Among Republicans the sense was widespread that there had been collusion between Buchanan and the Supreme Court in wiring the final decision. A year after Dred Scott, on March 3, 1858, Seward delivered a speech on the floor of the Senate accusing Buchanan of conspiring with Taney.
The day of inauguration came—the first one among all the celebrations of that great national pageant that was to be desecrated by a collation between the executive and judicial departments to undermine the National Legislature and the liberties of the people. The President, attended by the usual lengthened procession, arrived and took his seat on the portico. The Supreme Court attended him there, in robes which yet exacted public reverence. The people unaware of the importance of the whisperings carried on between the President and the Chief Justice, and imbued with veneration for both, filled the avenue and gardens far away as the eye could reach. The President addressed them in words as bland as those which the worst of all the Roman Emperors pronounced when he assumed the purple. He announced (vaguely, indeed, but with self-satisfaction) the forthcoming extra-judicial exposition of the Constitution, and pledged his submission to it as authoritative and final. The Chief Justice and his associates remained silent.
It was likely that Buchanan and Taney had just exchanged pleasantries on the inaugural stand, though it was also entirely possible that Buchanan may have said something about the coming of the opinion and Taney briefly replied. Seward never knew the true story, which went beyond Buchanan’s foreshadowing and was far more damaging than the conjecture. Not until the twentieth century did historians begin to piece together the collusion centrally involving Buchanan from the letters of Catron and Grier. How it had happened was kept hidden at the time.
Reverdy Johnson, the defense attorney in Dred Scott, took the lead in denouncing Seward in a widely published letter for having “desecrated the Senate chamber by virtually threatening the South with early practical subjugation. . . . Never was there a more direct incentive to servile insurrection. Could the slaves of the South hear such teachings, and be as mad and reckless as the speaker, many a homestead would swim in blood.” Johnson accused Seward of “libel” with “not, I know, a word of truth in his direct charges.” That the justices had “acted extra-judicially” was “groundless.” Taney had been the victim of “a slander so gross and revolting, that . . . it cannot but ultimately, if not at once, disgust the public mind.”
Southerners embraced Taney’s ruling as fervently as Northerners rejected it. In their view, the Republicans should have respectfully accepted the court’s judgment and folded their tent. Retrospectively, Jefferson Davis blamed Northern criticism as one of the causes of the war. “Instead of accepting the decision of this then august tribunal—the ultimate authority in the interpretation of constitutional questions—as conclusive of a controversy that had so long disturbed the peace and was threatening the perpetuity of the Union, it was flouted, denounced, and utterly disregarded by the Northern agitators, and served only to stimulate the intensity of their sectional hostility. What resource for justice—what assurance of tranquility—what guarantee of safety—now remained for the South?”
Years later, after the Civil War, Taney told his authorized biographer that “if Mr. Seward had been nominated and elected President instead of Mr. Lincoln, he should, if requested, as was customary, have refused to administer to him the official oath, and thereby proclaim to the nation that he would not administer that oath to such a man.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
ALL THE POWERS OF EARTH
James Buchanan was renowned among his friends for writing letters with impeccably beautiful penmanship finished with his large signature adorned with flourishes and curlicues. He decided he would send a thank-you note to Stephen A. Douglas, who had sold Chicago property to raise funds for Buchanan’s campaign, spoke before numerous rallies on his behalf, and carried Illinois for him by his “super-human efforts,” according to Trumbull. The note was misaddressed in his inimitably careful handwriting to “The Hon. Samuel A. Douglas.”
Slave market in New Orleans
When Buchanan visited Washington on his pre-inaugural foray, Douglas called on him at his suite in the National Hotel. Douglas prepared for his encounter by meeting beforehand with friends and allies in New York City to draw up a list of patronage positions he expected to be his reward. He believed that he ought to have a representative on the cabinet, be involved in the selection of other cabinet secretaries, and control the federal jobs in Illinois as well as having influence over those in other Northwest states. But no slight had been forgotten, no suspicion lessened, and no vindictive impulse stayed. Douglas was to remain the once and future rival. Senator John Slidell advised Buchanan against naming “in your cabinet any decided partisan of Douglas.” The three choices Douglas proposed for the cabinet, including his lieutenant congressman William A. Richardson, were denied. (Richardson was appointed governor of Nebraska and at first did not want to accept the lowly appointment until Douglas pressured him.) Douglas received crumbs here and there, but on important jobs was shut out.
From Buchanan, Douglas immediately gained the “irresistible” impression that “patronage for the Northwest had been disposed of before the nomination,” under the thumb of Senator Jesse Bright of Indiana, who had betrayed him at the convention. Douglas’s reaction was to take immediate affront. “If this purpose is carried out,” Douglas wrote a friend, “and I am the object of attack, I shall fight all my enemies and neither ask nor give quarter. . . . At present I am an outsider. My advice is not invited nor will my wishes probably be regarded, I want nothing but fair play. I ask nothing for myself. I want only a fair share for my friends. I desire the bold true men who fought the battle to be sustained. If this can be done I am content. If, on the contrary, the power of the Administration is to be used either for plunder or ambition,” he would retaliate.
Slidell wrote Buchanan that Douglas “assumes that he is the proper representative not only of Illinois, but of the entire Northwest. He is just now in a very morbid state of mind, believing or affecting to believe that there is a general conspiracy to put him down.” He was, Slidell warned, “ready to run amok like a maddened Malay.” Buchanan stiffened himself. He took Douglas’s demands and disappointment as an attempt at usurpation. “I trust in Heaven I may be President myself,” he wrote, “and think I shall be.”
“He is a stubborn old gentleman very fond of having his own way,” remarked Jeremiah Black, the new attorney general, about his friend Buchanan, “and I don’t know what his way is.”
The clash between Buchanan and Douglas extended beyond politics into society, where Buchanan had clear preferences. The old bachelor cultivated the company of married women of powerful men, loved to gossip and to have young ladies fluttering around his periphery. His niece, Harriet Lane, twenty-six years old when he entered the White House, for whom he had been the legal guardian since she was orphaned at the age of eleven, acted as his first lady. She had early accepted her uncle’s intimate friend William R. King as another uncle. (Later she burned the correspondence between the two men.) Well-educated and poised, she served Buchanan as his hostess in London when he was minister to England, where Queen Victoria befriended her and decreed that “dear Miss Lane” be awarded the rank of spousal ambassadorial consort. As the first woman to adopt the title of first lady, she was a style setter and grand hostess who invited artists to the White House, and she was responsible for the creation of the National Gallery of Art. But she had to endure the overbearing criticism of how the food was cooked and the selection of wine at her uncle’s dinners that publicly embarrassed her in front of guests. She enjoyed dancing and playing cards, pleasures he forbad. He invaded her private correspondence, forcing her to devise surreptitious methods of hiding it from him. Flirtatious with young men, she spurned the suitors he attempted to thrust on her. “Miss Lane served to keep the surface of society in Washington serene and smiling, though the fires of a volcano raged in the under-political
world,” wrote her friend Virginia Clay. Sara Pryor, the wife of Roger Pryor, a diplomat, editor, and Southern fire-eater, recalled, “Always courteous, always in place, silent whenever it was possible to be silent, watchful, and careful, she made no enemies, was betrayed into no entangling alliances, and was involved in no contretemps of any kind.”
Just before Buchanan’s inauguration, one of the coquettish young women in town for whom Buchanan had developed a distant affection, Adele Cutts, the twenty-two-year-old grand-niece of Dolley Madison, and a classmate of Harriet Lane at the Georgetown Visitation School for Girls, married the forty-four-year-old widower Douglas in an elaborate wedding on November 20, 1856, the social event of the season. Douglas’s sudden elevation in status distinctly irritated Buchanan. It was a marriage made in Washington heaven. He had position, power, and money. She had youth, beauty, and social station.
The early years of Adele Cutts were spent in the glow of her great-aunt, the ne plus ultra doyen of Washington society, with whom she was casually introduced to presidents and senators, the good and the bad. Adele lived in a mansion on Lafayette Square across from the White House. She attended her first party there at the age of seven. Her mother, Ellen O’Neal, of an old Maryland family, was a “brilliant” social figure. Her aunt, Rose Greenhow, held sway as a prominent hostess of a Southern social and political salon. Her father, James Madison Cutts, the cherished nephew of President Madison, had risen to no more than second comptroller of the treasury.
Adele’s lineage made her “the belle of Washington,” according to her friend Sara Pryor. “She did not impress one as having what we call ‘depth of character’. . . a woman to assume to lead and teach other women. . . . But she was beautiful as a pearl, sunny-tempered, unselfish, warmhearted, unaffected, sincere.”
In the three years since the death of his first wife Douglas’s alcoholism often raged out of control and his dress was disheveled. His vices had not gone unnoticed. Some of Adele’s friends counseled against the match. The Southern aristocracy that dominated the social scene, especially the women, regarded Douglas with a mixture of condescension and contempt. “The dirty speculator and party trickster,” wrote Varina Davis, Jefferson Davis’s wife, “broken in health by drink, with his first wife’s money, buys an elegant well-bred woman because she is poor and her Father is proud.” But tended by his new wife Douglas no longer appeared unshaven and his clothes ceased to be seedy. “She was very attentive to her ‘little giant,’ ” wrote Sara Pryor. “When he made those terribly long speeches in the Senate . . . she would wait in the gallery and hurry down to wrap his overcoat around him, as he stood in the hall dripping with perspiration. She imbibed enough political lingo to rally and amuse him.”
Douglas commissioned the building of three grand townhouses near the Capitol that became known as Douglas Row. He and his new wife took the corner one, four stories tall, with twenty high-ceiled rooms inlaid with walnut paneling. He sold the one next door to John C. Breckinridge and the other to Senator Henry Rice of Minnesota, both investors in his real estate speculations. In this large house, which Douglas called “Mount Julep,” after his favorite cocktail, Adele Douglas entertained on a luxurious scale, providing her husband with a social life to match his ambition, “with the regal manner of a princess,” according to Virginia Clay.
Douglas’s marriage rankled Buchanan. He resented Douglas’s capture of the adorable Adele. Buchanan was not and could not be a rival suitor, but he was jealous that a man he thought of as a political rival had her. The president relied on his power over the spoils to try to spoil it. Though he granted other Democratic senators influence over federal appointments in their states, he gave Douglas little other than the Chicago postmaster. Against the advice of his cabinet and without Douglas’s knowledge, Buchanan promoted Adele’s father, James Madison Cutts, from his midlevel position within the Treasury Department to a high and well-paid auditorship. The appointment cast Douglas in a bad light. It made it seem that he had sought the plum job for his father-in-law while neglecting to secure jobs for people from Illinois. With the patronage ploy Buchanan had created a little scandal of perceived nepotism and drove a stake into the heart of Douglas’s family. Douglas wrote him an angry letter demanding that Buchanan rescind the offer, “that any appointments you may make, or persons you may retain in office—no matter how near and dear they may be to me—must not be considered as any compensation for the omission to appoint such Democrats as I, in common with the rest of the [Illinois] delegation, have or may recommend.” Buchanan sent back a cutting reply. “Should I make the appointment . . . it will be my own regard for Mr. Cutts and his family, and not because Senator Douglas has had the good fortune to become his son-in-law.” The warfare that was political had turned viciously personal. Cutts stayed in the job.
Adele Cutts Douglas
When the Congress adjourned in late May 1857, Douglas returned to Springfield to deliver his views on the Dred Scott decision. It was his most important speech since he had introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act three years earlier. Senator Jesse Bright might have been handed the federal patronage of the Northwest, but he could never be more than the rough beast he was. Douglas was the still rising star of the Northwest. Buchanan was just beginning his term, but Douglas was the apparent successor. The results of the 1856 campaign underlined that the Democratic Party required a Northerner at its head to win the presidency. The Southerners controlled the party but could not nominate one of their own and expect to win. Douglas’s speech had to prepare him to face three future contests, the immediate one for reelection to the Senate in 1858, followed by a struggle for the party nomination, and then for the presidency itself. His conundrum was that Taney had eviscerated his doctrine of popular sovereignty, which he had invented to justify the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Taney declared no territorial government could prohibit slavery because that authority could only flow from the Congress, whose power to limit slavery was unconstitutional. The Taney opinion struck down both the Republicans and Douglas in a single blow. Douglas had to find a path through that seemingly implacable obstacle. On June 12 he strode to the podium of a packed Hall of the House of Representatives in Springfield. “We were pleased to see in attendance Col. W.H. Herndon, the Hon. A. Lincoln,” reported the Illinois State Register.
Douglas began by defending Taney’s honor against Republicans’ criticism. He reduced their objections to their harsh attacks on Taney personally while presenting himself as the champion of dignity who would never descend to ad hominem smears of “partisan malice.” “The moment that decision was pronounced,” Douglas said, “and before the opinions of the Court could be published and read by the people, the newspaper press, in the interest of a powerful political party in this country, began to pour forth torrents of abuse and misrepresentations not only upon the decision, but upon the character and motives of the venerable chief justice and his illustrious associates on the bench.”
The Republicans, he said, must either accept the court’s decision or by resisting it strike “a deadly blow at our whole republican system of government” that would “place all our rights and liberties at the mercy of passion, anarchy, and violence.” Douglas put the Republicans on the side of anarchy—“a distinct and naked issue between the friends and the enemies of the constitution—the friends and the enemies of the supremacy of the laws.”
He avoided discussing Taney’s legal reasoning, instead upholding his bowdlerized history of the founders as proslavery absolutists and seized upon his dictum that the Declaration of Independence was the charter for white supremacy. Once Douglas claimed that ground as his own he exposed the Republicans’ true and hidden agenda of sexual deviancy. If the Declaration “really means what the Republican or Abolition party assert it does mean, in declaring that a negro was created by the Almighty equal to a white man . . . we shall certainly be compelled, as conscientious and just men, to go one step further—repeal all laws making any distinction whatever on account of race and color, and au
thorize negroes to marry white women on an equality with white men.” If, on the other hand, “the opponents of the Dred Scott decision shall refuse to carry out their views of the Declaration of Independence and negro citizenship, by conferring upon the African race all the rights, privileges and immunities of citizenship, the same as they are or should be enjoyed by the white, how will they vindicate the integrity of their motives and the sincerity of their profession?” Douglas pronounced the Republicans caught in this “inconsistency,” a political trap they could not escape. “But so long as they quote the Declaration of Independence to prove that a negro was created equal to a white man, we have no excuse for closing our eyes and professing ignorance of what they intend to do, so soon as they get the power.”
Taney’s opinion stated that slaves could not be forbidden in any territory or to be brought into free states and that the Congress could make no law otherwise. Douglas made the decision seem as though it had acquitted his position rather than refuted it. Distorting Taney’s slanted version of slanted history to make it seem that the chief justice was vindicating popular sovereignty, he proclaimed it had been the underlying principle of the American Revolution and the Constitution all along, and only applicable to white men. “The history of the times clearly shows that the negroes were regarded as an inferior race, who, in all ages, and in every part of the globe, and under the most favorable circumstances, had shown themselves incapable of self-government. . . . It is on this principle that in all civilized and Christian countries the government provides for the protection of the insane, the lunatic, the idiotic, and all other unfortunates who are incompetent to take care of themselves.”
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