Penguin History of the United States of America (57 page)

Nobody had ever supposed that slavery could or would enter the Nebraska Territory, which under the 1854 Act stretched to the Canadian border. Kansas was a different matter. The anti-slavery North was quite sure that
the point of the Slave Power’s machinations was to seize that territory: ‘Come on, then, gentlemen of the slave states,’ said Senator Seward, ‘since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas This was not a challenge that the hotheads of the South were likely to ignore. Thus in a way the North created what it feared. The outcome was not what either side desired.

Thanks to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the South was legally free to defy the likelihood that Kansas would remain free soil. If the slavery party could seize power in the territory, it might eventually be established as a new slave state, and as such send two more Senators and at least one Representative to Congress. The slave-holding counties of the state of Missouri, which bordered on Kansas, welcomed the chance, and in 1854 and 1855 sent settlers into the territory to exploit it. But they were overwhelmed by the spontaneous movement of free farmers from the Old North-West, from Kentucky and Tennessee: by i860 the population of the territory was 107,000, much the greater part being free soil. Kansas had little attraction to slave-holders: they preferred Texas; and the climate and soil favoured such crops as maize and wheat (in the west, cattle) rather than anything slave-grown. Geography thus made Seward’s challenge good: the anti-slavery movement contributed little in either funds or population, in spite of the foundation of something called the New England Emigrant Aid Society, and the fulminations of the Missourians, who thought they were being overwhelmed by a tide of Garrisonian abolitionists. Being part, still, of the turbulent West, they were disinclined to take defeat peaceably. So there followed years of intricate and violent conflict, in which the anti-slavery forces usually carried the day, but in which the pro-slavery party was supported by the government in Washington: for although Pierce had retired after one term, he had been succeeded by another Democrat, a tired oldjacksonian warhorse, James Buchanan (1791–1868), sometime Senator and Secretary of State, who only got his party’s nomination because he came from Pennsylvania and it was essential to carry that state against the strong Republican challenge. He was completely dominated by the Southern Democrats in his Cabinet and in Congress.

The endless-seeming struggle (not until March 1861 was Kansas admitted to the Union as a free state) further embittered the broader conflict. In 1856 Charles Sumner made an abusive speech in the Senate on ‘the Crime against Kansas’ which enraged Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina. He attacked Sumner with a stick on the Senate floor, so brutally as to endanger the Senator’s life. News of the outrage against ‘Bleeding Sumner’ was followed by further bad news from ‘Bleeding Kansas’. A pro-slavery crowd had invaded the town of Lawrence and destroyed much property. The crime was avenged by a fanatical abolitionist, John Brown (1800–1859), who murdered five pro-slavery men in May; two months later he had to fight for his life against a crowd seeking another instalment of revenge.

Civil war, it seemed, had broken out on the Western marches: the new President was scarcely strong enough to wring his hands. Lacking effective leadership, moderate men were at a loss; extremists on both sides gained ground accordingly, since it seemed they had best discerned the realities of the situation all along. The balance of power in the Democratic party tipped more and more to the South, as Northern Democrats deserted to the Republicans, a frankly Northern party: party loyalties were no longer an effective check on sectionalism. As events see-sawed, what depressed one side elevated the other; neither was ever left in tranquillity for long. The abolitionist contention, that so long as the sin of slavery continued, America could not hope for peace or liberty, began to seem fearfully plausible to some; so, to others, did the belief of the Southern ‘fire-eaters’ that so long as the South continued in the Union, slavery could not be safe. Both sides, without ever abating an instant their own self-righteousness, began to believe the threats and fear the anger of the other: double paranoia was hastening the patient’s death. It was creditable to the judgement of Douglas and his dwindling following that they could see the unreality of all these alarums: but Douglas by his own recklessness had lost all power to control events.

The year 1857 brought another example of egregious meddling by otherwise sensible men. The Supreme Court, under the influence of the Chief Justice, Roger Taney of Maryland (1777–1864), declared that Congress had never possessed the constitutional right to pass or to enforce the Missouri Compromise. This provocation was especially pointless, because the Compromise was dead anyway, and the case in which the declaration was made (that of Dred Scott, a slave from Missouri who was claiming freedom through the courts – perhaps the only example of a slave taking a decisive part in the events that were leading to revolution) did not need this pronouncement to be settled. Taney seems to have supposed that the word of the Court would so impress the contending parties that they would, as it were, lay down their arms. He was deluded. He did not allow for the fact that he and four other justices of the seven-man Court were Southerners, which made it impossible for the North to believe in their disinterestedness; and his attempt to show that African-Americans could never be citizens, and that the Founding Fathers, whether in the Declaration of Independence (anti-slavery’s favourite document) or the Constitution, meant to found a white man’s republic, was offensive and untrue in itself, and couched in offensive language. The decision pleased the South, but the North simply regarded it as evidence that the slave conspiracy had subverted the Supreme Court. Tempers grew worse.

The year 1857 was also the year of a severe economic crisis. As so often before and since, the world market collapsed under the burden of its faulty organization. The North suffered badly. The South was unaffected, and made some provocative inferences. The 1850s were the great boom years of the ante-bellum period. Never had cotton-growing been so profitable. Large white mansions were built and paid for throughout the cotton kingdom;
all the luxuries of the world seemed at the command of the great planters. Now the North was prostrated by a storm which passed them by. It made them more certain than ever that the industrial world could not do without the South’s cheap and excellent product, on which, they thought, the prosperity both of England and the North depended. ‘Cotton is King,’ declared James Hammond, and would guarantee the wealth and independence of the South if it seceded: no one would dare make war on cotton.

Southern belief in cotton’s supremacy was mistaken: planters could miscalculate like everybody else, and there was to be a cotton glut in 1861 which would help to defeat many calculations. But until then the South flourished and grew overbold, and in its persecution mania began to overreach itself. Douglas was the appointed victim.

What with the economic crisis and acute hostility to the South, with which he was identified, it seemed likely that he would fail to be re-elected Senator from Illinois in 1858. His opponent, Abraham Lincoln, staked everything on his free-soil platform, and the two men debated the issue up and down the state, in a legendary series of confrontations which gave Lincoln a national reputation. Douglas won the election for all that, a formidable achievement considering the odds, for which he seldom gets any credit. Certainly it did him no good with the Southern members of his party. Douglas vigorously opposed the attempt to foist a pro-slavery constitution on Kansas, and reiterated, in the debates, his conviction that slavery could not defy geography, so it was ridiculous to talk about spreading it. Southern extremists, who were now beginning to demand a Congressional law protecting their right (derived from the
Dred Scott
judgement) to carry slaves into every corner of the national territories – even into Oregon and Nebraska – resolved that, come what may, Douglas must not receive the Democratic nomination in i860. Meantime the Republicans performed excellently in the state and Congressional elections of 1858; the Know-Nothings lost ground everywhere. Clearly, it would not take much for the ‘Black Republicans’, as the South called them, to win the Presidency; and if that happened, certain desperate souls swore – men such as Yancey of Alabama; Jefferson Davis of Mississippi – the South must secede from a Union dominated by anti-slavery.

Their argument was substantially fallacious. Abolitionist Republicans might threaten, but to abolish slavery peacefully would have required an amendment to the Constitution allowing the federal government to interfere in a matter which was otherwise reserved to the decision of the individual states. Such an amendment, requiring two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress and a majority of three-quarters of the states’ legislatures, could not possibly be passed over the resistance of the fifteen slave states, even if it was unanimously supported everywhere else, which was extremely unlikely. The Republicans repeatedly denied that they wanted to assail slavery directly, knowing the difficulty and unpopularity of the enterprise. They believed that if slavery were kept out of the territories it would begin to die;
apart from free soil, they wanted a Homestead Act, a transcontinental railroad and a protective tariff. The South was still opposed to all these schemes, not seeing any benefit to itself in them, and its entrenched position in Congress and the Democratic party made it unlikely that its opposition could be overcome. Even a man like Seward, who tended to run into exaggeration, was under no illusion that merely capturing the Presidency would give the Republicans all they wanted. It had never done much for the Whigs.

The slave-holders might have been reassured by these considerations, but perhaps their instinctive fears were wise. After all, their section had clearly lost ground to the North. There was now no hope of putting another Southerner in the White House: the choice would lie between a Republican and the renegade Douglas. Before long anti-slavery appointments to the Supreme Court would be made; the anti-slavery faction in Congress would steadily increase. Worse still, the non-slaveholding Southern whites – four-fifths of the total – might begin to listen to their Northern brethren, turn Republican, and challenge not only slavery, but the planter oligarchy which dominated their lives. In the states of the Deep South, the cotton South, where two-party politics did not exist and the slave-holders ran the Democracy, there were some disturbing signs of resentment and political activism. Perhaps there was something to be said for getting out of the Union peaceably, if it could be done, and setting up a new confederation explicitly committed to slavery for ever. But perhaps, in American conditions, the Constitution of the United States still offered the best guarantee of the slave-holders’ interests, as their forefathers had done their best to make sure that it would. To renounce it was a gamble, but to cling to it might be to accept that in the not very distant future emancipation would be universal; or it might be to do no more than win a little time. The whole Atlantic world was turning against slavery. Proud and provincial, the slave-holders, or most of them, could not admit these possibilities except as a dreadful danger. Any steps to avoid them were justified, and by 1859 the only step which suggested itself was secession from the Union. But the planters still hesitated, and might have done so for years more, but for John Brown.

Since the Kansas affair, which had undeservedly won him a great reputation in abolitionist circles, the visionary had hit on a deadly plan. The slaves, he thought, might be induced to rebel against their masters if Northern sympathizers were at hand with weapons and suggestions. Brown therefore proposed to descend on some suitable spot in the South, launch a revolt and, as the slaves flocked to join him, organize them into an army. This army would retreat into the vastness of the southern Appalachians and become a permanent thorn in the side of the Slave Power. Eventually all the slaves would join, and the peculiar institution would be destroyed… It was a preposterous fantasy, well illustrating Brown’s eccentricity, the abolitionists’ ignorance of the South and their growing tolerance of bloodshed and treason if these might help the cause. Brown easily raised
money and supplies from sympathizers in New England. On 16 October 1859 he and eighteen followers descended on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry on the upper Potomac, seized it, and issued a proclamation to the slaves.

Virginia snuffed out the threat without difficulty: Colonel Robert Edward Lee (1807–70) of the US army was at hand. Brown’s handful was soon forced to surrender, and Brown himself was taken down to Charlestown, Virginia, tried and hanged. His last address from the dock made a great impression on Northern opinion, its only weakness being its untruthfulness:

I never had any design against the liberty of any person; nor any disposition to commit treason or incite slaves to rebel or make any general insurrection.

His last written message was more authentic:

I John Brown am now quite
certain
that the crimes of this
guilty land: will
never be purged
away:
but with Blood. I had
as I now think: vainly
flattered myself that without
very much
bloodshed; it might be done.

Brown’s eloquence captivated New England. According to Wendell Phillips, Brown was ‘the impersonation of God’s order and God’s law’. Abolitionist clergy welcomed the slave rebellion which, they thought, Brown’s action would stimulate. Thoreau rejoiced that he was the saintly martyr’s contemporary. The ravings of these lettered gentlemen drowned the numerous Northern voices which condemned Brown as a criminal. Lincoln thought he was justly hanged. The Republican party denounced his raid in its i860 platform. A great anti-Brown meeting was held in Boston; to no avail. The impression made on the South was too deep. Here it was at last, the nightmare come true: the abolitionist appeal to the slaves to rebel, now naked and apparent, in spite of the endless disclaimers of Northern politicians, the doubts of Southern moderates. The fire-eaters instantly took command. Their programme was simple. Only a candidate pledged to the defence of slavery would be acceptable as the Democrats’ nominee in i860. That ruled out Douglas. If the Republican candidate won, the Southern states would leave the Union: they could not possibly be safe with a Brown sympathizer as President, and of course all black Republicans were Brownites at heart. Their tongues betrayed them. Had not Lincoln begun to proclaim that a house divided against itself could not stand? Had not Seward said there was an ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the sections? Now, in the light of Harper’s Ferry, it was plain what they meant. They meant to win the conflict and unite the house by means of a slave uprising.