For North and South alike, the most shocking, significant, and prophetic outcome of the 1856 election was not that Republican John Frémont was defeated in his bid for the presidency, but that he received as many votes as he did. The new Republican Party, which did not even exist in several Northern states only a year earlier, made a resounding statement in its first bid for the nation's highest office, and in the process, threw a scare into Southerners and Northern Democrats.
The message of the 1856 election was clear: Bolstered by the caning and its aftershocks, the new antislavery party had made an astounding showing across the North, and while it had fallen short of its ultimate goal, voting trends clearly infused Republicans with momentum for 1860. Almost overnight, the tremors from the caning had begun shifting national power in profound ways.
Frémont won eleven Northern states, all but five in the section, and collected more than 1.3 million popular votes and 114 electoral votes. Democrat Buchanan, who won every Southern state, plus Pennsylvania, California, New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana, garnered 1.8 million popular votes and 174 electoral votes. At first glance, the Buchanan margin seems comfortable, but his weakness is more apparent when third-party candidate Millard Fillmore's popular vote total is tallied. While Fillmore won only one state (Maryland), more than 870,000 Americans voted for him and it is likely that the majority of his votes would have gone to Frémont. Indeed, many of those who did vote for Frémont would once have supported Fillmore, since Know-Nothings were considered the main alternative to Democrats; had several thousand more made the switch to Frémont, he might have claimed victory. The most ominous sign for Democrats to consider in any future two-person race was that the combined popular vote total of Frémont and Fillmore exceeded Buchanan's by a significant margin.
There were other signs. Frémont's victory across New England was not a surprise, but his vote total was astonishing. He received more than 300,000 votes in the six-state region, while Buchanan and Fillmore combined got fewer than 200,000. In the sixteen Northern states collectively, Frémont's vote exceeded Buchanan's by more than 100,000, and the fact that Buchanan won only five of them was a stunning development for Democrats to ponder.
Looking even deeper into the election results, one state in particular illustrated the perilous situation for the South and the Democrats—Illinois, home to Democratic icon Stephen Douglas, architect of the divisive Kansas-Nebraska Act. Douglas had boasted in late 1855 that Illinois would furnish a huge Democratic majority, perhaps by as many as 40,000 votes. But the caning had disrupted the landscape dramatically. Buchanan won Illinois, but his margin of victory was razor thin—only about 9,000 votes more than Frémont (of nearly 240,000 cast), and the combined Frémont-Fillmore total trounced Buchanan by nearly 30,000 votes. A switch of a few thousand votes would have swung Illinois to the Republicans, which would have utterly embarrassed Douglas and the Democrats.
Moreover, historian Allan Nevins points out that, within Illinois, the North-South schism is starkly illustrated: the state's five pro-Southern districts voted overwhelmingly for Buchanan and the four pro-Northern districts gave Frémont a huge majority. It also illustrated a larger Southern problem: the northern part of the state was increasing in population much more rapidly than the southern region, causing Douglas and the Democrats deep concern about future voting patterns in Illinois.
In all, while Buchanan's election indicated that the majority of voters chose a safe, “Union-saving” course (the South's threats to secede if the Republicans won did sow fear in some Northern states), Frémont had carried a remarkable 60 percent of the Northern popular vote. Three Northern states had won the election for Buchanan, and all of them—Pennsylvania (Buchanan's home state), Illinois, and Indiana—were increasingly Republican. In Pennsylvania and Indiana, the combined Frémont-Fillmore vote nearly equaled Buchanan's total, and in New Jersey exceeded it. More warning signs for Democrats: Buchanan had won just 45 percent of the total popular vote and became the first man in American history to win the presidency without carrying a preponderance of free states.
The heavy vote for Frémont in the North and West alarmed Southerners for the future it suggested: “The strength developed by Frémont portends the continued agitation [against] slavery,” the New Orleans Bee said on November 8. Had Frémont been trounced, Republicans would have slunk away, discouraged and dispirited, but his formidable showing would convince the anti-slavery element “to renew their exertions, to organize their forces for another contest, and to keep up the struggle with energy and perseverance.” The fight would go to the bitter end. The election results had revealed that the North and South were enemies; they were “countrymen only in name.” It now appeared that white Southerners would have to choose “between submission and dissolution,” warned South Carolina Congressman Lawrence Keitt. Another prominent Southerner disgustedly declared that the Republicans had fomented a “complete revolution” in the North, replacing honest government with “sheer despotism” and warning that the new Republican congressional delegation was “vulgar and fanatical, hating us and hating our institutions.”
The New Orleans Daily Crescent best expressed the Southern conservative reaction to the election by saying the Northern voting results were a “stunning shock” and, as a result, the paper no longer “laughed at those who hinted at the…possibility of disunion.” The Crescent voiced its outrage that Frémont, “the candidate of the…abolitionists and haters of the South generally, has received the electoral votes of a large majority of Northern people!” The Republican candidate had won the North based upon a platform “which would inflict immeasurable degradation upon the Southern people,” one which would “strip them of respect at home and abroad and render them the laughing stock.” Worse, the 1856 results had occurred with a Republican Party that was barely organized. What could the South expect in another four years? The handwriting was clear.
Historian Eric Walther points out that had Frémont carried Pennsylvania or the combination of New Jersey, Illinois, and Indiana (he carried all the other free states except California), he would have won a clear victory without a single ballot from Southern states. The frightening future for the South to contemplate was that, in the realm of presidential politics, the South needed the North and the North could ignore the South. A “solid North” could win the Presidency outright—the South did not have enough electoral votes or population to achieve the same result with one of its candidates. What the South feared most was that any solid North in the future would undoubtedly sweep into power the despised anti-slavery Republicans.
Far from being disappointed at Frémont's defeat, Republicans expressed hopefulness and even a measure of glee about the Presidential results. “Republicans are reveling in the conviction that they have suffered a victorious defeat,” crowed W. H. Furness of Philadelphia succinctly. “They have not got a President, but they have what is better—a North.” In a letter to Sumner, William Jay added: “The news from Michigan and Illinois is glorious.” For his part, Sumner repeatedly referred to the Republican election defeat as “our Bunker Hill,” the Revolutionary battle in which an overmatched colonial army surprisingly inflicted heavy losses on British regulars before finally succumbing. As Bunker Hill helped colonists measure their progress, the presidential election result was an indication of Republican strength “and gives assurance of speedy triumph.” Sumner described the election results as “the beginning of the end” of the slave power's stranglehold on Congress, the presidency, and the nation. “All New England, with New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa, constitute an irresistible phalanx for Freedom,” he wrote.
More moderate Northerners recognized that the election results signaled the end of a middle-ground political position in the North. Before the election, Massachusetts statesman and orator Edward Everett had observed, “There is really no ground left on which a northern conservative man can stand,” and this argument was validated by Frémont's strong showing and Fillmore's feeble one in the free states.
Without question, Northerners and Southerners identified the caning as playing the key role in the Republicans' election outcome. One worried Southern Democratic activist noted to Buchanan: “The Club which broke Mr. Sumner's head has…turned more votes than all other causes that were at work.” Robert Winthrop suggested that Preston Brooks and Stephen Douglas “deserve Statues from the [Republican] Party. The cane of the former and the Kansas bill of the latter…have secured a success to the Agitators which they never could have accomplished without them.”
Historian William Gienapp, who has done extensive research and analysis on the timing of thousands of new Republican supporters, points specifically to Connecticut as an illustration of the caning's impact. In the last election before the caning—the spring of 1856—Republicans did no better than they did in the previous fall's election, polling about 11 percent of the vote. Yet, Frémont easily defeated Buchanan in Connecticut, polling more than 53 percent of the vote. The caning had shifted Northern voters' feelings, immediately and irrevocably, and also highlighted the vast gulf between North and South. Gienapp points out: “Because of the Sumner assault, the common values of the two sections seemed fewer, and increasingly less important.”
Or, as Pennsylvania Republican Alexander K. McClure, who visited Sumner at Cresson, wrote nearly fifty years after the caning, Brooks's attack caused thousands of Democrats with natural “anti-slavery proclivities” to sever their ties with the Democratic Party and unite in support of Frémont. McClure wrote: “The most effective deliverance made by any man to advance the Republican party was made by the bludgeon of Preston S. Brooks.”
Despite what both men could consider at least some good news—for one, Frémont's outstanding showing; for the other, Buchanan's victory—neither Charles Sumner nor Preston Brooks appeared to enjoy any personal happiness after the 1856 presidential election.
Brooks, like many Southern lawmakers, remained subdued and avoided public controversies when he returned to Congress in the fall of 1856. Republicans had become much bolder—they had carried the House and were soon to have twenty senators (of thirty-two total)—and Southern congressmen were much less aggressive. The notion of Kansas becoming a slave state had largely dissipated as a result of the election. Brooks made one major speech when the session resumed after the election, a measured oration in which he addressed the issues in Kansas. In a remarkably conciliatory tone, he announced that he was ready to vote for the admission of Kansas “even with a constitution rejecting slavery.” Northerners were astonished and Southern proslavery radicals were disappointed with the tone of Brooks's remarks.
In fact, by the winter of 1856, Brooks apparently was growing weary of the public attention that centered upon him and was hurt by the hostile attitudes of former friends from the North. Though never doubting the justice of the caning, he confided to fellow South Carolina Congressman James L. Orr that he was “tired of his new role” and “heartsick of being recognized the representative of bullies, the recipient of their ostentatious gifts, and officious testimonials of admiration and regard.” Northerner Julia Ward Howe's contention that Brooks displayed “an evil expression of countenance” when she spotted him at a Washington hotel was not an unusual reaction; without knowing or ever meeting Brooks, the abhorrence of his deed was enough for many to categorize him as a despicable human being. The New York Times had picked up similar reactions from its sources: “We have heard that in conversation Colonel Brooks more than once deplored his conduct as the blot and misfortune of his life.”
Any regrets Brooks felt about the caning's aftermath were moot. For the entire nation, he and his deed had come to define the persona of the entire slaveholding South: aghast Northerners decried the belligerence and the violence that Brooks and the caning represented; proud Southerners reveled in his courageous defense of honor, order, state, and region. The 1856 presidential election results had merely painted a clear picture of an already unmistakably divided land.
For Charles Sumner, while he was heartened by the results nationally and in Massachusetts (Republicans swept the state and Burlingame was reelected in a close race), his ill health and slow recovery dominated his thoughts and actions during the fall and winter of 1856–57. He again suggested that “at last we may have seen the beginning of the end of our great struggle,” noting the election had made it clear that the North had “assumed an attitude which it cannot abandon…our duty is clear, to scatter everywhere the seeds of truth.” But Sumner would not be the one to sow those seeds, at least not publicly.
He did not go to Washington for the fall session, but remained at Longfellow's home, attempting to clear his head and regain his strength. Longfellow noted in his diary on November 2: “Sumner…looks well in the face, but is feeble, and walks with an uncertain step.” And again on November 14, he noted that, while Sumner rode “horseback every forenoon, and [took] a walk in the afternoon,” Longfellow feared his friend had “a long and weary road before him.”
Sumner spent the weeks after the election reading and corresponding with friends and colleagues, often from bed. “I am a convalescent invalid,” he wrote in December, adding unhappily that his doctors believed he was months from a “complete recovery.” Dejected and lonely, he took great solace from the kindness of friends. A verse from abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier made the fragile Sumner's “pulse beat quick and my eyes moisten with tears.” At the same time, he confided to Whittier, he could not bear the thought that he might “survive with impaired powers, or with a perpetual disability.”
A disheartened Sumner, who was scheduled to stand for reelection to the U.S. Senate in the Massachusetts legislature in January 1857, even considered resigning his seat for health reasons, but again, his friends and fellow Republicans opposed this move on political grounds. Although the presidential campaign was over, they believed Sumner's vacant chair served as a powerful symbol that would enable them to continue to recruit new members into the party. John A. Andrew, who would soon become governor of Massachusetts and was never one for nuance, unambiguously summed up the point when he wrote to Sumner in December: “Sit in your seat if you can. If you can't let it be vacant.”
While Sumner desperately desired to speak on the issues of the day, he was discouraged by his physicians from doing so; his doctors ordered him to “take my seat and be quiet.” On one hand, perhaps this was a blessing, Sumner said, because had he spoken his heart, he feared being shot by Southern slave sympathizers. Yet his inability to return to work had drained him of energy and left him dispirited. “My chief sorrow,” he admitted to Whittier, “has been that I have been shut out from the field of action…. I long to speak and liberate my soul.”
As Christmas of 1856 drew near, both Charles Sumner and Preston Brooks, like the rest of America, wrestled with deep discouragement and, during the season of peace and goodwill, found neither.