American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  They were divided not only over slavery but also over temperance, women’s rights, keeping the Sabbath, prison reform, free land, tariffs, immigration, schools, banks, foreign policy, foreign relations. People’s origins caused other divisions: natives and newcomers often hated one another, immigrants from the British Isles and continental Europe were wary of one another; German Catholics looked down on Irish Catholics; Irish resented Germans; and some Irish disdained other Irish.

  The single most powerful antagonism in the early 1850s was native American hostility toward the newcomers who had been arriving each year by the hundreds of thousands—hostility toward their religion, their speech, their drinking, their very foreignness. And the fastest-growing party in the north was the Know-Nothing (or American) party, whose stated program was “Anti-Romanism, Anti-Bedinism, Anti-Pope’s Toeism, Anti-Nunneryism, Anti-Winking Virginism, Anti-Jesuitism, and Anti-the-Whole-Sacerdotal-Hierarchism with all its humbugging mummeries.…”

  Cutting through this welter of distrusts and conflicting concerns were three dynamic forces that dominated the politics of slavery. One was abolitionism, rooted in New England preaching and writing and the Yankee diaspora into western New York and Ohio and the northwestern states, an abolitionism often expressed in a strident anti-southernism. The second was the defense and protection of slavery, often reflected in a militant anti-northernism. The third was an “anti-niggerism,” shared extensively by some Whigs and many Democrats and probably by most Know-Nothings—and even by some abolitionists, though it was hard for militant abolitionists to accept this fact. Not everyone who wanted to free the slaves was pro-black; millions of Americans were against slavery and also against “niggers,” because they saw the former as a moral wrong and the latter as a threat. This attitude was most clearly reflected in Free-Soilism. Many Free-Soilers strenuously resisted the Nebraska bill and its threat of allowing slavery onto free soil because they did not want blacks to invade “white” territory, put their children into white schools, and compete for while jobs. They did not want blacks next to them, slave or free.

  These dominant groups defended their views in the name of liberty or freedom. Nativists wanted to pursue their lives and their work free of brawling, pushing, competitive Irishmen and Germans. Slave owners proclaimed their liberty to take their bondsmen into the new territories. Homesteaders wished to move into a Nebraska free of “niggerism.” Abolitionists continued to view slavery as the supreme affront to the whole ideal of liberty. Thus liberty as a value still served as a source of intellectual and political confusion rather than as a guide to coherent political action.

  This disarray posed a severe problem for serious politicians. They could not operate within the bounds of neatly polarized conflict. They had to win state and local elections against rivals who could easily outdemagogue them in the emotional politics of the early fifties. They had to calculate in terms of possible coalitions, political balance sheets, electoral margins. They had to deal with Americans as they were—with millions of persons not logically arrayed in rational ideological combat but intent on immediate daily needs of survival and betterment and self-esteem, some alienated from politics or apathetic toward it, parochial in outlook, variously cursing Catholics, blacks, Southerners, Northerners, abolitionists, slave owners.

  It would take, not a single event like the Nebraska bill, but a series of powerful hammerblows over a number of years before this jumble of attitudes could be heated and pounded into a viable political movement or party. For a time, as Americans turned against the Democratic party because of Nebraska, and the Whig because of its weakness and timidity, people were in a state of political confusion. Many nevertheless stayed with Whiggism or the Democracy. Others joined the Know-Nothings, either as a way station to some other political destination or as a place to settle down. Some met in “anti-Nebraska” meetings and simply formed anti-Nebraska groups. Some met and talked about organizing new Independent or People’s parties. Some pressed for a new Fusion party to embrace abolitionists, Know-Nothings, Conscience Whigs, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, and anyone else available for a coalition.

  In Ripon, Wisconsin, fusionists proposed that merging anti-Nebraska groups adopt the name “Republican”; a plea was sent to the Tribune that it adorn its masthead with a Republican banner, but Greeley hedged. Thirty congressmen, meeting at Mrs. Cratchett’s boardinghouse in Washington, discussed a new party to stop slavery expansion. “Republican,” they thought, would make a good name for such a party. Meetings in Jackson, Michigan, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, held almost simultaneously, debated the need for a new party and agreed that “Republican,” evoking memories of Jefferson and popular rights, would be a fine name for a party designed to attract a large variety of people.

  But all these efforts would atomize rather than mobilize protest unless events brought more hammerblows—and events did. In Washington the Senate battle raged on, as Douglas pleaded, demanded, goaded, orated, his sharp sentences going “straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, crashing and tearing,” Carl Schurz wrote. As Douglas, the Southerners, and the White House mobilized all their influence, including party patronage, the anti-Nebraska forces lost battle after battle, including the final Senate roll call, when the bill passed 37 to 14. In the House, where the Administration applied whip and spur, and Douglas made his presence known, the tall, gaunt, shrill-voiced Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia applied his rapier-like logic and command of facts to win a closer victory for the measure, 113 aye to 100 nay. Each major event on the Hill, and especially the final roll calls, produced outbursts of delight, rage, threats, recriminations, and dire predictions among hundreds of editors, preachers, and politicians in the country.

  The bill had hardly passed the House, in late May 1854, when the moral dimension of the issue was illuminated in Boston. Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old slave and leader of his people on a Virginia plantation, had escaped by boarding a ship bound for Boston, been tracked down by his master, put in chains in a Boston jail, and subjected to the provisions of the Fugitive Act. This provided for not a jury trial but a summary hearing before a commissioner who could dispatch the fugitive back into slavery. While Burns awaited his hearing, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker whipped up a Faneuil Hall crowd to a pitch of indignation. A mob tried to free Burns, only to be beaten off. By the time the commissioner ordered Burns returned to his master Boston was an armed camp, filled with cavalry, artillery, Marines, and police, and with outraged Bostonians and hundreds of protesters from Worcester and other towns. Church bells pealed and thousands watched in helpless fury as the trembling slave, his face scarred and a piece of bone projecting from a broken hand, was taken by cavalry and foot soldiers through flag-draped streets to his Virginia-bound ship. This was only the latest in a series of horrifying fugitive-slave recaptures, which in some cases had ended in the rescue of the runaway. But it was in the far-off territory itself that shocking events now would galvanize the nation and precipitate a transformation of party politics and ultimately of the American political system.

  “Come on, then, Gentlemen of the slave States,” William H. Seward of New York had cried out on the Senate floor shortly after the Nebraska bill passed the House. “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”

  It was certain from the start of the Nebraska debate that the Kansas part of the territory would be a combat zone. To publicize Kansas as an arcadia for homesteaders and planters alike, and then to legislate that the people in the territory would decide the burning issue of slavery on the basis of squatter sovereignty, was to thrust two gamecocks into a rain barrel. Escalation began as soon as slavery men heard that the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society was sending Yankees into Kansas in order to convert it into a free state, and when antislavery men heard that Missouri pla
nters were dispatching “border ruffians” into Kansas with the opposite purpose. Each side exaggerated the satanic purpose and effectiveness of the other.

  Each side exploited its own advantages. When a territorial delegate was to be elected, hundreds of Missourians crossed the boundary in buck-boards and wagons, on horseback and on foot, to pick an anti-free-stater as delegate. Proslavery men proceeded to organize a proslavery legislature, which promptly passed anti-antislavery legislation, including penalties for antislavery agitation. Antislavery colonists held their own convention, declared the proslavery legislature illegal, asked admission to the Union as a free state, and later met in convention to frame the free-state Topeka constitution. By the end of 1855 Kansas had two governments—and two sides each arming itself rapidly, the antislavery men with “Beecher’s Bibles,” considered more practical in combat than the Good Book. As the last snows melted on the prairies in the spring, Kansas was headed for a showdown.

  Then came the sack of Lawrence. Proslavery men had long considered the town a hotbed of abolitionism; armed with indictments against free-state leaders and two Lawrence newspapers—the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State—sheriffs men and “border ruffians” occupied the town. Spoiling for a fight, furious at finding the leaders gone and the populace unresisting, the invaders threw printing presses into the river and bombarded the Free State Hotel into rubble. One man angered by the nonresistance to this invasion was John Brown, on his way to Lawrence with his small troop of Liberty Guards when he heard about the sacking. He resolved to take the drastic action that the cowardly antislavery people refused to take. Selecting a small band from his Liberty Guards, including several of his sons, exhorting them to “fight fire with fire,” he led them to the houses of proslavery men and, while wives and children watched, dragged the victims out and hacked them to death with cutlasses. With the fifth murder Brown stopped; he had avenged the killing of six free-state men during Kansas’ months of violence, including the one man who had died at Lawrence.

  It is probable that, on the way to Lawrence, Brown was told of another assault by the “slave power,” far away in Washington. This news could hardly have tempered his passion, nor explained his action. Brown was an enigma to his neighbors in Pottawatomie Creek, and would remain so long after: was he a fanatical moralist who as a boy had seen a young slave beaten with a shovel by his master, a stern Calvinist who had dedicated his life to a merciless effort to extirpate the evil of slavery; or was he simply a homicidal lunatic from a family of lunatics?

  Each incident in Kansas provoked storms of oratory in Congress as both chambers became caldrons of sectional hatred and hyperbole. “Truly—truly—this is a godless place,” Sumner lamented early in 1856. No one writhed under the oratorical lashes of Douglas and southern senators with a greater desire for vengeance than the Massachusetts lawmaker. Carefully he planned his climactic attack on the moral wickedness, the supreme sinfulness, of slavery. From his first words when he gained the floor in mid-May—”Mr. President, you are now called to redress a great transgression”—to his final reference to Virginia, “where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles,” his speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” was studded with provocative and offensive personal attacks on his foes. He attacked the phalanx, especially Butler, charging that the South Carolinian had chosen a mistress who, “though ugly to others, is always lovely to him…the harlot, Slavery.…” When Douglas answered him in kind, Sumner ranted: “…no person with the upright form of man can be allowed—” He paused.

  “Say it,” Douglas shot back.

  “I will say it—no person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. …The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”

  “I will,” Douglas replied, “and therefore will not imitate you, sir.”

  This was not the kind of grand Senate debate in which senatorial gladiators harangued each other on the floor and then walked through the cloakroom arm in arm. These adversaries loathed one another. As the bonds of civility snapped, as allies and constituents egged the antagonists on, Congress trembled on the edge of violence. Preston S. Brooks, a thirty-six-year-old congressman from South Carolina, a Mexican War veteran considered to be a moderate and agreeable man, had listened to some of Sumner’s remarks. Incensed by Sumner’s “insults” to South Carolina and to Brooks’s admired uncle, Senator Butler, Brooks carefully planned vengeance. He would not challenge Sumner to a duel, because that would imply acceptance of the Massachusetts man as his social equal. He would simply thrash him, as he would any other inferior guilty of wrongdoing.

  After gallantly waiting for some women visitors to leave the Senate lobby, Brooks strode up to Sumner’s desk, where the senator was busy with correspondence, and rained twenty or thirty blows on Sumner’s head with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane. Sumner rose convulsively, wrenching his bolted desk from the floor, and reeled about as Brooks broke his cane on his head and kept on striking him, until bystanders dragged the assailant away. Almost insensible, his head covered with blood, Sumner, with the help of friends, stumbled out of the Capitol into a carriage a painful convalescence—and martyrdom.

  THE ILLINOIS REPUBLICANS

  Sacking a defenseless town, dragging helpless men out of their homes and hacking them to death, bloodying a United States senator pinioned under his desk—this explosion of baleful events sent new and irresistible shocks into the American conscience. Thirty months of rising conflict, culminating in these violent days of May, were arousing Americans to a consciousness of slavery as the supreme issue transcending all the others. The hurricane was whipping through the mainstream of American politics, washing out old waterways and carving new channels, wrenching people from ancient political moorings and leaving them adrift or clutching new ones.

  Fundamental economic and social forces, as well as bitter conflict, seemed to be transforming America during the 1850s. The economic boom roared on through the middle of the decade, both satisfying needs and raising expectations. Population soared under the impact of foreign immigration and domestic fecundity. Rising prices altered long-established relationships among groups and classes. Massive immigration caused new anxieties and tensions. Intense railroad building not only was altering the face of the land but causing social dislocation, as the jobs of draymen and teamsters and rivermen evaporated in one place and employment for railroad builders and trainmen and telegraphers suddenly materialized hundreds of miles away.

  The few Americans who were reading Karl Marx in the 1850s might have expected sweeping political change to follow economic and social, especially in the wake of the storm over slavery. A major political change indeed was in the making, as a few Americans tried a major political experiment—to create a new political party that would challenge the existing two-party system in elections. This had never been done. Earlier the Democratic party had gradually grown out of the old Republican party; the Whigs had never had to challenge a full-bodied Federalist party. Many politicians doubted that this new party—anti-Nebraska, or Fusion, or Republican, or People’s—would have any more success than Liberty-ites or Free-Soilers. Only a Republican zealot would have dreamed in 1854 that the isolated protest meetings of that year would start the formation of what would become the dominant party for three-quarters of a century.

  The question for Republicans by the end of 1854, indeed, was whether their movement would even survive. They faced not only the familiar Whigs and Democrats, Free-Soilers and Know-Nothings, but “Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells,” and assorted others, in David Potter’s listing. Of the third parties, the Know-Nothings seemed most ascendant. In November 1854 they swept Massachusetts, scored well in New York and Pennsylvania, and elected a large number of representatives to the
national House; after they won more victories the next year, some predicted that the nativists would take the presidency in 1856. Know-Nothings and anti-slavery representatives had enough in common in the new Congress to elect as Speaker Nathaniel P. Banks, a Massachusetts nativist and antislavery man who was once a Democrat, more recently a Know-Nothing, and now on his way to Republicanism.

  All the parties indeed seemed immobilized by 1856. The Democrats, claiming to be the only truly national party, were bleeding at both ends as proslavery extremists deserted them in the South and “Free Democrats” seceded in the North. Whigs, still torn between conscience and cotton, were walking a tightrope on nativism, as they watched Democrats making inroads among immigrants and Catholics, and Know-Nothings exploiting bigotry. Some Whig leaders followed the high road; invited to address an anti-alien organization, Edward Everett not only declined but lectured his would-be host on the need to greet newcomers “in a spirit not of exclusiveness but of fraternal welcome.” Other Whig leaders were less high-minded. The Know-Nothings, even in the flush of their victories, comprised the weakest party of all, for they were deeply divided over slavery. When the party adopted a proslavery platform in its convention in June 1855, northern delegates withdrew, and the party was on the road to extinction.

  The parties were immobilized because their top leadership was immobilized, and the leaders were immobilized because they were enmeshed in state and local politics. If the leaders could have fought in one great arena, some bold and committed spirit might have taken an advanced position against slavery—even in favor of emancipation—knowing that someday the people would catch up with him. But the national politicians of the day had to fight their battles within the states, and within key cities and counties in those states. Men like Sumner or Chase or Seward did take the lead, but only when local conditions permitted. No great national leader arose to rally Whigs or Democrats behind a daring commitment to halt and eventually abolish slavery; rather, month after month and year after year, state and sectional leaders calculated, advanced here, retreated there, compromised, adjusted, as they competed with rivals within and outside their parties, and tried to survive in the three-dimensional maze of American electoral and party politics.