Walker relied upon Buchanan as his bulwark and wrote him on August 3 about the campaign against him. “These attacks of the southern ultras, with every possible exaggeration, are circulated with great activity among the people from the insurgent presses, which are very numerous, by their orators in public addresses, and even by messengers throughout the territory, and at points where I have no adequate means of counteracting these calumnies.”
Walker had failed in his first effort to persuade the free state men to participate in an election. He had to navigate through the bramble of its factions. Radical abolitionists were allied with racist Jacksonian Democrats against any compromise over admission of Kansas under anything but their Topeka Constitution. Walker insistently applied his skills and charm on the main leadership, which was at least open to hearing him. After lengthy conversations the free state governor, Charles Robinson, became convinced that Walker “intended to act in good faith.” On August 25, a free state convention at Grasshopper Falls resolved that Walker had “repeatedly pledged himself that the people of Kansas should have a full and fair vote,” and, despite the noisy dissent of a fraction of the more militant groups, it was agreed to go to the polls to elect a congressional delegate and territorial legislature. There had not yet been a fair election.
On September 7, the proslavery delegates to the Kansas constitutional convention at Lecompton met to elect John Calhoun its president and adjourn until after the legislative elections. On October 5 and 6, the free state men turned out at the polls in force. The antislavery congressional delegate won by more than four thousand votes, an indisputable result, but somehow, at the same time, voters elected a proslavery legislature. That result appeared to be swayed by McGee County, which was Cherokee land settled by less than one hundred voters, but which recorded 1,266 proslavery ballots, and the town of Oxford, occupied by perhaps thirty people but which returned 1,628 votes. Walker investigated. If the results stood the legislature would be proslavery and if they were overthrown it would be antislavery. He discovered the “Indian reserve . . . not yet subject to settlement” and Oxford “a village of six houses, including stores, and without a tavern.” He tossed out the fraudulent returns and declared the free state contingent the majority in the legislature. He rode into Lawrence, gathered a large crowd, flourished the lengthy paper rolls of voters from Oxford, and revealed that most of the proslavery names were copied in order from Williams’ Cincinnati Directory of inhabitants. The belligerent former sheriff Samuel J. Jones rounded up those claiming to have been elected as proslavery members of the legislature in the chamber of Judge Cato, a Lecompton stalwart, who issued a ruling that Walker and Stanton must certify their election or be imprisoned. Walker denied the judge’s writ, and Cato simply gave up in the face of his authority. Jones marched into Stanton’s office to demand he certify him and the others, but Stanton brushed him aside. A group of free state men suggested to hang Jones, which they said would “give them such deep gratification,” but Stanton declined their offer. Walker armed himself with a pistol, recruited Stanton, and the two men called on the saloons on Lecompton’s main street to demonstrate undaunted fearlessness.
Back in Washington, conversations soon revolved around the turn of events in Kansas, particularly among Buchanan’s cabinet, certain members of which were also the core of his social circle. Howell Cobb was his favorite. A generation younger, only forty-one at the beginning of the administration, he had already been Speaker of the House and governor of Georgia. One of the wealthiest men from the South, master of one thousand slaves, and married to a Lamar, one of the most politically powerful and richest families in Georgia, he was naturally conservative, opposed to Calhoun and nullification, and excoriated by the Southern Rights faction for supporting the Compromise of 1850 as the leader of the Union faction. He was always sensitive to criticism from the Southern Rights flank. With Buchanan he “occupied closer relations toward him than any other member of his Cabinet,” according to Cobb’s contemporary biographer, “and Mr. Cobb was really the prime minister of the Administration.” He held lavish parties in his Washington mansion, dined with the President when his wife was in Georgia, and provided convivial company. He believed that slavery was more than constitutionally protected but also divinely ordained. In 1856 he wrote a tract entitled A Scriptural Examination of the Institution of Slavery in which he explained that “African slavery is a punishment, inflicted upon the enslaved, for their wickedness,” and “beneficial to the slaves,” citing the Bible as “our authority.” All Northerners opposed to slavery “are denominated abolitionists,” and abolitionism “is not a political question; it is a religious delusion.” These were quite ordinary views among men of his place and class.
The other frequent guests around Buchanan’s White House table were Attorney General Jeremiah Black, his friend from his home state, and Jacob Thompson, of Mississippi, his secretary of the interior. Buchanan especially liked Thompson’s young and charming Southern belle of a wife from a wealthy planter family to whom Thompson was engaged when she was fourteen and had sent to Paris for four years for finishing school before marriage. Thompson had been born in North Carolina, his father a doctor, and after graduating from the university there went to the frontier of Mississippi to make his fortune, which flowed from his father-in-law, Peyton Jones. Thompson built the largest mansion in Oxford on his 2,400-acre plantation, tended with formal gardens and displaying a gallery of paintings collected from his extensive travels. He was the political power of northern Mississippi, elected to the Congress in 1838, and a founder of the University of Mississippi. At its opening, he delivered a speech dedicating the school as a place where “the hearts of our young men should be kept in the right place, and it is verily a sin against our children to send them into that circle of fanaticism, which surrounds our northern colleges.” He was part of the delegation from the 1852 Democratic convention to inform Franklin Pierce personally of his nomination. Offered the consulship to Cuba, he declined, waiting to run for the U.S. Senate but narrowly edged out by Jefferson Davis. In 1856, Buchanan rewarded him with a cabinet appointment. Thompson was a force in his own right in his own state and in the cabinet represented the lower South. He had achieved a high station he felt was due him. He was ambitious about money, politics, and the trappings of high culture—and vindictive. There was one man among the many men he contended with that he particularly hated. After Polk’s election, Thompson lobbied the president-elect to name Walker to his cabinet. When Walker vacated his Senate seat, the governor handwrote his appointment of Thompson to succeed Walker. Walker brought the commission with him to Washington to present to the Senate once he assumed his cabinet post, but he withheld Polk’s signed paper appointing Thompson. The seat was instead filled by Henry S. Foote, an ally of Walker. Thompson never forgave Walker for his duplicity. “I never could tolerate Walker,” he wrote. “He was true to a friend only so far as that friend could serve him in his designs.”
Howell Cobb
Throughout September and October, Cobb, Stephens, and a few others were in frequent communication on what to do about Walker. In a letter of October 9, Cobb wrote Stephens, agreeing to his plan to make Kansas a slave state by passing a constitution “to say nothing” about slavery, create a new registration of voters for a referendum, and appear to be “carrying out the will of the majority.” The suggestion that the stamp of a popular vote would lend legitimacy to a Lecompton Constitution was soon carried to Kansas.
Cobb summoned John J. McElhone, an official reporter for the House of Representatives, to dictate a letter to him laying out the idea and to have it delivered to the vice president of the Lecompton convention, Hugh M. Moore, a contact of Cobb’s originally from Georgia. Shortly afterward, a clerk in the Land Office of the Interior Department, Henry L. Martin, of Mississippi, was called to the home of Jacob Thompson, who instructed him to go to Kansas. According to Martin, Thompson spoke to him “as to how the constitution might be shaped to protect the rights of slave
owners of the slaves then there . . . and indicated that all fair-minded men to be willing to go a step further than that . . . all men ought to be willing to allow them to bring such servants to Kansas and keep them”—the Dred Scott ruling in action. Thompson himself testified in 1860 before a congressional committee, “I had much discussion about that time with various individuals as to the manner in which the slavery clause should be drawn. There were private conversations in which great difference of opinion existed. My object was to secure the question of slavery, and yet secure the cooperation of the free State and pro-slavery Democrats. On this subject I expressed my opinions freely with Mr. Martin, so much as to the form and manner in which the clause should be drawn.” Then Martin went to see Cobb, who vouchsafed “to my care a letter to Hugh M. Moore.”
For weeks before the Lecompton convention Martin participated in the meetings to make sure “we had a majority.” While Walker moved to overturn the fraudulent election results from McGee and Oxford and make possible a free state legislature, the convention reopened on October 19 urgently determined to preempt the consequences of the only free election in the territory. Martin sat constantly at Calhoun’s side through the proceedings giving advice. It was a rump of a convention. Of the sixty elected delegates only forty-three showed up, and most of the sessions were conducted without a quorum. The slavery section was approved by only twenty-eight votes. It read: “The right of property is before and higher than any constitutional sanction, and the right of the owner of a slave to such slave and his increase is the same and as inviolable as the right of any property whatever. The legislature shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves without the consent of the owners, or without paying the owners, previous to their emancipation, a full equivalent in money for the slaves so emancipated. They shall have no power to prevent emigrants to the state from bringing with them such persons as are deemed slaves by the laws of any one of the United States or territories, so long as any person of the same age or description shall be continued in slavery by the laws of this state.”
The difficult part was how to frame this proslavery document that codified Dred Scott into a question for a referendum. Martin drafted a provision. The whole constitution would not be submitted to an up-or-down vote. Instead it would be passed one way or another on the choice of “constitution with slavery” or “constitution with no slavery,” which meant in fact acceptance of slavery as it existed and might exist through bringing in slaves. “I drew it up myself,” Martin recalled later. At midnight, in a candle-lit room, the intoxicated delegates voted to approve the referendum. The “schedule” contained other provisions: Walker was to be ousted on December 1, and his power would devolve to a provisional government headed by John Calhoun, who would oversee the election on December 21. Martin returned to Washington to report directly to Thompson.
Calhoun paid a visit to Walker to dangle before him the largest bribe of all. If Walker would concur with the referendum, Calhoun suggested, he would be made the next president of the United States. Walker failed to inquire if anyone had authorized Calhoun to speak in the name of the administration and to offer him support for the presidency. “I said that that was impossible,” Walker recalled, “and showed Mr. Calhoun this letter of Mr. Buchanan to me of the 12th of July, 1857. He [Calhoun] said that the administration had changed its policy. I told him I did not believe it. . . . I never would change or modify my views on that question in the slightest respect; that I would fight it out to the end, be the consequences to me personally or politically what they might. Mr. Calhoun continued to insist that I ought to go with the President upon this subject. I denied that he had any right to speak for the President.” Walker told him he had a letter from the president backing him and demanded to know if Calhoun had one countermanding it. “He said he had not, but that the assurance came to him in such a manner as to be entirely reliable”—that is, from the leading Southerners of the cabinet, Howell Cobb, Jacob Thompson and Secretary of War John B. Floyd—a Southern Directorate—that claimed the authority to speak in the president’s name. Walker told Calhoun that the framing of the referendum denied those opposed to the constitution as a whole any way to have a fair vote on it. “Therefore, I considered such a submission of the question a vile fraud, a base counterfeit, and a wretched device to prevent the people voting even on that question. I said to him that not only would I not support it, but I would denounce it, no matter whether the administration sustained it or not.”
Walker was anything but naive about the pulling of strings that traversed half a continent back to Washington. He took neither Calhoun’s professions of good faith nor his claim to represent the administration at face value. Walker himself intended to see Buchanan, whom he believed must stand by his word or open the floodgates of the deluge. Walker packed his trunks, boarded a steamer, and headed toward Washington on November 17.
Rolling down the Missouri River to St. Louis on the first part of his voyage, Walker did not know that the bell had tolled for him. The Washington Union of November 18, in an editorial written by Attorney General Black and approved by the Southern Directorate within the cabinet, crowed about the turn of events in Kansas as a conclusive triumph. “The vexed question is settled—the problem is solved—the dead point of danger is passed—all serious trouble about Kansas affairs is over and gone. . . . The black republican politicians had all their capital staked on the chances of disorder and confusion in Kansas. The enterprise has failed, and they are ruined. . . . They had their day when their tools and hirelings in Kansas were filling the Territory with alarms and agitating the whole country. . . . Those were the days of ‘bleeding Kansas,’ and then abolitionism waxed mighty.” But the Lecompton referendum “will consign it again to its original nothingness.”
Reading the editorial, Buchanan was befuddled. He wrote Black praising him for his “excellent” article, but expressed concern, “I deeply regret to observe that the notice of Governor Walker has been stricken out, whilst the praises of the Convention remain. What is the reason for this? It will give just cause for offence to Governor Walker’s friends; and I confess I am much worried myself at the omission.”
For months, Buchanan had been trying in vain to create a wave of favorable publicity for Walker but was being stymied. In September, Buchanan asked two Kansans he knew who happened to be visiting Washington to write a letter to be printed in the Union that would provide key points in Walker’s support. Word of the letter, set in type to be published in the paper, leaked from the editors to the Southern Directorate. Cobb passed back an order to spike the letter; it never ran. Walker heard about the suppression of the letter and wrote Buchanan, “My friends here all regard now the Union as an enemy.” Buchanan replied on October 22, praising Walker: “The whole affair is now gliding along smoothly.” He added that it was an “injustice” to blame the Union’s editor for killing the piece, that Cobb had done it out of “proper” motives to help Walker, “under a firm conviction that they would injure both yourself and the Administration.” He ended with a message from Mrs. Walker, who “sends her love.” On October 30, the Washington correspondent for the Associated Press, close to Cobb and Thompson, reported that Walker would soon be removed. Buchanan issued a statement that it was a false story. He confronted the A.P. reporter, who refused to reveal his source. Buchanan raised the curious incident with his cabinet and either Cobb or Thompson, or both, freely confessed, and told the president he had already agreed to Walker’s firing, which he had not. When a friend asked why Buchanan seemed preoccupied, Cobb replied. “Oh, not much; only Old Buck is opposing the administration.”
More than confusion about who was in charge—the president or his cabinet—was in the air. The entire atmosphere suddenly filled with panic. On August 24, the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company announced it was suspending all payments, an event described as reverberating like a “cannon shot.” The firm was more than the financial agent for the state of Ohio; it was among the largest bl
ue-chip Wall Street banks. When its speculative railroad investments turned to losses, it became apparent its chief financial officer had been embezzling funds. The Ohio Life was a creditor to most of the great New York banking houses, which were forced to call in their loans, which sent shock waves through finance and industry. The crash was not simply an American problem. It was a crisis of the global economic system. For a year the Crimean War was driving interest rates high on the London exchange, prompting the shedding of American equities and bonds, while pumping up a market bubble in American grain, which, at the war’s end, collapsed. Investors rushed to liquidate securities. The boom in Western land, railroads, and agriculture went bust. The Dred Scott decision was among the underlying factors contributing to stalling investment in Western railroads. Banks closed, railroads shut, farmers were dispossessed, and workers thrown out of work. The London correspondent for the New York Tribune, Karl Marx, wrote an article explaining that “the American crisis had begun to bear upon England,” created a global “panic,” the “contagion” spread to Europe, and “the present convulsion bears the character of an industrial crisis.” He began taking notes for a larger work.
Buchanan blamed the depression on the evils of paper money and banks, repeating the old formulas of the Jackson period. His grasp of the dynamics of the modern economy and its international dimensions was slight. He was “the Squire” in more than his country residence. Buchanan’s understanding of the economy was a study in backwardness and underdevelopment. His solution was to increase silver and gold coinage (called specie), cut government expenditures, and, in response to his home-state Pennsylvania manufacturers, modestly raise tariffs, which put him at odds with his Southern Directorate for whom low tariffs were a matter of doctrinal faith and felt to be essential to the cotton trade. Cobb issued a report openly rebuking Buchanan’s position. The economy recovered fairly quickly, unlike in the Panic of 1837, whose effects dragged it down for a decade, but the administration never managed to have any coherent policy. Buchanan expressed his helpless passivity in his December 8 message to the Congress, “. . . it is the duty of the Government, by all proper means within its power, to aid in alleviating the sufferings of the people occasioned by the suspension of the banks and to provide against a recurrence of the same calamity. Unfortunately, in either aspect of the case it can do but little.” His homily to bear the worst was a forerunner of his paralysis on secession. The South was less affected by the crisis, though its banks also suspended payments and credit, cotton and tobacco prices dived, and railroads went into receivership. Jefferson Davis blamed New York for its “extravagance,” and Southern spokesmen generally took the depression as evidence of the natural superiority of slave society, “solid substance,” as the Richmond Enquirer put it.
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