Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their married life apart.
CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed the Compromise. “Clouds and darkness are upon us at present,” he wrote Summer. “The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago.” It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of the sails of the antislavery movement.
Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.
The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss Haines’s School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded classes in literature, French, Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, “without [the teacher’s] permission,” one student recalled, “we could hardly breathe.” Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.
Living ten months a year under such regimented circumstances, Kate yearned to see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward’s notes to his own children. In cold, didactic fashion, Chase alternately praised and upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonishing her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued her penmanship. If the penmanship was good, he criticized her flat style of expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too long to write.
“Your last letter…was quite well written,” he told her when she was ten years old. “I should be glad, however, to have you describe more of what you see and do every day. Can’t you tell me all about your school-mates one by one…. Take pains, use your eyes, reflect.” “I wish you could put a little more life into your letters.” Four years later, he was still urging improvement. “Your nice letter, my darling child, came yesterday,” he wrote, “but I must say that it had rather a sleepy air. The words seemed occasionally chosen and arranged under the influence of the drowsy God.”
“It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit,” he advised. “Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by another…. No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to constitutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self culture.” The ascetic refrain of Chase’s instruction to Kate is that an effort of will can surmount most obstacles and self-denial can lead to its own gratifications: “I know you do not like writing…. You can overcome if you will…. I dislike for example to bathe myself all over with cold water in the morning especially when the thermometer is so low as at present: but I find I can when I determine to do so overcome my feeling of dislike and even substitute a certain pleasurable sensation.”
In his efforts to discipline and educate his daughter, Chase did not spare Kate his own morbid thoughts about death. “Remember, my dear child, that the eye of a Holy God is upon you all the time, and that not an act or word or thought is unnoticed by Him. Remember too, that you may die soon…. Already eleven years of your life are passed. You may not live another eleven years…. How short then is this life! And how earnest ought to be our preparation for another!” To illustrate his point, he described the death of a little girl just Kate’s age, the daughter of a fellow senator. The Monday before her death, he had seen her in the capital, “strong, robust, active, intelligent; the very impersonation of life and health. A week after and she had gone from earth. What a lesson was here. Lay it to heart, dear Katie, and may God give you grace.”
If Kate’s school reports were unfavorable, Chase refused to allow her to return home for vacation. “I am sorry that you feel so lonely,” he told her one summer. “I wish I could feel it safe to allow you to visit more freely, but your conversations with Miss Haines have made known to you the reasons why.” He urged her to understand: “you have it in your power greatly to promote my happiness by your good conduct, and greatly to destroy my comfort and peace by ill conduct.”
More often she excelled, relying on her nearly encyclopedic memory and hard work to please her exacting father. If unsparing in his criticism, he was extravagant in his praise. “To an affectionate father” nothing was more gratifying, he told her—not even the thought that he might someday “be made President”—than “a beloved child, improving in intelligence, in manners, in physical development, and giving promise of a rich and delightful future.”
He rewarded her with invitations to Washington, visits she vividly recalled years later. “I knew Clay, Webster and Calhoun,” she proudly told a reporter when she was in her fifties. As a small girl, she was particularly impressed by Clay, so tall that “he had to unwind himself to get up.” At ease with children, Clay “made much of me and I liked him.” Daniel Webster appeared to Kate an “ideal of how a statesman ought to look,” the very words later used to describe her father. “He seldom laughed, yet he was very kind and he used to send me his speeches. I don’t suppose he thought I would read them, but he wanted to compliment me and show that he remembered me and I know that I felt very proud when I saw Daniel Webster’s frank upon pieces of mail which came to me at the New York school.”
Of all her father’s Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he was of Frances Seward. “He was warm-hearted and sensitive,” Kate recalled. “He was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker.” When Sumner, in turn, spoke well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. “You cannot think, my precious child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised.”
Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her intimate chronicles of his life in Washington, long descriptions of the protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues “have visited the refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be.”
“The sun shines warm and clear,” he wrote one beautiful June day. “The wind stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects.” “I should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together.”
Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation’s capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, assisting him in his daily tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to assuage her fear that he might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he confessed that “Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among gentlemen.”
OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the “African mania” finally subdued, he felt the American peopl
e might focus their energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-expanding frontier.
With equal ire, he denounced both “the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South,” believing that the argument over slavery was simply “a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy,” with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.
He specifically condemned Seward’s “higher law” supposition invoked to invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that “in Civil government, such as we have, there can be no law higher than the Constitution and the Statutes. And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave.”
He exhibited similar scorn for Calhoun, who would shatter “the world’s best hope of freedom for the white man, because he is not allowed to have his own wayward will about negro slaves!…Poor man, he is greatly to be pitied!…It is truly a melancholy spectacle to behold his sun going down behind a cloud so black.”
In the early fifties, Bates still believed that the West could refrain from taking sides, trusting that “if we stood aloof from the quarrel & pressed the even tenor of our way, for the public good, both of those factions would soon sink to the level of their intrinsic insignificance.” His hopes would quickly prove futile, for the settlement was destined to last only four years.
“A HUMAN BEING,” the novelist Thomas Mann observed, “lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries…if the times, themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle,” do not provide opportunity, he continued, “the situation will have a crippling effect.”
More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men’s Lyceum, Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the “field of glory” was harvested by the founding fathers. They were a “forest of giant oaks,” he said, who faced the “task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land,” and to build “upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights.” Their destinies were “inseparably linked” with the experiment of providing the world, “a practical demonstration” of “the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time.”
Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands “won their deathless names in making it so.” What was left for the men of his generation to accomplish? There was no shortage of good men “whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle.” Such modest aspirations, he argued, would never satisfy men of “towering genius” who scorned “a beaten path.”
In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and ultimately provided Lincoln’s generation with a challenge equal to or surpassing that of the founding fathers. The sequence began when settlers in Kansas and Nebraska called upon Congress to grant them territorial status, raising once again the contentious question of extending slavery into the territories. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that appeared to provide an easy solution to the problem by allowing the settlers themselves the “popular sovereignty” to decide if they wished to become free or slave states. This solution proved anything but simple. Since both Kansas and Nebraska lay north of the old 36° 30' line, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would mean that the Missouri Compromise was null and void, opening the possibility of slavery to land long since guaranteed to freedom.
The debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened against increased antislavery sentiment in the North. Enforcement of the fugitive slave provisions contained in the Compromise of 1850 had aroused Northern ire. Near riots erupted when slaveholders tried to recapture runaway slaves who had settled in Boston and New York. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a common sentiment among Northerners: “I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous.”
Northern sentiment had been inflamed further by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Less than a year after its publication in March 1852, more than three hundred thousand copies of the novel had sold in the United States, a sales rate rivaled only by the Bible. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass later likened it to “a flash” that lit “a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery,” awakening such powerful compassion for the slave and indignation against slavery that many previously unconcerned Americans were transformed into advocates for the antislavery cause.
Until the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, there was no signal point around which the antislavery advocates could rally. As the Senate debate opened, Northerners were stirred into action “in greater numbers than ever,” the historian Don Fehrenbacher has written, fighting “with all the fierceness of an army defending its homeland against invasion.”
Passions in the South were equally aroused. To Southerners, the issue of Kansas was not merely an issue of slavery, but whether they, who had helped create and enlarge the nation with their “blood and treasure,” would be entitled to share in the territories held in common by the entire country. “The day may come,” said Governor Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, “when our Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intend to be equals in the Union, or independent out of it!”
This time Salmon Chase assumed the leadership of the antislavery forces. Seward understood that the bill was “a mighty subject” that “required research and meditation,” but he was distracted by a multitude of issues and the demands of Washington’s social life. With “the street door bell [ringing] every five minutes,” the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while Seward’s speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply “essays against slavery,” Stephen Douglas later said, “Chase of Ohio was the leader.”
Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” The “Appeal” was originally printed in The National Era, the abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Deemed by historians “one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever produced,” the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
“We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” the Appeal began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Passage of the Nebraska Act would mean that “this immense region, occupying the very heart” of the continent, would, in “flagrant disregard” of a “sacred faith,” be transformed into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its authors promised to call on their consti
tuents “to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery…for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”
“Chase’s greatest opportunity had at last come to him,” his biographer Albert Hart observes, “for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate all the previous experience of his life.” By the time he rose to speak on the Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a great battle. “By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr. Chase’s speech,” the New York Times reported. “The galleries and lobbies were densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the Senate.”
In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the Illinois senator to such a “high pitch of wrath” that he countered, accusing Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. “Do you say I came here by a corrupt bargain?” Chase demanded to know. “I said the man who charged me with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by a corrupt bargain,” Douglas replied. “Did you mean me? If so, I mean you.”
Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase refuted Douglas’s claim that the concept of “popular sovereignty” would provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary, Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights?…No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man.”
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