All the Powers of Earth

by Sidney Blumenthal

  After Stearns testified, he and Mason were the last men left in the Senate room. Mason handed him a Sharps rifle. “Doesn’t your conscience trouble you for sending these rifles to Kansas to shoot our innocent people?” he asked. “Self-defense,” replied Stearns. “You began the game. You sent Buford and his company with arms before we sent any from Massachusetts.” “I think,” said Mason, “when you go to that down below, the old fellow will question you rather hard about this matter and you will have to take it.” “Before that time comes I think he will have about two hundred years of slavery to investigate, and before he gets through that will say, ‘We have had enough of this business. Better let the rest go.’ ” According to Stearns, Mason “laughed and left the room.”

  As the House was embroiled in its battle over the Speaker, Stephen A. Douglas strode into the Senate to deliver his first formal address to the 36th Congress, entering as the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, and drawing “a crowd sufficient to have filled the immense galleries several times over,” according to the New York Times. “The Senator from Illinois!” dramatically announced the president of the Senate.

  In his first statement on Harpers Ferry, Douglas offered a proposal to give the Congress authority to “repel invasions” from one state into another. He read a letter from Governor Wise to President Buchanan requesting such aid, which Buchanan rejected. “I would make it a crime to form conspiracies with a view of invading States or Territories to control elections, whether they be under the garb of Emigrant Aid Societies of New England or Blue Lodges of Missouri,” he said. Douglas’s proposal was nothing less than a far-ranging Sedition Act that would turn the federal government into a police force hounding the Republican Party. The galleries applauded, but Douglas’s bill was dead on arrival. It was transparently contrived as another tactic to besmirch Buchanan.

  Harpers Ferry, Douglas went on, was “the logical, natural consequence of the teachings and doctrines of the Republican party,” and that in “exciting northern passion, northern prejudice, northern ambition against southern States, southern institutions, and southern people . . . invite the South to assail and abuse and traduce the North.” He offered as his proof none other than the words of his recent Republican opponent. “I had to meet this issue of the ‘irrepressible conflict,’ ” said Douglas, and he read at length from Lincoln’s “house divided” speech, which was the “same doctrine.” “Then,” said Douglas, “he goes on to say they must all be one thing or all the other, or else the Union cannot endure. What is the meaning of that language, unless it is that the Union cannot permanently exist, half slave and half free—that it must all become one thing or all become the other? That is the declaration. The declaration is that the North must combine as a sectional party, and carry on the agitation so fiercely, up to the very borders of the slaveholding States, that the master dare not sleep at night for fear that the robbers, the John Browns, will come and set his house on fire, and murder the women and children, before morning.” Douglas’s ghoulish tale of Lincoln inspiring the nighttime slaying of families was the only time his name was raised. Lincoln was at the forefront of Douglas’s mind if no one else’s. He was still debating Lincoln.

  Douglas’s proposal was tabled in less than a week. His anti-Buchanan ploy was especially irritating to Southerners. His fanciful suggestion to put federal military power behind both his anti-Lecompton and anti-abolitionist positions was popular sovereignty played with toy soldiers. Yet Douglas still believed that in taking this approach he could secure Southern delegates to the Democratic convention at Charleston, gain the nomination, and hold the South to win the presidency. “The prospects in the South are improving every day. We will have a strong party in the South when the convention meets,” he wrote Lanphier, the editor of the Illinois State Register, on October 1, 1859. A week before Douglas’s Senate speech attacking Lincoln, his forces were overwhelmed by Southern Ultras in state conventions in Alabama, Georgia, and Oregon, which was as Ultra as Mississippi. At the Alabama convention, the Ultras drew a line in the sand, ordering its delegates to uphold “a platform of principles, recognizing distinctly the rights of the South,” particularly “to protect the owner of slaves in the enjoyment of his property in the Territory,” or to walk out, in effect, to secede from the Democratic Party as the first step to secede from the Union.

  The day after Pennington’s election as Speaker, on February 2, Jefferson Davis introduced a number of resolutions into the record with minimal comment affirming the constitutional right to slavery. One of the proposals was more than a doctrinal statement. It was a torpedo launched toward the Democratic convention and intended to explode Douglas. Following the resolution of the Alabama party convention, it declared that neither the Congress nor a territorial legislature could prohibit any citizen from bringing slaves into “the common Territories,” a legislative codification of Dred Scott, the establishment of a national slave code. Buchanan, who had withheld his annual message to the Congress until after the selection of a Speaker, also timed its release to Davis’s resolution, and “cordially congratulated Congress upon the final settlement of slavery in the territories.”

  Douglas had already announced he would oppose such a maneuver. Davis, of course, knew that. Douglas understood the obvious purpose was to dictate a platform plank at the convention that would tear apart the party and sink him. He wanted to stand on the 1856 party platform, as though Dred Scott and what it had unleashed had not happened. The avatar of Manifest Destiny was King Canute trying to stop the rolling of the tides. His supporters were filled with alarm. “The platform movement in the Senate is designed to keep down Douglas,” Congressman John McClernand of Illinois, a Douglas stalwart, who replaced Thomas Harris in the Springfield seat after his death, wrote Lanphier. “The president is urging it on.” Toombs wrote Stephens on Davis’s resolutions: “Davis’ are those approved by the Pres[iden]t and are in the main good; but I think all of them are wrong. It is the very foolishness of folly to raise and make prominent such issues now. . . . Hostility to Douglas is the sole motive of movers of this mischief. I wish Douglas defeated at Charleston, but I do not want him and his friends crippled or driven off. Where are we to get as many or as good men in the North to supply their places?”

  Again, on February 29, the Senate galleries were overflowing to hear a presumptive presidential candidate, this time William H. Seward, at last ready to hold forth in his first speech of 1860. He thought it would “remove all obstacles to his nomination to the Presidency at Chicago,” wrote his friend Henry B. Stanton, the former secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society and New York state senator, and then a correspondent for the New York Tribune. “He read it to me before it was delivered, and requested me to write a description for the New York Tribune of the scene in the chamber during the delivery, which I did. The description was elaborate, the Senator himself suggesting some of the nicer touches, and every line of it was written and on its way to New York before Mr. Seward had uttered a word in the Senate Chamber.”

  Though Seward was the cynosure of censure, blamed as the instigator of John Brown, he had not yet uttered a word of his own. “In coming forward among the political astrologers,” he began, “it shall be an error of judgment, and not of disposition, if my interpretation of the feverish dreams which are disturbing the country shall tend to foment, rather than to allay, the national excitement.”

  But Seward had come to allay the excitement. He came to answer his accusers with a statesmanlike address, offering a lofty view of the historical development of political parties, the growth of free labor and slave economies, and promising that the Republican Party “will in this emergency lay aside all impatience of temper, together with all ambition, and will consider these extraordinary declamations seriously and with a just moderation.”

  He came as an exemplar of civility, disclaiming any antagonism, to plead that the Republicans were not for “negro equality,” not a sectional party, “never more patient, and n
ever loved the representation of other sections more, than now,” and to declare the party “vindicated against the charge of hostility to the South.”

  He came to excoriate John Brown. “While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest though fatally erroneous convictions, yet all good citizens will nevertheless agree, that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and human life.”

  So, in the interest of conciliation, the first antislavery senator called Brown’s antislavery beliefs “erroneous convictions,” and the defense attorney for fugitive slaves who with his abolitionist wife still operated at their home a lawbreaking station of the Underground Railroad and had freely given refuge to Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, a conductor of the Underground Railroad, and in fact one of John Brown’s co-conspirators, called the rising of the “servile” treason.

  Seward ended with a pastoral vision of the country in the near future, undoubtedly under his presidency, beyond “all the winds of controversy,” “through hazes, mists, and doubtful and lurid lights.” “But the appointed end of all this agitation comes at last, and always seasonably; the tumults of the people subside; the country becomes calm once more; and then we find that only our senses have been disturbed, and that they have betrayed us. The earth is firm as always before, and the wonderful structure, for whose safety we have feared so anxiously, now more firmly fixed than ever, still stands unmoved, enduring and immovable.”

  Seward’s peroration was intended to set the capstone on his persona as a great pacifier. He seemed to suggest that the “agitation,” the word used by Southerners and their Northern sympathizers to cast anathema on antislavery politics, would end in a miraculous turn of the earth’s cycles “seasonably,” and all would somehow be well again.

  “His speech,” reported the New York Times, “is a philosophical exposition of the real nature of that controversy, and aims mainly at dissipating the false impressions which misunderstanding on the one hand, and misrepresentation on the other, have created in regard to it.” The newspaper printed the whole speech in a special edition under the headline “The Irrepressible Conflict,” his most famous or infamous phrase from his most famous speech, whose reminder vitiated his attempt to sidestep it.

  “So calm in temper,” editorialized the New York Tribune, “so philosophic in statement, so comprehensive in grasp, so passionless even in its inculpations, so far-reaching in its views, it must everywhere be recognized as a speech which no other man could have made.” The “irrepressible conflict” melted into thin air.

  Immediately upon Seward finishing his speech Douglas leaped up to recall an earlier Seward, reading an excerpt from a speech Seward delivered in 1848 declaring the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution “a violation of Divine Law.” Douglas tossed aside Seward’s current gestures at mollification. “Whatever agitation [against nonintervention on slavery in the territories] has grown out of the question since, has been occasioned by the resistance of the party of which that Senator is the head.” Douglas took the opening to repeat his line from his debates with Lincoln, “This government was made by white men, on the white basis, for the benefit of white men.” Seward’s opportunism was an occasion for Douglas’s opportunism.

  Then Jefferson Davis rose. “I found rather those generalities not sufficiently glittering to delude,” he remarked with acid contempt. His line was an allusion to the condemnation of Republicans for embracing the Declaration of Independence and its claim that “all men are created equal” by Rufus Choate, the Massachusetts Old Whig, in his endorsement of Buchanan’s candidacy in 1856. Davis derided Seward’s “high-sounding professions of attachment to the Union, and fraternity to its various members,” and asked “are we to believe these mere professions of the lips[?]” He answered his question with more questions. “Who has been more industrious, patient, and skillful, as a sapper and miner against the foundations of the Constitution, than the Senator himself? Who has been in advance of him in the fiery charge on the rights of the States, and in assuming to the Federal Government the power to crush and to coerce them?” Davis took to instruct Seward. It was not enough that Seward proposed to leave slavery alone, it was despicable that he compared it invidiously to free labor. “There is nothing . . . which has led men to greater confusion of ideas than this term of ‘free States’ and ‘slave States.’ ” Seward, according to Davis, “was less informed than I had previously believed him to be. Negro slavery exists in the South, and by the existence of negro slavery, the white man is raised to the dignity of a freeman and an equal. Nowhere else will you find every white man superior to menial service. Nowhere else will you find every white man recognized so far as an equal as never to be excluded from any man’s house or any man’s table. Your own menial who blacks your boots, drives your carriage, who wears your livery, and is your own in every sense of the word, is not your equal; and such is society wherever negro slavery is not the substratum on which the white race is elevated to its true dignity.” But, Davis said, Seward failed to comprehend these basic facts of inequality. “I must suppose him to be as ignorant as his speech would indicate.”

  Seward was confident his speech had achieved its desired effect. “As he handed me some copies,” Henry B. Stanton recalled, “he said, in his liveliest manner, ‘Here we go down to posterity together.’ He was in buoyant spirits, seeming not to doubt that his nomination was assured.”

  Seward’s tone had been pitched to deflect the image of a radical. “I have had a very strong belief in Mr. Seward’s nomination till Mr. Brown visited Virginia,” James S. Pike, the New York Tribune correspondent, wrote privately. But Seward’s effort to escape the shadow lengthened it. He called attention to what he was so obviously avoiding. The consummate politician’s aloof pose above politics was unpersuasive. His condescension toward and condemnation of John Brown were compelled by the accusations against himself. His calls for civility blaming both sides in a false equivalence only stirred his enemies to assail him further. Absent in Europe for nearly a year he had lost an intangible touch for the state of play. He had measured the fabric of his speech too short and too long to fit the Republican Party. He did not cut it just right. “So passionless,” reported the Tribune, intending to be praiseworthy of his statesmanship. He tried to make people forget about “the irrepressible conflict,” but “the irrepressible conflict” had not forgotten about him. His February 29 speech, his last important speech as a senator as it would happen, was a miscalculation not only of the political environment of the Republican Party on the eve of its convention but also the beginning of his misjudgment of the impending crisis that would extend until the firing upon Fort Sumter. His faith in experience and expedience would no more gain the nomination than pacify secession. He expected events to run his way on assumptions that were being overthrown. Seward also seemed oblivious or indifferent that two days earlier in New York City a man in an ill-fitting suit had threaded the needle.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  RIGHT MAKES MIGHT

  The journalist Henry Villard went west to cover miners seeking to strike for their fortunes and on his eastward return over the plains of Kansas, on December 1, 1859, about thirty miles from the town of St. Joseph, “an extraordinary incident occurred,” he recalled. “A buggy with two occupants was coming toward us over the open prairie. As it approached, I thought I recognized one of them, and, sure enough, it turned out to be no less a person than Abraham Lincoln: I stopped the wagon, called him by name, and jumped off to shake hands. He did not recognize me with my full beard and pioneer’s costume.”

  Lincoln, by Mathew Brady, February 27, 1860, the day of the Cooper Union speech

  They had last seen each other more than a year ago at a campaign rally near Springfield. “When I said, ‘Don’t you know me?’ and
gave my name, he looked at me, most amazed, and then burst out laughing. ‘Why, good gracious! you look like a real Pike’s Peaker.’ His surprise at this unexpected meeting was as great as mine. He was on a lecturing tour through Kansas. It was a cold morning, and the wind blew cuttingly from the northwest. He was shivering in the open buggy, without even a roof over it, in a short overcoat, and without any covering for his legs. I offered him one of my buffalo robes, which he gratefully accepted. He undertook, of course, to return it to me, but I never saw it again. After ten minutes’ chat, we separated. The next time I saw him he was the Republican candidate for the Presidency.”

  Lincoln’s invitation to come to Kansas came from Mark Delahay, who wished Lincoln might help make him a U.S. senator, an ambition never realized. Lincoln hoped his presence might help him win support for his stealth presidential campaign from the Kansas delegation to the Republican convention. Delahay was married to the fifth cousin of Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks, and when Lincoln rode the legal circuit of Illinois he was part of his entourage in the town of Petersburg. Raised by a Quaker mother to oppose slavery, Delahay had been a nominal Democrat, and migrated to Kansas from Alabama in early 1855. There he purchased the newspaper in Leavenworth and served as one of three secretaries of the Topeka Constitutional Convention. Elected a free state delegate to the Congress, he was never allowed to take his seat in Washington. While Delahay was at a Free State Party meeting in Lawrence, a mob attacked the Leavenworth Register office and destroyed his printing press. He provided a regular stream of information to Lincoln on the troubles in Kansas. Some in Lincoln’s circle were wary of him, “distressingly impecunious and awfully bibulous,” according to Henry C. Whitney. But Lincoln found him useful.

  Just hours after he encountered Villard, Lincoln arrived at the town of Elwood, where he entered the dining room of the Great Western Hotel, removed his buffalo robe, and spoke for the first time about John Brown, whose execution was to be the next day. He was careful to judge separately Brown’s motive and his means. “It was a violation of law and it was, as all such attacks must be, futile as far as any effect it might have on the extinction of a great evil,” he said. “We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to slavery—it is through the ballot box—the peaceful method provided by the Constitution. John Brown has shown great courage, rare unselfishness, as even Governor Wise testifies. But no man, North or South, can approve of violence or crime.”