by Conrad Black
Of the 1852 Democratic contenders for president, Douglas and Cass, though worrisome, would have been better than Pierce and Buchanan, yet Pierce and Buchanan were the next presidential nominees. Scott and even Fillmore (and certainly Webster, had he lived) would have been better than Pierce and Buchanan, but in seeking obscurity of views and therefore comparative invulnerability from steadily angrier factions, the all-conquering Democratic Party fell into the hands of people whose views were indiscernible, not because they were calculatedly subtle and enigmatic but because they didn’t really have any fixed point of conviction to work from and had no idea how to navigate the dangers that loomed at every hand. The baton of leadership had passed from the clever and ferocious Jackson to the cunning Van Buren and Polk, to the palsied hands of Pierce, and would go on to the equally incapable Buchanan.
Van Buren was all tactics and no strategy. Polk was a very astute tactician and a brilliant strategist. Pierce and Buchanan had no tactical or strategic skill. Jackson, Clay, Webster, and Polk were now dead, and Lincoln had not yet arisen. The descent to insurrection and civil war would now enter its last act. America was sleepwalking toward the edge of a cliff.
9. KANSAS AND NEBRASKA
The time bomb in the Compromise of 1850, in the impetuous grip of Douglas, began to sizzle ominously when Douglas presented the Kansas-Nebraska Act in January 1854. This measure adopted the principle of “squatter-sovereignty,” or “popular sovereignty,” leaving it to the territories themselves to determine, when they had the population necessary to be credible as states, whether they wished slavery within their own borders or not. This not only invited extreme friction as partisans of both sides jostled for the local majority, it explicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise line of 36°30 and agitated the North while whetting the appetite of the South by opening the specter (or to the slave states, the prospect) of slavery spreading all over the country, and the entire United States being dragged backward, contra-historically, into a dark age that would degrade and fragment all the proud claims of the founders of the republic based on the “inalienable rights” and “self-evident truths” that “all men are created equal.” It had been enough of a stretch to keep this majestic canard going while over 10 percent of the whole population were slaves, but this was a mortal threat to the collective political self-esteem of the majority, who may not have been overly concerned with the fate of individual African Americans in bondage but were not prepared to be thought of, by themselves or anyone else, as believers in the backward malignancy of slave-holding. The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed after three months of bitter debate, formally renouncing any congressional or federal oversight of slavery.
Stephen A. Douglas was a brilliant legislator and a passionate believer in democracy and was not personally an appeaser or sympathizer to slavery. He believed that the people were always right and that the people would do the right thing. It was one of the catastrophic errors in American history, and Pierce was not a sufficiently authoritative leader of the nation to see that this was just civil war on the installment plan and that with so overarching and preoccupying an issue, only the federal Congress and administration could balance the factions and regions and keep the Union functioning. Douglas believed that the economic and cultural absurdity of slaves in Kansas and Nebraska would kill slavery in those states, but without offending the South, to whom the door had not been closed other than by the impeccable operation of the free suffrage of the free inhabitants. He is also thought to have been fishing for southern support, with an inexplicable unawareness of how seriously he could alienate his northern supporters. And he was allegedly rushing the development of central and northern states to facilitate a trans-continental railway from Chicago, rather than the southern route that was being pressed by the war secretary, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, with the usual torpid endorsement of the disconnected president.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act lit fuses in all directions; the New England Emigrant Aid Company was established, and promoted emigration of anti-slavery settlers to the territories approaching statehood, including 2,000 settlers in Kansas in the next couple of years. Secret societies promoting slavery arose in response, importing partisans of slavery. The “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” virtually fragmented the Democratic Party at a stroke, as large numbers of anti-slavery Democrats deserted their party, having little more regard for Douglas than for the post-Calhoun leadership in the South. But the biggest shoe to fall came down in mid-July 1854, when a group of influential Whigs, anti-slavery Democrats, and the remnants of the Free Soil movement met at Jackson, Michigan, and formed what they called the Republican Party, and called for prohibition of slavery in the territories, repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Fugitive Slave Act, and the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It was obvious that if the Whigs could trade their token vote in the South for the more sizeable anti-slavery Democratic vote in the North, revitalized as Republicans, a much more sonorously American name than the Whigs (the British party of Walpole, Pelham, Melbourne, and Palmerston), they could take the role of natural governing party from the Democrats, who had held it since Jefferson’s time, and smash the Jackson settlement, leaving the Democrats either split between southern slaveholders and Douglas populists or confined to the South, and in either case clamoring for the spread of slavery around the country, while the Republicans became preeminent outside the South and demanded the irreversible retrenchment of slavery. That would not be a division that could be healed within the legislative process as Clay had so artfully done, or even by a clever balance of sticks and carrots, as Jackson and Polk had managed. America was in sight of the brink.
It could be assumed that most of the Whigs, such as Seward, who with Thurlow Weed had overthrown Van Buren and Secretary of State Marcy’s Albany Regency and disapproved even the Compromise of 1850 as too accommodating of the South, and Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, and all the abolitionists, such as Charles Sumner—dynamic and purposeful and very able men, not tired, deracinated trimmers like Pierce and Buchanan—would rally to the Republicans, as they did. Meetings like the one in Jackson, Michigan, took place across the North in 1854 and 1855.
Lincoln first achieved national attention with two speeches, in Springfield and Peoria, in October 1854, in which he spoke in conciliatory terms of the South, acknowledged its constitutional right to slavery, but opposed slavery in free territory and proposed its very gradual abolition by the creation of conditions that would make that natural. He favored a less draconian Fugitive Slave regime that would restore due process. From these early days, he was carving a constituency that would grow steadily larger, in peace, and war, and posterity, and eventually include almost 100 percent of the population, for the patient, inexorable imposition of what was morally right and politically practicable, without malice or demeaning compromise. He felt that slavery had to disappear, but that this objective could be indefinitely delayed to accommodate the acquired rights of the South and to spare the South humiliation and breach of established constitutional arrangements. His was a voice of reason, emanating from the bowels of semi-rural, semi-frontier America, but as all the world knows, it would grow clearer and less disputable, and more legitimate, and would finally be permanently revered, for its tactical astuteness and moral clarity, and for the always patient and never scolding or priggish nature of its message, and above all for its infallible eloquence and almost poetic, exquisite formulation. Though the proportions of the crisis threatening the nation were now obvious and mortal, only the most discerning could be confident that, as in previous American crises, a leader of the very great stature required to lead the nation through the gathering storm was already visible, and certainly audible.
While Lincoln was launching himself as a great and timely political orator to a national audience, the Pierce administration compounded the catastrophe of its support for squatter sovereignty and the scrapping of the Missouri Compromise. When an American merchant ship, the Bl
ack Warrior, was seized by Spanish officials in Havana because of innocuous errors in its manifest papers, war hawks in the Congress, both the slavery faction wanting a Mexican War sequel of easy additions to slave-holding territory, and those wishing to distract the factions of America by waving the flag about in another turkey-shoot mismatch of a hemispheric conflict, agitated for war. The American minister in Madrid, Pierre Soule, served the Spanish a strenuous ultimatum considerably in excess of what Secretary of State Marcy had authorized. (Soule, a French revolutionary fugitive and adventurer, had emigrated to the United States and become a senator from Louisiana before his appointment to Madrid.) Spain accepted Marcy’s demand for an apology and reparations, but the secretary sent Soule to meet at Ostend (Belgium) with his ministers to France and Britain, John Mason and James Buchanan, in order to elaborate a policy for the acquisition of Cuba.
Soule was the chief author of the document that emerged, the so-called Ostend Manifesto, which called for the purchase of Cuba, as necessary to the security of the institution of slavery, and if the Spanish would not sell it, “we shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.” Marcy rejected the manifesto and Soule resigned in December 1854, but its publication in March 1855 stirred outrage in the northern states over the apparent willingness of the administration to plunge into an unprovoked foreign war to defend and expand slavery. (The United States would not be averse to foreign derring-do to distract from domestic problems, and it would also develop a weakness for exporting some of its problems to neighbors, to avoid dealing with them: here slavery, a century later, drugs, where it would try to strangle supply rather than seriously punish demand.) Buchanan, the ne plus ultra and cul-de-sac of doughface moral enfeeblement and amoral appeasement of whatever quarter complained loudest, gained support in the South, enhancing his prospects as a presidential nominee, which had narrowly been denied him in 1852.
The general disintegration of the party system was illustrated and accelerated by the emergence of what called itself the American Party, generally known, from their password at clubhouses that sprang up like indigestible mushrooms throughout the country, “I don’t know,” as the Know-Nothings. It was an anti-immigrant party that particularly resented Roman Catholics, who because of emigration from Ireland during the Great Famine of the 1840s (nearly a million people fled to the United States), and in a steady stream from Italy and Bavaria and the German Rhineland, had become, by 1850, the largest single religious denomination in the country. It could reasonably be assumed that in terms made famous 110 years later by President Lyndon Johnson, the “frontlash” would be at least double the backlash; in exploiting anti-Catholic sentiment the Know Nothings would alienate not only the Roman Catholics but at least as many non-Catholics who would be offended by the bigotry of the movement.
All through 1855 and 1856, Kansas would be a bleeding sore for the whole country, envenoming even relatively staid opinion. Pro-slavery elements from neighboring Missouri were known as “Border Ruffians,” and more than 5,000 of them secured the election of a pro-slavery legislature in March 1855. A pro-slavery legislature convened in July and enacted very pro-slavery legislation. The anti-slavery forces set up their own government at Topeka in October and enacted an entirely contrary, anti-slavery program. There were now two Kansas territorial governments legislating in exact contradiction to each other. There was frequent skirmishing between the parallel governments. Pierce made it a trifecta (after the squatter-sovereignty debacle and the Ostend Manifesto fiasco) by making it explicit in a special message to Congress in January 1856 that he favored the pro-slavery faction in Kansas. An outright civil war prevailed in Kansas from May to September 1856. The highlight of this discordant departure from the civic idyll recounted by de Tocqueville and others was the arrival of the anti-slavery militant John Brown, who, with the assistance of a raiding party consisting mainly of his own sons, hanged five pro-slavery leaders in the “Pottawatomie Massacre” in May 1856. There was now guerrilla war throughout Kansas, which took over 200 lives in November and December 1856, alone.
Congressional opinion divided sharply. The House supported admission of Kansas as a free state, but the Senate, where the slave states still held an equality of members, modified Douglas’s bill and proposed a constitutional convention for Kansas. When Congress adjourned at the end of August 1856, there was still no recognized government of Kansas. In May, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist firebrand, had spoken vituperatively in the Senate on “The Crime Against Kansas” on May 19 and 20, 1856, disparaging several southern legislators, including South Carolina’s Andrew Butler. On May 22, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks, came upon Sumner in his Senate chair from behind, and assaulted him with a cane, causing a severe concussion and his absence from the Senate for three years, convalescing. Public anger in the North spiked again. With civil war in Kansas for months on end and grievous bodily harm being inflicted on the floor of the U.S. Senate, there is little wonder that Americans of all political persuasions thought that the whole process of government was disintegrating. Nothing that had occurred for some years bore the least resemblance to what Madison, Hamilton, and others had had in mind for the brave new republic. Mere anarchy was abroad in the land, and in the Capitol itself.
10. BUCHANAN AND THE REPUBLICANS
The presidential campaign of 1856 was one of the most dismal in the country’s history, as people completely inadequate to the immense crisis that threatened the Union contested for the nation’s greatest offices. The American (Know-Nothing) Party met at Philadelphia in February and exhumed former President Millard Fillmore as their presidential candidate and Andrew Donelson of Tennessee as vice president. What was left of the rump of the Whigs supported the same candidates when they met at Baltimore in September. The American Party had not renounced its founding advocacy of the disqualification of Roman Catholics and the foreign-born from public office, nor the requirement of 21 years residence before the achievement of citizenship, but it didn’t specifically reaffirm that platform either. It split over slavery and confined itself to platitudinous nativism. Fillmore dishonored his former great office, and even the vice presidency to which he was actually elected under General Taylor, by being the bowsprit of such a contemptible and schismatic movement.
The Democrats met at Cincinnati in June and chose Buchanan on the 17th ballot over Pierce and Douglas. Pierce had certainly earned rejection and did the honorable thing by allowing his party the opportunity publicly to repudiate him as incompetent, rather than skulking away. Douglas was much the ablest of the three and a sincere democrat and far from a fellow traveler of the slaveholders. But he had put the whole country into a desperate crisis. Buchanan was even less well-suited to deal with it than had been Pierce, who was at least an amiable man and a general. Buchanan was a decayed servitor, a shilly-shallying appeaser, whom Polk despised as his secretary of state for being unable to take a position and stick to it. (It didn’t matter as Polk, like many successful presidents, reserved all important foreign policy matters to himself.) The 35-year-old two-term Kentucky congressman John C. Breckinridge was chosen for vice president. Breckinridge was talented but a militant supporter of slavery.
The Republicans met at Philadelphia later in June and unanimously made the eccentric selection of Colonel John C. Frémont, chiefly known as Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s son-in-law, and for his swashbuckling in California a decade before, when he had been court-martialed but pardoned by Polk. Frémont was a 43-year-old topographical engineer who led numerous exploratory expeditions to the Far West and was widely known, respectfully, as The Pathfinder. He was an impetuous and erratic hothead, but was adventurous and brave, had earned military distinction, had evoked the expansion of the country, and was one of California’s first U.S. senators, though he retired from that role after a year. He was an unambiguous opponent of slavery. New York’s Senator William Henry Seward could have had the nomination, but his chief promoter, the strong-arm boss of New York state, Thurlow Weed, convinced
him that a new party could not defeat the Democratic coalition and that it was better to aim for 1860. The vice presidential nominee was a former U.S. senator from New Jersey, William L. Dayton, who was supposedly popular with the Know-Nothings. (The runner-up was former congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois.)
The Republicans ran against “Bleeding Kansas,” advocating the admission of Kansas as a free state, the restoration of federal authority over slavery, and the prohibition of slavery in the territories. The Know-Nothings were a drain on both parties, and in the Northeast many of them went for the Republicans, because they disapproved the aristocratic and slave-holding South. Elsewhere, it was more difficult to trace the voting pattern. The Republicans were a brand-new formation with an eccentric and controversial leader. Their motto was “Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont.” The South would come in solidly for Buchanan, and it would have been astonishing if the winning party in 12 of the last 14 elections could not turn back a new party in a three-way race, and it did, 1.839 million to 1.335 million for Frémont to 875,000 for Fillmore, 45 percent to 33 percent to 22 percent; 174 electoral votes (all 14 slave states and 5 free states) to 114 for Frémont (11 free states) to 8 electoral votes, 1 slave state (Maryland) for Fillmore.
Pierce had been a disastrous president and would be a tragic ex-president. His marriage broke down, he sank into alcoholism, disgraced himself even more thoroughly than Tyler, a Virginian, by supporting the Confederacy in coming years, and died of cirrhosis in 1869, aged 64. Fillmore went back to Buffalo and lived uncontroversially, a patron of good causes such as the public library, and died in 1874, aged 74. Buchanan was popular in the South for recognizing Cuba at Ostend as essential to the security of slavery, and tolerated in the North as a stable conservator of the Union, albeit by appeasement of the secessionists. The majority of the free states had deserted the Democrats for the Republicans on their first try and with an odd candidate who was neither fish nor foul, neither military hero nor a public-policy proven quantity. A statesman was needed, which Buchanan was not.