Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  lies in . . . tropical America [where] we may see an empire as powerful and gorgeous as ever was pictured in our dreams of history . . . an empire . . . representing the noble peculiarities of Southern civilization

  84. Walker, The War in Nicaragua, 278.

  85. CG, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 651.

  . . . having control of the two dominant staples of the world's commerce—cotton and sugar. . . . The destiny of Southern civilization is to be consummated in a glory brighter even than that of old.86

  Another Virginian, George Bickley, put this fantasy on an organized basis with his Knights of the Golden Circle, founded in the mid-1850s to promote a "golden circle" of slave states from the American South through Mexico and Central America to the rim of South America, curving northward again through the West Indies to close the circle at Key West. "With this addition to either our system, the Union, or to a Southern Confederacy," wrote Bickley in 1860, "we shall have in our hands the Cotton, Tobacco, Sugar, Coffee, Rice, Corn, and Tea lands of the continent, and the world's great storehouse of mineral wealth."87

  Thus had Thomas Jefferson's Empire for Liberty become transmuted by 1860 into Mississippi Congressman L. Q. C. Lamar's desire to "plant American liberty with southern institutions upon every inch of American soil."88 But the furor over this effort to plant the southern version of liberty as slavery along the Gulf of Mexico took a back seat to the controversy sparked by the effort to plant it in Kansas.

  86. Pollard, Black Diamonds (New York, 1859), 52–53, 108–9.

  87. May, Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 150.

  88. CG, 35 Cong., 1 Sess., 279.

  4

  Slavery, Rum, and Romanism

  I

  The year 1852 turned out to be the last one in which the Whig party contested a presidential election. Millard Fillmore's efforts to enforce the fugitive slave law won him the support of southern Whigs for re-nomination. But the president had alienated antislavery Whigs, especially the Seward faction in Fillmore's own state of New York. Seward favored the nomination of Winfield Scott, a Virginian (but not a slaveholder). The Whig convention presented the curious spectacle of most southern delegates favoring a northern candidate, and vice versa, while many anti-war Whigs of four years earlier once again backed a general who had led American troops to victory in the war these Whigs had opposed. Maneuvers at the convention heightened the impression of Whig stultification. Southerners obtained enough support from northern moderates to adopt a plan pledging to "acquiesce in" the Compromise of 1850 "as a settlement in principle and substance" of the "dangerous and exciting" slavery question. All votes against this plank came from those northern Whigs who provided half of Scott's delegate support. Balloting for a presidential nominee ground through 52 roll calls as Yankee delegates furnished 95 percent of Scott's vote and southern delegates cast 85 percent of Fillmore's. On the fifty-third ballot a dozen southern moderates switched to Scott and put him over the top.1

  1. Potter, Impending Crisis, 232–33; Roy and Jeannette Nichols, "Election of 1852," in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 943–44.

  This denouement dismayed many southern Whigs. Suspecting that Seward had engineered the outcome, they feared a reprise of the Taylor debacle. When Scott's acceptance letter included only a lukewarm endorsement of the platform, they were sure of it. "If we support him," wrote a North Carolinian, "we must expect to constitute a tail to the army of abolitionists in front." Nine southern Whig congressmen led by Alexander Stephens and Robert Toombs announced their refusal to back Scott. As the campaign proceeded, defections of southern Whigs became a stampede. On election day Scott won 35 percent of the popular vote in the lower South (compared with Taylor's 50 percent four years earlier) and carried only Kentucky and Tennessee among the fifteen slave states. In the eleven future Confederate states the Whigs in 1852–53 elected no governors and merely fourteen of sixty-five congressmen while maintaining control of only the Tennessee legislature. Alexander Stephens's pronouncement that "the Whig party is dead" seemed no exaggeration in the lower South.2

  The transmigration of southern Whigs into Democrats was made easier by the increasing friendliness of northern Democrats toward the South. Even the return of Barnburners to the Democratic fold seemed not to hinder this process. The Democratic national convention adopted no fewer than three planks pledging fidelity to the Compromise of 1850, and affirmed that "Congress has no power . . . to interfere with questions of slavery"—except of course to help masters recover fugitives.3 Because of the party rule requiring a two-thirds majority to nominate a president, southern delegates were able to block the candidacies of Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas, whose notions about popular sovereignty made them suspect. But the southerners could not nominate their own candidate, the pliable James Buchanan. Through forty-eight ballots the party remained apparently as deadlocked as the Whigs. On the forty-ninth they nominated dark horse Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire, a former senator and a Mexican War veteran, who was acceptable to all factions and safe on slavery despite his Yankee background. Albert G. Brown of Mississippi considered Pierce "as reliable as Calhoun himself," while a South Carolina fire-eater mused that "a nomination so

  2. William J. Cooper, Jr., The South and the Politics of Slavery 1828–1856 (Baton Rouge, 1978), 330, 343.

  3. Schlesinger, ed., History of Presidential Elections, II, 952.

  favorable to the South had not been anticipated." Going into the campaign more united than in any election since Jackson's day, the Democrats won by a landslide.4

  Pierce fulfilled southern expectations. Although his efforts to acquire Cuba failed, the administration enforced the fugitive slave law vigorously and opened the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30' to slavery. But it did so at great cost to domestic tranquility, to the structure of the Democratic party, and ultimately to the Union itself.

  In March 1854, Anthony Burns escaped from slavery in Virginia and stowed away on a ship to Boston. There he found a job in a clothing store. But the literate Burns made the mistake of writing to his brother, still a slave. Intercepting the letter, their owner learned of Burns's whereabouts and headed north to reclaim his property. A deputy marshal arrested Burns on May 24 and placed him under heavy guard in the federal courthouse. The vigilance committee went into action, sponsoring a Faneuil Hall meeting which resolved that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Suiting action to words, a biracial group of abolitionists led by thirty-year-old Unitarian clergyman Thomas Wentworth Higginson tried to rescue Burns in an attack on the courthouse with axes, revolvers, and a battering ram. Higginson and a black man broke through the door but were clubbed back outside by deputy marshals as a shot rang out and one of the deputies fell dead.

  Appealed to for help, President Pierce ordered several companies of marines, cavalry, and artillery to Boston, where they joined state militia and local police to keep the peace while a federal commissioner determined Burns's fate. "Incur any expense," Pierce wired the district attorney in Boston, "to insure the execution of the law." The president also ordered a revenue cutter to stand by to carry Burns back to Virginia. Knowing that it was futile, vigilance committee lawyers nevertheless tried every legal maneuver they could think of while Bostonians raised money to purchase Burns's freedom. His owner seemed willing to sell, but the U. S. attorney refused to sanction this solution. To vindicate the law

  4. Quotations from Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 334. In addition to carrying all but two slave states, Pierce won every northern state except Vermont and Massachusetts, though he would have lost also Ohio and Connecticut had not the Free Soil party attracted antislavery Whigs away from Scott. With the return of Barnburners to the Democratic party, the Free Soil share of the northern popular vote dropped to 6 percent. Pierce received 51 percent of the national popular vote to Scott's 44 percent. Democrats won control of Congress by more than a two-thirds majority in the H
ouse and a nearly two-thirds margin in the Senate.

  he pushed the case to a successful conclusion. On June 2 the troops marched Burns to the wharf through streets lined with sullen Yankees standing in front of buildings draped in black with the American flag hanging upside down and church bells tolling a dirge to liberty in the cradle of the American Revolution. At the cost of $100,000 (equal to perhaps two million 1987 dollars) the Pierce administration had upheld the majesty of the law.5

  The fallout from this affair radiated widely. "When it was all over; and I was left alone in my office," wrote a heretofore conservative Whig, "I put my face in my hands and wept. I could do nothing less." The textile magnate Amos A. Lawrence said that "we went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists."6 A federal grand jury indicted Higginson, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and four other white and black abolitionists for riot and inciting to riot. After a district judge quashed the first indictment on a technicality, the government dropped the charges because it recognized the impossibility of winning a jury trial in Massachusetts. William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution on the Fourth of July while thousands breathed Amen to his denunciation of this document as a covenant with death. The New England states passed new personal liberty laws that collided in various ways with federal law.7

  Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin also passed stronger personal liberty laws after fugitive slave controversies in those states. The most poignant of these cases involved Margaret Garner, who in January 1856 escaped with her husband and four children from Kentucky to Ohio. When a posse was about to capture them, Margaret seized a kitchen knife, slit

  5. Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Burns (Philadelphia, 1975); Stanley W. Campbell, The Slave Catchers: Enforcement of theFugitive Slave Law 1850–1860 (New York, 1970), 124–32; Philip S. Foner, History of Black Americans from the Compromise of 1850 to the End of the Civil War (West-port, Conn., 1983), 69–77; Tilden G. Edelstein, Strange Enthusiasm: A Life ofThomas Wentworth Higginson (New Haven, 1968), 155–61. A year later a committee in Boston did finally purchase Burns's freedom. He attended Oberlin College for a time before emigrating to Canada, where he died in 1862.

  6. George S. Hilliard to Francis Lieber, June 1, 1854, Francis Lieber Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; Amos Lawrence to Giles Richards, June 1, 1854, quoted in Pease and Pease, The Fugitive Slave Law and Anthony Bums, 43.

  7. Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North 1780–1861 (Baltimore, 1974), 219–20; Campbell, The Slave Catchers, 202–6.

  the throat of one daughter, and tried to kill her other children rather than see them returned to slavery. The state of Ohio requested jurisdiction over Garner to try her for manslaughter, but a federal judge overruled state officials and ordered the Garners returned to their owner. That worthy gentleman promptly sold them down the river to New Orleans. On the way there one of Margaret's other children achieved the emancipation she had sought for him, by drowning after a steamboat collision.8

  Even more important than the fugitive slave issue in arousing northern militancy was the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed by Congress in May 1854. Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.

  The genesis of Kansas-Nebraska lay in the same impulse that had propelled Americans westward from the beginning. Restless settlers and land speculators had begun to cast covetous eyes on the fertile soil of the Kansas and Platte river valleys. By 1852, also, the idea of a transcontinental railroad through the region had become the dream of entrepreneurs, politicians, and frontiersmen alike. But until the government extracted land cessions from the Indians and organized the area as a territory, the region could not be surveyed and farmers could not settle there. Everyone talked about a railroad to California, growled a Missouri congressman, but "in the name of God, how is the railroad to be made if you will never let people live on the lands through which the road passes?"9 Southerners were in no hurry to organize this territory, for it lay north of 36° 30' where slavery was excluded by the Missouri Compromise. Besides, they preferred a southern route for a Pacific railroad through the already organized territory of New Mexico, with New Orleans as its eastern terminus.

  It so happened that two Illinois Democrats—William A. Richardson and Stephen A. Douglas—were chairmen respectively of the House and Senate committees on territories. Both were champions of Young America's manifest destiny to expand ever westward. A large investor in Chicago real estate, Douglas had enhanced the value of his property by securing a federal land grant for a railroad from that city to Mobile. Perhaps hoping to repeat the scenario from Chicago to San Francisco,

  8. Foner, History of Black Americans, 87–91; Campbell, The Slave Catchers, 144–47.

  9. CG, 32 Cong., 2 Sess., 560.

  Douglas and Richardson in 1853 reported bills to organize Nebraska territory embracing most of the remaining portion of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30'. The House quickly passed the measure, but opposition from southern senators tabled it in March 1853. To get his bill enacted, Douglas needed the support of at least a half-dozen southern senators. And they let him know exactly what it was going to cost.10

  The most powerful Senate bloc was a quartet of southerners who boarded together at a house on F Street. This "F Street Mess," as they called themselves, consisted of James M. Mason and Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia, Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, and David R. Atchi-son of Missouri—chairmen respectively of the foreign relations, finance, and judiciary committees, and president pro tern. In this last capacity Atchison was next in line for the presidency because Pierce's vice president had died during his second month in office. Intemperate, profane, and bellicose, Atchison was the most outspoken defender of southern rights in the Senate. His slaveholding constituents opposed the organization of Nebraska territory, for Missouri would thenceforth "be surrounded by free territory. . . . With the emissaries of abolitionists around us . . . this species of property would become insecure." Atchison announced that he would see Nebraska "sink in hell" before voting to organize it as free soil. We must "extend the institutions of Missouri over the territory," pledged a meeting addressed by Atchison, "at whatever sacrifice of blood or treasure." From the F Street Mess the word came to Douglas: if he wanted Nebraska he must repeal the ban on bondage there and place "slaveholder and non-slaveholder upon terms of equality."11

  Douglas knew that such action would "raise a hell of a storm" in the North. So he first tried to outflank the Missouri Compromise instead of

  10. The literature on the origins of the Kansas-Nebraska Act is large and contentious. For a useful summary of much of it, see Roy F. Nichols, "The Kansas-Nebraska Act: A Century of Historiography," MVHR, 43 (1956), 187–212. The most lucid account of the origins of this legislation is Potter, Impending Crisis, 145–76. My account has also drawn upon Nevins, Ordeal, II, 88–121; Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis ofthe House Divided: An Interpretation of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Garden City, N.Y., 1959), 104–80; Robert W. Johannsen, Stephen A. Douglas (New York, 1973), 374–434; Roy F. Nichols, Franklin Pierce (Philadelphia, 1958), 319–24; James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia, 1969), 21–57; and Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York, 1978), 178–87.

  11. Quotations from Nevins, Ordeal, II, 92–93; and Rawley, Race and Politics, 28.

  repealing it. His initial version of the Nebraska bill in January 1854 reproduced the language of the Utah and New Mexico legislation four years earlier, providing that Nebraska, when admitted as a state or states, would come in "with or without slavery, as their constitutions may prescribe."12 But for southerners this did not meet the case. If the Missouri Compromise pr
evailed during the territorial stage, slavery could never gain a foothold. Atchison turned the screws, whereupon Douglas discovered that a "clerical error" had omitted a section of the bill stating that "all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories . . . are to be left to the people residing therein."13 But this was not yet good enough, for the Missouri Compromise still lived despite the implicit circumvention of it by the clerical-error clause. So Douglas took the fateful step. He added an explicit repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30'. More than that, his new version of the bill organized two territories—Nebraska west of Iowa, and Kansas west of Missouri. This looked like a device to reserve Kansas for slavery and Nebraska for freedom, especially since the climate and soil of eastern Kansas were similar to those of the Missouri River basin in Missouri, where most of the slaves in that state were concentrated.

  This did indeed provoke a hell of a storm that made the debates of 1850 look like a gentle shower. The first clouds blew up from the Pierce administration itself. The president feared the political consequences of repudiating a covenant sanctified by thirty-four years of national life. Except for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and Secretary of the Navy James Dobbin of North Carolina, the cabinet opposed the repeal clause. The administration drafted a vague alternative that would have referred the whole question of slavery in the territories to the Supreme Court. But this did not satisfy the F Street Mess. With Davis and Douglas they pried their way into the White House on Sunday, January 22 (Pierce disliked doing business on the Sabbath), and confronted the president with an ultimatum: endorse repeal or lose the South. Pierce surrendered. Moreover, he agreed to make the revised Kansas-Nebraska bill "a test of party orthodoxy."14

  Northern Democrats and Whigs were stunned by Douglas's bill. But Free Soilers were not surprised. It was just what they had expected from the "Slave Power." And they were ready with a response to rally the