America Aflame (20 page)

The peoples of Europe faced overwhelming odds in battling authoritarian regimes, but Americans had a vital revolutionary legacy, a tradition of baptizing democracy in blood. William H. Seward stood on the floor of the Senate and declared that he knew “the value of peace, and order, and tranquility.… But I know also the still greater value of Liberty. When you hear me justify the despotism of the Czar of Russia over the oppressed Poles, or the treachery by which Louis Napoleon rose to a throne on the ruins of the Republic in France, on the ground that he preserves domestic peace among his subjects, then you may expect me to vote supplies of men and money to the President … to execute the edicts of the Missouri borderers in the Territory of Kansas.”
18

Outrage and righteousness engulfed the Senate. A day before the sack of Lawrence, Massachusetts's Charles Sumner presented a lengthy speech on “The Crime Against Kansas.” Sumner uncorked predictable perorations on the perfidy of the Slave Power and the rectitude of the free-staters. His stem-winder included the sexual imagery that northerners often employed in their depictions of the West, that pro-slavery settlers were committing “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.”
19

Southerners had sat through these diatribes before, and, considering the source—a man who had repeatedly proposed repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law—they allowed the rant to proceed unmolested. However, at one point in the speech, Sumner singled out South Carolina senator Andrew P. Butler for particular attention. Butler had been a strong supporter of the territorial legislature and a critic of free-state activities in Kansas. Sumner portrayed Butler as a “Don Quixote who had chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who … though polluted in the sight of the world is chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, slavery.” The frequent imagery of sexual defilement was particularly noxious at the time. When directed at an individual who valued and protected the chastity of women above all else, it was unforgivable. Even in metaphor, Sumner's charge was a major slur. But Sumner did not stop there. Senator Butler was an elderly gentleman and, as a result of either a minor stroke or bad teeth, had difficulty controlling his saliva when he spoke so that, occasionally, he literally spit out his words. Sumner mimicked Butler's speech impediment, mocking his “loose expectoration.”
20

Regrettably, such a display of poor taste was no longer unusual in the United States Senate. But South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, Butler's cousin, moved to defend his family's honor. The day after the sack of Lawrence, he entered a mostly empty Senate chamber—the Senate was not in session that day—and found Senator Sumner writing at his desk. Brooks carried a gutta-percha cane, and he struck Sumner some thirty blows to the head and shoulders in less than half a minute, as the Massachusetts senator could not get up from his seat to defend himself. Several lawmakers heard the commotion, but Brooks's colleague South Carolina representative Lawrence Keitt prevented them from coming to the senator's aid. The attack severely wounded Sumner. His seat in the Senate chamber stood empty for three years while he recovered; mute testimony to the wages of violence.

First “Bleeding Kansas,” and now “Bleeding Sumner.” To read the accounts of the incident in northern and southern newspapers was to measure the distance between two sides of an escalating conflict. The only question that seemed to remain was how far the breech would widen before the nation would crack. Horace Greeley and the
New York Tribune
fed the northern perception that the hallowed halls of Congress had now become an extension of Kansas, that the civil war in that territory had crossed a continent and spilled its blood on the nation's capital. The issue was no longer merely the extension of slavery in the territories but the enslavement of all Americans to the dictates of the Slave Power: “No meaner exhibition of Southern cowardice—generally miscalled Southern chivalry—was ever witnessed.… The reasons for the absence of collision between North and South—collision of sentiment and person—which existed a few years back, have ceased; and as the South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color … that Democracy is a delusion and a lie.”
21

Historians have written volumes about the concept of Southern Honor, about how the public image of a man required satisfaction if abused by a man of equal stature. Northerners cherished the concept of honor as well, though it may not have been as evident in their more urban, cosmopolitan society. If they perceived unwonted assaults on their liberties and leaders, however, they would act to uphold their honor, as decent men should.

Southerners swaggered to line up in support of Brooks. Sumner, they felt, was overdue for a severe chastisement. They showered Brooks with new canes, and, though the vote in the House of Representatives to expel him fell short of the required two-thirds majority, he resigned anyway and his constituents reelected him in a landslide, a further insult to Sumner's defenders. A newspaper in Edgefield, South Carolina, Brooks's district, captured the sentiment in the Lower South: “Some say he [Sumner] received fifty stripes, yet we very much doubt if the Captain cared to exceed the legal number of thirty-nine, usually applied to scamps.… We feel that our Representative did exactly right; and we are sure his people will commend him highly for it.… [W]e have borne insult long enough, and now let the conflict come if it must.”
22

Georgia's Alexander Stephens had always lamented the loss of decorum and civility in Washington. But the northern reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act radicalized him and his constituents. His bemused endorsement of Brooks's actions and the stifling of free speech in democracy's forum indicated how far he had gone down the sectional road in just two years. “Brooks whipped Sumner the other day,” he noted nonchalantly. “I have no objection to the liberty of speech when the liberty of the cudgel is left free to combat it.” It was as if Sumner had behaved like a fractious slave and received an appropriate punishment, a connection that inflamed northern public opinion. Stephens's bemusement was palpable: “The Yankees seem greatly excited about the Sumner flogging. They are afraid the practice may become general & many of [their] heads already feel sore.”
23

One northerner determined to take the battle directly to the slaveholders. In 1848, Frederick Douglass received an invitation to visit a white man in Springfield, Massachusetts, known for his anti-slavery views. Douglass had met a number of such men since he had left bondage, but this person was different. In what he said and in how he looked, this man was a breed apart from the middle-class reformers Douglass had encountered, or from any other human being for that matter. The meeting so captivated Douglass that he set his impressions down immediately, describing the man, who stood “straight and symmetrical as a mountain pine. His bearing was singularly impressive.… His hair was coarse, strong, slightly gray, and closely trimmed, and grew low on his forehead.… His eyes … were full of light and fire.”
24

Douglass sat down at a spare pine table, and the man's wife and children waited on them. The white man looked older than his years, “lean, strong, and sinewy,… built for times of trouble.” What particularly struck Douglass was the ease with which the white man conversed with him, as an equal without affect or condescension. The white man unveiled a scheme to establish a black state in the Appalachian Mountains comprised of escaped slaves protected from recapture by an armed militia. How and when slaves would rise up and make their way to the mountains remained unclear, but the white man was convinced that a sign or a prophet would trigger the exodus. What Douglass thought of the plan remains unknown, but the man impressed him as a committed anti-slavery warrior willing to give his life to free his fellow man. They would meet again.
25

Kansas stirred the white man's imagination. Here was a battleground where, unlike in the South, the slaveholder could not count on neighbors or government to protect his ill-begotten institution. So he went west with his sons. Connecticut native John Brown was fifty-six years old in May 1856, an age when most middle-class men in eastern cities were at the height of their business careers, engaged in civic activities, and doting on grandchildren. Brown had a family, a large family, but had not yet settled down to one particular occupation. He had a calling, though. He viewed himself as a liberator, and the chaos in Kansas afforded an opportunity to avenge the sin of slavery. The sack of Lawrence provided an immediate cause. At a small settlement along Pottawatomie Creek, Brown and his sons invaded the cabin of a pro-slavery family, dragged three men outside, shot the father through the head, and hacked and mutilated his two sons with broadswords. Ritual murders.

The eastern press, which had already inflated atrocities and inflamed public opinion on “Bleeding Kansas,” at first dismissed stories of the murders. The
New York Tribune
went so far as to report that Comanche Indians had murdered the family, as evidenced by the mutilated corpses, something white men would never do. As the
Tribune
concluded with unintended irony, “Terrible stories have floated through the newspapers, distorted and misrepresented by those whose interest it was to misrepresent them.” When it appeared that initial reports were proven correct, the
Tribune
placed Brown's actions within the larger context of “Bleeding Kansas.” It was a civil war, after all, and bad things happened to both sides. In the meantime, Brown and his sons headed back east to raise money for a larger plan.
26

The three incidents—the sack of Lawrence, the caning of Sumner, and John Brown's bloody foray to Pottawatomie Creek—occurred within days of each other. They blended together in the public mind and offered confirmation for the worst perspective of each section. If few northerners read southern newspapers and magazines and vice versa, northern and southern editors were certain to keep their readers informed. In September 1856, J. D. B. De Bow, a leading advocate for southern commercial and industrial development, and editor of the widely read magazine
De Bow's Review
, editorialized on “The War Against the South.” It was less an editorial than a compilation of what the northern press and northern politicians were saying since the May incidents in Kansas and Washington, D.C. He collected the pieces with a sense of urgency as anti-slavery men were “coming nearer and nearer to the possession of the Federal power.” The danger to the South and its institutions was no longer abstract, as the prayer of Ohio Republican congressman Joshua Giddings demonstrated: “I look forward to the day when there shall be a servile insurrection in the South, when the black man … shall assert his freedom, and wage a war of extermination against his master; when the torch of the incendiary shall light up the towns and cities of the South, and blot out the last vestige of slavery. And though I may not mock at their calamity, nor laugh when their fear cometh, yet I will hail it as the dawn of a political millennium.” De Bow also quoted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay published in response to the assault on Senator Charles Sumner. Emerson concluded, as Greeley had, “I think we must get rid of slavery, or we must get rid of freedom.” The nation could not persist as a whole with such disparate parts.
27

Again referring to the Sumner assault, De Bow selected the following exegesis from the
Boston Chronicle
. The asterisks “supply the place of a sentence too infamous to be repeated.” “Is it at all likely that animals * * * who tear little children from the arms of their mothers in order that they may be sold into everlasting bondage, is it at all likely, we ask, that such brutes would hesitate to murder the man who, in the discharge of his duty, has occasion to remind them of their crimes?”
28

Without apparently realizing that his words confirmed the assertions of his northern antagonists, De Bow quoted approvingly from an item in the
Galveston News
about a Texas legislator who had criticized the pro-slavery faction in Kansas: “That your right in common with every other citizen, to free opinion, free discussion, and the largest liberty of self-defense, is fully recognized, and will be respected. But there is one subject connected with your course in the Legislature—that of slavery—on which neither you nor any one entertaining your views, will be permitted to appear before the community, in a public manner.… The entire subject of slavery, in all its connections, is forbidden ground, which you shall not invade.”
29

The events in Kansas energized the new Republican Party. Formed in several northern states in the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the party sought to broaden its base in advance of the 1856 presidential election. In particular, the Republicans hoped to attract former Whigs, such as Abraham Lincoln, who had feared that the new party's radicalism on the slavery issue endangered the Union. The Republicans also looked to disaffected northern Know Nothings now as concerned about the threat of the Slave Power as with the threat of immigrants. There were Democrats as well, such as David Wilmot, who could no longer follow a party indifferent to the extension of slavery in the territories.

The Republicans represented themselves as the antidote to the Slave Power. Though they welcomed support in the South, they moved forward as an avowedly sectional party, attuned not only to northerners' opposition to slavery in the territories but to their economic interests as well: promoting a homestead act to open the territories to working men and women and their families; a higher tariff to protect the nascent industries of the Northeast and Midwest and the workers and entrepreneurs in those enterprises; and a vigorous program of internal improvements, especially a transcontinental railroad, to knit the far-flung western territories to the eastern seaboard facilitating migration and commerce. While former Know Nothings lent a nativist cast to some local races, by and large, the new party did not endorse anti-immigrant legislation. Instead, recognizing the growing influence of immigrants in American urban life, they appealed to their sense of fairness in keeping the territories white, and in maintaining an economic development program that would enhance opportunities for everyone.