The thing about causes and effects are that they only really become apparent in retrospect, which often reminds your resident historiorantologist of something the Indigo Girls once sang:
You don't know you're there/'til you're stuck in the middle. So it was with the United States of the 1850's. The people of the time knew their nation was splitting in the face of irreconcilable differences, yet it was the escalating rhetoric of the hotheads of both sides, not the calming voices of unity and reason, which carried the day. Like deer in the proverbial headlights, many (but increasingly fewer) of the common folk on both sides wavered indecisively in the face of an oncoming historical maelstrom.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, for at look at the beast that American Politics, ca. 1850 wrought. If you look real close, you'll see how the fates of presidencies and nations can turn on the whims of self-serving Senators, poorly-written but wildly popular books, and explosively dumb decisions by the Supreme Court...
To set the stage: The year is 1854, and Franklin Pierce is our President. A dyed-in-the-cotton believer in Manifest Destiny, Pierce has spent the early part of his presidency pissing off the Northern abolitionists by launching scheme after harebrained scheme to expand southern territory overseas. It's not working out - the Nicaraguans and Costa Ricans fought back, Spain wouldn't sell Cuba; in the end, about the best Pierce could do by way of expanding slavery was to let his South Carolina buddy James Gadsden pay Mexico $10 million for a makeover of the southern borders of New Mexico and Arizona.
This meant that the presumptive line of the upcoming transcontinental railroad would run from an originating point in the South - probably Houston - out to El Paso, through Tucson, and reach the ocean and the end of the line at Los Angeles (basically, along the route now occupied by Interstate 10). Logistically speaking, this made the most sense, since the addition of the Gadsden Purchase gave southern railroad men a relatively easy route upon which to lay tracks - but there were forces at work in the North that had absolutely no interest in seeing the South reap the economic and demographic benefits of controlling the only cross-continent rail line in the Western Hemisphere.
Back when Senators had Juevos...
Back before the 17th Amendment (which our old buddy Zell Miller wants to repeal), Senators were chosen by State legislatures, not direct votes by the people (anybody wanna ask Joe Lieberman where he stands on the 17th? - betcha he takes the 5th). This had a couple of effects, not all of them bad: even as the State and Federal Houses shifted around by census and personality, Senate remained remarkably stable, so it wasn't until pretty late in the game that the more radical elements in the North and South were able to capture enough votes in the State Houses to vote out longstanding, compromise-oriented Senators. On the downside, it meant that a state could end up with a real Ken Salazar of a Senator, if that Salazar happened to have a simple majority of support among a couple of hundred state legislators - and like all such support, it could come about as a result of respect, tradition, bribery, or graft born of naked ambition. In the end, the result was the same.
Most of the great Senators of the earlier generation had died or retired during the debates over the Compromise of 1850 or shortly thereafter, and as State Houses became more sectionally skewed, they began to send increasingly more polarizing figures to Washington to represent them. Guys like Steven A. "Little Giant" Douglas found there an environment rife with opportunity for the calculating man, and as Democratic Senator from the great State of Illinois, Douglas was in a position to take advantage of the situation. A big believer in westward expansion, he invested heavily in Chicago real estate and railroad stock, then surprised everyone (not) by coming out in favor of a transcontinental line with its eastern terminus in the Windy City.
The South, with its proposed rail route already secured, would never support such a scheme without the most generous of enticements, and Douglas, whom people called "a steam engine in breeches," knew the one piece of bait the South wouldn't be able to resist: the prospect of a new slave state north of the ancient (well, since 1820, anyway) demarcation line at the northern border of Arkansas. In 1854, he dangled just that before his southern colleagues, in the form of the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Weird Historical Sidenote: To debunk a popular misconception, this was not the Mason-Dixon Line, which was established in the 1760s as the border between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The 1820 line was at 36°30' North latitude, and doesn't really have a glamorous nickname associated with it.
How To Legislate A Civil War
Not that our current Congress isn't pretty good at doing it to other countries, but the Congress of the mid-1850s proved surprisingly adept at supporting measures that would lead to an internecine conflict in our own. Senator Douglas' proposed Act would abrogate the 34-year old Missouri Compromise (which allowed slavery in Missouri, but nowhere else north of 36°30') and open the new territories up to "popular sovereignty," which in theory meant that the settlers of a new territory would have a rational, reasonable public debate about the policies of their new home, then settle the matter at the ballot box. In practice, what it did was flood Kansas and Nebraska with the most zealotous hotheads from either side, who then started shooting at each other.
Popular sovereignty, as discussed in last week's historiorant, was the cop-out du jour for an 1850s pol who wanted to avoid taking a stand on slavery. It fit into Douglas' plan nicely: if the South could get enough people who wanted slavery to up and move to Kansas, then who was he to stand in the way of the will of the people? Sounded reasonable to Franklin Pierce, who generally behaved like putty in the hands of his southern cronies/overlords. He supported the measure, and quickly signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act after it passed by a narrow vote.
Northern abolitionists flipped out. Douglas said that it would be possible for him to travel from Boston to Chicago by night, lit the whole way by the light from all the burning effigies of himself. At public addresses, he was greeted with "three groans for Doug," but his support remained strong where it counted for him most: old-school Illinois Democrats, and the western, popular-sovereignty territories through which his railroad would run. Back east, Fugitive Slave Law-haters everywhere condemned the "Nebrascals" and the damnable "Nebraskality."
"So You're The Little Woman Who Wrote The Book That Made This Great War"
- A. Lincoln, 1862
In both North and South, people were hungry for information and solid, well-reasoned arguments that supported their particular positions. They did get some of this, but they also got an eyeful of the writings of the era's more riot-inciting writers, as well. Beginning as a serialized story published in newspapers, Harriet Beecher Stowe's fictionalized (and not all that well-written) account of slavery and the effects of the Fugitive Slave Law was taken as gospel among Northern abolitionists, and seen as sectionalist propaganda by the South.
Excerpt from Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter LX
The escape of Cassy and Emmeline irritated the before surly temper of Legree to the last degree; and his fury, as was to be expected, fell upon the defenceless head of Tom. When he hurriedly announced the tidings among his hands, there was a sudden light in Tom's eye, a sudden upraising of his hands, that did not escape him. He saw that he did not join the muster of the pursuers. He thought of forcing him to do it; but, having had, of old, experience of his inflexibility when commanded to take part in any deed of inhumanity, he would not, in his hurry, stop to enter into any conflict with him.
Also coming out on the side of antislavery advocates were a few nonaristocratic white southerners, including a guy named Hinton R. Helper, whose Impending Crisis of the South proclaimed that slavery was, in fact, a curse upon low wage-earning whites. In the South, Helper's books were gathered into great piles and set alight; in the North, the rapidly-coalescing Republican Party condensed them into campaign literature.
Probably the most reprehensible Oxified One of the 1850s was a guy named George Fitzhugh, a white southerner who clearly felt that he was doing African Americans a favor by owning them. Indeed, sometimes he sounds both surprised and a little miffed that blacks all over the South weren't spending their off-hours carving statues of their benevolent masters. You can get a sense of the growing alarm among the people of his camp by looking at the titles and years of publication of the following two excerpts:
Historiorant: WARNING: Severely Racist Crap Approaching! Historiokossians are advised that the following blockquote contains some of the most vile writing ever committed to paper by an American "scholar"; I present it here only to help frame the issue as US citizens in the 1850s were seeing them - know the enemy, and all that.
He (the Negro) is but a grown up child, and must be governed as a child, not as a lunatic or criminal. The master occupies toward him the place of parent or guardian. We shall not dwell on this view, for no one will differ with us who thinks as we do of the Negro's capacity, and we might argue till dooms day in vain, with those who have a high opinion of the Negro's moral and intellectual capacity.
< snip > ...We presume the maddest abolitionist does not think the Negro's providence of habits and money-making capacity at all to compare to those of the whites. This defect of character would alone justify enslaving him, if he is to remain here. In Africa or the West Indies, he would become idolatrous, savage and cannibal, or be devoured by savages and cannibals. At the North he would freeze or starve.
Source: Fitzhugh, George. Sociology for the South; or, The failure of a free society (Richmond, Va., A. Morris, 1854).
And
The Negro slaves of the South are the happiest, and, in some sense, the freest people in the world. The children and the aged and infirm work not at all, and yet have all the comforts and necessaries of life provided for them. They enjoy liberty, because they are oppressed neither by care nor labor. The women do little hard work, and are protected from the despotism [tyranny] of their husbands by their masters. The Negro men and boys work, on the average, in good weather, not more than nine hours a day. The balance of their time is spent in perfect abandon. Besides' they have their Sabbaths and holidays. White men, with so much of license and liberty, would die of [boredom]; but Negroes luxuriate in [physical] and mental repose. With their faces upturned to the sun, they can sleep at any hour; and quiet sleep is the greatest of human enjoyments.
Source: Fitzhugh, George. Cannibals All! Or, Slaves Without Masters (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1857).
Meanwhile, Back In Farm Country...
Things were getting shooting-bad. The ivory-tower types might be content to keep theirs a war of words, but Kansas was being settled by a different sort of debater. From the north came mostly just regular-old settlers, but interspersed among them were pioneers who were being financed by various free-soil organizations. Probably the foremost among these was the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which bankrolled the settlement of about 2000 abolitionists. Many of these carried a new breech-loading Sharp's carbine rifle they nicknamed "Beecher's Bibles," after Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet's brother), a preacher who had helped with the fundraising.
Southerners had thought they had a gentleman's agreement with the North (and perhaps they had, at the unspoken Federal cloakroom level), but to the eyes of the average fire-breather on the southern street, the abolitionist moves toward Kansas had all the earmarks of a betrayal of trust. They were supposed to get Kansas, in exchange for the abolitionists getting Nebraska. To them, the influx of abolition-supporting settlers into Kansas represented a threat to their goal of maintaining sectional balance. They recognized the stakes: If both Kansas and Nebraska voted for free soil, the North would have just the opening it needed to repeal the hated Fugitive Slave Law - then they'd probably start going after the institution of slavery itself.
In 1855, Kansas settlers voted on their territorial legislators - but so did a whole bunch of proslavery "border ruffians," who crossed over from Missouri and voted both early and often. Stubbornly clinging to a victory in the face of massive and very obvious fraud, proslavery Kansans formed their government at Shawnee Mission, while anti-slavery types set up a government of their own at Topeka (which President Pierce later declared to be "in rebellion"). Feuding continued over charges and counter-charges of fraud and illegitimacy, later expanding into fighting between individual settlers over land claims.
The fighting attracted the sort of folks who like to fight. Abolitionist John Brown showed up with his hard-fightin' sons in late 1855, even as groups like the Southern Emigrant Aid Society armed people like those of the Dark Lantern Society. Finally, in 1856, a gang of proslavery raiders attacked and burned a large part of the free-soil town of Lawrence. That set everybody off, as speeches in Washington set off reprisals in Kansas, vengeance begat vengeance (John Brown and four of his sons used broadswords to behead 5 pro-slavery men in one raid), and by the time it was over in the late 1850s, 55 people had died in "Bleeding Kansas."
Weird Historical Sidenote: The term "Jayhawk" was coined to describe the nature of Kansans during the late 1840s and 1850s, and apparently is a combination of "blue jay" (a noisy, quarrelsome bird that robs others' nests) and "sparrow hawk" (a fast, sneaky predator). Both sides called one another jayhawkers at first, but it wound up sticking to the free soilers. There's a good article on the term's relation to Kansas University here.
Senators of Cheney-esque Decorum
The sack of Lawrence prompted one of the few Senators who took a leadership role in the abolitionist cause, Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, to deliver a blistering speech on the floor entitled, "The Crime Against Kansas." He had little to lose, as nobody really liked him much anyway, and so it was a blistering speech - among other things, he informed his patrician colleagues that proslavery men were "hirelings picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization." He concluded by pointedly insulting South Carolina in general, and her well-loved Senator Andrew Butler in particular.
One of South Carolina's Congressmen responded to this insult to his state's honor in a manner that Dick Cheney can only dream of: he walked over to where Sumner was sitting at his desk, then proceeded to beat him with an eleven-ounce cane until it broke. By that point, Sumner was unconscious and bleeding from severe head wounds on the floor of the U.S. Senate, as his colleagues - the leaders of the nation - refrained from interfering. It would take him three and a half years of costly and painful treatment in Europe before he would return to his seat, but the voters of Massachusetts flipped South Carolina the Bird by re-electing his supporters to their House, who then rather poignantly left his seat in the Senate unoccupied.
Brooks took some flak for putting a man into a coma during a felonious assault on the floor of the U.S. Senate, but not as much as you might expect. The matter went to the House, where a defiant Brooks explained himself, then got himself sort-of absolved by asserting that the House had no jurisdiction over Representatives who flog Senators. Here's part of Brooks' rationale for why honor impelled him to break his cane; click on the link for his weasely defense:
Some time since a Senator from Massachusetts allowed himself, in an elaborately prepared speech, to offer a gross insult to my State, and to a venerable friend, who is my State representative, and who was absent at the time.
Not content with that, he published to the world, and circulated extensively, this uncalled for libel on my State and my blood. Whatever insults my State insults me. Her history and character have commanded my pious veneration; and in her defence I hope I shall always be prepared, humbly and modestly, to perform the duty of a son. I should have forfeited my own self-respect, and perhaps the good opinion of my countrymen, if I had failed to resent such an injury by calling the offender in question to a personal account. It was a personal affair, and in taking redress into my own hands I meant no disrespect to the Senate of the United States or to this House. Nor, sir, did I design insult or disrespect to the State of Massachusetts. I was aware of the personal responsibilities I incurred, and was willing to meet them.
Preston S. Brooks before the House of Representatives, July 14, 1856
The incident was huge, and blown even more out of proportion by extravagant applause for Sumner's antagonistic speech in the North. Southerners responded by sending Brooks new canes - some of them gold-tipped - to replace the one he'd broken over Charles Sumner's cranium.
"Old Buck" and "The Pathfinder"
This series was originally intended to be about party politics, and so it seems appropriate to finally return to them after six pages of stage-setting. Regrettably, however, the Election of 1856 wasn't much to write home about - rather than selecting great leaders who were intimately knowledgeable about the issues of the day, the two principle parties sought out the most Kansas-less candidates they could find. For the Democrats (who had had quite enough of Pierce's wussiness and found Douglas way too polarizing), that man was former ambassador to England James Buchannan; for the newly-strident Republican party, it was John C. Fremont, a dashing Western explorer with virtually no political experience.
The Republican Party was born as a purely sectional, and shockingly fast-spreading, antislavery movement in Wisconsin and Michigan. From its inception in the ashes of the Whig defeat in 1852, it was quickly able to dominate the House of Representatives, and by 1856 was the second dominant party in American politics. In a very real sense, the Republican Party skipped altogether the "third party" stage of development, and went straight to major-party status. In 1856, their platform countered that of the popular sovereignty-favoring Democrats by taking a strong abolitionist stand.
It attracted a diverse group of highly disaffected people: partyless Whigs, old Free-Soilers, and rank-and-file abolitionists, but had some likely support siphoned off by the American Party, which consisted of Know-Nothings who were now operating slightly above-board. The American Party nominated Millard Fillmore (who wanted his old job back) and capitalized on nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment: they received 8 votes in the Electoral College. Here's a little of their party platform:
http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/...
It probably didn't help Fremont much that he had born out of wedlock in Savannah, Georgia, and that he was alleged to a Catholic. "Old Fogy" Buchanan wound up carrying the day, despite people looking at him a little funny because he wasn't married (the story was that his beloved fiancé had died years before) and because he had a very long-term same sex roommate. Was our 15th President gay? I dunno - this article says yes, but you won't find any mention of it at the White House Historical Association. Whether he was or not is immaterial to the matter at hand, however: James Buchanan was a capable public servant with a record going back to the War of 1812 who found himself elected into times that screamed out for no mere capability, but for genius. Like our own times, the electorate found the leader it had chosen wanting in that regard.
Historiorant:
Alas, I see the hour of posting draws nigh, and so I must close this with only about 4 years elapsed. Next time: Dred Scott ends Buchanan's extremely short honeymoon period; the economy tanks; and we finally cue the tall, skinny guy.
As always, please ensure you're doing your historiokossian homework and checking out aphra behn and her twain series: Canadian History for Americans and Forgotten Founding Mothers, while teachers can touch base at rserven's Teacher's Lounge. Also, interested scholars should note that Tuesday, September 5th, will mark the debut of a brand-new website for progressive historians - be sure'n check out progressivehistorians.com on Tuesday! (it's in a beta-stage for the time being).
UPDATE: From the comments,
nitpicker directs us to an [analysis of the Kansas-Nebraska Act http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2006/08/rumsfelds-faulty-grasp-of-history.html] and its ultimately-Rumsfeldian overtones