Upon the Altar of the Nation (4 page)

T
he tortured decade of the 1850s began with America’s first armed conflicts over slavery and ended with a devastating war between the North and the South. At the outset, bloody engagements over slavery erupted not between soldiers (there were hardly any in the regular army) but among Americans learning to hate Americans. Long before the armies engaged, civilian Americans fought—and killed—one another.

The flashpoint was slavery and the issue of its expansion into the new territories. By the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act passed as part of the Compromise of 1850, federal marshals were required to support slave catchers in apprehending runaways for return to their owners. Enraged abolitionists organized vigilante groups to resist enforcement of the act, by force if necessary. In Boston, Syracuse, and other cities, mobs attacked marshals and marched on courthouses to free captured fugitive slaves.

Others protested with their pens. For years, Boston’s ardent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had stoked antislavery passions with his national paper The
Liberator.
He was echoed by Frederick Douglass, a self-taught former slave and militant abolitionist orator without peer.

In Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the daughter of the fiery evangelical Lyman Beecher and sister to New York’s famous minister Henry Ward Beecher, poured her anger into a bestselling novel,
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
that won immediate acclaim in the North and infamy in the South. More than three hundred thousand copies were sold in 1852, its first year in print. The two-million-plus copies sold over the next decade made it the bestselling novel in American history in proportion to population.

Countless thousands of Americans attended a dramatic stage adaptation of Stowe’s novel. Both readers and audiences agonized over the character of Tom, who is eventually beaten to death by his master, Simon Legree, even as they found inspiration in the escape of Eliza and her five-year-old son through the Underground Railroad. Years later, Abraham Lincoln reputedly greeted Stowe with these words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Ultimately, however, books do not make war. Killing does. As Congress debated the issue of slavery, Americans killed Americans. The violence escalated rapidly between the years 1854 and 1856 in the area that became known as Bleeding Kansas. The trigger was a bill proposed by Stephen A. Douglas, the Democratic senator from Illinois, to organize a large territory to be named Nebraska. To win Southern support for the bill, Douglas agreed to void the Missouri Compromise’s prohibition of slavery in the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase and to divide Nebraska into two territories, Nebraska and Kansas. Kansas would be eligible for settlement by Southern slaveholders, despite the fact that it lay north of the Missouri Compromise, in the “free territory” zone.

Douglas’s proposal immediately set off a fierce contest over slavery in the Kansas territory, confirming in visceral fashion the inadequacies of “popular sovereignty” as a solution to slavery. Douglas’s bill proved to be less a measure for popular sovereignty and order than a pretext for popular anarchy. While Southerners supported the proposal, many Northerners protested vehemently and formed a new political party, reviving the Jeffersonian “Republican” name for themselves.

Predictably, Douglas’s compromise proposal succeeded only in generating violence, as Northern and Southern sympathizers flooded into Kansas to determine its status as free or slave. On May 22, 1856, South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks entered the nearly empty chamber of the Senate and caned Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator of Massachusetts, nearly to death. At the same time, a proslavery mob of seven hundred wantonly destroyed the free-soil town of Lawrence, Kansas, burning down buildings, robbing merchants, and wrecking the town’s two abolitionist newspaper offices. In retaliation, a fanatical New York State abolitionist named John Brown, together with his four sons and two sympathizers, murdered five proslavery settlers in cold blood. Brown’s “Pottawatomie massacre,” as the slaughter became known, provoked further retaliation, initiating a guerrilla war that cost hundreds of lives in 1856, and thousands more before the Civil War ended.

The 1856 election centered around the expansion of slavery. The Republican candidate, John C. Frémont, conqueror of California, vowed to stop the “Slave Power” from expanding. In response, Southern Democrats declared that a Frémont election was grounds for secession. Frémont did not win, but he drew 1.3 million votes to 1.9 million for the Democratic nominee, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. The Democratic Party had won, but by a slender enough margin to put Southern Democrats on notice that their days of dominance were numbered.

Still, the slave power remained weighty and influential in Congress, and with five Southern Democrats on the Supreme Court, it continued to shape the laws of the land to protect their “peculiar institution.” In the 1857 case of
Dred Scott V. Sanford,
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney—a Marylander with Southern sympathies—ruled that blacks had no claim on American citizenship and Congress had no right to prohibit slavery in the territories. Relying on arguments put forward by John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (1782—1850), the redoubtable advocate of states’ rights, Taney ruled that the citizens of a territory could prohibit slavery only at the moment of admission to statehood and not before. This decision rendered the antislavery platform of the Republican Party unconstitutional; in effect, the Court had sanctioned the free spread of slavery.

Led by the powerful New York senator William H. Seward, outraged Republicans immediately denounced the decision as a blatant betrayal. Stephen Douglas, who had urged a doctrine of popular sovereignty whereby each territory would determine for itself whether to permit slavery, was also stung. When President Buchanan followed up
Dred Scott
with a recommendation to admit Kansas into the union as a slave state, Douglas formally broke with Buchanan, setting the stage for both a divided Democratic Party and a Republican victory in the 1860 national election.

In 1858 most Republicans assumed their party’s nominee would be Senator Seward. But this perception would change rapidly as the nation watched a mesmerizing Illinois senatorial campaign that pitted the popular “Little Giant” Stephen Douglas against an eloquent Republican opponent, the “Rail Splitter” Abraham Lincoln. Although Lincoln lost the Senate contest, the debates had served to thrust him into the national limelight, setting the stage for his election in 1860.

Both candidates—and their parties—believed that America stood in the vanguard of world history. The issue was in what way. In essence, the Lincoln-Douglas debates suggested two conflicting moral visions for America. Douglas’s vision privileged democratic local preferences over all else in political decision making. In this context, slavery emerged morally neutral. If the people, territories, and states wanted it, they could have it; if they did not, they could refuse it.

Lincoln’s vision subjected local consensus to moral dictates, whether based on history, the Bible, or enlightened rationality.
¹
Any democracy worth keeping, Lincoln reasoned, required moral consensus grounded in some higher authority. For Lincoln, that authority was the Declaration of Independence and its ringing affirmation that “all men are created equal.” If that declaration was morally right, Lincoln argued, then slavery was morally wrong and therefore could not be allowed to proliferate in the federal territories. Lincoln’s idea of the moral consensus was summed up in the party’s pithy motto: “Free soil, free labor, free men.”
²
By implication, the Constitution became an antislavery document subject to change only by appeal to a higher law than itself. Douglas criticized Lincoln’s categorical rejection of slavery in the territories as reckless and an inevitable call to civil war.

Citizen violence again captured the nation’s attention in 1859, and again John Brown was its source. In October, Brown, together with his sons and fourteen heavily armed followers, black and white, seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), hoping to incite a slave insurrection and create a black state within the South. A contingent of U.S. Marines under the Mexican War hero Robert E. Lee easily captured Brown and killed ten of his raiding party. At his hanging, Brown became the contested symbol of America’s relentless march to violence. Northern abolitionists deemed Brown a freedom fighter whose execution rendered him a “martyr.” In the view of white Southerners, Brown was a fanatical terrorist who embodied the essence of the “Black Republican” Party.

John Brown’s raid aroused a sudden tempest at the United States Military Academy. West Point, the nursery of America’s military leaders, was destined to play a determinative role in shaping men’s minds in the Civil War. Many Southern cadets erupted into violent passion, denouncing the abolitionists and everyone in the North who either shared abolitionist views or supported the Republican Party.

Passions boiled over when it was revealed that a former cadet, George W. Turner (class of 1831), at the time a farmer in Jefferson County, Virginia, was killed in the course of Brown’s raid.
³
On a cold December night in 1859, the most famous fistfight in West Point history broke out. Cadet Emory Upton—a self-defined “abolitionist” from Oberlin College who was “shocked” at the profanity he encountered at West Point—took offense when Wade Hampton Gibbs of South Carolina cheered Brown’s execution. Abolitionists were few and far between at West Point, but Upton and a small group of sympathizers met for weekly prayer meetings coordinated by the librarian, Oliver Otis Howard. When Upton announced his views to Gibbs, the Southern cadet responded with his fists. Fellow cadets understood “the national significance of the affair” at once and filled the hall to spur on their respective pugilists. Both cadets emerged badly bloodied but unbowed.
⁴

On February 27, 1860, Lincoln delivered a lecture at Cooper Union in New York that he later described as his most important speech. The reasons are clear. For Northern Republicans, Lincoln declared his antislavery sentiments and offered compelling historical evidence to establish (I) that the Framers of the Constitution were, in the main, antislavery; (2) that they tolerated slavery only with the understanding that it would be extinguished over time; and (3) that the federal government undoubtedly enjoyed the power to deny slavery in federal territories
before
they became states.

In other words, the Dred Scott decision—not the Republican Party’s antislavery platform—was unconstitutional. Furthermore, the “peculiar institution” itself was wrong. To expand slavery into the territories would be a denial that there was anything morally questionable about it. This, Lincoln hastened to add, did not mean that slavery therefore had to be extirpated by force where it already existed. Nor did it justify the deliberate cultivation of slave insurrections. To the South, Lincoln made clear his detestation of John Brown and his terrorist tactics: “John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.”
⁵

On May 18, 1860, Lincoln prevailed over the leading Republican contender, New York’s William H. Seward, and captured the Republican Party nomination. He decided to “make no speeches,” letting his earlier positions stand on their own. Already, a book-length edition of the Lincoln-Douglas debates had appeared in print, and copies of his Cooper Union speech were widely circulated.

Lincoln faced two Democratic candidates in the November presidential election: the Northern-based Stephen Douglas and the Southern-based John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. With a divided Democratic Party, a Republican victory was all but assured. With a plurality of the popular vote and a majority of the electoral vote, Lincoln would become the next president without needing a single electoral vote from the South. The prospects for Southerners were ominous, as they recalled Lincoln’s biblically based words, uttered in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention:

With Republican intentions clear, Southerners turned with alacrity to their philosopher-statesman John C. Calhoun. According to his argument, the Constitution not only permitted slavery everywhere but—equally important—also justified secession. The South was about to put Calhoun’s theory to its ultimate test.

I
n November 1860, with Lincoln’s “Black Republican” election, South Carolina’s forward momentum into revolt was assured. On December 20, a specially selected state convention unanimously adopted an ordinance of secession. At the same time, the rhetoric of self-righteous antagonism between North and South grew steadily hotter.

A national fast day for peace and reconciliation proclaimed by President Buchanan for January 4, 1861, failed miserably. For most Northern pulpits, the fast afforded an opportunity to preach against the sins of slavery in the South and secession in South Carolina. For most Southern pulpits, the fast marked an occasion to preach on ancient themes against the heresies of “Puritan” abolitionism. When not rejecting the immorality of the other, Northern and Southern preachers affirmed the sacred truths, respectively, of “union” and “states’ rights.”
¹
So much for peace and reconciliation.