A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (58 page)

At their convention in 1856, the Republicans ignored William H. Seward, who had toiled for the free-soil cause for years, in favor of John C. Frémont, the Mexican War personality who had attempted to foment a revolt in California. Frémont had married Thomas Hart Benton’s daughter, who helped hone his image as an explorer/adventurer and allied him with free-soil Democrats through Benton’s progeny (Benton himself was a slave owner who never supported his son-in-law’s candidacy, foreshadowing the types of universal family divisions that would occur after Fort Sumter). Beyond that, Frémont condemned the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy—a reference to the Mormon practice of multiple wives in Utah Territory. Slavery and the territories were again linked to immoral practices, with no small amount of emphasis on illicit sex in the rhetoric.
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Frémont also had no ties to the Know-Nothings, making him, for all intents and purposes, “pure.” He also offered voters moral clarity.

Southerners quickly recognized the dangers Frémont’s candidacy posed. “The election of Fremont,” Robert Toombs wrote in July 1856, “would be the end of the Union.”
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The eventual Democratic candidate, James Buchanan of Pennsylvania, chimed in: “Should Fremont be elected…the outlawry proclaimed by the Black Republican convention at Philadelphia against [the South] will be ratified by the people of the North.” In such an eventuality, “the consequences will be immediate & inevitable.”
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Buchanan—a five-term congressman and then senator who also served as minister to Russia and Great Britain, and was Polk’s secretary of state—possessed impressive political credentials. His frequent absences abroad also somewhat insulated him from the domestic turmoil. Still, he had helped draft the Ostend Manifesto, and he hardly sought to distance himself from slavery. Like Douglas, Buchanan continued to see slavery as a sectional issue subject to political compromise rather than, as the Republicans saw it, a moral issue over which compromise was impossible. Then there was Fillmore, whose own Whig Party had rejected him. Instead, he had moved into the American Party—the Know-Nothings—and hoped to win just enough electoral votes to throw the election into the House.

In the ensuing three-way contest, Buchanan battled Fillmore for Southern votes and contended with Frémont for the Northern vote. When the smoke cleared, the Pennsylvanian had won an ominous victory. He had beaten Fillmore badly in the South, enough to offset Frémont’s shocking near sweep of the North, becoming the first president to win an election without carrying a preponderance of free states. Buchanan had just 45 percent of the popular vote to Frémont’s 33 percent. Frémont took all but five of the free states. Republicans immediately did the math: in the next election, if the Republican candidate just held the states Frémont carried and added Pennsylvania and either Illinois or Indiana, he would win. By itself, the Republican Party totaled 500,000 votes less than the Democrats, but if the American Party’s vote went Republican, the total would exceed the Democrats by 300,000.

Buchanan, the last president born in the eighteenth century and the only man who never married to hold the presidency, came from a modest but not poor background. Brief service in the War of 1812 exposed him to the military; then he made a fortune in the law, no easy feat in those days. His one love affair, with the daughter of a wealthy Pennsylvania ironworks owner, was sabotaged by local rumormongers who spread class envy. The incident left his lover heartbroken, and she died a few days after ending the engagement, possibly by suicide. For several years Buchanan orbited outside the Jackson circles, managing to work his way back into the president’s graces during Jackson’s Pennsylvania campaigns, eventually becoming the minister to Russia. As a senator, he allowed antislavery petitions to be read before his committee, running contrary to the Democratic practice.

His first run at the presidency, in 1852, pitted him against Douglas, and the two split the party vote and handed the nomination to Pierce. After that, Buchanan had little use for the Little Giant, as Douglas was known, or so he thought. In 1856, Buchanan found that he needed Douglas—or at least needed him out of the way—so he persuaded the Illinois senator to support him that year, for which Buchanan would reciprocate in 1860 by supporting Douglas.

After the inauguration Buchanan surrounded himself with Southerners, including Howell Cobb, James Slidell, and his vice president, John Breckinridge. A strict constitutionalist in the sense that he thought slavery outside the authority of Congress or the president, he ran on the issue of retaining the Union. Yet his Southern supporters had voted for him almost exclusively on the issue of slavery, understanding that he would not act to interfere with slavery in any way. Buffeted by
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
and the rise of the “Black Republican” Party, the South saw Buchanan’s election as a minor victory. Soon the Supreme Court handed the South a major triumph—one that seemed to forever settle the issue of slavery in the territories. Yet once again, the South would find its victory pyrrhic.

Dred Scott’s Judicial Earthquake

America had barely absorbed Buchanan’s inaugural when two days later the Supreme Court of the United States, on March 6, 1857, set off a judicial earthquake. Buchanan had been made aware of the forthcoming decision, which he supported, and he included references to it in his inaugural address. The
Dred Scott
decision easily became one of the two or three most controversial high court cases in American history.

Dred Scott, the slave to a U.S. Army surgeon named John Emerson, moved with his master to Rock Island, Illinois, in 1834. Scott remained with Emerson for two years on the army base, even though Illinois, under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, prohibited slavery. In 1836, Emerson was assigned to Fort Snelling (in modern-day Minnesota), which was part of the Wisconsin Territory above the Missouri Compromise line, again taking Scott with him. At the time of Emerson’s death in 1843, the estate, including Scott and his wife, Harriet, went to Emerson’s daughter. Meanwhile, members of the family who had owned Scott previously, and who had by then befriended Scott, brought a suit on his behalf in St. Louis County (where he then resided), claiming his freedom.

Scott’s suit argued that his residence in both Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was prohibited (one by state law, one by both the Missouri Compromise and the principle of the Northwest Ordinance) made him free. A Missouri jury agreed in 1850. Emerson appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, which in 1852 reversed the lower court ruling, arguing that the lower court had abused the principle of comity, by which one state agreed to observe the laws of another. The Constitution guaranteed that the citizen of one state had equal protection in all states, hence the rub: if Scott was a citizen by virtue of being free in one state, federal law favored him; but if he was property, federal law favored the Emersons. Refusing to rule on the constitutional status of slaves as either property or people, the Missouri court focused only on the comity issue.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Emerson remarried and moved to Massachusetts, where her husband, Calvin Chaffee, later would win election to Congress as an antislavery Know-Nothing. Emerson left Scott in St. Louis, still the property of her brother, John Sanford, who himself had moved to New York. Scott, then having considerable freedom, initiated a new suit in his own name in 1853, bearing the now-famous name,
Scott v. Sandford
(with Sanford misspelled in the official document). A circuit court ruled against Scott once again, and his lawyers appealed to the United States Supreme Court. When the Court heard the case in 1856, it had to rule on whether Scott could even bring the suit (as a slave); the second point involved whether Scott’s residence in a free state or in a free federal territory made him free. In theory, the Court had the option to duck the larger issues altogether merely by saying that Scott was a slave, and as such had no authority to even bring a suit. However, the circuit court had already ruled that Scott could sue, and Scott, not Emerson, had appealed on different grounds.

If ever a Court was overcome by hubris, it was the Supreme Court of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice from Maryland who sided with his fellow Southerners’ views of slavery. Far from dodging the monumental constitutional issues, Taney’s nine justices all rendered separate opinions whose combined effect produced an antislavery backlash that dwarfed that associated with the Fugitive Slave Law. As far as the Court was concerned, the case began as a routine ruling—that the laws of Missouri were properly applied and thus the Court had no jurisdiction in the matter—and it might have washed through the pages of history like the tiniest piece of lint. Sometime in February 1857, however, the justices had a change of heart, brought about when they decided to write individual opinions. As it turned out, the five Southern justices wanted to overturn the Missouri Compromise, which they thought unconstitutional. In less than three weeks, the Court had shifted from treating the
Dred Scott
case as a routine matter of state autonomy to an earth-shattering restatement of the constitutionality of slavery.

Taney’s decision included the position that freedmen were citizens of one state but not the United States. Nor could emancipated slaves or their progeny be free in all states because a citizen had to be born a citizen, and no slaves were. He also dismissed (despite considerable precedence at the state level) any citizenship rights that states offered blacks. In other words, even if free, Taney said Scott could not bring the suit. Moving to free soil did not free Scott either, as slaveholders could take their property into territories, and any act of Congress regarding slaves would be an impairment of property rights guaranteed in the Fifth Amendment. Scott’s presence in Wisconsin Territory did not emancipate him either because, in Taney’s view, the Missouri Compromise, as well as the Northwest Ordinance, was unconstitutional in that it violated the Fifth Amendment; and, therefore, provisions of statute law over the territories were of no legal import. Forced by the weight of his own logic to admit that if a state so desired, it could grant citizenship to blacks, Taney still maintained that did not make them citizens of all states. Taney considered African Americans “as a subordinate and inferior class of beings [who] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
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Other members of the Court agreed that Scott was not a citizen, and after years of begging by Congress to settle the territorial citizenship question, the Court had indeed acted.

Doubtless Southerners, and perhaps Taney himself, expected intense condemnation of the ruling. In that, Taney was not disappointed: the Northern press referred to the “jesuitical decision” as a “willful perversion” and an “atrocious crime.” But no one foresaw the economic disaster the Court had perpetrated as, once again, the law of unintended consequences took effect.

Until the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the politics of slavery had little to do with the expansion of the railroads. However, in the immediate aftermath of the
Dred Scott
ruling, the nation’s railroad bonds, or at least a specific group of railroad bonds, tumbled badly. The Supreme Court ruling triggered the Panic of 1857, but for generations historians have overlooked the key relationship between the
Dred Scott
case and the economic crisis, instead pinning the blame on changes in the international wheat market and economic dislocations stemming from the Crimean War.
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Had all railroad securities collapsed, such an argument might ring true, except that only
certain
railroad bonds plunged—those roads primarily running east and west.
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Business hates uncertainty and, above all, dislikes wars, which tend to upset markets and kill consumers. Prior to the
Dred Scott
case, railroad builders pushed westward confident that either proslavery or free-soil ideas would triumph. Whichever dominated, markets would be stable because of certainty. What the Court’s ruling did was to completely destabilize the markets. Suddenly the prospect appeared of a Bleeding Kansas writ large, with the possibility of John Brown raids occurring in every new territory as it was opened. Investors easily saw this, and the bonds for the east-west roads collapsed. As they fell, the collateral they represented for large banks in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia sank too. Banks immediately found themselves in an exposed and weakened condition. A panic spread throughout the Northern banking community.

The South, however, because of its relatively light investment in railroads, suffered only minor losses in the bond markets. Southern state banking systems, far more than their Northern counterparts, had adopted branch banking, making the transmission of information easier and insulating them from the panic.

The South learned the wrong lessons from the financial upheaval. Thinking that King Cotton had protected Dixie from international market fluctuations (which had almost nothing to do with the recession), Southern leaders proclaimed that their slave-based economy had not only caught up with the North but had also surpassed it. Who needed industry when you had King Cotton?

A few voices challenged this view, appealing to nonslave-holding Southerners to reclaim their region. Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolina nonslaveholder, made a cogent and powerful argument that slavery crippled the South in his book
The Impending Crisis of the South
(1857). Helper touched a raw nerve as painful as that of slave insurrections. He spoke to poor whites, who had not benefited at all from slavery, a ploy that threatened to turn white against white. Southern polemicists immediately denounced Helper as an incendiary and produced entire books disputing his statistics.

Most of the fire eaters in the South dismissed Helper, insisting that the peculiar institution had proved its superiority to factories and furnaces. The few advocates of a modern manufacturing economy now found themselves drowned out by the mantra “Cotton is King.” Others, such as Jefferson Davis, deluded themselves into thinking that Southern economic backwardness was entirely attributable to the North, an antebellum version of modern third-world complaints. “You free-soil agitators,” Davis said, “are not interested in slavery…not at all…. You want…to promote the industry of the North-East states, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.”
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This conspiracy view was echoed by Thomas Kettell in
Southern Wealth and Northern Profits
(1860).