The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  The First Congregational Church in Beloit, Wisconsin, 1877

  Within the amputated remnant, the inhabitants of Beloit in a southern prairie county had more in common with other New England communities stretching eastward through Illinois and Indiana back to their starting point beyond the Appalachians than with immigrant miners in the north and west or lumber concerns in the forest counties of the center. Like other prairie communities, it soon developed a narrow sense of self based on the shared challenge of farming and building, and through communal institutions such as the churches and Beloit College. An outside influence, however, was to fuse a wider sense of identity and pride in being part of Wisconsin and, more intensely than that, being part of the United States.

  Just six years after Horace White decided to settle beside the Rock River, his friend Benjamin Brown started to advocate the “free soil” policies of the Liberty Party. The goal was to keep cheap slave labor out of the Territories, but Free Soil also meant keeping out free African-Americans as well. In 1854 even Abraham Lincoln took this for granted. “The whole nation is interested that the best use shall be made of these territories,” he acknowledged. “We want them for the homes of free white people.” It was a populist demand, aimed both at the aristocratic planters from the south and at moneyed speculators of the east who might bring in cheap black labor. As the escaped slave Frederick Douglass noted bitterly, “The cry of Free Man was raised, not for the extension of liberty to the black man, but for the protection of the liberty of the white.”

  Nevertheless, the slogan could be interpreted more broadly, to be against slavery wherever it existed. The way that Brown presented Free Soil policies led him to be dubbed, as his son recalled, “a nigger lover and abolitionist.” What had touched the new community of Beloit was the first little tug of a current that would pull it into the mainstream of national events.

  By 1848, when Wisconsin was admitted to the Union as a state, Brown was giving shelter to runaway slaves, and the combined influence of a powerful Congregational church and the community’s evangelical college ensured that he did so with the approval of Beloit’s leading citizens. Then in 1854 came news that Sherman Booth, editor of Milwaukee’s leading newspaper, the Free Democrat, had been imprisoned by a federal court under the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act for helping to rescue a slave from prison.

  At that point, it became impossible for any community in Wisconsin, however remote, to resist the powerful forces that had begun to convulse the rest of the country. No one could be indifferent to the outcome of the battle to control the federal government. The victors would determine the nature of property itself and shape the law that protected personal freedom.

  As it happened, the man responsible for the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had also done more than any other to shape the Territories and states of the United States from Iowa to California. For those reasons alone Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois deserves a greater fame than simply having come second to Abraham Lincoln in the Illinois debates of 1858. Until his encounters with Lincoln, the clout that Douglas wielded made him seem the natural successor in Congress to the great triumvirate of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John C. Calhoun.

  He made his mark from the moment he arrived in the House of Representatives in 1843 as a freshman Democrat from Illinois and threw himself into the debate over the annexation of Texas. Standing barely five feet tall, he compensated with a style of oratory that was sweaty, extravagant, loud, and combative. John Quincy Adams, the old Puritan lion, observed “the humunculus Douglas” with distaste. “In the midst of his roaring,” he noted, “to save himself from choking, he stripped off and cast away his cravat, unbuttoned his waistcoat and had the air and aspect of a half-naked pugilist.”

  Nevertheless, Douglas’s enthusiasm for annexing Texas, the great cause of the south, led a caucus of southern congressmen to back his election as chairman of the House Committee on Territories. His backers’ confidence was quickly justified. Calhoun had written to the British minister telling him that Texas was needed in the Union in order to provide “security to the slave interest,” and publication of his correspondence in 1844 so outraged antislavery senators that they threw out the Tyler administration’s attempt to annex Texas by treaty. It was Douglas who rescued the south’s tattered strategy.

  The annexation treaty was needed because Texas was regarded as an independent nation, but such a treaty required a two-thirds majority in the Senate. With characteristic flair, Douglas bypassed the obstacle by persuading Congress that Texas had originally been included within the Louisiana Purchase and thus was territorially part of the United States. On this basis, a simple resolution of Congress, requiring no more than a bare majority, would be sufficient for reannexation, so long as the voters of Texas agreed. Then, in a way that was to become his trademark, Douglas set out to mollify the anti-slavers with all the roaring energy he had used in upsetting them. He introduced an amendment that severed the long arm of Texas stretching north of the old slave frontier of 36 degrees 30 minutes, ensuring that this land would be free in accordance with the Missouri Compromise. Finally he promised that the rest of Texas, whether it remained one or became several states as some wanted, would be allowed to choose whether to be free or slave. This was to be the basis of the system he would call “popular sovereignty.”

  A lasting memorial to its inventor’s deal-making can still be seen in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the 3.5-million-acre slab of territory separating northern Texas from southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado that was lopped off at 36 degrees 30 minutes to soothe the antislavers, then forgotten. For fifty years it remained a no-man’s-land, unclaimed by any state, until, almost as an afterthought, it was attached to Oklahoma.

  Stephen A. Douglas

  Demonstrating an expansiveness to match that of Adams or Polk, Douglas presented popular sovereignty as the key to a still greater enlargement of the United States. “Our federal system is admirably suited to the whole continent,” he thundered to the House of Representatives. “I would exert all legal and honorable means to drive Great Britain and the last vestiges of royal authority from the continent of North America, and extend the limits of the Republic from ocean to ocean. I would make this an oceanbound republic and have no more disputes about boundaries or red lines upon maps.”

  It was a potent image to which many wavering legislators could subscribe, whatever their reservations about the dangers of conflict with Mexico and about spreading the peculiar institution of slavery. No fewer than sixteen different solutions to the problem of Texas were submitted in the Senate and House of Representatives, but the definitive joint resolution by which Congress annexed the territory and admitted the new state came in January 1845 from Douglas’s committee, a symbol of the crucial role he had played.

  For the next fifteen years the south and Douglas were to find each other mutually useful. With each new session, the southern caucus, first in the House, then in the Senate, voted him back to his chairmanship, and with each new surge of settlement westward, he and his committee provided Territorial boundaries and a framework of government that allowed a Territory’s voters to opt for slavery. The political marriage repeated the pattern of his personal life—born in Vermont, he had married a wealthy southerner, Martha Martin, whose profitable cotton plantations financed his career. Yet tied though he was to the south in both partnerships, he never felt close enough to its spirit to be admitted to the inner circles ruled by Calhoun and Jefferson Davis or to pay more than one brief visit to his wife’s Mississippi property.

  Douglas’s political mastery was already assured when the war with Mexico ended in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which forced the defeated nation to cede to the United States all its territory from the Rio Grande to San Francisco. By the end of that year, he had steered four new states—Florida, Texas, Iowa, and Wisconsin—into the Union and had three new Territories—California, Minnesota, and Oregon—waiting in line. But nothing that he had done so far compared to the tan
gle of problems thrown up by the United States’ huge acquisition of territory. At every point, sovereignty and slavery were interlocked.

  Texas maintained that its slave boundaries included half of nominally free New Mexico; northern Free-Soilers insisted that the Wilmot Proviso banned slavery throughout the newly acquired territory; southerners required the same territory to be opened to slavery; and Mormons, who believed that slavery was, in Brigham Young’s words, “of divine institution,” laid claim to most of the land between the Rockies and the Pacific, a region that contained California, which, with indeterminate borders and a goldswollen economy, was applying for admission to the Union as a free state.

  The Douglas strategy fell into two distinct stages, shaping the new land into governable units, then selling them to the two rival groups in Congress. The boundaries of California and the state lines dividing New Mexico from Texas and Utah are all physical memorials to the 1850 deliberations of the Senate Committee on Territories. But it was equally important that the legislation creating Utah and New Mexico as territories should contain the proviso that when they became states, they “shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe at the time of their admission.”

  This was popular sovereignty in action, a democratic solution to the growing conflict over slavery. The new states rather than the federal government would make the decision. The system was based, Douglas said, “on the great and fundamental principle that every people ought to possess the right of forming and regulating their own internal concerns and domestic institutions in their own way.” But it also rested on his unparalleled skills as a deal-maker, and the deals that Douglas made were to radicalize the north.

  Texas was paid $10 million to drop its claim to New Mexico, while the antislavers, offended by the possibility of Utah becoming a slave state when it lay north of 36 degrees 30 minutes, were bought off with the abolition of slave-trading in the District of Columbia and the assurance that the slave frontier still held good within the Louisiana Purchase. But the admission of a free California would swing the balance in Congress heavily against slavery, and the price exacted by the south was much higher. A new, tougher Fugitive Slave Act was promised and passed in 1850. It made the recovery of escaped slaves a federal responsibility, with fines of $1,000 in a federal court for anyone who hindered a slave’s capture, and allowed neither jury trial nor right of habeas corpus for the runaway.

  The senior senator, Henry Clay of Kentucky, “the Great Compromiser” of the previous three decades, packaged these proposals into an omnibus bill, but put together they proved too contentious to be accepted. Working his contacts, Douglas had his deals presented again as separate bills and saw them passed into law almost unaltered. Their success sealed his dominance in the Senate. He had eclipsed Clay; Calhoun had died during the debates, and Webster had alienated his following in New England by supporting the legislation on fugitive slaves. Douglas’s supporters termed him the Little General, a reference both to his height and to his Napoleonic grasp of strategy.

  His one weakness, and ultimately a fatal one, was his inability to understand how passionately ordinary people felt about justice and values—issues that were absent from his deals. Humorously, Douglas remarked that after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had been passed, he could have navigated his way back to Illinois following the line of his effigies that his opponents hung by day and burned by night. But those were only the outward signs of a growing resentment against the south’s political power. Just as the south always liked to picture itself as a society distinct from the effete, commercial, corrupted north, so northern states began to pride themselves after 1850 on being unlike the aristocratic, freedom-hating, corrupted society they saw south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  In Wisconsin, the catalyst was the Booth case of 1854. It began when federal marshals acting on behalf of a Missouri slave owner arrested a runaway slave named Joshua Glover under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act and locked him in Milwaukee’s county jail before taking him south. Sherman Booth, the eye-catchingly large and black-bearded editor of the Free Democrat, was alleged to have brought out a mob, yelling, “Freemen to the rescue,” that broke in and freed Glover when the marshals refused to accept a local judge’s writ of habeas corpus.

  In the state’s newly created Supreme Court, Chief Justice Abram D. Smith dismissed the charges against Booth on the grounds that the Fugitive Slave Act infringed the sovereignty of the new state. The court could not accept, he said, that “an officer of the United States, armed with process to arrest a fugitive from service, is clothed with entire immunity from state authority, to commit whatever crime or outrage against the state.” When the United States appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, Booth’s supporters pointed to the contradiction of making slavery a matter of state sovereignty beyond the scope of federal law, except where fugitive slaves were concerned and state sovereignty counted for nothing.

  The inconsistency was made clearer still in 1855 when the U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roger Taney, soon to polarize opinion still further with his ruling in the Dred Scott case, overturned Smith’s judgment, denying state courts any right to question a federal law. Thus Wisconsin— in common with most other western states created in equally arbitrary fashion—began to discover a sense of identity around the cause of antislavery and in opposition to Washington’s laws. Its anger, like that that of other free states, grafted itself onto a deeper-rooted sense of individual liberty growing in New England.

  In Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau, who had already refused to pay taxes for Polk’s imperialist war and advocated civil disobedience for those who wanted “to do justice to the slave and to Mexico,” pleaded with his fellow citizens in 1850 to remember that “they are to be men first and Americans only at a late and convenient hour.” With growing frequency the phrase the slave power was applied indiscriminately to the south and to the federal government, which was deemed to be under its control. In a way that eerily resembled Calhoun’s definition of the south as an oppressed area at war with Washington, the intellectuals of New England gave voice to the north’s feeling that it was in rebellion against an oppressive government.

  “The less government we have the better,” Ralph Waldo Emerson protested, “—the fewer laws and the less confided power.” Long before the Confederates made rebellion their philosophy, Walt Whitman made it his against a slave-supporting government, “My heart is with all you rebels—all of you today, always, wherever; your flag is my flag.”

  That same mood gave force to the glorious assertion of individual liberty in Leaves of Grass, published July 4, 1855:

  I am for those that have never been master’d,

  For men and women whose tempers have never been master’d,

  For those whom laws, theories, conventions can never master.

  Twenty years after Calhoun’s southern manifesto had declared, “The country is divided and organized into two great parties, the one sovereign and the other subject,” Thoreau demanded of the north, “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.”

  In the end everyone opposed to slavery had to make a similar appeal to a sense of individual integrity and moral principle more powerful than the laws and conventions that supported slavery. Such opposition required a double defiance from women and free blacks, because both were assumed to be subservient to the white males who made the law. Thus a woman brave enough to join the Female Anti-Slavery Sociey not only had to face the real danger of riots and the sort of mob violence that led to the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in 1837, but to find a personal justification for her behavior. “Whatever is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do,” the South Carolina abolitionist Angelina Grimke asserted in 1837. “I recognize no rights but human rights—I know nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is nei
ther male nor female.”

  When the free African-American David Walker published his fiery Appeal in 1829, a pamphlet that was circulating among southern slaves within months of its apperance, he too turned to a higher authority than the law that protected property. “Have we any other Master but Jesus Christ alone?” he demanded. “What right then, have we to obey and call any other Master, but Himself?… Let no man of us budge one step, and let slave-holders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears.” The National Black Conventions, which began in the 1830s, and the African churches that started to flourish at the same time, pictured themselves at the other end of the scale, nearer the restrained, middle-class respectability of the black Yankee, but like Walker the identity they envisioned was above all American, and the freedom they looked to lay beyond government.

  In the 1850s, abolitionists and the Free-Soilers in the north and west still understood freedom differently. The concept of individual liberty, as expressed by Emerson and practiced by women, free blacks, and abolitionists, was a product of the cities, a rebellion against the stultifying conformity induced by slavery and its supporters. By contrast, the general freedom experienced by pioneers out on the mythical frontier arose from an absence of any restraint, except the need to secure property, and a belief that such freedom was confined to whites.

  To fuse these ideas of liberty required the crucible pressure of a civil war and the oratorical grace, political pliability, and unbending morality that constituted Abraham Lincoln’s unique genius. Once Lincoln began to interpret the Constitution in the context of the Declaration of Independence, it became evident that individual rights extended to everyone. The critical change began in 1855 when resentment against the tide of Catholic Irish immigrants fleeing the potato famine gave rise to the nativist Know-Nothing party, for a time the most popular party in the Union.