The black slaves of the South were “elevated” as a “mud-sill” class. Talk of “free soil” and “free men” was mere hypocrisy. “The Senator from New York said yesterday that the whole world had abolished slavery. Aye, the name, but not the thing; all the powers of the earth cannot abolish that. . . . your whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves. The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated. . . . Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. . . . Yours are white, of your own race.”
If, as Seward threatened, the North was “to take the Government from us; that it will pass from our hands into yours,” the North would be ruined by Southern secession. “The South have sustained you in great measure. You are our factors. You fetch and carry for us. . . . Suppose we were to discharge you; suppose we were to take our business out of your hands;—we should consign you to anarchy and poverty.”
Hammond’s rise as governor of South Carolina, U.S. senator, and ideologue of slavery, heir to John C. Calhoun, proved the rule of oligarchy. But his picture of the harmonious South, “our glory,” was a screen drawn over his chaotic life. Surviving letters from his days at South Carolina College appear to document a homosexual relationship with a fellow student. He entered into the upcountry elite through marriage into a wealthy family. His wife inherited ten thousand acres and 150 slaves. His wife’s sister married Wade Hampton II, scion of one of the richest and most powerful families of the planter class. When as governor Hammond dismissed Preston Brooks as a feckless aide he was himself under stress. He had been sexually molesting his four teenaged Hampton nieces for years. He took an eighteen-year-old slave for a mistress and later took her twelve-year-old daughter, apparently the only one of her children not his, as another mistress, with whom he believed he had other offspring. Between 1831 and 1841, seventy-eight slaves died on his plantation. Discovering his affairs, his wife fled, the appalled family treated him as a pariah, and his brother-in-law Wade Hampton II circulated papers about his sex life. Hammond’s hope for a Senate seat in 1844 was destroyed and he was socially shunned. He feared that the “impression” had been created “very extensively that I was a Monster.” But with the death of Senator Andrew Butler in May 1857, he emerged as a compromise candidate to succeed him. The stains of his personal life by then seemed to matter only to the Hamptons.
Following his early idol John C. Calhoun, Hammond had rallied behind nullification. Then the ambitious young man had called Calhoun a “stumbling black” to secession; but Hammond proved insufficiently militant for the fire-eaters, who defeated him in gubernatorial and Senate races. “Cotton is king” was his new banner. It was taken up across the South, emblazoned in the headlines of newspaper editorials as a contemptuous rebuff to Northern agitation. Lecompton became his political linchpin. Within the hotbed of South Carolina, it positioned him as a moderate. In private he wondered, “But if Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave State, can any Slave State remain in it with honor?”
Douglas’s speech on March 22 dramatically concluded the formal Senate debate over the Lecompton controversy. “I have no defense to make of my Democracy,” he declared. “The insinuation that I am acting with the Republicans, or Americans, has no terror, and will not drive me from my duty or propriety.” The next day, Crittenden introduced a substitute bill that called for the Lecompton Constitution to be submitted to a popular vote and if rejected a new constitution to be written. The Crittenden measure was easily defeated; on the motion for admission of Kansas under the Lecompton Constitution thirty-three senators voted in favor and twenty-five opposed.
James Henry Hammond
The action turned to the House. Douglas prowled the aisles and cloakroom badgering members to support the Crittenden bill, which was cosponsored by Congressman William Montgomery of Pennsylvania. It passed on April 1 by 120 to 112. Twenty-two northern Democrats, following Douglas’s lead, defected from the administration. The bill went back to the Senate, which promptly rejected it again. But the Crittenden substitute had served its purpose as a murder weapon—the Lecompton bill was dead.
Alexander Stephens, floor manager in the House, working hand-in-glove with Howell Cobb, took control. He recruited William H. English, an ambitious congressman from Indiana, a protégé of Senator Jesse Bright who had nonetheless been close to Douglas, to propose a bill that would admit Kansas as a slave state with sixteen million acres if the Lecompton Constitution were accepted, but that if it were rejected the territory would be reduced to four million acres and Kansas could not qualify to become a state until the population on land was enough to elect a representative to the House. Senator Henry Wilson called it “a conglomeration of bribes, menaces, and meditated frauds. It goes to the people of Kansas with a bribe in one hand and a penalty in the other.” Seward termed it “an artifice, a trick, a legislative legerdemain.”
Full-scale bribery began in earnest. A slush fund disbursed checks through a House clerk, a government printer, and other agents to anti-Lecompton Democrats in amounts ranging from $500 to $20,000. Federal contracts were dangled, to build engines for navy ships, for example. Appropriations in key districts were held up until commitments from members on the bill were secured. Senator Slidell offered an entire township of land to one congressman. Cobb, Thompson, and Floyd of the War Department plied their influence with a bank of favors. Buchanan sent Cobb to lobby the House. Newspapers in the districts of swing congressmen were paid “to change their tone on the subject of Lecompton,” according to a witness. Individual reporters were handed cash. No expense was spared.
Under the weight of corruption Douglas’s support in the Congress buckled. Democrats who had opposed Lecompton could use the English bill to maintain their partisan bases in their districts and curry favor with the administration while enriching themselves. On April 24, Douglas conferred in Washington with Walker, Stanton, and Forney, all disaffected from Buchanan but in agreement that the English bill was something Douglas should support. He was caught between political imperatives for his senatorial race and his presidential hope. He faced a series of imponderables. If he voted against the English bill would he split his base, alienate loyal Democrats, and lose his Senate seat? But if he voted for it could he claim credit for a new referendum in Kansas and victory for his principle of popular sovereignty? If he voted against it would he estrange the South from his presidential bid? But if he voted for it could he make peace with Buchanan to his advantage? As Walker made the case for his voting for the English bill, Douglas paced the room nervously while sweat dripped from his forehead—“they were almost drops of blood.” Torn and wavering, Douglas at last deferred to the expedient wisdom of the “Wizard of Mississippi.”
Before he issued his statement, Douglas met the next day with his diehard anti-Lecompton group to inform them of his momentous decision. Senator David C. Broderick, of California, an Irish immigrant who had been a stonecutter, had been angered by Hammond’s denigration of working men. He was staking his political career against Lecompton. “I can’t understand you, sir,” he railed at Douglas. “You will be crushed between the Administration and the Republicans. I shall denounce you, sir. You had better go into the street and blow out your brains!” His heated remarks received approval around the room. Sweating blood again, Douglas switched once more. He would stand against the English bill.
Speaking to the Senate, Douglas echoed Henry Wilson, saying the bill offered “intervention with a bounty on the one side and a penalty on the other.” On April 30, the English bill passed by 112 to 103 in the House and 31 to 22 in the Senate. But when the referendum was held in
Kansas on August 2, the vote against accepting the Lecompton Constitution was overwhelming, 11,812 to 1,926. Neither Dred Scott nor the English bill could force slavery there. The fiasco belonged to Buchanan and the split party to Douglas.
“I expected that Douglas would oppose the settlement of the Kansas difficulties under the Lecompton Constitution. I won a bet on that from Governor Cobb,” recalled Alexander Stephens. “Afterwards I urged both Buchanan and Cobb not to wage war upon Douglas, but I could exert no influence upon either.”
Buchanan moved to decapitate Douglas’s organization in Illinois, removing his key men from positions of importance. Isaac “Ike” Cook had once been a Douglas man in Chicago, a financial backer of the Chicago Times, but quarreled with its editor and irritated Douglas, who had him fired as the Chicago postmaster. Buchanan ousted Douglas’s postmaster and inserted Cook back in the job. He also appointed other Douglas enemies as the collector of the Port of Chicago and the U.S. attorney of northern Illinois. Yet another enemy was named a mail agent whose task was to travel around the state firing postmasters in town after town who were Douglas loyalists. Douglas’s papers, the Chicago Times and the Illinois State Register, were deprived of government printing, a lucrative subsidy. Editors were bribed with postmaster appointments. Buchanan met with two Illinois editors at the White House and “told them he would remove every man in Illinois who had opposed him and his policy. . . . A general sweeping out is determined on.” “We are all to be struck down, if possible,” Congressman Thomas Harris, a Douglas loyalist, wrote to Lanphier, editor of the Register. One desperate pro-Douglas officeholder tried to keep his job by claiming he had named his children after James Buchanan and Howell Cobb. Led by Cook, the anti-Douglasites formed a counter-organization within the party dubbed the “National Democrats,” declaring as their motto: “Fealty to Senator Douglas is treason to Democracy.” Douglas called them “Danites,” after a secret band of Mormon assassins. Slidell “openly confessed” to Senator Foote “that he had used money freely in Illinois for the overthrow of Douglas, avowing at the same time his anxiety to see Lincoln elected over him.”
Under Cook, the National Democrats mustered about fifty delegates at the Illinois state Democratic convention on April 21, staged a walkout, and called for a new convention. Pro-Douglas speakers referred to them as “spaniels,” “hounds,” and “janizeries,” but still voted down “in the most cowardly manner” resolutions taking an “emphatic stand against the Administration” in the language that Douglas had transmitted, reported the Illinois State Journal. The National Democrats held their own convention on June 9 to nominate a slate of statewide candidates, though not a Senate candidate, in order to undercut Douglas. Their strategy was to win a few seats in the state legislature so that there would be no majority for Douglas, a stalemate that would allow a third candidate to emerge. It was a version of the scenario that had led to the election of Trumbull over Lincoln in 1855.
Buchanan’s interference in Illinois against Douglas left him as embittered as Douglas’s opposition to Lecompton had left Buchanan. The Washington Union of May 27 tainted Douglas and “the anti-Lecompton democracy of the north” as a “revival” of the Barnburners, the Softs of New York, who defected from the Democratic Party in 1848 to form the Free Soil Party. The administration paper predicted “their movement will degenerate . . . into unadulterated abolitionism . . .” and virtually read Douglas out of the party: “. . . no man can consistently be recognized as a member of the democratic party who refuses to acquiesce.”
Douglas girded himself for the battle to retain his seat upon which his future depended. The road to the presidency lay through Illinois. He mortgaged his Chicago property for $80,000 and took loans for campaign funds. His health was again “impaired,” according to Horace White, the Chicago newspaper reporter. He had to drag himself out of a sickbed to vote against the Lecompton bill. His wife, Adele, suffered a miscarriage. He was drinking, not sleeping, and filled with anxieties. Defeat for the Senate would end his career. He expected a hard campaign. “I shall have my hands full,” he told Forney about Lincoln. “He is the strong man of his party,—full of wit, facts, dates,—and the best stump speaker, with his droll ways and dry jokes, in the West. He is as honest as he is shrewd; and if I beat him my victory will be hardly won.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Lincoln’s law partner, reading the news dispatches, was gleeful. “The Buchanan faction here will kill him for the Senatorial seat,” Herndon wrote his abolitionist idol Theodore Parker on December 19, 1857. He could not help admitting some grudging admiration for Douglas’s break with Buchanan. “Douglas is more of a man than I took him to be: he has got some nerve at least,” he wrote Trumbull on December 16, 1857. But Herndon judged him only to be “a policy educated Devil,” in a letter to Charles Sumner, on January 28, 1858, mainly motivated by the calculus of presidential politics, and so trying to unite the North behind him for the Democratic nomination in 1860. Douglas’s fate was sealed, Herndon wrote Trumbull on February 27: “the Devil will get him: he is lost and gone.”
Abraham Lincoln, 1858
Lincoln, however, was less certain than his law partner about the foreordained doom of his lifelong rival. He was agitated by the Eastern Republican flirtation with Douglas as an unwarranted intervention by powerful members of his party and feared that powerful members of his party outside Illinois might use influence to brush him aside. Lincoln sounded out Trumbull for intelligence. On December 25, 1857, Trumbull wrote him about Douglas, “He himself does not know where he is going or where he will come out.”
Lincoln nervously wondered what had gotten into the Eastern Republicans. He replied on December 28: “What does the New York Tribune mean by its constant eulogizing, and admiring, and magnifying [of] Douglas? Does it, in this, speak the sentiments of the Republicans at Washington? Have they concluded that the Republican cause, generally, can be best promoted by sacrificing us here in Illinois? If so we could like to know it soon; it will save us a great deal of labor to surrender at once. As yet I have heard of no Republican here going over to Douglas; but if the Tribune continues to din his praised into the ears of its five or ten thousand republican readers in Illinois, it is more than can be hoped that all will stand firm. I am not complaining. I only wish a fair understanding. Please write me at Springfield.”
Through early 1858, Lincoln brooded over the Eastern Republicans’ promotion of Douglas. “I think Greeley is not doing me right,” he told Herndon. “His conduct, I believe, savors a little of injustice. I am a true Republican and have been tried already in the hottest part of the anti-slavery fight, and yet I find him taking up Douglas, a veritable dodger—once a tool of the South, now its enemy—and pushing him to the front. He forgets that when he does that he pulls me down at the same time. I fear Greeley’s attitude will damage me with Sumner, Seward, Wilson, Phillips, and other friends in the East.” Herndon recalled that Lincoln’s complaint was “so much of mingled sadness and earnestness.” Once again, he worried he would suffer defeat, but this time at the hands of his own party. Shortly before noon, “gloomy and restless” over Greeley’s enthusiasm for Douglas, Lincoln wandered out of his law office to play chess with Illinois Supreme Court justice Samuel Treat, an old friend and his regular chess partner—and that day “did not return again,” wrote Herndon.
On December 28, the day Lincoln wrote Trumbull about Greeley, he composed some notes for a speech. Since Douglas opposed Lecompton, Lincoln wrote he was “accosted by friends of his with the question, ‘What do you think now?’ Since the delivery of his speech in the Senate, the question has been varied a little. ‘Have you read Douglas’s speech?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, what do you think of it?’ In every instance the question is accompanied with an anxious inquiring stare, which asks, quite as plainly as words could, ‘Can’t you go for Douglas now?’ Like boys who have set a bird-trap, they are watching to see if the birds are picking at the bait and likely to go u
nder.” If the Republicans were to be “haltered and harnessed, to be handed over to him,” they would abandon their reason for existence. “His whole effort is devoted to clearing the ring, and giving slavery and freedom a fair fight. With one who considers slavery just as good as freedom, this is perfectly natural and consistent. But have Republicans any sympathy with such a view? They think slavery is wrong; and that, like every other wrong which some men will commit if left alone, it ought to be prohibited by law. They consider it not only morally wrong, but a ‘deadly poison’ in a government like ours, professedly based on the equality of men. Upon this radical difference of opinion with Judge Douglas, the Republican party was organized. There is all the difference between him and them now that there ever was. He will not say that he has changed; have you?”
Lincoln traced the history of “popular sovereignty,” from Lewis Cass in the 1848 campaign, “as a political maneuver to secure himself the Democratic nomination for the presidency. It served its purpose then, and sunk out of sight. Six years later Judge Douglas fished it up, and glossed it over with what he called, and still persists in calling, ‘sacred rights of self-government.’ Well, I, too, believe in self-government as I understand it; but I do not understand that the privilege one man takes of making a slave of another, or holding him as such, is any part of ‘self-government.’ ”
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