Chapter 9 - The Gathering Storm PDF

CHAPTER NINE THE GATHERING STORM WHEN WE LOOK BACK TO A MOMENT IN THE PAST, IT IS hard not to read into it nearly everything that we know is to come after it. We can’t help but see it as something carrying along with itself a future that we already know about, an awareness tha...

CHAPTER NINE THE GATHERING STORM WHEN WE LOOK BACK TO A MOMENT IN THE PAST, IT IS hard not to read into it nearly everything that we know is to come after it. We can’t help but see it as something carrying along with itself a future that we already know about, an awareness that gives us a perspective very different from that of the participants in that past moment. In particular, it is hard to read about the United States of the early nineteenth century, and particularly about the emerging cultural gulf between North and South and the ever-festering wound of slavery, without thinking of the series of events culminating in the coming of the Civil War as if they were predictable stages leading to a preordained outcome. Like the audience for a Greek tragedy, we come to this great American drama already knowing the general plot. We anticipate the heavy tread of events, the steps leading down an ever-narrowing stairway toward a bloody inevitability. We naturally tend to structure our thinking about the past in that way, with every step along the way understood solely in light of the grim terminus toward which we know it to be leading. Behind even the most innocent moments is ominous background music, reminding us of what is coming. That habit of mind should be resisted if we are truly to enter into the spirit of the past and to grasp the nature of historical change. History is only very rarely the story of inevitabilities, and it almost never appears in that form to its participants. It is more often a story of contingencies and possibilities, of things that could have gone either way, or even a multitude of other ways. Very little about the life of nations is certain, and even what we think of as destiny is something quite different from inevitability. Every attempt to render history into a science has come up empty-handed. The fact of human freedom always manages to confound the effort to do so. What we can say, though, is that there were landmark moments along the way in which a blood-stained outcome became much more likely, and after which the alternatives to armed conflict and separation became far fewer and far less accessible. Chief among such moments along what we now see, in retrospect, as a road to American disunion was the Mexican War of 1846. It is an event better remembered today by Mexicans (and Texans) than by most Americans. But the Mexican War had profound consequences for both countries, far out of proportion to its relatively short and decisive character. Above all else, the territorial gains it produced had the effect of destroying the uneasy peace over slavery that the Missouri Compromise had established and would lead to deeply unsettled circumstances that made an eventual conflict between North and South all but unavoidable. In more ways than one, the Mexican War provides support for the adage “be careful what you wish for.” Beginning in the 1820s, after Mexico had won its independence from Spain, it actively sought to attract immigrants from the American South who would settle and farm in its northern province of Texas. It more than got its wish, and got it more quickly than it could have imagined. Given the land hunger of so many westward-bound Americans, the vast and wide-open territory of the thinly settled Texas frontier was irresistible. By 1825, Stephen F. Austin, son of a Missouri banker, had brought three hundred settlers into Texas and thereby contributed the first trickle of what would quickly swell to a flood of migrants to the region. It didn’t take long before these Anglo immigrants were the dominant demographic group. By 1830, newly arrived Americans, many of whom had brought their slaves with them, outnumbered the Mexicans by three to one. Texas was almost overnight becoming a part of the cotton kingdom. What began as migration was rapidly becoming cultural conquest. Such rapid changes were certain to create discontent and conflict with existing residents, particularly given the sharp cultural differences between Protestant Americans and Catholic Mexicans. When the government of newly independent Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829 and insisted that the recent American immigrants convert to Roman Catholicism, it provoked intense resistance and open disobedience from the Americans, who were not willing to assimilate to what was rapidly becoming a minority culture. In response, in 1830, Mexico proceeded to close itself off to further American immigration; but that dictum went almost completely ignored, and the steady stream of incoming Americans continued essentially unabated. Finally, with the rise to power in Mexico in 1834 of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, a haughty and eccentric leader who had moved to strengthen central authority and make himself a virtual dictator, the issue came to a head. When Santa Anna abolished the Mexican Constitution of 1824 and dissolved the state legislatures, he provoked a rebellion in Texas and several other Mexican states. In the case of Texas, this soon turned into a struggle for independence, in which the settlers were led by Sam Houston, a colorful and well- traveled Virginia native who had served as a governor of Tennessee and was an adoptive member of the Cherokee tribe, as well as an experienced Indian fighter. It soon became clear that the matter between Texas and Mexico could not be settled without a clash of arms. The struggle began badly for the Americans, as Santa Anna’s army of six thousand moved swiftly and brutally against the resistance, obeying Santa Anna’s command that all survivors be summarily executed. After slaughtering a small but valiant American garrison holed up in the Alamo, an old Spanish mission in San Antonio that had been occupied by the rebels, the army proceeded to take the town of Goliad and to carry out a massacre of more than four hundred Texian prisoners of war. Santa Anna seemed on the verge of a great and bloody victory. But the tide would soon turn. Less than a month later, at the Battle of the San Jacinto River, a largely untrained but fiercely motivated American force of volunteers, adventurers, and a few regulars under Houston’s command would surprise the much larger Mexican Army, defeat it in a matter of minutes, and take Santa Anna prisoner. The Texas Revolution was a success, and in October 1836, Houston would be elected president of the newly independent Republic of Texas. A month later, a plebiscite was held that indicated an overwhelming majority of Texans wanted their independent nation to become part of the United States by annexation. Accordingly, Houston appealed to the U.S. government to consider such a move. But Andrew Jackson, then in the last months of his second term as U.S. president, hesitated to go that route, for fear that it would mean a war with Mexico and would reignite the slavery controversy, because the admission of Texas as a state, or as several states, would almost certainly come with proslavery strings attached. Jackson quickly extended diplomatic recognition to the new Republic of Texas but otherwise quietly deferred the question of annexation, as did his successor, Martin van Buren. The matter drifted into the 1840s, unresolved. In many ways, Jackson’s and Van Buren’s hesitation was entirely prudent. The country did not need the unsettlement of a war with Mexico. But southerners in particular were not happy with the status quo in Texas, because it left Texas increasingly vulnerable to falling under British influence and then serving Britain as an attractive alternative source of cotton and tariff-free markets – in other words, a competitor and a magnet for runaway slaves. In addition to such practical considerations, there was a more powerful respect in which such hesitation was hard to sustain. It was out of step with an increasingly self-confident national mood, not confined to any one section or region, that envisioned steady westward expansion as the realization of what the journalist John L. O’Sullivan, in advocating for Texas annexation, called “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence.” Today, when we hear the term Manifest Destiny, our reaction is likely to be guarded. We may take it to be an expression of arrogance, a florid way of saying “step aside, we’re taking over.” And that reaction is not entirely wrong or unwarranted. But it reflects an incomplete understanding. It is important to recognize that O’Sullivan himself, and the Young America movement of which he was a part, did not envision this “destiny” merely as an imperialistic land- acquisition project. His vision was far more idealistic than that, a vision that had sprung from the spirit of Jacksonian democracy but that recalled American dreams of previous generations, of America as a land of hope. He said of his country that “we are the nation of progress, of individual freedom, of universal enfranchisement … of the great experiment of liberty … an Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling, owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood.” A country embracing the great North American landmass, stretching “from sea to shining sea,” from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans: this was what they believed the United States was meant to be. Small wonder that even a figure like the poet Walt Whitman embraced the continent-spanning vision of Manifest Destiny with unbounded enthusiasm. The desire to incorporate Texas was a part of it; so, too, was the rising “Oregon fever” that was luring caravans of westward-bound wagons across the continent along the Oregon Trail to explore the lush green possibilities of the Columbia and Willamette valleys. Yes, there were economic and political motives involved; yes, there was arrogance and crusading zeal; but there were also generous democratic ideals being put forward. Like so many things in history, Manifest Destiny was a mixed bag. In the end, these expansive forces proved too hard to resist, and Congress, in 1845, finally passed a joint resolution approving the annexation of Texas. As Jackson had anticipated, it led very soon to diplomatic trouble with Mexico. But the newly elected President James K. Polk, who took office after the resolution had passed, was determined to move ahead. Even as he was trying to settle the matter through negotiations, and finding that the Mexicans were unwilling even to receive John Slidell, the special minister whom Polk had sent, Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor to take his army to Corpus Christi, on the northern side of the Rio Grande, in disputed territory. After an incident in which the Mexican Army captured an American army patrol, killing or wounding sixteen men, Polk reacted by requesting, and receiving, congressional support for a war resolution on May 13, 1846. Support for the war was overwhelming but not unanimous. Some northerners from the Whig Party, which had formed in the 1830s around opposition to Jackson’s presidency, suspected that the war was meant merely to expand the number of slave states in the Union, and opposed it strongly, with figures such as John Quincy Adams willing to label it “a most unrighteous war.” Daniel Webster, more the pragmatic defender of the national Union, feared that internal fragmentation might be the result. Yet the prospect of acquiring more land and the spirit of Manifest Destiny were irresistible, and their force even led some former opponents to change their position, on the basis that the addition of Mexican territory, being too arid for slavery- intensive agriculture, might actually promote the free-labor cause rather than inhibit it. As for the strictly military aspect of the war itself, it turned out to be highly successful, a contrast in that regard to its predecessor, the near-disastrous War of 1812. It had a distinctly southern bent, with both southern soldiers and southern officers in the majority. General Taylor led his Rio Grande–based army into north-central Mexico, taking the city of Monterrey and then defeating a superior force under Santa Anna at Buena Vista in February 1847. Soon after, General Winfield Scott landed a force farther south at the coastal city of Vera Cruz and then marched west, first to Puebla, then to Mexico City, entering the latter in triumph on September 13. A contingent of marines raised the American flag as they occupied the national palace, the legendary “halls of Montezuma.” With the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848, Mexico abandoned its claims to Texas above the Rio Grande and ceded California and the Utah and New Mexico territories to the United States. The result was yet another transformation of the American map, akin to a second Louisiana Purchase. If the newly annexed land of Texas is included in the total, the United States had just acquired nearly one million square miles of additional territory through the Mexican Cession. With the acquisition of the Oregon Territory two years before by treaty with Great Britain, the United States now had suddenly and dramatically achieved the dream of a transcontinental nation, including the acquisition of a new ocean coastline that featured the world-class harbors of San Francisco and San Diego. It must have seemed almost a culminating sign from on high when, in early 1848, at the same time that General Scott’s troops were occupying the Mexican capital and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was being negotiated, gold was found at Sutter’s Mill in California, some forty miles northeast of Sacramento. The resultant gold rush would bring three hundred thousand people to California in the next seven years, transforming it almost overnight from a remote Mexican frontier into a thriving American state, the home of the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party, John C. Frémont, in the election of 1856. Many Americans exulted over the American defeat of Mexico as an event of world-historical importance, an affirmation of republicanism and democracy over the lingering authoritarianism and monarchism of the Old World, and a revitalization of patriotic sentiment. The conflict had supplied the nation with a whole new generation of military heroes to take the place of those of the Revolution. But more than that, it seemed to many that the country had “entered on a new epoch in its history,” as a writer in American Review put it, an epoch that must “more than ever before, draw the world’s history into the stream of ours.” The discovery of gold in California seemed to be the crowning expression of divine favor; according to historian Robert W. Johannsen, “it was almost as if God had kept the gold hidden until the land came into the possession of the American republic.” The way ahead seemed majestically clear and open. But all this success and these giddy sentiments did not change the fact that the war had been deeply controversial, and that the amazing growth in the size and extent of the nation to come out of it was very soon going to prove to have been a deeply mixed blessing. As Jackson and other observers had predicted, the problem of slavery would have to reemerge, as decisions had to be made about whether to permit the extension of slavery into some, all, or none of the newly acquired lands. The delicately balanced Missouri Compromise that had been crafted in 1820 had calmed down the issue for the better part of three decades. But the 36° 30′ line extended only to the western boundary of the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Thus the Mexican Cession fell outside the boundary and raised anew, in more polarized times, the question of slavery’s extension.  Even before the war was concluded, there were already efforts afoot to control its effects with regard to the expansion of slavery. In 1846, Pennsylvania congressman David Wilmot, while endorsing the annexation of Texas as a slave state, proposed that Congress forbid the introduction of slavery to any of the territories that might eventually be acquired in the Mexican War. His effort, dubbed the Wilmot Proviso and attached as a rider to an army appropriations bill, drew directly on the language and concepts of the Northwest Ordinance and repeatedly passed the House, only to be rejected by the Senate. However, versions of the same idea were proposed again and again in the ensuing years. Yet, at the same time, vividly illustrating the widening cultural gulf between North and South, Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina responded to the Wilmot Proviso’s antislavery intentions with undisguised disdain. Slaveholders had a constitutional right, he insisted, to take their slaves into the territories if they wished. The prohibition being proposed, he argued, would violate the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which ensured that no one could be deprived of life or property – and slaves were considered legal property – without due process of law. Where was a middle ground to be found between two such antithetical positions, each of them claiming to draw on foundational sources? One way to manage the situation was to invoke the principle of “popular sovereignty,” which was described by its chief proponent, Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, as a system allowing the territories to “regulate their own internal concerns in their own way.” Instead of having a great and polarizing national fight over the issue, it would allow for solutions to be arrived at piecemeal, region by region, permitting the decision in each instance to be made by those who were closest to the situation and knew it best. It was an idea with much superficial appeal to Americans, invoking as it did the fundamental idea of self-rule, and of allowing the people to decide the laws by which they would be governed. But it ran directly against the natural-rights philosophy embedded in the Declaration of Independence. Time would tell whether it could be effective in managing and mitigating the nation’s growing divisions.  In the meantime, however, events were forcing the issue. The California gold rush, which had led to the largest mass migration in American history, had suddenly created a desperate need to organize a government to bring law and order to a disheveled and chaotic region suddenly overrun by ramshackle mining camps and shantytowns, permeated with rampant violence and crime. The situation bordered on crisis, and something had to be done. General Taylor, who had been elected president in 1848 on the strength of his military achievements, suggested that California be admitted immediately as a free state, skipping entirely the territorial stage. He did not believe that the newly acquired territory was suitable for slavery-intensive agriculture and that it was not in the interest of existing slaveholding states to press the issue in the territories. And in fact, by the end of 1849, the Californians themselves had already drawn up a constitution and created a state government that outlawed slavery. Southerners were shocked and angered by this turn of events, because Taylor was himself a slaveholder and many of them had supported him because they fully expected him to defend the introduction of slavery into the territories, tooth and nail. They felt betrayed. And the stakes were very high, because the admission of California as a free state would undermine the balance between slave and free states in the Senate and consign the slave South to being a permanent and shrinking minority, a mere corner in the emerging continental American map. Small wonder that Congress found itself in an uproar, and there began to be serious talk of southern secession in the air. The historical expansion of the United States. National Atlas of the United States from the U.S. Department of the Interior. Into this condition of high drama strode Henry Clay of Kentucky, the great deal-maker of the Senate, now in his seventies and in failing health. Clay was in some respects a tragic figure, having been repeatedly frustrated in his own ambitions for the presidency, and yet he was able to rise to the occasion and put aside a lifetime of disappointments for the sake of one last opportunity to preserve the Union. He took charge of the situation and fashioned a complex and multifaceted package of eight different resolutions that would, he hoped, settle “all questions in controversy between the free and slave States.” A great debate ensued, one of the greatest in the Senate’s storied history, featuring lengthy and memorable examples of the oratory of Clay, Calhoun, Webster, William Seward, and a host of others. Clay and Webster favored compromise, while the proslavery Calhoun and the antislavery Seward opposed it. Thanks to the untimely death of Taylor, whose stubborn opposition had become an obstacle to the fashioning of an agreement, and the succession to the presidency of his more politically astute vice president Millard Fillmore, and thanks to the skillful political work of Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, the measures making up what would become known as the Compromise of 1850 were passed individually, rather than as an Omnibus Bill, and by slim majorities in each case. Chief among these measures were the admission of California as a free state, the leaving of the slavery status of the other territories arising out of the Mexican War to be decided by popular sovereignty, and the passing of a much-strengthened Fugitive Slave Law, which was to be the compensation for the unequal standing that the admission of California imposed upon the South. To put it even more simply, the heart of the deal was that the slave South would be induced to accept the likely permanent minority status it feared, on condition that the North agreed to measures that would protect, in an active and affirmative way, the operation of the “peculiar institution” that had come to be deemed essential to the southern way of life. It was a sweeping effort, the last to be undertaken by the great generation of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster, to address the growing national crisis and secure the Union. Within two years, all three men would be dead. But the nation breathed a giant sigh of relief, as its politicians had moved back from the brink, and an outburst of patriotic harmony took hold for a time. “Let us cease agitating, stop the debate, and drop the subject,” said Douglas, representing the next generation in the Senate. For a time, the overwhelming majority of Americans seemed inclined to agree. In retrospect, it is difficult to see how anyone could have believed that such a compromise could hold. But we should make the effort to try to see the past as its actors saw it and understand the depth of their dilemma. More than ever, the country still had the wolf by the ear – and the great gains of the Mexican War had only augmented the size and ferocity of that wolf. The Compromise of 1850 did not effect any ultimate solutions, but it did buy time for the Union’s future. It reduced political tension, quieted secession talk, and allowed perspective and breathing room for the emergence of other, better solutions. It would allow the country to turn its attention back to its real business, the taming and settling of a giant continent. Often in politics, problems are not solved so much as they are managed – and it is often in the unromantic work of preventing the worst from happening that statesmanship shows itself to best effect. On the other hand, it is equally true that a festering wound does not heal itself, and the endless deferral of questions of principle may lead to a far worse reckoning when that reckoning must needs come. Moral reformers are sometimes disparaged as purveyors of “crackpot idealism,” which is fair enough; sometimes they are unrealistic and blind in their demands. But there is also such a thing as “crackpot realism,” a mistaken belief that the endless deferral of ideals is a more “realistic” political strategy than the effort, however difficult, to realize those ideals. It may be an especially fatal strategy for a land of hope. “What happens to a dream deferred?” asked the African American poet Langston Hughes. “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun? / Or fester like a sore – / and then run?…. Or does it explode?” In any event, it soon became clear that the imposition of a strict fugitive slave law was not going to be acceptable to a significant number of northerners. The reason is not hard to find. It was one thing for northerners to accept the existence of slavery “down there,” in circumstances that they did not have to confront in their daily life, and of which they did not have to approve but merely tolerate at a safe distance. Such acceptance was the acceptance of an abstraction. But the Fugitive Slave Law required far more of them than that. It required their active and direct support for the peculiar institution. It required them to be actively engaged in shoring up the institution, by cooperating in the tracking down, capture, and extradition of men and women who were merely seeking the conditions under which they could enjoy the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness to which the Declaration said they were entitled. Under such circumstances, toleration felt the same as complicity; as a consequence, the law was doomed to generate intense resistance and, ultimately, to be ineffective. The Wisconsin Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, Vermont passed laws effectively nullifying it and assisting captured slaves, and Emerson denounced it as a “filthy enactment” that should be broken “on the earliest occasion.” Abolitionist pastor Luther Lee of Syracuse, New York, declared simply, “The Fugitive Slave Law is a war upon God, upon his law, and upon the rights of humanity…. To obey it, or to aid in its enforcement, is treason against God and humanity, and involves a guilt equal to the guilt of violating every one of the ten commandments.” Given such feelings, the appearance in 1852 of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin could not have been more aptly timed, as a poignant and humanizing glimpse into the harsh realities of slave life and the perils faced by freedom-seeking slaves. Meanwhile, another threat to the uneasy settlement of 1850 was brewing, but it would emerge from a somewhat unexpected quarter: the push for a transcontinental railroad that would link the two coasts. That such a rail line should be built was beyond question. But the question of where the line would be built, and where its eastern terminus would be located, became an enormous political football and very quickly devolved into two main rival proposals: a southern one, promoted by Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, and a north-central one, promoted by Stephen A. Douglas. To make his proposal more palatable to southerners, Douglas proposed that the land west of Missouri be organized into two territories, the Kansas Territory and the Nebraska Territory, with each being allowed to settle by popular sovereignty the question of whether slavery would be permitted. The territorial consequences of the Compromise of 1850, from a 1911 atlas in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. This was a far more momentous proposal than it seemed. Because both the proposed territories were north of the 36° 30′ line established by the Missouri Compromise, Douglas’s bill was opening up the possibility of introducing slavery into territory where it had previously been forbidden. He was, in effect, proposing to repeal the Missouri Compromise, the principal instrument that had kept a lid on the sectional conflict for three decades. The proposal led to three months of bitter debate, but in the end, both houses of Congress passed the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, and President Franklin Pierce signed it into law. It was a reckless blunder, and it soon bore unwelcome fruit. Passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act destroyed the Whig Party and weakened the Democratic Party in the North. More than 80 percent of the northern Democratic Congressmen who voted for the act would fail to be reelected. Douglas had blithely assumed that the homesteaders moving into the Kansas territory from the Midwest would vote to exclude slavery. But he had not reckoned with the fact that the voting outcome could be changed by a change in the population and that proslavery elements had a strong motivation to do so. Slaveholders from adjacent Missouri began moving into Kansas and setting up homesteads partly in an effort to game the eventual vote and flip Kansas into a slave state. Such were the inherent limitations of popular sovereignty, even aside from its moral failings. Soon violent conflicts developed between the competing settlement communities, with a proslavery mob’s attack on the town of Lawrence being answered by an even more vicious attack by the abolitionist John Brown and his sons, who hacked to death, in front of their screaming families, five men from a proslavery farm near Pottawatomie Creek. The spectacle of “Bleeding Kansas” was becoming a national disgrace, as the embattled would-be state soon found itself pulled between the claims of two competing governments and two rival constitutions. So much for popular sovereignty as a way to tamp down conflict. Nor was the violence confined to Kansas in its effects. On May 20, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts delivered an incendiary speech denouncing the Kansas–Nebraska Act on the floor of the U.S. Senate, decrying it as an instrument of “the Slave Power,” designed for “the rape of a virgin Territory,” with the aim of producing “a new Slave State, hideous offspring of such a crime.” Sumner also went after specific individuals in a very personal way, including Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina, whom he accused of having embraced “the harlot, slavery” as his “mistress,” a loaded insult that seemed almost calculated to generate a fierce rejoinder. The response came two days later, when Butler’s cousin, congressman Preston Brooks, confronted Sumner at his desk in the Senate chamber after an adjournment, denounced the speech as “a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler,” and proceeded to beat him over the head with a gold-headed cane, nearly killing him. The reaction to this incident was also telling. In the North, there were rallies in support of Sumner in Boston and a half-dozen other cities, and Emerson’s comments were representative: “I do not see how a barbarous community and a civilized community can constitute one state. I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” But the southern view was different. The Richmond Enquirer praised the attack and asserted that Sumner should be caned “every morning.” Brooks received hundreds of new canes in endorsement of his assault, and one of them was inscribed “Hit him again.” Splinters of the cane became sacred relics. By the time he delivered his fateful speech, Sumner had become a member of a new political party, the Republican Party, which had arisen in direct response to the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Drawing its membership from antislavery elements in the Democratic, Whig, and Free-Soil parties, the new party had unified around the issue of opposing the extension of slavery into the territories. By 1856, it had become the second largest party in the country; the largest, the Democratic Party, was struggling to avoid a splintering between its northern and southern elements, just as the Whig Party had already done before. The sectional crisis was producing new political alignments, and they were growing dangerously sectional in character; the Republican Party was from the start almost entirely a party of the North. As the sole remaining national party, then, the Democrats expected to do well in the presidential campaign of 1856, with their highly experienced candidate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, who had served in both houses of Congress, as an ambassador to Russia and Great Britain, and as Polk’s secretary of state. It would be the Republicans’ first outing, and their candidate, the Californian John C. Frémont, was much younger, less well known, and completely without political experience. Nevertheless, in the election, Frémont won eleven states to Buchanan’s nineteen, taking all of the northernmost states (though failing to carry California), while Buchanan was strongest in the solidly Democratic South. The Republicans campaigned on a platform that combined classic Whig issues, such as internal improvements (including a transcontinental railroad) and protective tariffs, with firm opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories. It roundly condemned the Kansas– Nebraska Act and its disregard for the Missouri Compromise and what it called “those twin relics of barbarism – Polygamy and Slavery.” It was the first time a national party had declared its opposition to slavery. Buchanan, however, was a familiar face, elected to maintain the status quo in a turbulent time, and he believed that meant making conciliatory gestures and concessions toward the South: on states’ rights, on territorial expansion, on popular sovereignty, and on slavery. The Republicans were a sectional party, the Democrats argued, and therefore a threat to the Union. Buchanan had been out of the country during the worst of the Kansas debate, so he was not tainted by association with it. The territorial consequences of the Kansas–Nebraska Act, from a 1911 atlas in the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress. Yet before Buchanan could even get started on the Kansas issue, or anything else in his administration, something momentous came along to widen and deepen the chasm between the sections. A mere two days after his inauguration in March 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the long-awaited case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. And it was a blockbuster decision, one that would ratchet up the tensions between the sections by several orders of magnitude. The case was a bit complicated. Dred Scott had been born a slave in Virginia. He had been sold to Dr. John Emerson, an army surgeon, who took him to Illinois, a free state, and to the Wisconsin Territory, also free, where Scott married and had two daughters. After his master’s death in 1846, Scott sued in the Missouri courts for his freedom on the grounds that his residence in a free state and free territory had made him free. The case wended its way through the courts and finally was appealed to the Supreme Court, which was then presided over by Roger B. Taney, a Jacksonian Democrat from the border state of Maryland. The court ruled against Scott. Taney, who wrote the majority opinion, was not content to decide the case narrowly; he wanted to resolve the issue of slavery in the territories once and for all. Far from doing so, his Court’s decision blew up what little remaining national consensus there was. There were three main thrusts of Taney’s opinion. First, he dismissed Scott’s claims, arguing that Scott did not even have legal standing to sue because he was not a citizen – and he was not a citizen because, he asserted, the Framers of the Constitution did not intend to extend citizenship rights to blacks. Second, he argued (distinctly echoing Calhoun) that Congress lacked the power to deprive any person of his property without due process of law, and because slaves were property, slavery could not be excluded from any federal territory or state. Third and finally, the Missouri Compromise was not merely rendered moot by the Kansas– Nebraska Act; it was unconstitutional, and had been all along, because it had invalidly excluded slavery from Wisconsin and other northern territories. The explosive decision, only the second time in the Court’s history that it had declared an act of Congress unconstitutional, appeared to doom the doctrine of popular sovereignty, since it would seem that, if the federal government could not exclude slavery from the territories, neither could a territorial government, which after all derived its authority from the federal government. With the Missouri Compromise in tatters, everything it had decided was now up for radical reconsideration, even overturning. Before the Court’s decision, freedom had been the national norm, and slavery had been the regional exception. Now it appeared that matters would be completely reversed, as some radical southerners, emboldened by the decision, called for the establishment of a federal slave code to protect their property in human flesh. These radicals could feel the tide of events turning their way. They sensed, with good reason, that President Buchanan was on their side, perhaps even had known in advance of, and encouraged, the Dred Scott decision, and had hoped it would settle the slavery question once and for all. Northerners had similar suspicions of Buchanan: that he was a conscious tool of the southern slave-power conspiracy. His presidency was not going to be the instrument that would lead the nation out of its state of division. Leadership would have to come from elsewhere. All eyes now turned to Stephen Douglas, the “Little Giant” of Illinois, the last remaining prominent Democrat who had national and not merely sectional sources of support, and whose campaign for reelection to the Senate in 1858 was likely to be a warm-up for his long-desired run for the presidency in 1860. If anyone could hold the Democratic Party together, and thereby the country, it was he. But he would face a formidable challenge for that Illinois Senate seat from Abraham Lincoln, a rising star in the Republican Party who had been a successful trial lawyer and one-term Whig Congressman, and who had left politics for a time but had been goaded back into the fray by his fierce opposition to the Kansas–Nebraska Act. Lincoln had opposed Douglas from the very beginning of the controversy over that act, and he was the natural person to run against Douglas and his ideas. Lincoln’s life story would become the stuff of American legend, the tale of an uncommon common man born to humble frontier circumstances who rose in the world by dint of his sheer determination and effort. Born in Kentucky in 1809, his early life, he once said, could be summarized in one sentence: “the short and simple annals of the poor.” Our knowledge of his early life is scrappy. We know that he moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois, a typical pioneer farm boy, burdened with the tasks of hauling water, chopping wood, plowing, and harvesting. We know that he hated farmwork so much that he would seize the opportunity to do almost anything else. We know that he had almost no formal schooling yet was a voracious reader, with a great love of words and of oratory. When young man Lincoln arrived in New Salem, Illinois, as, by his own description, “a piece of floating driftwood,” he was a nobody. But he soon found employment as a clerk, insinuated himself into the life of the community, became popular, was appointed postmaster, ran for and on the second try was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, borrowed money to buy a suit, and then found himself thinking about a career in the law. As Lincoln said in announcing his candidacy for the General Assembly in 1832, he “was born, and [had] ever remained, in the most humble walks of life,” without “wealthy or popular relations or friends to recommend” him. But he had been given unprecedented opportunity to realize his potential by the right set of conditions. This was for Lincoln a kind of fulfillment of the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, which Lincoln revered and repeatedly recurred to, in its affirmation of the equal worth of all men and their equal entitlement to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness – and the equal right of all men to the fruits of their own labors, a declaration grounded not in the will of governments or men but in the dictates of Nature and Nature’s God. Lincoln loathed slavery from his earliest youth – something he shared with his Baptist parents – but his deepest complaint about slavery seemed to be that it was a form of theft, which allowed one class of men to steal from another class the fruit of the latter’s labors. The notion of economic equality was less important to him than the notion of limitless human opportunity – a priority that was much more in keeping with the ethos of the frontier. So this son of the frontier seemed to have found his moment in the territorial controversy of the 1850s and in the newly founded Republican Party, with his Senate candidacy serving as a moral platform in opposition to Douglas’s politically skillful but rather unprincipled opportunism, particularly to the moral relativism implicit in the doctrine of popular sovereignty. In July 1858, he challenged Douglas to a series of seven debates, and Douglas accepted the challenge. The debates became classics of their kind and are worth poring over today, not only to gain a sense of the political discourse of the time, conducted at a very high level, but to illuminate some of the perennial dilemmas of modern democracies, particularly when they are faced with a choice between popular sentiments and enduring principles. To be sure, these also were political debates, with the rhetorical aggressiveness and crafty trap-setting that fact implies. Lincoln tried to make Douglas look like a radical proslavery, pro–Dred Scott southern sympathizer, something he was not. Douglas tried to make Lincoln look like a dangerous abolitionist and advocate for “race amalgamation,” something he was not. Neither man, sadly, was able to rise above the sentiments of the crowd with regard to the principle of racial equality. Neither would pass the test of our era’s sensibilities. But they also engaged the questions besetting the nation in a rational and surprisingly complex way, one that dignified and elevated the process of democratic deliberation. We would do well to recover their example. Our own era’s content-free presidential “debates” are hardly even a pale imitation. Even though Lincoln went on to lose the election to Douglas, the strength of his arguments endured and made the election a close one. Indeed, his strong showing in the Illinois Senate campaign had brought him to the attention of the whole nation and made him a formidable Republican candidate for president in 1860, a candidacy that was likely to improve dramatically upon what the little-known and inexperienced Frémont had been able to mount in 1856. And there were other suggestive political takeaways from 1858. All across the North, the Republicans made significant gains in the congressional elections, a development that raised the concerns of southerners, not only because of the party’s antislavery commitments, but also because of its Whiggish economic program and its support for high tariffs. The Republican Party supplanted the Democratic Party as the party with the largest number of members in the House and, when all the ballots were counted, fell only four seats short of an absolute majority. An ascendant sectional Republican Party and a disintegrating national Democratic Party: these developments suggested trouble ahead for the Union itself. Another, and perhaps the last, fire bell in the night came with John Brown’s daring raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the night of October 16, 1859. Brown’s hatred of slavery had only hardened and intensified in the years since his Pottawatomie Massacre, and he was more convinced than ever that it was God’s will that he strike a powerful blow against the empire of slavery. His plan was to seize guns from the arsenal and use them to arm the slaves of the region and to fuel a slave uprising, which could lead to the creation in the Appalachian Mountains of a slave-run state within a state. His efforts failed, though not without the loss of fourteen lives, including the lives of two of his sons. Brown would be captured and hanged on December 2, but not before delivering a memorable speech in which he offered his life “for the furtherance of the ends of justice.” As with Preston Brooks, so with John Brown, the response to his actions and his execution were profoundly polarized. Southerners were horrified and took his violent rampage to be representative of the Republican antislavery program and a sure indication of what the North had in store for them. Northerners like Emerson, however, saw Brown as a martyr and saint, who “make[s] the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Unfortunately, matters had come to a point where the extremists on both sides reinforced one another’s perspective. There was not much room for moderates who saw slavery as neither an unalloyed good nor an irremediable evil but a problem that might eventually be solved by peaceful means. By the time of the presidential election of 1860, the Democratic Party was finally splitting apart. Douglas was the likely nominee of the party’s national convention, but he was unacceptable to southerners and Buchanan supporters, who eventually bolted from the party convention and nominated their own candidate, Vice President John Breckenridge of Kentucky. Douglas would be nominated by the remaining delegates on a platform of popular sovereignty and enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, but the Breckenridge Democrats would produce a platform calling for no restrictions on slavery in the territories and the annexation of slavery-rich Cuba. Other dissidents would form a new party, the Constitutional Union Party, which nominated John Bell of Tennessee and sought, through a deliberately vague platform, to encourage the moderation of passions and the enforcement of existing laws. The Republicans nominated Lincoln, choosing him over the somewhat more radical William H. Seward, as an effort to win over any waverers. The profound divisions among the Democrats made the prospect of a Republican victory very likely – but also very problematic. For one thing, not one of the four candidates was capable of being a truly national candidate and mounting an effective national campaign. The election returns for November 1860 bore this out. Lincoln won 180 electoral votes from all eighteen free states – and from only those states. He got not a single electoral vote from the South. Douglas, the only candidate who might have been able to appeal to the nation as a whole, failed miserably, despite a frenetic campaign that took him down into the hostile Deep South states in a desperate quest for support. He received a pathetic twelve electoral votes, finishing a far-distant last in the four-way race. Lincoln’s election was momentous in a great many ways, but first and foremost, he was the first president elected to office on the basis of an entirely regional victory. Some southerners had warned in advance of the election that such an outcome could mean that the South would have no choice but secession from the Union. The “compact” theory of the Constitution, which had long been favored by many southerners, seemed to offer a constitutional basis for doing so. In this view, because the Constitution was a “compact” between preexisting states, those states had a right to withdraw from the compact, just as any contract can be revoked or terminated if sufficient cause for doing so can be adduced. In addition, many southerners strongly believed that any act of secession would be squarely in the tradition of the American Revolution, which had been justified on the grounds that the people have the right to overthrow or replace any government that fails to reflect the consent of the governed. Soon after the election, South Carolina did just that, repealing its 1788 ratification of the Constitution and dissolving its union with the other states, citing the election of the antislavery Lincoln as justification. By February 1, 1861, six other southern states (Mississippi, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Alabama) had followed suit and, by February 7, had formed themselves into the Confederate States of America, adopting a Constitution that was virtually identical to the U.S. Constitution, but with added limits on the government’s power to impose tariffs or restrict slavery. It elected Jefferson Davis of Mississippi as president and Alexander Stephens of Georgia as vice president. Even this impressive show of organization and strength would not have been enough to effect secession, however, had there been sufficient pushback from national leaders. For one thing, the immensely important state of Virginia, along with the other Upper South states, had made no commitment to secession, and it was possible that those states could be restrained from joining the others. Yet James Buchanan, in the four months of his lame-duck presidency, took a supremely passive posture toward the Confederacy’s actions, believing that resistance would only exacerbate the South’s sense of grievance and hoping that somehow the many ongoing efforts at reconciliation might succeed in bringing the country back from the brink of dissolution. As a last, desperate move, Congress narrowly passed a constitutional amendment, which came to be called the Corwin Amendment, supported by Lincoln, Seward, and other Republicans, that would have explicitly protected slavery where it already existed. The text of the amendment read as follows: No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State. That stalwart antislavery men like Lincoln and Seward were desperate enough to support a measure so contrary to their own moral sentiments – and a measure as permanent as a constitutional amendment – speaks volumes about the sense of immense and immediate peril that had suddenly enveloped the land and the terrible abyss that seemed to be opening up before its leaders.  The amendment passed the House easily and passed the Senate by one vote above the required two-thirds majority on March 2, 1861, two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. Had it gone on to be ratified by the states, it would have been the Thirteenth Amendment. But it was destined never to be ratified. Instead, there would be secession and then four years of appalling war: a war to preserve the Union, but one that also would transform it in the process. Adoption of the Corwin Amendment might have bought some time, at best – just as the Missouri Compromise had. But it would have done so at enormous cost. It would have institutionalized the deepest moral wound in the nation’s life, inscribed it explicitly in the Constitution, and rendered the cultural gulf between North and South permanently impassable. It would have made the ultimate reckoning even more horrific. It was not the solution that the nation needed. In fact, matters had come to the point where it was no solution at all. Lincoln himself had predicted, in his “House Divided” speech of June 16, 1858, that the nation could not endure “permanently half slave and half free” but that it would have to “become all one thing or all the other.” Events were in the process of proving him right.