SIX

THE RISING STORM

(1849–1861)

I. CALIFORNIA AND THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

Grim, determined James Knox Polk had achieved his major territorial goals. He succeeded in expanding U.S. power to the Pacific. Polk single-mindedly pursued the goal of adding San Diego harbor and San Francisco Bay to the American Union. It was this presidential decisiveness—far more than the enthusiasm of newspapermen for Manifest Destiny—that accounted for the stunning expansion of U.S. power and influence in the late 1840s.¹ But Polk found he could not do all this without creating military heroes for his great political rivals—the Whigs. The Whig Party had led the opposition to the Mexican War. Now, ironically, the Whigs nominated General Zachary Taylor, a Louisiana slaveholder who had earned the nickname “Old Rough and Ready” in the war, as their presidential candidate in 1848.

Unfortunately for Jackson’s political heirs, the issue of slavery was splitting the Democratic Party. A new faction, the Free-Soil Party, was comprised of many ex-Democrats who were willing to tolerate slavery in the South but were unwilling to see it expand into the territories won from Mexico. The Free-Soilers nominated Martin Van Buren for president. Northern Democrats, who were willing to let slavery expand across the hot and sparsely populated Southwest to keep peace with their Southern slaveholding allies, nominated Lewis Cass. With the Democratic Party split, Taylor and the Whigs won the White House.

Zachary Taylor had not so much as cast a ballot for president in over forty years of army service.² As president, though, he would not be able to avoid the issues much longer. Events in California would astonish the world—and put pressure on Washington to keep pace. The peace had not even been signed with Mexico before gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill on the south fork of the American River, near Coloma, California. Word spread throughout the United States, speeded by means of the newly developed telegraph. The California Gold Rush began almost immediately. Tens of thousands of Americans from all regions, and others from around the world, struck out for the gold fields of the Sacramento Valley.

They came overland and by sea. As far away as China, California became known as Gum Shan—the Mountain of Gold.³ Many of them entered by way of the Golden Gate. With a typical pitchman’s flourish, U.S. Army Major John Charles Frémont, the Pathfinder, had named this entrance to San Francisco Bay.⁴ These “Forty-Niners” (1849) swelled the territory’s population. As much as $30,000 to $50,000 in gold was being taken out of the mines each day! West Pointer William Tecumseh Sherman, serving with the army in California, thought the gold would be more than sufficient to pay for the entire Mexican War.⁵

Soon California would be pressing for statehood. And, to Taylor’s chagrin, a decision about slavery in the territories could not be avoided. It was a decision that would split the nation.

California’s fate would be decided in Washington, where the slavery issue dominated. Southerners feared that if California entered the Union as a free state, anti-slavery forces would control the Senate and, eventually, outlaw slavery. “If the South is to be saved,” wrote an ailing John C. Calhoun, “now is the time.”⁶ The South must be assured that it would continue to have equal representation in the national government or it would have to consider secession. New York Senator William H. Seward matched Calhoun’s militancy. Seward, a Whig, said that Congress surely had the right under the Constitution to limit the expansion of slavery. Even so, he argued provocatively, there was a “higher law” than the Constitution—natural law.⁷ Not only could slavery’s expansion be limited, Seward said, but in time it could be abolished.⁸

Henry Clay of Kentucky arose on the Senate floor, thundering that “I know no South, no North, no East, no West, to which I owe any allegiance. . . . My allegiance is to the American Union and to my state.”

Clay offered a bundle of legislative proposals that covered many aspects of the dispute over slavery in the territories. Whether it was great or not, it was aptly called a compromise. First, California was to be admitted as a free state. Second, New Mexico would be organized as a territory with no restrictions on slavery. Third, the slave trade in the District of Columbia would be abolished. But fourth, Congress would pledge no further interference with the owning of slaves in the nation’s capital. Fifth, Congress would refrain from using its great power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution to regulate the slave trade among the states. Sixth and finally, Congress would pass a new, more stringent Fugitive Slave Act.⁹ Southerners claimed that as many as thirty thousand slaves had run away from their masters. This fugitive slave problem, they claimed, had cost Southerners as much as $15 million.¹⁰

We must be guided by the wisdom of George Washington in his Farewell Address, Clay argued.¹¹ When someone suggested that this latest effort would prevent his ever becoming president, Clay memorably responded: “Sir, I had rather be right than be President!”¹²

All eyes now looked to Daniel Webster to respond to Calhoun and Clay. Would he help Clay to pass this controversial compromise? Or would he speak for the North and reject it? The “Godlike Daniel” rose by his desk, his voice filling the crowded chamber: “I wish to speak today not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States. . . . I speak today for the preservation of the Union. ‘Hear me for my cause!’”^13*

Speaking for more than three hours on 7 March 1850, Webster endorsed Clay’s compromise, giving it essential backing at a critical moment. Webster still had confidence that the preservation of the Union would in the end bring an expansion of liberty. He still hoped to see slavery wither away in the West.

John C. Calhoun sat in his seat, glowering, almost unable to speak. When Webster warned the Senate that dissolution of the Union could never be achieved peaceably, Calhoun cried out: “No sir! The Union can be broken.”¹⁴ Calhoun and his followers insisted that California’s admission be delayed until she was organized as a territory—as almost all other states had been admitted. Calhoun hoped to use that time to settle California’s rich central valley with slave agriculture. A slaveholding California would have given Calhoun’s “peculiar institution” a window on the Pacific.

President Zachary Taylor presented an obstacle to the passage of Clay’s Compromise of 1850. Old Rough and Ready saw no reason to make all these concessions to the South on California. But that summer, Taylor was struck with “cholera morbus” after enduring hours of Fourth of July oratory. Consuming large quantities of ice milk and cucumbers, in the stifling heat of a Washington summer, he quickly took to his sickbed in the White House.¹⁵ There, the doctors invaded the sick room, and he was dead within the week.

The new president, Millard Fillmore of New York, was an anti-Seward Whig. He was more malleable than Taylor and quickly signaled his willingness to sign the Compromise of 1850. When Henry Clay was unable to get the legislation passed, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois took up the task. He broke the bill into smaller pieces and drove them through the Senate.

No one was especially happy with the result. Slaveholding Southerners feared the admission of California as a free state portended the end of slavery. Many Northerners despised the new Fugitive Slave Act, which brought the long arm of slavery into Northern communities that had previously thought themselves “free.” A unique system of escape for runaway slaves had been organized by former slaves with the help of sympathetic whites. The Underground Railroad was funded and supported largely by Quakers. It was neither underground nor really a railroad, but it nonetheless carried hundreds of fugitive slaves to freedom in the North or even in Canada. Former slave Harriet Tubman served as “conductor” on this railroad, and she reentered the South scores of times to help her brothers and sisters escape. Braving the hangman’s noose if captured, Miss Tubman humorously said she never ran her railroad off the tracks. Now, the Fugitive Slave Act required the citizens of free states to cooperate in handing escaped slaves over to their masters.

Despite the unpopularity of the Compromise of 1850, many Americans breathed a sigh of relief when it became law. They hoped it might finally resolve the slavery issue once and for all.

John Calhoun died in early 1850 before final passage of the compromise. Henry Clay and Daniel Webster would also soon pass away. A rising generation, represented by men like Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, William H. Seward of New York, and Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, now moved to center stage in the Senate. Douglas earned the nickname “the Little Giant” when he took up and passed Clay’s compromise as individual bills. Douglas, too, hoped to end the growing controversy over slavery.

Calhoun’s loss was deeply mourned by the people of the South. Even his frequent foe, Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton, said of him, “He is not dead, sir—he is not dead. There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.”¹⁶

Those doctrines! Calhoun was important because he dared to contradict Jefferson directly. Men were not born equal, he said, but unequal. He dared to say that slavery was not a necessary evil but a positive good. He recognized that the “peculiar institution” could never be defended if men thought it was fundamentally wrong. For all the intellectual force of his ideas on the rights of political minorities within a genuinely federal government, it is also true that no man’s doctrines did more to put his country on the road to civil war than did those of John C. Calhoun.

At the end of the war, poet Walt Whitman reported a dispute between two battle-weary, wounded Union veterans. One said he had seen Calhoun’s monument while marching through South Carolina. The other soldier disagreed, “I have seen Calhoun’s monument. That you saw is not the real monument. It is the desolated, ruined South; nearly the whole generation of young men between seventeen and thirty used up: the rich impoverished; the plantations covered with weeds; the slaves unloosed and become the masters; and the name of Southerner blackened with every shame—all that is Calhoun’s real monument.”¹⁷

The second great generation of national leaders had passed from the scene. But the agitation over the meaning of slavery in a nation dedicated to freedom had not slackened. In fact, it had hardly begun.

II. RAILROADS AND REFORM

In a single generation, Americans had seen canals and steamboats revolutionize transport. Railroads revolutionized it yet again. Just as the nation’s territory had expanded to the Pacific, the means for tying the country together physically were found in the railways.

Technical questions abounded: What should be the means of propulsion? Horses? Sails? Steam? Steam, emphatically, steam.

How should rails be constructed? Of steel? Of wood? Steel.

These decisions were not made by the government but by rigorous experimentation by inventors, investors, and industrialists. The free enterprise system was proving to be the most creative and productive force in the world.

Americans understood that their national life was being transformed by the railroad, and what Indians called the Iron Horse had profound implications for the spread of free institutions across the continent. When the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) drove the first spike on 4 July 1828, Maryland leaders asked Charles Carroll, the oldest living signer of the Declaration of Independence, to preside over the ceremony.¹⁸ South Carolina followed soon thereafter, building her first railroad in the critical year of 1833.¹⁹ DeBow’s Register, a Southern newspaper, boasted of the phenomenal growth of U.S. railroads. In just over a decade, the United States had created the world’s largest railroad system. With 3,688 miles of track, America led Britain (2,069), Germany (1,997), and France (552).²⁰

The development of American railroads was not uniform throughout the country, however. The rise of “King Cotton” in the South meant that transportation would be at the service of the slave-based plantation economy. In the North and West, rails often led the way in the development of the economy. Southern entrepreneurs were not encouraged to invest in railroads as they were in the North.²¹ Most railroads ran east and west, especially those that carried the waves of new immigrants. Because so few immigrants wanted to go to the South—or were welcomed in the South—this east-west development of the rail lines further served to isolate and alienate the South from the rest of the country.^*

The first decades of development had shown that steam locomotives required single tracks, and the idea of competition over a single line of track would not work.²² Soon, the railroads came to rely on long, single cars called saloons with an aisle running down the center.²³ First-class tickets provided more comfortable travel, but they also reinforced social divisions. This was an idea that ran counter to Jacksonian democracy. Many Americans came to have concerns about the rise of monopoly in the railroad industry. Vast fortunes were made in railroads. Some Americans worried about a class system based on wealth. They feared that the great disparities in wealth that characterized Europe would undermine the Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers, independent and free.

Even in the North, however, racial prejudice dictated that segregation would prevail. “Jim Crow” cars were put on behind other passenger cars to accommodate black passengers.^24* Frederick Douglass created a national stir when he refused to leave his seat in a first-class railroad car in Massachusetts. Douglass challenged the enraged white conductor to give him “one good reason” why he should leave his seat. “Because you are black!” the conductor shouted as he summoned several muscular stevedores to eject the famous abolitionist. “Snake out the damned n——!” the conductor yelled. Douglass, who had fought and floored a vicious “slave breaker” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, grabbed his seat tightly. By the time he was finally put off on the station platform, he had the seat he had paid for still held in his powerful grip. He had wrenched it from its mount. “They should at least have let me travel half way,” Douglass later told an English audience. “After all, I’m only half a Negro!”²⁵ The “half a Negro” gibe referred to the fact that Frederick’s father had been a white slaveholder on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

By the end of the 1850s, railroad construction had more than tripled. A government grant of twenty-two million acres of public lands provided a huge incentive for industry growth; though the rail system could not have been built as quickly or as efficiently by other means, this system was open to criticism for bringing corruption into state legislatures and Congress.²⁶ Despite these political challenges and the severe but temporary depression of 1857, America had clearly become a nation on wheels. In the North, some 22,385 miles of track connected the major cities and provided railheads for an agricultural revolution that was keeping pace with rapid industrialization. The vast territory of the South was less well served. Even here, however, the 8,783 miles of track exceeded most other nations in the world.²⁷

Paralleling the railroads came the development of Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph. After he tapped out his famous message—“What hath God wrought?”—in 1844, Morse would see his invention quickly spread. By 1850, telegraph lines stretched from Maine to Florida and soon spanned the continent.²⁸ Morse also developed for his invention the Morse Code, a system of dots and dashes memorized for a century by Boy Scouts and military recruits; it was essential to communication.^* At the same time, Cyrus McCormick’s reaper did for wheat what Eli Whitney’s cotton gin had done for cotton half a century before.²⁹

The rush of immigrants into America’s coastal cities and the spread of public education in the Northern states prompted the yearnings for reform. Emerson said that the young men of these days had been born “with knives in their brains.”³⁰ Labor unions began to demand better conditions for urban workers. Southern writers were quick to point to the unhealthy conditions these “wage slaves” labored under. (Nonetheless, no Northern manufacturers ever sought a national Fugitive Employees Act. This truth was doubtless attributable in part to the tide of cheap labor from immigration.)

The 1850s saw such city-based labor federations as the National Typographic Union (1852), the United Hatters (1856), and the Iron Moulders’ Union (1859).³¹ Some of the German immigrants—radical refugees from the failed European Revolution of 1848—brought Marxist socialism in their steamer trunks.³² By contrast, English writer Charles Dickens marveled at the clean and bright factories where Massachusetts’s famous “Lowell Girls” worked.³³ Still, the model textile plants where these young women were employed were hardly representative of the rising new industrialism. The Democratic Party—known in these years simply as the Democracy—reached out to labor and to immigrants.

Women’s rights groups began their long march toward freedom with the Seneca Falls, New York, convention in 1848. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott led the way in demanding votes (suffrage) for women.³⁴ This movement soon expressed itself in other ways too. The dignified Mrs. Stanton—daughter of a distinguished judge and wife of a New York senator—shocked many when she discarded the familiar floor-length hooped skirt and adopted the newly fashionable “bloomers.” This practical attire featured a short skirt and leggings. The respectable Mrs. Stanton and her fellow suffragettes faced the ridicule expressed in this doggerel verse:

                Heigh! ho! Carrion crow,

                Mrs. Stanton’s all the go;

                Twenty tailors take the stitches.

                Mrs. Stanton wears the britches.³⁵

Undeterred, women took the lead in such important social reform movements as Temperance (abstinence from alcoholic beverages), prison reform, and improvements in the treatment of the insane. “Cold Water Armies” formed to discourage drunkenness and saloons and to offer “the pledge” to young men. “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine,” promised legions of virtuous young women.

Many hardworking, hard-drinking laborers not surprisingly took a dim view of these efforts from socially prominent “do-gooders.” (Even in our own time, we’ve seen this superior and disdainful attitude of many reformers who look down their noses at hard hats and others who smoke and polish off a few beers after work.) As in England and Europe, the saloon often fulfilled an important social need for immigrants crammed into dark and unsanitary tenements. Party organizers often found in these taverns a ready audience for political recruitment.

Nor was the spirit of reform confined to dry land. Commodore Uriah Philips Levy finally succeeded in 1850 in banning flogging in the U.S. Navy. He had campaigned for decades against the inhuman practice. Now, neither black nor white American sailors could be beaten as a form of discipline. Although he may not have intended it as an abolition measure, the contrast with the treatment of slaves in the cotton fields could not have been more striking.^*

Nativism—a political and social movement to restrict the flood of immigration—flared in the 1850s to challenge the two-party system. In a number of Northern states—including Massachusetts and New York—a new group virtually eclipsed the Whig Party. Calling themselves the American Party, movement leaders organized secretly to take over legislatures and prevent immigrants’ voting. They answered all questions from outsiders: “I know nothing”; hence the name of derision history gives them—“Know-Nothings.” In Baltimore, groups like the “Plug Uglies” used violence to prevent immigrants from voting.³⁶

Much of this Nativism took on an anti-Catholic tone, with legislatures investigating Catholic parochial schools and convents. Requests for Catholic public school students to be allowed to read from their own Douay version of the Bible led to riots in Philadelphia. When Nativists elected a mayor in New York City, the legendary Catholic Archbishop John Hughes requested a meeting. If any of his houses of worship were attacked, he mildly informed His Honor, Catholics would “turn New York into a second Moscow.” Dagger John’s warning produced the desired effect: New York remained at peace.^* It surely didn’t help the abolitionist cause with Democrats that most Nativists were ardently antislavery.

The 1850s also gave America a literary treasure trove. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his immortal works—The Golden Legend, Hiawatha, and The Courtship of Miles Standish. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Herman Melville penned White Jacket and Moby Dick. Henry David Thoreau wrote Walden, and Walt Whitman produced Leaves of Grass.³⁷ Of all these masterpieces, however, the work that reached more Americans and more readers throughout the world than the rest combined was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written in 1852.

This book hit America like an earthquake. Written at the moment when the Fugitive Slave Act lacerated consciences throughout the North, Stowe’s book created unforgettable characters—like poor Eliza, the young slave woman. Carrying her infant at her breast, she raced across the frozen Ohio River. Stowe took care to depict Southern slave owners with charity. She showed them trapped in a system they did not devise. The worst villain of the book was the vicious Simon Legree, a transplanted Yankee. Even so, many Southerners reacted with hurt and rage. The book was banned in many Southern communities.

“Uncle Tom” has become a term of abuse in our own time, referring to a black man who is obsequious toward whites. But Stowe’s Uncle Tom was a messianic figure with whom millions of Americans—especially the evangelicals of the North—identified deeply. In England, Queen Victoria wept over the book. Her prime minister, Lord Palmerston, read it. For generations thereafter, Americans repeated the legend that when Abraham Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe, he said, “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”³⁸ Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been translated into dozens of languages and has sold millions of copies. Since its first publication, it has never been out of print.

Frederick Douglass did not need to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin to know the evils of slavery. As an escaped slave, he was asked to address an Independence Day crowd in Rochester, New York, in 1852. Douglass took care to praise the Founders. The signers of the Declaration, he said, “were brave men. They were great men, too—great enough to give fame to a great age . . . for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory.”³⁹

With penetrating insight, Douglass told his audience that Virginia had passed seventy-two laws mandating the death penalty for infractions committed by a black man, compared to only two such laws that similarly punished a white man. What was this, he asked, but an official concession by Virginia that the black man was fully human, fully moral, fully capable of choosing between good and evil? Does anyone think it necessary to pass death penalty laws for their cattle and horses? Who could answer Douglass’s piercing logic? Douglass defied anyone to say that the Constitution was a proslavery document. Instead, he believed it could be interpreted freely as an antislavery charter. Finally, he asked, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”⁴⁰

How thoroughly unlike William Lloyd Garrison. The outspoken white leader of American abolitionists publicly burned a copy of the Constitution. Polar opposite of John C. Calhoun on the question of slavery, Garrison nonetheless shared with the Southern senator a vitriolic loathing of cherished American institutions. He denounced the Constitution in the Liberator and damned it as “a covenant with death and hell.”

Not only did Frederick Douglass break the chains by which white slaveholders bound him, but he also had the courage to declare his independence from William Lloyd Garrison. Instead of calling for secession of the North from the South, Douglass stood for union. Douglass disputed the Garrisonian view that an abolitionist could never vote and could never even participate in the sinful American political system. Where Garrison condemned Washington and Jefferson to hell for the sin of owning slaves, Douglass spoke of the Founders with respect. Jesus Christ himself, Douglass pointedly reminded Garrison, ate with sinners and tax collectors.⁴¹ Douglass made his break public with these bold words: “I would unite with anybody to do right; and with nobody to do wrong. And as the Union, under the Constitution, requires me to do nothing which is wrong, and gives me many facilities for doing good, I cannot go with the American Anti-Slavery Society in its doctrine of disunion.”⁴²

Harriet Stowe recognized Douglass’s superior abilities. Once, when lecturing in Britain, Douglass said that he had as much right to sell Thomas Auld, his former owner, as Auld had a right to sell him. Then, with a sparkle of wit, Douglass offered to sell Auld to any and all comers! The crowd whooped in delight.

III. “BLEEDING KANSAS”

The election of 1852 represented the Whig Party’s last stand. The anti-Jackson party nominated General Winfield Scott, hero of the War of 1812 and the Mexican War, for president. He lost to the Democrats’ nominee, former U.S. senator Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire.

The most influential Democrat of this time, however, may well have been Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who had won national fame by pushing the Compromise of 1850 through the Senate. Ambitious for the White House, the Little Giant led Senate Democrats to support his Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854. Under Douglas’s bill, the Missouri Compromise that had preserved sectional peace for thirty years would be repealed. It made the spread of slavery possible, at least in theory, anywhere in the western territories if local citizens voted for it.

Douglas advanced his Kansas-Nebraska bill under the flag of Popular Sovereignty. Under this banner, Democrats argued that the “sacred principle” of democracy was that the people of any territory could decide whether or not to permit slavery. Douglas famously took a neutral position on the extension of slavery itself. “I don’t care,” he often said, “whether slavery is voted up or down.”

Douglas used his powerful position as chairman of the Senate Territories Committee to advance his bill. The law galvanized antislavery sentiment throughout the country. It meant that slavery could spread to the Pacific if local settlers voted for it. Denounced as “squatter sovereignty,” Douglas’s solution to the slavery issue offended not only abolitionists and Free Soil supporters, but also those Southern “fire-eaters” who considered any limitation on slavery to be intolerable.^*

Who could answer Douglas? He seemed to be rolling over all opposition. His natural opponents, the Whigs, were themselves splitting over the slavery issue.

Abraham Lincoln at this point was a successful lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, and a former one-term Whig congressman. As the Whig Party disintegrated, men like him were left without a political home. Lincoln hesitated before joining the new political party that was formed in Ripon, Wisconsin, in 1854. New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley urged the new alliance of anti-Nebraska groups, giving it the name Republican. Choosing this name was a good public relations move. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans had long since dropped Republican from their name. Here, Greeley’s friends could claim roots for their new party that went back to the Founder’s vision (even if, in truth, these new Republicans were probably closer to the nationalism, financial conservatism, and anti-slavery beliefs of Hamilton than they were to Mr. Jefferson’s agrarian roots). It was not entirely clear what direction the Republicans would take. Would they align with the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings? In a number of states, just such an unholy alliance did occur.⁴³ Lincoln was having none of it. In a letter to Joshua Speed, a friend of his youth, he wrote:

I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of Negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].⁴⁴

Soon, as we shall see, Lincoln’s dedication to liberty and the equality of man would prompt him to take up the challenge laid down by Stephen Douglas. Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed by President Pierce, but it did not bring an end to conflict over slavery. In fact, it inflamed it. “Border Ruffians” from Missouri swept across the border and brought violence to the prairie. Antislavery elements throughout the North urged their followers to strengthen the Free Soil factions in Kansas.

Abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher (Harriett Beecher Stowe’s brother) encouraged resistance by force. Crates full of “Beecher’s Bibles”—rifles, actually—turned up in the territory that newspaperman Horace Greeley had labeled “Bleeding Kansas.”

Following a Border Ruffian raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in May 1856, Massachusetts’s Charles Sumner delivered a stinging speech on the Senate floor titled “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner grievously insulted Andrew Butler, an elderly South Carolina senator. His rude and personal attack suggested the old man was drooling. South Carolina, Sumner cried, had sent to the Senate “a Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress who, though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”⁴⁵

This talk of drooling and prostitutes was too much. Talk of sexual connection between white Southerners and slaves was always explosive.^* Butler’s nephew, South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks, did not bother to challenge Sumner to a duel. The Yankee would never “give satisfaction,” he felt sure. Instead, Brooks strode into the Senate chamber and, finding the Massachusetts lawmaker alone, caned Sumner brutally, nearly killing him. The violence of the slavery issue could not be confined to Bleeding Kansas. Now, it had invaded the Senate floor. “The only men who don’t have a revolver and a knife,” said South Carolina Senator James Hammond, “are those who have two revolvers!”⁴⁶

Following the raid on Lawrence, Kansas, New England abolitionist John Brown determined to claim “an eye for an eye.” He and his sons and several followers staged their own attack on Pottawotamie, Kansas. There, on 23 May 1856, they hacked to death several proslavery men—even as the men’s terrified wives pleaded for their lives.

Stunned by all this violence, the Democracy in 1856 turned against President Pierce and chose instead James Buchanan. An elderly bachelor, Buchanan had the good fortune to be out of Congress and serving as ambassador to England during the rancorous debates over the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Also known as a doughface, Buchanan’s diplomatic skills would enable him, it was hoped, to resolve the deepening divisions at home.

The new Republican Party was determined to field a candidate. John Charles Frémont, the famous “Pathfinder,” was a young, dynamic choice. The slogan: “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Speech, Free Men, and Frémont.” The first Republican Party platform condemned both slavery and polygamy as “relics of barbarism.” Republicans championed the cause of freedom, striving to defend the Founders’ vision. They opposed Calhoun’s ideas and the Democrats’ “don’t care” indifference to the survival of freedom in an expanded republic.

Hopes for a calm resolution of issues in reasoned debate were in vain. The election of 1856 was another very ugly one. It was further complicated when the Know-Nothings nominated former president Millard Fillmore.

Frémont was attacked because he had been born out of wedlock, the son of a French Catholic. He had married Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s intelligent and vivacious daughter, Jessie—a decided plus—but the ceremony had been performed by a Catholic priest. This was an affront to the Nativists. Buchanan, on the other hand, had no wife at all. Some Republican papers depicted him as a spinster—in a dress!

Southern politicians regularly called the new party the “Black Republicans.” This was to distinguish them from the Jeffersonian Republican Party and to taint them with the black flag of anarchy. But most of all, it was to associate the Republicans with black people. Increasingly, Southern leaders followed the earlier tack of the High Federalists and current path of the Garrisonians and threatened disunion: “The election of Frémont would be the end of the Union, and ought to be,” growled fire-eater Robert Toombs of Georgia.⁴⁷

In the end, Buchanan was elected with 45.3 percent of the popular vote. He carried the entire South, his own Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Frémont, with 33.1 percent of the vote, swept the Upper North. It was a truly impressive showing for the candidate of a new national party. Fillmore won 21.6 percent of the vote, carrying only Maryland. It was the last gasp of the Know-Nothings.

IV. DRED SCOTT

President-elect James Buchanan and many other national Democrats hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would resolve the divisive issue of extending slavery into the territories for them. Buchanan wrote privately—and quite improperly—to friends on the Supreme Court, urging a broad ruling. He thus tried to influence the outcome of the Court’s decision. When he mounted the inaugural stands on 4 March 1857, Buchanan was seen whispering animatedly with Chief Justice Roger B. Taney. Could they have been discussing the momentous case then before Taney’s court?⁴⁸ The case of Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford had been wending its way through federal courts for nearly a decade. The case was brought by Dred Scott, a slave, who sued to seek his own freedom and that of his family because his master had taken the Scotts to the free state of Illinois.

After his whispered discussion with Taney, Buchanan delivered his inaugural address, telling the assembled crowd the ruling was coming: “[I]n common with all good citizens, I shall cheerfully submit” to the Supreme Court’s ruling, “whatever it may be.”⁴⁹ This was a singularly dishonest comment, since it now appears that he knew very well what the ruling would be. Buchanan went on to express the hope that mere “geographical” parties would rapidly become extinct. Of course, he meant the Republicans. That is surely one way to dispense with your opponents. Thomas Jefferson, who actually embraced his opponents in his inaugural address and pronounced their dissent legitimate, would have marveled to see what had become of the Democratic Party he and Madison had founded.

Two days later, the eighty-year-old Taney read his fifty-page opinion in a Supreme Court chamber jammed with spectators.^50* The ruling was truly breathtaking. First, Taney found that Dred Scott was not an American citizen and could never become so because of his race. Taney might have stopped his reading there. Case dismissed. Despite the patent absurdity of the claim, if Scott were not a U.S. citizen, he could not sue in a U.S. court. But Taney was determined to plow ahead. He next ruled the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, saying Congress had no power to interfere with Sandford’s “property” without due process, as spelled out in the Fifth Amendment. Of course, Congress is granted authority under Article IV, Section 3 to make “all needful regulations in territories.”⁵¹ In effect, Taney was ruling the ancient and revered Northwest Ordinance of 1787 unconstitutional too. That act of Congress under the Articles of Confederation had famously banned slavery north of the Ohio River.

Finally, Taney offered the outrageous obiter dictum that, as a black man, Scott was “so inferior [that he] had no rights which the white man is bound to respect.”^52* His opinion—which rested on an obviously false reading of the history of the American founding—adopted Calhoun’s doctrines. Under Taney’s ruling, America would be a slave nation and free states would be mere local exceptions to the general rule.⁵³ Now, Frederick Douglass mourned, every black man in America would have to sleep with a pistol by his pillow.

If the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott opinion had been meekly accepted, America would truly have ended her experiment in ordered liberty. She would have “lost the bubble” in 1857.

Southerners welcomed Taney’s opinion. Following the doctrines of John C. Calhoun, many in the South began to clamor for territorial expansion, not for greater human liberty at all. Instead, they wanted more land to be brought under cultivation by more slaves. Senator Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi Democrat, demanded annexation of Cuba and her half million slaves.⁵⁴ Davis’s colleague, Albert Gallatin Brown, spoke for this contingent when he declared on the Senate floor: “I want Cuba and sooner or later we must have it. I want Tamalpais, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery.”⁵⁵

But as much as Southerners appreciated the Dred Scott ruling, Northerners condemned it. No ruling more inimical to the Founders’ vision had ever been handed down. But it was an overreach—and a grave misstep for the defenders of slavery. In a stroke, Taney the Marylander shocked millions of Northerners into a belated recognition of freedom’s peril. Horace Greeley spoke of it with sneering contempt. The Dred Scott opinion, he wrote in the New York Tribune, was entitled to “just so much moral weight as would be the judgment of a majority of those congregated in any Washington barroom.” To the Chicago Tribune, Taney had set back the “current of progressive ideas and Christian humanity.”⁵⁶

Far from settling the slavery question, Taney’s Dred Scott ruling inflamed opposition to the extension of slavery. It served as the greatest recruitment tool for the new Republican Party.

Following his single term in Congress, Abraham Lincoln had returned to the circuit as a lawyer. He now made a comfortable living, especially as an advocate for the rising force of railroads. He continued, however, to maintain his interest in politics. Now fully committed to the new Republican Party, Lincoln used temperate language to challenge the opinion. But challenge the Dred Scott ruling he did.

While the opinion of the Court . . . expressly declare[s] that the Constitution of the United States neither permits Congress nor a Territorial legislature to exclude slavery from any United States territory, the [majority justices] all omit to declare whether or not the same Constitution permits a state . . . to exclude it.⁵⁷

A shudder must have gone through Lincoln’s hearers. Despite the careful, lawyerly language, Lincoln raised the most frightening specter imaginable—that the United States would cease to have any free states at all. If slaves were nothing but “property,” if Congress and the territories could not deprive slaveholders of the full use of that “property,” how logically could free states prevent slavery from flooding the Union from Maine to California? Under the misrule of Dred Scott, the question was, How indeed?

V. LINCOLN MEETS DOUGLAS

To New England abolitionists, any concession to Southern slaveholders was unthinkable. But to Lincoln, the peace of the Union required Northerners to make some allowances.

Unlike the abolitionists, he went out of his way to recognize the humanity of his opponents—Northern and Southern alike. In a speech in Peoria, Illinois, in 1854, Lincoln pointedly said, “Only a small percentage [of the people] are natural tyrants. That percentage is no larger in the slave states than in the free. The great majority, south as well as north, have human sympathies.” But granting this, Lincoln powerfully argued that these very human sympathies “manifest in many ways their sense of the wrong of slavery and their consciousness that, after all, there is humanity in the Negro.” He showed how Southerners had joined Northerners to impose the death penalty on African slave traders in 1820. “But you never thought of hanging men for catching and selling wild horses, wild buffaloes or wild bears.”⁵⁸ Lincoln’s mild manner combined with his powerful use of logic made him a star of the new Illinois Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the powerful Stephen A. Douglas would have to win reelection to the Senate or fade from prominence. “A steam engine in britches,” the energetic Douglas determined to win.⁵⁹ His task was complicated by his open feud with his fellow Democrat, President Buchanan. First, they clashed over patronage. But soon they fought over Bleeding Kansas. Senator Douglas thought the proslavery constitution, written by a rump legislature in Lecompton, Kansas, was a fraudulent expression of the people’s will. He was right. President Buchanan, however, endorsed the Lecompton Constitution. Horace Greeley was so impressed with Douglas’s stance that he publicly urged Illinois Republicans to back the Little Giant.⁶⁰

Lincoln knew this would destroy the Republicans—in Illinois and nationally. Ignoring the meddling of a faraway New York editor like Greeley, Lincoln challenged Douglas to a series of debates around the state. Douglas could have stiff-armed the tall and gangly Lincoln. The one-term former congressman had gained a fine reputation in Illinois courtrooms and a good income as a lawyer for the railroads, but he could not match Douglas’s international fame. Still, despite his underdog status, Lincoln had his reasons for throwing down the gauntlet, just as Douglas had his for accepting. He wanted—perhaps even needed—to show the Illinois legislature that he still commanded a great following among the voters; it was, after all, the legislature that would select the United States senator.^*

Douglas had great confidence in his own booming voice, his quick wit, his slashing debating style. He had sharpened his skills in the United States Senate for five years, sitting next to men like Webster, Clay, and Calhoun.

But beyond demonstrating that his rhetorical mastery merited a return trip to the Senate, there were serious ideological issues at stake. Douglas accepted Lincoln’s challenge in part because he was eager to show that his argument for Popular Sovereignty was superior to Lincoln’s case for limiting the extension of slavery. “Let the people decide” had a powerful appeal. Lincoln’s case for the Founders’ vision of liberty and the equality of man could be made to sound woefully impractical, Douglas felt sure.

Douglas traveled around the state in high style. He had his own private railroad car, well-stocked with whiskey and refreshments. It was provided to him by George B. McClellan. McClellan was a West Pointer who had risen to become president of the Illinois Central Railroad.⁶¹ Douglas’s arrival in each town was hailed by a booming cannon and brass bands. Lincoln rode in the public cars and brought no contingent of campaign aides with him. Even so, some young women greeted him with a banner: “Westward thy Star of Empire takes its way / Thy girls Link-on to Lincoln / Their Mothers were for Clay.”⁶²

Douglas immediately attacked Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech. Earlier that summer (1858), Lincoln had electrified the state’s Republican convention with this speech, in which he said that a house divided against itself—half free and half slave—could not stand. Lincoln was a dangerous radical, Douglas maintained. And he was for mixing the races. Slavery, he argued, was perfectly acceptable if the people of each state desired it.

Lincoln once again used logic to deflate his opponent. “Although volume upon volume has been written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it by being a slave himself.”⁶³

Douglas could not resist playing on racial prejudice. “Those of you,” he told one crowd, who believe the Negro is your equal and ought to be on equality with you socially, politically, and legally, have a right to entertain those opinions, and of course will vote for Mr. Lincoln.”^64* He accused Lincoln of seeking to promote marriage between whites and blacks.

Lincoln responded by saying that because he did not want a black woman for a slave that did not mean he had to take her for a wife. He already had a wife, he said, and as to the black woman, he could “just leave her alone.” Then Lincoln showed from the Census of 1850 that the vast majority of mixed-race persons lived in the South. Clearly, slavery and not freedom produced such results.

Once again, Lincoln used logic to trip up his debate opponent. While he did not favor complete social equality between blacks and whites, he said:

[T]here is no reason in the world why the Negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man.

Douglas attempted to show himself humane with a crude analogy. In the struggle between the crocodile and the Negro, he said, he favored the Negro. But in the struggle between the white man and the Negro, he favored the white. Thus, he tried to dehumanize the black man and place him outside the community of concern for which the white majority had responsibility. Under Douglas’s definition of Popular Sovereignty, it was always the white majority that would make decisions about black men’s freedom. And he thought that was just. Lincoln responded that for a man to rule himself was freedom. But for a man to rule another man without his consent was tyranny.

Lincoln succeeded in pressing Douglas on slavery in the territories after Taney’s Dred Scott decision. What was left of Douglas’s Popular Sovereignty, Lincoln wanted to know. How could the people of a territory vote slavery down if Taney said every American had a right to carry his “property” with him?

In response, Douglas introduced his so-called Freeport Doctrine. Named for the Illinois town where they met, the Freeport Doctrine said slavery could not exist without “friendly legislation” to support it. Antislavery voters could simply refuse to pass such laws and slavery would effectively be kept out of a territory, Douglas claimed. Thus, he said, Popular Sovereignty was entirely consistent with Taney’s ruling.

Like the seasoned lawyer he was, Lincoln had skillfully maneuvered Douglas into making a concession that would prove fatal—not only to Douglas but also to his Democratic Party. Southern fire-eaters were outraged. Douglas would never get their support for president, they cried. But unless Douglas had devised some barrier to the spread of slavery in the territories, how could he ever claim election as a Northern man? Lincoln would later exploit Douglas’s fatal misstep. He knew it was absurd to contend that “a thing may be lawfully driven away from where it has a lawful right to be.”⁶⁵ Checkmate.

Lincoln’s performance in the debates marked him as a leader. Lincoln was also a powerful wrestler, and wrestlers know how to use their opponents’ strength against them. Lincoln used Douglas’s worldwide fame to catapult himself into national prominence, though the positive results seemed slow in coming. Douglas, for instance, went on to win reelection by the Illinois legislature, despite Lincoln’s impressive showing. Lincoln admitted he felt like the little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark: he was too big to cry, but it hurt too much to laugh. Yet he would later recognize that his famous sparring match was “a stumble, not a fall.”

The Lincoln-Douglas debates were the most important since the ratification of the Constitution. Lincoln showed a mastery of law, philosophy, and history that raised him not only above Douglas but above every other statesman of the age. After these debates, there would be no more Republicans flirting with Douglas the Democrat. The future of the Republican Party was now bound up with the future of freedom in America. “The fight must go on,” Lincoln said after the votes were counted. “The cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even, one hundred defeats.”⁶⁶

VI. JOHN BROWN AND HARPERS FERRY

Extreme abolitionists like John Brown were in no way willing to merely place slavery on the path of ultimate extinction. They demanded action and they demanded it now. Brown moved freely among the leaders of the abolition cause. He began to share, but not completely, his plans for a dramatic strike against slavery. A group of financial backers known as the Secret Six helped Brown rent a Maryland farmhouse across the Potomac River from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.^* Brown assembled a small force of twenty-one impressionable young men—including his own sons and some former slaves. He planned to raise the banner of liberation in that strategic town and call on slaves to join in a bold bid for freedom.

Brown was an unlikely choice to organize a revolution—or anything else. Father of twenty, he had failed as farmer, as a merchant, and in every other line of work. Still, he was charismatic. Tall, straight as a ramrod, bedecked with blazing eyes and a bushy beard, Brown seemed the picture of an Old Testament prophet to many. Others saw in him the demon of unreasoning fanaticism. No one would ever meet John Brown and think of Lincoln’s appeal to “mind, all-conquering mind.” Brown had escaped capture for his murders of proslavery men in Kansas. This only emboldened him to greater exploits. He tried to enlist Frederick Douglass in his plot, but Frederick recoiled from his friend. He was “shocked” at the plot and thought it would immediately be stamped out.⁶⁷ Embittered, Brown determined to go ahead without Douglass’s aid.

When he finally struck on 16 October 1859, John Brown seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and took several Virginians as hostages. The news alarmed the entire nation.

Colonel Robert E. Lee was home on leave in Virginia when the news of Harpers Ferry came. He immediately reported to the White House, taking Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart with him.⁶⁸

There, President Buchanan authorized Lee to take a detachment of U.S. Marines to Harpers Ferry to capture Brown and his cohorts. Lee raced to retake the federal arsenal. He sent Stuart under a white flag of truce to demand the immediate surrender of Brown and his fellow insurrectionists. From inside the arsenal, Lee and his Marines could hear cries coming from some of the hostages. They feared they would die in an assault on the building. One of the hostages, Lewis W. Washington, yelled out, “Never mind about us, fire!” Lee knew the voice well. It was the grandnephew of George Washington. Smiling amid the tension, Lee told his Marines, “The old revolutionary blood does tell!”⁶⁹

As soon as Brown rejected the lieutenant’s demand, J. E. B. Stuart touched his hat. He gave the signal to Lee and the Marines to storm the place. Instantly, the Marines charged forward, battering the heavy oaken doors in, using their bayonets instead of bullets to spare the hostages.⁷⁰ Within minutes, Brown and his remaining men were captured. Two of Brown’s sons were among the dead. The raid had ended barely thirty-six hours after it had begun.

Brown’s venture was a complete and bloody failure. Frederick Douglass had predicted that. But Brown was soon able to change the impression. When he was brought to trial, he rejected with scorn his lawyers’ attempt to plead not guilty by reason of insanity. Brown impressed all who saw him with his calm composure, his ready willingness to die for the cause of abolition. Even Virginia’s proslavery governor, Henry A. Wise, who visited the abolitionist in prison, marveled at Brown’s steadfastness.⁷¹

Brown was charged with “treason” against Virginia and tried in a state court. This was further evidence of President Buchanan’s doughface policies, since Brown’s target was the federal arsenal. The verdict was a foregone conclusion. Sentenced to be hanged, Brown addressed the court:

I believe to have interfered as I have done . . . in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done.

Brown’s pose as Christian martyr was almost perfect. Northern writers generally praised him. Emerson said the “gallows would be glorious like the cross.”⁷² Henry David Thoreau told the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts: “No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature.”⁷³

Unknown to the general public was the letter Brown received from Mahala Doyle. She reminded Brown how he had invaded her Kansas home three years earlier and taken her husband and sons out to butcher them. “My son John Doyle whose life I begged of you is now grown up and is very desirous to be at Charlestown on the day of your execution,” the unforgiving widow wrote.⁷⁴

John Brown was hanged on 2 December 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia. On his way to the gallows, he handed this message to one of the officials: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with Blood.”⁷⁵

In the crowd that assembled at Charlestown that day, a professor from the Virginia Military Institute, Thomas J. Jackson, noted Brown’s “unflinching firmness.” Soon, Professor Jackson—Stonewall Jackson—would be giving lessons in unflinching firmness. Standing nearby, fire-eater Edmund Ruffin actually admired Brown’s courage. But young John Wilkes Booth, already a famous actor, had only contempt for the old man. Abolitionists were “the only traitors in the land,” Booth said.⁷⁶

VII. THE ELECTION OF 1860

The Republican Party was eager to avoid the brand of John Brown’s dangerous radicalism. Although Democrats in Congress struggled to implicate the “Black Republicans,” none of their charges could be proved. A congressional investigation of John Brown’s activities yielded no evidence of Republican support. The fury that was unleashed in the wake of John Brown’s raid was enough, however, to convince Frederick Douglass he had better accept the longstanding offer of a British speaking tour. Frederick’s friends feared he might be kidnapped and dragged southward in chains to face an enraged all-white jury on charges he conspired with Brown. For such an offense, Douglass could have been hanged. Hurriedly, Douglass departed for England through Canada.

As for Abraham Lincoln, he had always stood against just such extremism as John Brown represented. Reverence for law must be the “political religion” of this country, Lincoln had said in his address to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield as long ago as 1838. “Old John Brown is hanged,” Lincoln now told his fellow Republicans. “We cannot object.” Lincoln acknowledged Brown’s courage and his moral opposition to slavery, but he thought the raid demonstrated Brown’s insanity.⁷⁷ Then he reminded his listeners that just as Brown had been hanged for treason, so would they have to treat other traitors if they tried to rebel against the lawful government.

Lincoln moved boldly in February 1860 to give an address in New York City. Many Republicans assumed that New York Senator William H. Seward would be the party’s 1860 presidential nominee. By speaking at the Cooper Union, Lincoln offered a challenge to Seward in his very backyard.

His speech thrilled New Yorkers. He carefully outlined the Founders’ views on slavery and aligned the Republicans with those views. He presented the Republican cause as prudent, moderate, but firm. To Southerners, he was patient, almost pleading. Lincoln concluded with a ringing affirmation of freedom in these words:

All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. . . .

Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.⁷⁸

William Seward lacked this fluency of expression. His previous speech on the “irrepressible conflict” between slavery and freedom had hung the title of radical around his neck. He frightened people. When Lincoln said essentially the same thing in his “House Divided” speech, he took care to take his text from the Bible.^* It was much harder to label him dangerous—as Stephen Douglas had learned.

When the Republican Party convention met in Chicago in May, the leading candidates were William H. Seward of New York; Salmon P. Chase, an ex-Democrat, of Ohio; and Simon P. Cameron of Pennsylvania. Lincoln’s campaign manager, Judge David Davis, had shrewdly worked to make Lincoln everyone’s second choice. Judge Davis made sure to fill the visitors’ galleries at the Wigwam with Illinois “leather lungs.” These were burly young men hired to shout their lungs out for Lincoln. Judge Davis took pains to show all the delegates that Lincoln could carry the states of the lower North.

Lincoln was concerned by reports that Judge Davis was wheeling and dealing to get him the nomination. “I authorize no bargains and will be bound by none,” Lincoln telegraphed Davis.⁷⁹ Davis reportedly replied when he read the note: “Lincoln ain’t here and don’t know what we have to meet.”⁸⁰ When Seward was blocked, Lincoln was nominated on the third ballot. In Springfield, cannons were fired in celebration. All seemed exultant except Lincoln.

Democrats were deeply divided. Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis had demanded a federal slave code for the territories. There would be no states’ rights for the North. If the federal government protected slavery in the territories—as Davis and his supporters argued—then these territories were overwhelmingly likely to vote to become slave states. This, Senator Stephen Douglas and many Northern Democrats could not accept.

When the Democratic Party’s nominating convention gathered in Charleston, South Carolina, disunion was already in the air. Unable to agree on a nominee for president—their rules required two-thirds to nominate—the Democrats suffered a walkout by cotton-state delegates. They agreed dispiritedly to reconvene in Baltimore. Baltimore was only slightly less vehement on the slavery issue than Charleston had been.

It was there that the fatal split finally occurred. When the convention refused to approve a platform calling for a federal slave code for the territories, another walkout occurred. The Southern delegates reconvened in Richmond, Virginia, to nominate Vice President John C. Breckinridge. This faction actually wanted to reopen the African slave trade. Senator Stephen A. Douglas had finally achieved his long-sought prize, the nomination for president of the national Democratic Party. But by the time he won it, the prize was hardly worth having.

A small faction of Old Line Whigs and former Know-Nothings assembled as the Constitutional Union Party and nominated Kentucky’s John C. Bell and Massachusetts’s distinguished Edward Everett. Now, the national election would be a four-way split.

Many Democrats understood that their party’s split could only elect Lincoln. Stephen Douglas defied tradition and took to the rails to campaign with vigor. He wore himself out with speeches from train platforms in the North and the South, denouncing secession and calling for national unity. Lincoln did not even appear on the ballot in ten Southern states. His supporters carried rails in honor of his title, the rail-splitter. Republicans gloried in the fact that Lincoln had worked with his hands.

By this time, Lincoln was a wealthy and successful lawyer. This did not detract from the appeal of his hardscrabble youth. Actually, this was a great part of the Republicans’ appeal. You, too, by hard work and honesty can become rich, Republicans told workers. His young supporters marched in all the Northern cities in a quasi-military company of “Wide Awakes.”^* Soon, all of America would be on the march.

When the votes were tallied in November, Lincoln swept the populous Northern states. He won 1,866,452 votes in a four-way contest (more than Buchanan four years earlier). He gained 180 electoral votes (152 were required to win). Douglas came in second in popular votes (1,375,157), but because most of those votes were cast in the North, he won only 12 electoral votes. Breckinridge swept the South with 847,953 votes and 72 electoral votes. Bell prevailed only in the Border States, winning 590,631 votes and 39 electoral votes.

It was the most important election in American history. Immediately, preparations began in the South for secession. The legislature in South Carolina called for a secession convention to meet in Charleston in December. There was no time to lose, secessionists told reluctant fellow Southerners. Once Lincoln had entered the White House, they reasoned, it would be harder to break free.

President Buchanan was in thrall to his Southern cabinet members. Secretary of War John Floyd made no effort to prevent the seizure of federal forts and arsenals throughout the South. Buchanan frittered. When South Carolina voted for secession, Buchanan was paralyzed. Fire-eater Robert Barnwell confronted him, demanding he turn over Fort Sumter. Buchanan waved his hands in impotent frustration: “You are pressing me too importunately, Mr. Barnwell; you don’t give me time to consider; you don’t give me time to say my prayers. I always say my prayers when required to act upon any State affair.”⁸¹

Loyal Unionists prayed for “just one hour of Andrew Jackson” instead of the invertebrate Buchanan.

Seven states had seceded by the time Lincoln prepared to take the oath. Lincoln had been informed of an assassination threat against his life during his journey to Washington. Refusing to cancel his speech on Washington’s Birthday at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, he told the anxious crowd he would give his life for

that sentiment in the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope, to the world, for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men. This is a sentiment embodied in the Declaration of Independence. Now, my friends, can this country be saved upon that basis? If it can, I will consider myself one of the happiest men in the world, if I can help to save it. If it cannot be saved upon that principle, it will be truly awful. But if this country cannot be saved without giving up that principle, I was about to say I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it.⁸²

It was an uncharacteristically emotional moment for Lincoln. Against his better judgment, he was persuaded to change his plans and pass through secessionist Baltimore—where the plot was said to be thickening—in the middle of the night. When he arrived safely in Washington, he faced international ridicule. It was said he had come through Baltimore disguised as a Scotchman. Cartoonists lampooned him.

Washington was little better. Rumors of treasonous plots swirled through the muddy streets of the capital. Old General Winfield Scott, a Virginian and a staunch Unionist, pledged to defend the city’s streets. There would be no violence, no armed disruption of the peaceful transfer of government. For the inauguration on 4 March 1861, Scott stationed sharpshooters on all the federal buildings. Breathing defiance of the rebels, Scott said he would stuff them into his artillery pieces positioned at the Capitol and “manure the Virginia hills” with their bodies.⁸³

President Buchanan and the president-elect came onto the inaugural stands arm in arm.⁸⁴ Lincoln approached the podium to be sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States. None other than Chief Justice Roger B. Taney would administer the oath. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, his defeated rival, held Lincoln’s tall, black hat.⁸⁵

His inaugural address was the most eloquent yet delivered in Washington City. He offered an olive branch to the states that had passed secession ordinances even as he denied the right of any state to secede. In a passage sometimes overlooked, he laid out his view of Fort Sumter. The federal installation in Charleston harbor was surrounded by a Confederate “ring of fire.” “The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government and to collect the duties and imposts,” Lincoln said, trying not to provoke. He spoke to his dissatisfied fellow countrymen: “You have not oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend it.’”^* He appealed to reason, to friendship, and to those “mystic chords of memory stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone.”

The future of freedom hung on those words. Not just American freedom, but world freedom was at stake. If a dissatisfied minority could break up the government whenever it lost an election, popular government was indeed impossible. If the failure to gain sufficient ballots led dissenters to resort to bullets, this grand experiment in ordered freedom would fail.

The next four years would be the years of freedom’s fiery trial. Before Abraham Lincoln looked out on another inaugural assembly, the sacred fire of liberty was nearly extinguished. The American republic would come close to death and would be reborn. The new president knew what was at stake. He believed our sacred Union was “the last, best hope of Earth.” To save this precious experiment in ordered liberty, Lincoln in this inaugural address appealed to sweet reason and to “the better angels of our nature.”⁸⁶