All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  “The revulsion in the business in the country,” Buchanan wrote Walker on October 22, “seems to have driven all thoughts of ‘bleeding Kansas’ from the public mind.” But Kansas had not been driven from Buchanan’s mind. He was in a crisis of political capital. While Walker steamed back to Washington, Buchanan crumpled under pressure. Up to that point he believed or convinced himself he had been a stalwart supporter of Walker. His wife and Mrs. Walker were social friends. Buchanan, who had spent a lifetime in the trenches of politics, seemed strangely innocent of the movements of his own cabinet’s actions to manipulate him. Senator Henry S. Foote of Mississippi, a supporter of Walker, recalled, “It was unfortunately of no avail that these efforts to reassure Mr. Buchanan were at that time essayed by myself and others; he had already become thoroughly panic-stricken; the howlings of the bull-dog of secession had fairly frightened him out of his wits, and he ingloriously resolved to yield without further resistance to the decrial and vilification to which he had been so acrimoniously subjected.” Soon “the first significant foreshadowings appeared of the President’s determination to go over—horse, foot, and dragoons—to the secession faction.”

  “The President was informed in November, 1857, that the States of Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina, and perhaps others would hold conventions and secede from the Union if the Lecompton constitution, which established slavery, should not be accepted by Congress,” wrote the Washington correspondent of the New Orleans Picayune, who added, “The President believed this.”

  John Forney, who established the Philadelphia Press newspaper in August, met with his old patron. “He said he had changed his course because certain southern States had threatened that if he did not abandon Walker and Stanton they would be compelled either to secede from the Union or take up arms against him.” “Well,” Buchanan pled to Forney, “cannot you change too? If I can afford to change, why can’t you? If you, Douglas, and Walker will unite in support of my policy, there will not be a whisper of this thing. It will pass by like a summer breeze.” Forney demurred, invoking Andrew Jackson, the byword for presidential decisiveness. “Sir,” a defensive and flustered Buchanan answered, “I intend to make my Kansas policy a test.” “Well, sir,” Forney replied, “I regret it; but if you make it a test with your officers, we will make it a test at the ballot box.” It was the final break; Forney abandoned Buchanan, and his newspaper became a hotbed of criticism.

  Almost every Northern Democratic newspaper defected from Buchanan. Douglas’s paper, the Chicago Times, led the pack, more than a weathervane but a leading indicator of Douglas’s future movements. Under the headline “The Democracy must Submit the Constitution or be Damned,” it editorialized, “The country elected him to the office of President, and has sustained his administration since then under the assurance that the privilege of voting for or against the CONSTITUTION would never be denied the people of Kansas. Upon any other ground Mr. Buchanan would never have been nominated at Cincinnati, or, if nominated, WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ELECTED.”

  Walker met on November 26 with Buchanan at the White House and was rebuffed. Buchanan felt it was Walker’s responsibility to support the changeable president, not the other way around. Walker should change, too. The Southern Directorate had angled Buchanan into their corner. Without his nod or knowledge, his cabinet had made him the standard-bearer of their plot to undermine his emissary. Buchanan had been usurped without a ripple of resistance. If he were to sustain Walker, he would have to confront his cabinet, possibly replace them, their states in rebellion, and the reigning wing of the Democratic Party. Walker had once been the guiding hand behind a president, and now a president was guided against him. Walker had once been the tribune of Southern expansion, but in the cockpit of Kansas had surprisingly come down on the free state side as had the three governors before him. Kansas was not his yellow brick road to the presidency but to oblivion.

  Walker left behind his deputy, Frederick P. Stanton, as the acting governor, who on December 7 convened the newly elected legislature with its free state majority, which launched an investigation into the McGee and Oxford frauds, set the date of January 4, 1858, for a vote on the Lecompton Constitution as a whole, and rejected participation in the referendum of December 21 on the terms of the Lecompton convention as “a farce and a swindle.” On December 11, Stanton was dismissed, the fifth territorial governor to fall to presidential betrayal.

  Walker formally resigned on December 15. “The idea entertained by some,” he wrote, seeming to refer to Buchanan, “that I should see the federal constitution and the Kansas-Nebraska bill overthrown and disregarded, and that, playing the part of a mute in a pantomime of ruin, I should acquiesce by my silence in such a result, especially where such acquiescence involved, as an immediate consequence, a disastrous and sanguinary civil war, seems to me most preposterous.” He did not leave without describing how he had been subverted behind Buchanan’s back. If Buchanan did not understand how events had been turned, Walker did. “Nor was it until my southern opponents interfered in the affairs of Kansas, and, by denunciation, menace, and otherwise, aided at a critical period by several federal office-holders of Kansas, including the surveyor-general, (the president of the convention,) with his immense patronage, embracing many hundred employees, intervened, and, as I believe, without the knowledge or approbation of the President of the United States, produced the extraordinary paper called the Lecompton constitution.”

  “So disappears from the stage, and is lost in the crowd supporting this Administration, Robert J. Walker,” observed The National Era, the capital’s antislavery paper, drawing a shroud over him.

  Not quite.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE UNMAKING OF THE PRESIDENT

  After meeting with the president, Walker raced to Douglas, who was in Chicago, to give him a blow-by-blow account of his disastrous encounter at the White House. Even before the inevitable clash Douglas was irate. “By God, sir, I made Mr. James Buchanan, and by God, sir, I will unmake him!” Douglas exclaimed to Charles H. Ray, editor of the Chicago Tribune, an ally of Lincoln, on November 24. “Douglas has stood by and justified for years far greater outrages in Kansas than any committed by Lecompton Convention,” the Tribune’s Washington correspondent wrote, “Until he commits himself here in the face of the South, I cannot have full confidence in his private professions made at Chicago.”

  Stephen A. Douglas

  Douglas was in an aggressive, expansive, and unguarded mood. He believed his graceful concession at the 1856 Democratic convention, his stump speaking during the campaign, and financial support at considerable personal expense had made possible Buchanan’s rise to the presidency. Douglas thought he deserved credit for delivering a united party at the start of Buchanan’s presidency. Douglas had extended favor to Buchanan to receive favor. But on the ledger Douglas counted only debits. Patronage in Illinois had been wiped away, there was no representative of Illinois in the cabinet, no suitable name Douglas suggested was accepted for any prominent appointment, and insult was added to injury with the gratuitous appointment of Douglas’s new father-in-law to an elevated post in the Treasury that was contrived to expose Douglas to the charge of nepotism. Douglas long ago had taken the measure of Buchanan as a flighty lightweight, inveterate gossip, and vengeful weakling. When, during the 1852 battle for the nomination, Douglas’s agent, George N. Sanders, editor of the Democratic Review, had tagged Buchanan along with the other weary contenders in the field as “old fogies,” Douglas asked that Sanders cease and desist because of the ill-will he was fostering, but not because Douglas disagreed with the characterization. Later, in 1860, after Lincoln’s election, he “launched out into a kind of tirade on Mr. Buchanan’s duplicity and cowardice” to a correspondent for the New York Times. “If there is such a rumor afoot,” he said, “it was put afoot by him, sir; by his own express proceeding, you may be sure. He likes to have people deceived in him—he enjoys treachery, sir, enjoys it as other men do a good cigar
—he likes to sniff it up, sir, to relish it!”

  Douglas’s platform of popular sovereignty now floated on nothing but thin air. Dred Scott had obliterated his proposition, which he tried to elide through obfuscation. He had depended on Walker to vindicate him, but Walker was eviscerated. In the court and in the territory, in theory and practice, popular sovereignty was rendered moot. Douglas’s principle was vacated first by Taney, then by Calhoun, his once presumed agent. The Lecompton convention was the spirit of the law of which Dred Scott was the letter. With or without Douglas, the Northern Democratic Party was in revolt and the party as a whole divided. Douglas could thrust himself into the forefront of the revolt or fall into the ranks behind Buchanan, whom he despised. If he followed the president, he would put his chance at reelection to the Senate, which was the prerequisite of his next presidential campaign, at jeopardy. “To admit Kansas as a Slave State would be destructive of everything in Illinois; we could never recover from it,” James W. Sheahan, editor of the Chicago Times, Douglas’s newspaper. “Remember that the only fight of 1858 will be in Illinois.”

  Norman B. Judd, chairman of the Illinois Republican State Committee, had already picked up political intelligence about Douglas. Judd, a former Democrat close to Trumbull, informed him on November 21, 1857, that Douglas was telling his friends in Chicago that the Lecompton convention had been devised “by certain members of the Cabinet to ruin him,” that Buchanan wasn’t part of their plot, but was helpless before them. If Douglas failed to fight them, Judd wrote Trumbull, he “has not the ghost of a chance of being re-elected to the Senate, and without he can maintain himself in the State his hopes of the Presidency are all gone.”

  Lincoln first raised his concern about Douglas’s difficult position within the Democratic Party in a letter on November 30. “What think you of the probable ‘rumpus’ among the democracy over the Kansas constitution?” Lincoln wrote Trumbull. “I think the Republicans should stand clear of it. In their view both the President and Douglas are wrong; and they should not espouse the cause of either, because they may consider the other a little the farther wrong of the two.”

  Before he set off for Washington Douglas called several Republican leaders to his Chicago home to inform them he was about to do battle with Buchanan. He wanted them to stop criticizing him, and to split or neutralize them. “He really made some of their eyes stick out at his zeal,” Judd wrote Trumbull. In Washington anticipation preceded him like that before a prizefight. On the evening of his arrival supporters gathered at his home to serenade him. The Chicago Tribune correspondent, after being briefed “personally” by Walker, reported, “The message, of course, is ready. Mr. Buchanan is as punctual, neat, and trim about such a matter as an old maid.”

  On December 3, Douglas was ushered into the White House. He introduced his conversation telling Buchanan that he had come as his friend to give him constructive advice, a stilted and rehearsed opening. He urged Buchanan to reject the Lecompton referendum. Buchanan refused his demand. He said he would accept it. “If you do, I will denounce it the moment your message is read,” Douglas declared. “Mr. Douglas,” Buchanan replied, “I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed.” He raised the specter of cautionary examples of men who had dared to cross Jackson and suffered the consequences. “Beware the fate of Tallmadge and Rives,” he warned. Yet his history was misremembered. Senator Nathaniel P. Tallmadge of New York had broken with Jackson’s successor, Van Buren, and switched to the Whigs, who reelected him. William Cabell Rives, Jackson’s minister to France, was elected after Jackson’s term three times to the Senate, the last as a Whig. But Douglas did not bother to engage Buchanan in a dialogue on the nuances of their careers. “Mr. President,” he said, “I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead.”

  Douglas returned to the White House once more. “Mr. Douglas,” said Buchanan, “how are we to allay the contention and trouble created by this strife over the Lecompton Constitution?” “Why, Mr. President,” replied Douglas, “I do not see how you should have any trouble in the premises. The Constitution says, ‘Congress shall make all needful rules and regulations respecting the Territories,’ etc., but I cannot recall any clause which requires the President to make any.” Douglas, of course, was chairman of the Committee on Territories. In short, the president should defer to him. Buchanan advised him that he was on a course that would end with his departure from the Democratic Party and the smashing of his hopes. “Mr. Senator, do you clearly apprehend the goal to which you are now tending?” “Yes, sir,” said Douglas, “I have taken a through ticket, and checked all my baggage.” Leaving the White House, Douglas did not return again while Buchanan lived there.

  He quietly went to see Alexander Stephens, who had been a catalyst of the Southern Directorate that brought about the crisis. “I have seen Douglas twice,” Stephens wrote his brother on December 4. “He is against us: decidedly, but not extravagantly, as I had heard. He puts his opposition on the ground that the Kansas Constitution is not fairly presented. He looks upon it as a trick, etc. His course, I fear, will do us great damage. The Administration say they will be firm. He and they will come into open hostility, I fear.”

  On December 8, in his first annual message to the Congress, Buchanan formally endorsed the Lecompton referendum, which he claimed would restore the “peace and quiet of the whole country.” On whether slaves could be brought into Kansas, he referred to the Dred Scott ruling. “This point has at length been finally decided by the highest judicial tribunal of the country, and this upon the plain principle that when a confederacy of sovereign States acquire a new territory at their joint expense both equality and justice demand that the citizens of one and all of them shall have the right to take into it whatsoever is recognized as property by the common Constitution.”

  The same day, Douglas rose before the Senate, the galleries packed, to proclaim on Buchanan and Lecompton, “I entirely dissented.” He compared the referendum to “Napoleon’s idea of a fair and free election of himself as First Consul. . . . If you vote for Napoleon, all is well; vote against him, and you are to be instantly shot. That was a fair election. This election is to be equally fair.” Upholding the “great principle” of popular sovereignty, Douglas carefully underlined his indifference to slavery. “It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided.” He concluded, “But if this constitution is to be forced down our throats, in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and insult, I will resist it to the last. I have no fear of any party associations being severed.” The galleries burst into “loud applause,” prompting Senator Mason of Virginia sitting in the chair to declare, “The offenders against the peace and decorum of the Senate should be expelled. I move that the galleries be cleared.”

  On the Senate floor, reported the New York Tribune, a Southern senator “congratulated” Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, “on the ascension of Mr. Douglas to the Republican party,” “You have a new leader, who will lead you to the devil, as he has led us.” “You are the only man . . . whom we can elect in 1860,” Forney wrote Douglas.

  The nefarious plot of Douglas to destroy Buchanan—“this coup d’etat”—was laid out in an article on December 15 in the New York Herald headlined: “The Great Conspiracy to Rule or Ruin Mr. Buchanan’s Administration.” According to this account, while Buchanan was making his cabinet, “a very mysterious effort was made by the Southern fire-eaters in behalf of Robert J. Walker as Premier. We now understand that Mr. Senator Douglas had a very long finger in that pie. . . . The experiment failed; but, not suspecting any trick in the matter, and desirous of conciliating all sides of the party, Mr. Buchanan, as a compromise to the fire-eating Walker clique, offered him the Governorship of Kansas. . . . Mr. Douglas has formally opened the war. . . . It is enough that this coup d’etat of Walker and Douglas involves an issue of life or death to the
administration and the democracy. . . . One party or the other must go to the wall—the President or Mr. Douglas.”

  About a week after his speech Douglas secretly summoned two Republican members of the House, Schuyler Colfax of Indiana and Anson Burlingame of Massachusetts. According to a private memorandum, Colfax recorded that Douglas “was convinced that Jeff Davis and others of the Southrons were really for Disunion, and wished an opportunity to break up the Union; that they hoped and worked to unite the South; that their efforts must be resisted; that their course in the end might compel the formation of a great constitutional Union party. . . . He said our true policy was to put the Disunionists in such a position that when the breach was made, as it would be, they would be in the position of insurgents, not we, as they desired should be the case; so that, they being the rebels, the army and the power of the nation would be against them.” Colfax concluded that he “believed that Douglas would be forced out of his party if he persisted in his present course.” Colfax shared his memo with the editors of the Chicago Tribune and Horace Greeley.