s imagination. Here was a battleground where, unlike in the South, the slaveholder could not count on neighbors or government to protect his ill-begotten institution. So he went west with his sons. Connecticut native John Brown was fifty-six years old in May 1856, an age when most middle-class men in eastern cities were at the height of their business careers, engaged in civic activities, and doting on grandchildren. Brown had a family, a large family, but had not yet settled down to one particular occupation. He had a calling, though. He viewed himself as a liberator, and the chaos in Kansas afforded an opportunity to avenge the sin of slavery. The sack of Lawrence provided an immediate cause. At a small settlement along Pottawatomie Creek, Brown and his sons invaded the cabin of a pro-slavery family, dragged three men outside, shot the father through the head, and hacked and mutilated his two sons with broadswords. Ritual murders.

  The eastern press, which had already inflated atrocities and inflamed public opinion on “Bleeding Kansas,” at first dismissed stories of the murders. The New York Tribune went so far as to report that Comanche Indians had murdered the family, as evidenced by the mutilated corpses, something white men would never do. As the Tribune concluded with unintended irony, “Terrible stories have floated through the newspapers, distorted and misrepresented by those whose interest it was to misrepresent them.” When it appeared that initial reports were proven correct, the Tribune placed Brown’s actions within the larger context of “Bleeding Kansas.” It was a civil war, after all, and bad things happened to both sides. In the meantime, Brown and his sons headed back east to raise money for a larger plan.26

  The three incidents—the sack of Lawrence, the caning of Sumner, and John Brown’s bloody foray to Pottawatomie Creek—occurred within days of each other. They blended together in the public mind and offered confirmation for the worst perspective of each section. If few northerners read southern newspapers and magazines and vice versa, northern and southern editors were certain to keep their readers informed. In September 1856, J. D. B. De Bow, a leading advocate for southern commercial and industrial development, and editor of the widely read magazine De Bow’s Review, editorialized on “The War Against the South.” It was less an editorial than a compilation of what the northern press and northern politicians were saying since the May incidents in Kansas and Washington, D.C. He collected the pieces with a sense of urgency as anti-slavery men were “coming nearer and nearer to the possession of the Federal power.” The danger to the South and its institutions was no longer abstract, as the prayer of Ohio Republican congressman Joshua Giddings demonstrated: “I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the Sout
h, when the black man … shall assert his freedom, and wage a war of extermination against his master; when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns and cities of the South, and blot out the last vestige of slavery. And though I may not mock at their calamity, nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet I will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium.” De Bow also quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay published in response to the assault on Senator Charles Sumner. Emerson concluded, as Greeley had, “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” The nation could not persist as a whole with such disparate parts.27

  Again referring to the Sumner assault, De Bow selected the following exegesis from the Boston Chronicle. The asterisks “supply the place of a sentence too infamous to be repeated.” “Is it at all likely that animals * * * who tear little children from the arms of their mothers in order that they may be sold into everlasting bondage, is it at all likely, we ask, that such brutes would hesitate to murder the man who, in the discharge of his duty, has occasion to remind them of their crimes?”28

  Without apparently realizing that his words confirmed the assertions of his northern antagonists, De Bow quoted approvingly from an item in the Galveston News about a Texas legislator who had criticized the pro-slavery faction in Kansas: “That your right in common with every other citizen, to free opinion, free discussion, and the largest liberty of self-defense, is fully recognized, and will be respected. But there is one subject connected with your course in the Legislature—that of slavery—on which neither you nor any one entertaining your views, will be permitted to appear before the community, in a public manner.… The entire subject of slavery, in all its connections, is forbidden ground, which you shall not invade.”29

  The events in Kansas energized the new Republican Party. Formed in several northern states in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the party sought to broaden its base in advance of the 1856 presidential election. In particular, the Republicans hoped to attract former Whigs, such as Abraham Lincoln, who had feared that the new party’s radicalism on the slavery issue endangered the Union. The Republicans also looked to disaffected northern Know Nothings now as concerned about the threat of the Slave Power as with the threat of immigrants. There were Democrats as well, such as David Wilmot, who could no longer follow a party indifferent to the extension of slavery in the territories.

  The Republicans represented themselves as the antidote to the Slave Power. Though they welcomed support in the South, they moved forward as an avowedly sectional party, attuned not only to northerners’ opposition to slavery in the territories but to their economic interests as well: promoting a homestead act to open the territories to working men and women and their families; a higher tariff to protect the nascent industries of the Northeast and Midwest and the workers and entrepreneurs in those enterprises; and a vigorous program of internal improvements, especially a transcontinental railroad, to knit the far-flung western territories to the eastern seaboard facilitating migration and commerce. While former Know Nothings lent a nativist cast to some local races, by and large, the new party did not endorse anti-immigrant legislation. Instead, recognizing the growing influence of immigrants in American urban life, they appealed to their sense of fairness in keeping the territories white, and in maintaining an economic development program that would enhance opportunities for everyone.

  “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” came at the beginning of the 1856 presidential campaign, a coincidence that only exacerbated sectional tension and further scrambled party affiliation. In northern states, leaders fashioned fusion tickets from the remnants of old parties. In the South, the Democratic Party presented itself as the protector of southern rights, and though the American, or Know Nothing, Party and the moribund Whigs continued to find adherents, especially in border cities, the Democrats increasingly cornered the political market in the cotton states. The fluidity of party politics that characterized the North was much less common in the South. Alexander Stephens abandoned two decades of hostility to the Democratic Party and joined his former enemies. The equality of the South in the Union meant more to him than any other issue. In fact, there really were no other issues; all derived from this basic principle.

  The party switch was more agonizing for Abraham Lincoln. He had rebuffed Republican attempts to “unwhig him,” as he put it in 1854, and he abhorred the nativism of the Know Nothings. But events in Kansas left Lincoln “ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose the slave power.” In May 1856, Lincoln took the plunge and attended the Illinois state convention of the Republican Party.30

  Carl Schurz also faced a difficult decision. Most of his countrymen favored the Democratic Party. The Know Nothings were anathema, and the Whigs had dabbled around the fringes of nativism. Their combination in the new party did not endear the Republicans initially to the German community. But the strong anti-slavery orientation of the Republicans made forty-eighters listen. The party seemed to embody the principles of their revolution more than the political alternatives.

  Walt Whitman was a lifelong Democrat, despite his flirtation with the Free Soilers. He had reveled in the Democrats’ celebration of the individual and the party’s inclusiveness. His poetry was the literary version of Democratic philosophy. The publication in 1855 of Leaves of Grass marked a major event in American literature, though, at the time, this was not apparent. What was obvious, however, was that Leaves of Grass was very different from anything that had come before. Unlike the formal rhymed and metered poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, Whitman’s poems were improvisational and dealt with subjects such as the sensuality of the human body and the excesses of slavery in such vivid imagery that some reviewers condemned the work as obscene. Lincoln, an avid reader of American literature, carried around a dog-eared copy that he hid from his wife, Mary, who scorned it as perverted, though she had not read it.

  What made the sectional divide especially troubling for Whitman was its threat to the Union and its divine mission. Whitman longed for a “Redeemer President,” who would mend the separation and return the nation to its redemptive course. He was not certain if the Republicans could respond to that calling, but he was increasingly sure the Democrats could not.31

  Harriet Beecher Stowe did not take long to throw herself headlong into the Republican cause. Here, at last, was a party dedicated to preserving the freedom of the territories. Even if party leaders equivocated on abolition, at least they were willing to stand up to the Slave Power’s attacks on democracy. From December 1855 to September 1856—a time that spanned both the Kansas incidents and the presidential campaign—Harriet wrote a second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Though less successful both artistically and financially than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the new novel reflected a shift in Harriet’s perspective on slavery, as well as the impact of Kansas and the rise of the Republican Party on her writing.

  Whereas Tom was saintly, Dred, an escaped slave and the purported son of Denmark Vesey, the former slave who led an abortive revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, vows “a day of vengeance” against the slaveholders. Inspired by Old Testament parables of righteousness and revenge, Dred develops his plot. But Milly, a female slave, quoting pacifist passages from the New Testament, persuades Dred to drop his scheme. Dred’s conversion is useless, as whites discover the plot and kill him. While Harriet took special care to depict the South and white southerners evenhandedly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she is now extremely critical of southerners. Harriet also implies that martyrdom, however saintly, will neither impress slaveholders nor weaken slavery. More forceful strategies are necessary.32

  The 1856 election campaign reflected the remarkable transformation that had changed not only American politics but also public opinion. The middle ground continued to shrink. Men such as Lincoln and Stephens sought out party affiliations that would cater to sectional interests even as they did so in the name of the Union. Both men stil
l loved the Union but wondered if it could, or even should, survive in its present state. For Harriet Beecher Stowe, violence now seemed a viable and even necessary alternative. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher shipped guns to Kansas. Ministers and laymen north and south increasingly perceived violence as a policy option.

  The upstart Republicans held their convention in Philadelphia in mid-July in a revivalist fervor reminiscent of the earlier Liberty and Free Soil party gatherings. The delegates framed a platform condemning the “twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy. It would be difficult to sustain an argument that polygamy represented a threat to the American body politic in the mid-1850s. There was no epidemic, current or pending, of men and women seeking multiple partners. As everyone at the time understood, however, the Mormons in Utah Territory espoused, though did not require, polygamy as part of their religious doctrine. Memories of Mormon settlements and the turmoil they generated remained fresh in the minds of midwesterners, a likely constituency for Republican votes. While anti-slavery sentiment varied, few voters were sympathetic to the Mormons.33

  Polygamy was also a code word to mid-nineteenth-century Americans, especially to northerners and especially when paired with slavery. Polygamy attacked traditional family relations, as did slavery. Slavery and polygamy unleashed the same unbridled passions that would destroy religion, republican government, and the family, the basic institutions that held together far-flung Americans in the nineteenth century. Both reflected an absence of personal discipline. Linking slavery to a despised religious movement further discredited the institution and its supporters as beyond the pale of Christian democratic civilization. From there, it was but a few steps to read southerners out of America, as facile as dismissing Indians and Mexicans as vanishing relics of inferior civilizations.