The pairing of slavery and polygamy also highlighted the threat of both to a modern America, a nation devoted to progress, technology, and self-improvement. These “relics of barbarism” harked back to a dark (and Catholic) past when superstition and dependence bedeviled mankind. They were, in a word, un-American, at least the America posited by the new party and its followers.
The Republicans nominated Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont as their first presidential candidate, passing over more prominent names such as New York’s William H. Seward and Ohio’s Salmon P. Chase. Frémont’s selection reflected both the fledgling party’s attempt to broaden its appeal in the North and the tried-and-true Whig formula of nominating a military hero for the presidency. His lack of political experience—he was not a member of the party—placed him above the dirty fray of politics. Frémont’s greatest asset was his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of Missouri’s former Democratic senator and congressman Thomas Hart Benton. Lincoln later called her “quite a female politician.” She managed her husband’s campaign, ghostwrote his rare position papers, and advised the political novice not to say a word. Frémont, handsome and youthful, also represented the new party’s appeal to the West, a region that held a special place in the American imagination. For a party focused on keeping the West white and free, a western candidate made sense. The Pathfinder, as Frémont was known, had helped create the West, both in image and in fact. Here was a new party with a new man from a new place to bring a new day to America.34
The Republican platform reflected the party’s origins as an amalgam of anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs, and northern Know Nothings. The platform demanded the exclusion of slavery from the territories and the admission of Kansas as a free state, though in deference to conservative former Whigs, it did not call for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.
The Democrats turned away from likely candidates out of necessity. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, followed closely by the clashes in Kansas and in the Senate, had alienated many northern Democrats against both President Pierce and Stephen A. Douglas. Facing a northern revolt and southern steadfastness against any candidate who would not support pro-slavery interests in the territories, the party turned to Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan. His greatest virtue was that he had been out of the country the previous four years serving as ambassador to Great Britain. He had no established position on the slavery question. Southerners accepted him as electable. Northern Democrats hoped for the best. A blank slate was better than anyone tainted by either the Douglas bill or the war in Kansas. Buchanan was hardly a political novice, though. Unlike Frémont, Buchanan had been involved in politics for more than thirty years by the time of his nomination. He had cultivated a reputation as a friend of the South, and his closest friends were southerners. Tall and white-haired, he exuded an air of experience, though, according to one observer, he had the countenance of a “well-preserved mummy.”35
The Know Nothing movement began to disintegrate as the slavery issue took precedence. The Know Nothings split into northern and southern factions, with many in the northern wing declaring for the Republican Party despite false rumors that Frémont was a Roman Catholic. It was a shocking denouement for a party that just one short year earlier had scored significant electoral successes in several major northern and border cities, trading on the immigration issue as a primary concern of native-born urbanites. All they could muster from their shattered convention was the nomination of former president Millard Fillmore, who, like his Republican counterpart, was not even a member of the party whose standard he carried.
With the Democratic Party as the only national political organization in the race, the presidential campaign of 1856 unfolded as a series of local and regional contests directed at specific audiences, primarily in the North and in the competitive border states. The Democrats would prevail overwhelmingly in the Lower South. In the North, the Democrats tried simultaneously to shore up their immigrant base by noting the connections between the Republicans and the erstwhile Know Nothings, and to appeal to evangelicals by intimating that Frémont had received a Catholic education, had studied for the priesthood, or was himself a secret Roman Catholic. Claims also surfaced alleging that Frémont and New York’s Archbishop John Hughes had, on occasion, staggered drunkenly through the streets of the city at night on their way home from evening mass. The circumstantial evidence was sufficient for Democratic papers to cry out that Frémont was “the instrument of vice, and the foe of God and of Freedom.” Punning on the Republican declaration of “Free Soil and Frémont,” Democratic editors quipped, “Free Love and Frémont.”36
Democrats also denounced the meddling of evangelicals in politics. The party initiated a new publication, Political Priestcraft Exposed, to promote this connection and unfurled a large banner in lower Manhattan portraying a priest standing on a Bible with a revolver in one hand and a rifle in the other, bearing the caption “Beecher’s Command—kill each other with Sharp’s Rifles.” It remains unknown what Lyman Beecher thought of his favorite son got up in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest.37
The Democrats played both sides of the religious aisle because the sectional crisis had energized northern churches, most of which had remained neutral over the issue of slavery, as a frustrated Harriet Beecher Stowe noted time and again in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and especially with events in Kansas and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner, more evangelical ministers began to speak out on political issues, justifying their position by emphasizing the moral questions these issues raised.
The Democrats also cast the election as a referendum on the Union, especially in the North. A Republican victory, they charged, would assuredly precipitate a secessionist movement in the South. Although the Republicans disavowed abolitionism, Democrats intimated that the party’s radical fringe would have greater influence in a sectional crisis, further polarizing the nation and precipitating both a race war and a civil war. Widely circulated comments by southern Democrats confirmed this view. Virginia’s Democratic governor, Henry A. Wise, declared that a Republican victory “would be an open, overt proclamation of public war.” Georgia’s Robert Toombs vowed that the “election of Frémont would be the end of the Union, and ought to be.”38
The importance of evangelical imagery in the political campaigns of the major parties was especially evident among the Republicans, the heirs of the revivalist free-soil movement. A participant in the party convention allowed that the gathering resembled a “Methodist conference rather than a political convention,” and another characterized the party platform as “God’s revealed Word.” Delegates concluded the convention with a rousing chorus of “The Frémont Crusader’s Song”: “We’ve truth on our side / We’ve God for our guide.”39
The Republicans’ campaign erased any line between religion and politics. Churches became party gathering places; ministers stumped for the party’s candidates and even served as poll watchers. Frémont and his wife capped the campaign on election eve by attending the “Church of the Holy Rifles,” as evangelicals proudly called Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. The congregation gave the couple a rousing ovation.40
The ubiquity of religious rhetoric and imagery in the Republican campaign, however, further polarized an already divided Union. One minister depicted the upcoming election as “a decisive struggle … between freedom and Slavery, truth and falsehood, justice and oppression, God and the devil.” The Republican faithful chimed in with an Election Day spiritual: “Think that God’s eye is on you; / Let not your faith grow dim; / For each vote cast for Frémont / Is a vote cast for Him!”41
Away from the pulpit, Republican campaigners sometimes found tough going in the North. A portion of the northern electorate perceived the Republicans as a gilded version of the radical anti-slavery parties of the 1840s, promoting racial equality and emancipation to the detriment of the white population, an association the Democrats exploited. As Lincoln stumped for the tic
ket in Illinois, he confronted hecklers at numerous places throughout the state. The Democratic press charged him with “niggerism.”42
Buchanan and the Democrats emerged victorious. The only national party had won a national election. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and California voted for Buchanan, who swept the Lower South. Buchanan’s victory, though, was narrow in these northern states; the Republicans performed remarkably well considering it was the first time they had fielded a presidential candidate. They had achieved a “victorious defeat” and eagerly looked forward to good prospects of prying at least Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Illinois from the Democratic column in 1860.43
The South had not yet lapsed into one-party politics. Fillmore garnered 40 percent of the popular vote in the South but won only the state of Maryland. He fared poorly in the Lower South. The states that had the greatest stake in slavery voted solidly Democratic.
Frémont and Fillmore combined outpolled Buchanan in the popular vote, 2.2 million votes to 1.8 million. The Democratic candidate achieved a majority in the electoral college, however, primarily as a result of his strong showing in the South. The results were not comforting for southerners. An upstart avowedly anti-slavery party had carried eleven free states.
The Republicans, except for a radical fringe, loved the Union as much as the Democrats did. The issue was never union or disunion but the nature of the national compact. The Republicans believed that the preservation of the Union was inseparable from the founding ideals and that those ideals were incompatible with the institution of slavery. They perceived a dynamic and prosperous nation and welcomed the changes that flowed all around them, from the settlement of the West to the peopling of the great cities of the East. They believed that slavery, and particularly slaveholders—the Slave Power—impeded both the operation of American ideals and the fulfillment of the nation’s great potential. Republicans also agreed that the United States could never fulfill its role as a beacon to the world as long as it sustained the institution of slavery. Most Republicans were not abolitionists because they were constitutionalists. The law of the land was the law of the land. But the territories were another matter.
The Democrats, and more particularly the southern Democrats, cherished the Union as well. They perceived no contradiction between slavery and America’s founding precepts. Many of the Founding Fathers, after all, had owned slaves, and although the word “slavery” never appears in the Constitution, the basis of representation and the return of fugitives clearly implied the Founders’ tolerance of the institution. Besides, the nation had existed for nearly seventy years as a blend of free states and slave states, and during this time America had attained a continental empire, influence around the world, and untold prosperity. It would be an overstatement to declare that the Republicans looked to the Union of the future, and the Democrats, particularly the southern Democrats, perceived the Union from the perspective of the founding, but if northerners marched confidently into the future, southerners entered tomorrow with trepidation.
Abraham Lincoln retired to his law practice once again. Alexander Stephens, buoyed by the election of Buchanan, looked forward to working with the new administration and reducing sectional animosity in Congress and the nation. President-elect Buchanan spent the days before his inauguration settling his cabinet picks, a majority of whom were southerners, and in discussing various points of law with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland.
Out on the Plains, Kansas remained on political tenterhooks, and bands of Lakota Sioux vowed to continue their way of life. The young warrior Light Hair became proficient with bow and arrow. One day, he joined his father on a routine raiding party against the Omaha, seizing livestock, an increasingly necessary activity as the buffalo dwindled. Light Hair claimed his first kill in the battle—a young Omaha woman—an act that earned him derision from his peers.
A year or so later, about the time James Buchanan took the oath of office as president, Light Hair killed two men in a raid on another tribe. In this skirmish he had demonstrated skill and courage, and soon all in camp talked about his bravery. Light Hair’s father, a respected medicine man, decided it was time for his son to receive a name more in keeping with a Sioux warrior. In a brief but moving religious ceremony attended by the elders following a tradition as old as the wind that blew across the Plains, the tribe bestowed a new name on Light Hair. Henceforth, the land, his people, and his gods would know him as Crazy Horse.
CHAPTER 6
REVIVAL
THE MEN, somber-faced and silent, decked out in the urban middle-class uniform of black broadcloth and white shirts, ascended the wooden staircase to a large, sparsely furnished room. They stood or took the few chairs, opened their Bibles to pray, spoke of their conversion, and begged for forgiveness. They sang a hymn and went back down the stairs and out into the street crowded with lunchtime shoppers and businessmen purposefully headed somewhere. The worshipers had skipped lunch to read God’s word and sing His praises in the fellowship of other men. It was autumn in New York, and the chill air hinted at winter’s arrival.1
The streets seemed more crowded now than a week or a month ago: scruffy children with their hands out; beggars beseeching a penny or a piece of bread. An economic depression, called a “Panic,” had halted prosperity with a thunderclap of vengeance. Wild speculation in western lands and railroads, the bane of frontier regions, had infested eastern financial centers. Rationality succumbed to the fever. Was not progress unending? Was not gold flowing from California? Never mind that the value of railroad stock reflected the hopes of promoters much more than the value of their railroads. A ship carrying millions in gold bullion from California to back the paper currency financing the fever sank. A bank failed. Then others, suddenly chastened, began to call in loans, and the call fell on deaf ears. British banks withdrew their funds from New York banks. Manufacturers could no longer fuel their expansion with borrowed capital as lenders closed their books, and then their doors. Inventories piled up; workers were dismissed; and the misery mounted with the cold weather. It had all happened so quickly: “in broad daylight and in fair weather, the blast came, in obedience to its own laws of existence and motion.”2
The winter of 1857–58 would be hard. Already, children were dying in the squalid Irish warrens of lower Manhattan, and the poor in other cities would soon feel the harsh blast of a most miserable winter. Few could afford enough food, and fewer still coal to keep warm. Contemporary sources estimated that anywhere from 30,000 to 100,000 people lost their jobs in New York alone; 40,000 in Philadelphia; and 20,000 in Chicago. As the ripples of default spread out from Gotham, few escaped the Panic’s impact. Carl Schurz’s career as a real estate speculator and rising businessman in small-town Wisconsin came to an abrupt end. Facing severe financial embarrassment, the loss of his property, and even the ability to provide food for his family, Schurz took to the lecture circuit, eking out a living, studying law at night, hoping a career change would alter his fortunes. New York’s Journal of Commerce, whose columns once touted new stock offerings, incredible inventions, and surefire advice on amassing fortunes, now proffered this poetic nostrum: “Steal awhile away from Wall Street and every worldly care / And spend an hour about mid-day in humble, hopeful prayer.”3
That this should be happening in America’s greatest city seemed all the more incredible. By 1857 Americans had come to understand the fragility of their democratic institutions; now they confronted the frailty of their dreams as embodied in the nation’s burgeoning cities. The city was as much a destination for young men and women of ambition as the West. And like the West, the young nation’s freewheeling spirit permeated the chock-a-block offices and residences of New York.
As America’s cities transitioned from commercial entrepôts to diverse centers of trade, industry, and services in the 1840s, they forged a national economy that sustained unprecedented economic growth and energy. Walt Whitman, whose poetry mimicked the brashness of the city, liked n
othing better than to stroll down Broadway, his hat cocked at a rakish angle, with a flower in his buttonhole and a cane swinging by his side, to revel in the myriad sights and sounds of a metropolis that seemingly changed before his eyes and ears: “The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of the promenaders, / The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor …/ The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of the rous’d mobs.”4
Such excitement was not for everyone, and the city began a geographic sorting-out process to shield those who could afford a quiet residence from those who could not, and to group like activities together for efficiency and profit—here a retail area, there an industrial enclave, and further away a middle-class residential neighborhood. The city characterized by eclectic land uses, a livery stable next to a dry goods shop, on top of which residences were located, was disappearing. A writer in Harper’s in the 1850s complained that New York “is never the same city for a dozen years altogether,” and that anyone born there forty years ago would “find nothing, absolutely nothing, of the New York he knew.” New Yorkers swarmed up the narrow island as soon as and even faster than developers could plat lots. “How this city marches northward!” marveled attorney George Templeton Strong in 1850.5
New York’s growth was nothing short of astonishing, not only by American but also by global standards. Between 1800 and 1850, Manhattan grew by 750 percent, the highest rate of urban growth in the world during that period. Immigrants from Germany and Ireland, raw farm boys like Walt Whitman, and hopeful girls and their families from small towns streamed into the nation’s metropolis until New York came to be the synonym for a dynamic America: “the great city of New York wields more of the destinies of this great nation than five times the population of any other portion of the country.”6
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