by Conrad Black
Douglas had destroyed the Compromise he had helped Clay create, and while that was a grievous error, slavery had to be resolved; it was ultimately an intolerable evil and hypocrisy, and in precipitating the issue as he inadvertently did, Douglas forced its attempted resolution. He would play a unique role in also inadvertently elevating the indispensable savior of the Union and emancipator of the slaves. It was a terrible drama, and would have a sanguinary but noble end, and Douglas’s role would be Shakespearean: tragic, honorable, and fortuitous. Buchanan was a final twist and trailer of a stale performance. (His cabinet was also undistinguished, except for, up to a point, Cass as secretary of state, but there would now be little of foreign affairs, and Cass did little and handed over for the last few months of the term to Attorney General Jeremiah S. Black.) All sensed that a mighty climax was now imminent. America was now an important country in the world and had called immense attention to itself for over 80 years, and had never ceased to absorb international curiosity and fire the imagination of observers everywhere. The suspense was constant; Armageddon was almost at hand.
11. DRED SCOTT AND LECOMPTON
There was no respite. Two days after the inauguration, on March 6, 1857, Taney’s Supreme Court brought down another showstopper on the Fugitive Slave Act—the Dred Scott decision. Scott was a slave who had been taken to Illinois and Wisconsin, where slavery was illegal, and remained there between 1834 and 1838. He sued for his liberty in 1846 in Missouri, claiming to have been automatically emancipated by operation of the law in Illinois and Wisconsin. The first trial in Missouri favored Scott but he generally lost after that. There were three issues before the Supreme Court: whether Scott was a citizen of Missouri entitled to sue in the state’s courts; whether he had gained his freedom and retained it on his return to Missouri; and whether the Missouri Compromise, which outlawed slavery in territories north of 36°30, was constitutional. The majority decided against Scott on all three counts, finding the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional 36 years ex post facto. The decision had been leaked to Buchanan, who had predicted in his inaugural address two days before that slavery matters would be “promptly settled.” It was an appalling decision. Of course, once emancipated, slaves were citizens, and of course the emancipation did not apply only in some states and not others, and conferred the full rights of citizenship, including access to the courts. And the only possible contention that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional was based on the Kansas-Nebraska era, Calhounite claim that the federal government had no business being involved in slavery at all, a preposterous notion given that it was the issue upon which the future of the Union now depended.
Taney was a bigoted Jacksonite (though a Roman Catholic who might have been expected to be warier of the dangers of group discrimination), and the Court showed the problems that arise when one party, embarked on a controversial course on an overarching issue, has named virtually all the judges for 56 years. Dred Scott was an obvious travesty, a miscarriage of justice and a rape of equity, and was, along with popular sovereignty, another red rag to the northern bull, which would rather not have been disturbed, and another incitement of the South to demand the expansion of slavery throughout the territories.
The next bombshell to rock the nation came in the last months of 1857. The pro-slavery Kansas legislature wanted a pro-slavery constitution for the territory without recourse to a popular vote. The governor, Robert Walker of Mississippi, insisted on a legislative election, and that it be conducted fairly, though he was prepared to dispense with a popular referendum on the state constitution. The governor conscientiously threw out thousands of fraudulent ballots stuffed into boxes by the pro-slavery party. The free-state advocates emerged with a clear majority. The ensuing constitutional convention at Lecompton, Kansas, determined that the constitution would not be submitted to the people, but that only one clause would, which would determine whether slavery would be allowed in Kansas when it was incorporated as a state. If the vote on that issue was negative, then slavery would not “exist” in the state, but existing ownership of slaves, as Dred Scott had determined, would continue. This was another stacked deck for the slavery supporters, in the teeth of a clear majority in the territory.
Walker went to Washington to lobby Buchanan, who was determined to appease the South to hang on to his party. Stephen A. Douglas, conforming to overwhelming opinion across the North, came out in opposition to the Lecompton Constitution on December 9, 1857. Buchanan reneged on his previous guarantee to Walker and decided in favor of Lecompton, provoking Walker’s immediate conscientious resignation. Free-state voters boycotted the December 21 vote on the constitutional slavery clause and the pro-slavers won, though about half their 6,000 votes were judged fraudulent. The free-state faction, evidently the majority, persuaded the acting governor to bring forward the opening of the legislative session, where it called for a clear vote on the Lecompton Constitution as a whole. This was held on January 4, 1858, and recorded an overwhelming majority against.
Buchanan, once embarked on his course, would not vary it, and proposed the admission of Kansas as a slave state, a shocking capitulation of the president to what was clearly a chronically minority view, in Kansas and in the country. Douglas repudiated the president and broke completely with him. Buchanan managed to put his bill through the Senate, but the House of Representatives, where the free majority in the country predominated, voted to resubmit the Lecompton Constitution for a free vote in Kansas. A new bill was proposed that provided for a new vote on Lecompton and, in the event of non-passage, continuation of Kansas as a territory until it had achieved a population of 90,000, which would qualify it for a seat in the House of Representatives. This bill passed and the vote was held on August 2, 1858, and yielded an 85 percent rejection of Lecompton. Kansas remained a territory until accepted as a free state in January 1861, just before the inauguration of Buchanan’s successor. Except for the Republicans, who demanded an end to the appeasement of the slave states and the containment of slavery, this issue had been a disaster for almost everyone, including the southerners militant for an expansion of slavery in the territories or, in the alternative, secession. The ambivalent tyros, Pierce and Buchanan, had, with an assist from the reckless Douglas, destroyed the Jackson strategy that, with powerful help from Clay and Webster, had held the Union together for 30 years.
12. ABRAHAM LINCOLN
On June 16, 1858, Lincoln gave another historic address at Springfield, Illinois, where he applied the Biblical standard that “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” He avoided disparagements of the South and stated his faith in the indissolubility of the Union, but said “it will become all one thing, or all the other.” It was not a mystery which option he expected to prevail. Lincoln ran for the United States Senate from Illinois in the autumn of 1858 against Douglas and challenged him to a series of seven debates, between August 21 and October 15. They were formidable exchanges before large audiences in open-air meetings, and slavery was aired in all its aspects. At Freeport, Illinois, on August 27, Lincoln asked Douglas to explain “popular sovereignty” in the light of the Dred Scott decision. Douglas debunked Dred Scott by saying that the popular will would always prevail, as there could be no slavery without the application of police, who were subject to local control. This was entirely true, but outraged the South, which always assumed that authorities throughout the country would have to enforce slavery if the Supreme Court ordered it. Lincoln identified slavery as “a moral, a social, and a political wrong,” although he denied that he thought African Americans were in fact the equal of whites (though he later changed this view).82 Douglas dodged the moral issue, but virtually split the Democrats on the argument that local authorities and voters in the territories could exclude slavery if they wished. The autumn elections produced heavy gains for the Republicans. Lincoln defeated Douglas in the popular vote, in that Republicans won a majority in the Illinois legislative elections; but since not all were up for reelection, the Democrats re
tained their majority in the legislature, which chose U.S. senators, and Douglas was reelected. Abraham Lincoln, having split the Democrats end to end like a rail, and more than held his own against the greatest Democratic leader since Polk, if not Jackson, became a national celebrity and a presidential contender. The Republicans took 29 of 33 congressmen from New York. The hard-pressed administration had lost control of the Congress.
On October 16, 1859, John Brown led a group of 18 men in a takeover of the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and planned to incite a slave revolt throughout the South. He held the arsenal for two days, but was then compelled to surrender by a force led by Colonel Robert E. Lee. No slaves rose and the effort was a complete failure. Brown was convicted and hanged on December 2. He had been supported by a number of northern abolitionist groups, and while few northerners approved of insurrection by slaves, Brown was widely admired as a man of conviction and principle, and the spectacle of such a desperate attempt, and such a severe end, given that he had not killed anyone, offended many, and kept the pot boiling.
In early 1860, Jefferson Davis presented a series of radical pro-slavery and quasi-secessionist resolutions to the Senate. Apart from the familiar Calhounite assertions, Davis pushed out a little further the gamecock southern view that Douglas had incited with popular sovereignty and the scrapping of the 36°30 demarcation from the Missouri Compromise. He said that neither Congress nor any territorial legislature had the license to impair slave-holding rights within the territories, that the federal government must protect the rights of slaveholders there, and that these matters could be determined only by state legislatures after admission to statehood. Thus, the whole vast middle of the continent should simply be thrown open to slavery as a matter of right and normal operation of the law, with no consultation with the inhabitants, and slavery must be aggressively protected by the government of the United States, a country the majority of the population of which clearly disapproved of slavery.
Most southern states claimed in one sort of public meeting or another the right to secede, and in South Carolina and Mississippi money was voted for the setting up of armed forces toward a military cover for exiting the Union. The South had taken up like fox hunters the call for expansion into the territories, and as the Republican Party was absolutely dedicated to confining slavery to, at the most generous, the Missouri Compromise line, it was generally agreed and often restated in the South that the election of a Republican president would be cause for secession, and if secession were resisted, war. On February 27, 1860, Abraham Lincoln made an impressive oratorical debut in New York City, at the Cooper Union. While the leading candidate for the presidential nomination was New York’s Senator Seward, Lincoln, though relatively obscure and politically inexperienced, was intelligently clarifying the slavery issue and was emerging as a slightly exotic challenger, who had rendered the Republicans the mighty service of forcing Douglas, the Democrats’ strongest leader, into irreconcilable differences with the South. As grave as the Union’s prospects were, those of the Republicans were steadily more promising. At the Cooper Union, Lincoln demolished “popular sovereignty” and refuted the southern argument that the election of the Republicans would justify their secession. He condemned extremism on both sides, made a Clay-like appeal for reciprocal accommodation, recognized the gravity of southern threats to dissolve the Union, but made it clear that the extension of slavery, which the South now claimed virtually as a birthright, was completely unacceptable.
Lincoln had said before that he considered attempted secession a matter that had to be resisted by force if necessary, and that if it came to that, he was confident that the North would win. In a much-publicized address at Cincinnati on September 17, 1859, to a large audience that included many southerners who had come across the Ohio River from Kentucky to hear him, Lincoln said, addressing the southerners: “Will you make war upon us and kill us all? ... I think you are as gallant and as brave men as live; that you can fight as bravely in a good cause, man for man, as any other people living . . . but man for man you are not better than we and there are not so many of you as there are of us. You will never make much of a hand at whipping us.”83 Lincoln was, after all, a frontiersman; he was very strong physically and had had no shortage of hand-to-hand combat. He was a man of peace, but not a pacifist.
The fact was that both sides were spoiling for a fight. The national government had been reduced to a dithering, hair-splitting, talking shop, impotently enduring endless threats bellowed at it from its constituents. The Jackson settlement was bound to turn into a shabby and unsustainable compromise when it was operated by weaklings who would never threaten to hang their vice presidents for treason and invade states of the Union as if they were foreign territory, as Jackson had done. The parties had put up steadily more ambiguous leaders to try to dissemble their way through the contradictions, and in the interest of attracting the South to him, Douglas, with the self-destructive abandon of a mindless opportunist, had seized on “popular sovereignty.” Lincoln had forced him to keep his place as senator from Illinois by renouncing the main point of “popular sovereignty”—the right of slaveholders to their property in territories whatever the Congress or local governments thought of it. He had proffered the South more than the North was prepared to give, and then tried to take it back when Lincoln cut him off at the knees.
Unless the North was prepared to allow the South to withdraw, it would now come to war, and was like a classic series of aggregated grievances between two parties that can only be resolved by a fight, and a fight of unlimited length until one protagonist had beaten the other unconscious and stood over him in complete victory, or, in the case of the South, had so exhausted the North that it could not continue. Either the Union would break or the objecting party, the North, would have to beat the South into unconditional surrender.
Nothing less would clear the air, much less resolve the issue (as General U.S. Grant would explain, 20 years later, to German Imperial Chancellor Bismarck).84 This could not be simply a successful dust-up. The South, in all its pride and courage, was chippy, swaggering, and disdainful. It could not be tamed like a disobedient child with a good birching, such as Germany, under Bismarck’s leadership, would figuratively administer to the (almost unoffending but inadequately deferential) Danes, Austrians, and French. Nothing less would save the Union, which had so sonorously and loudly proclaimed itself the light unto the world and clarion of human freedom and dignity, the ark of deliverance of the rights of man, just one long lifetime before.
This was about to be the choice, acquiescence in the dissolution of the Union, northern suppression of the insurrection, or a successful southern war of independence. They were all bad choices for those who believed in the United States, but they were the only choices. The South didn’t think the North had the will or ability to prevent the secession of the South, and many northerners thought so too. The task for the new president, if he wished to save the country—and the Republicans did, and were now almost certain to win, given the fragmentation they had engineered among their opponents—would be to persuade the North to suppress the insurrection, and then do it, in the certain knowledge that the South would fight with the desperate courage and ingenuity of ferocious, brave people, proud of what they were defending, contemptuous of their opponents, a martial society much handier with horse and gun and rural travel than the more urban, polyglot North.
CHAPTER SIX
Civil War and Reconstruction
The Agony and Triumph of the
American Union, 1860–1889
1. THE 1860 ELECTION
The Democrats met at Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860. Jefferson Davis was now the principal heir to Calhoun, and the South demanded protection of slavery in the territories. It was not enough, as Calhoun himself had demanded, that the federal government have no role in these matters, or, as Douglas had proposed, that territories could vote for slavery if they chose. Now, the federal government had to spon
sor and protect slavery in the territories, and slavery could only be repealed, if at all, when the territories became states. This mania cannot be entirely laid at the door of Douglas, but he opened the door for the monster of belligerent slavery to emerge. Douglas went as far as he could, advocating Calhoun’s formula of congressional non-intervention in slavery, as well as adherence to Supreme Court rulings, including Dred Scott, and the takeover of Cuba (an outright act of belligerency against a foreign power). The southerners, who would have leapt for joy at the Douglas platform just a few years before, stalked out of the convention, which had failed to choose a nominee, and the official Democrats returned to Baltimore in June (after the Republican convention). Douglas was finally nominated there for president and he chose the relatively anti-secessionist former Georgia governor Herschel Vespasian Johnson as vice president. The southerners, representing 11 states, also reverted to Baltimore and chose Vice President John C. Breckinridge for president and transplanted North Carolinian Joseph Lane, senator from the new state of Oregon, for vice president.