The Zealot and the Emancipator

by H. W. Brands

  No, Schurz didn’t like Douglas, but he couldn’t help respecting him. “I have never seen a more formidable parliamentary pugilist.”

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  THE PUGILIST HAD hoped not to have to battle over slavery again after the Compromise of 1850. “I have determined never to make another speech upon the slavery question,” Douglas declared at the time. “And I will now add the hope that the necessity for it will never exist. I am heartily tired of the controversy, and I know the country is disgusted with it.”

  But he couldn’t leave it alone. The fight for the 1850 compromise had taught Douglas how difficult the slavery question was, but it had also shown him how talented he was. Many called him the heir to Henry Clay in Congress. The mantle fit imperfectly, Douglas being a Democrat and Clay having been a Whig. Yet that very difference meant that Douglas might achieve something that had forever eluded Clay: the presidency. The Compromise of 1850 definitively split the Whigs; by Clay’s death in 1852 they were demoralized and nearly defunct. The Democrats held together, giving them the inside track to the White House. As the leading Democrat in Congress, the most celebrated Democrat in the country, Douglas imagined himself sitting where Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, the patron saints of his party, had sat.

  Which was what brought him back to the slavery question. The Compromise of 1850 had tied up all the loose ends of the slavery question. The states determined for themselves whether to allow or forbid slavery within their boundaries—no one disputed this. Congress, via the Missouri Compromise and now the Compromise of 1850, had ruled on slavery in the federal territories. The Fugitive Slave Act had strengthened the constitutional promise of interstate cooperation in the return of escaped slaves.

  The 1850 compromise displeased all sides to some extent. Northerners felt tainted by the Fugitive Slave Act; Southerners resented the admission of free California. But neither side was so displeased as to seek to overturn the compromise, and the nation moved on.

  Stephen Douglas looked forward to the Democratic convention of 1852, where he hoped to be rewarded with the party’s nomination. During the convention’s early rounds he led the balloting. But three other candidates split the vote with him, and in exhaustion the party turned to little-known Franklin Pierce, who easily won the general election.

  Douglas handled the setback gracefully. He was a loyal Democrat and placed the party above any individual, he said. But he silently measured himself against Pierce and concluded that if merit counted, he—Stephen Douglas—should be president rather than Pierce. And he commenced calculating how to bring the rest of the party to the same conclusion.

  His answer was to reopen the slavery question. The South was the birthplace of the Democracy, as the party called itself, and Southerners remained its most coherent bloc. They no longer possessed the numbers to make one of their own the party’s nominee, but they could veto candidates they didn’t like. Douglas determined to ingratiate himself to Southern Democrats.

  Most Southerners had accepted the Missouri Compromise at the time of its negotiation in 1820. Their concession was the ban on slavery in the territories above the 36°30ʹ line. Few imagined slavery would ever be profitable there, and so they judged they weren’t giving up much. But over time—and under attack by Northern abolitionists—Southerners began to chafe at the principle of the exclusion. They said they ought to have the same rights as Northerners in all the federal territories. And that included the right to take property, in their case including slaves, where they chose.

  Stephen Douglas decided to give them that right. He wrapped his gift in a bill to provide a territorial government for Nebraska, a large region of the Louisiana Purchase above the Missouri Compromise line. Such a government was long overdue, Douglas declared. “To the states of Missouri and Iowa”—the region’s next-door neighbors—“the organization of the Territory of Nebraska is an important and desirable local measure; to the interests of the Republic it is a national necessity,” he said. A territorial government for Nebraska would allow the rapid development of America’s western possessions. “The tide of emigration and civilization must be permitted to roll onward until it rushes through the passes of the mountains and spreads over plains and mingles with the waters of the Pacific,” Douglas said. A territorial government would open the way to construction of railroads and telegraph lines to the Pacific. “No man can keep up with the spirit of this age who travels on anything slower than the locomotive and fails to receive intelligence by lightning.”

  Douglas understood that Southerners could hardly be expected to rally behind his Nebraska bill if the territory should remain off-limits to slavery. To bring them around, he proposed to repeal the Missouri Compromise. He realized this would be controversial; Northern opponents of slavery, considering the Missouri Compromise settled policy, would resist vehemently. A fellow legislator afterward recalled Douglas saying of repeal, “I know it will raise a hell of a storm.”

  Yet he went ahead. And he did so with no observable pangs of conscience. Douglas appealed to the guiding concept of democracy: that the voice of the people, if not necessarily the voice of God, is the voice that must direct public officials. The Missouri Compromise had denied settlers north of the 36°30ʹ line the right to determine for themselves whether to allow or forbid slavery. Douglas’s Nebraska bill would restore this right. “The bill rests upon, and proposes to carry into effect, the great fundamental principle of self-government, upon which our republican institutions are predicated,” he explained. “It does not propose to legislate slavery into the territories, nor out of the territories.” By this time the bill had evolved to propose two territorial governments: one for Nebraska, the other for Kansas. Douglas continued, “It does not propose to establish institutions for the people, nor to deprive them of the right of determining for themselves what kind of domestic institutions they may have. It presupposes that the people of the territories are as intelligent, as wise, as patriotic, as conscientious as their brethren and kindred whom they left behind in the states.”

  “Popular sovereignty” was what Douglas called the concept of allowing settlers to determine the fate of the territories with respect to slavery. When the Nebraska bill became law as the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the measure killed the Missouri Compromise and replaced it with popular sovereignty.

  Whether the law had won Douglas the Southern support he required to capture the next Democratic nomination remained to be seen. In the meantime it earned him the wrath of much of the North. Abolitionists called him the spawn of Satan; even moderate antislavery men shook their heads in dismay. At a stroke the Douglas measure overturned three decades of precedent between the two sides in the sectional dispute. Opponents of slavery had thought they had the evil institution contained by the Missouri Compromise line. But the line was now erased, and slavery could spread as far north as Canada. There seemed to be nothing the slaveholders wouldn’t demand, and little they wouldn’t get.

  Douglas noted the uproar with wry resignation. “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy,” he observed.

  7

  JOHN BROWN DIDN’T waste time on effigies; he preferred substance to symbolism. From Massachusetts he moved his family to the Adirondack Mountains of New York, where antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith had pledged land to start a colony of African Americans. North Elba, as the settlement was called, would show what blacks could do when their talents and energy were allowed to flourish. John Brown heard of the scheme and traveled to New York to meet Smith. He liked what he learned, and decided to relocate once again.

  Life in North Elba was challenging. The winters were long and cold, the growing season short and uncertain. Yet hardship never daunted John Brown, and he pitched in and fashioned a new life. Richard Henry Dana Jr. had come to the attention of American readers with a memoir about California when it was still part of Mexico. Two Years Before the Mast inflame
d James Polk’s lust for California, which had contributed to his demand for war against Mexico. In 1849, Dana took a shorter journey, through the Adirondacks, where he discovered John Brown’s new home. “The farm was a mere recent clearing,” Dana wrote. “The stumps of trees stood out, blackened by burning, and crops were growing among them, and there was a plenty of felled timber. The dwelling was a small log-house of one story in height, and the outbuildings were slight. The whole had the air of a recent enterprise, on a moderate scale, although there were a good many neat cattle and horses. The position was a grand one for a lover of mountain effects; but how good for farming I could not tell.”

  The owner arrived some hours after Dana. “Late in the afternoon a long buckboard wagon came in sight, and on it were seated a negro man and woman, with bundles; while a tall, gaunt, dark-complexioned man walked before, having his theodolite and other surveyor’s instruments with him, while a youth followed by the side of the wagon.” The tall man was Brown, who supplemented the family income by part-time work as a surveyor. Brown stepped forward and greeted the visitors. “A grave, serious man he seemed, with a marked countenance and a natural dignity of manner,” Dana said.

  The visitors were asked to dinner. “We were all ranged at a long table, some dozen of us more or less, and these two negroes and one other had their places with us. Mr. Brown said a solemn grace.” Dana noted that Brown addressed the negroes formally. “The man was ‘Mr. Jefferson’ and the woman ‘Mrs. Wait.’ ” The two were recent arrivals from a place where they had been accorded less respect. “It was plain they had not been so treated or spoken to often before, perhaps never until that day, for they had all the awkwardness of field hands on a plantation.”

  The conversation with Brown impressed Dana and his friends. “We found him well informed on most subjects, especially in the natural sciences. He had books, and had evidently made a diligent use of them.” The house was large for a cabin, with four rooms, but small for the crowd who lived there. “He seemed to have an unlimited family of children, from a cheerful, nice healthy woman of twenty or so, and full-sized red-haired son, who seemed to be foreman of the farm, through every grade of boy and girl, to a couple that could hardly speak.”

  Dana and his friends tried to pay for their meal. The eldest daughter, Ruth, managed the household, in the place of Brown’s wife, Mary, who was ailing; Ruth consented to accept the cost of the food the visitors had consumed but nothing for her trouble. “We had some five-dollar bills and some bills of one dollar each,” Dana recorded. “She took one of the one-dollar bills and went up into the garret, and returned with some change! It was too piteous. We could not help smiling, and told her we should feel guilty of highway robbery if we took her silver.” She reluctantly acquiesced. “It was plain this family acted on a principle in the smallest matters.”

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  FOR ALL THE APPEARANCE it presented to visitors, North Elba was a struggle for John Brown. Ruth recalled a winter day when her father nearly froze to death. He was returning from Springfield, where he still had business. He had found a ride most of the way but was left to cross the final mountain pass on foot, carrying his travel bag. “Before he came within several miles of home, he got so tired and lame he had to sit down in the road,” Ruth said. “The snow was very deep, and the road but little trodden. He got up again after a while, went on as far as he could, and sat down once more. He walked a long distance in that way, and at last lay down with fatigue in the deep snow beside the path, and thought he should get chilled there and die.” Another traveler approached but walked on past without seeing him. Brown concluded that the man was drunk. Thinking that if a drunkard could keep walking, so could he, Brown summoned his strength for a final push. With great effort he staggered to the house of a farmer named Scott. “Father could scarcely get into the house, he was so tired,” Ruth recalled, evidently drawing on Brown’s recollection or perhaps Scott’s. Scott set Brown by the fire, gave him something to eat and eventually drove him the rest of the way by ox-drawn sled.

  Brown never got comfortable in North Elba, committed though he was to the cause. Money was a constant problem. As Richard Dana had guessed, the mountains were indeed better for admiring than for farming, and Brown’s efforts always came up short. In the early 1850s he shuttled back and forth between North Elba and Hudson, with continuing connections to Springfield. Much of the time he was trying to collect money owed to him, part of the time to postpone paying money owed by him.

  Yet it wasn’t just the money. He was searching for something, though he didn’t know what. He was growing old. He had sired a large family. Most other men of his era and his position would have found that fulfilling. John Brown wanted more.

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  HE GOT IT in Kansas. Stephen Douglas had twinned Nebraska with Kansas in his bill to suggest that the former, filled with free farmers from Iowa, would develop into a free state, while the latter, attracting slaveholders from Missouri, would become a slave state. Popular sovereignty would yield a result satisfying to both sides.

  He was disingenuous or naive. And because Stephen Douglas was anything but naive, disingenuousness was the only explanation. Kansas was the more appealing of the two territories on physical merits, and to Kansas the first settlers flocked. They raced and jostled to claim the choicest parcels of land for growing crops, the most convenient spots for siting towns. Jostling had been a feature of every new frontier in American history, but it had a novel aspect in Kansas. Popular sovereignty with respect to slavery meant that whichever side—pro-slavery or antislavery—put more of its people on the ground would determine the future for the state Kansas became. This was important to the prospective Kansans, of course, but not only to them. Kansas became a test of strength for the two sides in the national debate. The settling of Kansas provided the closest thing America had witnessed to a national referendum on slavery.

  The two sides waged the contest with great vigor and little scruple. David Atchison, a Democratic senator from Missouri and the president pro tem of the Senate—which made him the acting vice president of the United States, following Millard Fillmore’s promotion to the presidency on the death of Zachary Taylor—urged his fellow Missourians to do whatever it took to secure Kansas for slavery. “The people of Kansas, in their first elections, will decide the question whether or not the slaveholder is to be excluded, and it depends upon a majority of the votes cast at the polls,” he told a crowd in western Missouri. Atchison asserted that the Yankee opponents of slavery were conspiring against the honest people of the South. He challenged Missouri to fight back. “If a set of fanatics and demagogues a thousand miles off can afford to advance their money and exert every nerve to abolitionize the territory and exclude the slaveholder, when they have not the least personal interest, what is your duty? When you reside in one day’s journey of the territory, and when your peace, your quiet, and your property depend upon your action, you can, without an exertion, send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institutions. Should each county in the state of Missouri only do its duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot box. If we are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern states will have shown themselves recreant to their interests, and will deserve their fate.”

  The slavery men had the advantage at first. Missouri was next door to Kansas, giving Missourians a head start in the race there. And settlers from elsewhere typically passed through Missouri en route to Kansas, affording the Missourians a chance to hinder the progress of those from free states.

  Missouri answered David Atchison’s call to flood the polling places. In early voting for territorial offices, the turnout vastly exceeded the populations resident in the precincts, and many of the voters didn’t even bother to spend the night in Kansas, returning at once to their Missouri homes. The bulging ballot boxes predictably favored the pro-slavery candida
tes, who proceeded to form a pro-slavery legislature that passed pro-slavery laws.

  The laws were more extreme than anything on the books in the South. An “act to punish offences against slavery” decreed death as the penalty for disseminating abolitionist literature or merely speaking against slavery. The law was enforced by vigilante groups, in particular Missourians known as “border ruffians.”

  The opponents of slavery refused to be intimidated. Abolitionists organizing as emigrant-aid societies sponsored settlers who established communities devoted to the cause of freedom. Foremost was the town of Lawrence, some forty miles from the Missouri border. Underwritten by the New England Emigrant Aid Company, itself funded by abolitionist Amos Adams Lawrence of Massachusetts, the town waved its antislavery principles proudly. Three newspapers spread the good word of freedom; the Free State Hotel, the finest hostelry in Kansas, welcomed visitors and newcomers. After a trying first winter, the town grew rapidly and became a focus for free-state settlement in the surrounding area. The residents had bright hopes for their own future and that of Kansas, which would tip toward freedom if their efforts succeeded.

  This was precisely what worried the slave-state men and their Missouri supporters. For months they harassed the inhabitants of Lawrence, threatening dire harm to persons and property. The tension built, and the ruffians grew full of themselves. A British traveler named Thomas Gladstone encountered a large gang of them after one of their excursions into Kansas. “I had just arrived in Kansas City, and shall never forget the appearance of the lawless mob that poured into the place,” Gladstone wrote: “men, for the most part of large frame, with red flannel shirts and immense boots worn outside their trousers, their faces unwashed and unshaven.” The hooligans were armed to the teeth with rifles, revolvers and bowie knives, and they swore a blue streak. “Looking around at these groups of drunken, bellowing, bloodthirsty demons who crowded around the bar of the hotel, shouting for drink, or vented their furious noise on the levee without, I felt that all my former experiences of border men and Missourians bore faint comparison with the spectacle presented by this wretched crew, who appeared only the more terrifying from the darkness of the surrounding night.”