John C. Frémont was very much a player in this expansionist game. Born in 1813 in Savannah, Georgia, Frémont was the son of a French émigré, Jean-Charles Fremon, and Anne Beverley Whiting Pryor, a Virginia belle. But his parents had never married, and distressed by his illegitimate birth, after his father’s death, Frémont added the accent and the “t” to his name, as if to give himself the pedigree he likely felt he lacked. An indifferent student expelled from the College of Charleston, he knew how to position himself, securing a post on the USS Natchez on a two-year expeditionary voyage to South America and then one with the team mapping out a railroad route through Cherokee land. The goal was to remove the Indians from land where gold had been discovered.
Commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, Frémont met the famous senator Thomas Hart Benton, a man with his own dream of empire, and eloped with Benton’s brilliant seventeen-year-old daughter, Jessie. But that didn’t leave him—or Jessie, for that matter—homebound. In 1842, he headed a twenty-five-man, four-month expedition to survey the region between the Missouri River and the Continental Divide, and then John and Jessie together wrote about the expedition; or he told of it, and she turned what he told into such vividly melodramatic prose that it thrilled the public almost as much as Barnum did. (Years later, the western writer Wallace Stegner would call Frémont more of a Path-publicizer than Path-finder.) They romanticized the buffalo herds and prairie dogs, the exhausted horses and the antelope they ate for supper, and the pine nuts supplied by Indians—but not the Indians who left blood on the bushes after a raiding party.
Frémont the Pathfinder was articulate, charismatic, and slightly reserved, a shabby aristocrat but self-made—albeit with the help of political patronage—and a man who, like Whitman, wore no lace on his buckskin sleeves. He also liked the limelight, and as an aggressive trailblazer he was perfect for the smudgy pages of the penny press. In 1846, believing his hour had come, he headed what might be considered a filibustering mission in Alta California, when he declared California independent of Mexico on the Fourth of July in Sonoma. Early the next year, Commodore Robert Stockton appointed Frémont governor, but when General Stephen Watts Kearney challenged Stockton’s authority, Frémont was caught in the middle. Refusing to follow Kearney’s orders, Frémont was soon court-martialed; this was the first in a series of disputes and disagreements that would characterize the erratic Pathfinder’s spotty career.
Shrewdly, Frémont had invested in the Las Mariposas gold mines in California, where gold had been famously discovered, and there, above the San Francisco Bay, Jessie Frémont held court to an array of optimists, go-getters, and transplanted easterners, including the Unitarian minister and naturalist Thomas Starr King and the writer Bret Harte. By then a well-known figure, rich and prominent, Frémont was a successful candidate for Senate from California should California enter the Union, which it did in September 1850. That year, the Frémonts returned to Washington—briefly, for he was not reelected.
In 1855, though, the Pathfinder’s name was seriously being tossed around by the fledgling Republican Party as its candidate for president of the United States.
THE REPUBLICAN PARTY was an amalgam of Conscience (antislavery) Whigs, disgruntled Democrats, and former members of the Liberty Party (abolitionists, unlike Garrison, committed to political action as well as moral suasion). All of them had been galvanized by the failed Kansas policy and opposed the further extension of slavery into the territories. The small cadre of men who first formed the Republican Association in Washington included men such as Francis Blair, a Democrat of note who had for many years published the renowned Democratic Party newspaper, The Globe. Soon Republican clubs were springing up nationwide, and a convention was held in Pittsburgh in early 1856 to form an Executive Committee. In June, then, the Republicans met in Philadelphia and nominated John Frémont as their presidential hopeful. He was just what they needed: a man with name recognition and not much else. Men such as William Seward had a record that could be used against them, and anyway Republicans didn’t really think they’d win this time out. They needed just a placeholder. So with his ties to the powerful Benton family and also to Missouri’s influential Blair family, Frémont was their man.
“The merest baby in politics,” sniggered Horace Greeley. But that was what the new party wanted; at forty-three years old, the explorer became the Republican poster boy who, during the campaign, rarely opened his mouth.
“FREE SPEECH, FREE PRESS, Free Soil, Free Men, Frémont, and Victory,” the Republicans cried during torchlight parades, their platform one of excluding slavery from the territories. “Whether or not Frémont won,” observed the editor Evert Duyckinck, “the moral victory at any rate will be for Free Soil—for Slavery must in the end be a losing game.”
That was in part true: the antislavery Republicans won eleven of the sixteen free states and voter turnout was very high. But James Buchanan, their Democratic rival, received the prize he had long sought. Because the Kansas-Nebraska Act had destroyed the reputation of Franklin Pierce and fatally tarnished the reputation of Buchanan’s chief Democratic rival, Stephen Douglas, the way had at last been cleared for his nomination on the Democratic ticket—and his victory. For Buchanan was running against a splintered Whig Party: some few Whigs had rallied around Millard Fillmore on an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant American (Know-Nothing) party ticket; the rest of them voted for Frémont and the newly organized Republicans.
The campaign against the Republicans and Frémont had been ugly and was fueled by paranoia. Democrats said slaves and free blacks would use Frémont’s victory as an excuse to revolt; absurd rumors reached the Hawthornes in England, for instance, where the novelist was working for the Pierce administration as the U.S. consul to Liverpool: “the negroes received an idea or instruction that he [Frémont] would aid them with an army—& they began to rise.” Even Frémont’s father-in-law, Thomas Hart Benton, who had lost his seat in the Senate and then in the House when he had opposed the extension of slavery, predicted disunion if Frémont won. He’d campaigned for Buchanan. And the corpulent Howell Cobb of Georgia, a genial man and Unionist, warned that if Frémont was elected, the South would secede.
Cobb was not the only one talking about secession, nor was such talk confined to the South. In Massachusetts, William Lloyd Garrison and the skilled Boston abolitionist Wendell Phillips were accusing the Republicans of not standing strongly enough against slavery. Thomas Higginson began planning a disunion convention in Worcester “to consider the practicality, probability and expediency of a separation between the free and slave states.”
Millard Fillmore tried to position himself as the compromise candidate, which he definitely was not. “We are treading upon the brink of a volcano,” Fillmore warned, “that is liable at any moment to break forth and overwhelm the nation.” To his mind, both of the other candidates represented sectional interests, while he spoke for compromise, the Union, and the Union’s salvation. Buchanan presented himself the same way, but Frémont supporters retaliated by dressing “Old Buck,” as Buchanan was called, in women’s clothes and arguing he was a Southern servant bent on preserving slavery, even in Kansas. Though formerly sympathetic to the South, James Gordon Bennett, the Democratic editor of the powerful New York Herald, backed Frémont.
Such were the divisions, prejudices, aspersions, and fears. And when the pro-Southern Buchanan won, he had to know that Republicans had achieved their own kind of victory. They were stronger than he dared admit. They had done well; they had proved themselves a competitive, viable party, not a will-o’-the-wisp. And henceforward Whigs and Know-Nothings would eventually vanish from the national scene.
Yet Buchanan may have felt protected by the Supreme Court as early as inauguration day. On March 4, right before being sworn in as chief executive, Buchanan was seen in a tête-à-tête with Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, who would administer the oath of office. Then, in his inaugural address, Buchanan re
ferred to the Court’s impending and crucial decision about the slave Dred Scott. Suing for his and his family’s freedom in Missouri, where they lived, Scott had argued all the way to the Supreme Court that his family’s earlier residence in free states or territories had made them free. (After a delay of three years, the Missouri court had declared them unequivocally free, but shortly afterward, in a partisan decision, the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the decision of the lower court and sent Dred Scott back to slavery.)
“To their decision, in common with all good citizens,” promised Buchanan, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court, “I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be.”
Did Buchanan already know the decision? Republicans suspiciously took note of his little chat with Taney. But whether or not a confidence had been breached, it was true, and more heinous, that just a month earlier President-elect Buchanan had written Supreme Court Justice John Catron of Tennessee, a Southern rights man, that he would like to refer to the Dred Scott case in his inaugural. Catron responded by telling Buchanan that he might “safely say” the Supreme Court would “settle a controversy” that had rocked the nation, though he also informed Buchanan that the judges were split. So Catron recommended that Buchanan lobby his fellow Pennsylvanian, Supreme Court Justice Robert Grier, to make sure that the court arrived at a comprehensive solution, once and for all, to the problem of slavery. Thus Catron not only violated confidentiality, he suggested that Buchanan intervene in Court affairs, and Buchanan complied. According to the historian Kenneth Stampp, Buchanan along with several of the justices thereby “secretly made a pawn of Dred Scott in a game of judicial politics.”
In the stunning 7–2 decision delivered on March 6, the Court ruled that blacks were, in fact, property and as such had no rights of citizenship, meaning they could not petition the courts and, in addition, had never been citizens. Moreover, the Court declared unconstitutional and void all congressional acts excluding slavery from the territories, meaning that slavery might exist anywhere it wanted. In other words, it declared the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. A staggering blow to Free Soil and antislavery activists, the decision deepened the rift in the Democratic Party and strengthened the Republicans, who looked forward to the next round of elections.
The decision did nothing for Dred Scott and his family. Fortunately, they were all soon emancipated. By a quirk of inheritance, they were now “owned” by Dr. Calvin Clifford Chaffee, a Massachusetts abolitionist, but because he did not live in Missouri and therefore could do nothing legally to free them, he transferred ownership to a Missouri family living close to the Scotts (and their previous owners). They signed the freedom papers, but Scott died of tuberculosis the following year.
Proslavery Southerners hailed the Dred Scott ruling as a vindication of slavery, and Northern Democrats such as Stephen Douglas twisted the interpretation of the ruling so it wouldn’t vitiate popular sovereignty (the freedom to vote up or down for slavery). But the decision did, in fact, impair it: if Congress couldn’t restrict slavery in the territories, did Congress then have any power over the territorial legislatures at all? Republicans deplored the decision, claiming it perverted the Constitution. At the anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York, Frederick Douglass called the ruling the infamous product of the Supreme Court’s slaveholding wing—and he went on to invoke the higher law of the British abolitionist Henry Lord Brougham: “Man cannot hold property in man.”
“The sun in the sky is not more palpable to the sight than man’s right to liberty is to the moral vision,” Douglass continued. “To decide against this right in the person of Dred Scott, or the humblest and most whip-scarred bondman in the land, is to decide against God.”
Yet Douglass did not, as Garrison had, call for dissolution of the Union. That would, as he shrewdly noted, “withdraw the emancipating power from the field.”
Abraham Lincoln, who also said man cannot hold property in man, deplored the Dred Scott decision, but to many it seemed as though he tiptoed around the question of how to counter it—if, that is, one does not bear in mind what he said at the Springfield, Illinois, statehouse on the evening of June 26, 1857. After studying a recent speech in which Stephen Douglas had defended the Dred Scott ruling, Lincoln forcefully argued, in reply, that the decision had been “erroneous.” The decision, he said, was based on a misinterpretation of historical facts and was by no means a settled doctrine. And by answering Stephen Douglas’s suggestion—if the framers of the Declaration of Independence had wished to include African Americans, they would have made them equal to white men—Lincoln responded by noting that the framers “did not mean to say all were equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity,” but they did say “with tolerable distinctiveness, in what respect they did consider all men created equal—equal in ‘certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”
Lincoln’s speech was as dramatic, in its way, as the Dred Scott decision, for he understood that Dred Scott threatened to make slavery the law of the land. That is, the issue was no longer the protection of slavery where it already existed but the legitimization, even the tacit encouragement, of its extension. The nation was being redefined. Compromise was more impossible than ever. Again, the Dred Scott decision not only failed to accomplish what it was intended to do—put a lid on the explosive subject of slavery—it annulled the Compromise of 1850 and, further, deprived the slaves of liberty in places where there were actually no slaveholders. The moral, political, and symbolic consequences would be huge.
Lincoln declared that though a slave “in some respects . . . is not my equal; but in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands without asking leave of any one else, she is my equal, and the equal of others.” Decidedly not an abolitionist, Lincoln believed in the humanity—the inalienable right—of all people to freedom, and he was, as well, an adroit politician, disgusted by slavery though cautious about how far he would go denouncing it, especially since the Springfield speech was his opening bid in a run for the U.S. Senate seat against Stephen Douglas himself.
Lincoln was a moderate and willing to compromise, and the abolitionists thus regarded him as conservative. Southern fire-eaters considered him a toxic radical.
Whitman likely read Lincoln’s Springfield speech—the poet was a Brooklyn journalist at the time—but whether or not he did, years later he wondered if “you noticed that the time to look for the best things in best people is the moment of their greatest need? Look at Lincoln: he is our proudest example: he proved to be big as, bigger than, any emergency—his grasp was a giant’s grasp—made dark things light, made hard things easy.”
“LAND! LAND! IS the cry.”
On mules, in wagons, buggies, stagecoaches, on horses, on foot, aboard riverboats, settlers poured into Kansas, where land sold for about ninety cents an acre; there were timber lands and town lots and amber waves of grain. To Thomas Higginson, who went there, everyone seemed full of hope.
But that depended on which Kansas you were in. There were two governments in Kansas: one, with a proslavery legislature, sat in Lecompton, a small town on the Kaw River, which consisted of a large wooden shack and a muddy street as well as several taverns. The other government, the free-state government, was located fifteen miles west in Topeka. There was a post office in the log cabin that served as a blacksmith shop, a new sawmill, two boardinghouses, and two stores in Topeka, and more and more were coming. The town was booming, and its free-state government represented three times as many Kansans as Lecompton. But since its constitution barred slavery from the territory, President Pierce had not recognized the Topeka constitution or government, which he called treasonable, and when its legislature tried to meet in 1856, it was dispersed at the point of a gun.
In March 1857, shortly after taking office, Buchanan appointed Robert J. Walker of Mississippi as territorial governor of Kan
sas to replace the failed governors from the Pierce administration, and he expected Walker to do his bidding. Though a lifelong Democrat descended from a staunch Jacksonian father, Walker was no lackey. He fully expected Buchanan to fulfill the pledge he had made to him: that Walker was to have a free hand in Kansas and that, moreover, any Kansas constitution had to be ratified by a vote of the people.
The Lecompton government, however, planned to elect (proslavery) delegates to a constitutional convention by allowing day-trippers from Missouri to vote; these delegates could then draft a proslavery constitution. Free-staters boycotted the election, and out of the 9,000 or so males eligible to vote in Kansas, only 2,000 actually voted, and many of them were not even Kansas residents; they’d merely crossed the border. The election was a sham. Then too, abolitionists and free-staters were wary of Governor Walker; the journalist James Redpath reported with concern that “Walker is all things to all men.” But when he spoke in Topeka, Walker gained their confidence and, encouraging them to vote in the upcoming elections of a new legislature, he assured them that their votes would be counted.
A second election was held in October, and when a huge number of votes were again cast by day-trippers from Missouri, Walker was outspoken in denouncing the fraud and throwing out the illegal ballots. Southerners savagely reviled Walker as a heartless free-stater and Buchanan as a traitor for having appointed him. Buchanan was livid. Southern politicians were beside themselves.
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