by Bruce Catton
This was saying bluntly what most Republicans believed, and since it was written by a man who came from North Carolina, every good Republican was bound to feel that it was a gift from the gods—as perhaps it would have been if American politics could still be played by the old rules, under which it was always advisable to shoot irritating darts into the opposition’s hide. Sales of The Impending Crisis went up as the Republicans talked about their plan, Mr. Helper found it advisable to move out of the South and take up residence quietly in New York, and spokesmen for the cotton South discovered that there was on earth one book more detestable than Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
When Clark, the Congressman, urged the House to resolve that anyone who had endorsed the Helper book was unfit to be speaker, he was not taking a wild shot in the dark. Sixty-eight Republican members of the House had so endorsed it, and they included just about every Republican who could conceivably be a candidate for the speakership; included, as a matter of fact, John Sherman himself, who found himself called on to explain the inexplicable.
Sherman did his best. Gaining the floor, he recited the deal with Mr. Blair, and said that Blair had told him, after an exchange of letters with Helper, that “the obnoxious matter in the original publication” would be eliminated; it was because of this assurance, said Sherman, that eminent Republicans had given their endorsement to the scheme. As for his own part: “I do not recollect signing the paper referred to, but I presume, from my name appearing in the printed list, that I did sign it. I therefore make no excuse of any kind. I never read Mr. Helper’s book, or the compendium founded upon it. I have never seen a copy of either.… I never addressed to any Member such language as I have heard today. I never desire such language to be addressed to me if I can avoid it.”5
Since the House had not formally organized, and was presided over by a confused and ineffective clerk, there was no rule to keep members from discussing an extraneous resolution at a time when they were supposed to be balloting on the speakership. The kind of language which John Sherman deplored grew worse and worse. Congressman Clark had asked: “Do gentlemen expect that they can distribute incendiary books, give incendiary advice, advise rebellion, advise non-intercourse in all relations of life, spread such works broadcast over the country, and not be taken to task for it?”6 As one Southerner after another rose to speak on this point, Sherman learned that no man in politics ever gets very far by explaining that he lent his name without knowing precisely what the borrower intended to do with it.
Representative Shelton F. Leake, of Virginia, demanded whether he was asked to consent to the election of an official “who, while I am here in the discharge of my public duties, is stimulating my Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my wife and helpless children.” Sherman, who confessed afterward that he had never dreamed the Helper book would kick up such an uproar, replied that he would repeat once more—having said it, on the floor of the House, five times before—that “I am opposed to any interference by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave in the slave states”; but another Virginian retorted hotly: “They do not mean to interfere with slavery in the states, and yet when a band of assassins violate the sacred soil of my native state, we hear not one word of denunciation from you.” He was followed by Lucius Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, who cried that when the spirit of the Constitution was no longer observed on the floor of the House, “I war upon your government: I am against it.” Republican William Kellogg, of Illinois, got the floor to assert that slavery was “a moral, social and political wrong” which he would resist to the end; the shorthand reporter noted that this was greeted by a mixture of applause and hisses, and there was a great deal of shouting and threatening which did not get taken down. At one point Kellogg was recorded as demanding: “Does the gentleman call me a spaniel coward?” and the clerk who was trying to preside over all of this, being called on to order the sergeant-at-arms to restore quiet, confessed that he did not know if that functionary were in the House or if he himself had the authority to give him orders in any case.7
It went on, for week after week, all business at a standstill; nothing mattered, apparently, except the single issue of slavery, and the men who spoke so hotly on this issue were not so much trying to persuade one another as to give vent to their own pent-up emotions. In the end—on January 30, 1860—John Sherman concluded that he had had enough. He withdrew his candidacy, and after a series of involved deals the House, on February 1, managed to elect a speaker—William Pennington, of New Jersey, a Republican, recently a Whig, chosen by a majority of one vote. At various places in the North, ardent Republicans celebrated, firing cannon and making jubilant speeches, as if some sort of victory had been won; and if the House had in fact discharged the unendurable emotional tension that possessed it, so that it could now get down to business and give the nation orderly government, a celebration would have been in order.8 But nothing had been settled. One stalemate had been ended, but the greater stalemate remained: the un-digestible lump of slavery remained, and this one effort to cope with it had been a noisy and spectacular failure. Only the extremists had gained anything.
The political system clearly was being strained beyond its limit. The attempt to name a speaker had hinged, for week after week, on the question of one undistinguished book; and this question, in turn, had been discussed in the lurid, distorting light that came down from Harper’s Ferry. John Brown had underlined Helper’s confused message; his abortive uprising, quenched in blood and leading him to a scaffold, gave the whole business its cutting edge. The violence that smoldered just below the surface on the floor of the House had been terribly real at Harper’s Ferry, and it was not for a moment out of any man’s mind. Congressman McClernand, of Illinois, a devout Douglas Democrat, wrote to a friend that “our country for the first time is in serious danger of Civil Commotions,” adding that unless conservative patriotism somehow triumphed in the coming presidential election “the result must be disastrous.” The situation now was made to order for the extremists. Southerners who loved the Union and wanted it preserved were being driven into the camp of the fire-eaters. Their uneasy fears about the dire things that might happen if the slave system were tampered with seemed to have been confirmed, and they were drifting to the point where they would permit no one to touch the system in any way. The Democratic party was their party, and nothing mattered now but to retain a firm control over it. If the party was wrecked thereby, that could not be helped.
On the day after the speaker election, Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, arose in the Senate to present a series of resolutions on the slavery question. These began by reasserting the state-sovereignty doctrines of John C. Calhoun, declared that it was the Senate’s duty “to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property” in the territories, and then flatly stated that there was no power anywhere to limit slavery in the territories. Congress could not do it; its solemn duty was to protect slavery there. Residents of a territory could not do it; they could outlaw slavery only when their territory was admitted to the Union as a state. Meanwhile, all acts of Northern individuals or states which interfered with the return of fugitive slaves were asserted to be “hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution and revolutionary in their effect.” A little later, Davis modified the resolutions slightly, but the meaning remained unchanged.9 In effect, he had presented a straight slave code as a principle for Senatorial adoption.
That the Senate would actually adopt any such code was highly improbable, as Davis knew. The real target was the approaching convention of the Democratic party. If the policy set forth in these resolutions could be made to stick as official party doctrine—and the Senate Democratic caucus, in March, endorsed it—Douglas would be in an impossible position, for he could never defend this code in the Northwest and he obviously would never try to do so. Davis was not one of the fire-eaters, and men like Yancey considered him unsound, and when i
n mid-May he was still arguing for his resolutions, Davis spoke optimistically about the prospects of the Federal Union: “I have great confidence in the strength of the Union. Every now and then I hear that it is about to tumble to pieces, that somebody is going to introduce a new plank into the platform and if he does the Union must tumble down.… I come to the conclusion that the Union is strong and safe-strong in its power, as well as in the affections of the people.” And yet, fighting to assure Southern control over the party, he had given Yancey and the other extremists a solid platform.10
Douglas was in the middle, and he quickly recognized the fact. Declaring that it was “the path of duty and wisdom to stand by the doctrine of non-intervention,” he asked bitterly why these resolutions should be offered in the Senate. “There is no necessity for legislation; no grievances to be remedied; no evil to be avoided; no action is necessary; and yet the peace of the country, the integrity of the Democratic party, is to be threatened by abstract resolutions, when there is confessedly no necessity for action.”11
Douglas was under dual pressures, from the sectionalists of North and South alike. The gist of the Davis resolutions was simply an assertion that the slavery issue was untouchable; in the frenzy built up by the John Brown raid, the South was likely to agree with deep determination. But the untouchable had to be touched, for there were determined men in the North who felt quite as deeply about it as any Southerner. The John Brown episode had stirred profound passions in the North as well as in the South. The institution of slavery had one maddening quality: it ennobled its opponents. John Brown was a brutal murderer if there ever was one, and yet to many thousands he had become a martyr, made a martyr by the character of the thing he attacked. Unbalanced to the verge of outright madness, he had touched a profound moral issue, an issue that ran so deep that he took on a strange and moving dignity when he stood upon the scaffold. If what he had done made adoption of a slave code seem essential in the South, it also made acceptance of such a code unthinkable in the North.
Before the month of February ended, Douglas came under Northern fire. It came from a Republican, rather than from a Northern Democrat, but it illustrated perfectly the size of the obstacle he would meet if he campaigned in the Northwest on anything like the Davis resolutions; and it was delivered by his old opponent in the 1858 Senatorial campaign, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who went on to New York on February 27 to make a speech before a substantial audience at the Cooper Institute.
Lincoln was not quite a national figure at this time. His long debate with Douglas in 1858 for the Illinois Senatorial seat had drawn attention, and he had maneuvered Douglas into frank statement of that Freeport doctrine which slavery leaders found so vicious, but he was still comparatively a minor figure in the Republican party. He was being brought to New York by Republicans who opposed Seward and thought that this effective speaker might offset Seward’s predominant strength in the party, and he came with some nervousness, fearing that he might be a little too Western, too countrified, for a New York audience; but he got a cordial reception, and he immediately aimed his guns at Douglas and at the whole pro-slavery position. He made it clear that although Douglas might seem hostile to slavery in the South, there were Northerners who considered him altogether too friendly to it; for slavery was “an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity.”
This was the inadmissible point. Lincoln spoke for men who were willing to agree that the institution was not to be touched—not now; but they insisted that it must be recognized as a wrong which must be contained in such a way that it could some day die a natural death. Looking beyond his immediate audience to the men of the South, Lincoln put his finger on the problem to which American politics could not find the solution: “The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task.”12
Two days after Lincoln spoke, Senator Seward arose in the Senate to contribute his own bit. He was untidy, carelessly slouchy, hoarse of voice, a man described by Editor Halstead as “a jay bird with a sparrow hawk’s bill”; and the South hated him for having spoken of an irrepressible conflict. He was disowning the irrepressible conflict now, speaking hopefully of the Union as something that would endure despite temporary storms, but his voice brought no healing. If the Union were to be assailed, he said, the assault could come only from the Democratic party, for the threat of disunion was made, if not in that party’s name, at least in its behalf, and he spoke of the existing turmoil as of something that arose because “a great policy fastened upon the country through its doubts and fears, confirmed by its habits, and strengthened by personal interests and ambitions, is to be relaxed and changed.”13 Saying this, Seward came mortally close to touching the untouchable; at the very least he was going opposite to the spirit of the Davis resolutions, and he offered no help at all to Lincoln’s despairing complaint: “We must somehow convince them that we do let them alone.”
These men were moderates—Lincoln and Davis, Seward and Douglas. Each man had a love for the Union, an awareness of the mysterious force that operates as a sort of continental destiny. But in this winter when the lines were growing taut, each man was reaching a position from which he could not retreat and on which he would not compromise.
Davis believed that the North must willingly adapt itself to the fact of slavery. Slavery existed and it had to be accepted; it should not be agitated as a moral issue by people remote from it. When Northerners interfered with slavery, they interfered with the well-being and hopes of the whole Southern community, and the very attempt to contain and limit slavery, looking as it did toward its eventual demise, was interference despite all disclaimers. People in the North must make the necessary adjustments to something which, after all, was a purely Southern concern.
Lincoln and Seward had come to an opposite position. They saw slavery as an evil affecting the entire country, and although they were willing to accept its present existence as a hard fact, they refused to admit that it must be extended into the indefinite future. They could stomach even the fugitive slave laws if—and only if—they could be sure that some day no such laws would be necessary. Like Davis, they were being driven into sectionalism, and were leaders in a purely sectional party, because slavery itself was sectional.
Douglas was the most flexible of the group. He was perfectly willing to tolerate slavery as long as his toleration did not require him to do intolerable things. Slavery could be voted up or down in the territories, as far as he was concerned, so long as it was at least disposed of by the people directly concerned; he wanted it to cease to be a constant irritant, and he hoped that the country could get on with its other business. Standing in the middle, he stood also in storm center, and sometimes it seemed as if everybody was fighting him.
Thus the moderates, as immoderate winds gathered: the forces that drove them being the same as those that blew in on the delegates at Charleston. With the moderates the will to work out some sort of solution survived; with lesser men the will to hate and to hurt grew strong. Symptomatic of this was the action, in this same session of a divided Congress, a short echo ahead of the Charleston convention, of Congressman Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, who stood up on April 5 to address his fellow legislators.
Lovejoy had been through the mill. He had seen his older brother, Elijah, preacher of abolition, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, more than twenty years earlier, and kneeling by his body had vowed “never to forsake the cause”; he had been a minister and an anti-slavery agitator, and in 1856 had been elected to Congress, a die-hard Free-Soil Republican who bore scars from his long fight against slavery. He spoke now as too many others were speaking—out of complete conviction that his own cause was reasonable and right and that men who opposed him were willfully wrong in the head; spoke not so much to convince as t
o castigate, to discharge anger that could no longer be contained. Breathing upon the tempest, he made it blow all the harder.
Slavery, he declared, was the sum of all villainies, worse than robbery, worse than piracy, worse than polygamy: “It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy, it has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself.” If heaven were run on slaveholding principles, Jehovah would be a Juggernaut “rolling the huge wheels of his omnipotence, axle-deep, amid the crushed and mangled and bleeding bodies of human beings.” As he spoke, waving his arms, his fists clenched, Lovejoy stalked over to the Democratic side of the House to speak into the faces of his opponents, and Virginia’s Roger Pryor came out to meet him, shouting that it was bad enough to have to listen to such talk “but he shall not, sir, come upon this side of the House, shaking his fist in our faces.” A Republican from Wisconsin, John Potter, cried that Democrats were just as offensive when they made speeches, and got into such a wrangle with Pryor that he was challenged to fight a duel. (He accepted, specifying that they must fight with bowie knives; Pryor’s second replied that these were outside the code, and in the end there was no duel.) Thirty or forty Congressmen gathered about the speaker, some to heckle Love joy, others to demand that people stay on their own side of the House; all to no effect whatever. Congressman William Barksdale, of Mississippi, grated out: “Order that black-hearted scoundrel and nigger-stealing thief to take his seat and this side of the House will do it”—and, after contributing some spirited columns to the Congressional Globe, Love joy came to a close and the uproar died down.14