America Aflame (17 page)

Douglas was a consummate nationalist. In some ways he resembled the railroads he represented in courts and promoted in the Senate. His mind ran straight to the horizon, where an ever-more glorious future awaited his clients and America. Railroads would connect the vast continental empire and preserve the nation's revolutionary ideals and democratic traditions. This vision was not much different from that held by Douglas's Illinois rival, Abraham Lincoln, who made his initial political reputation as a proponent of just the kind of internal improvements advocated by the Little Giant. Lincoln made his living, like Douglas, securing handsome fees from railroad companies. Both men supported the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law inclusive. They held differing views on slavery in the territories, with Lincoln much more the advocate of congressional intervention to prohibit it, Douglas supporting popular sovereignty. Both agreed, however, that the Union was paramount.

When Douglas submitted his railroad bill in January 1854, this was the consensus across America: citizens would agree to disagree on slavery in the territories, but all would rally to the cause of the Union to overcome those differences. Despite some well-publicized cases of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law, northern states and their citizens adhered to the bargain for the most part. Although Harriet Beecher Stowe had touched northerners (and some in the South, when they could get their hands on the book) with her dramatic novel, its influence did not translate into political action. A frustrated Frederick Douglass saw the push for black civil rights in the North stall and even regress, while in the South slavery seemed as strong as ever as cotton prices soared. Religious intolerance and nativism, on the fringes of politics for twenty years, had entered the mainstream. It seemed, in fact, as if conservative reaction to the revolutionary movements in Europe had crossed the Atlantic.

Douglas hoped his railroad bill would not only keep the slavery issue quiescent but would also pull the nation together and open new territories to the farmers and townspeople of the East. A transcontinental railroad to tame the western “wilderness” had long been a dream of Douglas and many others. Making land accessible to potential settlers and developing a lucrative commerce between the new territories and the East were the most certain methods of cementing his beloved Union and its democratic institutions. The railroad was the means to this glorious end. Douglas's own experience in Illinois, where Chicago grew from a raw frontier town to the major metropolis between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, confirmed his judgment. Railroads sealed Chicago's role as the commercial hub for prosperous midwestern farmers and eastern merchants and manufacturers.

Douglas was the voice of Young America: brash, assertive, and confident. That the land through which a Pacific railroad must pass was not a wilderness but a home to Indians did not concern the senator. Removing the “Indian barrier” and establishing white government, he asserted, were “first steps” toward the greater end of stimulating “a tide of emigration and civilization.” He thought it absurd that parts of the Louisiana Purchase, American soil since 1803, remained unorganized and largely unsettled. “How are we to develop, cherish and protect our immense interests and possessions on the Pacific,” he asked his Senate colleagues, “with a vast wilderness fifteen hundred miles in breadth, filled with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication?” The cure was simple: remove the “savages,” pass a railroad bill, and organize the territories.
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Except, as Douglas well knew, it was not that simple. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 divided the Louisiana Purchase at 36° 30', prohibiting slavery above that line. The Nebraska Territory, which Douglas proposed to organize for the purpose of attracting settlers and building a railroad, lay above 36° 30'. Southern lawmakers would not support a bill that would further reduce their power in the Congress. Since the admission of California in 1850, the free states had, by 1854, almost double the number of representatives in the House, and held a majority in the Senate. Two, perhaps three states might be carved from the Nebraska Territory. By the provisions of the Missouri Compromise these would be free states. The territorial issue concerned not only southern slaveholders but also those farmers and workers in the South who might own slaves someday and migrate to the new lands. What seemed acceptable to southerners in 1820, with the rich soil of the Old Southwest newly opened to slavery, was much less attractive in the 1850s. What southerners found more palatable about Douglas's railroad bill was the railroad. A southern route for the Pacific railroad could secure economic independence for the South and provide a shield against political intrusions by the northern majority. As the
New Orleans Delta
explained, the Pacific Railroad was “the great panacea, which is to release the South from its bondage to the North.”
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Douglas addressed southern desires in his Nebraska bill by providing for the construction of three railroads from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, one of which would traverse a southern route. None of these railroads would become reality until the Congress organized the Nebraska Territory so the government could grant lands for rights-of-way. Responding to southerners' objections to the Missouri Compromise prohibition, Douglas applied the language Congress employed in organizing the New Mexico and Utah territories as part of the Compromise of 1850. The Nebraska Territory, “when admitted as a State or States,… shall be received into the Union, with or without slavery, as their constitution may prescribe.” It was Douglas's beloved principle of popular sovereignty, “the great fundamental principle of self-government upon which our republican institutions are predicated.” The measure implicitly repealed the Missouri Compromise since residents could vote to sanction slavery in any new territory. But southerners asked Douglas to go further: to divide the Nebraska Territory into two entities, Nebraska and Kansas, and to make the repeal of the Missouri Compromise explicit. The tacit assumption was that Kansas, next door to slave state Missouri, would become a slave state and Nebraska would enter as a free state. Douglas, who had worked hard to ensure that his railroad bill would not revive the slavery controversy, reluctantly agreed, predicting that the revised bill would “raise a hell of a storm.” He was right.
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No sooner had Douglas introduced his Nebraska bill to the Senate on January 23, 1854, than a manifesto, an “Appeal of the Independent Democrats,” appeared in the
National Era
, the newspaper that had serialized
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. The bill, the authors declared, closed off opportunities both for immigrants from Europe and the native-born on the farms and the crowded cities of the East. The signers, mostly lawmakers from the Northeast and Midwest, saw the repeal as “a gross violation of a sacred pledge; as a criminal betrayal of precious rights; as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, emigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary regime of despotism.” They attacked Douglas as a tool of “servile demagogues.”
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The Missouri Compromise, which abolitionists despised as a pact with the devil, had suddenly assumed the trappings of holy writ. Congress had organized territories employing several principles including the outright prohibition of slavery (the Northwest Ordinance) and popular sovereignty (the Mexican Cession), as well as the geographically explicit Missouri Compromise. Lawmakers had demonstrated a flexible and accommodating spirit with respect to the issue of slavery in the territories, preferring the Union above all other principles. The Douglas bill did not guarantee slavery anywhere. The Missouri Compromise, if anything, encouraged its existence within certain boundaries.

But 1854 was not 1820. In the interim, the Western world outside the United States had turned against slavery with a vengeance. Although few Americans identified with abolitionists, northerners increasingly opposed slavery's extension. Also, by the mid-1850s, American cities, especially those in the North, burst with newcomers, both from abroad and from the countryside. Perhaps all would fulfill their dreams in these hustling urban centers. But the era of small shops and artisanal work was passing, and the semiskilled labor force grew. Would opportunities continue to exist for all? At least there was the West. The West was much less important in the American imagination of 1820 than it was in 1854. Turning the West into plantation country implied, for many northerners, turning them away from the chance to prosper. But southerners felt the same way: keeping the West open for them meant keeping the dream of starting over or of growing greater alive.

Horace Greeley, from the moment Douglas introduced his bill, turned the pages of his
New York Tribune
into an anti-Nebraska newspaper. Greeley not only captured northern public sentiment but also shaped it with sharp editorials. In one editorial, he charged, “Not content within its own proper limits,… it now proposed to invade and overrun the soil of freedom, and to unroll the pall of its darkness over virgin territory whereon a slave has never stood. Freedom is to be elbowed out of its own home to make room for the leprous intruder. The free laborer is to be expelled that the slave may be brought in.” It was all there: sex, class, and patriotism.
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The Douglas bill did not please all southerners initially either. Some dismissed the repeal of the Missouri Compromise as mere window-dressing to hide the fact that both Nebraska and Kansas would eventually enter the Union as free states anyway. Others expressed concern that an explicit repeal would unnecessarily inflame public opinion in the North. Senator John Bell of Tennessee predicted that the Nebraska bill would create in the North “a more decided and deep-rooted hostility to slavery and the whole South.” If by some miracle slaveholders could actually capture a majority in Kansas, then anti-slavery sentiment would become “more widely diffused and more intense.” In exchange for this heightened sectional animosity, the South would, in reality, gain nothing. Bell understood that the more populous North would win the migration race to Kansas.
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Yet southern lawmakers voted overwhelmingly in favor of a bill that offered so little to the South while generating so much northern ill will. Perhaps that was the point: to tweak the northern beast. The beast responded. It was a perfect example of how Newton's Third Law of Motion applied to politics in the 1850s. The Douglas bill produced such a sharp reaction in the North, and not just among the usual abolitionist contingent, that southerners reacted in kind, embracing a proposal that would have only marginal impact on their well-being. The northern response to the Nebraska bill gave the lie to the assumption that ethnicity and religion had eclipsed slavery as the nation's central political and moral issue.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, like the toppling of the July monarchy in France, provoked a revolution of unintended consequences. The sectional response to the act destroyed what remained of the Second American Party System, splintering it into a kaleidoscope of parties and fusion groups so confusing that the
Congressional Globe
, the publication charged with matching lawmakers with their party affiliation, gave up the task following the 1854 congressional elections. Accompanying the disintegration of parties was the loss of the broad center in American politics, the Unionism of Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Stephens, and Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln, Stephens, and Douglas continued on, of course, but only Douglas could straddle the eroding national middle; Lincoln and Stephens found political homes in sectional causes and parties.

Reality, a rare commodity since the introduction of the Wilmot Proviso, became ever more elusive. Ghosts haunted Washington. Most northerners, especially those in the dynamic cities, wanted the opportunity to prosper, and increasingly viewed the South and slaveholders as obstacles to that end. Southerners wanted the same thing, and similarly viewed Yankees as barriers to their pursuit of happiness. Every political issue became a sign, a symbol confirming both views at the same time. Never mind that most of these issues worked little harm or benefit to either side. The reality, again, no longer mattered. In this atmosphere, demagogues prospered, and moderates faltered. Whoever could best convince his constituents of the perfidy of their common enemy achieved success. Politics became a religion, as religion had become politics: dogmatic, orthodox, and unflinching. America went to bed one night a moderate, accommodating nation and woke up the following morning ready for Armageddon. A railroad bill became a call to arms.

Abraham Lincoln answered the call. Out of politics and immersed in a successful law practice, Lincoln made no public comment on the Kansas-Nebraska Act in the months following its passage. He had spoken relatively little about slavery in a political career that extended back to the early 1830s. But Lincoln held a visceral dislike of slavery. The institution denied a man the right to improve himself. As a man devoted to the Constitution, however, he saw no way to interfere with slavery where it currently existed. The territories were another matter, though he was never in the forefront of those clamoring for the Wilmot Proviso, nor did he consider supporting anti-slavery parties. He was a Whig through and through, and a Clay Whig at that.

When Lincoln delivered a eulogy for his mentor in 1852, he stressed Clay's sense of duty, his elevation of the nation's interest above personal gain, and how he agonized over the institution of slavery, an inherited curse for which he could find no cure. Henry Clay, Lincoln explained, “did not perceive, that on a question of human right, the negroes were to be excepted from the human race.” Consequently, “he ever was, on principle and in feeling, opposed to slavery.” The great dilemma, for both Clay and Lincoln, was how to end slavery “without producing a greater evil.” The dilemma led both Clay and Lincoln to support the American Colonization Society, which advocated transporting freed slaves, voluntarily, back to Africa. Such a plan, Lincoln believed, would succeed both “in freeing our land from the dangerous presence of slavery” and “in restoring a captive people to their long-lost father-land with bright prospects for the future.”
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