At his inauguration, Pierce had expressed northern Democrats’ hopes when he said, “I fervently hope that the question [of slavery’s expansion] is at rest, and that no sectional or fanatical excitement may again threaten the durability of our institutions or obscure the light of our prosperity.” Most white Americans, shaken by the capital’s constant struggle from 1846 to 1850, had agreed. Yet it only took an hour to persuade Pierce to saw into the republic’s most important load-bearing pillars. Pierce even took out his pen and personally crafted the language that would doom him, his party, and the delicate political balances of the antebellum United States. The Missouri Compromise, he wrote, “had been superceded by the principles of the legislation of 1850”—in other words, the rest of the West would be something like New Mexico after the Compromise of 1850: open to slavery until either local elections or court decisions decided otherwise. The president was all in. What remained was to convince enough northern Democratic congressmen to vote for the bill.48
The next day, Monday, January 23, Douglas formally introduced the bill under a new name, for he now proposed two territories. One, Kansas, stretched west from the Missouri border; the other, Nebraska, from the latitude of Iowa north to Canada. Listeners took Douglas as implying that Kansas would be slave territory, and more northerly Nebraska free. Observers might also have mused that only a month before, they had assumed that Kansas was too far north to be a slave territory. Douglas and Pierce tried to make the bill seem palatable in the North by proclaiming to the press that the “great principle of the Nebraska bill” was not slavery extension, but self-determination. But the same observers might also consider that everywhere that slavery was permitted to go since 1787, it had gone.49
Yet opponents of slavery also saw opportunity in the Kansas-Nebraska bill. A group of congressmen seized it by publishing a document they called the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats”—although its primary authors were not actually Democrats, but Free Soil Ohioans Joshua Giddings and Salmon Chase. The “Appeal” deployed Free Soil arguments from the 1840s, backed now with proof in the form of Douglas’s craven treason. Legalized slavery in the Nebraska Territory—for the “Appeal” didn’t believe Kansas could contain it—would extend the slave lords’ domain all the way north to the Canadian border and box freedom in. Overturning once “sacred” compromises, Douglas’s “enormous crime” would enable slavery to block wage laborers and independent farmers from new territories, for “labor cannot be respected when any class of laborers is held in bondage.” The “Independent Democrats” promised to fight Kansas-Nebraska to the end in Congress. And “if overcome in the impending struggle,” they wrote, “we shall not submit. We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of freedom, and call on the people to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery. We shall not despair, for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”50
The battle that followed the introduction and simultaneous denunciation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was the most thunderous in the history of congressional debate over the expansion of slavery. All the great Senate lions roared: Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, William Seward of New York, and Chase against the bill; and in its favor Douglas, Douglas, and again Douglas. The southern supporters sat back and let Douglas do his work. His squat, furious figure was on the floor almost every day, denouncing ministers who preached sermons against him, cursing the anti-slave-expansion New York Tribune, and recalling minute details of the Missouri Compromise debate in order to make his points. Eventually, on March 3, he forced a Senate vote and won it, 37 to 14. Most of the no votes were northern Whigs, while 14 northern Democrats joined 23 southerners in voting yes.51
The battle moved into the House. By now, “anti-Nebraska” mass meetings were being held across the North. “We went to bed one night, old-fashioned, conservative, compromise Union Whigs,” textile-mill heir and former Cotton Whig Amos Lawrence recalled, “and waked up stark mad Abolitionists.” In New York, merchants who had fought for the Compromise of 1850 now organized public meetings against the 1854 bill. There were ominous rumors of a new political party.52 Northern Democrats strained against party-line pressure, but Douglas and the administration herded them relentlessly. Finally, Douglas’s floor managers broke a filibuster. On May 22, the Kansas-Nebraska Act passed the House, 113 to 100, with 44 northern Democrats voting for and 42 against. After three bruising months, Douglas—his arms bound by his F Street captors—had repealed the Missouri Compromise.
The act destroyed the two-party system that had existed for the previous two decades. The Whig Party split along North-South lines and collapsed in the fall midterm elections. The new “Know-Nothing” Party, also known as the American Party, which captured 62 congressional districts, picked up many former Whigs with a “nativist,” or anti-immigrant, message. But 37 of the 44 northern Democratic congressmen who had supported Kansas-Nebraska fell, most of them before the scythe of another new party. This was the Republicans, who suddenly emerged in 1854, coalescing around the ideals of the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats” and winning 46 House seats. Compared to their Free Soil or Liberty predecessors, Republicans appealed to a wider audience. They opposed the expansion of slavery both on moral grounds and because they believed the white man’s frontier should be unsullied by black slaves. They also espoused a pro-industry policy, and eventually they would incorporate many of the nativists.53
It soon became obvious that the Republican coalition had the potential to win a commanding majority of northern voters. The Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed not only the Missouri Compromise but also many of the other structures that had encouraged compromise on the question of the expansion of slavery. But the rise of the Republicans did not yet portend a new equilibrium between two national parties. Southern voters and politicians now believed more than ever that they would be able to make the expansion of slavery normative. In the debates, Douglas had tried to highlight the allegedly democratic essence of “popular sovereignty,” insisting that Kansas citizens were free to choose against slavery. This was a smokescreen for what the act meant as both policy and politics. Salmon Chase insisted that “Southern gentlemen” in Congress were now claiming that “they could take their slaves into” Kansas and “hold them there by virtue of the Constitution,” no matter what the voters decided. Southern House members, in particular, agreed. They insisted that repeal of the Missouri Compromise meant the federal government’s acknowledgment of their substantive-due-process doctrine. They planned to get final confirmation of the right of enslavers to take their “property” into federal territory by either victory in the demographic competition for control of the Kansas plains or success in getting the Supreme Court to overturn a territorial act forbidding slavery.54
Salmon Chase also insisted that those “southern gentlemen” did not speak for “the great majority” of white southerners. Yet the southern press, at least, agreed with the F Street vision. It wanted the expansion of slavery. The Nashville Union and American said the Kansas-Nebraska Act “saved [the South] from unconstitutional proscription and insult by Congress,” while a Florida editor described it as a “mere act of justice,” an acknowledgment of all citizens’ “right to carry property” into the territories. For many southern whites, Kansas-Nebraska confirmed the substantive-due-process doctrine as law, even if they knew not all northerners would agree. From 1854 forward, the right to expand slavery into the territories would be an article of faith in southern popular politics. And no wonder—many of them had already lived its essence, the use of enslaved African Americans as the tools of their entrepreneurial pursuits. Even to those who did not own slaves, the unlimited use of enslaved African Americans as chattel property was associated with freedom, modernity, and liberal economic life.55
The southern white voting public was, however, uncertain about the best way to proceed: Was immediate enforcement of the ideas that John Calhoun had championed more important than remaining in the Union, or was more patience nece
ssary for the ultimate extraction of one’s natural right to transport slaves? One door had already closed. Kansas would not grow cotton, much less sugar, but Kansas-Nebraska’s passage destroyed any chance to get Cuba. The island, momentarily in Young America’s grasping reach, would have delivered enslavers tangible benefits. Southern enslavers would have exploited the island together with northern white allies, and Cuba would have become two or three Democratic states. The remainder of the nineteenth century would then have proceeded very differently.
But while the Young America and Mississippi Valley supporters of Cuba acquisition had waited for the island to fall into US hands, by means diplomatic or not-so-diplomatic, the F Street mess and their allies had moved. Even before the hammer of the 1854 fall elections fell on the Democrats, the conflict over the Kansas-Nebraska bill had raised doubts about the possibility of acquiring Cuba during Pierce’s presidency. “No More Slave States,” proclaimed a New Jersey newspaper article. “There was a time when the North would have consented to annex Cuba, but the Nebraska wrong has rendered annexation forever impossible.” The Ostend Manifesto, written by Pierce’s ambassadors to the Old World to push both Madrid and Washington to carry out the sale of Cuba, arrived on US shores right at the time of the northern Democrats’ stunning fall 1854 electoral defeat. The New York Tribune quickly leaked its contents. Northern reaction was scornful. The administration—though it had run on Cuba in 1852—quickly disowned the manifesto and seized the Cuban junta’s New York-based ship. Over the next few years, other filibustering schemes would entice young male adventurers—such as William Walker, whose 1856 invasion of Nicaragua ended in his execution. But Cuba had been the real prize, and slave-owning expansionists had knocked it out of their own reach by forcing northern allies to risk all their political capital on the Kansas-Nebraska bill.56
Now, concluded southern hard-liners like James Mason, Kansas controlled the “destiny” of the South. Yet free-soil settlers already outnumbered pro-slave ones on the plains. Supposedly, “nine-tenths of the whole number of [land] claimants” who had squatted on the Kansas public domain by the summer of 1854 planned to vote to exclude slavery. That fall, President Pierce established a territorial government staffed by southerners and compliant northerners, such as Governor Andrew Reeder, who told southern congressmen that he hoped to bring slaves to Kansas himself. He scheduled an 1855 election for the territorial legislature. Senator Atchison urged white Missourians to “do their duty” and secure “peace and quiet” at the Kansas ballot box. The 5,000 Missourians who crossed the border to vote illegally accounted for 75 percent of the ballots. All but one of the legislators elected were proslavery. Reeder, feeling betrayed by the way southern radicals had overturned even the façade of popular sovereignty, resigned.57
Meanwhile, the northern press and Republicans in Congress charged that Democrats had adopted the idea that “the subjugation of white freemen may be necessary that African slavery may succeed” in Kansas. In response to electoral cheating, Amos Lawrence used his textile-mill fortune to fund the “New England Emigrant Aid Company,” an operation that paid free-state settlers to move to Kansas—and armed them. In contrast, although an Alabama editor claimed that “every mail brings tidings of the gallant young men buckling on their armor for the struggle that is to give Kansas to the South,” few southern slaveholders were willing to take that risk. Instead, slavery expansionists relied on the Missourians—whom northerners called “border ruffians” and “pukes”—to win the battle through intimidation and illegal voting.58
Above all, slavery expansionists counted on their control over the levers of power in Washington to make the results of border-ruffian elections permanent. Stephen Douglas was already obediently pushing Kansas statehood through Congress. It looked like another fraudulent election would soon make Kansas the sixteenth slave state. On May 21, 1856, proslavery forces sacked and burned the free-soil town of Lawrence. In response, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner gave an outraged speech in which he denounced the administration, Douglas, and the South for what he called “the crime against Kansas.” He threw in what sounded like personal attacks on Senator Andrew Butler, of the F Street mess. A couple of days later, Butler’s South Carolina cousin, US representative Preston Brooks, assaulted Sumner at his Senate desk with a cane, beating the Massachusetts man into bloodied unconsciousness. “We much regret that the insolence of such men as Sumner renders such scenes occasionally necessary” to defend one’s honor, wrote a Georgia editor. Northern newspapers, even racist ones like the New York Herald, took a different view—that southern “slave lords” respected free-state whites so little that they would inflict “nigger-driving” whippings on them, even in the Senate.59
During 1855, slave-state settlers had murdered several Kansas free-soil men as part of a campaign of intimidation. “Thick-headed bullies in the West [think] that the Northern and Eastern men will not fight. Never was a greater mistake,” wrote one free-soil editor, for “the Free State men in Kansas will fight before they are disfranchised. . . . Mark the word.” When a Kansas free-soil leader counseled patience, recently arrived Connecticut native John Brown called him “a perfect old woman.” Brown brought his many sons, the financial backing of wealthy New York land magnate Gerrit Smith, and also weapons. On the night of May 24, 1856, Brown and his sons went on a killing spree. They stormed into proslavery cabins along Kansas’s Pottawatomie Creek, pulled men out, and murdered them execution-style. Brown, who believed he was the agent of a vengeful God who hated slavery, intended the murders as exemplary political terrorism. The inevitable eruption of violence would force free-state men to fight for their convictions. Indeed, settlers spent the summer hunting each other across the territory. While another governor fled, nearby US Army units blocked armed northerners from entering Kansas. By the summer of 1856, in-migration had virtually stopped.60
THE “BLEEDING KANSAS” DRAMA took place against the backdrop of the 1856 presidential election. This was the first one contested by the brand new Republican Party, which nominated John Fremont. Although he was the grandson of a Virginia planter, Fremont ran on a platform focused on the single issue of blocking slavery’s further expansion. The Americans, or Know-Nothings, who nominated ex-president Millard Fillmore of New York, were split between their northern and southern wings. General economic prosperity also had lessened the perceived relevance of their anti-immigrant message. The Democratic convention rejected both the disgraced Franklin Pierce and the compromised Stephen Douglas in favor of Pennsylvanian James Buchanan, who had spent the past four years overseas as an ambassador. But southern delegates knew him well. They expected him to cave to their dictation.61
During the summer of 1856, local Democratic activists began to report that party members were returning to the fold. The states in which slavery was legal contained 120 of the 149 electoral votes needed for victory. The southern Whigs were gone, so the Democrats could expect to win all 120 slave-state votes. This left them needing only a few northern states for victory. On election day, they managed to win Pennsylvania (Buchanan’s home state), New Jersey, Indiana, and Illinois—and thus, the presidency. But southern expansionists could see that the old balance was gone. Population shifts meant that a Republican president could be elected without a single southern electoral vote. And Buchanan had won a minority of the popular vote, even though Frémont had received only 600 votes from southerners brave or inattentive enough to cast their ballots for a sectional party aimed at their section.62
Some northern Democrats, meanwhile, convinced themselves that Buchanan would be less subservient to the slave power than Pierce. They misread the willingness of the southerners to implement strategies aimed at forcing the entire nation to accept slave property as a truly national institution while they still had the leverage to extract such an outcome. Harriet and Dred Scott, however, had a much clearer sense of what they were dealing with. In 1852, the Missouri’s supreme court’s proslavery activist justices—reversing their own precede
nts in dozens of successful freedom suits—ruled that territories’ antislavery laws did not overrule the property claims of Eliza Emerson, a Missouri citizen. The Scotts appealed to federal court, and Emerson handed off her property claim to her brother, changing the case’s name to Dred Scott v. Sanford. It reached the US Supreme Court in 1856. Some of the questions were technical, but the biggest issues were as timely as it was possible for a case to be. Did Congress have the power to pass the slavery restrictions of the Missouri Compromise? Could the federal government extinguish or limit enslavers’ property claims?63
Over the past thirty years, a series of presidents, starting with Andrew Jackson, had loaded the Court with a southern majority. Although Chief Justice Roger B. Taney had voluntarily manumitted all his human property decades earlier, the Court under his leadership, in cases ranging back to Prigg v. Pennsylvania and beyond, had steadily moved toward establishing enslavers’ property claims as a fundamental, natural right. This Court increasingly ranked the property claims of entrepreneurial, mobile enslavers higher than the rights of legislative majorities—even congressional ones. The Court was coming to accept the claims, enunciated by Calhoun and others, that slaveholders’ property rights meant that neither the federal nor the state governments could limit enslavers’ mobility, and that neither could refuse to help enforce enslavers’ power over forced migrants or fugitives.64
On March 4, 1857, James Buchanan took the oath of office—the fifteenth consecutive president for whom the issue of forced migration had been an irritant. In his inaugural address, Buchanan announced that there was no need for Americans to feel agitated about Kansas, or about whether it had been just for Congress to revoke the Missouri Compromise. For soon the Supreme Court would settle all key questions about slavery and expansion. Two days later, Taney’s Court issued a decision. Six of the nine justices agreed that the Scotts had no standing to sue for their freedom. Taney himself delivered an opinion that laid out the case against the Scotts’ freedom in its most extreme form, including a claim that the Court’s majority agreed with him that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. While Justice Peter Daniel (a Virginian) restated the “common-property” doctrine to explain why Congress could not exclude slavery from territories, Taney’s argument was a sophisticated and lengthy rendering of Calhounian substantive due process. “The Federal Government can exercise no power over person or property” belonging to a migrant into the territories, including the forced migrants they brought with them, “beyond what [the Constitution] confers, nor lawfully deny any right which it has reserved”—including the right to have one’s property protected from unreasonable search and seizure, such as by legislative emancipation.65
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