CHAPTER EIGHT
Freedom and Liberty First, and the Union Afterwards
ON MAY 21, 1856, between seven hundred and eight hundred heavily armed proslavery “border ruffians,” led by Samuel Jones, the belligerent sheriff of Douglas County, Kansas, rode into the free-state town of Lawrence. Meeting no resistance, they destroyed the offices and presses of the two local newspapers, burned the home of the free-state governor, and set fire to the finest hotel in the territory, confiscating its store of liquor. One proslavery man died, crushed by a collapsing wall of the burning hotel.1
Republican editors throughout the North took immediate advantage of the propaganda value the “Sack of Lawrence” provided. They painted a wildly exaggerated picture of murder and devastation visited upon free-state settlers by Southern marauders bent on planting slavery in the territory.2 The townsmen had been “butchered,” “slaughtered,” “shot down in cold blood,” it was reported, while women and children were forced to flee “from their blazing homes” lest they too fall victim to the “ruthless invaders.”3
The attack on Lawrence and the widespread coverage it received in the Northern press represented the culmination of nearly two years of turmoil in the unfortunate Kansas territory. Settlers had divided primarily over disputed land titles, but owing to the well-publicized efforts of antislavery societies to help people the territory and the equal determination of proslavery forces to keep free staters out, Kansas became the “fighting point” where the North and South vented years of frustration and anger over the slavery issue.4
Antagonism surfaced even before the Kansas-Nebraska Act emerged from Congress, when Eli Thayer, an enterprising Yankee and foe of slavery, announced grandiose plans to assist free-state settlers who wished to move West. To meet that threat, proslavery Missourians encouraged slaveowners to take up homes in Kansas to insure that the future state would be “moulded by our private and domestic institutions.” They also joined secret societies designed to discourage free-state migrants and threatened to resort to “the last argument” if peaceful persuasion failed.5
The determination of these Missourians to protect their “homeland” was made clear in November 1854, when hundreds of them crossed into Kansas and illegally participated in the territory’s election for a delegate to Congress. Erastus D. Ladd, a Kansas resident who hailed from Wisconsin and was a prolific correspondent for the Milwaukee Sentinel, voiced the fears of many Northerners when he wrote that the violence and fraud attending the voting was “part of a grand nefarious scheme … to make Kansas a Slave State.”6
Ladd’s warning seemed right on the mark when, in March of the following year, five thousand whiskey-swilling Missourians, led by their hotheaded United States senator, David Atchison, poured into the territory and elected a proslavery legislature. After stealing the election, the lawmakers promptly passed draconian statutes that stripped slavery’s opponents of their basic civil rights. Anyone who spoke against the institution or circulated abolitionist literature committed a felony; anyone who gave refuge to fugitive slaves or encouraged them to flee their masters could be punished by death; and no man could hold public office in Kansas who refused under oath to affirm slavery’s legitimacy. The legislature gave weight to this enactment when it expelled its few antislavery representatives.7
In response to that slave code, free-state men set up a rival government in Topeka, adopted an antislavery constitution, and took preliminary steps toward statehood. As the year 1855 came to a close, matters in the territory had reached an impasse; its settlers seemed impossibly divided.8
The Republican press unquestionably embellished the news from Kansas for propaganda value and twisted the truth for political advantage. To focus only on the distortions, however, risks minimizing both the disturbing events that did occur and the genuine alarm with which contemporaries received them.9 In Wisconsin, Republicans greeted the reports from the territory as a vindication of their opposition to popular sovereignty. In countless editorials and numerous Freedom for Kansas meetings held throughout the state, they seized upon the ballot box frauds and the laws of the “bogus pro-slavery legislature” as evidence of the doctrine’s failure. Rumors of violence committed by the “ignorant mercenaries of slavery” against free-state Kansans also were broadcast in all their gory details. Southerners, it was argued, believed they could bring their slaves with them into the territories, and “once there, [they] cannot be removed by future legislation. This, of course, would make Kansas and Nebraska slave states for good.” What was worse, the Pierce administration, which was “utterly subservient to the Slave Power,” sided with the South.10 All these acts, Republicans claimed, flaunted the ruthless determination of slaveowners to establish “slavery as the law of the land and arbiter of the destinies of this Republic” and posed a direct threat to “the perpetuity of our republican institutions.” Horace Rublee and David Atwood, in the Wisconsin State Journal, grimly articulated the conclusion many state residents reached. “Kansas has become the battleground of freedom. On her soil a struggle that has been impending for years has begun.… [It] must end in the destruction of slavery… or its ascendancy upon the American continent.”11 So by the time Sheriff Jones and his band of “Missouri cutthroats” marched into Lawrence, thoughtful Northern citizens could readily accept that proslavery thugs intended to reduce it “and all other abolition towns to ashes” and murder or banish all “men guilty of belonging to the free state party.”12
As the reported outrages in Kansas mounted, many Republicans became convinced that force might be necessary to bring peace and freedom to the territory. Free-state Kansans, they contended, had just grounds to resist the imperious attempts of proslavery interests to snuff out their rights, and they called upon the citizens of Wisconsin to send them “thousands of rifles and powder and balls.” At a Milwaukee meeting of the Kansas Emigrant Aid Society, antislavery radicals such as Sherman Booth and Edward Holton joined with well-known conservatives and moderates, including John Tweedy and Rufus King, and publicly pledged Sharps rifles to assist the free-state settlers. In other towns, Edward Daniels, whom the society had sent to investigate the goings-on in Kansas, openly asked for weapons. A resort to arms, possibly involving civil war, it was alleged, remained “the only means of redress left.”13
The vocal Republican support for a violent resolution to the territory’s problems seemed to satisfy a need to stand up to the South. For too many years, Southern hotheads had browbeaten the North with threats of disunion if their demands were not met. Republicans drew the line in Kansas; here Northern rights would be sustained at all costs. Cyrus Woodman, a conservative ex-Democrat and lead district businessman, gave voice to this hardening antisouthernism. He rejoiced that “at last there is a North.”
I was always called a proslavery man up to the time of the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. I thought I had got low enough in the dirt to satisfy the South then, but to be kicked after I was down was a little more than I could stand, and now if Kansas comes into the Union as a slave state it will be without any help of mine.14
The Kansas troubles drove an ever-deepening wedge between the North and South and blessed the Republicans with an issue to advance the fortunes of their fledgling party. Yet, the Kansas ruckus alone did not promise success. The political confusion that attended the breakup of the second party system, along with resurgent nativism and the rise of the Know Nothings still vied for the electorate’s attention. Moreover, much of the news from the far-off territory was contradictory, sensational, and open to question. An electrifying event in the nation’s capital proved to be decisive in forging a durable and successful coalition.
The day after the Lawrence raid, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, while working on constituent matters at his seat in the nearly empty Senate chamber, suffered a brutal and bloody beating at the hands of Preston S. Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina. Sumner had provoked Brooks several days earlier when he delivered a speech entitled “The Crime Against Kansas,” in which he scathingly rebuked the Pierce administration and the South for attempting, no matter the cost, to plant slavery in the territory. Sumner also fired a tasteless personal onslaught against South Carolina’s aging senator, Andrew P. Butler, a relative of Brooks.15 The assault on Sumner shocked and infuriated Northerners, especially after the South greeted it with boastful approval and returned the unrepentant Brooks to his seat in an uncontested election. In Wisconsin, Rufus King snapped that Brooks should “be treated like any other dog and shot at sight,” while other indignant Republicans urged their representatives in Washington to arm themselves “and be prepared for any emergency.” John Fox Potter, running for Congress in the southeastern district, warned that if elected he would suffer no insult, “And the man who interferes with me in debate, I will blow his lights, liver and innards as far as powder and ball can do it.”16
Most important, the attack on Sumner persuaded many that a truly “malevolent and violent spirit prevailed Southward,” and unless checked, it threatened to undermine “the liberties of the people in the North.”17 It also lent credibility to the endless horror stories flowing out of Kansas and the Republican contention that Southern slaveowners and their friends would stop at nothing to achieve their goals. “I don’t know of any despotism more to be dreaded than what the poor Emigrants at Kansas have witnessed within the last two years,” wrote one Wisconsin Republican. “And … the outrage upon a Massachusetts Senator has no parallel in the history of our country.”18 Seizing the opportunity, Republicans quickly linked the two issues as irrefutable evidence of Southern determination to retain a stranglehold over the national government and “extend, strengthen and render permanent that shameful institution,” slavery. The Kansas atrocities now had a counterpart in Washington where “brute force has been appealed to, to silence Free Speech.” Rufus King equated it to an attack on northern rights and manhood.
Will the Free States of the Union submit any longer to be dragooned, insulted, and outraged by the minions of slavery? Shall we not at least stand up for our own? Is there not spirit and manhood enough left in the North to vindicate the Freedom of Debate, the Liberty of Speech, and the personal inviolability of our representatives in Congress? Will not Wisconsin record her protest against each and every phrase of Border Ruffianism, and renew her pledge of devotion to the cause of Right, Humanity and Freedom?19
Throughout the North, “Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” profoundly influenced the political landscape, dimming Democratic hopes of an easy victory in November’s presidential contest, dramatically boosting Republican prospects and self-assurance, and effectively destroying Know Nothing expectations of becoming a durable national political organization.20 Indeed, slavery had already exposed deep divisions among Northern and Southern Know Nothings. At its national meeting in 1855, the organization split over the issue; it did so again, this time fatally, early in 1856. In Wisconsin, the Know Nothing party, as distinct from the nativist appeal, had never really taken hold. The size of the state’s foreign-born and Catholic population created an insurmountable roadblock to Know Nothing political success, while the unrelenting opposition and influence of antislavery men in the Republican party all but insured that its political program would never find an acceptable home there. And, in spite of the fears the immigrants raised among the native-born, the shared experience of taming the Wisconsin frontier helped blunt those concerns, as did strenuous Republican efforts to court foreigners who held pronounced antislavery principles, especially German Protestants.
So by 1856, crushing political liabilities, along with the violence in Kansas and the attack on Sumner, persuaded most nativists within the state that slavery presented a far greater threat to them than “honest and intelligent foreigners” and was now the all-important question.21 And Republicans were prepared to take them in, on one condition. “We gladly welcome all to the Republican party and platform,” Rufus King wrote. “ALL, whether native or foreign-born, American, Whigs, Democrats, or no party men, Catholics or Protestants, who agree and will act with us, in resisting the aggressions of slavery. And provided they make that the paramount issue, we neither ask, nor care whether their sentiments on other political topics concur or conflict with ours.”22 Sensing the drift of events, the editor of the Milwaukee Daily American proclaimed,
Whigs, Democrats, Americans, Abolitionists and Republicans are clustering in one conglomerated mass, in which past political differences are forgotten, while the great and overpowering issue of liberty of speech, freedom of the press, and the inviolability of the spirit of the Missouri Compromise is thrust upon the people of the North.23
As the year wore on, many Know Nothings, including the American’s editor, made their way into the Republican ranks.24
With the Know Nothings neutralized, Wisconsin’s Republicans labored to patch up their differences and grasp the political opportunity Sheriff Jones and Congressman Brooks had provided.25 A chastened Sherman Booth dropped his opposition to the call for a delegate convention, which came together as scheduled on June 4. The meeting, all later agreed, was a harmonious one where “the best feelings prevailed.”26 Charles Roeser, for example, one of the German Republicans who had signed the summons for a mass convention with Booth, played a prominent role. He served on the resolutions committee with antislavery stalwarts John Fox Potter and Byron Paine and was named to the state central committee. Together they drew up a decidedly radical platform. It declared that “the great and only issue which now divides the parties of this nation is that of freedom and slavery,” and it called on the federal government to protect the individual rights of all settlers in the territories. It also summoned Congress to repeal the fugitive slave law, to admit no new slave states into the Union, and to abolish slavery wherever it constitutionally was empowered to do so. The party then “thoroughly purged itself of all affinity with Know Nothingism,” professing that “all men, irrespective of nativity or religion, are entitled to equal rights,” and it unqualifiedly condemned “all secret political organizations as dangerous to our political and civil rights.”27 The delegates adjourned in high spirits, brimming with confidence.
The presidential campaign of 1856 generated great enthusiasm in Wisconsin and the nation. “Politics is all the rage nowadays,” observed Willet S. Main. “The excitement never ran higher than at present. It outdoes 1840 by a long shot.”28 The Republicans nominated John C. Frémont, a national hero without an embarrassing political past, and adopted antislavery resolutions every bit as radical as Wisconsin’s. The Democrats placed James Buchanan before the people on a platform that made support of the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act a test of party orthodoxy. A veteran of forty years with the Democracy and hailing from the critical state of Pennsylvania, Buchanan had been conveniently abroad as the nation’s minister to England during the bitterly divisive Kansas-Nebraska debates. Pliant, conservative, and controlling a powerful political organization in his home state, he was viewed as a perfect candidate for the times.29
With the campaign underway in earnest, Wisconsin’s Democrats attempted to stem the Republican tide by cynically manipulating the nativist issue and insisting that Frémont’s election would lead to disunion. In an effort to shore up their support among the state’s immigrants, they assailed Republicans for admitting former Know Nothings. At the same time, in order to undermine his strength among nativists, they accused Frémont of being a Catholic. Exasperated Republicans denounced the Democrats for dodging the slavery issue and for their hypocritical regard for civil and religious liberty, so amply contradicted by their objection to Frémont “on the ground that he belongs to the Roman Catholic Church.”30
Ethnocultural concerns probably won the Democrats few votes in 1856, but they likely earned some with their argument that Republican success would force the slave states out of the Union. “Its platform is a declaration of war upon the South and its institutions,” they warned, and it is “full of treason against the Union.”31 Although Democrats carefully swore their opposition to slavery’s extension, their Unionism clearly outweighed their antislavery professions.32 “Dissolve the Union and where are we?” they asked. “Constant strife and warfare over what are now common possessions,” “anarchy, blood … and destruction,” all of these would accompany a dismembered Union and inevitably lead to the loss of individual liberty and the destruction of the Constitution.33 For that reason, Democrats contended, no one could belong to the Republican party, “and be anything else but a disunionist.”34
The absolute Unionism of the Democrats drained their antislavery position of all moral content. Whatever they felt about slavery, most stood by the core doctrine of their party, popular sovereignty, ostensibly a middle ground between Northern and Southern extremism, which by upholding the right of territorial residents to decide slavery’s fate without interference from Congress seemed to be a truly democratic solution to the problem.35 To counter the Republican charge that uprooting slavery would be impossible once it gained a foothold in the west, Democrats insisted that few slaveowners would move into territories already free. Thus, “We may safely concede to it [slavery] a right to extend, when we know it has no power to do so.”36
The Democratic claims failed to win Wisconsin. Frémont received 56 percent of the vote and turnout was the highest yet recorded in a statewide contest. Nearly 119,000 voters showed up at the polls, an increase of 48,000 from the previous year, and comprising about 80 percent of the eligible electorate. Indeed, more Northern voters registered an opinion in the 1856 contest than in any other between 1848 and 1860,37 and although Buchanan won the election, Frémont rolled up majorities in all but five Northern states and captured one-third of all the ballots cast.38 In Wisconsin, the Republican tally increased a remarkable 83 percent from 1855, while the Democratic total jumped 43 percent. Unsurprisingly, the returns show that both parties obtained substantial support from prior nonvoters (see table 10). They made up as much as 44 percent of the Republican and 33 percent of the Democratic electors.39 The Wisconsin experience was not unusual though, as both organizations picked up substantial numbers of new voters throughout the North.40
Frémont also retained the backing of nearly all of Bashford’s supporters from 1855, while Buchanan won about 85 percent of Barstow’s voters, suggesting that disenchantment with traditional party politics and leaders still ran deep among some Democrats. But Democratic alienation did not translate into gains for the Republicans, as those voters chose to abstain rather than support Frémont. In fact, the Republican success with Bashford loyalists and previous nonvoters in 1856 stands in stark contrast to their failure to win over Democrats. It appears that except for a few holdovers from 1854, the bulk of Wisconsin’s anti-Nebraska Democrats had either rejoined the party by 1856 or simply did not vote, a pattern followed in most Northern states.41 After protesting passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, they came to embrace popular sovereignty as the best solution to the bothersome slavery question, and few, it seems, ever felt that their separation from the party would be permanent.42
As in earlier elections, in 1856, counties with large foreign-born populations went overwhelmingly Democratic. Counties with native-born populations turned in equally disproportionate majorities for Frémont. Most of the state’s Scandanavian and English-speaking residents, except the Irish, apparently backed Frémont, who also won over some German Protestants; but the Republicans received a meager return on their efforts to attract immigrant voters, especially Germans, and were understandably disappointed.43 Nevertheless, the Kansas and Sumner outrages completed the political revolution in Wisconsin, which Republicans nourished with a compelling antislavery interpretation of national events. The resulting party appeal, or ideology, was broad enough to attract radicals who were motivated primarily by the moral dimension of the antislavery crusade, moderates who hoped to confine slavery and place it on the road to extinction, and a small number of conservatives who were alarmed about the political and economic consequences Southern domination of federal affairs might have on the nation’s future.44 All those factions toiled in an uneasy alliance for the success of the Republican political program, united in the conviction that the “Slaveocracy” was conspiring to undermine liberty in the free states. “The great and living issue of the day in American politics, is resistance to slavery oppression,” they preached. “It is upon this rock that the Republican Party is founded.”45
First developed by Liberty men, the idea of a slave power conspiracy rested in the belief that slaveowners, with the help of corrupt Northern Democrats “anxious for a little pay,”46 dominated all branches of the federal government and looked to retain their mastery by planting slavery throughout the American West. Moreover, the despotic conspirators plotted to extend their reach to include Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and in time, even the free states themselves.47 The fundamental issue, then, was simple: “Shall the National Government be devoted to slavery, using its patronage, purse and power to increase and extend it, or shall its sympathies and support be on the side of human freedom, meting out to every man those rights set forth in the Declaration of Independence.”48
The image of the slave power controlling the federal government frightened Republican loyalists. It combined their loathing of slavery and the shameful contradiction it presented to their deeply held democratic values with their great fear that unless control was wrested from the slaveowning oligarchs, the liberties of Northern whites would be snuffed out. Christopher Sholes expressed that sentiment best.
We have been endeavoring for a long time to convince the people that slavery was more than a mere question of black or white, that it was not confined to the proposition whether a man with a dark or black skin should or should not be owned. But it was a question involving liberty in all its length, breadth, height and depth, and slavery in equal extent. It was a most natural, indeed an inevitable result of the dominance of the slavery sentiment at Washington.49
In making their case, Republicans often pointed to the South itself, where fewer than “500,000 slaveowning aristocrats” ruled the region with an iron fist and kept both blacks and the poor white majority under their absolute control.50 They did so out of necessity, Republicans maintained, because slavery could not withstand the glare of free criticism. And while these “slavocrats” professed adherence to political liberty, they suffered no word to be written or spoken against the peculiar institution and enforced a rigid proslavery orthodoxy backed by “the most odious police regulations.” They also declared themselves children of enlightened idealism, yet suppressed freedom of conscience and the free transmission of “the great leading ideas of the age,” out of fear that “they might engender a thought against slavery.” In short, Southern liberty, progress, and prosperity had been sacrificed to safeguard slavery. And now, Republicans warned, the slave barons stood ready to destroy the American Union, its republican institutions, and all remnants of individual liberty.51
Southern leaders and spokesmen added to Northern worries with public declarations that America’s republican experiment had failed and that slavery was “the natural and normal condition of the laboring man, whether white or black.”52 Republicans denounced these “madmen” and their color-blind defense of slavery, along with their abandonment of the revolutionary principles of the nation’s founders, as evidence of slavery’s inability to coexist with freedom. And they grimly accepted the slaveowners’ contention that ultimately “one must give way and cease to exist [while] the other must become universal.”53
Those circumstances of Southern life and thought, as Republicans understood them, where “slavery overrules everything,” intensified their growing anxiety over the slave power’s preeminence in national affairs and the notion that “a deep laid scheme for the overthrow of popular liberty” existed.54 Skillfully cultivating growing resentment of the South’s overbearing tendencies, most Wisconsin Republicans deemphasized the horrors the slave system imposed on its black victims and played down “extending the claims of liberty as a right beyond the pale of our own race.” They focused instead on the growing anxiety and “prudential selfishness” Northern whites felt with respect to their own freedom.55 The party’s accent on white self-interest represented a realization that laboring on behalf of enslaved blacks alone would not bring political victory. Wisconsinites had to be convinced that if the slave power was not stopped, no one’s freedom in the long run would be saved. In knitting together their antislavery coalition, the Republicans succeeded, as their Liberty and Free Soil forebears had not, because they were able to shift the electorate’s attention from blacks, who were “only an incident of the strife,” to anxieties about their own liberty and the future of free institutions in America.56 And it was within that framework of deepening unease and suspicion about the ultimate goals of the slave power that they responded to events in and after 1856.
Self-interest, fear, anger, idealism; all of these and other emotions motivated men to embrace Republican doctrine. Yet the party’s success would have been impossible were it not for the prevailing sentiment among its members that slavery was inherently wicked and “at war with all the best interests of humanity.”57 Most had always hated the institution, but few had been moved to active resistance until forced by circumstances and the conviction that slavery, the source of Southern attitudes, power, and prestige, lay at the bottom of the increasingly divisive sectional strife. “Slavery is the direct cause of the present exasperated state of feeling between the different portions of the Union,” Governor Coles Bashford claimed in an address to the Wisconsin legislature. “It is the only brand of dissension which threatens permanently the peace of the country and endangers the perpetuity of our Republican institutions.”58 In a solemn Independence Day editorial, the Wisconsin State Journal tied Republican resistance to the “Aristocrats of Bondage” to their underlying antislavery feelings.
The most prominent and dangerous evil in our national fabric … is that of Slavery; an evil so odiously intrusive that it forces itself more persistently upon the attention, on this day, than upon any other; as if by contrast with the principles and memories which consecrate our national anniversary, to become tenfold more hideous and deformed. It is a specter that will not be put down even upon this festal day. It is the discord that mars all our music, gives the lie to all our professions, and makes us feel like a nation of hypocrites in the midst of our rejoicing. Against this evil … the people who earnestly and really believe in the Declaration of Our Independence must unite. It must be walled in … or anarchy and disaster are in store for us. Already its influence has entered the free states, our best men are proscribed for their devotion to liberty; and we must either conquer or become mere serfs ourselves to a slaveholding oligarchy.59
The Republican party’s hostility toward the slave power and slavery found political expression in its uncompromising opposition to the further spread of black bondage, which symbolized the twin desires to confront Southern imperiousness and see slavery eventually driven from the country. “That water will run down hill is no more certain than that slavery must die unless allowed to spread itself over new territories,” ran the commonly accepted belief in antebellum America. “Expansion or death is its inevitable law. And nobody knows this better than the Slavery propaganda.”60
Wisconsin’s Republicans expounded the expand-or-die theory so often that no informed observer could question their commitment to the ultimate extinction of slavery.61 As the 1850s drew to a close, nearly all them would agree with the party editor who explained, “We oppose the extension of slavery because it is in itself morally and politically wrong.” And, those “opposed [to] its extension from such principles must of course see that if slavery is wrong in one place, it was equally wrong in another, if wrong in a territory, it would also be in a State. And so seeing it must beget a desire to have it abolished everywhere.”62 This willingness to take whatever legal and constitutional steps were necessary to hem the institution in and bring about its slow but inevitable death clearly distinguished the Republican appeal from the popular sovereignty doctrine of Northern Democrats and made slaveowners understandably edgy.63
The party’s antiextension message also exploited the widespread Northern belief in free labor’s superiority over slave labor. Free labor, so the thinking went, encouraged diligence and hard work and brought about increased productivity and prosperity. It rewarded the honest, independent laborer and wage earner with an opportunity to raise himself economically and socially and to move into the ranks of the “middling class.”64 By contrast, the slave labor system stifled enterprise and initiative. It spawned poverty, ignorance, and a “moral miasma” that affected not just its obvious victims, the enslaved blacks, but the South’s laboring white classes as well. With labor of all sorts viewed with disdain, the region’s “poor white trash” had little hope of improving their lot in life. Even lowly blacks looked down upon these “degraded and brutish … white men who labor.” Allow slavery into the territories, Republicans warned, and these same attitudes and conditions would take root and drive out industrious Northern settlers who would never agree to labor alongside bondsmen or place limits on their social and economic mobility. “Free labor and slave labor are antagonistic to each other,” they insisted, and “the states of this Union must ultimately be all free or all slave.”65
The territorial issue therefore had profound political, social, and economic implications for Republicans that went directly to the heart of the future course of the nation. Slavery’s expansion would insure its perpetuation and Southern preeminence in national affairs, and it would discourage Northerners from taking up homes in the West. With so much at stake, Republicans had to risk all to keep slavery penned up. Carl Schurz, the German-born antislavery activist, predicted that unless slavery’s advance was arrested, the unavoidable contradictions between it and freedom would bring about “a crisis more violent than any we have seen yet, and will envelop Slavery, and Union, and progress, and prosperity, in the flames of a universal conflagration.”66 Yet, while Republicans understood the dangers of confronting the South, few in 1856 could have comprehended the ultimate bloody consequences.
In defending their stand against slavery, Wisconsin’s Republicans linked their cause to that of the nation’s founders.67 The fathers, they argued, looked upon slavery as an unmitigated evil, strictly local in character, and entirely incompatible with the genius and principles of the new American government. They had tolerated its continued existence temporarily for the sake of national unity, but they looked forward to the day when republican ideals and the good sense of the American people would bring about its demise.68 Thus, the founders had adopted a national constitution based upon individual liberty and the natural rights of all men, and they deliberately avoided all mention of slavery within the charter “as one would the existence of a loathsome disease.” Early efforts to end the importation of enslaved blacks and to keep slavery from overspreading the national domain gave additional substance to their professions.69 But Southern slaveholders and their Northern lackeys in the Democratic party had frustrated the founders’ desire to remove the contradiction between the fundamental principles of American government and the institution of slavery. The Republican goal was to complete the job their revolutionary predecessors had started: “To confine slavery within the narrowest limits and to promote its gradual abolition by local legislation.”70
The reopening of the slavery controversy and the emergence of the Republican party, as the Democracy tirelessly pointed out, did in fact pose a genuine threat to the slaveholding South and the American Union. Well before the outbreak of formal hostilities, Wisconsin’s Republicans had concluded that a showdown of some sort with the South was probable. “The battle between Aristocracy, Slavery and Despotism, on the one side, and Liberty, Republicanism and Equality, on the other … can no longer be conciliated by compromise or suppressed by the threats of dissolution of the Union. We must choose between resistance and submission.”71 Republicans chose resistance. Indeed, the decision to embrace the party suggests they had already decided its antislavery appeal took precedence over the Union, and they began to coalesce around a policy of absolute Unionism only in the year prior to the election of 1860, and especially after the South repudiated its legitimate outcome and brought on the secession crisis and war. Before then, the state’s Republicans had never matched their steadfast refusal to bow to the slave power’s demands with a well-defined policy of what they would do if the South did attempt to secede. But continued Southern aggression, most had concluded, irretrievably ruptured the good faith shown by the North in smoothing out past disagreements and left no choice but to resist further compromises on slavery questions, regardless of the consequences to the Union.72 One Watertown Republican angrily voiced this shift in values.
I say, drive slavery from the whole country, and drive the South from the Union.… Let the South take charge of herself.… Once I thought calculating the worth of the Union a political heresy, not to be thought of, much less to be tolerated in any person, but the problem has been forced on us by Southern knaves and Northern traitors.73
The Kansas outrages only increased the resolve of Republicans. The Union had done nothing to protect the civil rights of the free-state settlers from proslavery sympathizers, they protested, and further attempts to placate them would lead only to greater demands later on. “The threats of secession have lost their power to force freemen from their position in the maintenance of right and justice,” Republicans defiantly proclaimed. They were prepared to wage “unconditional warfare” against the South until either slavery or “the political connection between the free and the slave states is destroyed.”74
Republican willingness to risk disunion rather than back down was predicated on the notion that stopping slavery and preserving Northern rights superseded threats to the unity of the American states. The Union, they cried in terms reminiscent of their Liberty party forebears, had been formed to advance freedom and individual liberty. Instead, in recent years it had been manipulated to bolster human bondage. The greater danger, then, was not that the Union would be dissolved, but that it would become an agent of oppression and tyranny. And “when the Union fails to accomplish the purposes for which it was framed, its perpetuity ceases to be desirable.” The Wisconsin State Journal best summed up this position. “Slavery is so repugnant to free men; so utterly at war with all the principles which we are taught to venerate … so unjust, overbearing, and inhuman, that should it acquire an absolute … predominance in the nation, disunion would be the only course left for the free states.”75
Other Republicans agreed and resolved that only the eventual destruction of slavery could save the Union.76 Former Liberty men and other antislavery radicals had no problem with that position; they had always maintained that combating slavery took precedence over the Union. It is also likely that some Republicans without identifiable party antecedents or a history of political activism held their antislavery principles above their attachment to the Union.77 The alienation of past Whigs, on the other hand, had been brewing for many years. The emergence of the territorial issue in the 1840s, the growing domination of the slave power in national councils, the dissolution of their party and political connection to the South, and their unquestioned hostility toward slavery all combined by the middle of the decade to erode Whig dedication to the Union.78 Democratic Republicans seemed to have been most steadfastly Unionist, but they were few in number and spoke with more than one voice.79
To be sure, no Republican looked forward to a breakup of the Union. Most often they rationalized their unyielding refusal to make any further concessions to slaveholders on principle and blithely dismissed secessionist bombast as “simply ridiculous, and not entitled to the slightest consideration.” It was all bluff and had “never been serious, never.” Dissolution, after all, would render the fugitive slave law inoperable and require significantly higher taxes in the South to help police the peculiar institution and maintain a new government. “The South is too well aware of its dependent position, ever to dare the step,” Republicans optimistically explained. “She may cry disunion, but dissolve she never will.”80
On occasion, Republicans seemed willing to let the slave states go. If the triumph of antislavery principles and men proved unpalatable, “Let the door be open for them to pass out.” The South’s obstreperous behavior had pushed Northern patience to the limit, and if it should choose to leave, “we are willing it should make the attempt.”81 Frustrated and angry Republicans themselves sometimes threatened disunion if they failed to wrest control of the government from the slave power. Some even thought that the South’s efforts to expand slavery revealed a plot “to drive the North out of the Union.” Make no mistake about it, John Fox Potter declared, “This is the key to their whole policy. What seems suicidal to [us] looks like immortality to these scoundrels.”82 Other Republicans did take threats of secession seriously though, and they vowed to resist any attempt to the death. The slave states’ legal and constitutional rights to retain slavery would not be contravened, but those Republicans would never consent to “speculate upon a contingency in which disunion could be justifiable, or even excusable.” Force, they cautioned, would be employed to bring back “every state that forgets its loyalty.”83
The Republican party was to a great extent the legitimate offspring of Liberty and Free Soil parents. Its appeal drew on the various shades of antislavery thought advanced over the years, and it differed primarily in its emphasis on the slave power conspiracy to subvert free institutions and individual liberty.84 Aided by events that seemed to substantiate their allegations, Republicans reordered the components of the antislavery agenda and blended those into a convincing whole.
The Republican achievement was to forge a durable coalition of men persuaded by its claims and in substantial agreement with its national goals, in spite of the different assumptions and viewpoints they may have brought into their evaluation of the growing crisis. That broad commitment to the party’s national program did not carry over to state matters. Early on, nativism threatened to rupture the party, but the greatest danger to Republican harmony in Wisconsin came from the explosive state’s rights issue. Divergent attitudes toward blacks also came to the surface, but those were comparatively minor and never imperiled party unity.