by Jill Lepore
The Compromise of 1850 lasted for barely four years, but in the interim it transformed the abolitionist movement and, once again, realigned the parties. In 1851, Charles Sumner, running as a Free-Soiler, won the Massachusetts senate seat long held by Daniel Webster, architect of the compromise that Sumner despised. That same year, Frederick Douglass broke with Garrison on the question of the Constitution. “I am sick and tired of arguing on the slaveholders’ side,” Douglass said. He had come to believe that the Constitution did not sanction slavery and could be used to end it.79 “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed,” Douglass said bitterly, in a blistering speech he delivered in Rochester on July 5, 1852. “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” he asked.
I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.80
But even as Douglass called on Americans to realize the promise of the nation’s founding documents, expansion to the West led to still more staggering constitutional distortions and moral contortions.
In 1854, the seesaw tipped once more, pressed down, on the proslavery end, by Stephen Douglas, who served as chair of the Senate’s Committee on Territories. Congress had been talking about plans for a transcontinental railroad since the 1830s. Douglas wanted the railroad to go through Chicago. But between Chicago and the Pacific stood the so-called Permanent Indian Territory, the land to which Andrew Jackson had removed eastern Indians, including the Cherokees. Douglas argued that, in an age of improvement, in the country of the future, the very notion of a Permanent Indian Territory was absurd: “The idea of arresting our progress in that direction has become so ludicrous that we are amazed, that wise and patriotic statesmen ever cherished the thought. . . . How are we to develop, cherish, and protect our immense interests and possessions on the Pacific, with a vast wilderness fifteen hundred miles in breadth, filled with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication? The Indian barrier must be removed.”81
When a bill organizing the Permanent Indian Territory into Kansas and Nebraska was introduced into Congress in January of 1854, Douglas proposed an amendment that amounted to a repeal of the Missouri Compromise, which would have prohibited slavery from both territories. Instead, in accordance with the principle of popular sovereignty, the people of Kansas and Nebraska would decide. The Kansas-Nebraska Act effectively opened to slavery land that had previously been closed to it. Its consequences represented, to many northerners, an outrageous betrayal of the Constitution itself. New York senator Preston King predicted that “past lines of party will be obliterated with the Missouri line.” Maine senator Hannibal Hamlin declared, “The old Democratic party is now the party of slavery.”82
So far from serving as a safety value with which to release the pent-up pressure of the growing American population, expansion into the West had proved explosive. The Kansas-Nebraska controversy made the Democratic Party into the party of slavery, and it spelled the end of the American Party, also known as the Know-Nothing Party. The Know-Nothings had pledged never to vote for any foreign-born or Catholic candidate and campaigned for extending the period of naturalization to twenty-one years. They’d won control of the Massachusetts legislature and over 40 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania. One Pennsylvania Democrat said, “Nearly everybody seems to have gone altogether deranged on Nativism.” In New York, Samuel F. B. Morse ran for Congress as a Know-Nothing and lost, but he spread his message by reprinting his nativist tract Imminent Dangers and began arguing that abolitionism was itself a foreign plot, a “long-concocted and skillfully planned intrigue of the British aristocracy.”83 (“Slavery per se is not a sin,” Morse insisted. “It is a social condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom.”)84 In February 1854, at their convention in Philadelphia, northern Know-Nothings proposed a platform plank calling for the reinstatement of the Missouri Compromise. When that motion was rejected, some fifty delegates from eight northern states bolted: they left the convention, and the party, to set up their own party, the short-lived North American Party. Nativism would endure as a force in American politics, but, meanwhile, nativists split over slavery.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act also drew forty-five-year-old Abraham Lincoln out of his law practice and back into politics. As a member of the House, Lincoln had opposed the war with Mexico and supported the Wilmot Proviso, but he’d hardly spoken about slavery. In the spring of 1854, he began meditating on the institution of slavery and, like a lawyer preparing for court, weighing possible arguments with which to defeat those who defended the institution. In a fragment written in April, he anticipated a line of debate:
If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B.—why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?—
You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own.
You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest; you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.85
Lincoln found a political home in a new political party, the Republican Party, founded in May 1854, in Ripon, Wisconsin, by fifty-four citizens determined to defeat the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Three of those fifty-four citizens were women. Their new party drew a coalition of former Free-Soilers, Whigs, and northern Democrats and Know-Nothings who opposed slavery. If the Democratic Party had become the party of slavery; the Republican Party would be the party of reform. In that spirit, it welcomed the aid of women: women wrote Republican campaign literature and made speeches on behalf of the party. One of the party’s best, and best-paid, speakers was Anna Dickinson, who became the first woman to speak in the Hall of the House of Representatives.86
Joining the new party, Lincoln wrestled with the implications of the speeches and writing of far-seeing Frederick Douglass, who had staked the fundamental case against slavery in the common humanity of all people. In August 1854, still working out his best line of argument, Lincoln began speaking at political meetings. That fall, campaigning as a Republican, he decided to challenge Stephen Douglas for his seat in the Senate. He debated Douglas in Peoria before a fascinated crowd. Douglas spoke for three hours and then, after a dinner break, Lincoln spoke for just as long. Lincoln argued that what Douglas advocated was an abomination of the idea of democracy. The matter depended on whether “the negro is a man,” Lincoln said.
If he is not a man, why in that case, he who is a man may, as a matter of self-government, do just as he pleases with him. But if the negro is a man, is it not to that extent, a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself? When the white man governs himself, that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government—that is despotism. If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that “all men are created equal;” and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.
For this, for making d
emocracy into the abomination of despotism, he said he hated the Kansas-Nebraska Act:
I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.
Lincoln’s was the language of free soil, free speech, and free labor. He grounded his argument against slavery in his understanding of American history, in the language of Frederick Douglass, and in his reading of the Constitution. “Let no one be deceived,” he said. “The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms.”87
Lincoln lost the race. And still he kept at work, refining his argument, as if he were hewing a log, cutting it into boards, and sanding them. “Most governments have been based, practically, on the denial of equal rights of men,” he wrote, in a note to himself. “Ours began, by affirming those rights. . . . We made the experiment; and the fruit is before us. Look at it—think of it. Look at it, in its aggregate grandeur, of extent of country, and numbers of population—of ship, and steamboat, and rail.88
Kansas, left to decide whether it would enter the Union as a free or a slave state, broke out in outright war. Southerners moved into Kansas to vote for slavery; northerners moved into Kansas to vote against it. Eventually, they began shooting one another. Horace Greeley dubbed it “Bleeding Kansas.” Soon there would be blood on the Senate floor. Lincoln privately confided his despair about what he described as the nation’s “progress in degeneracy,” a political regression:
As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.89
In May of 1856, Charles Sumner delivered from his desk in the Senate a thundering speech called “The Crime Against Kansas,” indicting the barbarism of slavery, comparing slavery to rape (and intimating that all slave owners raped their slaves), and warning of a civil war. “Even now, while I speak,” Sumner shouted, “portents lower in the horizon, threatening to darken the land, which already palpitates with the mutterings of civil war.” Two days later, Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of South Carolina senator Andrew Butler, who had cowritten the Kansas-Nebraska Act with Stephen Douglas, approached Sumner while Sumner was sitting at his desk on the Senate floor. “Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” Brooks told Sumner. “It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” Not waiting for a reply, Brooks then beat Sumner mercilessly with his cane, thwacking him on the head again and again. Longfellow, who had been quietly doing his own part in the fight against slavery—buying the freedom of fugitive slaves and funding free schools—wrote to Sumner to tell him that he was “the greatest voice on the greatest subject that had been uttered since we became a nation.”90 It would take Sumner more than three years to recover from his head injuries. In all that while, Massachusetts refused to elect a replacement, leaving his Senate seat empty.
“The South cannot tolerate free speech anywhere,” the Cincinnati Gazette argued.91 But what Brooks’s caning of Sumner illustrated best was that the battle over slavery was a battle over the West. In the 1856 election, the Republican Party, incorporating Free-Soilers and acknowledging the growing political power of the West, nominated the Californian and famed explorer John C. Frémont for president, and only narrowly voted down Lincoln for vice president. The party adopted the slogan: “Free Speech, Free Soil, and Frémont!” It included on its platform opposition to the idea that slavery could be left to the states: “We deny the authority of Congress, of a Territorial Legislature, of any individual or association of individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States, while the present Constitution shall be maintained.”92
Frémont, however, proved a lackluster campaigner. As more than one Republican pointed out, his wife, the formidably eloquent Jesse Benton Frémont, “would have been the better candidate.”93 The Whigs nominated the unmemorable Millard Fillmore, the president of their nominating convention declaring, “It has been preached that the Whig party is dead, but it is not so.” He was wrong. The Whigs really were dead. In 1856, Democrats decided their best chance of winning an election was nominating a proslavery northerner, and chose James Buchanan. Polk once confided in his diary, “Mr. Buchanan is an able man, but in small matters without judgment and sometimes acts like an old maid.”94 A man of limited imagination, Buchanan’s sole political virtue was the appearance of evenhandedness: during the maelstrom of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he had been serving as ambassador to Great Britain, which made him appear, to American voters, unstained, as if a vote for Buchanan were a vote for union. In the general election, Buchanan campaigned by arguing that electing Frémont, a known opponent of the extension of slavery to the territories, would lead to a civil war; he won by a landslide.
The war Buchanan hoped to avert would come, with or without him. Frémont had been the first presidential candidate to promise to end the extension of slavery; Buchanan, who promised no such thing, was the first president whose inauguration was photographed. A blurry black-and-white print of the East Portico of the Capitol Building captured a crowd of men in top hats and ladies in hoop skirts, pressed against railings, on Wednesday, March 4, 1857. Buchanan was sworn in by Chief Justice Roger Taney, a wizened seventy-nine-year-old Maryland Democrat who’d been named to the court by Andrew Jackson. Buchanan proceeded to deliver an inaugural address in which he waved aside the small matter of slavery: “Most happy will it be for the country when the public mind shall be diverted from this question to others of more pressing and practical importance.” He also expressed his contentment with a much-anticipated decision of Taney’s Supreme Court in a case known as Dred Scott v. Sandford. Scott, born into slavery, had been carried into a free state and had sued for his freedom. Buchanan, from his perch at the Capitol, calling out across a sea of top hats, insisted that he was happy to leave to the court both this question and the broader question of the extension of slavery. “It is a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States, before whom it is now pending, and will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled,” Buchanan said. “To their decision, in common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit.”95
This was, to say the least, decidedly disingenuous. In truth, Buchanan had lobbied for the postponement of the ruling, and had also pressured at least one justice, a northerner, to join the court’s proslavery majority. The next day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Judge Taney was at home, writing his opinion. “The decision in the Dred Scott case will be delivered tomorrow,” reported a correspondent for the New York Herald.96 The nation held its breath.
The debate had been raging since 1787. Does the Constitution sanction slavery, or does it not? Frederick Douglass had come to find the very question an absurdity. Taney did not.
He handed down his decision on March 6. Only once, in Marbury v. Madison, had the Supreme Court overturned federal legislation. Taney chose, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, for the court to wield this power again. Writing for a 7–2 majority, he declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. But it was his logic that staggered. Congress had no power to limit slavery in the states, Taney argued, because the men who wrote the Constitution considered people of African descent “beings of an inferior o
rder, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” No “negro of the African race,” he ruled, could ever claim the rights and privileges of citizenship in the United States.97
Word spread by telegraph to every corner of the sprawling Republic. Reaction came swiftly, a torrent of outcry, and, from proslavery agitators, hushed relief. A few daily newspapers, setting type overnight, managed to get news of the ruling into their pages on Saturday, March 7. The Albany Journal even editorialized, finding the ruling to be no surprise since “Five of the Judges are slaveholders, and two of the other four owe their appointments to their facile ingenuity in making State laws bend to Federal demands in behalf of ‘the Southern institution.’” Most papers didn’t report the decision until Monday, March 9, and lengthier accounts of the opinion didn’t appear until March 13, when William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator ran a full column summarizing the court’s opinion, beginning with this decree: “That negroes, whether slave or free, that is, men of the African race, are not citizens of the United States by the Constitution.” The implications of the ruling stunned his readers. Even Americans who held no strong views on the question of slavery—and they were rare enough—were nonetheless shocked by the court’s exercise of the authority to determine the unconstitutionality of the law. The National Era ran an essay called “The Supreme Court—The Oligarchy, The People” on March 19, predicting, accurately enough, that “so far from suppressing the agitation of Slavery, or reconciling the People to its pretensions, this action of the Supreme Court will furnish new materials for controversy, add fuel to the fire, arouse the popular mind still more against the domination of the Slave Power.” That same day, the Independent ran a piece: “Can Judges Make Law?”98 Its answer: No.