by H. W. Brands
Lincoln felt compelled to take bold action. Having made himself the most visible foe in Illinois of Douglas, he was the obvious choice for the state’s Republicans to put forward against Douglas in the race for the Senate. As in most states prior to passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, the Senate race in Illinois in 1858 was actually a contest between parties. If the Democrats won a majority in the state legislature, that majority would make Douglas senator. If the Republicans won, Lincoln would replace him.
The Illinois Republicans, meeting in Springfield, did nominate Lincoln for the Senate, and he kicked off his campaign with an acceptance speech calculated to strike sparks. William Herndon had watched Lincoln draft the speech. “He wrote on stray envelopes and scraps of paper, as ideas suggested themselves, putting them into that miscellaneous and convenient receptacle, his hat,” Herndon recalled. “As the convention drew near he copied the whole on connected sheets, carefully revising every line and sentence, and fastened them together, for reference during the delivery of the speech, and for publication.” In fact, said Herndon, Lincoln didn’t really need the copy for his delivery. “He had studied and read over what he had written so long and carefully that he was able to deliver it without the least hesitation or difficulty.”
Lincoln knew the speech could make or break his campaign for the Senate, and perhaps whatever political career lay beyond the campaign. He needed to attract attention—to say something provocative. He was careful not to preempt himself. A political associate dropped by the office while Lincoln was crafting his message; the fellow asked Lincoln what he was writing. Lincoln responded vaguely that it was something he might speak or publish one day, but that he couldn’t share it at present. There was a particular passage Lincoln wouldn’t reveal, as he told the friend afterward in explaining his secrecy. “You would ask me to change or modify it, and that I was determined not to do. I had willed it so, and was willing if necessary to perish with it.”
Lincoln often commenced speeches with a humorous anecdote, to loosen the crowd. Not on this day. He was dead serious. He got straight to the point, speaking slowly and emphasizing the key words with care. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it,” he said. He made clear he intended to campaign against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and its consequences. “We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to slavery agitation,” he said. Stephen Douglas’s policy—popular sovereignty—had done no such thing. “Under the operation of that policy, that agitation has not only not ceased, but has constantly augmented. In my opinion, it will not cease until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed.”
The crisis was inevitable, Lincoln judged. Borrowing from the Gospel of Matthew, he declared, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
Lincoln paused to let reporters get the line. He elaborated: “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Lincoln’s argument was red meat to both sides of the slavery debate. Southerners naturally heard it as a declaration of war against slavery, by the candidate of the avowedly antislavery party. Northerners interpreted it as an ominous prediction that the logic of the Dred Scott decision would open the doors to slavery everywhere.
Northerners, in particular Illinoisans, were his audience at the moment. Democrats among them, and likely some Republicans, would call him alarmist. The Dred Scott case dealt with the territories only; the states remained the masters of their fate on slavery.
Lincoln argued that he wasn’t alarmist at all. He revisited recent events. At the beginning of 1854 slavery had been excluded from more than half the states by their own constitutions, and from most of the federal territories by congressional ban. But then came the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the congressional ban. “This opened all the national territory to slavery,” Lincoln said. Defenders of the law, starting with Stephen Douglas, contended that it did nothing more than enshrine the principle of self-government. Lincoln denounced any such perversion of the sacred principle, saying that in the hands of Douglas it amounted to precisely this: “That if any one man choose to enslave another, no third man shall be allowed to object.”
Even as the Douglas bill was moving through Congress, Lincoln continued, a law case came before the courts, brought by Dred Scott. The timing was convenient for the advocates of the law, in that it allowed them to dodge difficult questions on the constitutionality of popular sovereignty by declaring that the courts would have to decide. The case was still in the system at the time of the presidential election of 1856. The Democratic candidate won, but with a minority of the popular vote. Still, a win was a win, and the slavery cause benefited, for James Buchanan endorsed the opening of the territories to slavery. Shortly after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Supreme Court delivered its decision in the Dred Scott case, giving Douglas, Buchanan and the slavery party all they could hope for. Whereupon the senator and the president declared that every good citizen must fall in line behind the court’s decision.
This sequence of events was so convenient it suggested a conspiracy among the Democrats, Lincoln said. He drew an analogy. “When we see a lot of framed timbers, different portions of which we know have been gotten out at different times and places and by different workmen—Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance—and when we see these timbers joined together, and see they exactly make the frame of a house or a mill, all the tenons and mortices exactly fitting, and all the lengths and proportions of the different pieces exactly adapted to their respective places, and not a piece too many or too few—not omitting even scaffolding—or, if a single piece be lacking, we can see the place in the frame exactly fitted and prepared to yet bring such piece in—in such a case, we find it impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” Lincoln’s listeners caught his reference to Stephen Douglas, Franklin Pierce, Roger Taney and James Buchanan; some smiled even if they thought his argument overdrawn.
They weren’t smiling when Lincoln extrapolated from the Dred Scott decision to a dire warning about slavery in the country at large. While the majority opinion of the Supreme Court in the case, and the separate concurring opinions, had declared that the Constitution did not permit Congress or the territorial legislatures to exclude slavery from the territories, they were silent on the obvious next question. “They all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a state, or the people of a state, to exclude it.” Lincoln granted that the omission might have been an oversight. But given the neat fit of the timbers of the slave house Stephen and company had been constructing, it was a suspicious oversight. The same reasoning that led the Taney court to declare that slave owners could take their property to any territory might lead it to declare that slave owners could take their property to any state. Indeed, one of the associate justices, Samuel Nelson, appeared to lay the groundwork when he wrote, “Except in cases where the power is restrained by the Constitution of the United States, the law of the state is supreme over the subject of slavery within its jurisdiction.” This might appear a nod to state supremacy, but the introductory clause was crucial. “In what cases the power of the states is so restrained by the U.S. Constitution is left an open question,” Lincoln said. In just the same way the Kansas-Nebraska Act had left open the questio
n of restraints upon the territories. “Put that and that together,” Lincoln said, “and we have another nice little niche, which we may, ere long, see filled with another Supreme Court decision, declaring that the Constitution of the United States does not permit a state to exclude slavery from its limits.”
This was the nightmare of all opponents of slavery: the reconquest of the North by the slave power. It might sound extreme, Lincoln admitted. But the undoing of the Missouri Compromise had sounded extreme before the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision. By land area, slavery had regained half the ground it had lost in the previous several decades. Regaining the rest appeared a matter of time. “Such decision is probably coming, and will soon be upon us, unless the power of the present political dynasty shall be met and overthrown.” Moderate antislavery men, who had long thought time was on their side, needed to reconsider. “We shall lie down pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their state free; and we shall awake to the reality, instead, that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”
How could this awful outcome be averted? By Republicans banding together against the slave power. “Two years ago the Republicans of the nation mustered over thirteen hundred thousand strong,” Lincoln said, referring to the election of 1856. Their numbers were growing. Lincoln looked to the race for Illinois senator—his own race—and to the contests beyond. “The result is not doubtful. We shall not fail. If we stand firm, we shall not fail. Wise councils may accelerate or mistakes delay it, but, sooner or later the victory is sure to come.”
18
JOHN BROWN LEFT Kansas not long after the arrival of John Geary. Some observers of the Kansas scene surmised that Geary winked at Brown’s departure, despite the murder charges trailing him. Kansas needed peace more than it needed justice; better that Brown be out of Kansas than in a Kansas jail, inspiring lynch mobs or rescue attempts.
Brown was happy to be gone. The peace that settled upon Kansas didn’t suit his purposes; having taken up arms against slavery, he intended to keep fighting until slavery was vanquished. Kansas was no longer the place; “Africa,” the slave South itself, would be the next, and final, battlefield.
Brown’s rejection of anything but armed struggle informed a comment he made to one of his half sisters, living in Ohio. He hadn’t seen her in years, but on his way east from Kansas he stopped at her house. She was antislavery, like all the Browns, but more interested in politics than he. “John, isn’t it dreadful that Frémont should have been defeated and such a man as Buchanan put into office!” she said.
“Well, truly, as I look at it now, I see it was the right thing,” Brown replied. “If Frémont had been elected, the people would have settled right down and made no further effort. Now they know they must work.”
John Brown arrived in Boston in early 1857. He hoped to raise money for his continuing campaign, and to the armchair abolitionists of New England he was a great hero, the only authentic freedom fighter most of them had ever encountered. Frank Sanborn was smitten at first encounter. Fresh out of Harvard, imbued with the ideals of liberty, Sanborn worked for one of the many emigrant-aid societies that sprang up to assist the settlement of Kansas by free-state men. Brown took care to cultivate Sanborn, who might open the doors to others in Massachusetts. Sanborn responded by recommending Brown to his friends in the antislavery network. “ ‘Old Brown’ of Kansas is now in Boston, with one of his sons, working for an object in which you will heartily sympathize—raising and arming a company of men for the future protection of Kansas,” Sanborn wrote to an abolitionist minister based in Worcester. “He wishes to raise $30,000 to arm and equip a company such as he thinks he can raise this present winter, but he will, as I understand him, take what money he can raise and use it as far as it will go. Can you not come to Boston tomorrow or next day and see Capt. Brown?” Sanborn added, “I like the man from what I have seen—and his deeds ought to bear witness for him.”
What Sanborn didn’t realize, because Brown took pains to disguise it, was that Brown’s campaign for Kansas wouldn’t take place in Kansas itself. His war had never been about Kansas per se; it was a struggle against slavery. And it was a struggle that would be won only in the homeland of slavery in the American South. Yet Brown realized that this was more than most of those from whom he sought money had bargained for. They were still thinking of Kansas, so he would let them think of Kansas. But he would use their money for his larger campaign.
Henry David Thoreau was a generation older than Frank Sanborn yet no less enamored of Brown. The famous transcendentalist recognized a kindred spirit in Brown, or thought he did. “A man of rare common-sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles—that was what distinguished him,” Thoreau recalled of Brown. “Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life.” Thoreau and the others wanted to hear war stories from Kansas; Brown rationed his responses. “He did not overstate anything, but spoke within bounds,” Thoreau said. “I remember, particularly, how, in his speech here, he referred to what his family had suffered in Kansas, without ever giving the least vent to his pent-up fire. It was a volcano with an ordinary chimney-flue. Also referring to the deeds of certain Border Ruffians, he said, rapidly paring away his speech, like an experienced soldier, keeping a reserve of force and meaning, ‘They had a perfect right to be hung.’ ” Brown was the opposite of a rhetorician, but that made him the more powerful speaker. “It was like the speeches of Cromwell compared with those of an ordinary king.”
Brown’s resolve was still more impressive. “When I expressed surprise that he could live in Kansas at all, with a price set upon his head, and so large a number, including the authorities, exasperated against him, he accounted for it by saying, ‘It is perfectly well understood that I will not be taken,’ ” Thoreau recalled. Brown wasn’t admitting to the Pottawatomie murders, but the suspicion that he was behind them sent shivers of excitement through his audience. Brown boasted of the deterrent effect in Kansas of his reputation. Often he had openly entered pro-slavery towns to transact business, he said, and no one had attempted to arrest him. “No little handful of men were willing to undertake it, and a large body could not be got together in season,” he explained.
Brown stayed in private homes while in Boston; his comportment there enhanced the impression he made. “He used to take out his two revolvers and repeater every night before going to bed, to make sure of their loads, saying, ‘Here are eighteen lives,’ ” one of his hosts remembered. To the lady of that house, Brown said, “If you hear a noise, put the baby under the pillow. I should hate to spoil these carpets, but you know I cannot be taken alive.” Once he held the little girl up in one of his large hands, looked her in the eye and said, “When I am hung for treason, you can say that you used to stand on Captain Brown’s hand.”
Yet Brown had cause to believe that if the showdown came in Massachusetts, he wouldn’t in fact be hanged. Theodore Parker, another of his sponsors, sketched for a friend, who happened to be a judge, how Brown might avoid both arrest and the gallows. “If I were in his position,” Parker said, “I should shoot dead any man who attempted to arrest me for those alleged crimes”—the Pottawatomie murders. “Then I should be tried by a Massachusetts jury and be acquitted.”
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AMOS LAWRENCE WAS bowled over by Brown. “Captain John Brown, the old partisan hero of Kansas warfare, came to see me,” the textile magnate and philanthropist wrote in his diary. “I had a long talk with him. He is a calm, temperate, and pious man, but when roused he is a dreadful foe.” On the basis of this impression, Lawrence donated money to the Brown cause and promised more. “Enclosed please find twenty-five dollars toward the fund for the brave Captain John Brown, who may appropriately be called the ‘Miles Standish’ of Kansas,” he wrote to a group collecting money for Brown.
“Few persons know the character of this man, or his services; and he is the last one to proclaim his merits. His severe simplicity of habits, his determined energy, his heroic courage in time of trial, all based on a deep religious faith, make him a true representative of the Puritanic warrior.” Lawrence noted that Brown’s family required support while he was in the field. “It would afford me pleasure to be one of ten, or a smaller number, to pay a thousand dollars per annum till the admission of Kansas into the Union, for this purpose.”
Shortly thereafter Lawrence gave Brown seventy dollars directly. “It is for your own personal use, and not for the cause in any other way than that,” he explained. When Lawrence’s challenge grant of support for Brown’s family was quickly met by several friends, Brown suggested that the money be used to buy a better home and farm than his wife and younger children currently had in North Elba. Lawrence told Brown he needn’t worry. “In case anything should occur while you are engaged in a good cause, to shorten your life, you may be assured that your wife and children shall be cared for more liberally than you now propose. The family of ‘Captain John Brown of Osawatomie’ will not be turned out to starve in the country, until liberty herself is driven out.”
Many of those to whom Brown appealed professed to eschew violence; they sought assurance that what aid they gave him would be used defensively. “If you get the arms and money you desire,” one asked, “will you invade Missouri or any slave territory?”
Brown refused to answer straightforwardly. “You all know me,” he said. “You are acquainted with my history. You know what I have done in Kansas.” In fact, they didn’t know, about Pottawatomie, and Brown declined to enlighten them. He continued, “I do not expose my plans. No one knows them but myself, except perhaps one. I will not be interrogated; if you wish to give me anything, I want you to give it freely. I have no other purpose but to serve the cause of liberty.”