These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  The contenders were decidedly lackluster, the cramped and shortsighted men of a cramped and shortsighted age. One Democratic Party prospect, Pennsylvania lawyer and lifelong bachelor James Buchanan, had served as Polk’s secretary of state. Buchanan favored solving the territorial problem by extending the Missouri Compromise line all the way across the continent. Senator Lewis Cass, who’d served as Jackson’s secretary of war, had a subtler mind. Cass favored a political scheme dubbed, by its supporters, “popular sovereignty,” under which each state ought to decide, on entering the Union, whether it would allow or prohibit slavery. At the party’s nominating convention, Cass prevailed, and delegates chose, as his running mate, William Butler, a general who had served in the War with Mexico with no particular distinction.

  Military heroes were the fashion of the political year. The Whig Party courted two of the war’s two better-known generals, Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, casting aside the two aging leaders of the party, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Taylor had never belonged to a political party; Scott was nearly as mysterious. Taylor only grudgingly agreed to declare himself a Whig. “I am a Whig,” he said, adding, “but not an ultra Whig.” As he himself admitted, he’d never even voted.58 Nevertheless, he won the nomination. Clay, dismayed at the rise of the war heroes, declared, “I wish I could slay a Mexican.”59

  The rise of Cass and Taylor left Democrats and Whigs who opposed the extension of slavery into the territories without a candidate. They bolted and, at a convention held in Buffalo in June of 1848, formed the Free-Soil Party. Casting about in desperation for a man with a national reputation, they settled on ex-president Martin Van Buren and adopted as their motto “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor, and Free Men!”60

  The Free-Soil, Free-Speech movement came out of the dispute over the interpretation of the Constitution, but it was also tied to revolutions that convulsed Europe in 1848. Margaret Fuller filed reports from Italy, where she nursed fallen revolutionaries in a hospital in Rome. Reeling from those revolutions, the king of Bavaria asked the historian Leopold von Ranke to explain why his people had rebelled against monarchial rule, as had so many peoples in Europe that year. “Ideas spread most rapidly when they have found adequate concrete expression,” Ranke told the king, and the United States had “introduced a new force in the world,” the idea that “the nation should govern itself,” an idea that would determine “the course of the modern world”: free speech, spread by wire, would make the whole world free.61

  Unlike the predominant U.S. response to the Haitian revolution, most Americans, following Margaret Fuller, greeted the revolutions in Europe as democratic revolutions, the people rising up against the tyranny of aristocracy and monarchy. Marx’s Communist Manifesto, published that year, was hardly read, and soon forgotten (only to be rediscovered decades later). But it captured a sentiment that coursed across the American continent: the workers had lost control of the means of production.

  People who rallied behind “free labor” insisted on the moral superiority of yeoman farming and wage work over slave labor. But the language of the struggle between labor and capital suffused free labor ideology. “Labor is prior to, and independent of capital,” Lincoln said in 1859, and “in fact, capital is the fruit of labor.”62 But the battle, for Free-Soilers, wasn’t really between labor and capital; it was between free labor (the producing classes) and the slave power (American aristocrats). The Free-Soil movement enjoyed its strongest support in two particular sorts of middling classes: laboring men in eastern cities and farming men in western territories. If it sounds, in retrospect, like Marx, its rhetoric in fact borrowed from the nature writings of Emerson and Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, who cursed the railroads, Free-Soilers believed in improvement, improvement through the hard work of the laboring man, his power, his energy. “Our paupers to-day, thanks to free labor, are our yeoman and merchants of tomorrow,” the New York Times boasted. “Why, who are the laboring people of the North?” Daniel Webster asked. “They are the whole North. They are the people who till their own farms with their own hands, freeholders, educated men, independent men.” As laboring men moved westward, they carried this spirit with them, so long as they founded free states. The governor of Michigan argued, “Like most new States, ours has been settled by an active, energetic, and enterprising class of men, who are desirous of accumulating property rapidly.”63

  Free-Soilers and their bedfellows spoke of “Northern Progress and Southern Decadence,” comparing the striving, energetic, and improving work of free labor to the corruption, decadence, and backwardness of slavery. Slavery reduced a man to “a blind horse upon a tread-mill,” said Lincoln. Slavery had left the South in ruins, wrote New York senator William Seward: “An exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads.” As Horace Greeley put it, “Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity.”64

  This attack by northerners led southerners to greater exertions in defending their way of life. They battled on several fronts. They described northern “wage slavery” as a far more exploitative system of labor than slavery. They celebrated slavery as fundamental to American prosperity. Slavery “has grown with our growth, and strengthened with our strength,” Calhoun said. And they elaborated an increasingly virulent ideology of racial difference, arguing against the very idea of equality embodied in the American creed.

  Some of these ideas came from the field of ethnology. The Swiss-born American naturalist Louis Agassiz advocated “special creation,” the idea that God had created and distributed all the world’s plants and animals separately, and strewn them across the lands and the seas, each to its proper place. With proslavery southerners, Agassiz also subscribed to polygenesis, the theory that God had created four different races, each in a separate Garden of Eden. But, as Frederick Douglass observed, slavery lay “at the bottom of the whole controversy,” since the dispute between polygenists and monogenists was, at heart, a debate “between the slaveholders on the one hand, and the abolitionists on the other.”65

  Conservative Virginian George Fitzhugh, himself inspired by ethnological thinking, dismissed the “self-evident truths” of the Declaration of Independence as utter nonsense. “Men are not born physically, morally, or intellectually equal,” he wrote. “It would be far nearer the truth to say, ‘that some were born with saddles on their backs, and others booted and spurred to ride them,’—and the riding does them good.” For Fitzhugh, the error had begun in the imaginations of the philosophes of the Enlightenment and in their denial of the reality of history. Life and liberty are not “inalienable rights,” Fitzhugh argued: instead, people “have been sold in all countries, and in all ages, and must be sold so long as human nature lasts.” Equality means calamity: “Subordination, difference of caste and classes, difference of sex, age, and slavery beget peace and good will.” Progress is an illusion: “the world has not improved in the last two thousand, probably four thousand years.” Perfection is to be found in the past, not in the future.66 As for the economic systems of the North and the South, “Free laborers have not a thousandth part of the rights and liberties of negro slaves,” Fitzhugh insisted. “The negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world.”67

  The Free-Soil Party opposed every single one of Fitzhugh’s claims. And, if it drew support from farmers and laborers, it also earned the loyalty of free blacks. To support the party, Henry Highland Garnet, a black abolitionist in Troy, New York, reprinted David Walker’s Appeal. The party held its first convention in Buffalo in the summer of 1848. Salmon Chase drafted the party’s platform, which very closely followed Chase’s interpretation of Madison’s Notes. The Constitution couldn’t be rejected, Chase argued, it had to be reclaimed. His key ideas, he explained, were three: “1. That the original policy of the Government was that of slavery restriction. 2. That under the Constitution Congress cannot establish or maintain slavery in the territories. 3. That the original policy of the Gover
nment has been subverted and the Constitution violated for the extension of slavery, and the establishment of the political supremacy of the Slave Power.”68

  The Free-Soil Party had also drawn the support of women who’d been involved in the temperance and abolition movements, and who’d campaigned on behalf of the Whig Party in 1840 and 1844. On the heels of the Free-Soil convention in Buffalo, three hundred women and men held a women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Margaret Fuller was still in Italy, but it was her work that had served as a catalyst.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton, thirty-two, drafted a manifesto. The daughter of a New York Supreme Court Justice, Stanton had grown up reading her father’s lawbooks. Earlier that spring, she’d been instrumental in securing the passage of a state Married Women’s Property Act. Under most existing state laws, married women could not own property or make contracts; anything they owned became their husbands’ upon marriage; the New York law allowed women “separate use” of their separate property. Stanton, whose husband, also a lawyer, would help found the Republican Party, was also a noted abolitionist. As Fuller had pointed out, the migration of abolitionism into party politics illustrated to women just how limited was their capacity to act politically when they could not vote. The women who gathered at Seneca decided to fight for all manner of legal reform and, controversially, for the right to vote. They felt, Stanton later wrote, “as helpless and hopeless as if they had been suddenly asked to construct a steam engine.”

  Stanton’s Declaration of Sentiments did not merely call for piecemeal legislative reform but instead echoed the Declaration of Independence:

  When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

  And on it went. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her,” Stanton wrote. “To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.” Man took woman’s property, passed laws in which she had no voice, subjected her to taxation without representation, denied her an education, made her a slave to his will, forbade her from speaking in public, and denied her the right to vote.69 One Whig newspaper called the convention “the most shocking and unnatural incident ever recorded in the history of womanity.”70 But nothing so weak as ridicule ever stopped Stanton, who refused to let the battle over the meaning of the Constitution be settled by men alone.

  Margaret Fuller, the most accomplished American woman of the century, would miss that battle. With her babbling, toddling nearly two-year-old son and his father, and with the manuscript of her epic history of the revolution in Rome wrapped in a blue calico bag tucked into a portable wooden desk, she left Italy in 1849 and set sail for New York. Less than three hundred yards from the shore of Fire Island and mere miles from New York City, their ship ran aground on a sandbar in a raging storm. Other passengers pried planks from the deck of the ship and, using them as rafts, made their way to shore. Fuller, who was terrified of water and unwilling to let go of her baby, sat on the deck in a white nightdress and waited for a lifeboat from the island lighthouse while the ship beneath her broke to pieces, its masts splintering, its rigging whipping in the wind. A wave crashed over her and she was plunged into the fearsome sea.

  Thoreau came from Massachusetts to comb the beach in search of her remains or any of her pages. Only the tiny bare body of her baby was ever found.71

  IV.

  HISTORY TEEMS WITH mishaps and might-have-beens: explosions on the Potomac, storms not far from port, narrowly contested elections, court cases lost and won, political visionaries drowned. But over the United States in the 1850s, a sense of inevitability fell, as if there were a fate, a dismal dismantlement, that no series of events or accidents could thwart.

  Near the end of 1849, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, despairing for the Union, composed a poem about the American ship of state. Long-fellow, born by the sea in Portland, Maine, in 1807, was America’s best-known and best-loved poet. He was also the beloved and passionately loyal friend of six-foot-four Charles Sumner, who in the 1840s campaigned against the annexation of Texas and the War with Mexico while fighting against racial segregation in Boston schools. In 1842, Sumner had convinced Longfellow to put his pen to the antislavery cause, and Longfellow had dutifully written and published a little book of Poems on Slavery. Well known for his abolitionist views, Longfellow had in 1844 been urged by the Liberty Party to run for Congress. “Though a strong anti-Slavery man, I am not a member of any society, and fight under no single banner,” he wrote, declining. “Partizan warfare becomes too violent—too vindictive for my taste; and I should be found but a weak and unworthy champion in public debate.”72

  By 1849, Longfellow, like most Americans who were paying attention, feared for the Republic. He began writing a poem, called “The Building of the Ship,” about a beautiful, rough-hewn ship called the Union. But as he closed the poem, he could imagine nothing but disaster for this worthy vessel. In his initial draft, he closed the poem with these lines:

  . . . where, oh where,

  Shall end this form so rare?

  . . . Wrecked upon some treacherous rock,

  Rotting in some loathsome dock,

  Such the end must be at length

  Of all this loveliness and strength!

  Then, on November 11, 1849, Sumner came to dinner at Longfellow’s house in Cambridge, flushed with excitement about the Free-Soil Party. Sumner was running for Congress as a Free-Soiler; November 12 was Election Day. He convinced Longfellow that the Union might yet be saved, and that he ought to write a more hopeful ending to his poem. Longfellow drafted a revision that night and the next day went to the polls to vote for Sumner. Longfellow’s new ending became one of his most admired verses:

  Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State!

  For thee the famished nations wait!

  The world seems hanging on thy fate!

  He wrote to his publisher, “What think you of the enclosed, instead of the sad ending of ‘The Ship’? Is it better?” It was better. Lincoln’s secretary later said that after Lincoln read Longfellow’s poem, “His eyes filled with tears and his checks were wet. He did not speak for some minutes, but finally said with simplicity, ‘It is a wonderful gift to be able to stir men like that!’”73

  By the middle of the nineteenth century, the struggle over slavery that had begun on the shores of the Atlantic had reached the shores of the Pacific—across three thousand miles hatched and crisscrossed with train tracks and telegraph wires. “The Union has been preserved thus far by miracles,” John Marshall had written in 1832. “I fear they cannot continue.” Another miracle, it seemed, was needed in 1850. The discovery of gold in California had led to a gold rush. Migrants came from the east, from neighboring Oregon, from Mexico, and from parts elsewhere, unimaginably far, even from Chile and China. In 1849, a California constitutional convention decreed that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, unless for the punishment of crimes, shall ever be tolerated in the State.” (A resolution to prohibit “free negroes” from settling in the state was defeated.) With a constitution ratified by voters in the fall of 1849, the request to enter the Union went to Congress.74

  It must have felt like living on a seesaw. Admitting California as a free state would have toppled the precarious balance between slave and free states. Congress seemed at an impasse. But over eight months of close negotiation, Henry Clay, much aided by Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, a short, brawny bulldog of a man, brokered a compromise or, rather, a series of compromises, involving a set of issues related to slavery. To appease Free-Soilers, California would be admitted as a free state; the slave trade would be abolishe
d in Washington, DC; and Texas would yield to New Mexico a disputed patch of territory, in exchange for $10 million. (John C. Frémont, an opponent of slavery, was elected California’s first senator.) To appease those who favored slavery, the territories of New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah would be organized without mention of slavery, leaving the question to be settled by the inhabitants themselves, upon application for statehood. Douglas promoted the idea of popular sovereignty, proclaiming, “If there is any one principle dearer and more sacred than all others in free governments, it is that which asserts the exclusive right of a free people to form and adopt their own fundamental law.”75

  Unfree people, within Stephen Douglas’s understanding, had no such rights. The final proslavery element of the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law, required citizens to turn in runaway slaves and denied fugitives the right to a jury trial. The law, said Harriet Jacobs, a fugitive slave living in New York, marked “the beginning of a reign of terror to the colored population.”76 Bounty hunters and slave catchers hunted down and captured former slaves and returned them to their owners for a fee. Little stopped them from seizing men, women, and children who had been born free, or who had been legally emancipated, and selling them to the South, too. Nothing so brutally exposed the fragility of freedom or the rapaciousness of slavery. “If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive-Slave Law,” Longfellow wrote bitterly. “That is all it is for.”77

  Harriet Tubman, who’d first run away when she was only seven years old, helped build a new American infrastructure: the Underground Railroad. Tubman, five feet tall, had been beaten and starved—a weight thrown at her head had left a permanent dent—but had escaped bondage in 1849, fleeing from Maryland to Philadelphia. Beginning in 1850, she made at least thirteen trips back into Maryland to rescue some seventy men, women, and children, while working, in New York, Philadelphia, and Canada, as a laundress, housekeeper, and cook. People took to calling her “Captain Tubman” or, more simply, “Moses.” Once, asked what she would do if she were captured, she said, “I shall have the consolation to know that I had done some good to my people.”78