Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  19. Malin, John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-six, contains an exhaustive account of the various filters through which contemporaries and later historians viewed and distorted the Pottawatomie massacre.

  held a national convention in February with hopes of healing its sectional breach of the previous year. Some of the northern delegates who had walked out in June 1855 returned. But once more an alliance of southerners with New York and Pennsylvania conservatives defeated a resolution calling for repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Seventy Yankee delegates thereupon exited to organize a "North American" party. The remaining delegates nominated Millard Fillmore as the American party candidate for president.

  The North Americans called a convention to meet a few days before the Republican gathering in June. Their intent was to nominate an antislavery nativist whom the Republicans would be compelled to endorse in order to avoid splitting the antislavery vote. But the outcome demonstrated the impossibility of the nativist tail wagging the antislavery dog. Once again Nathaniel Banks, who had just consolidated Republican control of the House by his election as speaker, served as a stalking horse for Republican absorption of North Americans. Still in good standing among nativists, Banks allowed his name to be put in nomination as the North American presidential candidate. After the Republicans nominated their candidate, Banks would withdraw in his favor, leaving the North Americans little choice but to endorse the Republican nominee. Several delegates to the North American convention were privy to this plot. It worked just as planned. Banks received the nomination, whereupon all eyes turned to Philadelphia, where the Republicans convened their first national convention.

  Republican leaders like ex-Whig Thurlow Weed of New York and ex-Democrat Francis Preston Blair of Maryland were shrewd men. Recognizing that old loyalties would inhibit some political veterans from attending a "Republican" conclave, they did not use that label in the call for a convention. Instead they invited delegates "without regard to past political differences or divisions, who are opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise [and] to the policy of the present Administration." The platform and candidate would have to be carefully crafted to attract as many and alienate as few voters as possible. Especially delicate was the task of winning both nativists and immigrants (at least Protestant immigrants). Almost as difficult was the fusion of former Whigs and Democrats. The platform pursued these goals by concentrating on issues that united disparate elements and ignoring or equivocating on those that might divide them. Four-fifths of the platform dealt with slavery; it damned the administration's policy in Kansas, asserted the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories, called for admission of Kansas as a free state, denounced the Ostend Manifesto, and quoted the Declaration of Independence as authority for free-soil principles. Two brief planks echoed the ancient Whig program of government financing for internal improvements by endorsing such aid for a transcontinental railroad and for rivers and harbors improvements—projects that would also attract Democratic support in areas benefitting from them (Pierce had vetoed three rivers and harbors bills). The final plank, relating to nativ-ism, was a masterpiece of ambiguity. By opposing all legislation that might restrict "liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens," the platform seemed to rebuke nativism. But by specifying "citizens" it apparently did not preclude the Know-Nothing plan (which Republicans had no real intention of carrying out) to lengthen the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. And "liberty of conscience" was also a code phrase for Protestants who resented Catholic attempts to ban the reading of the King James Bible in public schools.20

  Because the Republican party was new, its platform was more important than usual in American politics. But of course the candidate would do even more to shape the party's image. Seward and Chase were the most prominent possibilities. But each had made enemies among groups that Republicans needed to attract: nativists, antislavery Democrats, or conservative Whigs. Besides, Seward and his adviser Thurlow Weed doubted the chances for Republican victory in 1856 and preferred to wait for better odds in 1860. The most "available" man, precisely because he had almost no political experience and therefore no record to defend, was John C. Frémont. The dashing image of this "Pathfinder" of the West was a political asset. Frémont would win votes, predicted one Republican strategist, "from the romance of his life and position."21 His marriage to the headstrong Jessie Benton, daughter of the legendary Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton, who was an enemy of the Atchison faction in Missouri, provided Frémont with important connections among ex-Democrats. His role in promoting a free California in 1849 and his endorsement of a free Kansas in 1856 gave him good antislavery credentials. Frémont thus won the nomination on the first

  20. The call for the convention is quoted in Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 864; the platform is reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History ofAmerican Presidential Elections 1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1039–41.

  21. Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976), 283.

  ballot. Ex-Whigs received a sop with the selection of New Jersey's William Dayton for vice president.

  Dayton's nomination threatened to upset the delicate scheme to secure North American endorsement of the Republican candidates. Banks declined the North American nomination as planned, but in return for backing Frémont the nativists expected Republican endorsement of their vice-presidential nominee. When the Republicans refused, North Americans made angry noises for a time but finally accepted Dayton. Their endorsement of the Republican ticket required them to swallow an extra-large slice of humble pie, for Frémont's father had been a Catholic and the Pathfinder had been married by a priest. False rumors circulated during the campaign that Frémont himself was a secret Catholic. Some embittered North Americans, especially in Pennsylvania, vowed to support Fillmore, but that candidate offered them cold comfort because he was only a nominal Know Nothing and his main backing came from southern ex-Whigs who could not bring themselves to affiliate with Democrats.

  As an organized political movement, nativism went into a long eclipse after 1856. Hostility to Romanism (as well as Rum) remained a subterranean current within Republicanism. But for mainstream Republicans the Slave Power, not Catholicism, was the danger that threatened American liberties. "You are here today," the party chairman had told delegates to the Republican convention, "to give direction to a movement which is to decide whether the people of the United States are to be hereafter and forever chained to the present national policy of the extension of slavery."22

  In all respects the Democratic candidate was Frémont's opposite. The Pathfinder at forty-three was the youngest presidential nominee thus far; James Buchanan at sixty-five was one of the oldest. While the colorful Frémont and his ambitious wife had made numerous enemies as well as friends over the years, the dour Presbyterian bachelor Buchanan seemed colorless and safe. While Frémont had served in public office only three months as senator from California, Buchanan had held so many offices that he was known as "Old Public Functionary"—congressman for a decade, senator for another decade, five years in the diplomatic service

  22. Nevins, Ordeal, II, 460. For an account of nativism in the 1856 election that emphasizes Republican ambivalence, see William E. Gienapp, "Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North before the Civil War," JAH, 72 (1985), 541–48.

  as minister to Russia and to Britain, and four years as secretary of state. But Buchanan shared one political attribute with Frémont—availability. He had been out of the country as minister to Britain during the Kansas-Nebraska furor. Unlike Pierce and Douglas, the other candidates for the nomination, he carried no taint of responsibility for the mess in Kansas. Buchanan also came from Pennsylvania, which was shaping up as the crucial battleground of the election.

  At the Democratic national convention Pierce and Douglas drew much of their support from southern delegates grateful for their role
in repealing the Missouri Compromise. Most of Buchanan's votes came from the North—an irony, for Buchanan would turn out to be more pro-southern than either of his rivals. As the balloting went on through more than a dozen roll calls, Pierce and then Douglas withdrew for the sake of harmony, enabling Buchanan to win on the seventeenth ballot. Reversing the proportions of the Republican platform, the Democratic document devoted little more than a fifth of its verbiage to the slavery issue. It endorsed popular sovereignty and condemned the Republicans as a "sectional party" inciting "treason and armed resistance to law in the Territories." Other planks in the platform reasserted old Jacksonian chestnuts: state's rights; a government of limited powers; no federal aid to internal improvements; no national bank so "dangerous to our republican institutions and the liberties of the people."23

  The campaign evolved into two separate contests: Buchanan vs. Fill-more in the South and Buchanan vs. Frémont in the North. Electioneering was lackluster in most parts of the South because the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Though Fillmore won 44 percent of the popular vote in slave states, he carried only Maryland. Frémont won all of the upper North—New England plus Michigan and Wisconsin—with a lopsided margin of 60 percent of the popular vote to 36 percent for Buchanan and 4 percent for Fillmore. Large Republican majorities in the Yankee regions of upstate New York, northern Ohio, and northern Iowa ensured a Frémont victory in those states as well. The vital struggle took place in the lower-North states of Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, and New Jersey. Pennsylvania and any of the others, or all of them except Pennsylvania, when added to the almost solid South would give Buchanan the presidency.

  Democrats concentrated their efforts on the lower North, where they presented an image of Union-saving conservatism as an alternative to

  23. Schlesinger, ed., History of Presidential Elections, II, 1035–39.

  Republican extremism. The old issues of banks, internal improvements, and the tariff seemed of little interest in this election. Even the newer ones of temperance and nativism affected only regional pockets. Democrats of course went through the motions of branding Republicans as neo-Whig promoters of banks and protective tariffs or as bigoted heirs of the Know Nothings. But the salient issues were slavery, race, and above all Union. On these matters northern Democrats could take their stand not necessarily as defenders of slavery but as protectors of the Union and the white race against the disunionist Black Republicans.

  These Yankee fanatics were a sectional party, charged Democrats. That was quite true. In only four slave states (all in the upper South) did Frémont tickets appear, and the Republicans won considerably less than one percent of the vote in these states. If Frémont won the presidency by carrying a solid North, warned Democrats, the Union would crumble. As Buchanan himself put it, "the Black Republicans must be . . . boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be re-iterated again and again."24 Southerners helped along the cause by threatening to secede if the Republicans won. "The election of Frémont," declared Robert Toombs, "would be the end of the Union, and ought to be." When the September state elections in Maine went overwhelmingly Republican, Governor Henry Wise of Virginia put his militia on alert and wrote privately: "If Frémont is elected there will be a revolution." Senator James Mason of Virginia added that the South "should not pause but proceed at once to 'immediate, absolute and eternal separation.' "25

  These warnings proved effective. Many old-line Whigs—including the sons of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—announced their support for Buchanan as the only way to preserve the Union. Even Frémont's father-in-law Thomas Hart Benton, despite his hatred of the Democratic leadership, urged his followers to vote for Buchanan. Other Whig conservatives in crucial states like New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois voted for Fillmore (whose campaign the Democrats secretly helped to finance), thereby dividing the anti-Democratic vote and helping place the latter two states in the Democratic column.

  Not only would a Republican victory destroy the Union, said Democrats, but by disturbing slavery and race relations it would also menace

  24. Buchanan quoted in Roy F. Nichols and Philip S. Klein, "Election of 1856," in Schlesinger, ed., History of Presidential Elections, II, 1028.

  25. Toombs quoted in Potter, Impending Crisis, 262; Wise and Mason quoted in Roy F. Nichols, The Disruption of American Democracy (New York, 1948), 44.

  white supremacy in both North and South. "Black Republicans," an Ohio Democratic newspaper told voters, intended to "turn loose . . . millions of negroes, to elbow you in the workshops, and compete with you in the fields of honest labor." Democrats in Pittsburgh pronounced the main issue to be "the white race or the negro race" because "the one aim of the party that supports Frémont" was "to elevate the African race in this country to complete equality of political and economic condition with the white man." Indiana Democrats organized a parade which included young girls in white dresses carrying banners inscribed "Fathers, save us from nigger husbands!"26

  These charges of disunionism and racial equality placed Republicans on the defensive. In vain did they respond that the real disunionists were the southerners threatening to secede. In vain also did Republicans insist that they had no intention to "elevate the African race to complete equality with the white man." On the contrary, said a good many Republicans, the main purpose of excluding slavery from the territories was to protect white settlers from degrading competition with black labor. To refute the charge of egalitarian abolitionism, the free-state "constitution" of Kansas contained a provision excluding free blacks as well as slaves. "It is not so much in reference to the welfare of the Negro that we are here," Lyman Trumbull told the Republican convention, but "for the protection of the laboring whites, for the protection of ourselves and our liberties." Abolitionists like Lewis Tappan and William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Republican party precisely because it "had no room for the slave or the free man of color. . . . Its morality . . . is'bounded by 36 deg. 30 min. . . . It is a complexional party, exclusively for white men, not for all men."27

  But Republican denials failed to convince thousands of voters in the lower North that the party was not, after all, a "Black Republican" communion ruled by "a wild and fanatical sentimentality toward the black race."28 Democrats could point to many Republicans who had spoken in behalf of equal rights for blacks. They noted that most men now calling themselves Republicans had voted recently for the enfranchisement

  26. Quotations from Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856 (Kent, Ohio, 1983), 232; Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 187; Rawley, Race and Politics, 167.

  27. Quotations from Rawley, Race and Politics, 151.

  28. Frémont: His Supporters and Their Record, a Democratic campaign pamphlet reprinted in Schlesinger, ed., History of Presidential Elections, II, 1071.

  of blacks in New York, Wisconsin, and elsewhere, and that the Massachusetts legislators who had ended school segregation now backed Frémont. Democrats could also point to endorsements of Republicans by prominent black men like Frederick Douglass, who declared that Frémont's election "will prevent the establishment of Slavery in Kansas, overthrow Slave Rule in the Republic . . . and [put] the mark of national condemnation on Slavery."29 Next to the taint of disunion, the tarbrush of black equality was the biggest obstacle to Republican success in large parts of the North.

  Republicans knew that to win they must attack, not defend. They perceived the Achilles heel of the opposition to be subservience to the slave power. "The slave drivers," declared an Ohio Republican, "seek to make our country a great slave empire: to make slave breeding, slave selling, slave labor, slave extension, slave policy, and slave dominion, FOREVER THE CONTROLLING ELEMENTS OF OUR GOVERNMENT." A Republican victory, predicted a meeting in Buffalo, would ensure "for our country a government of the people, instead of a government by an oligarchy; a government maintaining before the world the rights of men rather than the privileges
of masters."30

  The precise point of Republican attack was Kansas. Shall I speak of "the tariff, National Bank, and internal improvements, and the controversies of the Whigs and Democrats?" asked Seward rhetorically in a campaign speech. "No," he answered, "they are past and gone. What then, of Kansas? . . . Ah yes, that is the theme . . . and nothing else." A lifelong Democrat who decided to vote Republican explained that "had the Slave Power been less insolently aggressive, I would have been content to see it extend . . . but when it seeks to extend its sway by fire & sword [in Kansas] I am ready to say hold, enough!" He told a Democratic friend who tried to persuade him to return to the party: "Reserve no place for me. I shall not come back."31

  The campaign generated a fervor unprecedented in American politics. Young Republicans marched in huge torchlight parades chanting

  29. Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, 4 vols. (New York, 1950–55), II, 401.

  30. Quotations from Maizlish, Triumph of Sectionalism, 230; Holt, Political Crisis of 1850s, 197.

  31. Rawley, Race and Politics, 160–61; Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 1069–70.

  a hypnotic slogan: "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!" Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found it "difficult to sit still with so much excitement in the air." A veteran politician in Indiana marveled: "Men, Women & Children all seemed to be out, with a kind of fervor, I have never witnessed before in six Pres. Elections in which I have taken an active part. . . . In '40, all was jubilant—Now there is little effervescence—but a solemn earnestness that is almost painful."32 The turnout of eligible voters in the North was an extraordinary 83 percent. The northern people seemed to be "on the tiptoe of Revolution," wrote one awestruck politician, while a journalist confirmed that "the process now going on in the politics of the United States is a Revolution."33