The Half Has Never Been Told

by Edward E. Baptist

  The decision immediately came in for massive criticism. Many Republicans rejected as illegitimate the Court’s attempt to overrule majority opposition to the expansion of slavery. They insisted that the Constitution gave Congress the power to make basic law for the territories. Some rejected the Court itself as illegitimate. Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, the most famous paper in the United States at the time, described the Court’s decision as “false statements and shallow sophistries” no better than what one could gather in any “Washington Bar-room.” The concept of due process had been around since the Magna Carta, one critic pointed out, but only in the 1830s had anyone discovered that it prevented legislatures from abolishing the use of human beings as property.66

  Historians have generally sustained the dissenters’ insistence that Taney was incorrect to claim that the Scotts could not sue because no people of African descent had ever been accounted as US citizens. Indeed, at least five states clearly counted free African Americans as citizens in 1789 when they ratified the Constitution. On other grounds, historians and contemporary critics alike are less persuasive. For instance, some insist that the due-process clause in the Fifth Amendment, which mentions “property,” does not include slave property, and hence does not protect slavery from seizure by congressional lawmaking. But as Justice Peter Daniel pointed out, with its fugitive slave clause the Constitution does more to specify enslaved people as a specific type of “property” than it does for any other kind. In such a case it seems less reasonable to think that the enslavers who wrote the due-process clause would not have intended it to encompass enslaved human beings.

  Some critics insisted that in his most sweeping claims Taney did not speak for the whole Court. However, the fact is that he could assemble a majority of the justices behind almost every conclusion. Other critics insisted that Taney wrote as a mere partisan. Dred Scott was emphatically a political decision, of course, but then, so are most Court decisions. The justices could easily have ruled against the Scotts on procedural grounds and left the deeper issues alone. Instead, like the widow Eliza Emerson, and like the congressmen who demanded Kansas-Nebraska, Taney and his Court allies sought out a constitutional Armageddon: a final battle to settle all questions and usher in an age in which the enslaved had no allies. They wanted to stand in the place of God, hear a Kentucky woman’s prayer—Will I live to see the end?—and reply: No, you will not.67

  Moreover, Taney and his allies made the Dred Scott decision partisan in favor of everybody but African Americans and Republicans. Taney’s attack on black citizenship recycled Stephen Douglas’s rhetorical strategy of focusing northern white anger on black people. When the New Orleans Picayune said Scott v. Sandford (the court misspelled the enslaver’s last name) rendered unconstitutional “the whole basis of the Black Republican organization,” northern Democratic newspapers concurred: the Court had shattered “the anti-slavery platform of the late great Northern Republican party into atoms,” said the New York Herald. While some furious Republicans advocated extralegal action to overrule the use of the judicial branch to advance a minority’s political agenda, they should not have been surprised by the court’s decision. The decision reaffirmed one of the most significant traditions in the history of the United States: the construction of white people’s futures on the backs and from the hands of enslaved African Americans, a process piloted by southerners, who always found many northern allies. The Constitution’s most important compromises had been created by enslavers and their closest northern allies to sustain slavery’s expansion. The constitutional system had sustained that process for seventy years. And Taney’s Court was insisting more clearly than ever that the price of union was still the right of enslavers to treat enslaved people as fully chattel property.68

  “All the powers on earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him . . . philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry”—and Law had brought Dred and Harriet Scott and their daughters down as prey. So said ex-congressman Abraham Lincoln in an Illinois speech in the summer of 1857. He pushed his listeners to see how enslavers were engineering an ever-tighter perimeter around 4 million human beings; collectively a Gulliver tied down, stretched out on a continent that was now to be one giant whipping-machine. “One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him,” said Lincoln, continuing the metaphor. Partisan politics, the constitution, half the churches in the country, and a vast array of business interests had all been twisted and leveraged to bind the enslaved as if in a prison cell “bolted with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is” (italics added).69

  After returning to Illinois in 1849 from his single term in Congress, Lincoln had stepped back from the political whirl. But in 1854 news of Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act had rendered him “thunderstruck.” He helped organize the Illinois Republican Party, and, freed from the need of cooperating with southern Whigs, he found his distinctive voice. He began to insist, in every speech he gave, that the expansion of slavery would always escape the categories and compromises in which white America tried to contain and store it. The entrepreneurial destruction and re-creation of everything that forced migration touched went beyond white abolitionists’ moral critique of slavery as a sin. It went beyond the regional arrogance that insisted slavery was archaic, for, efficient or not, slavery had locked southerners to the continued expansion of the institution. “We would be as they were,” he warned northerners, were all our wealth invested directly in the cotton machine. What was now happening, Lincoln insisted, was that in order to protect slavery’s future growth, the principles and institutions which had offered people like Lincoln opportunities for freedom unprecedented in the history of ordinary tillers of soil and hewers of trees were being twisted. Shut every door and arm every bolt, and you would replace possibilities still undreamed with slavery everlasting. Immeasurable misery was the future for those locked in the prison house. And for the millions of people around the globe who hoped the modern world would bring liberation from ancient tyrannies, the death of the promise of freedom for all in the United States meant the death of the world’s hopes for liberation.

  Lincoln’s fears might have come true. Many factors already rendered the situation of southern expansionists more promising than at any point since 1837. Support for national expansion remained high, and an unparalleled stretch of economic prosperity sustained enslavers’ revenues at previously unimagined heights. Enslavers had in their pocket an opinion from the Supreme Court and an act of Congress (Kansas-Nebraska) that opened new possibilities. Democrats, North and South, could have been satisfied to lay the Dred Scott decision as the last brick on a constitutional and political-economic edifice that ended the debate about the expansion of slavery. That could have left “the Democracy,” the Democratic Party, as the dominant national political organization.

  Once the mechanisms of 4 million locks were armed, the entire array of defenses against freedom might never have been unlocked. Yet once again, as in 1837, the overuse of leverage—this time political, rather than financial—created a disastrous outcome for southern enslavers. In the summer of 1857, Kansas had held an election for delegates to a constitutional convention. The free-state majority boycotted the election, while Missourians again poured over the border to vote illegally. Of 19,000 actual male residents, 85 percent did not cast ballots. So when 60 delegates assembled in October 1857 at the town of Lecompton, all 60 were proslavery. They proceeded to write the most proslavery state constitution in US history. Its Article VII parroted the Calhounian doctrine: “The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanctions, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and its increase is the
same and as inviolable as the right of the owner to any property whatsoever.” (Number 23 in the constitution’s “Bill of Rights” read “Free negroes shall not be permitted to live in this State under any circumstance.”) The convention decreed that the 200-odd slaves already in Kansas could never be freed, even by constitutional amendment.70

  Free-staters boycotted the ratification ballot as well, and the proslavery voters who participated approved the Lecompton constitution by a tally of 6,000 to 600. As northerners watched this travesty unfold each day on the pages of their telegraph-updated newspapers, southern Democrats pressed for instant congressional acceptance of the undemocratic document, which would be the last step in confirming Kansas as a slave state. The Buchanan administration fell humbly into line. But northern Democrats, led by Stephen Douglas, realized that “the Lecompton fraud” rendered absurd their previous claim that the “popular sovereignty” idea they’d used to sell the Kansas-Nebraska bill was about giving the choice to the voter. If these Democrats wanted to win elections in Illinois, New York, or New Hampshire, they had to repudiate Lecompton. Douglas knew he was fighting for his political life. He turned his thunderous energy against the Democrats who were loyal to Buchanan and his pro-southern administration.

  At the same time that the Democratic Party began to scratch and claw itself to pieces in Congress, the fighting in Kansas began to generate economic fallout. The number of emigrants riding the rails west through Chicago toward Kansas plummeted from 100,000 in 1856 to 10,000 in 1858. The market for Kansas land warrants vanished, imploding speculative schemes, while railroad stocks plunged in price. Major northern banks collapsed under the weight of failed investments in both. The collapses became the Panic of 1857, which put hundreds of thousands out of work in the North. Yet factors continued to buy southern cotton, because international demand remained high. Remembering how northern debt collectors had wagged their fingers during the 1840s, proslavery writers chortled that this time, “the slave labor staples of the South will furnish the means for extrication from commercial indebtedness.” Still, while southern nationalists savored schadenfreude, Republicans, true to their own dogma, insisted that somehow “slavelords” must have caused the panic. And Lecompton kept political wind in their sails. Northern Democrats up for reelection in 1858, including Stephen Douglas, were vulnerable.71

  Abraham Lincoln decided to challenge Douglas for his Senate seat. Lincoln used the election to test his arguments, in particular his claim that any policy that enabled further forced migration to occur—like Douglas’s “popular sovereignty”—inevitably led to the subordination of all political and economic freedom to the needs of enslavers. In the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates of August to October 1858, the challenger grounded the antislavery argument on a foundation that held true whether the listener was an open racist like David Wilmot, an abolitionist, or something in between. Lincoln insisted that slavery contradicted what he understood to be the fundamental truths of American identity, particularly the natural-rights claims of the Declaration: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Lincoln acknowledged the difficulty of ending slavery in a day, a week, or a year. Slavery, he said, was like a gruesome metastatic cancer growing on a man’s neck. “He dares not cut it out. He bleeds to death if he does, directly.” Slavery, he said, was also like a rattlesnake that crawled into “a bed where the children are sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children.” Or the awakened serpent “might bite the children.” But leave it coiled in the bed, let the cancer grow, and the result was also death. Permit expansion, and, as the past seventy years had shown, you deepen American slavery’s severity, entrench more securely its “immense pecuniary interest.”72

  For the Union, Lincoln insisted, cannot “endure permanently half slave and half free. . . . It will become all one thing or the other.” His ultimate opponents, the slavery-expansionist politicians of the South, agreed with his analysis of slavery as a system that needed geographic growth in order to function. And, Lincoln warned, they would try to ensure that growth would happen by trying to turn the entire United States into slave territory. This would limit all Americans’ rights, making people in the free states as subservient to the thought-policing of proslavery orthodoxy as those in the South. Historians have dismissed the idea that slavery could have returned to the free states. But perhaps his claim was not implausible. At the Ottawa, Illinois, debate, Lincoln asked: “What is necessary for the nationalization of slavery? It is simply the next Dred Scott decision. It is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no State under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that under the Constitution neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature can do it.” Even as Lincoln and Douglas squabbled, the case of Lemmon v. People of New York was moving toward the Supreme Court. In it, a Virginia slaveholder who was taking his slaves to Texas via New York protested that the latter state had violated his rights when it declared his slaves to be free because he had kept them in Manhattan during an extended visit. A Taney-led Supreme Court might well rule, on the broadest substantive-due-process grounds, that no state could deny slaveholding citizens of the United States the right to hold their human property.73

  Lincoln acknowledged that most northern whites were reluctant to imagine a society in which African Americans could claim the rights of the free, much less the rights of the equal. In recent years, Lincoln critics have cherry-picked quotations from these acknowledgments to “prove” that Lincoln was a “racist.” He did use cagey qualifications here, especially during the debates in “Little Egypt” in southern Illinois, where Douglas was particularly successful at using race-baiting to fire up virulently anti-black crowds. But he stuck to his central points. Slavery undermined freedom’s future for whites as well as blacks. It could not be allowed to expand, or it would go everywhere and change everything. Though its excision must not be rushed destructively, it must begin, and excision should begin with the defeat of the Douglas Democrats who had long enabled southern expansionists to get their way.74

  Douglas fought both at home and in Washington to prove that the northern wing of the Democratic Party had not been turned into a front by which enslavers defrauded northerners of votes. Through late 1857 and the first part of 1858, southerners in Congress and the supine Buchanan administration demanded a vote on Kansas’s admission as a slave state under the Lecompton constitution. Douglas and his loyalists among the northern Democrats in Congress now made a stand. In April 1858, after a furious debate that featured a brawl between thirty congressmen, which, among other things, dislodged Mississippi Congressman William Barksdale’s previously unsuspected toupee, the House rejected the Lecompton bill. The Senate insisted (over Buchanan’s protests) on returning the proposed constitution to the territory’s actual residents for another opportunity to reject or ratify. In August, free-state Kansas voters, finally turning out to vote—now that they had a fair chance—turned down the Lecompton constitution.75

  Douglas’s stand against Lecompton held Illinois Democrats’ votes to the party line in November 1858. The party eked out a narrow victory that translated into his reelection as US senator. But southern Democratic strategists, seeing that powerful elements of the northern wing were trying to muster enough defiance to preserve themselves, planned a test that would require either commitment to slavery’s expansion or full-scale breakup of the national party.76

  IN MAY 1858, PROSLAVERY Kansans murdered five settlers outside their cabins at a free-state settlement. John Brown responded with a raid into Missouri, killing one enslaver and carrying off eleven enslaved people to Canada. Early the next year, Brown went to Boston and met with a group of wealthy abolitionists who admired his Kansas work. They included his backer Gerrit Smith, abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, and Thomas Went-worth Higginson, the epitome of a Boston aristocrat. The “Secret Six,” as they called themselves, seduced by Brown’s Old Testament-prophet manner of carrying himself, agreed to support the
plan he unfolded. Brown proposed that he and a group of raiders seize the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, where the Blue Ridge Mountains meet the Potomac River. If he controlled the armory, Brown believed, slaves from fifty miles around would flock to his vanguard.

  The backers tingled vicariously, righteously. Here was a northerner truly willing to meet southern bullying with unblinking violence. They agreed to send Brown money and weapons, and he established a hideout near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. From there he began recruiting commandos: his sons, a dozen or so other white men, and five African Americans. The Secret Six also set up a secret meeting between the scourge of Kansas and Frederick Douglass, the most prominent African °American of the era. In a quarry outside of Chambersburg, Brown tried to persuade Douglass to join him. Douglass, whose two decades in slavery had given him a far more realistic understanding of enslavers’ massive power, warned him that Kansas bushwhacking against soft targets, plus abolitionist propaganda, had led Brown and his backers to the unrealistic belief that slaveholding society would crumble easily. An abolitionist attack on the federal government not only was futile but might turn public opinion against a movement that many northern whites already saw as irresponsibly radical.