Penguin History of the United States of America (56 page)

The price of this achievement, even if it was what it seemed, was fearfully high. The South was bitterly opposed to the explicit exclusion of slavery from California and its implicit exclusion from the territories under the popular sovereignty formula: was this equality within the Union? And the abolition of the District of Columbia slave-trade seemed to be an ominous exercise of national power, directly attacking slavery: worse might follow. On the other side, the new Fugitive Slave Law was denounced, above all in New England, as an intolerable affront to the rights of Northern states and the consciences of Northern men and women. For the small-meshed network of its provisions not only bound all public officers to assist slave-holders to recapture runaway slaves, but entitled them to call on the assistance of bystanders, imposed terrific fines and up to six months’ imprisonment on all who were convicted either of helping the runaways or trying to rescue them from custody; and, worst of all, by forbidding persons claimed by slave-holders from testifying in their own defence and accepting almost any evidence that slave-holders chose to present as valid, made possible the kidnapping of Northern free Negroes. Emerson wrote bitterly in his journal, ‘the word
liberty
in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word
love
in the mouth of a courtesan’. In Cincinnati Airs Stowe was moved to write
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, of which the most famous episode is the escape of the slave Eliza across the ice of the frozen Ohio river, pursued (in the stage version, which was even more popular than the novel) by bloodhounds. North and South, the Whig party began to break up.

There was irony in this: preservation of the party had been one of Henry Clay’s chief aims in bringing forward his proposals. Webster had accepted appointment as Fillmore’s Secretary of State especially in order to rally the Whigs behind the Compromise, and used federal patronage ruthlessly to that end. But the Southern Whigs, who had fought so valiantly against the disunion forces in their section, were not forgiven: in the 1852 Presidential election the voters abandoned them for the Democrats. In Massachusetts the party split between the ‘Conscience Whigs’ (who leaned towards the abolitionists) and the ‘Cotton Whigs’ (who leaned towards the South). That too was electorally disastrous. So, for different reasons, was the nomination of General Winfield Scott for the Presidency in 1852. The South saw him as too much the puppet of Seward, and therefore of anti-slavery; Northern Protestants, full of resentment of the Irish refugees who were pouring into America to escape famine, and the Germans who were escaping political persecution, noticed that Scott had educated his daughters in a convent and refused to vote for him. Webster and Clay died in 1852: they had no
successors as conservative statesmen whose personal authority was enough to unite their party in a national cause. The Whig débâcle was complete.

A new generation of sectional politicians was arising: of men, that is, who lacked a national following. Seward was one; Jefferson Davis (1808–89) °f Mississippi, the spokesman of the South, was another. Webster’s place in the Senate was filled by Charles Sumner (1811 – 74), a Massachusetts orator even more flowery and turgid than his predecessor, but of a very different political stripe. Sumner won the Senate seat only because of a split in the state Democratic party, which let in an alliance of Conscience Whigs and anti-slavery radicals. No one expected him to be re-elected, but meantime he became the voice of abolition in the Senate, as his friend Charles Francis Adams, latest of the family, was in the House: and a rancorous, insulting voice it was.

Posterity naturally sees in all this portents of civil war; but to contemporaries – to Stephen A. Douglas, for instance – the future did not seem so unpromising. Franklin Pierce, the new President, was a nonentity, but he was also a Democrat; and the Democrats-controlled Congress. There was a coarseness in Douglas’s nature, and an optimism bred by his intense ambition, which made him insensitive to the meaning of events, in spite of his great abilities (Seward once had to tell him that no man who used the word ‘nigger’ in public would ever be elected President). Yet it was in good faith that he now perpetrated a tremendous blunder.

The Compromise of 1850 had wrecked the Whig party and given the Democrats an unmanageable majority, largely composed of newcomers, in both houses of Congress – a majority which Pierce’s weak leadership was unable to consolidate. Its Northern and Southern, free soil and slavery wings, were soon quarrelling bitterly over the spoils, and Douglas thought it his duty to try to unite them over some great measure. He fancied he knew the very thing. For years he had been pushing his ‘Western Programme’, a project to bind the East and West together by furthering settlement along the routes of emigration to Oregon and California, possibly by a homestead bill which would more or less make a present of the public domain to pioneer families; by establishing a transcontinental telegraph; and by one or more transcontinental railroads. Such a programme required the political organization of the lands between the Rockies and the river Missouri, across which pioneers were now pouring in ever-increasing numbers, many of them to settle in the valley of the river Platte. In fact these Platte settlers were beginning to harass Congress with demands for a territorial government, and were backed by the people of Missouri, Iowa and Illinois. Douglas had tried repeatedly to get Congress to act, but had always been defeated: the heart of the opposition coming from the Democratic Senators and Congressmen of the Southern states. Like any good politician, Douglas accepted that he would have to buy them off, and inquired as to the price. It did not seem too extortionate: the South was again hankering for a symbolic assertion of its equal rights within the Union. To get a bill through Congress all Douglas
needed to do was to include a provision applying the principles of the 1850 Compromise to the Nebraska Territory (as it was to be called). This would theoretically permit slavery in the area; but popular sovereignty and the facts of physical geography and population movement would ensure that in practice it remained free soil.

There would be a mighty battle in Congress, of course, but that would have the excellent effect of reuniting the Democrats; the West would welcome the bill, especially after Douglas decided to propose the establishment of two new territories, Kansas and Nebraska, rather than just one; in the end the South would have its symbol, the North would have the land, the question of slavery extension would be settled for good (since there would be no further territory into which the institution could, even in theory, expand) and Douglas would be able to get on with the great work of developing the West. Accordingly, in the winter of 1853–4 he presented his bill to Congress.

He was bold and ingenious, and the Nebraska question had to be dealt with somehow: it was becoming urgent. All the same, the bill had too many inevitable enemies for real success to be possible; the dangers were enormous, and all came to pass; in retrospect it is clear that Douglas should have let the matter rest until a better season. The anti-slavery men denounced the bill because it implicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise; the South denounced it because it did not do so explicitly; and the Whigs, seeing a chance to revive their own fortunes by splitting the Democrats, made all the mischief they could. Since the key to passage still lay with the South, Douglas conceded the explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and then was successful in pushing the bill through both houses of Congress. Instead of the Democrats the Whigs split, irredeemably, on North-South lines. Pierce signed the bill into law on 30 May 1854. So far so good. But the South was not the only part of the country that was interested in symbolic politics. The Missouri Compromise might have been superseded, might be, as the Attorney-General thought, unconstitutional; nevertheless, to the anti-slavery movement it had long stood as the one guarantee that ‘the Slave Power’ might be checked, and the United States be held to its professions of freedom and equality. The congressional abolitionists signed a manifesto drafted by Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio which asserted that the Nebraska bill was

part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region immigrants from the Old World and free labourers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.

They fought the bill relentless until it became law, and then carried the battle to the country.

Douglas could overwhelm his opponents in Congress: out of doors it was another matter. A hurricane of rage swept the North in what was
probably the most spontaneous outburst of popular indignation since the Stamp Act disturbances. Douglas had been too ingenious, like Grenville and Townshend; like Lord North with his Tea Act, he had passed a statute which had much to recommend it to practical men, but had overlooked the climate in which it would have to operate. All too many Northerners, even members of his own party, lacked his robust confidence that slavery could not spread, and that therefore the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a free soil measure. The outlook for the 1854 elections suddenly became alarming. Even Illinois was not safe. Douglas hurried back to his state to keep it in line, noting hostile demonstrations all along the way. ‘I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy,’ he said. ‘All along the Western Reserve of Ohio I could find my effigy upon every tree we passed.’ In spite of his efforts, the elections went against his followers; and a dangerous opponent emerged. Abraham Lincoln, who had stuck to the trade of lawyer for five years, was provoked by the crisis to re-enter politics. Soon he was challenging Douglas for control of Illinois.

And the development predicted and feared since 1846 was coming about: a new, exclusively Northern political party was appearing. It would take a year or two to consolidate, but meantime, at Jackson, Michigan, in a grove of oak-trees, ten thousand anti-Nebraska citizens had met on 6 July 1854 and formed themselves into a Republican party – an example instantly followed in Massachusetts, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois and elsewhere. The party proved to be a powerful magnet: by 1856 it had absorbed most of the old Whigs, the old Free Soilers and the anti-Nebraska Democrats. It had, of course, no support in the South; for its guiding principle was of implacable opposition to any further expansion of slavery or concession to the ‘slavocracy’. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, it said, was part of a plot to enable the slave-holders to control the government, to introduce Southern aristocracy to the democratic North, to burden the economy of the territories with the peculiar institution; at all costs the plot must be resisted. This frenzy began to alarm the South, which Calhoun had always been trying to unite in its own sectional party. The outlook for Douglas and those others who were trying to keep the Democratic party together was poor; and if the Democratic party failed, no other leaders, no other group had a chance of reconciling the sections, now that the Whigs had vanished. Even the churches had split: as early as 1845 the Methodists had broken into Northern and Southern wings, next year the Baptists did the same.

The rise of the Republicans was at first threatened by the unexpected emergence of a rival, the American party, nicknamed the Know-Nothings because of its origin as a secret society the members of which were supposed, to say, when challenged, ‘I know nothing’. The Know-Nothings exploited the still-rising resentment of native Americans against the Irish and German influx. The foreign-born population went from 2,240,535 in 1850 to 3,096,753 in i860; and its increase was mostly concentrated in the eastern ports of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Inhabitants of those cities
were alarmed, especially by the Irish, notoriously prone to be drunken and riotous; many conservative Whigs, led by former President Fillmore (who was the American candidate in 1856), who could not stomach Republican radicalism, joined the Know-Nothings; and so did many voters who thought the old parties corrupt and wanted a new reign of political virtue. The Know-Nothings did strikingly well in state and city elections in 1854; but they began to fade before 1856. They reeked too much of prejudice for many of the respectable. ‘I am not a Know-Nothing,’ said Lincoln. ‘How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of Negroes be in favour of degrading classes of white men?’ Much better to support the Republicans, who appropriated and discreetly rephrased Know-Nothing principles and put them in the party platform: the Republican party was to be the party of the Protestants and native-born until far into the next century. Furthermore, the inexperience of the Know-Nothing leaders told against them; they did not know what to do with electoral victory, while the Republicans, who inherited men and political machinery from the Northern Whigs, the Free Soilers and many Northern Democrats, showed themselves to be superbly skilful practitioners of the traditional arts of politics. They appropriated causes wherever it would do good: by i860 they were not only the party of anti-slavery, free soil and Protestantism, but the party of temperance too (during one of their frequent public clashes, Lincoln gained kudos by ostentatiously refusing to drink whisky with Douglas, a famous toper). They showed themselves sympathetic to industry and business, and positively eager to steal Douglas’s pet proposals of a transcontinental railroad and a homestead act for parcelling out the public domain in the West. Kansas-Nebraska, in short, had raised up a formidable enemy for Douglas, the Democrats and the South.

Nor were matters helped by a turn to violence. At times it seemed as if Boston was on the verge of another tea-party: the local view was that the abolitionists had been proved right by the South’s ‘treachery’ over the Missouri Compromise, and consequently there was bitter resentment at the continuing enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law: many Bostonians showed themselves ready to impede its operations, by any means, as their ancestors had been ready to impede the Tea Act. Massachusetts (not alone) passed a Personal Liberty Law which in effect (and quite unconstitutionally) nullified the Fugitive Slave Act, as South Carolina had once nullified the tariff. Wendell Phillips was always at hand to remind Bostonians of the cause. The Act had caused turbulence elsewhere; there were anti-slavery riots and a few slaves were rescued from recapture. But these demonstrations did not amount to much. Many found they could let off enough steam by writing letters to President Pierce addressing him as ‘the chief slave-catcher of the United States’. Fighting began elsewhere.