IN OCTOBER 1852, IN his big house overlooking salt marshes stretching toward the Atlantic, hardly a dozen miles north of the Pilgrim landing, Daniel Webster lay dying of cirrhosis of the liver. His stomach and legs were swollen; he could barely sit up; he vomited blood even as five or six leeches sucked away. But the old warrior would die as he had lived, acting the parts of squire, orator, and statesman. Even prostrate on a sofa the Secretary of State seemed as imposing as ever in his blue coat, buff vest, black pantaloons, white cravat and turned-down collar. He spent hours watching as his ox and sheep were paraded, past his window, and he supervised the daily activities of house and farm, gazing raptly at the stars and stripes of a miniature Union flag fastened to the masthead of a tiny boat in his pond. Toward the end, after completing his will and assembling family and servants around his bed, he delivered an oration on immortality. Drowsily closing his eyes for a moment and then opening them, he cried out, “Have I—wife, son, doctor, friends, are you all here?—have I, on this occasion, said any thing unworthy of Daniel Webster?”
The old gladiator died in bitter political disappointment. Vexed and humiliated by the Whig convention’s nomination of General Winfield Scott earlier in the year, he had written his son that he was determined to quit as Secretary of State “and either go abroad, or go into obscurity…” President Fillmore kept him on until the end. Webster predicted that the Democrats under Pierce would sweep the country. As a “national party,” he said, “the Whigs are ended.”
But not only the Whig party was dying in the early 1850s; a way of government was dying with it. The three resplendent leaders who had, in their different ways, acted for union were gone. Calhoun had died within a few weeks of Webster’s great speech of March 7, 1850, still doubting that “two peoples so different and hostile” could “exist together in one common Union,” while hoping that the North might make the necessary concessions for the nation to continue. Henry Clay, the very symbol of union, had died only four months before Webster. During most of their public lives these three leaders had fought to save the Union, even at the sacrifice of high principles like liberty and equality, as they defined them.
But now, in the early 1850s, the air was filled with the voices of those who proclaimed that the Union was but a means to higher ends—and what lofty ends was this union serving? Ralph Waldo Emerson happened to be on the beach at Plymouth the Sunday morning when Webster died, looking out across the rough water whose spray was blowing onto the hills and orchards. Not since Napoleon, Emerson reflected, had Nature “cut out such a masterpiece” as Webster, a strong leader, the teacher of the nation’s legislators in style and eloquence, the model for young adventurers. “But alas!” as he wrote in his journal, “he was the victim of his ambition; to please the South betrayed the North, and was thrown out by both.”
At dawn that Sunday morning the great bell of the Marshfield parish church loudly rang out. People stood transfixed; someone had died. The bell tolled three times three strokes, the signal for the death of a male. Then, indicating his age, it pealed seventy times. Webster! Born a few years before Shays’ Rebellion and the drafting of the Constitution, he had, along with Clay and Calhoun, dominated the last forty years of Congress. A friend, walking around Webster’s farm with him, once noted that the Marshfield land was not rich by nature, but rich with the money and manure the senator had lavished upon it. Webster had made a fainéant national government work too, after a fashion. Emerson mused: “He brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture.”
By the 1850s in the upper Mississippi Valley, the endless work to clear and plow the land, the desperate struggles with bugs and blizzards, the risky financial gambles with machines and middlemen—all this effort was paying off. A twelve-year-old boy in Wisconsin, John Muir, would never forget the joys and woes of pioneer Wisconsin farm life: planting corn and potatoes and spring wheat while the nesting birds sang in the mild soothing breeze, the oaks behind “forming beautiful purple masses as if every leaf were a petal”; then the heavy summer work, sweaty days of sixteen or seventeen hours grinding scythes, chopping stove wood, fetching water from the spring, harvesting and haying under a burning sun; in the winter, rising in a bitterly cold house, squeezing throbbing, chilblained feet into soggy boots, hauling and chopping and fencing in the frozen wastes and yet still relishing the wonderful radiance of the “snow starry with crystals.”
Farming remained the main occupation of Americans—about three-quarters of the nation’s 24 million population were still “rural”—but the agricultural heartland was moving west. In what Allan Nevins called the Northwestern Surge, land-hungry settlers had broken through the Appalachians to seize the flat and later the rolling prairies to the west. Illinois began the 1850s with fewer people than Massachusetts and ended the decade with almost half a million more. Wisconsin jumped ahead of New Jersey. The population of Iowa soared from 200,000 to almost 700,000. With 2,340,000 inhabitants, Ohio became the third biggest state of the Union. The irresistible magnet was the soil, dark and black, fertile from age-old grassland vegetation and deep root systems, six and even ten or twelve feet deep. The climate, while occasionally cruel, was just about right for rich yields.
Improved farm machinery boosted production during the 1840s and 1850s. The steel plow was the decisive weapon in breaking up the prairie land, replacing eastern-type cast-iron plows that would not scour effectively. John Deere had fashioned his first steel plow from a saw blade in 1837; a decade later this plow, manufactured by the thousands in the East, was rapidly coming into use in the prairie region. In the late 1850s farmers even tried to substitute a steam plow for the ox-driven plow, but the ungainly contraption was not a success. The most dramatic change on the prairie came with the improvement of the reaper. Hussey’s reaper, the most widely known in 1840, was mounted on two large drive wheels from which extended a platform with its cutting knife on the forward edge. The grain fell on this platform and had to be quickly raked away by half a dozen men. With Cyrus McCormick’s improved reaper, the grain was raked from the side of the platform, thus forestalling the need to bind before the machine came around again. Reapers often were deployed together by the scores, with hundreds of men, women, and children harvesting the golden grain behind them.
Everything ultimately turned on the intelligence, daring, and persistence of the farm people. James Baldwin left a striking record of his farm days, as portrayed by Allan Nevins: “Here is a sober, hardworking Quaker farmer of Indiana, living in a log cabin with stick-and-clay chimney—but with the skeleton of a new frame house near by.” About it stretched the “big woods,” especially thick down by the watercourses, two large cornfields speckled by charred stumps, other fields marked for “tree dead-enin’,” and a full-grown orchard. “The farmer’s speech is Hoosier dialect. Yet like the Yankee squire he is proud of his shelf of books: the Journals of George Fox and John Woolman, Walker’s Dictionary, standard texts like Noah Webster’s blue-backed spelling book, Pike’s Arithmetic, and Lindley Murray’s English Reader; some volumes of McGuffey; old classics like Robinson Crusoe; and in due time Dickens. Though his daily dress is blue jeans, he has a ‘go to meetin’ suit of drab homespun and a gray beaver hat in which he takes on a mien of dignity.”
Out of this magical mix of men and machines and moisture with sun and soil was arising the granary of the world—a cornucopia of corn and wheat, of oxen and horses, of pork and beef, and later of poultry, and the products of grain, especially whiskey. At first corn was king, then wheat. The corn crop of 1839 came to 377 million bushels, while that of 1849 was almost 600 million. Wheat production in the next decade rose by 75 percent to about 175 million bushels, while the rate of increase of corn production fell somewhat. Illinois led the nation in corn and later in wheat. By the 1850s that state and Indiana and Wisconsin were far outstripping New York and Pennsylvania in wheat output. One stockman alone, B. F. Harris of Urbana, raised annually about 500 cattle and 600 hogs on his four-thousand-acre farm.
The prairie land seemed to pulsate with energy. The air was filled with the clatter of revolving wooden horse rakes, threshing machines, seed drills, corn planters, harrows, sulky plows, self-scouring disks, and—in the farmhouse—hand-washing machines and chain-bucket pumps. Farm people flocked to agricultural fairs to see new machines, inspect livestock and produce, hear political orators. Energy radiated outward. The railroads and canalboats that brought people and machines west returned east loaded with hogs and foodstuffs. Cattlemen trying to save money drove huge herds of steers overland, pasturing their beeves on roadside grass and in hired meadows, trying frantically to keep them out of farmers’ fields. With a sixty-day drive from Illinois to eastern cities, however, stockmen increasingly chose to sell their hogs and cattle in western cities instead. Alton and Peoria and especially Chicago were rapidly becoming the slaughtering centers of the nation.
This Northwestern Surge in agriculture produced a powerful social and economic undertow in the East. Farmers in the Northeast were accustomed to change; many had shifted from a self-sufficient home economy to a market economy as the seaboard cities expanded. Now they were faced with a more severe challenge as grain from the West cut heavily into the market for their cereals, and their holdings of swine and sheep fell off. The drovers of Long Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Westchester, who had once hustled their herds into the cattle market at Bull’s Head Village in-lower Manhattan, had to stand by helplessly as wholesale slaughterers brought in cattle and hogs by the hundreds of thousands via canals—especially the Erie—and railroads from the West. Some farmers could not make the transition, and they—or at least their sons and daughters—escaped to the city or to the West.
But others proved that Yankee resourcefulness was still alive. They stepped up their production of milk and apples and berries and market vegetables. They bred some of the best sheep and blooded horses and poultry and cattle—Guernsey, Durham, Devon, and other breeds. Upstate New Yorkers produced cheddar good enough for the export trade, and built more than a score of cheese factories during the 1850s. New England farmers made money out of the rich tobacco lands along the Connecticut River, out of maple sugar, cranberries, butter, vegetables. Canneries, using tin canisters—later “tin cans”—preserved lobsters, oysters, fruit jellies, peas, tomatoes, sweet corn, some of which was bought by whalers for their long voyages. The Yankees were quick to take advantage of farm fads. One of these was “hen fever”—unbridled speculation in blooded fowls. Shanghai chicks, Cochin Chinas, and other fancy Oriental poultry brought from $75 to $100 a pair at the Boston Fowl Show in 1852.
Many of these efforts were experimental, and not all ended well. Ephraim Bull of Concord spent years perfecting an early-ripening variety of the wild northern fox grape. After eleven years of planting, selecting, and testing his stock, he exhibited his “Concord grape” amid much acclaim in the Massachusetts Horticultural Hall. But Bull was better at inventing than profit-making, for commercial nurseries moved in on his trade in seedlings and bested him in competition. The embittered Bull at least had the last word. On his gravestone in Concord cemetery is carved the epitaph: “HE SOWED, OTHERS REAPED.”
While northwestern farming surged, and northeastern agriculture adapted, much of southeastern farming lagged behind. A South Carolinian in 1857 summed up the situation in an address to his state’s agricultural society, in much the same words of warning used by other farm leaders: “Our present system is to cut down our forest and run it into cotton as long as it will pay for the labor expended. Then cut down more forest, plant in cotton, plough it uphill and downhill, and when it fails to give a support leave it….Then sell the carcass for what you can realize and migrate to the Southwest in quest of another victim. This ruinous system has entailed upon us an exhausted soil, and a dependence upon Kentucky and Tennessee for our mules, horses, and hogs, and upon the Northern States for all our necessaries from the clothing and shoeing of our negroes down to our wheelbarrows, corn-brooms and axe-handles. ” The South was still self-sufficient in food, but already in 1859 the wheat and corn crops of Illinois and Ohio exceeded those of all seven states of the Deep South combined.
Slavery was keeping the South excessively rural, with an unbalanced economy dominated by dangerous speculation in cotton, tobacco, and sugar. Southerners could not break out of their economic prison, walled in by poor communication and transportation, depleted soils, limited capital, lack of diversification, a slower population growth, and, first and last, a great sluggish under-class of poor whites and under-caste of blacks. Moreover, the large plantation owners lacked an incentive to break out of the pattern, for the prices of cotton and tobacco rose steadily between 1850 and 1860, even while production doubled. King Cotton brought prosperity—at least to a few—and made it possible to ignore the underlying problems.
The southern “rim states” were somewhat more successful in agriculture. Northwestern Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley produced heavy crops of wheat; small farms were thriving in Tennessee and Kentucky; Arkansas and Florida were boosting their cattle and hog production; the piedmont country of Virginia and North Carolina displayed agricultural diversity in its market gardening and livestock raising; Texas was rapidly becoming a livestock empire by itself. By 1856 Texans were driving their longhorns overland to the slaughterhouses of Chicago. By the end of the decade the “outer” South was, in agricultural diversification and innovation, leaving the “inner” far behind.
Agriculture North and South showed the defect of its own virtue of abundance—colossal waste. Land was depleted by inefficient plowing, waste or improper use of manure and other fertilizers, single-cropping of the same land year after year, heavy leaching. It was easy to squander a commodity that seemed in endless supply. Throughout the nation, however, were men aware of this waste and inefficiency. Long active in their own states, in 1852 they formed the United States Agricultural Society to represent and assist the nation’s agriculture and promote experimentation and education. As farm journals burgeoned—Prairie Farmer, American Agriculturalist, American Farmer, Farmer’s Register, and Cultivator—editors preached better fencing, fertilizing, plowing, draining, rotating. Greeley’s Tribune appointed an agricultural editor. The message was further spread at fairs and exhibitions. Scientific farming, however, remained in its infancy.
States began establishing agricultural courses, departments, and—in Michigan—a college of agriculture. The federal government largely stood aloof. Despite a tiny budget, the Patent Office promoted use of new seeds and new crops, such as sorghum cane, but bills to establish grants of public lands for higher education met a presidential veto. Agriculture—still the foundation of the American economy—was left primarily to private leadership and enterprise.
The British and Pennsylvania pig iron that helped mechanize much of the northwestern farmer’s work supplied also the thousands of miles of rails that bound him closer to the markets of the East. The railroad fever and expansion of the 1850s was producing a virtual revolution in transportation. Hardly a town or large city did not harbor ambitions that the rails would come its way, bringing investors, buyers, jobs, and access to the whole railroad gridiron developing in the Northwest. The eleven thousand miles of railroad in existence in 1852 almost tripled in length by the end of the decade. The north-central states led the way in this expansion, followed by the Northeast, the south Atlantic states, and the old Southwest.
America’s hundred-year romance with the railroad was well under way, although some people did not love the iron horse. “The railroad will leave the land despoiled, ruined, a desert where only sable buzzards shall wing their loathesome way,” cried an orator. A state legislator waxed more evangelical than environmental: “Canals, sir, are God’s own highway, operating on the soft bosom of the fluid that comes straight from Heaven. The railroad stems direct from Hell. It is the Devil’s own invention, compounded of fire, smoke, soot, and dirt, spreading its infernal poison throughout the fair countryside. It will set fire to houses along its slimy tracks. It will throw burning brands into the ripe fields of the honest husbandman and destroy his crops.…”
But, as Bismarck once remarked, it is not by speeches and parliamentary resolutions that the great questions of the day are decided but by blood and iron, and the iron rails continued to chop through the countryside, at a national average of almost forty miles a week. Each mile cost from $20,000 to $40,000, but capitalists and civic leaders in the big eastern cities and the growing inland towns raised the money, with aid from European financiers. The local citizen helped out too; during the 1850s Wisconsin farmers mortgaged their property for almost $5 million to invest in railroad building. Politicians and capitalists and townspeople alike felt well rewarded when the first iron horse arrived in town. Church bells rang, bands played, and politicos gave speeches as the hissing monster rumbled into the new depot. And when the Erie Railroad completed its 450-mile main line stretching from the Hudson to the Lakes in 1850, President Fillmore and Daniel Webster themselves rode the train—Webster seated on a rocking chair fastened onto an open flat car—to the end of the line at Dunkirk, where they were greeted by a parade, a barbecue, and a twenty-one-gun salute from the U.S.S. Michigan.
Cities wanted railroads—and railroads built cities. Chicago, perfectly situated at the center of the northwestern heartland, and at the southern tip of Lake Michigan around which east-west traffic to the north had to detour, had not a single railroad tie in 1850. Within five years it became the terminus for 2,200 miles and had 100 big trains arriving and departing each day. Its grain elevators, trackside warehouses, lake and canal facilities meshed with its railroads radiating out like spokes in a wheel. Soon trains out of Chicago were jumping the Mississippi into Iowa, steaming down to Cairo and points south, invading Missouri, and linking with the great northern arms of the Father of the Waters.
Lake Michigan served as a broad seaway south to Chicago, lapping the wilderness to the north; two other nautical boulevards, Lakes Ontario and Erie, pointed directly at Chicago from the east. But these inland seaways were not connected and hence could not serve heavy transportation until man intervened. As the constantly improved Erie Canal disgorged people and freight from the east, more and more Lake Erie steamers navigated its shallow and frisky waters. The opening of the Canadian-built Welland Canal enabled steamboats to pass around Niagara Falls between Ontario and Erie. But the most momentous development for Chicago and all the other Great Lakes cities was the extraordinary feat, conceived and engineered by a young Vermonter named Charles T. Harvey, of building the Sault Ste. Marie Canal to bypass the rapids between huge Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soon lake steamers were toting vast quantities of copper and iron ore from the mines on Superior’s shores to points east. By the late 1850s Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and scores of smaller cities were battening off this new lake commerce, and ships were carrying western products from Chicago to Liverpool over the thousand-mile seaway stretching toward the northeast.
Not only grimy ore boats plied the lake waters. Fine lake steamers were built to carry first-class passengers in style, as well as immigrants below-decks. “The handsomest of the lake vessels by the middle fifties,” Nevins wrote, “the Western World, was 348 feet long, with powerful engines and beautiful interior fittings. She and her peers, the Plymouth Rock, the Western Metropolis, and others, with several hundred staterooms each, competed in luxury and entertainment for those who could pay. Down the green lakes they slipped with dancing, gambling, flirtation, and feasting, the musicians in the ballrooms thrumming their guitars,” to the chant:
Old Huron’s long, old Huron’s wide,
De engines keep de time.
Still, nothing could compete for romance with the river-boating a thousand miles south, on the Mississippi. Nevins pictured the river port scenes: “The mile-long expanse of boats smoking and throbbing at the St. Louis and New Orleans levees; the motley crowds of passengers—fur-traders, immigrants, soldiers, cotton-planters, land-speculators, gamblers, politicians, British tourists, Indians, and plain farmers; the avalanche of pork, grain, tobacco, cotton, and hides that the Illinois, the Cumberland, the Washita, the Arkansas, and the Red poured into the central Mississippi stream, cramming every deck; the lordly pilots, the hardbitten captains, the profane mates, the chanting roustabouts; the fierce races as the firemen tied down safety valves; the hands crammed fat-pine into the roaring furnaces, and the passengers cheered.…”
No lady, northern or southern, could ever forget those New Orleans riverboats—stepping down the long promenade deck with its view of hundreds of lights reflecting off the river water, or parading into the palatial dining saloon, with its glittering mirrors, shining candelabra, table settings of damask and silver, and bowers of fruits and flowers.
Romantic—but not altogether economic. The lower Mississippi was often a fickle and even faithless waterway as the water rose and fell unpredictably, channels silted up, and vessels grounded or waited for days in order to pass through. In St. Louis, crates, barrels, hogsheads of tobacco, bags of corn, and a great confusion of goods of all descriptions piled up for two miles along the winding riverbank, often delayed there by a water level that could rise or fall almost forty feet. St. Louis was far enough north to suffer from ice, far enough south to suffer from floods. Despite these difficulties the Missouri city, as well located among rivers as Chicago was among lakes, became by the 1850s one of the world’s biggest centers for breaking and transferring freight.
As northern canals grew wider and longer, northern steamers bigger and deeper, northern ports more mechanized northern capitalists bolder and richer, northern free workers more productive, the South fell behind in the competition to exploit the riches of the heartland.
Businessmen preferred economics to romance. They were making and selling and buying and importing their own cornucopia of goods. George W. Cable described a New Orleans wharf: “drays with all imaginable kinds of burden; cotton in bales, piled as high as the omnibuses; leaf tobacco in huge hogsheads; cases of linens and silks; stacks of rawhides; crates of cabbages; bales of prints and of hay; interlocked heaps of blue and red ploughs; bags of coffee, spices, and corn; bales of bagging; barrels, casks, and tierces; whiskey, pork, onions, oats, bacon, garlic, molasses, and other delicacies; rice, sugar—what was there not?…” Agriculture still dominated invention and production, but transportation and industry were becoming increasingly important. In 1854 the Patent Office issued fifty-six patents for harvesting implements, thirty-nine for seed planters, and sixteen for plows; in 1856 it issued forty for sewing machines, thirty-one for looms, and nineteen for locks.
Products that would become household names were being manufactured now in quantity: not only the McCormick reaper but the Colt revolver, the Remington rifle, Otis elevators, Goodyear’s India-rubber fabrics, Baldwin locomotives. Cities were already specializing in their output. Cincinnati produced more than 125,000 chairs a year by the mid-1850s; Chicago about $2.5 million in ready-made clothes; Lynn, Massachusetts, about 4.5 million boots and shoes. Americans were ingenious in making machines that helped make machines—drills, saws, pumps, belts, milling machines, turret lathes. The American system specialized in interchangeable parts. By the end of the decade, manufactories were turning out 300,000 iron stoves a year, with interchangeable panels, tops, lids, fireboxes.
It was the age of iron—iron locomotives, ships, railroad rails, bridges, farm machinery, pianos—and buildings. Substituting iron beams for wood, Americans made the first multi-story iron building frames. Cast-iron beams were enormously heavy, however, and soon Trenton was using specially designed machines to roll wrought-iron ones. These beams were used in building Cooper Union and Harper Brothers’ new building after the old one burned. James Bogardus’ Manhattan foundry for making iron was made of iron.
Merchant princes were catering to family buyers, especially women. H. B. Claflin earned a fortune out of the dry-goods business. Charles L. Tiffany sold fine jewelry and silverware. Visitors in New York gaped at the huge department stores, with their plate-glass windows and marble pillars. There were a hundred piano manufacturers in New York City alone. But women produced for themselves—books, selling in the hundreds of thousands. “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his friend the publisher William D. Ticknor, “and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash.”
Fueled by enormous farm output, abundant natural resources, rising productivity, a thickening transportation grid, heavy inflows of cheap labor from abroad, and constant experimentation and innovation, the great economic boom roared on. Critical to expansion was the capital that flowed from foreign and eastern and—increasingly—western investors, from home savings, and from the nearly 27 million ounces of gold that were produced in the decade after James Marshall had looked into Sutter’s mill stream with a wild surmise. Commodity output in agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and construction more than doubled during the two decades after 1840. Economic historians differ as to which decade brought the most significant economic “takeoff” or acceleration—the 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, or 1850s—but without doubt all the earlier forces making for greater productivity came together most powerfully in the later years.
Such was the view from the top, but from the bottom Americans were still making little progress toward equalizing the average family’s share of this cornucopia of farm, freight, and factory. By the end of the 1850s masons, blacksmiths, stonecutters, and foremen or overseers were making about two dollars a day; teamsters, quarrymen, blacksmiths’ and boiler-makers’ helpers, and unskilled laborers about one dollar. The old patterns of discrimination persisted: male weavers received 93 cents a day, female weavers 65 cents. Women spinners got half a dollar a day. Some Americans romanticized that the early years of the republic had been golden years of equality, others that the labor and populist movements of the 1830s had had an egalitarian impact. Sober statistics indicated that inequality in the American republic in its first seventy years had simply been constant.
At the glittering Crystal Palace exhibition in London in 1851, the National Intelligencer reported proudly “our handled axes, hay rakes, grain cradles, scythes and snathes, three-tined hayforks, solid steel hoes, road-scrapers, posthole augers, fan-mills, smut-mills, sausage cutters, sausage stuffers, tin-man’s tools, permutation locks, wheel cultivators, carpenters’ tools, currycombs, corn-blooms, portmanteaus and trunks, ice-cream freezers, axletrees, paint-mills,” had established for American industry a “character independent of and unlike that of any other nation.” Most of these products betrayed the hold that agriculture still had on American industrial enterprise, but the Yankees also invaded the English market with sewing machines, clocks, and even the Hoe printing press.
Farm commodities—cotton, wheat, pork, and the like—made up by far the greater part of American exports across the Atlantic. Those exports were soaring; during the 1850s America’s foreign commerce more than doubled. In exchange for their commodities Americans were importing textiles, machinery, iron in the form of rods, bars, rails, and castings. Using the great export routes of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, as well as the Atlantic ports, Chicago and Cleveland and St. Louis and New Orleans were shipping out their flour and pork and bacon at the rate of tens of millions of dollars a year.
Eastern port cities boomed along with this commerce; so did the American merchant marine. The coastal trade flourished; richly decorated “floating palaces” were steaming along Long Island Sound to Connecticut ports, where passengers could link with the expanding railroad grid. New York City gained and held the lion’s share of foreign commerce, followed by Boston, and then by Philadelphia and Baltimore in close competition. The glory of all these ports was the American merchantman—especially the packet, the brig, and the clipper ship. The packet was the most versatile vessel, so dependable that it could run on regular schedules, able to carry cabin passengers, best-paying freight such as textiles and fine goods, and sometimes bulkier freight. The brigs, great square-rigged vessels with two or three masts, were the workhorses of the marine fleet, majestic in size and speed, thrilling to see amidst the spume of the Atlantic. But the pride and the boast of American sailors was the clipper ship, narrow of beam, daintily concave in sides and bow, low and clean of deck, slicing through the water at fifteen knots or more, under a panoply of sails reaching two hundred feet above water.
London liked the grain and the goods that arrived on the packets; it was less enthusiastic about some of the people. The 1850s were a bumptious period in American diplomacy. The new American minister in London, James Buchanan, received instructions from the new Secretary of State, William L. Marcy, to appear at court not in gold braid and ostrich feathers but “in the simple costume of an American citizen.” When Buchanan dutifully showed up in sober republican attire, aside from a dress sword he added so he would not be mistaken for a servant, a London newspaper upbraided the “puppyism” of “the gentleman in the black coat.” American visitors in Europe were invincibly boastful. They felt they had much to brag about—especially after 1851 when the New York yacht America won her cup off the Isle of Wight in a duel with British yachtsmen.
Behind Yankee vainglory lay a surge of organized popular feeling. Since the mid-1840s a movement known as Young America had risen, primarily in the western wing of the Democratic party. Inspirited by the defeat of Mexico and the acquisition of territory, exuberantly nationalistic but also keenly sympathetic to the republican and revolutionary movements of Europe, Young America enjoyed thwacking the “Old Fogeys” in the party hip and thigh. There had been a Young England, a Young Italy, a Young Germany, they pointed out—why not a Young America? Led by a man of dubious reputation named George Sanders, a wealthy Kentucky Democrat, Young America mixed nineteenth-century liberal idealism and crassly materialistic expansionism into a heady brew that for a short time helped raise popular consciousness of America’s “manifest destiny.” By supporting the Hungarian patriot Kossuth and others “who had suffered in the cause of liberty,” Young America both abetted and exploited a wave of popular feeling for Hungarian and other rebels against “oppression”—a feeling that amounted to a fad and even a Kossuth craze.
For these Americans too, the watchword was liberty. When Kossuth arrived in New York Harbor in December 1851, the health officer who boarded the ship saw fit to welcome “Noble Magyar! Illustrious Kossuth!” to the land of free speech and action, and as the hope and trust “of the friends of liberty in every nation and clime.” Said the New York Herald: “National glory—national greatness—the spread of political liberty on this continent, must be the thought and action by day, and the throbbing dream by night, of the whole American people, or they will sink into oblivion.” But liberty, as Americans defined it, seemed to have a variety of meanings and applications—liberty of speech and religion, liberty to take and exploit land, liberty of enterprise, liberty of foreigners to revolt against oppression, liberty of Americans to intervene in such revolts, liberty of Americans to spread liberty. And self-interest often seemed to lurk behind the lofty ideals. Thus William Seward could talk about the nation’s “divine purpose” of spreading democracy, and almost in the same breath, of farmers’ need of gaining markets for “our surplus meat and bread.” And, aside from the abolitionists, all the talk of liberty seemed to have no relevance to slaves.
It was this seeming hypocrisy that especially galled foreigners. Punch portrayed a diabolical, cigar-smoking American, pistol in hand, whip tucked under his arm, blowing smoke rings that displayed lynch law, repudiation, dueling, and slavery. The caption: “THE LAND OF LIBERTY.”
The mixed concepts of liberty as liberation, and liberty as exploitation, dominated the goals of American foreign policy in the early fifties. Everything seemed to conspire to make Cuba a tinderbox. This was a time, in the wake of the revolutions of ’48 and the counter-insurgencies, when American liberals, North and South, could grieve over the sufferings of subjugated Cubans as well as the oppression of Hungarians, Italians, French, or Irish. To southern planters, however, Cuba was a slave dependency where Madrid, under pressure from London and Paris, occasionally threatened to emancipate the slaves, thus creating a “free soil” area to the south. And to other Americans, Cuba was a large and profitable-looking piece of real estate.
This was also a time when the President of the United States, instead of being predisposed against going to war, was wholly prepared to do so if necessary to protect “American national interests.” Franklin Pierce, moreover, was a nationalist who had warned in his Inaugural Address that his administration would not be restrained “by any timid forebodings of evil from expansion.” He was close to southern and western expansionists who were gaining increasing influence in the Democracy, and to leaders of Young America who set the tone of much of the debate.
Yet Pierce had to proceed warily. He had to husband the support of northern and southern moderates on slavery and expansion, both in dealing with Congress and in seeking to retain the presidency. And he had to work with two men in his own administration who dreamed of entering the White House. Secretary of State Marcy was a venerable Democratic party wheelhorse, three-term governor of New York, and an anti-abolitionist, who had won some notoriety for saying that he could see “nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belongs the spoils.” James Buchanan, secretary of State under Polk, was modest and shrewd enough to accept the London ministry. Buchanan’s compliance with Marcy’s dress instruction was an early indication that neither man would allow the other—or the President—to outbid the jingo vote at home.
But the Cuban tinderbox lay waiting, and the spark that threatened to ignite it was struck early in 1854 when the Spanish authorities in Havana rather arbitrarily seized an American coastal steamer, the Black Warrior. The Spaniards had reason to feel edgy: For some years various filibusters, bearing the torches of liberty and realty, had been launching expeditions into Cuba expecting that the oppressed masses would rise against their overlords. Americans had been variously implicated in these efforts. Not for the first or last time, the Cubans failed to rise and welcome their deliverers. After the Havana authorities had executed a number of Americans among the invaders, a bellicose American mob assaulted Spaniards in New Orleans and sacked the Spanish consulate.
The Whig administration of the day had resisted demands for war and even offered Madrid an apology. But the patriotic Democrats were now in power, and they would not let the Spaniards off so easily. In Madrid itself there appeared one of the most remarkable products of American parochial politics ever to grace the diplomatic corridors of power: Pierre Soulé, a United States senator from Louisiana and a longtime leader of southern expansionists. Soulé was no swamp rat, but a well-mannered gentleman and fine conversationalist, a democrat who had fled monarchist France as a youth and developed ties with European radicals. Appointed Minister to Spain by Pierce, he arrived in Madrid amid much controversy, and promptly created a furor when the Duke of Alba and the French ambassador at a diplomatic grand ball made cutting remarks about Mrs. Soulé’s plump figure and low-cut costume, leading the aggrieved husband to cross swords with the duke and then to shoot the ambassador in the leg. Talk about these duels had hardly died down when Soulé was presented with the Black Warrior provocation.
For a time the stage seemed set for American annexation of Cuba and war with Spain. Pierce sent Congress a truculent message alleging longtime Spanish insults to American rights and honor, and demanding indemnity, failing which he was prepared to use any means for redress that Congress would grant him. Marcy more calmly instructed Soulé to demand satisfaction. The Louisianian was beside himself with hope and excitement. This seemed to him—and to his fellow annexationists at home—the ideal moment to strike, for the outbreak of the Crimean War would divert British and French attention to their eastern crisis, and Madrid itself was preoccupied by a domestic military revolt. Soulé did his part by exceeding Marcy’s instructions and bidding Madrid to agree to pay an indemnity and to dismiss the Havana officials—and to do so within forty-eight hours—or he would regard his demands as rejected.
But this was to be another day that a President did not go to war. Sensing that Soulé had overreached himself, the Spanish minister in Washington dealt directly with Marcy, while French and British diplomats closed ranks with the Spanish. Madrid, long expert at procrastination, used delay as a means of cooling tempers. The calls by southern press and politicians for seizure were matched by demands for a hands-off policy by Northerners aware of the proslavery implications of accession, and by some influential southern journals.
Frustrated, Pierce decided to convene a conference of his ministers in Madrid, London, and Paris. This trio—Soulé, Buchanan, and the Virginia expansionist John Mason—issued the Ostend Manifesto (actually neither a manifesto nor written in Ostend) calling for the American purchase of Cuba or, failing that, use of force to seize it. The manifesto turned out to be far too blatant, arousing a furor at home; “Manifesto of the Brigands,” the Tribune called it. Defeated in the fall congressional elections, Pierce drew back. Marcy repudiated the document and rebuked Soulé. The Louisianian resigned. The affair was over. It remained for the London Times to write its epitaph: “The diplomacy of the United States,” it observed, “is certainly a very singular profession.”
The expansionist energies of Young America and other nationalists did not flag on the shores of Cuba. Eight hundred miles farther south lay the Isthmus. For centuries Americans, North, Central, and South, had dreamed of a waterway that would link the Atlantic and the Pacific. The dream became even more compelling when gold-rushers to California, to avoid the long trip around Cape Horn, took the tortuous and disease-ridden overland mule trail from ocean to ocean. Britain, however, also had interests and possessions—notably British Honduras—in Central America. After some angry incidents and confrontations Zachary Taylor’s Secretary of State, John M. Clayton, and Britain’s minister in Washington, Henry Lytton Bulwer, had signed a treaty by which the two nations renounced territorial ambitions in Central America, agreed to cooperate in constructing an isthmian canal, and promised never to gain or exercise exclusive control over the canal.
Democrats were still denouncing the treaty as an ignominious surrender and repudiation of the Monroe Doctrine when the American minister in Greytown, in the British protectorate of the Mosquito Coast, had his face cut open by a broken bottle during mob disorders. When an American naval commander demanded reparation and it was not forthcoming, he bombarded the town. Tempers cooled, but British-American relations were further embittered when the American filibuster William Walker made himself dictator of Nicaragua and talked of forming a Central American federation, and when New England fishermen jousted with Canadian authorities over fishing rights along the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. Other incidents followed; the absorption of the British in the Crimean War, and of Americans in the widening split between North and South, may have helped avert serious confrontations.
If the Atlantic had been for Americans an ocean of commerce and an arena of conflict—an arena of invasions, sea battles, blockades, privateers, filibusters—the Pacific had been pacific. What was known of the largest of oceans, aside from the reports of explorers, had been learned in pursuing the prodigious source of a few rather specialized products: sperm oil for the brightest, purest kind of light, as in lighthouse beacons; spermaceti, for the better grade of candles; whalebone, for corsets, stays, whips, and umbrellas; ambergris, for perfumes and aphrodisiacs. The source for all these was the whale—the humpback, the bowhead, the right, and above all the sperm whale.
In their two- and three-year journeys to the southern and northern and western Pacific, whalemen explored new routes and charted distant islands, reefs, and shoals. They also left way stations and repair ports, the most important of which was Honolulu. By the 1850s, several hundred whalers were visiting the Hawaiian port every year. Its ship-repair facilities made it a vital naval station; inevitably Pierce and Marcy included Hawaii as part of the nation’s manifest destiny. Whalemen from Massachusetts found on Hawaii a large and energetic band of missionaries from Boston, who had built out of coral blocks a large stone church, in the image of a New England meeting house, that served also as a landmark for sailors.
During this height of the era of whaling 600 whalers were bringing home over a quarter million barrels of sperm and whale oil a year, and 2.5 million pounds of whalebone. “Home” was a remarkably small number of ports—notably New Bedford and other New England seacoast towns and river ports like Poughkeepsie on the Hudson. Whaling flourished for a time in the island towns of Nantucket and Edgartown, but eventually they yielded ground to New Bedford. Collectively the whaling towns provided more than 15,000 men for crews and employed thousands more in building, outfitting, and repairing the slow, stubby, broad-beamed vessels strong enough to survive forty or more months of warring with wind, wave, and whale.
Herman Melville had shipped out of Fairhaven, across from New Bedford, on a whaler bound for the South Seas, and no one pictured the romance of whaling as evocatively as he did. The long-awaited, transcending moment of excitement came with the chase by the speedy little whale-boats:
…The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooners, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails.…
A short, rushing sound leaped out of the boat; it was the darted iron of Queequeg. Then all in one welded commotion came an invisible push from astern, while forward the boat seemed striking on a ledge; the sail collapsed and exploded; a gush of scalding vapor shot up near by; something rolled and tumbled like an earthquake beneath us. The whole crew was half suffocated as they were tossed helter-skelter into the white curdling cream of the squall. Squall, whale, and harpoon had all blended together.…
This was a romantic view of the whaler’s life; the view from the forecastle was markedly different. The forecastleman shared the hardships of the ordinary seaman—sleeping and living in a tiny, stinking compartment, with swill and vomit washing about under the wooden bunks, with almost no ventilation or light during cold or stormy weather, with men of a dozen lands and tongues smoking, spitting, cursing, quarreling amid greasy pans, sea chests, soap kegs, in sweat-saturated underclothes. For the whalers, whose voyages were long, conditions were even worse than for ordinary seamen. Their water turned foul, butter rancid, meat rotten, with bread so full of worms that it became common practice to scald them out or—more agreeably—to pour half a pint of rum into the bread casket ahead of time. On the “Nantucket sleigh-ride” a man could drown or lose a limb. Pay was poor. Whalemen lived wretched, oppressed lives, second in misery only to the lot of Africans on the slaver.
The indomitable whalers sailed far beyond the Sandwich Islands to the Bonins, the South China Sea, and Japan. Ever since independence, and freedom from the British Navigation Acts, Americans had been conducting an active trade with the Chinese in tea and silks, working closely with the British, in the treaty ports of Canton, Shanghai, and other Chinese trading centers. A major obstacle in dealing with the Chinese was their conviction that the visitors were “foreign devils” and “barbarians,” while the Americans looked on the Chinese as quaintly mysterious. The inscrutable Orient and Occident had similar problems in Japan. Several American whaling men who had survived a shipwreck off the Kuriles were incarcerated by the Japanese for a year, and required to trample on a tablet picturing the Crucifixion.
Yet trade was growing, and the Fillmore administration decided on a bold step: dispatching Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan to work out commercial understandings. The expedition cleared Norfolk in November 1852. Six months later the Japanese were awed by the spectacle of Perry’s small fleet steaming up the Bay of Yedo (later Tokyo) against the wind. They were apprehensive too:
Thro’ a black night of cloud and rain,
The Black Ship plies her way—
An alien thing of evil mien—
Across the waters gray.
Through a skillful mixture of diplomacy and firmness, Perry worked out a convention for shipwrecked sailors. It was a small start, and disappointing to some traders at home, but within a few years the consul general, Townsend Harris, tactfully negotiated a commercial treaty that set the direction of Japanese-American diplomacy for another half century.
The railroads that forked out of Chicago and rolled across Illinois pointed toward Missouri and Iowa—and toward the vast Kansas-Nebraska Territory that lay beyond. Settlers particularly fastened their gaze on the sandy clay of the fertile river bottoms in eastern Kansas. Slave owners in northwestern Missouri, flanking the winding Missouri River north and south, dreamed of growing hemp and tobacco in the reaches southwest of the river. Land-hungry homesteaders throughout the north eyed the bottomlands and the rich clay loam of the upland prairies beyond.
The territory in itself posed a hot issue, for the question of slavery there was still open. The area was also bound to lie in the vortex of other pressures rising throughout the land: the old issue of federal disposal of lands; the question of local and national treatment of long-beleaguered Indian tribes; and, in the frenzied transportation boom of the 1850s, federal choice of the routes for the transcontinental railroads that would link Atlantic and Pacific. In 1820 American politicians and their political system had handled such factors through a compromise that barred slavery north of 36º30?, and hence, by implication, Nebraska. In 1850 another compromise had endorsed the expedient of popular (territorial) control of slavery while seeming to leave the 1820 compromise intact. But the pressures now were more explosive and centrifugal than ever.
Standing most exposed in this controversy was no Clay or Webster but the forty-year-old chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas looked like a giant who, beneath his great mane and high forehead, had been squashed flat into a broad swath of eyebrows, a wide mouth and neck, and dwarfed legs. Life indeed had tried to squash him flat. Fatherless shortly after his birth in Vermont, put out to farm work as a child by a taskmaster of an uncle, denied a full education, he wandered west, taking job after job, until he settled in Illinois to read law and enter politics. He lost a congressional election by thirty-five votes, and a Senate contest by five legislative votes, before winning a House seat in 1843 and a Senate seat four years later. In his one term in the upper chamber he had achieved a Senate and national reputation as a quick-witted, resourceful, and pugnacious debater and yet also as a conciliator between northern and southern Democrats. Trained as a boy in woodworking, in his short life Douglas had become a master craftsman in the more unruly fields of railroad promotion, tariff making, public land disposal, river and harbor subsidies.
Douglas had a most ingenious plan: to admit Nebraska as a territory, neither legislating slavery there nor legislating it out, leaving the decision on slavery to the people in the territory, and to do all this without openly repudiating the Missouri Compromise. This last requirement was crucial, because Douglas knew that millions venerated that compromise as virtually the holy writ of the Union, sanctified by Clay, Webster & Co. Yet Douglas could not act alone. He could only exert leverage among the great balances of the domestic mobile, and those balances were swinging against him as of January 1854. Two of these swung together: the growing southern influence over the machinery of Congress, and Pierce’s weak presidential leadership. Moreover, time did not lie on Douglas’ side; he was desperately eager to go about his principal business of organizing the Nebraska Territory before his enemies on both flanks could thwart him.
For a time, after Douglas introduced his Nebraska bill in the Senate early in January 1854, it seemed that he might pick his way through the thickets. Providing that Nebraska, when admitted as a state, should be received into the Union “with or without slavery,” as its “constitution may prescribe” at the time of admission, the measure neither affirmed nor repealed the Missouri Compromise—it simply ignored it. Antislavery leaders were not unduly upset; it was hard to argue against local “popular sovereignty,” and they doubted that the territory would be hospitable to slavery anyway. But now the leading proslavery senators swung into action, a formidable phalanx: Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, longtime disciple of Calhoun, champion of nullification, chairman of the Judiciary Committee; two states’ rights, proslavery Virginians, Robert M. T. Hunter and James M. Mason; and David R. Atchison of Missouri, a leader of the proslavery faction, chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, and bitter foe of Thomas Hart Benton, whom he had helped defeat for re-election in 1850. These senators lived and concerted together in Washington, in their famous “F Street Mess.”
The phalanx saw its chance to strike the Missouri Compromise its deathblow. With their chairmanships, big Democratic majorities, and complaisant President, they could hardly expect such an opportunity again. Douglas, startled when proslavery Senator Archibald Dixon of Kentucky brought up an amendment that directly repudiated the compromise of 1820, pleaded with Dixon in the Senate chamber to avoid such a drastic step. Later, when Douglas asked Dixon to join him in a carriage ride so they could talk undisturbed, Dixon was so persuasive—he had the votes—that Douglas not only agreed to support Dixon’s amendment but proposed to sponsor it.
“By God, Sir,” Douglas said, “you are right. I will incorporate it in my bill, though I know it will raise a hell of a storm.”
Why this flip-flop by the “Little Giant”? politicians wondered at the time, and historians ever since. To Douglas, it was not a change of heart but a recognition of where power lay in the Senate and House, of the need to placate that power in order to move ahead on railroad-building and western development. Critics charged that he yielded to the Southerners because of his presidential ambitions, but he was playing better short-term congressional politics than long-term presidential. Long before the term “pragmatist” became popular, Douglas was an expert in calculating short-run advantage and step-by-step movement. He had no strong feeling about slavery, and even less understanding of how others could feel so strongly on the matter. He preferred to leave the future of slavery up to “the laws of climate, and of production, and of physical geography.…” Material forces, not moral, would decide.
It remained only for Douglas and the Southerners to line up the Administration. Increasingly pressed for time, Douglas had only one day—a Sunday—to persuade the President, who would transact no business on the Sabbath. With the aid of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Pierce’s reluctant assent was gained for a meeting with Douglas and a small group. Sensing that the measure would divide his party and the nation, but crippled by divisions within his Cabinet and within himself, the President could not resist the Senate junto; he even agreed in writing that the Missouri Compromise was inoperative. On January 23, 1854, Stephen Douglas brought in his Nebraska bill, embracing the fateful amendment.
Waiting for Douglas’ move was a trio of antislavery senators: Chase, Wade, and Sumner. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio had been born in New Hampshire and had, like Douglas, lost his father in his early years; the uncle who took him in was the Protestant Episcopal bishop of Ohio. Settling in Cincinnati, Chase gained fame as the “attorney-general for runaway negroes” in his ardent defenses of fugitive slaves. A one-man antislavery party, he deserted the Whigs to work for the Liberty party in 1840 and the Free-Soilers in ’48. The deaths of three wives, and of four of six daughters, seemed to deepen his compassion. His junior colleague from Ohio, Benjamin F. Wade, born in Massachusetts and in poverty, rough of mien and coarse of speech, was a Senate neophyte experienced nonetheless in Ohio politics. The most arresting of the trio was Charles Sumner, Boston-born, Harvard-educated, friend of his fellow Unitarians Channing, Longfellow, and Emerson. His longtime denunciations of the cotton Whigs as “the lords of the loom” still alienated him from Robert Winthrop and the rest of the Whig establishment in Boston. Well over six feet tall, large of frame, pedagogical and humorless of bearing, he spoke, said Longfellow, “like a cannoneer…ramming down cartridges,” pressing a single idea with such doctrinal fervor that Francis Lieber complained of his “Jacobinical abstraction” and Winthrop labeled him a “Jesuit of the first water.”
Chase and his Senate and congressional friends had ample time to prepare their counterattack. On January 24 Washington’s National Era blazoned forth with their “APPEAL OF THE INDEPENDENT DEMOCRATS IN CONGRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.”
“We arraign this bill,” the appeal proclaimed, “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants 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.…”
This hyperbole set the tone for the whole manifesto. It offered little reasoned historical or legal analysis, or even a convincing attack on slavery, but rather paraded a series of horribles that would result from the bill: all unorganized territory would be open to slavery, territorial settlement would be slowed up, the transcontinental railroad would be sidetracked, the homestead law vitiated, the whole country placed under the “yoke of a slaveholding despotism.” Again and again the address returned to its main charge: the bill was a diabolical conspiracy against freedom, a plot contrived by a servile demagogue truckling to the South for the sake of his presidential ambitions. “Shall a plot against humanity and Democracy, so monstrous, and so dangerous to the interests of Liberty throughout the world, be permitted to succeed?”
Editors and preachers and merchants had already been thundering against the assault on the Missouri Compromise; now the sheer force of this address, printed also in the New York Times and other newspapers, set off detonations across the North. Never mind the rhetorical absolutes in the address, the exaggerations and distortions, the conspiracy theory—its transcending moral conviction, its timeliness, and above all its reverberating call for the defense of liberty struck home to men and women determined, whatever their specific position on slavery, that this barbaric insult to freedom not be extended to “free soil.” Horace Greeley in New York, Samuel Bowles in Massachusetts, Henry Ward Beecher in Brooklyn, Theodore Parker in Boston, Horace White in Chicago, were only the most noted of those who used the occasion to hurl their own thunderbolts from press and pulpit.
Still underestimating the power of this moral tempest, Douglas predicted that the “storm will soon spend its fury.” It did not, because of its own intensity, because the bill lacerated the public as it wended its way through Senate and House, and because Douglas and his supporters, as well as the antislavery men and their allies, fought the congressional battle so furiously that the issue could not die. Douglas spent most of his time superbly managing the bill, but his angry speeches, laced with epithets, bristled in the press accounts. Greeley, fearing that the bill would “suffocate the moral force of liberty and equality within the young republic,” in Jeter Isely’s words, blasted the measure in a series of brilliant editorials—and watched his Weekly pick up another 35,000 readers nationwide during the first six months of 1854. The Tribune’s opposition could be expected; more significant was the spectacle of leading Democratic papers of Free-Soil tendencies—William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, the Rochester Union, Buffalo Republic, Cleveland Leader, and others—almost overnight turning against the Democratic party leadership.
Would this wave of indignation pass over the North and then subside, like so many moral protests in the past? Or would it take form in some new and lasting political constellation? Looking back later, some historians saw an entire new movement and party spring to life as people mobilized against the Nebraska bill. Few did mobilize at the time, however. The editorial thunderbolts did not descend on people neatly arrayed in the Democratic and Whig parties. In the absence of strong party ideology or organization, Americans were perceiving and acting as members of a variety of subcultures.
They were divided not only over slavery but also over temperance, women’s rights, keeping the Sabbath, prison reform, free land, tariffs, immigration, schools, banks, foreign policy, foreign relations. People’s origins caused other divisions: natives and newcomers often hated one another, immigrants from the British Isles and continental Europe were wary of one another; German Catholics looked down on Irish Catholics; Irish resented Germans; and some Irish disdained other Irish.
The single most powerful antagonism in the early 1850s was native American hostility toward the newcomers who had been arriving each year by the hundreds of thousands—hostility toward their religion, their speech, their drinking, their very foreignness. And the fastest-growing party in the north was the Know-Nothing (or American) party, whose stated program was “Anti-Romanism, Anti-Bedinism, Anti-Pope’s Toeism, Anti-Nunneryism, Anti-Winking Virginism, Anti-Jesuitism, and Anti-the-Whole-Sacerdotal-Hierarchism with all its humbugging mummeries.…”
Cutting through this welter of distrusts and conflicting concerns were three dynamic forces that dominated the politics of slavery. One was abolitionism, rooted in New England preaching and writing and the Yankee diaspora into western New York and Ohio and the northwestern states, an abolitionism often expressed in a strident anti-southernism. The second was the defense and protection of slavery, often reflected in a militant anti-northernism. The third was an “anti-niggerism,” shared extensively by some Whigs and many Democrats and probably by most Know-Nothings—and even by some abolitionists, though it was hard for militant abolitionists to accept this fact. Not everyone who wanted to free the slaves was pro-black; millions of Americans were against slavery and also against “niggers,” because they saw the former as a moral wrong and the latter as a threat. This attitude was most clearly reflected in Free-Soilism. Many Free-Soilers strenuously resisted the Nebraska bill and its threat of allowing slavery onto free soil because they did not want blacks to invade “white” territory, put their children into white schools, and compete for while jobs. They did not want blacks next to them, slave or free.
These dominant groups defended their views in the name of liberty or freedom. Nativists wanted to pursue their lives and their work free of brawling, pushing, competitive Irishmen and Germans. Slave owners proclaimed their liberty to take their bondsmen into the new territories. Homesteaders wished to move into a Nebraska free of “niggerism.” Abolitionists continued to view slavery as the supreme affront to the whole ideal of liberty. Thus liberty as a value still served as a source of intellectual and political confusion rather than as a guide to coherent political action.
This disarray posed a severe problem for serious politicians. They could not operate within the bounds of neatly polarized conflict. They had to win state and local elections against rivals who could easily outdemagogue them in the emotional politics of the early fifties. They had to calculate in terms of possible coalitions, political balance sheets, electoral margins. They had to deal with Americans as they were—with millions of persons not logically arrayed in rational ideological combat but intent on immediate daily needs of survival and betterment and self-esteem, some alienated from politics or apathetic toward it, parochial in outlook, variously cursing Catholics, blacks, Southerners, Northerners, abolitionists, slave owners.
It would take, not a single event like the Nebraska bill, but a series of powerful hammerblows over a number of years before this jumble of attitudes could be heated and pounded into a viable political movement or party. For a time, as Americans turned against the Democratic party because of Nebraska, and the Whig because of its weakness and timidity, people were in a state of political confusion. Many nevertheless stayed with Whiggism or the Democracy. Others joined the Know-Nothings, either as a way station to some other political destination or as a place to settle down. Some met in “anti-Nebraska” meetings and simply formed anti-Nebraska groups. Some met and talked about organizing new Independent or People’s parties. Some pressed for a new Fusion party to embrace abolitionists, Know-Nothings, Conscience Whigs, Free-Soilers, Barnburners, and anyone else available for a coalition.
In Ripon, Wisconsin, fusionists proposed that merging anti-Nebraska groups adopt the name “Republican”; a plea was sent to the Tribune that it adorn its masthead with a Republican banner, but Greeley hedged. Thirty congressmen, meeting at Mrs. Cratchett’s boardinghouse in Washington, discussed a new party to stop slavery expansion. “Republican,” they thought, would make a good name for such a party. Meetings in Jackson, Michigan, and Worcester, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, held almost simultaneously, debated the need for a new party and agreed that “Republican,” evoking memories of Jefferson and popular rights, would be a fine name for a party designed to attract a large variety of people.
But all these efforts would atomize rather than mobilize protest unless events brought more hammerblows—and events did. In Washington the Senate battle raged on, as Douglas pleaded, demanded, goaded, orated, his sharp sentences going “straight to the mark like bullets, and sometimes like cannon-balls, crashing and tearing,” Carl Schurz wrote. As Douglas, the Southerners, and the White House mobilized all their influence, including party patronage, the anti-Nebraska forces lost battle after battle, including the final Senate roll call, when the bill passed 37 to 14. In the House, where the Administration applied whip and spur, and Douglas made his presence known, the tall, gaunt, shrill-voiced Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia applied his rapier-like logic and command of facts to win a closer victory for the measure, 113 aye to 100 nay. Each major event on the Hill, and especially the final roll calls, produced outbursts of delight, rage, threats, recriminations, and dire predictions among hundreds of editors, preachers, and politicians in the country.
The bill had hardly passed the House, in late May 1854, when the moral dimension of the issue was illuminated in Boston. Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old slave and leader of his people on a Virginia plantation, had escaped by boarding a ship bound for Boston, been tracked down by his master, put in chains in a Boston jail, and subjected to the provisions of the Fugitive Act. This provided for not a jury trial but a summary hearing before a commissioner who could dispatch the fugitive back into slavery. While Burns awaited his hearing, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker whipped up a Faneuil Hall crowd to a pitch of indignation. A mob tried to free Burns, only to be beaten off. By the time the commissioner ordered Burns returned to his master Boston was an armed camp, filled with cavalry, artillery, Marines, and police, and with outraged Bostonians and hundreds of protesters from Worcester and other towns. Church bells pealed and thousands watched in helpless fury as the trembling slave, his face scarred and a piece of bone projecting from a broken hand, was taken by cavalry and foot soldiers through flag-draped streets to his Virginia-bound ship. This was only the latest in a series of horrifying fugitive-slave recaptures, which in some cases had ended in the rescue of the runaway. But it was in the far-off territory itself that shocking events now would galvanize the nation and precipitate a transformation of party politics and ultimately of the American political system.
“Come on, then, Gentlemen of the slave States,” William H. Seward of New York had cried out on the Senate floor shortly after the Nebraska bill passed the House. “Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”
It was certain from the start of the Nebraska debate that the Kansas part of the territory would be a combat zone. To publicize Kansas as an arcadia for homesteaders and planters alike, and then to legislate that the people in the territory would decide the burning issue of slavery on the basis of squatter sovereignty, was to thrust two gamecocks into a rain barrel. Escalation began as soon as slavery men heard that the Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society was sending Yankees into Kansas in order to convert it into a free state, and when antislavery men heard that Missouri planters were dispatching “border ruffians” into Kansas with the opposite purpose. Each side exaggerated the satanic purpose and effectiveness of the other.
Each side exploited its own advantages. When a territorial delegate was to be elected, hundreds of Missourians crossed the boundary in buck-boards and wagons, on horseback and on foot, to pick an anti-free-stater as delegate. Proslavery men proceeded to organize a proslavery legislature, which promptly passed anti-antislavery legislation, including penalties for antislavery agitation. Antislavery colonists held their own convention, declared the proslavery legislature illegal, asked admission to the Union as a free state, and later met in convention to frame the free-state Topeka constitution. By the end of 1855 Kansas had two governments—and two sides each arming itself rapidly, the antislavery men with “Beecher’s Bibles,” considered more practical in combat than the Good Book. As the last snows melted on the prairies in the spring, Kansas was headed for a showdown.
Then came the sack of Lawrence. Proslavery men had long considered the town a hotbed of abolitionism; armed with indictments against free-state leaders and two Lawrence newspapers—the Herald of Freedom and the Kansas Free State—sheriffs men and “border ruffians” occupied the town. Spoiling for a fight, furious at finding the leaders gone and the populace unresisting, the invaders threw printing presses into the river and bombarded the Free State Hotel into rubble. One man angered by the nonresistance to this invasion was John Brown, on his way to Lawrence with his small troop of Liberty Guards when he heard about the sacking. He resolved to take the drastic action that the cowardly antislavery people refused to take. Selecting a small band from his Liberty Guards, including several of his sons, exhorting them to “fight fire with fire,” he led them to the houses of proslavery men and, while wives and children watched, dragged the victims out and hacked them to death with cutlasses. With the fifth murder Brown stopped; he had avenged the killing of six free-state men during Kansas’ months of violence, including the one man who had died at Lawrence.
It is probable that, on the way to Lawrence, Brown was told of another assault by the “slave power,” far away in Washington. This news could hardly have tempered his passion, nor explained his action. Brown was an enigma to his neighbors in Pottawatomie Creek, and would remain so long after: was he a fanatical moralist who as a boy had seen a young slave beaten with a shovel by his master, a stern Calvinist who had dedicated his life to a merciless effort to extirpate the evil of slavery; or was he simply a homicidal lunatic from a family of lunatics?
Each incident in Kansas provoked storms of oratory in Congress as both chambers became caldrons of sectional hatred and hyperbole. “Truly—truly—this is a godless place,” Sumner lamented early in 1856. No one writhed under the oratorical lashes of Douglas and southern senators with a greater desire for vengeance than the Massachusetts lawmaker. Carefully he planned his climactic attack on the moral wickedness, the supreme sinfulness, of slavery. From his first words when he gained the floor in mid-May—”Mr. President, you are now called to redress a great transgression”—to his final reference to Virginia, “where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles,” his speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” was studded with provocative and offensive personal attacks on his foes. He attacked the phalanx, especially Butler, charging that the South Carolinian had chosen a mistress who, “though ugly to others, is always lovely to him…the harlot, Slavery.…” When Douglas answered him in kind, Sumner ranted: “…no person with the upright form of man can be allowed—” He paused.
“Say it,” Douglas shot back.
“I will say it—no person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. …The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”
“I will,” Douglas replied, “and therefore will not imitate you, sir.”
This was not the kind of grand Senate debate in which senatorial gladiators harangued each other on the floor and then walked through the cloakroom arm in arm. These adversaries loathed one another. As the bonds of civility snapped, as allies and constituents egged the antagonists on, Congress trembled on the edge of violence. Preston S. Brooks, a thirty-six-year-old congressman from South Carolina, a Mexican War veteran considered to be a moderate and agreeable man, had listened to some of Sumner’s remarks. Incensed by Sumner’s “insults” to South Carolina and to Brooks’s admired uncle, Senator Butler, Brooks carefully planned vengeance. He would not challenge Sumner to a duel, because that would imply acceptance of the Massachusetts man as his social equal. He would simply thrash him, as he would any other inferior guilty of wrongdoing.
After gallantly waiting for some women visitors to leave the Senate lobby, Brooks strode up to Sumner’s desk, where the senator was busy with correspondence, and rained twenty or thirty blows on Sumner’s head with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane. Sumner rose convulsively, wrenching his bolted desk from the floor, and reeled about as Brooks broke his cane on his head and kept on striking him, until bystanders dragged the assailant away. Almost insensible, his head covered with blood, Sumner, with the help of friends, stumbled out of the Capitol into a carriage a painful convalescence—and martyrdom.
Sacking a defenseless town, dragging helpless men out of their homes and hacking them to death, bloodying a United States senator pinioned under his desk—this explosion of baleful events sent new and irresistible shocks into the American conscience. Thirty months of rising conflict, culminating in these violent days of May, were arousing Americans to a consciousness of slavery as the supreme issue transcending all the others. The hurricane was whipping through the mainstream of American politics, washing out old waterways and carving new channels, wrenching people from ancient political moorings and leaving them adrift or clutching new ones.
Fundamental economic and social forces, as well as bitter conflict, seemed to be transforming America during the 1850s. The economic boom roared on through the middle of the decade, both satisfying needs and raising expectations. Population soared under the impact of foreign immigration and domestic fecundity. Rising prices altered long-established relationships among groups and classes. Massive immigration caused new anxieties and tensions. Intense railroad building not only was altering the face of the land but causing social dislocation, as the jobs of draymen and teamsters and rivermen evaporated in one place and employment for railroad builders and trainmen and telegraphers suddenly materialized hundreds of miles away.
The few Americans who were reading Karl Marx in the 1850s might have expected sweeping political change to follow economic and social, especially in the wake of the storm over slavery. A major political change indeed was in the making, as a few Americans tried a major political experiment—to create a new political party that would challenge the existing two-party system in elections. This had never been done. Earlier the Democratic party had gradually grown out of the old Republican party; the Whigs had never had to challenge a full-bodied Federalist party. Many politicians doubted that this new party—anti-Nebraska, or Fusion, or Republican, or People’s—would have any more success than Liberty-ites or Free-Soilers. Only a Republican zealot would have dreamed in 1854 that the isolated protest meetings of that year would start the formation of what would become the dominant party for three-quarters of a century.
The question for Republicans by the end of 1854, indeed, was whether their movement would even survive. They faced not only the familiar Whigs and Democrats, Free-Soilers and Know-Nothings, but “Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells,” and assorted others, in David Potter’s listing. Of the third parties, the Know-Nothings seemed most ascendant. In November 1854 they swept Massachusetts, scored well in New York and Pennsylvania, and elected a large number of representatives to the national House; after they won more victories the next year, some predicted that the nativists would take the presidency in 1856. Know-Nothings and anti-slavery representatives had enough in common in the new Congress to elect as Speaker Nathaniel P. Banks, a Massachusetts nativist and antislavery man who was once a Democrat, more recently a Know-Nothing, and now on his way to Republicanism.
All the parties indeed seemed immobilized by 1856. The Democrats, claiming to be the only truly national party, were bleeding at both ends as proslavery extremists deserted them in the South and “Free Democrats” seceded in the North. Whigs, still torn between conscience and cotton, were walking a tightrope on nativism, as they watched Democrats making inroads among immigrants and Catholics, and Know-Nothings exploiting bigotry. Some Whig leaders followed the high road; invited to address an anti-alien organization, Edward Everett not only declined but lectured his would-be host on the need to greet newcomers “in a spirit not of exclusiveness but of fraternal welcome.” Other Whig leaders were less high-minded. The Know-Nothings, even in the flush of their victories, comprised the weakest party of all, for they were deeply divided over slavery. When the party adopted a proslavery platform in its convention in June 1855, northern delegates withdrew, and the party was on the road to extinction.
The parties were immobilized because their top leadership was immobilized, and the leaders were immobilized because they were enmeshed in state and local politics. If the leaders could have fought in one great arena, some bold and committed spirit might have taken an advanced position against slavery—even in favor of emancipation—knowing that someday the people would catch up with him. But the national politicians of the day had to fight their battles within the states, and within key cities and counties in those states. Men like Sumner or Chase or Seward did take the lead, but only when local conditions permitted. No great national leader arose to rally Whigs or Democrats behind a daring commitment to halt and eventually abolish slavery; rather, month after month and year after year, state and sectional leaders calculated, advanced here, retreated there, compromised, adjusted, as they competed with rivals within and outside their parties, and tried to survive in the three-dimensional maze of American electoral and party politics.
The task of party invigoration, of creative political response to the hurricane of events and the social dynamics of the 1850s, would fall on a cadre of activists who, amidst all the murk, had a clear vision of what they believed in, where they wanted to go, and how they proposed to get there. No state demonstrated their problems and their progress more vividly than Illinois.
Illinois seemed the distillation of America. Though it opened on the Great Lakes to the north and flanked hundreds of miles of the Mississippi on its west, already it was the quintessential heartland. Both its industry and its agriculture were booming in the 1850s, the two meeting in Chicago’s grain elevators and McCormick’s reaper factory. Illinois embraced sections and cultures: Chicago teemed with Irish and Germans; northern Illinois was dotted with towns more Yankee than Dedham; southern Illinois, touching Kentucky and reaching farther south than Richmond, was a land of people who still talked and thought as Virginians and Kentuckians. No one—no European traveler, no nationally ambitious politician, no immigrant heading west along the northern routes, no businessman looking for profit—could ignore Illinois.
If Chicago was the economic capital of Illinois in the 1850s, Springfield was the legal and political. Like Bloomington and Peoria and a dozen other places in central Illinois, it was a boom town, with its brand-new railroad connection to Chicago and New York, its population that was doubling while land valuation tripled. This town smack in the middle of the state was also the capital, with a proud new statehouse built of buff-colored stone that had been dragged by teams of twelve oxen from a nearby quarry. Springfield was still in part an unfinished frontier town: on a wet day people could sink to their knees in the prairie mud of the unpaved sidewalks; hogs ran wild in the streets, and in the business district imposing three-story shops stood next to ramshackle houses. The public square was crowded with buggies and sometimes by “movers” headed west in their covered wagons. Yet Springfield also had its aristocracy, dominated by wealthy old Whig families like the Stuarts, Edwardses, and Todds.
One of the Todds, Mary, a small and refined woman of quick temper, had married below her station in accepting a local lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, a man of tall frame, easygoing manner, hollowed cheeks, huge arms and hands, coarse black hair, and dowdy garb. Even after Lincoln was making good money as a lawyer, he could be seen currying his horse and milking his cow.
If you wanted to find Abe Lincoln in Springfield, you would look for a battered sign, LINCOLN & HERNDON, swinging on rusty hinges outside an office building downtown. You would climb a narrow flight of stairs, cross a dark hallway, and enter an office filled with a long, creaking sofa, a few old cane-bottomed chairs, and desks piled high with papers that overflowed the pigeonholes. If Lincoln wasn’t there, his partner, William Herndon, might be. Billy seemed almost the opposite of Abe: youthful, nervous, verbose, something of a dandy, but admiring, of “Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln might be down at the courthouse or the capitol, or visiting another law office, or some place where you might find him telling jokes that had a crowd in stitches—“he could make a cat laugh,” someone said—or he might be sitting by himself in a state of such utter melancholy that no one would dare approach him.
If Lincoln was not in town, he was probably out riding circuit. Gone were the days when he might ride horseback through rain and snow for thirty miles or so. Now he could take trains, with his free pass, or drive a horse and buggy. In earlier times he had been lucky to find a farmhouse where he could put up overnight in the extra room; now he could often stay at a newly built hotel. He often traveled with other lawyers, and with David Davis, circuit judge of the judicial district, a huge man of three hundred pounds, cherubic face, and sharp, penetrating mind. At night Lincoln might have to share a bed with another attorney, but the judge had his own bed, as tribute to the principle of separating bench and bar.
Life on the circuit was hard but educational. Lincoln, arguing every kind of case under every kind of law, constitutional, patent, admiralty, and common, came to know virtually every economic interest and human problem in the heart of Illinois.
He became a respected lawyer, trusted with important responsibilities, arguing many cases involving human problems, including divorce, rape, murder, and both sides in fugitive-slave cases. But most of his cases dealt with property: disputed wills, railroad rights-of-way, foreclosures, debt collection, patent infringements, trespass violations, mortgages, property damages. While early in his career he represented rivermen against bridge and railroad enterprises, later he took so many cases for railroads—he represented the Illinois Central in eleven appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court—that by the mid-1850s he was known as a railroad lawyer. Yet he also sued the Illinois Central when they offered him a fraction of the fee he billed them, and won. A Whig, a man of property, he prospered in the economic boom of capitalist Illinois. He believed in individual liberty, initiative, and enterprise. It was best, he said, “to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” Some would get rich, but a law to prevent that would do more harm than good.
But Lincoln was much more than an attorney for capitalism. A onetime state legislator, a Whig congressman in 1845-47, an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate, he had repeatedly subordinated his law practice to his desire to run for office. Herndon marveled at this man who could be so relaxed and casual at times but who seemed “totally swallowed up” in his greed for office. His ambition, Herndon said, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”
Politically ambitious—and yet the soul of political caution. When news of the Nebraska bill reached Springfield, and Herndon and other militant young Whigs wanted to use aggressive, even desperate means to defend the cause of freedom, Lincoln urged them to do nothing rebellious or illegal. People all around him were breaking away from Whiggism to the Know-Nothing or Republican or some other party, but Lincoln would have none of it. Above all he feared being linked with abolitionists or other extremists, but he dared not offend the radicals, for they voted too. When Republicans and other antislavery leaders invited him to a Springfield meeting to form a state organization, he contrived to be out of town; and when they elected him to their state central committee, he declined the poisoned chalice.
He was not sure where he stood. “I think I am a whig,” he wrote his friend Joshua Speed, “but others say there are no whigs, and that I am an abolitionist.” As a congressman he had voted for the Wilmot Proviso forty times, he went on, and he had never heard of anyone trying to “unwhig” him for that. He simply opposed the extension of slavery, he insisted to Speed.
“I am not a Know-nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people?” Americans seemed to be degenerating. “As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.’” At that point, Lincoln added, he would prefer to emigrate to some country like Russia, “where they make no pretense of loving liberty.”
If he was politically immobilized, at least he could speak for himself, and when Stephen Douglas returned to Illinois late in 1854, Lincoln’s competitive spirit was aroused by the man who had succeeded so brilliantly in politics as he had not. The Little Giant, after journeying to Chicago “by the light of my own effigy,” Douglas related almost pridefully, tried to defend his Nebraska role to a mass meeting, only to be howled down. Farther south he found his audiences more friendly. When he defined his position to a wildly cheering audience at the state fair in Springfield early in October, Lincoln was there, sitting directly in front of him and listening intently to every word; at the end he rose and announced that he would respond to Douglas the next day, at the same time and place. He did, before a crowd as enthusiastic as Douglas’, and the two men squared off again in Peoria—exchanges that would lead to a much more extended confrontation four years later.
Still, Lincoln continued to take a moderate position on slavery, far short of abolition, and to act as a conciliator among anti-Nebraska Whigs, fusionists, and others, not to take leadership and certainly not to join the controversial Republicans. Few other moderate antislavery leaders of statewide standing were willing to embrace Republicanism or radicalism. Yet within a year a strong Republican party was growing in Illinois. What had happened?
The persons who built the Republican party in Illinois were not national leaders—the Republicans still had none—nor were they noted state anti-slavery men—most of them were still standing by their old parties—but a “third cadre” of militant grass-roots activists. These were the people who organized meetings, put up posters, carried on antislavery correspondence, carried around petitions, got people to vote. One antislavery orator alone, a man named Ichabod Crane, subsidized by an anti-Nebraska fusion group in Chicago, spoke to more than a hundred rallies and probably many more than 100,000 persons during 1854, and to almost another hundred meetings during the next two years. The militants had a superb political vehicle—the city or county convention. No one could stop them from “issuing the call,” organizing and holding the convention, adopting rules of order, electing a chairman, conducting vigorous debate, passing resolutions, all before press and public.
Perhaps the most remarkable of the activists’ meetings was held in the winter of 1856 in Decatur by a group of anti-Nebraska newspaper editors, mainly old-line Whigs. Only one politician was present—Abraham Lincoln, who had just declined to serve as an Illinois delegate to a Republican national organizing convention in Pittsburgh. To Lincoln’s satisfaction, the Illinois editors took a moderate position, calling for restoration of the Missouri Compromise but acceding to slavery in the South and the fugitive-slave law. Acting boldly as men who were political leaders as well as editors, they called for a statewide convention, to take place in Bloomington in late May. While Lincoln was out of town, Herndon added his partner’s name to the call. Told by old-line Whigs that he had ruined Lincoln, Herndon anxiously wrote his partner: Did he approve?
“All right, go ahead,” Lincoln replied. “Will meet you, radicals and all.”
The Bloomington convention met in the wake of lurid accounts of the sack of Lawrence and the caning of Sumner. The grass-roots activists were still taking the lead; Lincoln came to Bloomington but was immensely relieved when old-line Whigs and bolting Democrats showed up along with radicals and abolitionists. At least he could play the role of conciliator. He and Judge Davis and old-line Whig Orville Browning worked strenuously behind the scenes to prevent splits among the polyglot delegations of Whigs, anti-Nebraska Democrats, Know-Nothings, German immigrants, and temperance reformers. The convention censured both the Nebraska bill and nativism. Soon the call rang out for “Lincoln, Lincoln” to give the concluding address. The normally analytical attorney seemed to catch fire as he spoke. Men sat enthralled, reporters listened with their pencils transfixed while Lincoln gave perhaps his most galvanizing speech—a speech lost to history because of those frozen pencils.
By this time the national parties were wheeling into line, in preparation for the presidential election battle of 1856. After the Know-Nothings split into their northern and southern wings earlier in the year, the “South Americans” prepared to do battle behind Fillmore, and the “North Americans” looked toward other parties, especially the Republicans. As nativists, they could hardly look to the Democratic party, with its hospitality to immigrants and Catholics. The Democratic national convention met in Cincinnati early in June.
Pierce hoped to be renominated, but his weakness as President and flabbiness as a leader had disappointed even his southern friends in the party. The Southerners would rather reward the Northerner who had taken leadership on the Nebraska bill, fought for it, and put it through—the Little Giant. Southern support now was Douglas’ undoing, however, for at this point the Democracy wanted to win a national election, not merely a congressional enactment, and a moderate safe-and-sane candidate was available in James Buchanan. The Pennsylvanian had worked closely with southern leaders, but less flamboyantly than Douglas. He had served in both House and Senate; he was experienced in foreign affairs as a former Secretary of State—and he had the great advantage of having been in London during the battle over Kansas. Keeping in close touch with the contest from Washington, Douglas learned over the telegraph of the successive ballots as Pierce fell behind and Buchanan forged ahead; then the Illinoisan, always a believer in party unity and discipline, asked that his name be withdrawn.
Two weeks later, in a fervency of moral indignation and high enthusiasm, two thousand Republican delegates and friends gathered in Philadelphia’s Musical Fund Hall. This crusading new party was already proclaiming itself as a national movement but one look at the state standards revealed that it was embarrassingly sectional—not a single southern delegation was present. Unswayed by Democratic charges that they were a single-issue party, the Republicans adopted a platform of nine planks, most of which took a strong stand against slavery extension, but they did not neglect to call for government-aided construction of a Pacific railroad “by the most central and practical route.” The convention quickly chose for President a man who seemed an ideal candidate—John C. Fremont, soldier, western explorer, famous as the “Pathfinder,” and a moderate on slavery. True, he was politically inexperienced but he was young and bold and determined, just the right candidate, in Nevins’ words, for a party that would be young, bold, and determined. The fact that he was married to the spirited Jessie Benton, daughter of the maverick Democratic senator from Missouri, seemed a fine little extra—until the senator announced that he was sticking by his party’s choice of Buchanan and, to boot, that he loved his son-in-law “like a son” but flatly opposed him for President. The presidency had now become such a glittering prize in American politics that parties were compelled to broaden their ranks and win over third parties. Already there were three parties in the 1856 field, but where were the Whigs and the North Americans? The latter threatened to hold their own convention and nominate their own candidate—a move that would divide the antislavery forces even further—until Thurlow Weed and other Republican managers contrived an adroit piece of political chess play. In a move that once again indicated the close affinity between Republicans and northern Know-Nothings, the leaders of the latter party had chosen Speaker Banks for President as a holding operation until the Republicans selected their own candidate. The maneuver worked; once Fremont was nominated by the Republicans, the North Americans soon dropped Banks and endorsed the Pathfinder.
The Whigs, broken as a major party, had their last hurrah in a September gathering of their leaders in Baltimore. There they fell back on their political and intellectual taproot—preservation of the Union. Denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as merely sectional and divisive, they endorsed Fillmore as a friend of the Union and of the Constitution, “without adopting or referring to the peculiar principles of the party which has already selected” him. So disappeared the northern leadership of the great Whig party in the bowels of the Know-Nothing party, for whose nativist prejudices it had little but contempt. It was the politics of nostalgia; these Whig “gentlemen,” a Republican journalist observed, “are evidently incapable of the idea that the process now going on in the politics of the United States is a Revolution. ”
By now the parties’ orators and foot soldiers—Fremont’s Republican-North Americans, Buchanan’s Democrats, and Fillmore’s Know-Nothing-Whigs—were locked in furious combat throughout the North. The Democrats were so strong in the South, the Fillmore forces so weak, and the Republicans so absent, that Buchanan won there by default, and the Democracy was able to deploy its finest southern orators in the battle of the North. That battle on the part of all three parties consisted, rhetorically, of systematic exaggeration and distortion of the positions of both foes. Although the Republicans in particular tried to moderate their position on slavery in order to capture the centrist vote, southern Democrats frightened the electorate with warnings of disunion and secession should Fremont win.
It was also a battle of cadres. Here the Democrats had the advantage, with their thousands of well-disciplined jobholders and their tens of thousands, of stalwarts who could not forget the glory days of Jackson and Van Buren. But the Republicans had the advantage of enthusiasm, as their militants used press, pulpit, parades, and personal proselytizing to transmit their new gospel. They could call on some of the most eminent literati. In Concord, a group of Republican neighbors had gone to Emerson’s house to ask him to join the Massachusetts delegation to the Republican national convention. They had done so in fear and trembling, for Emerson was known to be averse to “meddling with politics” in any partisan way. Though Emerson was not at home, Mrs. Emerson electrified her visitors by stating that of course Mr. Emerson would put aside his private affairs in this “momentous crisis.”
But this election would not be decided in Massachusetts—all New England, and New York too, were expected to go Republican—rather in the great swing states in the center. Foremost of these was Pennsylvania, with its twenty-seven electoral votes, and its bellwether state elections three weeks before the presidential. The Democrats poured in vast sums of money, some of it scourged out of New York merchants in the southern trade; the Republicans brought in less money but battalions of orators. The Democrats’ victory in the state election presaged Buchanan’s win in November. Still the Republicans fought on. Women and clergymen were so militant in the cause that Democrats sneeringly dismissed them as “Pulpit and Petticoats.” The militants took on a radical posture, appropriating the air of the “Marseillaise” and bringing audiences to their feet with the battle song:
Arise, arise, ye brave,
And let your war-cry be
Free speech, free press, free soil, free men,
Fremont and victory.
Illinois was the critical battleground of the West. Lincoln, Herndon, and other anti-Nebraska leaders canvassed the state, trying especially to bring old Whigs over to Fremont and the Republican state ticket. While Lincoln was disappointed in the outcome of the Republican national convention—Fremont was not conservative enough and Lincoln himself had lost as a favorite-son candidate for Vice-President—he was now enlisted in the Republican cause. Still, he was cautious and conciliatory. Even in 1856, he did not speak of the Republican party, for fear of alienating Free Democrats and old-line Whigs; he solicited votes for the anti-Nebraska or Fremont cause.
History and geography, more than campaigning, dictated the presidential election results. The South went for Buchanan, the upper tier of northern states for Fremont, and Maryland for Fillmore. But the Democrats carried Pennsylvania, Indiana—and Illinois. Republican disappointment was tempered by elation over their 1.3 million popular votes, second to the Democrats’ 1.8 million, but far ahead of Fillmore’s 870,000. Their “glorious defeat” had put them in the strategically crucial position of being the major opposition party.
Lincoln pondered the election results. Illinois, a microcosm, had gone Republican in the north and Democratic in the south, but had elected a Republican state ticket. Lincoln’s ability to moderate clashes among Free Democrats, old-line Whigs, disaffected Germans, unreconstructed Know-Nothings, and radical abolitionists left him as undisputed leader of the Illinois Republican party. But what about the national party? Could it both restrict slavery and preserve the Union?
“We don’t want to dissolve” the Union, he had warned his foes in a speech in Galena, “and if you attempt it, we won’t let you. ” The purse and the sword would not be in the Southerners’ hands, “We won’t dissolve the Union, and you shan’t.”