“The Slumbers of the North Are O’er”
James Blaine wrote that despite Northern abhorrence for the new, tougher Fugitive Slave Act, the general result of the compromise measures was that “slavery agitation had to a very large extent subsided.” John Sherman confessed that as a local Whig politician in Ohio in 1850, he had supported the compromise measures in order to restore peace between the sections of the nation, which did come. He noted that both the Whig and the Democratic Party platforms in 1852 almost identically professed support for those measures and denounced the renewal of slavery agitation in Congress. Within two years the Democratic Party broke that pledge by an act that repealed the Missouri Compromise. “No single Act of the Slave Power,” Henry Wilson wrote, “ever spread greater consternation, produced more lasting results upon the popular mind, or did so much to arouse the North.”1 To legions of people in the free states, who had previously temporized and compromised on slavery questions, the veil was torn away. The oligarchic designs of Southern leaders stood in the illuminating light of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Southern leaders broke the brief peace because, after the compromise measures of 1850 were enacted, they soon realized that their plan to seize Mexican lands for slavery had backfired. From their perspective, Blaine explained, the annexation of Texas as a slave state was a gain, but the unanticipated addition of California to the free states was a grievous loss, and it was no consolation that the New Mexico and Utah Territories were open to slavery. It became evident that those territories were unlikely to hold slaves in mass. Elsewhere, north of the Missouri Compromise line, slavery was prohibited. That region north and west of Missouri, extending to California and the Oregon Territory, though vast, had been mostly unknown, unorganized, and considered uninhabitable for a long time. As the real value of that region became clearer, the slaveholders foresaw what they could not see before, the steady ingress of many more free states from that region into the Union and slavery hemmed into the Southeast. Their best hope was to spread slavery into that immense territory of the Midwest, north and west of Missouri, which required the abrogation or repeal of the time-honored Missouri Compromise.2
Henry Wilson added a defensive reason for the repeal. The weakening of slave society relative to free society necessitated more slave territory, more concessions, more demands, and more privileges in the interests of slavery. The slave states, “though starting side by side with the free States, . . . were falling signally behind in the race of life.” Although some few in the oligarchic class may well have been very rich, powerful, and well educated, “the blasting presence of slavery” generally wasted the “material, mental, and moral” resources of society. Their rate of population growth lagged behind the free states, and the cause was slavery. A “very large per cent” of Americans who settled in the West were from the poor white class in the slaveholding states. They left the South “mainly on account of slavery and the hindrances it interposed in the way of their success in life.” In addition, George Boutwell noted that slavery generally deterred European immigrants, who disproportionately chose to settle in the free states, augmenting their populations. Having chafed under the rule of the nobility for hundreds of years, these Europeans unsurprisingly settled in free states or free territory, avoiding subjugation by the new American oligarchy. As a result, Wilson explained, “the slave States were passing, by the operation of nature’s laws, into a hopeless minority.” These circumstances drove the slaveholders to pursue means to artificially boost their position in their competition with the free states. What Northerners deemed the “aggressions” of the Southern statesmen were, from the Southerners’ perspective, acts designed to compensate for their stunted development relative to the free states. After listing the slave-state statesmen’s many “aggressions,” George Julian explained, “They knew that the exclusion of [slavery] from all Federal territory would . . . virtually sentence it to death. They believed, with our Republican fathers, that restriction means destruction.” But unlike the founding fathers, the later generations of Southern statesmen were not republican and sought to preserve their oligarchic regime and prevent its absorption into enveloping republicanism. They sought slavery’s perpetuity, not ultimate extinction. Julian bluntly observed, “They were simply obeying the law of self-preservation.”3
At this time, Blaine explained, the new generation of Southern statesmen had “other designs than those which lay on the surface.” They resolved to remain in the Union, if they “could maintain their supremacy” within it. However, “If they were to be outvoted and, as they thought, outraged by free-State majorities, then they would break up the government and form a confederacy of their own. . . . They did not aim at small things. They had ability and they had courage. They had determined upon mastery within the Union, or a Continental Empire outside of it.”4
By spreading slavery across the Missouri Compromise line, they would extend and strengthen their interstate ruling class, move northward, and cut off the free states in the East and West. Although California had entered the Union as a free state, its two senators were Democrats and “stood by the extremists of the South as steadily as if California bordered on the Gulf of Mexico.” They might yet bring California into the Southern fold. By this plan, the Southern statesmen could either acquire mastery over the Union or create a larger expanse of slave territory that they could bring out of the Union as the foundation for their empire. Either way, the further extension of slavery was the key objective in their ambitions. They sought to find a pretext for crossing the Missouri Compromise line and “aimed to secure by far the larger share of the vast domain comprised in the United States. The design was audacious, but from the stand-point of the men who were committed to it, it was not illogical.”5
Kansas sufficed as slaveholders’ first target for expansion. Blaine wrote that “the Southern acquisition of Kansas would pierce the very centre of the army of freedom, and would enable the South thenceforth to dictate terms to the North.” Also, the Southern statesmen knew that “all the crops grown in Missouri by slave labor could be as profitably cultivated in Kansas.” They did not necessarily need slavery to proliferate immediately in any new territory, only first to take root, because “they reckoned that States with few slaves would continue to stand for Southern institutions as stubbornly as States with many slaves.” Emancipation and manumission did occur during the founding era, especially in states with few slaves. But in their very different era, experience in the South had taught them that “emancipation had been made difficult,” even where slavery did not prevail in high proportions.6
Henry Clay of Kentucky, one of the last Southern slaveholding abolitionists, had died in 1852. The Calhoun Revolution in the South produced the new senator from Kentucky, Archibald Dixon. He, Blaine wrote, “belonged to a class of men that had been recently and rapidly growing in the South—men avowedly and aggressively pro-slavery.” It was “an alarming fact” that Dixon, Clay’s immediate successor, first led the South against the time-honored slavery restrictions in the Missouri Compromise, the signal achievement of Clay. Backed by his proslavery compeers, Dixon announced that when the bill was proposed to organize the Nebraska Territory in 1854, “he would move that ‘the Missouri Compromise be repealed, and that the citizens of the several States shall be at liberty to take and hold their slaves within any of the Territories.’”7
Dixon dutifully applied the theory of Calhoun, that the right to hold slaves followed the Constitution and the Constitution trumped the Missouri Compromise. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, chairman of the Committee on Territories, supplied a pretext for repealing the compromise that was better calculated to suit Northern sentiment. He argued that the compromise measures of 1850 had voided and rendered inoperable the Missouri Compromise line, and he instead substituted Lewis Cass’s version of popular sovereignty, or the votes of the people in the territories, not Congress, as the means to determine whether subsequently organized territory would prohibit or establish slavery.8 On January 23, 1854, Douglas introduced his bill organizing the Nebraska and Kansas Territories on the basis of popular sovereignty.9
The alarm in Congress was immediate. Almost at the same time that Douglas reported his bill, certain members of Congress released a public letter explaining the danger of the bill to the American people. Charles Sumner was among the writers and signers of the “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.”10 The appeal condemned the bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge.”11 Its intention was “to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” They carefully traced the boundaries of the territory in question. If slavery were planted in all these lands, its expanded domain would “cut off the Free States of the Pacific from the Free States of the Atlantic”; slavery would extend from the Mexican border to Canada. They reviewed the legislative history to show that the rationales given for the repeal were “mere inventions, designed to cover up from public reprehension meditated bad faith.” The bill was a “plot against humanity and Democracy, . . . dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world.” They appealed to the people, warning them that “the dearest interests of Freedom and the Union are in imminent peril” and admonishing them to disregard “servile demagogues” who would expect them to submit to the slaveholders’ new demands. They appealed to “Christians and Christian Ministers to interpose,” reminding them that their “Divine Religion requires them to behold in every man a brother, and to labor for the Advancement and Regeneration of the Human Race.” The repeal would break yet another precedent, this time opening American territories to slavery where “it does not exist, and where that extension involves the repeal of ancient law, and the violation of solemn compact.” They urged all to “protest earnestly and emphatically, by correspondence, through the press, by memorials, by resolutions of public meetings and legislative bodies, and in whatever other mode may seem expedient against this enormous crime.” As for themselves, they pledged “to resist it by speech and vote, and with all the abilities which God has given us.” If they lost the legislative battle, “we shall not submit. We shall go home to our constituents, erect anew the standard of Freedom, and call on the People to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of Slavery. We will not despair; for the cause of Human Freedom is the cause of God.”12
In the subsequent debates in Congress, several senators and representatives participated who would later serve as Republicans in the Reconstruction Congress. In February Benjamin Wade attacked Senator Douglas’s specious rationale for claiming that the Missouri Compromise was already void. What Douglas was really doing, Wade argued, was “legislating for the privileged aristocracy of the South, to the exclusion of the whole North.” The immense domain of unorganized territory would become a massive fiefdom for an extended aristocracy, which would welcome freemen into their society on the condition that they were willing to “degrade[e] themselves by working upon a level with your miserable slaves.” There was “an antagonism between these two principles,” the principles by which slave society and free society were organized. If slavery was planted there, the unpropertied freeman from the free state would never willingly emigrate to a domain where he would have to surrender his more exalted condition that belonged to him in the free states. The freeman’s only reasonable choice would be to remain where he was, in a free state. By opening the territories to slavery, “you as effectually blast and condemn it for all the purposes of free immigration as though you should burn it with fire and brimstone, as Sodom and Gomorrah were once consumed. Every man understands this.” In this dystopian vision of America’s future, the lands above the Missouri Compromise line would be superadded to the existing domain of the slaveholding oligarchy. The empire of the slaveholding oligarchy would become the dominant element of the nation and would compress republicanism into a constricted space. In point of numbers, Wade said, the slaveholders amounted to no more than four hundred thousand, according to the last census, and the freemen numbered around thirteen million, and it was for that small minority that the bill’s parent and advocates contended. He invited Douglas to tell his Illinois constituent—“the hard-fisted laboring man of that great State—that this is the principle upon which he acts.”13
Wade asked, “Sir, what will be the consequence of passing this bill?” Their broken faith, in attempting to “legalize slavery in half a continent, and to bring it into this Union in that way,” would destroy Northern trust in future Southern offers, and the North might likewise consider all prior concessions to the slaveholders void and inoperative. More ominously, he said that the senator from Kentucky was wrong to believe that the Northern people would humbly acquiesce to this act. Wade warned him, “I tell the gentleman that I see indications entirely adverse to that. I see a cloud, a little bigger now than a man’s hand, gathering in the north, and in the west, and all around, and soon the whole northern heavens will he lighted up with a fire that you cannot quench.” Meetings were taking place everywhere where people expressed “their alarm, their dismay, their horror at the proposition which has been made here.” Wade asked him, “Do you not see that you are about to bring slavery and freedom face to face, to grapple for the victory, and that one or the other must die?” Their insistence on bringing the bill to a vote was accelerating the date of that final conflict, which Wade believed had always been inevitable, because “principles so entirely in opposition to each other, so utterly hostile and irreconcilable, could never exist long in the same Government. . . . I tell you, sir, if you precipitate such a conflict as that, it will not be liberty that will die in the nineteenth century.”14
While the debate in Congress was still raging, Charles Sumner wrote home to a friend about the disturbing new policy: “There is but one remedy,—Union at the North without distinction of party, to take possession of the National Government, and administer it in the spirit of Freedom, and not of Slavery. Oh, when will the North be aroused?” Indeed, they were aroused and responded exactly as Sumner hoped. The “precious repose of the country,” George Julian wrote, “was rudely shocked” by this bill. James Blaine wrote that Douglas’s bill “fairly stunned” the Northern people. They “had grown to manhood with profound respect and even reverence for the Missouri Compromise, and had come to regard it almost as sacredly as though it were part of the organic law of the Republic.” In 1864 Henry Raymond wrote that the bill had given “new and increased force to the popular feeling in favor of freedom which the proposition to repeal the Missouri Compromise had excited, and everywhere the friends of freedom gathered themselves together and rallied round her banner, to meet the conflict which was plainly now closely impending, forced upon the people by the grasping ambition of the slaveholders.”15
Northerners reacted in this way because the bill boldly threatened their self-interest, that is, their interest in perpetuating their republican liberty in their free states and territories. Prior to the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Henry Wilson wrote, the Northern people had been “lulled by the siren song and drugged by the sorceries of compromise.” Slavery was other people’s problem, and therefore, as long as “it was only the slave that was crushed, . . . the North, sordid and safe, accepted its existence. . . . ”
But when the compromise itself was abrogated, and its obligations were treated as a thing of naught; when the monster [prepared] to spring upon the fair domain of freedom, and range at will over territory that compromise had made inviolate, then the cry of danger reached ears that were deaf to the voice of duty. Though large masses of the people were still craven, and ready, for present advantage, to eat the bread of dishonor, this flagrant outrage increased the number of those who comprehended the situation, and who were willing to co-operate with others to resist encroachments that were becoming so serious. Men who sat unmoved under the fulminations of the Abolitionists, answering their arguments . . . that they were but the words of fanaticism and folly, did not remain quite as serene when they witnessed these encroachments.16
In short, the Kansas-Nebraska bill opened a wide door to slavery, and Northerners regarded its prospective spread as a direct threat to themselves. The bill united Northern self-interest in their own rights with their interest in the rights of others who were crushed by the oppression of Southern oligarchy. The pleadings of outraged humanity emanating from the slave states might soon come home and come from them. With the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, Wilson continued, “The North was not only aggrieved and indignant at its gross breach of faith, but it was alarmed. The Slave Power had shown itself ready to oppress not only the blacks but the whites, to crush not the hitherto prostrate race alone, but the nation as well. Patriotism no less than philanthropy, self-preservation no less than humanity, demanded action.”17
Future Reconstruction Republican senators and representatives in Congress showed that they had quickly taken the measure of their constituents’ alarm. Prior to the Senate’s imminent passage of the bill in March, Benjamin Wade spoke again: “Here is a territory larger than all the free States together, situated in the very heart of the Continent, . . . capable of sustaining many millions of inhabitants.” Thirty years before, free-state representatives had agreed to concessions demanded by the slaveholders and, in return, received the slaveholders’ agreement that this land north of the Missouri Compromise line would be perpetually reserved for freedom. “Shall this law be repealed, and the whole of this fair region opened to the inroads of Slavery?” He ascertained that his constituents expected him to use “every legitimate means to defeat the measure.” For this, senators in support of the bill branded him and his colleagues in the opposition “factionists.” But Wade pointed out that although the opponents of the bill were a minority in the Senate, they yet represented a majority of the American people. This showed “in a very strong light the anti-democratic principle on which this body is organized.”18
His reference to the Senate’s misalignment with the popular will suggested the potential for a realignment of parties and again invoked the antidemocratic character of the proposed bill, to which Wade had already alluded in his prior speech. His further comments developed the theme of democratic and antidemocratic principles of government. The ascendancy of liberty or tyranny was at stake, in determining whether to open the unorganized territories to slavery. The Congress was engaged in “shaping and moulding the institutions of a nation in its infancy.” In whatever form they shaped those institutions in these vast territories, and in whatever form those institutions developed, the nation would develop a like form. The nature of the “political relation that the people of these Territories would sustain to us, as members of this great Republic,” depended on whether the character of those institutions would be hostile or friendly to free-state republicanism. Hence, the character of the institutions in those territories, and subsequently the political character of the nation, depended on whether slavery or liberty was to be planted in those territories. Northern liberty would be isolated and die or would be strengthened, depending on how these territories would be organized, with or without slavery.
Wade moved straight to the heart of their differences. The debate had revealed the contrary character of their principles by which each side wished to establish those institutions. During the debates, the arguments that had “been urged in defense of this measure seem to me not less extraordinary and alarming than the measure itself.” The bill’s advocates in the Senate had “assailed, denounced, and repudiated” the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the basis of American republicanism, “as self-evident falsehoods.” Though these “doctrines grated harshly on my ear,” Wade at least paid them the compliment of maintaining moral consistency. “The advocates of this bill, in order to sustain it upon principle, have rightly judged that the Declaration of Independence must also be superseded and rendered inoperative.” But the fathers had sacrificed too much for the Declaration that they should lightly throw it away. For its “great truths,” the fathers had stood up to British power and “pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.” Under “the influence of those soul-inspiring principles,” the fathers achieved their victory. But the modern Democratic Party had recently discovered that “these principles were all false” and branded anyone who contended for them “hypocrites or wild enthusiasts.” Be that as it may, Wade maintained, “I stand upon the good old Declaration, that all men are equal, and have inalienable rights; that is, equal in point of right; that no man has a right to trample upon another.” Wade acknowledged the observation that some do actually trample on others, but that fact does not sustain the right of natural inequality. Rather, the fact merely demonstrates that “by force or fraud,” someone wrested away another’s rights, and American justice frowns upon this violation. “Such were the doctrines of the fathers; and the oppressed of every nation will hear with dismay that they are repudiated, denounced, and denied, in the American Senate.”19
Remarkably, right there in colloquy with Wade, Senator John Pettit of Indiana brazenly denied the truth of the Declaration again and affirmed the principle of natural inequality. Wade then distilled the great contest into a difference between their contending political principles:
Because a man is weak, because he is ignorant, because he is imbecile, does not confer the right upon the first man who is wiser or stronger than he to subject him to minister entirely to the wishes of the stronger man. If you come to that, . . . then we have receded to the old idea; we have not gained anything. If physical force is the rule, you have the divine right of every king, and every emperor, and every monarch, to reign over his subjects, and the right of the privileged orders everywhere. . . . I had supposed that we had been singularly privileged in coming out from that old absurdity, and making a declaration that puts us infinitely ahead of every other nation. I never heard it denied until I reached the Senate of the United States; . . . and that we are to go back for our principles of government to the thirteenth century, and find there the divine right of kings reigning in full force.20
Wade again warned the Southern senators: “You have shocked the public mind. . . . You have aroused a spirit that cannot be allayed. No man, unless he is wilfully blind, can fail to see that it is so. What do you hear but excitement—men gathering together and counselling upon this subject in every part and parcel of the free States. It takes a pretty strong measure to stir men up to these things; and this is a strong measure—yea, sir, it is a dangerous measure.”21
He did not understand why Southern senators for whose benefit the bill served would have expressed indifferent interest in the bill, yet pressed dangerously forward to pass it. If they were indifferent, “Why harrow up those feelings, those hard feelings, that must necessarily arise, consequent upon this?” He knew that “the public mind is excited almost to madness on this subject. The people apprehend that something is being done here to their injury, to their insecurity.”22
Repelling the charge that he and other antislavery northerners were the aggressors, Wade asked, “If you put a man into the fire and hold him there, and he undertakes to get out, is he the aggressor? Is he guilty of excitement because he resists?” In reply to the new claim that the Missouri Compromise line had been unconstitutional, Wade read aloud an excerpt of a speech by the bill’s sponsor, Stephen Douglas, during the 1850 debate. Opposing Calhoun, Douglas had argued that the territory north of the Missouri Compromise line had been consecrated forever to freedom “by the solmn guarantees of law,” and had urged the extension of the line to the Pacific. But now he was urging the repeal of the line and standing by Southerners who maintained its unconstitutionality. “Strange times,” Wade commented.23
Following Wade, William Fessenden warned that his own state legislature, a Democratic legislature, had “recently passed resolutions, almost unanimously, instructing its Senators to endeavor, by every proper means in their power, to defeat the passage of this bill in its present shape.” In this new conflict, he warned, Southern statesmen could expect a different North, a North that would firmly oppose their new demand to repeal the Missouri Compromise. Previously, Southerners had threatened disunion, and Northerners obeyed the clarion call of “concord and brotherly love,” inducing them to placate the South. The “people of the free States . . . pretty generally chose to submit.” They submitted again very recently, and the Compromise of 1850 brought peace. “Suddenly, in the midst of this concord of ours” came the bill that would rob from the people of the free states what they had received for conceding so much to the slaveholders. And the bill was presented “without a word to the country.” Long before, the free states had given concessions to the slave states, and in consideration they received the promise that all territory north of the Missouri Compromise line would be forever free. He asked his Southern colleagues, did they believe that “the free States feel nothing at being robbed of their portion?” He cautioned them to take no solace in the fact that the bill’s author, Senator Douglas, was from the free state of Illinois, for “we repudiate him as acting for us in our part of the country.” To his Southern colleagues, Fessenden predicted, “Anything but peace you will have.” Northerners had heard the threat of disunion from Southerners “until we are fatigued with the sound.” This time the sound would have no effect. Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina broke into Fessenden’s speech, declaring, “If such sentiments as yours prevail, I want a dissolution right away,” to which Fessenden replied, “Do not delay on my account.”24
Having passed the Senate, the bill was taken up by the House. In April Elihu Washburne warned that it would be wrong to believe that “the North will acquiesce in this great wrong.” Rather, the result will be “the formation of sectional parties,” and “there will never be peace in the country” until Congress reestablishes the Missouri Compromise line. By repealing the compromise, the South should expect the North to declare its compromises benefiting the South “inoperative and void” and to repeal them, in like fashion. In the future, the North might one day dominate Congress “in the majesty of its power and strength” and then commence breaking down “all the compromises” in just retaliation for the South’s broken faith. Washburne denied that he had been an “agitator, no factionalist, and not much of a politician.” But if “the extension of slavery is to be the ruling policy of this Government . . . then I shall become an ‘agitator.’” He added that “the greatest reforms and the greatest discoveries that the world has ever known” were owed to agitation. Galileo, Columbus, the Pilgrims, and “our revolutionary fathers” were all agitators. And more agitation was coming. The bill had “taken a deep hold of the public mind, and there is no power on earth that can control its workings.”25
“Mr. President, it is now nearly midnight,” Charles Sumner began, in a dramatic speech to the Senate, while the House of Representatives was voting on May 22–23, 1854. Conceding “the determination of the majority” to pass the Kansas-Nebraska bill, Sumner rose at that late hour, he said, to utter “a few words of earnest protest against the consummation of a great wrong.” He asked, without the Senate’s objection, to present remonstrances against the bill, some of which had been placed into his hand that day. No objections having been heard, Sumner proceeded to lay them before the Senate. The remonstrances came from a large number of New York citizens, the religious Society of Friends in Michigan, the Baptist clergy and laity from Michigan and Indiana, and “one hundred and twenty-five separate remonstrances, from clergymen of every Protestant denomination in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, constituting the six New England States.” At one time, some of the clergy, “forgetful of the traditions of other days,” had acquiesced in the slaveholders’ demands, but now the clergy of many denominations, “learned divines, eminent bishops, accomplished professors, and faithful pastors . . . at last unite.”26
“‘In the name of Almighty God, and in his presence,’ these remonstrants protest against the Nebraska bill,” Sumner announced. The clergy’s united interposition at this time was appropriate, he maintained, because, “believing in God as I profoundly do, I cannot doubt that the opening of an immense region to so great an enormity as Slavery is calculated to draw down upon our country His righteous judgments.” The passage of the bill at that dark hour was a signal moment in the life of the nation and invited divine intervention. Once accomplished, their deed made “all future compromises impossible” and placed “freedom and slavery face to face, and bids them grapple.” It was time for American clergy to step forward from the temple where they had nurtured and guarded American liberty and assert their spiritual authority.
Sir, from the first settlement of these shores, from those early days of struggle and privation—through the trials of the Revolution—the clergy have been associated, not only with the piety and the learning, but with the liberties of the country. For a long time, New England was governed by their prayers more than by any acts of the Legislature; and at a later day, their voices aided even the Declaration of Independence. The clergy of our time may speak, then, not only from their own virtues, but from the echoes which yet live in the pulpits of their fathers.
For myself, I desire to thank them for their generous interposition. They have already done much good in moving the country. They will not be idle. In the days of the Revolution, John Adams, yearning for Independence, said: “Let the pulpits thunder against oppression!” And the pulpits thundered. The time has come for them to thunder again.
At that moment, Senator James Mason of Virginia arose to object latently to the reception of the petitions. He cited the remonstrants’ “unchristian purposes” and “prostitution of their office.” The Northern clergy were “profaning their office, profaning the name of the Almighty” and were unworthy of association with Southern churchmen. The presiding officer, therefore, declined to accept the remonstrances. Sumner’s last task before the vote was to note that even men with spiritual authority were made to suffer the indignity of surrendering their liberty to the impious oligarchy. At another time, though Sumner did not say whether on earth or in the hereafter, Mason would repent that he had spoken so, in order “to impeach the right of clergymen to appear, by petition or remonstrance, at the bar of Congress.”27 Thus having invoked the watchful eye of Providence, Sumner gave up the floor, while the other branch of Congress sent the Kansas-Nebraska bill to the president’s desk for his signature.
The Founding of the Republican Party
“The Republican Party,” wrote George Boutwell, “was the child of events.”28 The final event that precipitated the formation of the party was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The party’s name denoted its fundamental purpose, to protect and strengthen republicanism, the model of government established by the American founding fathers. Unlike most political parties that exist within the compass of republican government, this party was not organized merely to advance a competing policy program; it was organized to defend republican government itself against revolutionaries within the nation. Northern political opponents, who differed on policy and partisan affiliations, but who were commonly devoted to republicanism, united to make common cause against the antirepublican threat.
They were a motley group. George Julian wrote that among them were “tariff men and free traders, conservative Whigs and radical Democrats, Know-Nothings and anti-Know-Nothings.”29 He said that the action of the Republicans was not “inspired by a creed, but an object,” which was this one point: “that the virgin soil of our Territories should be unpolluted by slavery, and that this crime against humanity, and plague of our politics, should be denationalized.” But Julian knew that where slavery existed, political society was “dominated by a formidable oligarchy of educated land-owners,” under whose dominion was a “large population of ignorant negroes and equally ignorant whites.”30 Hence, the men united against the threatened spread of slavery, despite their differing partisan creeds, because slavery upended republicanism. If slavery was restricted to a geographic corner of the nation, the oligarchy would be similarly restricted, while the rest of the nation would expand and grow on free soil, expanding republican political society. In that case, the power of the oligarchy relative to the power of the expanding republican portion of the nation would weaken. The oligarchy might be able to harass and annoy free society, but with diminishing power within the nation, the danger they posed to republicanism would likewise diminish. But slavery’s spread in like measure spread oligarchy and magnified the danger to republicanism. Therefore, the Republican Party was able to unite both the abolitionist humanitarian and the man indifferent to the suffering slave, because both the selfish and the selfless republican citizen could understand that their form of government that protected others’ liberty and their own liberty was under attack. Their single policy aim, to check the further spread of slavery in the territories, was the means by which they would protect their republicanism.
The party was unusual, because its sole reason for existing was to contend for the political regime model established by the American founding, and that regime model entailed the ultimate extirpation of slavery. As such, it was a fundamentally conservative party, counterrevolutionary in character. Its formation was made necessary because the dominant Democratic Party had first become a vehicle for political revolution, the destruction of American republicanism and the continued expansion, development, and final triumph of oligarchy in America. Samuel Pomeroy recapitulated, “The Democratic Party—in its early days the friend of freedom and the rights of man—became ultimately the ally of the slave power and the embodiment of its interests.”31
James Blaine dated Van Buren’s defeat in 1844 as the beginning of Calhoun’s total influence over the Democratic Party, but it “moved so rapidly and so far, that men in the North, who wished to remain in the ranks of the Democracy, were compelled to trample on the principles, and surrender the prejudices, of a lifetime.” In particular, Reconstruction Republicans who were former Democrats deplored the transformation of their party. John Hale had left the Democratic Party and successively joined the Liberty, Free Soil, and Republican Parties. He remembered Van Buren’s surprising demise at the 1844 convention, with the words, “I repeat but history when I say that the breath of slavery has made and unmade the public men of this country.” The old Democratic Party led by Andrew Jackson, said George Williams, had opposed “monopolies, class legislation, and the unjust and artificial distinctions of society.” But “Calhounism however found its way into the party and worked like poison. Contrary to the teachings of the Fathers that Slavery was a political, social and moral evil, it came to teach the ethics of Calhoun that Slavery was a political, social and moral blessing.” Charles Van Wyck professed, “Slavery is a mildew and blight” that the national government should restrain. He then asked, did not that profession of his principles “contain the recorded principles of the Democratic Party . . . from the adoption of the Constitution down to 1847?” But “allegiance to slavery propagandism” had become “the test of good fellowship” in the party. The new party leaders were determined “to crucify the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe,” and because he, Van Wyck, refused to declare the enactments of the fathers “unjust, unconstitutional, and with abolition tendencies,” he was marked out as a party apostate. His principles, he maintained, were the original principles of the Democratic Party, and so, “with many Democrats throughout the Union, I could no longer worship the divinity when the spirit had fled.” James Doolittle said, “I walked the deck of the Democratic ship as long as it bore the Democratic flag,” but when “Calhounism—which declared that the basis of republican institutions was founded upon slavery . . . became its motto, I did not follow that flag any longer.” The Democratic Party had substituted “Calhounism for republicanism, slavery for freedom, and the doctrines of Mr. Calhoun for the doctrines of Mr. Jefferson.”32
However much Calhoun and his followers tried to clothe constitutional doctrines, moral principles, and political policies in the political and legal language of the American Republic, the Republicans did not mistake its misleading outward form for its inner substance. All protestations to the contrary, they saw that Calhoun’s philosophy rebelled against the theory and principles of the American founders. Calhounism supplied a constitutional, political, and moral justification for the ruling class in the South and was inherently hostile to the republican political societies in the North. Under the influence of Calhounism, the Democratic Party was also becoming sectional.
Following the Compromise of 1850, Northerners had not yet cast off their allegiances to the two national parties to form one dominant party in their section. Until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Henry Winter Davis said, there was no “bond of Union” among Northerners, “no one pervading and common interest so controlling as to concentrate its power and dictate its policy.” While some Northern antislavery Democrats and Whigs had defected to the sectional Liberty and Free Soil Parties, the intersectional Whig and Democratic Parties remained intact. Northern political affiliations were divided. Southern leaders were bonded together by their interest in slavery, and this allowed the South “to impose on the divided North its policy and views.”33
The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act revealed the tightening alignment of the Democratic Party, the leaders of the Southern section, and Calhounism. James Blaine noted that almost all Southern Whigs in Congress voted with the Southern Democrats for the passage of the act, which ended the Whig Party in the South and doomed the Whig Party as a national organization. “Northern men,” Davis said, were “deserted by southern Whigs,” who rallied to their Southern brethren in the Democratic Party. The unity of Southern leaders behind the bill drove Northerners together. Southern leaders, Davis said, had “created a North.” Northerners united “in the negative interests of repelling the intrusion of slavery on its borders. It never united for that defensive purpose till the South united to invade the domain secured to it by the Missouri Compromise.”34 To Northern citizens who understood what was happening, compromise was thenceforth impossible, as Charles Sumner said on the night of the act’s passage. Further compromise meant surrendering the fathers’ republicanism and allowing Southern statesmen to complete their revolutionary project.
Northerners were challenged to counterorganize a more effective defense of their republicanism, and the existing parties were deemed inadequate to the crisis. Massive party dealignment in the North was virtually instantaneous with the act’s passage. Northerners ignored the lead of their national parties and fused with each other in opposition to the policy manifest in the Nebraska bill. In his Recollections, published in 1895, John Sherman wrote, “It is difficult, at this distance of time, to describe the effect of the act of 1854 upon popular opinion in the northern states.” In his state of Ohio, the people were overwhelmingly opposed to the repeal of the Missouri line, and supporters of the bill were eventually turned out of office. “Party lines were obliterated. In every congressional district a fusion was formed of Democrats, Whigs and Free Soilers, and candidates for Congress were nominated solely upon the issues made by the Kansas and Nebraska bill.” By February 1855, less than one year after the enactment of the bill, Richard Yates countered the disbelieving claim of Representative Alexander Stephens of Georgia, that the recent elections constituted “no test of the popular sentiment of the free States” on “the Nebraska bill.” Indeed, Yates said, “In the whole history of legislation, from the first dawnings of our national existence down to the present time, no public measure ever met with such withering and blasting popular condemnation as did the Nebraska bill, and its authors and abettors.” He cited election returns in Ohio, New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Iowa and mentioned other states where new governors and legislators were chosen, and “almost the only question discussed in all these elections was the Nebraska bill. . . . The old questions of tariff and internal improvement were lost sight of.”35
Many who later served in Congress as Republicans during Reconstruction had participated in shaping the new party from the existing parties’ disaffected elements, all united in opposition to the Nebraska bill. In his Congressional Reminiscences, John Wentworth recorded evidence of meetings that he had attended around the Capitol immediately before and after the passage of the act of 1854, where antislavery Whigs and Democrats began to discuss the necessity of forming a new party, called “Republican.”36
The first state to organize a Republican Party was Michigan, on July 6, 1854, in Jackson.37 Future Reconstruction senator Jacob Howard served as the convention’s chairman of the Committee on Resolutions and personally drafted them.38 His committee presented a platform that recited the condemnations of slavery by “the Fathers of the Republic,” affirmed the incompatibility of slavery with the principles of republicanism, affirmed the constitutional right of Congress to legislate against slavery in the territories, declared themselves “independent of all former party ties,” denounced the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, demanded the repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, and announced that they were thenceforth “postponing and suspending all differences with regard to political economy or administrative policy” in order to “act cordially and faithfully in unison.” Having declared a policy “truce,” Howard’s platform identified the mission of their new party with something beyond their policy aims, that is, with the political regime established by their republican fathers, and the platform identified their party’s opponent with a different form of political regime: “Resolved, That in view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government, and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as REPUBLICANS until the contest be terminated.”39
Among the participants at the 1854 Michigan convention were future Reconstruction Republican representatives Fernando C. Beamen and Austin Blair as well as Senator Zachariah Chandler.40 Jacob Howard later served on the Senate Judiciary Committee that proposed the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and on the Joint Committee on Reconstruction that proposed the Fourteenth Amendment.41 The report of his Reconstruction Committee blamed slavery for “building up a ruling and dominant class” that “had produced a spirit of oligarchy adverse to republican institutions, which finally inaugurated civil war.”42 The theme shared by the 1866 report and the 1854 platform is the antebellum development of revolutionary aristocracy or oligarchy, coextensive with slavery, and the consequent interregime conflict between the oligarchy and republicanism.
Joseph P. Smith’s history of the Ohio Republican Party called future Reconstruction Republican representative William Lawrence “the father, or at least one of the fathers of the organization” in that state. Immediately after the Nebraska bill was reported in the U.S. Senate, Lawrence, then a state senator, delivered a speech at a public meeting in Columbus, which he claimed to be “probably the first in the country, of citizens, irrespective of political party views, to denounce the proposed repeal of the Missouri compromise.” Lawrence continued to organize and speak against the bill around the state, through its final enactment in May. As chairman of the anti-Nebraska convention’s Committee on Permanent Organization, he then participated in a public call for “a State convention of citizens of all previous parties opposed to the repeal of the Missouri compromise,” scheduled for July 13, 1854, one week after the Michigan convention.43 The call expressed the hope that
the delegates will be appointed in each county from all political parties; for whatever “live” issues there may be between the two great parties which divide the State, there is one question made by Southern slaveholders at this momentous crisis as common to all as the free air of heaven. It is whether this Republic and its free institutions shall be ruled by, and its great mission of freedom be sunk into, an oligarchy of slaveholders and the extension of slavery and slave power. Can any Northern man of any party hesitate upon such a question, or refuse to aid in reclaiming our free institutions from the domination of slaveholders; in purifying Northern representation in Congress from all pliant tools of Southern ambition; in breaking the chain of Southern measures now forging to bind this Republic to the car of slavery?44
Again, the Ohio call, like the Michigan platform, frames the issue as an interregime conflict between oligarchy and republicanism, and it was Lawrence who later moved to adopt the name “Republican” for their new party.45 Among those who participated in forming the Ohio state party were future Reconstruction Republican senator John Sherman, the chairman of the first state convention; Senator Benjamin Wade; and Representatives James Ashley, John Bingham, Ralph Buckland, Ephraim Eckley, James Hubbell, Rufus Spalding, and William B. Allison (whose future congressional district would be in Iowa).46
A call for an anti-Nebraska convention in Madison, Wisconsin, to be held on the same day as the Ohio convention, July 13, appealed to “all men opposed to the repeal of the Missouri compromise, the extension of slavery, and the rule of the slave power.” The objects were “to prevent the future encroachments of the slave power, to repeal all compromises in favor of slavery, and to establish the principle of freedom as the rule of the State and National governments.” The times called “for the union of all free men for the sake of freedom. There is but one alternative. We must unite and be free, or divide and be enslaved by the praetorian bands of the slaveholders and their Nebraska allies.”47 The call recognized that the spread of chattel slavery brought political slavery as well—“the rule of the slave power.” If they did not join together and resist the spread of chattel slavery, they themselves would be enslaved. Unity among free men, regardless of prior partisan affiliation, was necessary.
The first resolution of the Wisconsin convention recognized that the Kansas-Nebraska Act ended the possibility of compromise. There was no more middle ground between “freedom or slavery,” and the government would eventually be “devoted to one or the other.” The second resolution declared that, “in the defense of freedom,” they would “be known as Republicans,” and they pledged themselves to “bring the administration of the government back to the control of first principles.”48 Once again, the “Republican” appellation for the state party aligned with their mission—to restore and protect the republican character of the national government, which they deemed to be directly threatened.
At the time of the Wisconsin convention, future Reconstruction Republican representative Cadwallader Washburn had been engaged in managing his business holdings, but, agreeing with the convention’s platform, he accepted a nomination to run for Congress as a Republican and won office that fall, in 1854.49 Future Reconstruction Republican senators James Doolittle and Timothy Howe were state judges in 1854, and the Wisconsin state constitution prohibited judges from standing for elective office. Both took an interest in the anti-Nebraska political activity. When pressed by a newspaperman, Judge Howe strongly endorsed the nascent Republican Party, condemned the Nebraska bill as “a piece of high-handed and unblushing villainy,” and repeated the Wisconsin convention’s call for men to unite in a “higher and holier mission.” Within a year of the Wisconsin convention, Howe resigned his position on the bench and entered politics.50 Doolittle avoided the anti-Nebraska organizing because he believed it would be improper for a sitting judge to engage in politics, but soon he too resigned his judgeship, in March 1856. Five months later, he launched his political career as a Republican and became “one of the enthusiastic founders” of the Wisconsin organization.51
On July 20, 1854, two weeks after the Michigan convention and one week after the Ohio and Wisconsin conventions, Massachusetts held an anti-Nebraska convention. The very first resolution reported by the Committee on Resolutions read: “Resolved, That the unquestionable existence of a settled purpose, on the part of the Slave power, to convert the Republic which our fathers founded on principles of justice and liberty, into a slaveholding despotism, whose vital and animating spirit shall be the preservation, propagation and perpetuation of slavery, calls for the immediate union of all true men into a party which shall make the question of Freedom paramount to all other political questions.”52
Again, the Massachusetts resolution frames the issue as an interregime conflict, warning of the slaveholders’ intention “to convert the Republic which our fathers founded” into a despotic political regime, coextensive with slavery. The resolution appeals to Massachusetts men to subordinate “all other political questions” to the paramount question, the survival of republicanism. Future Reconstruction Republican senator Henry Wilson attended that convention and proposed the second resolution: that “we hereby form ourselves into the Republican Party of Massachusetts.” At the subsequent Republican State Convention of Massachusetts, the first reported resolution stated that “the Republican Party . . . may justly claim to be the true National and Democratic party,” thereby indirectly denouncing the formally named Democratic Party as undemocratic. The reason given by the resolution is that the Republican Party, “disregarding the aristocratic, hereditary distinction of birth and color[,] maintains the right of all men to freedom and equality before the law,” whereas the Democratic Party heeded aristocratic distinction and did not maintain the right of equality before the law.53
A week after the bill was enacted in May, Charles Sumner responded to an inquiry from a Massachusetts political committee about the future. He explained the necessity of forming a new political party. Neither the Whig nor the Democratic Party was competent to defend liberty, because each party depended upon its “slaveholding wings.” The Northern portion of each party was forced to yield “all that is dear to it,” and while Northerners “vainly” considered themselves part of a national party, their membership in each slaveholder-controlled national party helped to install “the sectional power of Slavery in the National Government.” The result of this, Sumner said, at the Republican State Convention of Massachusetts, four months later, was that an “Oligarchy of Slaveholders” was “now ruling the Republic.” Addressing the question “What are our political duties here in Massachusetts at the present time?” Sumner answered, “this Oligarchy which, at every political hazard, we must oppose, until it is overthrown.” To achieve that great task, the North could no longer afford to dilute its strength or its principles in the two major parties. They had to form a new antislavery, antioligarchy political party that would mass the strength and devotion of the free states for republicanism. Thus, Sumner appealed to “the true-hearted, magnanimous citizens ready to place Freedom above Party, and their Country above Politicians,” and asked them to “leave old parties.” In his letter to the Massachusetts committee, he urged them, “Abandon old party ties; forget old party names; let by-gones be by-gones; and for the sake of Liberty, and to secure the general welfare, now unite against the Despotism of Slavery, and in this union let past differences disappear.” Policy differences had to be set aside in order to defend the political regime from internal threat. To great applause at the convention, Sumner announced, “As REPUBLICANS, we go forth to encounter the Oligarchs of Slavery.” On the campaign trail for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, Sumner explained how the Southern statesmen controlled the national government and how they were actively repurposing its institutions and changing its form for oligarchy. Then he restated the purpose of the Republican Party: to “expel the Slave Oligarchy from all its seats of National power, driving it back within the states.”54 Here again Sumner framed the formation and aims of the Republican Party in opposition to an attempt to convert the American Republic into an oligarchy resembling the model of the Southern states.
In some free states, the organization of the state parties was halting, and their platforms were less comprehensive. For example, Indiana’s republican organization in 1854 was at first denominated the “People’s Party,” and its platform, George Julian wrote, “was narrow and equivocal.” But the generally expressed mission of the movement in the free states was to join together, regardless of prior political affiliation, for the protection of American republicanism against antirepublicanism, coextensive with slavery. The first platform of the national Republican Party, published in 1856, reflects this mission. Its preamble referred to the call for the national Republican convention, addressed to the American people, “without regard to past political differences or divisions,” who were “opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise” and “to the extension of slavery into free territory” and “in favor of . . . restoring the action of the Federal Government to the principles of Washington and Jefferson.”55
The first resolution affirms that “the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence” are the same principles “embodied in the Federal Constitution.” Calhoun and his followers had denounced the principles of the Declaration and praised the Constitution, at least their version of the Constitution, as they re-created it through reinterpretation, divested of the principles of the Declaration. But the Republican platform recognized that the plan for government in the Constitution was faithful to the principles of the Declaration and ought to be read that way. The resolution declares that the maintenance of those principles “is essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions.” Since the principles of the Declaration constituted the moral foundation of American republicanism, the removal of that foundation doomed American republicanism.
The second resolution claims the founding fathers’ legacy for their party. Both the “republican fathers” and the party were pledged to upholding the natural rights recognized by the Declaration and for which government under the Constitution was formed. The fathers had carried out that pledge by abolishing slavery in all parts of the national territory and by prohibiting the deprivation of natural rights in their Constitution. Therefore, the Republican Party acknowledged the duty to resist the spread of slavery within the exclusive jurisdiction of national government, because slavery stripped away those natural rights promulgated by the republican fathers’ Declaration and protected by the republican fathers’ Constitution:
That with our republican fathers we hold it to be a self-evident truth that all men are endowed with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons within its exclusive jurisdiction; that as our republican fathers, when they had abolished slavery in all our national territory, ordained that no person should be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, it becomes our duty to maintain this provision of the Constitution against all attempts to violate it for the purpose of establishing slavery in any Territory of the United States, by positive legislation, prohibiting its existence or extension therein.
The Struggle for the National Government Commences
The successful fusion of Northerners of all parties against the Nebraska bill in the elections of 1854 marked an unprecedented moment in American history. Although the political parties did indeed differ on policy questions, as they always had, the ultimate issue that henceforth divided them was not policy merely. The subsequent formation of the national Republican Party and its state syndicates from 1854 to 1856 formally reorganized the major party movements in the United States, each aligned to two different political regimes. Each of the two major political organizations of the nation was coalescing around a different form of political regime concentrated in a different section of the nation, demarcated by the presence or absence of slavery. The Democratic Party advanced the interests of the Southern statesmen, who constituted the ruling power in the slave states and advanced the principles of oligarchy. The Republican Party contended for the interests of the free-state people, who constituted the ruling power in their section and advanced the principles of republicanism. Opposite clusters of geography, regime principles, and political organizations were uniting, arrayed against the other. These simultaneous movements would continue to clash and build strength, attracting all the elements of the respective political societies to their opposing poles, until they were engaged in interregime war.
The movement toward the alignment of the parties, opposing sections, and opposing forms of political regimes was fixed when the Republican Party rose in the North. The Whig Party was dead. “It perished, at last, in the vain effort to outdo its rival in the work of abasing itself at the feet of the slave oligarchy,” wrote Julian, and by 1856 the Republican Party had absorbed Northern Whigs.56 The Northern Democracy remained formidable through the 1850s, but nevertheless could not prevent the sectional alignment of parties and regimes and, instead, became subject to the forces of that alignment. The strength of the Northern Democracy weakened as the Southern wing forced its Northern wing to align with Southern oligarchy.
The Republicans considered the Northern Democracy to be subordinate to the Southern wing. Delivering an address in Boston on the state of the nation in 1857, Representative Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts maintained that the parties were then sectional, despite the persisting strength of the Northern Democracy. As a result of the anti-Nebraska bill fever in the North in 1854, one year later “the Representatives of the people of the North found themselves arrayed in the House of Representatives of the United States, against the party, South and North, which had supported the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.”57 Banks notably contrasted the “Representatives of the people of the North” and Northern Democrats who remained with their party.
The entrance of these representatives of the Northern people in Congress marked “the first time that parties had been thus formed,” he continued. Battles over slavery had occurred before in Congress, and they did array the sections against each other, but these battles were bipartisan affairs and did not break up the major parties. The rise of the Republican Party altered the character of the party system, and that was unprecedented. The formation of a Northern party, Banks explained, “was a natural result of the attempt on the part of the late Administration to break down all barriers, executive, legislative, and judicial, which looked to the limitation of slavery by the General Government.” Therefore, the survival of the Northern Democracy depended upon its continued participation in the attempt to break down those barriers to slavery, which the Southern statesmen favored and the Republican Party opposed. To survive, the Northern wing of the Democratic Party had to become more Southern. As it did so, many Northern Democrats took flight to the Republican Party in a series of emigrations that Julian denominated the “Democratic hegira.”58
But many other Northern Democrats steadfastly remained in their party, despite its instrumentality in advancing the interests of Southern statesmen. Senator Stephen Douglas, the leader of the Northern Democracy, James Blaine wrote, went “far with the pro-slavery men” and “had borne great burdens in their interest.” Douglas’s “adhesion to Southern interests,” Henry Wilson wrote, lasted until he could see that if he continued to acquiesce to the pressure of new Southern demands, he “could not carry Illinois.” Eventually, the drift of the two wings of the party toward their opposite poles forced him to choose sides. Before two years had passed since the first Republican Party National Convention, Douglas began to act in concert with the Republicans.59 Finally, large waves of disaffected Northern Democrats who remained loyal to Douglas flowed into the Republican Party.60
John Logan, a Republican representative from Illinois, had been a Douglas Democrat until the war and was well positioned to understand the motives of Democrats, North and South. He could explain why many Northern Democrats had held back from the Republican banner. The answer was simply stated by Douglas: “‘So long as there was hope for a peaceful solution,’” Logan quoted Douglas to have said, he had “‘prayed and implored for Compromise.’”61 For the sake of preserving the Union, Douglas allowed himself to be used by oligarchic interests.
The determination of these Northern Democrats to preserve the Union did not necessarily mean that they lacked sound republican or antislavery principles. For example, Representative Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts was a Radical Republican during Reconstruction but a Douglas Democrat before the war. In his autobiography he professed his lifelong hostility to slavery and precisely stated his republican principles: “that the full and only end of government is to care for the people in their rights and liberties, and that they have the right and privilege to call on either the State, or the United States, or both, to protect them in equality of powers, equality of rights, equality of privileges, and equality of burdens under the law, by carefully and energetically enforced provisions of equal laws justly applicable to every citizen.” These tenets, he claimed, “tinged, if not permeated every public aim of my life,” and, notably, were hostile to minority rule and the minority’s proscription of others’ rights and liberties. Yet before the war in which he fought as a general officer in the Union army, Butler remained a leading Northern Democrat, was a leader of the Democratic conventions of 1860, and that year alternately supported two Southern Democrats, James Guthrie of Kentucky and even Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, for the American presidency. In preferring Guthrie, Butler explained that “he looked upon the preservation of the Union as infinitely beyond any question in regard to slavery.”62 Butler did hold antislavery and republican principles, but unionism compelled him, he believed, to suppress them. Unionism was one factor that explained why some Northern Democrats preserved their fellowship with the national party and continued to accommodate the demands of the Southern statesmen through the end of the 1850s.
Logan also quoted his friend Senator James McDougall of California, another antebellum Douglas Democrat, who spoke freely about the Southerners in his party after the war began. He had also refrained from breaking his party ties, despite his private resistance to the outrageous demands of Southerners in his party. Supporting the Union war effort and repenting of his party fellowship with traitors, McDougall told the Senate that, “having been accepted and received as a Democrat of the old school from the olden time, and having fast Southern Sympathies, I did know all about them. . . . I know that secession was a thing determined upon. . . . I was advised of and understood the whole programme, knew how it was to be done in details.” McDougall had “made war” upon the secessionist conspirators in private. But once secession had come, McDougall’s unionism turned him sharply against them in public, and he wished to divulge all that he knew from his close association with them to the Senate. Looking back, he said that in fact, the nation had been “engaged in a war of opinion . . . since 1838. . . . There has been a systematic organized war against the Institutions established by our fathers, since 1832. This is known of all men who have read carefully the history of our Country. If I had the leisure, or had consulted the authorities, I would give it year by year, and date by date, from that time until the present, how men adversary to our Republican Institutions have been organizing War against us, because they did not approve of our Republican Institutions.”63
This credible testimony invoked by Logan substantiated the assessment of the Republican Party founders. They were correct in their belief that the Democratic Party was a vehicle for the destruction of republicanism, which called for an organized defense. The organization of the Republican Party was imbued with that purpose. The two parties were aligned with republicanism and oligarchy, respectively. But unionism delayed many Northern Democrats, like McDougall, Douglas, Butler, and Logan, from joining that defense.
Another factor accounting for the extenuation of the Northern Democracy was that some Northerners had been misled. They did not understand what the intentions of the Southern statesmen were, as McDougall understood them. The oligarchy successfully employed secrecy and deception to advance their revolution under the noses of Northerners and even gained Northern Democrats’ unwitting cooperation. During the war, Horace Maynard upbraided “the utter falsehood” of the Southern statesmen who had controlled the Democratic Party and who then concocted and controlled “the thing they call the Southern Confederacy.” He attacked their “falsehood in recounting the past, falsehood in expounding the present, and falsehood in prognosticating the future.” Maynard revealed that a long-serving U.S. representative from Virginia had confided in him that secession “was nothing but the effect of a monstrous system of lying.”64 Southern statesmen’s principled arguments about the founding fathers, the Constitution, and republicanism amounted to a Machiavellian ruse. They cleverly invoked the concepts, traditions, and language venerated by republican America in order to coax Northern assent for their public measures, which advanced their hidden oligarchic aims, while covering up their true antirepublican character.
These Southern statesmen who had controlled the Democratic Party, Maynard claimed, were “not as numerous, in point of fact, as the figures on a chess-board.” Their partnership “is eminently a close corporation, and was so intended to be.” They constituted a “lordly and insolent oligarchy” that wielded “absolute authority over ‘the South.’” To support his revelations, Maynard pointed to his loyal colleagues in the House that day: “There are those within the reach of my voice, who also knew them, and can testify to their utter perfidy; who have been the victims of their want of principle, and whose self-respect has suffered from their insolent and overbearing demeanor.”
Men like Maynard, who had lived close to them and had felt their sting, could understand them more easily than outsiders. Without careful study and reflection, Americans who were not then living next to them, like Maynard, could not fully understand the oligarchy, because “they, like a certain school of ancient philosophers, had two sets of principles or doctrines, an exoteric and an esoteric—one for outsiders, the other for themselves.” To outsiders, they mastered the art of disingenuously discoursing on “‘Democratic principles’ for the Democratic party.” Behind those exoteric doctrines, crafted for Democratic consumption but serving the oligarchy’s political advantage, lurked their esoteric doctrines. In the meantime, the oligarchy’s secrecy and unity helped them exploit and control gullible Northerners:
No Northern man was ever admitted to their confidence, and no Southern man, unless it became necessary to keep up their numbers; and then not until he was thoroughly known by them, and known to be thoroughly corrupt. Some Northern men and many Southern men were, after a fashion, petted and patronized by them, as a gentleman throws from his table a bone or a choice bit to a favorite dog; and they imagined they were conferring a great favor thereby, which could be requited only by the abject servility of the dog. To hesitate, to doubt, to hold back, to stop, was to call down a storm of wrath that few men had the nerve to encounter, and still fewer the strength to withstand. Not only in the political circles, but in social life, their rule was inexorable, their tyranny absolute.
Another factor was a genuine disposition by some in the Northern Democracy to embrace the oligarchic cause of the South. These Democrats were the Southern oligarchy’s fifth column in the North. Logan quoted loyal Tennessee senator Andrew Johnson, whose close proximity to the ruling oligarchy gave him a unique perspective on them and their Northern allies. Johnson explained to the Senate that “there is a Party in the South, with associates in the North . . . , that have become tired of Free Government” and had pursued “a deliberate design for years to change the nature and character and genius of this Government.” “They raise an outcry against ‘Coercion,’ that they may paralyze the Government, cripple the exercise of the great powers with which it was invested, finally to change its form and subject us to a Southern despotism. Do we not know it to be so? Why disguise this great truth? Do we not know that they have been anxious for a change of Government for years?”65
“Coercion” was the allegedly unconstitutional exertion by the federal government to arrest secession, and the cry was raised to stay the hand of the national government. This was Calhoun’s theory of state sovereignty in action, which protected the Southern revolution against interference from the government.
Despite Northern Democrats’ malingering in the 1850s, the Republican Party rapidly rose and confronted the Southern oligarchy, showing that they understood their antagonists sufficiently well. Many in the North could not be so deceived, nor would they so submit to servile obedience, nor could they be so induced to compromise to preserve the Union, for the high price of selling out their fathers’ republicanism. They posed a barrier to the oligarchy’s revolutionary project. Faced off against each other, the republican North and the Southern oligarchy contested for control of the nation.
The Republicans frequently alluded to Southern statesmen’s prior control of the national government. James Blaine acknowledged Webster’s accounting in 1850, when he calculated that since the establishment of the national government, the South had received “three-fourths of the places of honor and emolument.”66 But what ultimately mattered was the character of the Southern statesmen who held office. It mattered whether Southern statesmen like James Madison or, alternatively, John C. Calhoun administered the government. If the slaveholders had administered the government consistent with the principles of republicanism, as the slaveholding abolitionists from the South previously did, it logically followed that unified political development of the nation toward a purer form of republican government, entailing universal emancipation, would have been a more likely prospect. Crisis, sectionalism, disunion, and division might have been averted. But because the South and its statesmen had changed and embraced new political principles at war with the principles of the American founding, their strong presence in the offices gave them the opportunity to administer the governing institutions in the interest of slavery and to reshape and repurpose those institutions, consistent with oligarchic principle. Therefore, control of the national government by the free or slave section would determine whether the nation would further develop in a republican direction, as established by the founders or, alternatively, would transform itself into an oligarchy.
George Boutwell noted that the terms of the “contest for supremacy” of the national government were settled after 1820. The census of that year foretold the South’s inevitable loss of the House of Representatives, even granting the enumeration of three-fifths slaves in the South for the purposes of apportioning representation. It was essential that Southern statesmen retain control of the Senate, and to control the Senate they needed at least to maintain an equilibrium of slave states, which they did maintain until 1850. As long as Southern senators acted together, which they did, Blaine explained, their share of Senate votes could defeat any measure obnoxious to them—bills, treaties, or nominations of candidates to the federal judiciary, diplomatic corps, or cabinet. With the power to defeat, they gained the power to recommend and dictate terms.67
From 1820 to 1850, wrote Boutwell, Southern statesmen so skillfully used their advantage that, although they were a minority, the South “subjected the political organizations of the country to its will, and reduced an entire generation of statesmen to a condition of moral and political servitude.” Because the slaveholders acted as a unit, they “usually dictated the candidates of each party,” and in presidential elections both the Whig and the Democratic Parties “were rival bidders for southern support. The presidency was sold in the market.” Aside from the possible exception of the 1840 election of William Henry Harrison, Southern statesmen determined the president “in every contest from 1828 to 1856 inclusive.” Boutwell illustrated how powerful Southern statesmen’s national influence was, in the case of the Nullification Crisis. At bottom, nullification was “a means by which the slave-holders attempted to assert their power in the government of the country.” Although President Jackson had crushed the nullifiers’ attempt to dictate federal law in 1832, “their policy, however, was not changed,” and they were never punished. “Indeed,” Boutwell continued, “the leaders in the treasonable scheme of nullification, including Mr. Calhoun, were soon restored to public confidence and advanced to new places of trust and power.”68
The admission of California as a free state in 1850 upset the equilibrium of slave- and free-state representation in the Senate, but the repeal of the Missouri Compromise opened the prospect of adding as many more new slave states and senators as the South could arrange by their united action. Although the people in the territories were supposed to settle the slave question under the Kansas-Nebraska Act, it was early noticed that the slaveholders would gain an upper hand in determining the answer. During the 1854 Nebraska bill debates, Elihu Washburne pointed out that prior to a popular vote, slaveholders could “first go in there with their slaves; and being first on the ground, they will have a controlling influence in the election of a Territorial Legislature, which would fix the character of the Laws.” Further, the party that controlled the national government could defeat a popular vote for a slavery prohibition in the territories. Washburne asked:
But suppose a Legislature should be elected which would pass a law to exclude slavery, would not such a law be likely to meet with a veto from a good Nebraska Democrat, appointed Governor by this Administration, which veto would prevent the bill from becoming a law . . . ? . . . In case such a law should be passed, would you not be likely to have some good Nebraska Democrats as Judges, who might be disposed to carry out the doctrine that I have heard so often advanced, that the Territorial Legislature would have no constitutional right to pass any law excluding slavery from the Territory? I tell you, sir, if you let slaves once go in there you will never get them out.69
Hence, whichever party could successfully install its version of constitutional interpretation on slavery in the federal judiciary, and could control nominations for the executive office, that party would influence the free or slave status of future states admitted to the Union. In turn, the balance of power in the Senate, and even the House, would shift in favor of the party that controlled the national government, further augmenting its strength. In short, the contest for the slave or free status of the territories and the contest for control of the national governing institutions were parallel struggles that would determine, as Washburne later said, whether the nation would be confirmed a “Union of republican States” or transform into “a Confederation of oligarchies.”70
When the Thirty-Fourth Congress met in December 1855, the representatives who took their seats were actually representatives from the two antagonistic political regimes, organized for political battle. The inchoate Republican Party commanded a bare plural majority in the House and was a minority, seventeen Republicans to forty-three Democrats, in the Senate. Their strength thus arrayed, John Sherman wrote, the party “was about to engage in a political contest for the administration of the government.” Sherman understood the nature of the contest. In that Congress the name denoting the opposing party, the Democratic Party was “a misnomer. The word ‘Democracy,’ from which it is derived, means a government of the people, but the controlling power of the Democratic party resided in the southern states, where a large portion of the people were slaves, and the ruling class were slaveholders, and the name was not applicable to such a people.” Despite their antirepublican character, the Democrats had an advantage. The Republicans “had to contest with an adverse Executive and Supreme Court, with a well-organized party in possession of all the patronage of the government, in absolute control of the slaveholding states, and supported by strong minorities in each of the free states.”71
An indication that the struggle in Congress concerned fundamental things, sharply divergent principles regarding the nature of good government itself, was that congressmen could barely talk to each other. In those days, it was becoming increasingly difficult for Northern and Southern men in Washington to demonstrate intellectual sympathy for their political opponents’ point of view or to maintain cordial relations. James Blaine wrote that the Southern “point of view was so radically different from that held by a large number of Northern people that it left no common ground for action,—scarcely, indeed, an opportunity for reasoning together.” John Sherman remembered, “The sincere friendship that often exists between political adversaries in public life were not possible during this period. Social lines were drawn on sectional lines, and in the north party lines became hostile lines.” This led to “unjust criticism” and caused the criticized man “to regard his political adversaries as enemies to their country and disturbers of the public peace.” From a philosophical distance, Sherman confessed that he, too, held strong prejudices during that period. Amicable relations were suspended because organized interregime conflict had commenced. Both sides had become fully aware that they were contending for their most dearly held things, and in that contest they were attempting to wipe out their opponents’ most dearly held things—their different ways of life and the fundamental principles by which they lived. There could be only one victor in such a contest; the other would be left to rue an irreplaceable, lost cause—all that made them feel at home in the world. These are the stakes in a struggle over the fundamental form of a political regime.
This social self-segregation in national councils was invented and promoted by the founding father of the oligarchic revolution, John C. Calhoun. John Wentworth remembered that Calhoun “deemed it his duty to define the rules which would govern his conduct with anti-slavery men. If one of them asked him a civil question, he should give him a civil answer, and nothing more. He should never originate a conversation with one of them unless in the line of unavoidable business. If one offered to him his hand, he should take it. But he should never offer his hand to one. With this idea of Mr. Calhoun, I presume, originated at the South what is called social ostracism.”72
When Wentworth was a Democrat and spoke warmly in favor of the annexation of Texas, “I received a great many hearty shakes from the hand of Mr. Calhoun. But when I became an advocate of the freedom of the Mexican acquisition, I received only those shakes which I went after, knowing the terms.”73 Calhoun had created a new code of friendship for his followers. Friendship was earned by serving the interests of the Southern statesmen. Others were shunned, though they were colleagues in the government and fellow citizens. This social decree prevented the kind of intellectual intercourse with opponents that might arrest Calhoun’s propagation of new revolutionary principles. Calhoun’s rules of conduct prevented sympathetic private discussion in which the principled differences between his followers and their opponents might be brooked. In this detail also, Calhoun could be seen cultivating the revolutionary seeds that ripened in the 1850s.
The primary battle fought in and out of the Thirty-Fourth Congress was over Kansas. The Republicans’ determination “to make Kansas a free State,” Henry Wilson wrote, “was a deliberate and successful stand made by the friends of freedom against the aggressions of the Slave Power.” The Southern statesmen were likewise determined to make Kansas a slave state. The battle “foretokened a fearful contest, fierce encounters, and bloody strifes.” Neither side “fully comprehended the magnitude and violence of the struggle on which they were entering.” Once the struggle began, Wilson continued, “there seemed to be no other alternative but to advance till the superior force or tact of the one compelled the other to desist.”74 Wilson’s personal reflections also underscore the unique nature of their conflict. Beginning with the battle over Kansas, each side saw no alternative but to fight on, despite their uncertainty of the future costs. This indicated that both sides knew that they were both fighting for self-preservation. At stake were two radically opposed national destinies.
Everyone saw, as George Boutwell wrote, that as a result of the new territorial policy, “the supporters of slavery and the devotees of freedom were invited to a contest of arms for the adjustment of a question which might and should have been settled by Congress.”75 Both sides aided emigration to Kansas, to stake their claim for freedom or slavery, and violence erupted.76 By displacing the interregime political conflict from the national capital to Kansas, Congress, or at least the Democratic supporters of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had inaugurated the first phase of interregime war. Before the Thirty-Fourth Congress met, Sherman recounted, they had already received “reports in the newspapers of gross frauds at pretended elections of rival legislatures, of murder and other crimes, in short, of actual civil war in Kansas.” The interregime conflict even invaded journalism. Sherman acknowledged that the newspaper accounts they received “were contradictory.”77
Subsequently, regime forces clashed within and without the government, struggling for domination. The influence of the executive branch in Kansas affairs was quickly felt. President Franklin Pierce, a Democrat, recommended an appropriation to support a violent proslavery mob from Missouri styling itself the legislature of Kansas. Republicans sensed that the president had requested the appropriation so that he could throw the military onto the scales in favor of slavery, despite the fraudulence, which John Sherman knew in detail, as a member of the Kansas Investigating Committee in the House of Representatives.78 The territorial governor sent a memorial to the House of Representatives documenting electoral abuses by the Missouri proslavery “border ruffians.” President Pierce instead blamed abolitionist agitation for the disturbances in Kansas and appointed a new territorial governor who began his office by proclaiming his proslavery sympathies at a center of border ruffianism in Missouri.79 By 1856 the majority report of the Kansas Investigating Committee documenting the Kansas outrages was widely circulated. Sherman spoke forcefully in Congress against Southern support of the pro-slavery violence and election frauds and proposed and won adoption of an amendment to a military appropriations bill, prohibiting the president from deploying the army in Kansas. Showing his hand, the president convened both houses of Congress, asking for a repeal of the amendment. Publicity of these events, and Representative Preston Brooks’s near assassination of Charles Sumner in the Senate for his “Crime against Kansas” speech, Sherman wrote, “aroused public sentiment in the north.”80
To the Republicans, Brooks’s assault on Sumner in the Senate chamber in May 1856 and the proslavery violence in Kansas were both open attacks on republican institutions and manifested the characteristics of interregime conflict. The conduct of both sides in both cases followed the moral logic of the political regime each side represented. To Henry Wilson, the Brooks affair “fairly represented freedom and slavery as they stood at that time confronting each other.” That event was not merely symbolic, but was “typical of what was being enacted on the wider theatre of the nation.” Sumner of Massachusetts and Brooks of South Carolina hailed from the epicenters “of the two civilizations which divided the country.” The North, accustomed to obedience to the Constitution and the law, was restrained in its contest with the South, which flouted or twisted the Constitution and the law to achieve domination.81 Southern statesmen could abide the institutions of free government only if those institutions supported their policies and interests. Otherwise, they would resort to force or fraud.
Unsuspecting and unprepared for the oligarchy’s mode of administering justice, Sumner was writing, his knees underneath his desk, when Brooks surprised him and began raining blows down upon his head with a cane. Senators coming to Sumner’s aid were held back by Brooks’s accomplices, Representatives Henry A. Edmundson of Virginia and Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina, the latter brandishing his cane and shouting, “Let them alone, God damn you!” Although Sumner was larger and more powerful than Brooks, his restraints prevented him from defending himself, and in his attempt to wrench himself free after the first blows, he ripped the bolts of the desk from the Senate floor. Brooks struck Sumner some fifteen to twenty times, breaking his cane, and continued even after his victim fell to the floor, bloody and unconscious.82 The next day after the assault, Wilson took the Senate floor and denounced the attack on free speech and constitutional government.83 Southern statesmen were resorting to brute force to bend the nation to their will, when the institutions of free government were not complying with their aims. This was precisely the point of Sumner’s speech, “The Crime against Kansas,” which had precipitated the assault.84
Sumner had said that in Kansas, “the very shrines of popular institutions, more sacred than any heathen altar, are desecrated, . . . the ballot-box, more precious than any work in ivory or marble from the cunning hand of Art, is plundered.” To fasten slavery onto unwilling Kansas, “here in our Republic, force—ay, Sir, FORCE—is openly employed in compelling Kansas to this pollution, and all for the sake of political power.” Rather than condemning these abuses, Senator Butler of South Carolina had risen to attack the Republican Party as “sectional and fanatical” and had asserted the constitutional doctrine of Calhoun, that slavery prohibitions violated the equal right of the states to the territories as the common property of the states. Sumner repelled the charges. The policy of “the great fathers of the Republic” was that freedom should be national and slavery a sectional exception. The Nebraska bill that reversed that policy “was a swindle of a great cause, early espoused by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, surrounded by the best fathers of the Republic.” He denied that by “equality under the Constitution,” the fathers meant that slave states possessed the rights “to compel fellow-men to unpaid toil, to separate husband and wife, and to sell little children at the auction-block” in the territories. These “asserted rights . . . shock equality of all kinds” and mocked the fathers. Butler, not the Republicans, was an “unblushing representative . . . of a flagrant sectionalism.” By maintaining the policy of the fathers, the Republican Party was “more than any other party, national,—and that it now goes forth to dislodge from the high places that tyrannical sectionalism of which the Senator from South Carolina is one of the maddest zealots.”85
The sectionalism that Senator Butler defended was more than a Southern policy preference for the extension of slavery. Sumner looked into South Carolina and identified the nature of that sectionalism that Butler was advancing in Washington and in the territories. Butler’s South Carolina was “republican only in name, confirming power in the hands of the few, and founding the qualifications of its legislators on ‘a settled freehold estate of five hundred acres of land and ten negroes.’” In Washington, members of these interstate ruling classes in the slave states constituted a “Slave Oligarchy now controlling the Republic.”86 They were attempting to substitute forcibly their sectional proslavery policy for the republican fathers’ antislavery national policy. By doing so, the Southern statesmen were also expanding the basis for their sectional system of government, minority rule. They were attempting to substitute their oligarchic system of government for the fathers’ republican system. In Kansas Southern statesmen were engrafting their political regime onto that territory before statehood, and they were employing the tool—force—that was characteristic of their regime and hostile to republicanism. Force, not persuasion, was the natural tool of proslavery men in Kansas and of the ruling class in the slaveholding states to gain what men would not freely give, by their votes or by their labor. For that reason, Southern statesmen were the true sectionalists and revolutionaries.
This was the speech that Brooks had “read . . . twice over carefully,” he announced to Sumner, immediately before his first blow. By beating Sumner, Brooks proved Sumner’s argument. When Wilson rose to condemn the assault on the following day, he deferred to “older Senators . . . to vindicate the honor and dignity of the Senate.” No Democrat stepped forward, so Republican senator William Seward thereupon proposed a resolution for the formation of a committee, selected by the president, to make inquiry. But Senator James Mason amended the resolution so that the Senate, with its Democratic majority, would select the committee, which subsequently included only Democrats and did nothing. In the South, “leading public men and presses” praised the deed “so that,” wrote Wilson, “the bludgeon became the weapon of honor, the bully the hero of the hour.”87 Southern approval proved Sumner’s analysis even further.
That fall in 1856, the nation faced a presidential election. To some in the North, the Democrats’ nomination of James Buchanan promised an end to the conflict between the sections and parties. Sherman and Blaine agreed that Buchanan of Pennsylvania appeared to be a good choice at the time. Northerners believed that Buchanan, with his vast and distinguished experience in government service, his conciliatory approach to conflict, and his Northern roots, would quiet the violence and ensure free and fair elections in Kansas, resulting in the prohibition of slavery. That expectation, weighed against Republican nominee John C. Frémont’s poverty of experience in public affairs, held many Northern Democrats in the party. Northern and Southern Democrats remained sufficiently united to secure Buchanan’s election.88
Buchanan would be a bitter disappointment. Rather than quell interregime conflict in favor of liberty, he allowed it to worsen under his watch. The flashes of violence on the plains of Kansas had been signs that interregime conflict within the Union was becoming interregime war. The North, liberty, and the republicanism of the fathers were arrayed against the South, slavery, and oligarchy, deceptively hiding its nature behind the misleading name of the party it controlled.