The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876

by Nester, William

  The Whigs were just as divided as the Democrats. Their convention at Baltimore in May became an epic, exhausting, and ultimately self-destructive battle between President Millard Fillmore and Gen. Winfield Scott. The first vote was a dead heat between them, with Fillmore’s 133 edging out Scott’s 132 votes. Not much changed in vote after vote until the general finally surpassed the two-thirds hump with 159 votes on the fifty-third ballot. The deadlock, disarray, and split in the Whig Party prompted many of its followers to search for another party that better reflected their beliefs and hopes.41

  Once again the Free Soilers competed for many of the same liberal voters and states as the Whigs. They held their convention at Pittsburgh and renominated John Hale as their presidential candidate. Much more notably, the Free Soil leaders embraced Frederick Douglass, naming him the party’s secretary.

  That year another fringe party emerged. Like the abolitionist Liberty Party, the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, also known as the American or Know Nothing Party, was largely devoted to a single issue, but it differed from the Liberty Party by calling for the restriction rather than the liberation of others. The issue was unfettered immigration—2,939,000 foreigners stepped ashore in the United States just from 1845 to 1854, with Irish Catholics composing around 1,200,000, or 40 percent, of the total.42 The party was founded in 1849 to resist what its adherents called an immigrant horde that carried with it worsening wages, disease, ignorance, crime, poor morals, and an alien religion—Catholicism. In northern cities, Democrats mobilized immigrants into political machines of patronage, corruption, and one-party government. The American Party was best known as the Know Nothing Party because its early organizers claimed to know nothing about their own efforts. The party was most popular in northeastern cities with large, swelling immigrant populations.43

  The main contest was between the Democrats and the Whigs. Personality appears to have been the presidential election’s deciding factor. Scott’s victory over Fillmore at the Whig convention proved to be pyrrhic. While Scott may have been brighter and braver than Franklin Pierce, his critics dismissed the abrasive, easily irritated general as “Old Fuss and Feathers,” a glaring contrast to his affable opponent.

  Pierce won 1,601,274 votes, or 50.9 percent of the popular vote, and twenty-seven of the thirty-one states, while Scott got 1,386,580, or 44.1 percent. The rest—155,825, or 5.0 percent—fell to Free Soil candidate John Hale. Pierce racked up an even more lopsided victory in the Electoral College by winning 254 votes to Scott’s 24.

  When Franklin Pierce was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1853, he was the youngest man and the first born in the nineteenth century to hold that office. Pierce’s critics denounced him as a “doughface,” a northerner with southern principles. That was an apt description. Pierce soon acted decisively on these principles in a way that provoked the latest national crisis.

  4

  Bleeding Kansas

  Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.”

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Let North and South—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it that the succeeding millions of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed in the latest generations.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN

  Arguably, no one was more politically divisive during the 1850s than Stephen Douglas, the chief architect behind the Compromise of 1850 and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act.1 His nickname, the “Little Giant,” was inspired not just by his political deeds but by his booming voice and arguments resounding from a large head framed with a mane of dark hair atop a barrel-chested body and stubby legs. He was born in Vermont and emigrated to Illinois in 1833 at age twenty. There he studied law while supporting himself by teaching school. His brilliant gifts of oratory and reason as a lawyer soon carried him into politics as a fervent Democrat. He rose through a series of state elected and appointed posts until 1842, when he won a seat in the House of Representatives. He served two terms there before, in 1846, being sent to the Senate, where he remained until his death from typhoid in June 1861.

  Douglas dedicated his career to boosting the interests of his state and himself, and he articulated values that reinforced both. His political creed’s core was “popular sovereignty,” or letting the peoples of territories and states decide the issues that directly affected them, including whether or not to permit slavery. The virulent racism that he expressed in many of his speeches reflected the prevailing attitudes of his time as well as his ownership for years of a Mississippi plantation worked by scores of slaves. He became a slaveholder when his first wife inherited her childhood plantation. That he was a Democrat supposedly opposed to internal improvements did not keep him from championing federal land grants to underwrite a transcontinental railroad that would stretch west from Chicago to San Francisco and in which he would be a partner. He first began propounding this vision as a freshman congressman in 1843 and persisted until his death. He gained the perfect platform to do so after becoming chair of the Senate Committee on Territories. Meanwhile he invested heavily in real estate and railroad companies that would enrich him if his idea was approved.

  Douglas joined his interests in slaves and railroads in a bill that he introduced in the Senate on January 4, 1854.2 When he did so he could not imagine that the bill’s passage would exacerbate sectional passions and propel the nation toward secession and civil war, but this is exactly what it did. Under the 1820 Missouri Compromise, slavery was banned above and legal below 36°30´ north latitude from Missouri to the Rocky Mountain watershed, then the nation’s western boundary. With what became known as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas destroyed this compromise by splitting all this land between the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and leaving the question of free or slave in the hands of the people actually living in each territory. He justified this policy with the notion of “popular sovereignty.”

  By holding out the possibility to southerners of slavery’s expansion across all the territories, Douglas sought their support for federal land grants for his railroad scheme. It did not quite work out as he hoped. Douglas was hardly the only proponent of a transcontinental railroad emanating from his home state. Senators from Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana called for terminals at St. Louis, Memphis, Vicksburg, and New Orleans, respectively. Most senators and representatives elsewhere did not support the railroad plan because it did not directly help their states. The most that Douglas and other boosters got was a $150,000 appropriation for a survey of possible routes.

  If Douglas’s railroad plan fizzled, enthusiasm for his Kansas-Nebraska Act spread like wildfire, at least among southerners. After two months of debate the bill passed the Senate by thirty-seven to fourteen votes on March 3, an unsurprising passage since the southern states and Democrats had the edge there. But the outcome in the House was uncertain since most representatives were northerners. For the next two months this bill was Congress’s most hotly debated issue. The final vote was close, with 113 to 100 in favor on May 22. President Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law on May 30, 1854.

  Word of the Kansas-Nebraska Act filled Abraham Lincoln with revulsion and dread. He later explained that “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist . . . but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska bill.”3 He decided to harness these powerful feelings by reentering the political arena and challenging the bill’s author head on. Douglas was then traveling around Illinois making speeches justifying his act. Lincoln first replied at Springfield, then
elaborated his views in a three-hour address at Peoria on October 16, 1854. This speech was among the most brilliant that Lincoln ever devised.4

  Typically, Lincoln was conciliatory rather than judgmental toward Douglas and others who championed the Kansas-Nebraska Act: “I do not propose to question the patriotism or to assail the motives of any man or class of men, but rather to confine myself strictly to the naked merits of the question.”

  The future of slavery was this age’s core question. Central to confronting that question was distinguishing “between the existing institution and extension of it.” Lincoln regretted that he was forced to accept slavery since the Constitution protected it, but he opposed the spread of this “evil.” He was filled with “hate” for slavery both because of its “monstrous injustice” and “because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world; enables the enemies of free institutions . . . to taunt us as hypocrites; causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity; and especially because it forces so many good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty, criticizing the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

  Yet here, too, Lincoln was conciliatory. He insisted that “I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us we should not instantly give it up. Doubtless there are individuals on both sides who would not hold slaves under any circumstances, and others who would gladly introduce slavery anew if it were out of existence.”

  He then asserted an extended argument, grounded in the nation’s founding documents and history, that the framers intended and hoped that slavery would eventually die out. He expounded the Declaration of Independence’s most critical passage: “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The framers intended that universal right to embrace all men in all times and places, including black men. Thus slavery was not the “moral right” claimed by slavocrats but was solely a legal right that violated the natural rights of black men. He distilled that argument to its essence: “If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal’ and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.”

  He called on Americans to return the Declaration of Independence “to the position that our fathers gave it. . . . Let North and South—let all Americans—let all lovers of liberty join in the great and good work. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union, but we shall have so saved it as to make and to keep it forever worthy of the saving. We shall have so saved it that the succeeding millions of free, happy people, the world over, shall rise up and call us blessed in the latest generations.”

  Lincoln was elected to the state assembly in 1855. He no sooner took his seat than he spread word of his interest in winning an open U.S. Senate seat.5 His three Democratic Party rivals were James Shields, with whom he had nearly fought a duel thirteen years earlier; his friend Lyman Trumbull; and Governor Joel Matteson. The election was held on February 8. In the hundred-seat assembly, a Senate candidate needed fifty-one votes to win. On the first ballot, Lincoln garnered the largest share with forty-five votes, while Shields got forty-one and Trumbull got five. Lincoln’s supporters failed to talk Trumbull into sending his supporters to Lincoln. Instead Shields threw his support to Matteson and a series of ballots ensued with Lincoln’s share peaking at forty-seven on the ninth. On the tenth ballot Lincoln chose to throw the race to Trumbull as the lesser of two evils—Trumbull opposed and Matteson supported the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Lincoln also astutely reckoned that Trumbull would thereafter be his devoted political ally.6

  Under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, settlers could begin staking claims on May 30, 1854. This inspired fervent abolitionist and slavocrat groups alike to try to ensure that the territories reflected their own beliefs and interests.7 Congressman Eli Thayer of Massachusetts formed the New England Emigrant Aid Company to help organize and finance parties of Free Soilers to settle in Kansas and Nebraska. Horace Greeley, the New York Tribune’s editor, called repeatedly for Free Soilers to transplant themselves to those western lands. Meanwhile Senator David Atchinson of Missouri led slavocrat efforts to take over those territories. He promised Secretary of War Jefferson Davis of Mississippi that he and his followers would “shoot, burn, & hang” to assert a slavocracy over Kansas, and “the thing will soon be over.”8 He emphasized that his intention was “to ‘Mormonize’ the Abolitionists,” or to mass murder Free Soilers as Missourians had murdered Mormons who tried to settle in the state during the 1830s. Atchinson eventually would be good to his word.

  The slavocrats enjoyed a decisive geographic and thus political edge since Missouri was adjacent to the disputed territories while New England was far away. Andrew Reeder, Kansas’s first appointed governor, held an election for the territory’s delegate to Congress on November 29, 1854. Atchinson led hundreds of Missouri border ruffians into Kansas to pack the polls and elect a slavocrat to that post. Reeder then scheduled an election to choose a legislature for Kansas Territory on March 30, 1855. At that time a census counted 8,501 residents, of whom 2,905 were registered voters and only 242 were slaves. Atchinson again rallied several thousand followers to cross the border and stuff ballot boxes and bully Free Soilers at each polling place. The number of recorded votes was 6,307, or 2,003 more than those officially registered. An investigation later found that all but 500 of the 5,427 votes cast for slavery were invalid.9

  Although Governor Reeder knew that the election was fraudulent, he certified it anyway. The Pierce administration promptly recognized the proslave government that was set up at Lecompton, while the Democrats introduced a bill in Congress upholding the recognition. The result was a territorial legislature packed with thirty-six slavocrats and only three Free Soilers. The legislature promptly passed laws that forced each man in the territory to take an oath to support slavery or else forgo his right to hold any public office or serve on juries; made it a felony to criticize slavery; and condemned to death anyone who helped escaped slaves or distributed abolitionist literature.

  Free Soilers denounced the slavocracy and organized their own government at Topeka in October 1855. The constitution they wrote was approved in a referendum by 1,731 to 46 in December. In January 1856 the Free Soilers elected a legislature and Charles Robinson as their governor. In Congress the Republican Party introduced a bill recognizing the Free Soil government as legitimate.

  Upon taking office, Robinson sent an urgent plea to backers in New England for firearms to resist the border ruffians. Of the dozens of churches and groups that responded, none was more generous than the congregation headed by Henry Ward Beecher, a fiery liberal minister and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s father. He preached an impassioned sermon to his well-heeled followers, passed the collection plate, bought 325 rifles with the proceeds, and shipped them west in boxes labeled “Bibles”; those rifles became affectionately known as “Beecher’s Bibles.”

  These weapons did not reach Free Soilers in time to help deter a slavocrat invasion. On May 21, 1856, seven hundred border ruffians rode into Lawrence, the closest large Free Soil town to Missouri, and terrorized that community by burning the hotel and the Free Soil governor’s home, destroying the two newspaper presses, and plundering businesses and homes. They did not, however, kill anyone. Two nights later, John Brown and seven followers retaliated by murdering five slavocrats along Pottawatomie Creek.

  The worsening terrorism by slavocrats was not confined to Kansas. Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was an articulate advocate for free soil and abolition.10 He delivered a brilliant oration entitled “The Crime against Kansas” on May 19 and 20, 1856. Among those whom Sumner criticized for the violence and anarchy in Kans
as was Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. On May 22, Preston Brooks, Butler’s cousin and a South Carolina representative, entered the Senate, strode over to Sumner, and viciously beat him with his cane.

  This crime split the nation, with most northerners condemning Brooks as a thug while slavocrats lauded him as a hero. The House of Representatives voted 121 to 95 to expel him, short of the necessary two-thirds majority. Brooks resigned and was promptly reelected by his constituents in a special election. Charges were filed in a federal district court; Brooks was found guilty of assault and fined $300. The beating so physically and emotionally crippled Sumner that he needed two and a half years before he was ready to return to the Senate.

  The heinous sack of Lawrence and beating of Sumner were turning points for many northerners. They were appalled that southerners cheered rather than condemned such atrocities. Swelling violence, anarchy, and extremism were eating away the nation’s political and moral foundations. In light of these events, the president and many in Congress appeared not just callous but complicit.

  It takes power to get power. President James Polk at once asserted and greatly expanded American power by besting Britain and Mexico in showdowns. Through diplomacy alone he won a contest with Britain over the Oregon Territory that had begun with American sea captain Robert Gray’s discovery of the Columbia River mouth in 1792. A joint occupancy compromise deal between the United States and Britain lasted from 1818 to 1848. After an exchange of war brinksmanship rhetoric, the British caved to Polk’s demand that the United States take exclusive control of the Oregon Territory by extending America’s northern frontier with Canada along the forty-ninth parallel from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. “Mr. Polk’s War” succeeded where his diplomacy failed to get Mexico to recognize America’s annexation of Texas and to sell New Mexico and California to the United States. After expanding American territory by nearly a quarter, all the way to the Pacific coast, over a mere two years, Polk was a tough foreign policy act to follow.