Battle Cry of Freedom Read online

  12. CG, 33 Cong., 2 Sess., 115.

  13. Potter, Impending Crisis, 159.

  14. Rawley, Race and Politics, 35.

  North against this "gross violation of a sacred pledge," this "atrocious plot" to convert free territory into a "dreary region of depotism, inhabited by masters and slaves." These phrases came from the collaborative pens of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, Joshua Giddings, and three other free-soil congressmen who published an "Appeal of the Independent Democrats" in the National Era—the same paper that had serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin.15

  This Appeal set the keynote for an outpouring of angry speeches, sermons, and editorials in Congress and across the North. The moderate New York Times predicted that the northern backlash could "create a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred of the institution [slavery] which will crush its political power, at all hazards, and at any cost." Hundreds of "anti-Nebraska" meetings sent resolutions and petitions to Congress. "This crime shall not be consummated," declared a typical resolution. "Despite corruption, bribery, and treachery, Nebraska, the heart of our continent, shall forever continue free." Of ten northern state legislatures in session during the first months of 1854, the five controlled by Whigs denounced the bill and four of the five controlled by Democrats refused to endorse it. Only the Illinois legislature, under pressure from Douglas, approved the measure. In Congress northern Whigs unanimously opposed it. The newly elected Whig senator from Maine, William Pitt Fessenden, considered Douglas's bill "a terrible outrage. . . . The more I look at it the more enraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist."16

  Douglas insisted that repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30' was nothing new. The Compromise of 1850, he declared, had superseded that restriction by allowing popular sovereignty in former Mexican territory north as well as south of that line. Northern senators exposed the speciousness of this argument. The Compromise of 1850 applied only to the Mexican cession, not to the Louisiana Purchase, and no one at the time—Douglas included—had thought otherwise. The supersedence theory emerged as a rationalization for a policy forced on Douglas

  15. National Era, Jan. 24, 1854. Why these six antislavery leaders designated themselves Independent Democrats is not clear. Nearly all of them had been Whigs before becoming Free Soilers. The name may have been a legacy from the 1852 election, when the Free Soilers had called their party the Free Democracy.

  16. New York Times, Jan. 24, 1854; resolution quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 127; William P. Fessenden to Ellen Fessenden, Feb. 26, 1854, quoted in Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York, 1976), 259.

  by southern pressure. Nevertheless, Democratic party discipline and Douglas's parliamentary legerdemain pushed the bill through the Senate in March by a vote of 41 to 17 with only five of the twenty free-state Democrats joining northern Whigs and Free Soilers in opposition.17

  Northern Democrats in the House who had to face elections in the fall proved more resistant to administration pressure. Nevertheless Alexander Stephens, floor manager of the bill, applied "whip and spur" and drove it to passage on May 22 by a vote of 115 to 104. "I feel as if the Mission of my life was performed," wrote an exultant Stephens.18 Perhaps so, but only by giving the coup de grâce to the intersectional two-party system. Every northern Whig in the two houses voted against the bill, while 25 of 34 southern Whigs voted or were paired for it. Of 75 southern Democrats, 72 voted or were paired for the measure while 49 of 108 northern Democrats voted or were paired against it. Many of the latter knew that an affirmative vote meant defeat for reelection, while a negative vote meant an end to influence in the party establishment. Only seven of the northern representatives who voted Aye won reelection, while several who voted Nay left the Democratic party never to return. For northern and southern Whigs the bitter divisions caused a final parting of the ways. "The Whig party has been killed off effectually by that miserable Nebraska business," wrote Truman Smith of Connecticut, who resigned in disgust from the Senate. "We Whigs of the North are unalterably determined never to have even the slightest political correspondence or connexion" with southern Whigs.19 That was fine with southerners. "We will have no party association . . . with Northern Whigs," they declared, "until they shall give unmistakable evidence of repentance [of] the impulses of a wild fanaticism."20

  17. These figures include senators who were paired or declared for and against the bill. The actual roll-call vote was 37 to 14. In addition to the northern senators who voted against the bill, two Whigs and one Democrat from slave states also voted No, mainly because they feared a northern backlash that might harm the South. See Robert P. Russel, "The Issues in the Congressional Struggle Over the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, 1854," JSH 29 (1963), 208–9.

  18. Nevins, Ordeal, II, 156; Rawley, Race and Politics, 55. The vote totals here include those paired or declared for and against the bill. The actual vote was 113 to 100.

  19. Quoted in William E. Gienapp, "The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1980, p. 323. The published version of this study, with the same title (New York, 1987), appeared too late to be cited here.

  20. This is a composite quotation from the Richmond Whig, Florida Sentinel, and Southern Recorder, all quoted in Cooper, The South and the Politics of Slavery, 358.

  Adding insult to injury, southern senators killed a bill passed by a predominantly northern vote in the House to provide settlers with a 160-acre homestead grant on public lands. Such a law, explained one southerner, "would prove a most efficient ally for Abolition by encouraging and stimulating the settlement of free farms with Yankees and foreigners pre-committed to resist the participancy of slaveholders in the public domain."21

  The question was, who would pick up the pieces of the smashed political parties? In the lower South, Democrats would soon sweep most of the remaining shards of Whiggery into their own dustbin. In the upper South, Whigs clung to a precarious existence—under different names—for a few more years. In the North, matters were more complicated. Some antislavery Whigs like William H. Seward hoped to rejuvenate the party for the 1854 state and congressional elections by absorbing Free Soilers and anti-Nebraska Democrats. But the latter groups declined to be absorbed. Instead, along with many Whigs they proposed to abandon "mere party names, and rally as one man for the re-establishment of liberty and the overthrow of the Slave Power."22 New antislavery coalitions thus formed throughout the North to contest the fall elections. These coalitions called themselves by various names—Anti-Nebraska, Fusion, People's, Independent—but the one name that emerged most prominently was Republican. An anti-Nebraska rally at a church in Ripon, Wisconsin, seems to have been the first to adopt this label. A meeting of thirty congressmen in Washington endorsed the name on May 9. The new party in Michigan officially designated itself Republican in July. Conventions in numerous congressional districts, especially in the Old Northwest, chose this name that resonated with the struggle of 1776. "In view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of republican government," resolved the Michigan convention, "and against the schemes of aristocracy the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed, or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as Republicans."23

  The campaigns in the North were intense and bitter, nowhere more

  21. Jabez L. M. Curry to Clement C. Clay, July ?, 1854, quoted in Nevins, Ordeal, II, 335.

  22. National Era, May 22, 1854.

  23. Quoted in Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 154.

  than in Douglas's own state of Illinois. Douglas opened the canvass with a speech on September 1 in Chicago, where a hostile crowd shouted him down for two hours until he strode angrily off the platform and headed for friendlier districts downstate. Meanwhile, Abraham Lincoln was "aroused . . . as he had never been before" by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.24 Still calling himself a Whig, Lincoln took the stump in
behalf of anti-Nebraska candidates for the legislature, hoping that victory would forge a legislative majority to elect him to the U. S. Senate. Lincoln and Douglas confronted each other on the same platform in speeches at Springfield and Peoria during October. In these addresses Lincoln set forth the themes that he would carry into the presidency six years later.

  The founding fathers, said Lincoln, had opposed slavery. They adopted a Declaration of Independence that pronounced all men created equal. They enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery from the vast Northwest Territory. To be sure, many of the founders owned slaves. But they asserted their hostility to slavery in principle while tolerating it temporarily (as they hoped) in practice. That was why they did not mention the words "slave" or "slavery" in the Constitution, but referred only to "persons held to service." "Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution," said Lincoln, "just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time." The first step was to prevent the spread of this cancer, which the fathers took with the Northwest Ordinance, the prohibition of the African slave trade in 1807, and the Missouri Compromise restriction of 1820. The second was to begin a process of gradual emancipation, which the generation of the fathers had accomplished in the states north of Maryland.

  Lincoln denied "that there CAN be MORAL RIGHT in the enslaving of one man by another." But he did not want to pass judgment on southern people. When they "tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery, than we, I acknowledge the fact. . . . They are just what we would be in their situation. . . . When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it," Lincoln acknowledged that fact also. "I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia."

  24. CWL, IV, 67.

  But a moment's reflection convinced him of the impossibility of that. "What then, free them and keep them among us as underlings? Is it quite certain that this betters their condition? . . . What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals?" Even if Lincoln's own feelings would accept this, "we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. . . . A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded."

  In any case, the Constitution protected slavery where it already existed. But that "furnishes no more excuse for permitting slavery to go into our own free territory, than it would for reviving the African slave trade." The great "moral wrong and injustice" of the Kansas-Nebraska Act was that it opened territory previously closed to slavery, thus putting the institution "on the high road to extension and perpetuity" instead of restricting it in order gradually to end it. Popular sovereignty was false in principle and pernicious in practice, said Lincoln. Its assumption that the question of slavery in a territory concerned only the people who lived there was wrong. It affected the future of the whole nation. "Is not Nebraska, while a territory, a part of us? Do we not own the country? And if we surrender the control of it, do we not surrender the right of self-government?" I "can not but hate" this "declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of . . . the monstrous injustice of slavery." Douglas's assertion that natural conditions would prevent bondage from taking root in Kansas was a "LULLABY argument." Temperature, rainfall, and soil in eastern Kansas were the same as in Missouri and Kentucky. Five slave states already existed north of the 36° 30' line. "Climate will not . . . keep slavery out of these territories . . . nothing in nature will." Lincoln knew that Missourians had already taken slaves to Kansas. The only way to stop them was for Congress to vote slavery out.

  But such action, Douglas had protested, would be contrary to the settlers' "sacred right of self-government." Nonsense, replied Lincoln. Slavery was contrary to that right. "When the white man governs himself that is self-government; but when he governs himself, and also governs another man . . . that is despotism. . . . The negro is a man. . . . There can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another," "Let no one be deceived," concluded Lincoln:

  The spirit of seventy-six and the spirit of Nebraska, are utter antagonisms. . . . Little by little . . . we have been giving up the old for the new faith. Near eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a "sacred right of self-government." These principles cannot stand together. . . . Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. . . . Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.25

  This eloquent speech expressed the platform of the new Republican party. Lincoln did not formally become a Republican for another year or more, after the Whig party had crumbled beyond salvation. Nor did he go as far as many other Republicans who called for abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and repeal of the fugitive slave law. But Lincoln's affirmation of moral opposition to slavery, his belief that the national government had a right and duty to exclude it from the territories, and his conviction that this "cancer" must eventually be cut out, became hallmarks of the Republican party. The historical basis of Lincoln's argument, of course, had some holes in it, and Douglas lost no time in driving his own oratory through the largest of them. The same supposedly antislavery fathers who had excluded slavery from the Northwest Territory had allowed it to expand into southwest territories, laying the groundwork for seven new slave states and the great cotton kingdom of the lower South. But free soilers brushed this problem aside; if the republicans of the Jeffersonian era had fallen short of the mark in some things, the new Republicans of the 1850s would not repeat the same mistake. Slavery must not expand; the party that had passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act must be repudiated.

  A majority of northern voters in 1854 seemed to agree. The elections were a stunning rebuke to the Democrats. After carrying all but two northern states in 1852, they lost control of all but two free-state legislatures in 1854. The number of northern Democrats in the House would drop from 93 to 23, who would be far outnumbered by their 58 southern Democratic colleagues. Perhaps one-quarter of northern Democratic voters deserted their party in this election.26

  Having elected 150 congressmen under various labels, opponents of

  25. Ibid., II, 247–83. These quotations are from Lincoln's famous speech in Peoria on Oct. 16, 1854.

  26. These election results are calculated from the Whig Almanac (published by the New York Tribune) for 1854 and 1855.

  the Democrats would control the next House—if they could come together under the same political umbrella. But that was a big if. The difficulty of doing so was illustrated by Lincoln's fortunes in Illinois, where the anti-Nebraska coalition had a substantial majority on a joint ballot of the legislature. Lincoln's fellow Whigs constituted about three-quarters of this coalition. But a half-dozen anti-Nebraska Democrats refused to vote for a Whig for U. S. senator, causing Lincoln to fall short of a majority in ballot after ballot. Finally, to prevent the election of a Douglas Democrat, Lincoln threw his support to an anti-Nebraska Democrat, Lyman Trumbull, who thereby won on the tenth ballot.27

  The muddy waters in Illinois were quite translucent compared with the murky depths of northern politics elsewhere. Up from the great deep came a tidal wave of nativism that seemed to swamp even the anti-Nebraska movement in some areas, especially in states east of Ohio. "Nearly everybody appears to have gone altogether deranged on Nativism," yelped a Pennsylvania Democrat in 1854. "The 'Know Nothing' fever is epidemic here," wrote a Pennsylvanian from another
part of the state. A Connecticut politician lamented that nativists "are making havoc with the Democratic party here," while a Whig leader in upstate New York warned that his district was "very badly infected with Knowno-thingism." Variously described as a "tornado," a "hurricane," a "freak of political insanity," these "Know Nothings" swept the state elections of 1854 in Massachusetts and Delaware, polled an estimated 40 and 25 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania and New York, and made impressive showings in other parts of the Northeast and the border states.28 Who were these mysterious Know Nothings, where did they come from, and what did they stand for?

  II

  The nativist parties that had flared up in the early 1840s died back to embers after the elections of 1844. Recovery from the depression mitigated the tensions between native and foreign-born workers which had sparked the riots of that year. Even as the volume of immigration quadrupled following the European potato blight of the mid-forties, the accelerating

  27. Don E. Fehrenbacher, Prelude to Greatness: Lincoln in the i850's (New York, 1962), 37–39. This balloting was not for Douglas's seat in the Senate. Having been reelected in 1852, Douglas would come up again in 1858 when he faced Lincoln in a more famous contest.

  28. Holt, Political Crisis of the 1850s, 157–58.

  American economy seemed able to absorb all who came. The Mexican War and the ensuing controversy over slavery focused political energy on those issues. War against a Catholic nation might have been expected to fan anti-Roman sentiments—except that the Democratic war party was also the party of immigrants, while the Whigs, who had earlier dallied with nativism, opposed the war.

  In the 1852 presidential election the Whigs, led by anti-nativist William H. Seward, tried to appeal for the Irish and Catholic vote. General Scott, Whig presidential candidate, was a high-church Episcopalian who had educated his daughters in a convent. As commander of American forces in Mexico he had protected Church property. In 1852 the Whigs planted friendly Irish questioners in audiences addressed by Scott, giving the candidate a chance to declare how much he "loved to hear that rich Irish brogue."29 But this clumsy effort backfired, for while Irish Americans as usual voted Democratic, many Whigs were offended by the appeal to "paddies" and stayed home on election day. As the slavery issue knocked southern Whigs loose from their party, a renewal of ethnic hostilities did the same in a number of northern states.