The American People: Creating a Nation and a Society

As civil war threatened in Kansas, a Brooklyn poet, Walt Whitman, heralded American democracy in his epic poem Leaves of Grass (1855). Whitman identified himself as the embodiment of average Americans "of every hue and caste… of every rank and religion." Ebulliently, Whitman embraced urban mechanics, southern woodcutters, planters' sons, runaway slaves, mining camp prostitutes, and a catalog of others in his poetic celebration of "the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." At the same time, Whitman's faith in the American masses faltered in the mid 1850s. He worried that a knife plunged into the "breast" of the Union would bring on the "red blood of civil war." Inevitably, as Whitman feared, blood flowed in Kansas. In May 1856, supported by a prosouthern federal marshall, a mob entered Lawrence, smashed the offices and presses of a Free-Soil newspaper, fired several cannonballs into the Free State Hotel, and destroyed homes and shops. Three nights later, motivated by vengeance and a feeling that he was doing God's will, John Brown led a small New England band, including four of his sons, to a proslavery settlement near Pottawatomie Creek. There they dragged five men out of their cabins and despite the terrified entreaties of their wives, hacked them to death with swords.

The Compromise of 1850, however, only delayed more serious sectional conflict. It added two new ingredients to American politics. The first hinted at the realignment of parties along sectional lines. Political leaders as different as Calhoun, Webster, Van Buren and New York senator William Seward all flirted with or committed themselves to new parties. Second, although repudiated by most ordiinary citizen, ideas like secessionism, disunion, and a "higher law" than the Contistution entered more and more political discussion. Some people wondered whether the question of slavery in the territories could be compromised awat the next time it arose.

The conflict between Buchanan and Douglas took its toll on the Democratic party. When the nominating convention met in Charleston, South Carolina, a hotbed of secessionist sentiments, it met for a record ten days without being able to name a presidential candidate. The convention went through 59 ballots, was disrupted twice by the withdrawal of southern delegates, and then adjourned for six weeks. Meeting again, this time in Baltimore, the Democrats acknowledged their irreparable division by naming two candidates in two separate conventions. Douglas represented northern Democrats, and John C. Breckenridge, Buchanan’s vice-president, carried the banner of the proslavery South. The Constitutional Union party, made up of former southern Whigs and border-state nativists, claimed the middle ground of compromise and nominated John Bell, a slave-holder from Tennessee with mild views.

With Democrats split in two and a new party in contention, the Republican strategy aimed at keeping the states carried by Fremont in 1856 and adding Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana. Seward, the leading candidate for the nomination, had been tempering his antislavery views to appear more electable. So had Abraham Lincoln, who seemed more likely than Seward to carry those key states. With some shrewd political maneuvering emphasizing Lincoln’s “availability” as a moderate with widespread appeal, he was nominated by his party.

Unlike Lincoln, John Brown was prepared to act decisively against slavery.  On October 16, 1859, he and a band of 22 men attacked a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia).  He hoped that the action might provoke a general uprising of slaves throughout the upper South or at least provide the arms by which slaves could make their way to freedom.  Although he seized the arsenal, federal troops soon overcame him.  Nearly half his men were killed, including two sons.  Brown himself was captured, tried, and hanged for treason.  So ended a lifetime of failures.  In death, however, Brown was not a failure.  His daring if foolhardy raid, and his impressively dignified behavior during his trial and speedy execution, unleashed powerful passions, further widening the gap between North and South.

The Dred Scott decision and Buchanan's endorsement fed northern suspicions of a slave power conspiracy to impose slavery everywhere. Events in Kansas, which still had two governments, heightened these fears. In the summer of 1857, Kansas had still another election, with so many irregularities that only 2,000 out of a possible 24,000 voters participated. They elected a proslavery slate of delegates to a constitutional convention meeting a Lecompton as a preparation for statehood. The convention decided to exclude free blacks from the state, to guarantee the property rights of the few slaveholders in Kansas, and to ask voters to decide in a referendum whether to permit more slaves. The proslavery Lecompton constitution clearly unrepresentative of the wishes of the majority of the people of Kansas, was sent to Congress for approval. Eager to retain the support of southern Democrats, Buchanan endorsed it. Stephen Douglas challenged the president's power and jeopardized his own standing with southern Democrats by opposing it. Facing the reelection to the Senate from Illinois in 1858, he needed to hold the support of the northern wing of his party. Congress sent the Lecompton constitution back to the people of Kansas for another referendum. This time they defeated it, which meant that Kansas remained a territory rather than becoming a slave state. While Kansas was left in an uncertain status, the larger political effect of the struggle was to split the Democratic party almost beyond repair.

Athough far from a radical abolitionist, in these debates Lincoln skillfully staked out a moral position not only in advance of Douglas but well ahead of his time. Lincoln was also very much part of his time. He believed that whites were superior to blacks and opposed granting specific equal rights to free blacks. He believed, furthermore, that the physical and moral differences between whites and blacks would 'forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality' and recommended 'separation' and colonization in Liberia or Central America as the best solution to racial differences.

Lincoln, however, differed from most contemporaries in his deep commitment to the humane principles of equality and essential diginity of all human beings, including blacks. Douglas, by contrast, arguing against race mixing in a blatant bid for votes, continually made racial slurs. Lincoln believed not only that blacks were 'entitled to all the natural rights...in the Declaration of Independence" but also that they had many specific economic rights as well, like 'the right to put into his mouth the bread that his own hands had earned.' In these rights, blacks were, Lincoln said, 'my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.'

Unlike Douglas, Lincoln hated slavery. At Galesburg, he said, 'I contemplate slavery as a moral, social and and political evil.' In Quincy, he said that the difference between a Republican and a Democrat was quite simply whether one thought slavery wrong or right. Douglas was more equivocal and dodged the issue in Freeport by pointing out that slavery would not exist if favorable local legislation did not support it. Douglas's moral indifference to slavery was clear in his admission that he did not care if a territorial legislature voted it 'up or down.' A white supremacist, Douglas was democratic enough to want white poeple to be able to create whatever type of society they wanted. Republicans did care, Lincoln affirmed, sounding a warning that by stopping the expansion of slavery, the course toward 'ultimate extinction had begun.'

Although barred by the Constitution from doing anything about slavery where it already existed, Lincoln said that since Republicans believed slavery to be wrong, 'we propose a course of policy that shall deal with it as wrong'

Others were immediately upset.  The new fugitive slave law angered many northerners because it brought the evils of slavery right into their midst.  The owners of runaway slaves hired agents, labeled 'kidnappers' in the North, to hunt down fugitives.  In a few dramatic episodes, most notably in Boston, literary and religious intellectuals led mass protests to resist slave hunters' efforts to return alleged fugitives to the South.  When Senator Webster supported the law, New England aboliltionists denounced him as 'indescribably base and wicked.'  Theodore Parker called the new law a 'hateful statute of kidnappers,' and Ralph Waldo Emerson said it was a 'filthy law' that he would not obey.  Frederick Douglass would not obey it either.  As a runaway slave himself, he was threatened with arrest and return to the South until his friends overcame his objections and purchased his freedom.  Douglass still risked harm by his strong defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act.  Arguing the 'rightfulness of forcible resistance,' he urged free blacks to arm themselves and even wondered whether it was justifiable to kill kidnappers.  'The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter,' he said in Pittsburg in 1853, 'is to make a half dozen or more dead kidnappers.'  Douglass raised money for black fugitives, hid runaways in his home, and help hundreds escape to Canada.

Other northerners, white as well as black, increased their work for the underground railroad in response to the fugitive slave law. Several states passed "personal liberty laws" that prohibited the use of state officials and institutions in the recovery of fugitive slaves. But most northerners complied with the law. Of some 200 blacks arrested in the first six years of the law, only 15 were rescued, and only 3 of these by force. Failed rescues, in fact, had more emotional impact than successful ones. In two cases in the early 1850s (Thomas Sims in 1851 and Anthony Burns in 1854), angry mobs of abolitionists in Boston, reminiscent of the prerevolutionary days of the Tea Party, failed to prevent the forcible return of blacks to the South. These celebrated cases aroused the antislavery emotions of more northerners then the abolitionists had been able to do in a thousand tracts and speeches.

On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, declaring the "experiment" of putting people with "different pursuits and institutions" under one government a failure. By February 1, the other six Deep South states (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas) had seceded. A week later, delegates met in Montgomery, Alabama, created the Confederate States of America, adopted a constitution, and elected Jefferson Davis, a Mississippi senator and cotton planter, its provisional president. The divided house had fallen, as Lincoln had predicted it would. What was not yet certain, though, was whether the house could be put back together or whether disunion necessarily meant civil war.

Republican hopes that southern Unionism would assert itself seemed possible in February 1861. The momentum toward disunion slowed, and no other southern states had seceded. The nation waited and watched, wondering what Virginia and the border states would do, what outgoing President Buchanan would do, and what Congress would do. Prosouthern and determined not to start a civil war in the last weeks of his already dismal administration, Buchanan did nothing. Congress made some feeble efforts to pass compromise legislation, waiting in vain for the support of the president-elect.