by H. W. Brands
10
LINCOLN’S MODERATION WAS innate; his was not a passionate temperament. On the slavery question, Lincoln’s moderation was also tactical. Stephen Douglas’s decision to reopen the issue of slavery in the territories had revived Lincoln’s political hopes; having had his hopes dashed before, he determined to move cautiously.
But caution was itself risky at a time when American politics was careening toward danger. On each side of the slavery debate, emotions were being deliberately inflamed to mobilize supporters against the other side. Northern abolitionists underwrote lectures by Frederick Douglass and others who could testify to the horrors of life under the lash; Southern defenders of slavery warned that the abolitionists were promoting slave rebellion and race-mixing.
Henry Ward Beecher made a habit of, and a handsome living by, stirring emotions. Beecher was a son of Lyman Beecher, a minister of Puritan persuasion who never found an unpopular cause he couldn’t get behind. Henry Beecher followed his father to the pulpit but charted his own path from there. From the pulpit of his Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, Henry preached a gospel of love and opportunity, not justice and repentance; the good news of Beecher’s Good Book was that God wanted men to be happy. And women, too: Beecher’s church was crowded with women, not a few of whom vied for places near the front, where his loving eye might fall upon them. It did on several, and Beecher’s reputation for ministering intimately to certain members of his flock added to the aura that came to surround him.
Bad fortune befell Plymouth Church in 1849 when the structure burned to the ground. But Beecher was wont to say that God intended men to find the good in the bad, and Beecher certainly did when, amid the rebuilding, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. Henry Beecher, like all the Beechers—he had nine siblings—had been opposed to slavery from the cradle, but the new law gave him reason to oppose it more strenuously than ever. As he did, it brought larger crowds to his new church, expanded to accommodate them. By the mid-1850s Henry Beecher was the most famous clergyman in America. His printed sermons sold by the tens of thousands; his words were quoted in newspapers and journals; no visit to New York was complete until the visitor had taken the East River ferry to Brooklyn and walked the few blocks to hear the great man hold forth.
He never expounded to more widely noticed effect than in an 1856 sermon on Kansas. “A battle is to be fought,” he began, in soothing tones that belied the subject. “If we are wise, it will be bloodless.” His voice began to rise as he sketched the alternative. “If we listen to the pusillanimous counsels of men who have never shown one throb of sympathy for liberty, we shall have blood to the horse’s bridles.” Again softer: “If we are firm and prompt to obvious duty, if we stand by the men of Kansas, and give them all the help that they need, the flame of war will be quenched before it bursts forth, and both they of the West, and we of the East, shall, after some angry mutterings, rest down in peace.” Harsher once more: “But if our ears are poisoned by the advice of men who never rebuke violence on the side of power, and never fail to inveigh against the self-defense of wronged liberty, we shall invite aggression and civil war.”
Beecher recounted the violence already inflicted on Kansas by the minions of slavery. “At the hiss of an unscrupulous man”—David Atchison—“hordes of wild and indolent fellows that hang about the towns and cities of slave states as gigantic vermin rushed into Kansas, crushed the free and actual settlers at the polls, and by a wholesale fraud, not even denied or discouraged, reared up a legislature whose office it was to forge law for the benefit of slavery and for the extinction of liberty.”
Thankfully, some brave defenders of freedom had traveled to Kansas too. These were actual settlers, men—with their women and children, in some cases—steeped in the American tradition of liberty and personal responsibility. They stood against the evildoers.
The struggle continued, Beecher said, even as he spoke, even as his listeners sat safely in their pews. “On the one side are representatives of civilization; on the other, of barbarism. On the one side stand men of liberty, Christianity, industry, arts, and of universal prosperity; on the other are the waste and refuse materials of a worn-out slave state population—men whose ideas of society and civilization are comprised in the terms: a rifle, a horse, a hound, a slave, tobacco, and whisky.” The latter had no religion worth the name. “There is nothing but an annual uproarious camp-meeting where they get just enough religion to enable them to find out that the Bible justifies all the immeasurable vices and wrongs of slavery.” The free-state men brought books, newspapers, schools, open minds. “The slave state men come without books—without enough education to read, if they had them—without schools or a wish for them. They come with statutes framed for making free thought a sin, free speech a penitentiary offence, a free press punishable with death if it in the least loosens the bonds of oppression.”
Beecher’s listeners were not on the battle lines of the struggle, but they had a role to play in this epic contest. What the Kansas heroes required were weapons, which any friend of freedom could help supply. These would make all the difference. “Arms and courage will inevitably secure an unbroken peace,” Beecher said.
He quoted the Book of Revelation in describing the war that would come if those who claimed to love liberty failed to do their part. “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain, burning with fire, was cast into the sea; and the third part of the sea became blood.” In his own voice he interpreted: “So will armed slavery be cast into Kansas. But will not these rivers of blood dash against the Alleghenies, and that fire flash along the line between the North and South?”
Beecher again appealed for donations. “Let them that have money now pour it out,” he said. Time was of the essence. “What is done must be done quickly.” There must be no holding back. “Funds must be freely given. Arms must be had, even if bought at the price mentioned by our Saviour: ‘He that hath no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one.’ ”
* * *
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HENRY BEECHER COULD speak at length; he could also compose epigrams, as when, asked how a man of the Bible could advocate sending weapons to Kansas, he replied that in the present case a single Sharps rifle was worth a hundred Bibles. Weapons henceforth dispatched to Kansas by antislavery groups were often dubbed Beecher’s Bibles.
Yet Henry Beecher, for all his fame, wasn’t even the most powerful abolitionist in the Beecher family. That honor went to his sister Harriet, who married a man named Stowe. And as Harriet Beecher Stowe she wrote the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which won more converts to the antislavery cause than all her brother’s sermons—and all the words written and spoken by any other abolitionist.
She claimed no personal credit for the achievement, believing herself the agent of a higher power. She once told a friend she hadn’t written Uncle Tom’s Cabin at all.
“What!” the friend replied, astonished. “You did not write ‘Uncle Tom’?”
“No,” said Harriet Beecher Stowe. “I only put down what I saw.”
“But you have never been at the South, have you?”
“No, but it all came before me in visions, one after another, and I put them down in words.”
“Still,” said the friend, “you must have arranged the events.”
“No,” said Stowe. “Your Annie”—the friend’s daughter—“reproached me for letting little Eva die. Why, I could not help it. I felt as badly as anyone could. It was like a death in my own family, and it affected me so deeply that I could not write a word for two weeks after her death.”
“And did you know that Uncle Tom would die?” the friend asked.
“Oh yes, I knew that he must die from the first, but I did not know how. When I got to that part of the story, I saw no more for some time. I was physically exhausted, too. Mr. Stowe had then accepted a call to Andover”—her husb
and, like her father and brother, was a minister—“and had to go there to find a house for the family.” At her husband’s urging, Harriet had gone with him and for a time was distracted by refurbishing and refurnishing a home. Uncle Tom, she thought, was the furthest thing from her mind. One busy morning was followed by midday dinner, after which she looked forward to a nap. “But suddenly arose before me the death scene of Uncle Tom with what led to it—and George’s visit to him. I sat down at the table and wrote nine pages of foolscap paper without pausing, except long enough to dip my pen into the inkstand.”
Just as she finished, Calvin Stowe awoke from his nap. “Wife, have not you lain down yet?” he asked.
“No, I have been writing, and I want you to listen to this, and see if it will do.” She read, with tears streaming down her face at the pathos of the scene. He wept also.
“Do!” he said. “I should think it would do.” He took the sheets from her, folded them carefully and sent them to her publisher, without a single revision or correction.
“I have often thought,” Harriet Stowe concluded the story, “that if anything had happened to that package in going, it would not have been possible for me to have reproduced it.”
Harriet Stowe’s friend remembered this story and brought it up to her later, after publication of a new edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in the preface of which Stowe told of writing a sketch, many years earlier, of the death of a loyal slave. In the preface she said she had read the sketch to her children, who were deeply moved. This was the inspiration of Uncle Tom, Stowe told her new readers. The friend asked Stowe if there was a contradiction between the two versions.
“No,” Harriet Stowe replied. “Both are true, for I had entirely forgotten that I had ever written that sketch, and I suppose I had unconsciously woven it in with the other.”
Whatever the origins of Uncle Tom, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a sensation across the North and in other countries as well. Its affecting account of the saintly Tom, the angelic Eva and the sadistic Simon Legree left a deep impression on the minds and hearts of its millions of readers. Abraham Lincoln might or might not have said, on meeting Stowe, eighteen months after Fort Sumter, “So this is the little lady who made this big war,” but the plausibility of the statement made it stick in literary lore.
* * *
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CHARLES SUMNER WON far fewer friends to the antislavery cause than Harriet Beecher Stowe, but he made almost as many enemies of slavery’s advocates as Henry Beecher. The senator from Massachusetts was a striking figure, tall and powerful, with a full mane of hair. He had attended the Boston Latin School as a young man, and when he entered politics, he littered his speeches with sufficient Latinisms to give his rotund delivery a Ciceronian air. For this reason, it jolted many listeners to hear Sumner descend to the most scurrilous mode of personal insult in attacking slavery and all who defended it.
In May 1856, Sumner outdid himself. During a five-hour speech spread over two days, the Republican lawmaker denounced the “crime against Kansas,” as he called the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the events the law set in motion. It was a particularly lurid crime, Sumner said: “It is the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime.”
Sumner dredged classical history for parallels to the corruption that had produced the travail of Kansas, but the worst from the days of Nero and Caligula “were small by the side of the wrongs of Kansas, where the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, have been desecrated; where the ballot-box, more precious than any work in ivory or marble, from the cunning hand of art, has been plundered.” Sumner glared about the Senate. “Are you against sacrilege?” he demanded. “I present it for your execration. Are you against robbery? I hold it up for your scorn. Are you for the protection of American citizens? I show you how their dearest rights have been cloven down, while a tyrannical usurpation has sought to install itself on their very necks!”
Sumner’s recounting of recent history could have been delivered by Henry Beecher or Abraham Lincoln, so far as it traced the facts. Where Sumner left Beecher and Lincoln behind was in his characterization of the men he held responsible. Two in particular drew his wrath: Stephen Douglas and Andrew Butler, a Democratic senator from South Carolina.
Elaborating, Sumner called Douglas “the squire of slavery, its very Sancho Panza, ready to do all its humiliating offices.” Douglas had delivered Kansas to the slave power, bound hand and foot. Or so he had attempted. Sumner dared him to follow up. “I tell him now that he cannot enforce any such submission. The senator, with the slave power at his back, is strong, but he is not strong enough for this purpose. He is bold. He shrinks from nothing. Like Danton, he may cry, ‘l’audace! l’audace! toujours l’audace!’ but even his audacity cannot compass this work.” Switching back to his classical theme, Sumner said of Douglas, “He may convulse this country with civil feud. Like the ancient madman, he may set fire to this temple of constitutional liberty, grander than the Ephesian dome; but he cannot force obedience to that tyrannical usurpation.”
Andrew Butler was the Don Quixote to Douglas’s Sancho Panza. A sponsor with Douglas of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Butler was also a conspicuous representative of the South Carolina school of hair-trigger defensiveness on slavery. Sumner called Butler a blowhard and an ignoramus. “There was no extravagance of the ancient parliamentary debate which he did not repeat; nor was there any possible deviation from truth which he did not make, with so much of passion, I am glad to add, as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration.” Sumner branded Butler a fool. “He cannot ope his mouth, but out there flied a blunder.” Sumner ridiculed a Butler speech impediment, mocking the senator’s “incoherent phrases discharged with the loose expectoration of his speech.”
But it was the Don Quixote reference, in which Sumner returned to his sexual imagery, that got the attention of his audience. “The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight,” Sumner sneered. “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot Slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator.”
Butler was not in the Senate that day to hear Sumner’s insults. But those present anticipated trouble. Stephen Douglas had a thick skin, yet he knew the trait wasn’t universal among his colleagues. “That damn fool will get himself killed by some other damn fool,” Douglas muttered of Sumner from the back of the chamber.
The other damn fool proved to be Preston Brooks, a South Carolina congressman and cousin of Butler. Brooks was closer in age and strength to Sumner than Butler was, and when he learned what Sumner had said of his compatriot and kinsman, he concluded he had to respond. The allegation that rankled most was the one that made slavery Butler’s mistress. It was an open secret that slave owners forced themselves upon the women they owned; the many light faces among slave children were daily testament. Yet precisely because the secret was so open, it was denied with the utmost vigor by apologists for slavery. Preston Brooks was not going to let Charles Sumner get away with this insult.
Brooks weighed challenging Sumner to a duel. But judging that a duel would dignify the charges, he settled for caning his cousin’s antagonist. He entered the Senate and approached Sumner’s desk. Before Sumner realized what was happening, Brooks began beating him about the head and shoulders with his heavy, gold-capped cane. Sumner tried to get away but became entangled in the desk, which was attached to the floor. By the time Brooks was finished, Sumner was an
unconscious bloody mess and so badly injured he would require years to recover.
Northerners were appalled by this violence on the very floor of the Senate. Southerners sent Brooks congratulations and offered replacements for his cane, which had broken from the force of the blows.
11
THE VIOLENCE AGAINST Charles Sumner touched something in John Brown he hadn’t felt before. It arrived amid a change in Kansas he hadn’t expected. The struggle against slavery there had been developing slowly, and in a manner that appeared to favor freedom. In December 1855, Brown wrote to Mary of a recent encounter with the enemy. “About three or four weeks ago news came that a Free-State man by the name of Dow had been murdered by a proslavery man by the name of Coleman, who had gone and given himself up for trial to the proslavery Governor Shannon,” he said. “This was soon followed by further news that a Free-State man who was the only reliable witness against the murderer had been seized by a Missourian (appointed sheriff by the bogus legislature of Kansas) upon false pretexts, examined, and held to bail under such heavy bonds, to answer to those false charges, as he could not give; that while on his way to trial, in charge of the bogus sheriff, he was rescued by some men belonging to a company near Lawrence; and that in consequence of the rescue Governor Shannon had ordered out all the proslavery force he could muster in the Territory, and called on Missouri for further help.” Two thousand men had answered the call and descended on Lawrence. They demanded the surrender of the witness and of those who had rescued him.