CHAPTER SIX
We Must Unite or Be Enslaved
AS THE YEAR 1854 began, the political situation in Wisconsin was muddled. The People’s coalition offered no binding principles or ideological appeal to take to the voters, while bitter factionalism and internal battles for party control split the majority Democrats. What shape the future political landscape might take was anyone’s guess. The federal government’s approval of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the dramatic rescue of a fugitive slave held in a Milwaukee jail helped shed some light.
Stephen A. Douglas, the ambitious Unites States senator from Illinois, submitted his bill to organize the Nebraska Territory in early January. After nearly five months of turbulent proceedings, it passed both houses of Congress and was signed into law by President Pierce. The act repealed that part of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that prohibited slavery above 36º30’ north latitude and permitted settlers of the newly organized territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide on slavery themselves.1
The federal government’s endorsement of popular sovereignty and the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise once again thrust slavery and the sectional controversy to center stage in the nation’s politics. Many Northerners truly feared that the peculiar institution was intended to take root in one of the territories. As one alarmed Wisconsin diarist noted, the “slavery monster shall spread his wings over our intire [sic] Republic” unless northerners resisted this latest outrage of Douglas and the slave power.2 Joseph C. Cover, a lead district Whig leader and newspaper editor, predicted that the act would abolitionize the entire North and bring about slavery’s early demise.3
Wisconsin’s Free Soilers wasted no time in trying to exploit the issue. Shortly after the bill’s introduction, they encouraged state residents to overwhelm their representatives in Congress with anti-Nebraska petitions; the response was enthusiastic. In more than thirty anti-Nebraska meetings, thousands of angry Wisconsinites adopted resolutions that denounced the measure and instructed their congressmen to vote against it.4 In late January, Sherman Booth asked for a nonpartisan state convention to meet in Madison and formulate a response to this brazen “attempt of the Slave Power to desecrate every foot of free territory… with the curse of slavery.”5 For several reasons, the call for a statewide meeting initially met with little enthusiasm.
For one, most Democrats kept silent on the matter, presumably awaiting direction from their national leaders. When it came in February, Democrats were urged to rally around Pierce and the Nebraska bill as a manifestation of party loyalty and to rely on the west’s physiographic characteristics and the benign influence of popular sovereignty to keep slavery out of the territories. Trying to put the best face possible on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, some even falsely insisted that the 1820 settlement actually had impaired freedom’s spread by insulating territories below 36º30’ north latitude from the democratic tendencies now prevalent throughout the North. Josiah Noonan, the administration boss in Wisconsin, also used the patronage whip unsparingly to weed out anti-Nebraska sentiment and sternly warned the unconvinced to maintain “an expressive silence” on the issue lest they contribute to a new wave of sectional animosity that threatened to convulse the nation and destroy the Union. By early March, reluctant Democrats began to fall in line.6 Although administration backers failed to suppress all internal opposition to the Nebraska bill, surprisingly few Democrats publicly disavowed the new test of party faithfulness. Most dissidents seem to have muzzled their objections and looked to work from within to correct the party’s alleged proslavery leanings.7
The state’s Whigs also responded coolly to the idea of a convention. Without exception, they denounced Douglas’ bill as a scheme to introduce slavery in the territories, but they remained unwilling to see their party absorbed by the Free Soilers. When Rufus King reprinted Booth’s call without comment, party conservatives, worried that they would have limited influence in any coalition managed by those two, publicly scolded him for supposedly conspiring once again to sell out to the abolitionists. Other Whigs opposed the meeting, imagining that the Nebraska controversy might give new life to their party.8
Important local issues such as railroad land grants, temperance, and corruption in state government also occupied the attention of state residents and suppressed enthusiasm for a convention. Finally, and probably most decisive, with the North generally hostile to the Nebraska measure, few believed it actually would succeed in the House of Representatives. As one Democrat succinctly stated, “Its passage was not … looked for by the people.”9
In spite of the lukewarm response to his appeal, Booth continued to press for a mass protest meeting. Unexpected help came when a federal marshal arrested a hapless black, Joshua Glover, near Racine on the evening of March 10. A Missouri runaway, Glover had escaped to Wisconsin from his owner, Bennami Garland, two years earlier. Finding work as a millhand, Glover, by all accounts, was considered “a faithful laborer and an honest man.” On the night of his capture, he had been drinking and playing cards in his home with two black acquaintances, Nelson Turner and William Abby. Unknown to Glover, Turner had betrayed his whereabouts to Garland and unlatched the door to allow him entry along with his accomplices. After a short but violent struggle, Glover was bound, thrown into a wagon and carted off to the Milwaukee county jail.10
On the morning after Glover’s arrest, citizens of Racine held a mass meeting on the public square. They adopted resolutions demanding a fair trial for Glover and promised to use force if necessary to free him.11 In the meantime, word of Glover’s seizure had reached Booth. Acting quickly, he mounted his horse and rode through Milwaukee’s streets shouting that slavecatchers were in town and that an indignation meeting would be held that afternoon at the county courthouse. Booth then persuaded a county judge to issue a writ of habeas corpus on the fugitive’s behalf, but the sheriff refused to serve it on the grounds that Glover was held in federal custody and not subject to local authority.12
Later that day, more than five thousand people jammed the courthouse grounds to protest Glover’s arrest. After a vigilance committee selected to obtain a writ of habeas corpus returned empty-handed, the crowd grew restive. At about 5:00 P.M., Glover’s self-appointed attorney condemned the seizure in a fiery speech and suggested they take the law into their own hands. Booth followed and advised against a forcible release, but after local officials refused a demand to deliver Glover, the crowd rushed the jail, smashed in the door and whisked him away to freedom. One reporter was moved to write of the affair, “We regret to … inform the friends of Glover that it was deemed unsafe for him to remain in this Republican country, and that by this time he is safe in Canada, under the protection of a monarchy.”13
For Booth’s alleged role in the rescue, a United States commissioner had him arrested on March 15. Two days later, at a preliminary hearing, he was released on bond for later trial, but not before he regretfully denied taking a direct role in liberating Glover, immodestly claiming that the need for his voice against the Nebraska bill had restrained him. Then, amidst wild cheering, he went on to say that rather than see one fugitive returned to slavery, he would prefer to “see every Federal officer in Wisconsin hanged.” Booth had voiced similar sentiments just before his arrest, warning that “every U.S. Judge and Marshall … [would] be treated to a wet bath or a coat of tar and feathers,” if necessary, to safeguard habeas corpus and jury trial rights. “If the time has come when we are called on to yield these sacred rights,” he proclaimed, “then … the time has come for revolution.”14
Coming amidst the tumultuous congressional contest over the Nebraska bill, the Glover affair brought the slavery controversy closer to home and intensified the growing distrust of federal authority.15 At a crowded “Anti-Slave Catchers Mass Convention,” convened in Milwaukee on April 13, those in attendance renewed the argument that the Fugitive Slave Act represented an unjust seizure of power by the national government and a threat both to individual freedom and states’ rights. They also endorsed the famed Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, authored by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, that had provided a thoughtful defense of state prerogatives, as well as of civil liberties thought to be under attack by the administration of President John Adams. These proclaimed that whenever the federal government transcended its constitutional mandate, “Its acts are unauthoritative, void and of no force.”16
Booth’s extremism and popular support for the rescue horrified Wisconsin’s Democrats. Countenance the willful destruction of public property and the flagrant violation of federal law, they warned, and soon security for both whites and blacks would be imperiled. “We might as well bid welcome to anarchy.”17 Whigs, on the other hand, began to rethink their opposition to a mass convention and a new antislavery coalition, even though they disliked seeing “the laws of the land trampled upon, and the mob triumphant.” Because of the Senate’s recent passage of the Nebraska bill, characterized as a violation of the public faith and a renunciation of the solemn bisectional covenant embodied in the Missouri Compromise, most excused the angry citizens who actively resisted the Fugitive Slave Act. As Charles Holt, the conservative Whig editor of the Janesville Gazette approvingly wrote, “the attempted repeal of the Missouri Compromise has so exasperated many [Northerners] that they consider themselves absolved from the obligation to enforce the fugitive slave law.”18
Seizing the moment, Free Soilers skillfully tied the Glover affair to the House battle over the status of slavery in Nebraska. Riding a wave of popularity, Booth renewed his call for a fusion of all men opposed to the further extension of slavery, and by late April he appeared to be gaining ground among Whigs. In his Grant County Herald, Joseph Cover proclaimed that Whig and Democratic harmony had been irreparably shattered, and from this some new political organization soon would arise. David Atwood and Horace Rublee, of the Wisconsin State Journal, agreed. “There is no use in trying to keep up the old political parties,” they asserted; “New combinations are inevitable.”19 Booth applauded this progress and asked for further encouragement from all Whigs. After several false starts, during which union backers labored to appease headstrong conservatives and a few diffident moderates,20 the signal Booth awaited finally arrived. On May 18, the State Journal printed an unambiguous endorsement of “a union of men opposed to slavery should the Nebraska Bill become law.”21Four days later the House passed the measure and on May 30 it received Pierce’s signature.
Now Booth patiently waited, supposing Whigs would take the initiative after House approval. When they did not, he once again proposed a state convention. On the day the bill became law, Rufus King at last broke the Whig silence. He observed that a nonpartisan meeting had been summoned in Ohio “to determine what action should be taken … in view of the passage of the Nebraska Bill,” and he asked if all the free states should do the same.22 One week later, King urged that the coming congressional elections be conducted without reference to party distinctions and all issues save slavery laid aside to facilitate an anti-Nebraska coalition.23 Christopher Sholes and two Democratic editors, E. B. Quiner and John Walworth, joined him. Finally, on June 9, Booth, on behalf of “many citizens,” formally invited
All men opposed to the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Extension of Slavery, and the Rule of the Slave Power … to meet at Madison, Thursday, July 13, to take such measures as may be deemed necessary to prevent 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 time has come 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.24
King endorsed Booth’s call the following day. On June 12, Atwood and Rublee did the same.25 Holt followed, but with a warning; if Booth and King staged a repeat performance of the “cattle show” held in Water-town the previous year, he would withdraw his support. Most other Whigs quickly laid aside lingering doubts and fell in line, although some in the lead district continued to balk. They sympathized with the goal of unifying the state’s anti-Nebraska men but feared that “party hacks, place seekers, spoilsmen,” and the “vegetable remains of two or three defunct parties or factions” would control and manipulate the convention for their own selfish purposes.26
As Free Soilers, Whigs, and a few antislavery Democrats took tentative steps toward cooperation, Governor Barstow and Josiah Noonan renewed their war for control of the Democracy. During the final weeks of the Nebraska debate, the governor and Beriah Brown journeyed to Washington and tried without success to pry the Pierce administration loose from its attachment to Noonan. While they were in the capital, the Milwaukee boss made arrangements with Horace Tenney to establish an anti-Barstow paper in Madison to compete with Brown’s Argus. Shortly after their return, Barstow and Brown publicly broke with the administration, contending that “support of the Nebraska Bill… is not a test of Democracy.” Although they never explicitly came out against the act, Barstow and Brown clearly were trying to rally anti-Nebraska Democrats, fed up with Noonan’s dictation, and conservative Whigs, opposed to fusion, with assurances that popular sovereignty would secure the territories for freedom and keep the Union intact.27
With Barstow and Noonan doing battle, preparations for the mass convention proceeded with enthusiasm. Delegates were chosen at meetings held throughout the state. Train and steamship fares were reduced for men coming from the populous lakeshore counties, and keepers of hotels, public houses, and other businesses eagerly anticipated the influx of free-spending conventioneers. Minor preconvention skirmishes between Whigs and Free Soilers over the role each would play in the new coalition were transcended by the need for mutual forbearance and compromise in order to bring about a successful union.28 Finally, on July 13, as delegates poured into Madison, spokesmen from all three parties met informally to iron out remaining differences over procedural and organizational matters. Leaving nothing to chance, they hoped the gathering would come off without a hitch.29
By early afternoon, upwards of one thousand people had arrived,30 forcing an adjournment from the assembly’s chambers to the east lawn of the capitol building. Taking the advice of the State Journal’s editors, Booth, King, and other party bosses remained in the background to give the impression that new men were in control of the convention, but behind the scenes they wielded considerable influence. At their urging, John Walworth, the Democratic editor of the Monroe Sentinel, was named to preside over the meeting to emphasize its nonpartisan character, in spite of the overwhelming numbers of Whigs and Free Soilers. Another conciliatory gesture included the appointment of a Democrat, Rhenodyne A. Bird, and the Whig, Charles Holt, to chair the resolutions committee, which then sought Booth’s blessing before presenting its report to the delegates. Similarly, Myron and Harlow Orton, prominent conservative Whigs from Dane county, were permitted to address the gathering along with the radicals Booth, Charles Clement, Hiram McKee, and the recent Wisconsin immigrant and abolitionist, William Abijah White. Myron Orton’s speech, a “laboured eulogy” to the Whig party, provoked the only note of dissension when the Free Soiler James Densmore let go with a loud hiss at the mention of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Otherwise, the convention rolled along with impressive smoothness and efficiency.31
The delegates created a state central committee of nine headed by the newcomer White to coordinate activities in the state and make contact with similar organizations that were springing up around the North. They also selected five men, including two prominent Germans, to oversee the establishment of foreign-language newspapers and to court Wisconsin’s considerable foreign-born population. Most importantly, the resolutions committee deliberately avoided divisive issues such as land distribution and homestead legislation and reported a set of distinct antislavery measures that the delegates unanimously adopted. And, probably following the suggestion of meetings held earlier in Ripon, Wisconsin, and Jackson, Michigan, and of thirty or so anti-Nebraska House members, they took to calling themselves Republicans.32
The Republican platform sprang from the Free Soil platforms of 1848 and 1852, which in turn had Liberty party parentage. It called for the confinement of slavery to its present borders, the admission of no more slave states, the exclusion of slavery from all territories under federal jurisdiction, the prohibition of human servitude in any future land acquisitions, the restoration of freedom to Kansas and Nebraska, and “the repeal and entire abrogation of the Fugitive Slave Law.” It also asked party members to support only candidates for office who were fully committed to the Republican antislavery platform and to the goal of delivering “the Administration of the government back to … first principles,” a familiar way of advancing the supposed policy of the founding fathers “to limit, localize, and discourage Slavery” and bring about its gradual extinction peacefully and constitutionally. No other alternative existed; continued Southern domination of the federal government had forced Republicans to battle over “freedom or slavery as a political issue.” In conclusion, the new party invited all men, whether foreign-born or native-born, to join in the struggle.33
Amidst wild cheering, Wisconsin’s first Republican convention came to an end, its members pledged to return home and begin the mundane task of preparing for the upcoming congressional campaign. By August, organizational meetings at the local level were being held around the state. The shift of nearly the entire leadership of the Whig and Free Soil organizations and the experience of working together in prior years facilitated the movement into the new party. The unification process stalled only in Walworth County, where stubborn conservatives dominated the Whig party, and Free Soilers, who outnumbered them, foolishly snubbed them in selecting candidates for local office and drove many into the welcoming arms of the Democracy. The enthusiasm manifested for the new party in the lead district more than offset the Walworth county split. By late August, Cover and George Bliss, influential editor of the Whig Mineral Point Tribune, counted themselves in the Republican column along with the rest of the Whig leadership and the region’s few Free Soilers.34
The efforts of local Whigs and Free Soilers to bury party differences and merge also bore fruit in the congressional nominating conventions. In the southeastern district, Free Soilers dominated the coalition, and four of them, Booth, Charles Clement, Christopher Sholes, and Wyman Spooner, competed for the spot. A plurality of the delegates favored the controversial Booth, but King, fearful that Booth’s selection would alienate many Whigs, used his considerable influence on behalf of Spooner, who alone among the candidates had belonged to that party prior to 1848. After five unsuccessful attempts to choose a nominee, Sholes and Clement rewarded King’s persistence and swung their support behind Spooner. Sholes, commenting on the nomination, proclaimed that now “our union is perfect.” Booth took the rejection calmly, even after the State Journal compared him unfavorably to Spooner, stating that the former Whig was “a zealous opponent of slavery without being a brawling fanatic, and is progressive without being crazy.”35
In the western region, Republicans had no trouble selecting a candidate. Few Free Soilers lived there, and the convention’s choice fell between two Whigs, Cadwallader C. Washburn, whose brothers Elihu and Levi already represented Maine and Illinois in Congress, and former representative Orsamus Cole. The popular Washburn easily won the nomination, and except for a soundly quashed attempt to amend the Madison convention’s call for the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law to a demand for its modification, the meeting was thoroughly friendly.36
Charles Billinghurst, an anti-Nebraska Democrat and editor of the Burr Oak, and James Shafter, the Whig party’s congressional nominee in 1852, were the Republican hopefuls in the heavily Democratic north. After seven informal ballots, the party convention remained almost evenly divided between the two men. Shafter then rose, thanked the delegates for their support, and withdrew in favor of Billinghurst. The erstwhile Democrat promptly received the party’s endorsement and the gathering broke up in high spirits.37
The choice of a Free Soiler, a Whig, and a Democrat to represent the new party in its debut was fortunate. It helped unite all factions behind the candidates and platform and allowed Republicans to enter their first campaign brimming with confidence and enthusiasm. By contrast, internal feuding as usual threatened Democratic harmony. Daniel Wells, the party incumbent representing the southeast, had his work cut out for him. A warm friend and supporter of Noonan’s, he reluctantly had voted against the Kansas-Nebraska measure because his constituency was thoroughly “disaffected on that question.”38 By combining his anti-Nebraska vote with careful attention to and encouragement of the district’s administration supporters, Wells entered the party convention in early October an overwhelming favorite. With Noonan’s backing, an effort to unseat him by friends of Barstow was thwarted easily. Just as important, the convention heeded Wells’s advice to be “wily as serpents and harmless as doves” on the slavery question. It adopted a resolution that opposed slavery’s extension “by all constitutional means” and extolled popular sovereignty as “the only true basis” upon which to achieve that goal. This “time serving milk and water position” did not entirely satisfy administration men, but political reality and the advantage of appearing to be both anti-Nebraska and pro-Pierce proved irresistible; Wells entered the contest with most of the party behind him. The incumbent further enhanced his reelection chances by instructing his followers in Walworth County to nominate dissident Whigs for local office in exchange for their support. Finally, with Noonan and George Paul holding the president’s followers in line, Wells took to the stump to shore up his support among anti-Nebraska Democrats, and on election eve, he circulated a pamphlet strongly critical of Douglas’s bill.39
Only an all-out effort kept the Barstow and Noonan factions tenuously allied behind Wells; otherwise the feud took a painful toll in the district. Both sides nominated candidates for local and state offices, and in the governor’s home county of Waukesha, where antiadministration sentiment was strongest, Barstow’s champions openly disavowed both Pierce and Wells. Noonan retaliated by convincing his friend, the popular and opportunistic ex-Free Soiler Alexander Randall, to run for a seat in the state assembly against the governor’s personal choice. In spite of the Democracy’s problems, party loyalty, hard work, political skill, and an overconfident Republican coalition helped reelect Wells comfortably.40
Democrats in western Wisconsin did not fare so well. Supporters of the president hoped to unseat the popular incumbent, Ben Eastman, an unrepentant anti-Nebraska man.41 At the party convention, Eastman took a slight lead in early balloting over his nearest competitor, a Barstow supporter, while the pro-Nebraska candidate ran a distant third. On the second day of the meeting, Otis Hoyt, the administration’s choice, began to pick up strength; on the twenty-third ballot he overtook Eastman but still remained short of a majority. Seizing their chance, party regulars secured an endorsement of a set of resolutions sustaining both Pierce and Nebraska. Eastman interpreted that as a personal rebuke and, along with the entire Green County delegation, promptly abandoned the meeting. The remaining delegates then gave the nomination to Hoyt.42
Hoyt’s selection and the pro-Nebraska platform did not sit well with the district’s Democrats. “The report of the doings of the … convention has reached this place,” exclaimed one Rock county man, “and it is no go…. Democrats will not submit to such doughfaced dictation.” Only Noonan’s organ, the Wisconsin Patriot, backed Hoyt, but Dane County’s Democrats, under Barstow’s control, refused to endorse his candidacy. To make matters worse for the unfortunate Hoyt, Eastman bolted the party in favor of Washburn,43 and the Pierce administration blocked passage of a rivers and harbors bill highly popular in the southwestern counties. As Joseph Cover put it:
The Homestead Bill, River and Harbor Bill, Pacific Railroad Bill—all were for the special benefit of white laboring men—and consequently failed. Such bills as those repealing the Missouri Compromise and for the recovery of fugitive slaves, were full of niggers, and they went through like Croton Oil.44
With so many obstacles, few people expected Hoyt to win. The popular Washburn handily defeated him, capturing 60 percent of the vote.45
Democrats in northern Wisconsin faced similar problems. The incumbent, John Macy, had favored the Kansas-Nebraska bill at first, but strong opposition back home led him to pair off on the measure when the final vote came. For this act and his ties to Barstow, Pierce Democrats under the lead of Charles Robinson, the pugnacious editor of the Green Bay Advocate, sought to dump Macy in favor of an unqualified Nebraska man at the district’s nominating convention.46 Macy won renomination anyway, then spurned his opponents by deliberately refusing to take a stand on the Nebraska question or express support for the president. Because of Macy’s renegade behavior, a number of administration men walked out of the meeting in protest, and with Noonan’s blessing, placed an avowed Pierce and Nebraska candidate in the race.47 The slavery issue and local political rivalries crippled the Democratic effort in the North and left them to the mercy of the Republican coalition. So in spite of their overwhelming numbers, the Democrats suffered another crushing defeat.48
The success of the new party was remarkable. It elected two congressmen, won a majority of the seats in the state assembly, and nearly captured the senate as well. Three months later, the Republican legislative majority then picked the old abolitionist, Charles Durkee, to serve in the United States Senate in place of the incumbent Isaac Walker.49
Nearly half of the Republican vote in the 1854 congressional races came from men who had backed the People’s coalition in 1853 (see table 7). Since Whigs had cast 50 percent and Free Soilers 35 percent of the People’s ballots, it is highly likely that they also made up the bulk of this portion of the Republican tally. About half of 1853’s conservative Whigs moved into the Republican camp, constituting about 5 percent of the new party’s support, while Democrats formed another 7 percent.
Republican candidates also attracted a rather large number of votes from men who had sat out the election in 1853; those voters comprised close to 40 percent of their support.50 Whigs and Democrats who failed to show up in 1853 undoubtedly cast some of these Republican ballots. But how many? By comparing the election returns in the 1855 judicial and gubernatorial contests with 1854’s congressional totals, at least one inference can be drawn (see tables 8 and 9).
An analysis of these races suggests that the 1854 coalition remained largely intact the following April. About 90 percent of those who voted the Republican ticket in 1854 did so again in the spring election for state supreme court justice; the Democratic candidate for the judgeship picked up 82 percent of his party’s congressional ballots. In the 1855 governor’s campaign, held in November, the returns suggest that 15 percent of the men who voted Republican in 1854 crossed over to the Democrats. If this is true, Democrats actually made up 20 to 25 percent of the Republican vote in 1854,51 but most of them returned to the Democracy one year later.
The overall Republican coalition in 1854 seems to have been made up of roughly 40 percent Whigs, 25 percent Free Soilers, 20 percent Democrats, and 15 percent prior nonvoters.52 Democratic support in 1854 did not vary much from 1853; nearly 80 percent of its vote came from party loyalists, 10 percent from supporters of the People’s coalition, 5 percent from disaffected Whigs, and 5 percent from nonvoters.
Outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Glover rescue, as well as the emergence of a political union dedicated to combating the slave power and its northern allies, did not translate into increased voter turnout. Only 47 percent of the eligible electorate in Wisconsin bothered to vote in 1854, suggesting that the political passions unleashed sparked only a partial electoral revolution. Several possible explanations for this exist. For one, in spite of the genuine consternation brought on by the decade-old territorial controversy and the accompanying sectional conflict, slavery so far had failed to obtain a foothold anywhere in the West. That simple fact, plus the widespread belief that the North’s superior industry, talent, and drive would safeguard the territories for freedom, probably quelled much unease. “Slavery can never go to the new territories,” one Democrat insisted. “This is the only point of practical importance in the controversy about which the masses care a fig.”53
Apathy and alienation undoubtedly contributed to the low turnout as well. Not only had slavery failed to expand, but old party issues ceased to be important. The growing sense that politicians lacked principles and cared only for “spoils … the fat office,” added to the problem.54 Consequently, many men did not feel compelled to vote. During the 1854 campaign, Willet S. Main, Dane County’s Democratic sheriff and a relatively attentive chronicler of local and national events, expressed this indifference. “One week from today our election comes off. Candidates are hard at work. I… do not feel much interest in the result. May the right triumph.” Reluctantly, Main showed up and voted a split ticket, but he added, “I don’t care but a little how the [election] goes.”55 If party activists like Main felt this way, it is not surprising that a majority of the state’s eligible voters stayed home on election day.
Finally, simple confusion almost certainly augmented the abstention rate. The withering away of the Whigs, the numerous coalition efforts, the interminable power struggles within the Democratic party, all of these must have left many perplexed. In an apt comment, Willet S. Main mused:
Politics is pretty well mixed. Hards and Softs, Barnburners, Wooleys & Silver Greys, Republicans, Whigs and Nationals, Nebraska and anti-Nebraska, all in friction, yes and Know Nothings, all appear to be mixed in a heterogeneous conglomerated mass of fusion. No one can tell where he belongs or what his politics are.56
Nevertheless, the 1854 election did foreshadow a change in the making. The Republican coalition united Free Soilers and most Whigs, and it attracted enough Democrats, abstainers, and new voters to achieve impressive election victories. Success at the polls also bolstered Republican confidence and acted to counter the Democratic charge that the party would founder once the furor over Nebraska subsided, although as 1854 came to an end, it was not yet clear if the Nebraska bill and the fugitive slave controversy would be enough to sustain the organization. “The truth is the people of the North are incapable of any lengthy and persistent effort in behalf of justice and right,” Cadwallader C. Washburn anxiously noted. “They rouse up and become indignant for a time but gradually settle down and acquiesce in whatever imposition may be placed upon them.”57 Between 1854 and 1860, however, events would give shape and substance to the Republican appeal and help usher in a new and final chapter in the politics of antislavery. First, though, the party and its distinctly antislavery message had to contend for political supremacy, not just with its Democratic opponents, but with the emergent force of nativism.