America Aflame (21 page)

“Bleeding Kansas” and “Bleeding Sumner” came at the beginning of the 1856 presidential campaign, a coincidence that only exacerbated sectional tension and further scrambled party affiliation. In northern states, leaders fashioned fusion tickets from the remnants of old parties. In the South, the Democratic Party presented itself as the protector of southern rights, and though the American, or Know Nothing, Party and the moribund Whigs continued to find adherents, especially in border cities, the Democrats increasingly cornered the political market in the cotton states. The fluidity of party politics that characterized the North was much less common in the South. Alexander Stephens abandoned two decades of hostility to the Democratic Party and joined his former enemies. The equality of the South in the Union meant more to him than any other issue. In fact, there really were no other issues; all derived from this basic principle.

The party switch was more agonizing for Abraham Lincoln. He had rebuffed Republican attempts to “unwhig him,” as he put it in 1854, and he abhorred the nativism of the Know Nothings. But events in Kansas left Lincoln “ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose the slave power.” In May 1856, Lincoln took the plunge and attended the Illinois state convention of the Republican Party.
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Carl Schurz also faced a difficult decision. Most of his countrymen favored the Democratic Party. The Know Nothings were anathema, and the Whigs had dabbled around the fringes of nativism. Their combination in the new party did not endear the Republicans initially to the German community. But the strong anti-slavery orientation of the Republicans made forty-eighters listen. The party seemed to embody the principles of their revolution more than the political alternatives.

Walt Whitman was a lifelong Democrat, despite his flirtation with the Free Soilers. He had reveled in the Democrats' celebration of the individual and the party's inclusiveness. His poetry was the literary version of Democratic philosophy. The publication in 1855 of
Leaves of Grass
marked a major event in American literature, though, at the time, this was not apparent. What was obvious, however, was that
Leaves of Grass
was very different from anything that had come before. Unlike the formal rhymed and metered poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, Whitman's poems were improvisational and dealt with subjects such as the sensuality of the human body and the excesses of slavery in such vivid imagery that some reviewers condemned the work as obscene. Lincoln, an avid reader of American literature, carried around a dog-eared copy that he hid from his wife, Mary, who scorned it as perverted, though she had not read it.

What made the sectional divide especially troubling for Whitman was its threat to the Union and its divine mission. Whitman longed for a “Redeemer President,” who would mend the separation and return the nation to its redemptive course. He was not certain if the Republicans could respond to that calling, but he was increasingly sure the Democrats could not.
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Harriet Beecher Stowe did not take long to throw herself headlong into the Republican cause. Here, at last, was a party dedicated to preserving the freedom of the territories. Even if party leaders equivocated on abolition, at least they were willing to stand up to the Slave Power's attacks on democracy. From December 1855 to September 1856—a time that spanned both the Kansas incidents and the presidential campaign—Harriet wrote a second anti-slavery novel,
Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
. Though less successful both artistically and financially than
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, the new novel reflected a shift in Harriet's perspective on slavery, as well as the impact of Kansas and the rise of the Republican Party on her writing.

Whereas Tom was saintly, Dred, an escaped slave and the purported son of Denmark Vesey, the former slave who led an abortive revolt in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822, vows “a day of vengeance” against the slaveholders. Inspired by Old Testament parables of righteousness and revenge, Dred develops his plot. But Milly, a female slave, quoting pacifist passages from the New Testament, persuades Dred to drop his scheme. Dred's conversion is useless, as whites discover the plot and kill him. While Harriet took special care to depict the South and white southerners evenhandedly in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
, she is now extremely critical of southerners. Harriet also implies that martyrdom, however saintly, will neither impress slaveholders nor weaken slavery. More forceful strategies are necessary.
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The 1856 election campaign reflected the remarkable transformation that had changed not only American politics but also public opinion. The middle ground continued to shrink. Men such as Lincoln and Stephens sought out party affiliations that would cater to sectional interests even as they did so in the name of the Union. Both men still loved the Union but wondered if it could, or even should, survive in its present state. For Harriet Beecher Stowe, violence now seemed a viable and even necessary alternative. Her brother Henry Ward Beecher shipped guns to Kansas. Ministers and laymen north and south increasingly perceived violence as a policy option.

The upstart Republicans held their convention in Philadelphia in mid-July in a revivalist fervor reminiscent of the earlier Liberty and Free Soil party gatherings. The delegates framed a platform condemning the “twin relics of barbarism”—slavery and polygamy. It would be difficult to sustain an argument that polygamy represented a threat to the American body politic in the mid-1850s. There was no epidemic, current or pending, of men and women seeking multiple partners. As everyone at the time understood, however, the Mormons in Utah Territory espoused, though did not require, polygamy as part of their religious doctrine. Memories of Mormon settlements and the turmoil they generated remained fresh in the minds of midwesterners, a likely constituency for Republican votes. While anti-slavery sentiment varied, few voters were sympathetic to the Mormons.
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Polygamy was also a code word to mid-nineteenth-century Americans, especially to northerners and especially when paired with slavery. Polygamy attacked traditional family relations, as did slavery. Slavery and polygamy unleashed the same unbridled passions that would destroy religion, republican government, and the family, the basic institutions that held together far-flung Americans in the nineteenth century. Both reflected an absence of personal discipline. Linking slavery to a despised religious movement further discredited the institution and its supporters as beyond the pale of Christian democratic civilization. From there, it was but a few steps to read southerners out of America, as facile as dismissing Indians and Mexicans as vanishing relics of inferior civilizations.

The pairing of slavery and polygamy also highlighted the threat of both to a modern America, a nation devoted to progress, technology, and self-improvement. These “relics of barbarism” harked back to a dark (and Catholic) past when superstition and dependence bedeviled mankind. They were, in a word, un-American, at least the America posited by the new party and its followers.

The Republicans nominated Lieutenant Colonel John C. Frémont as their first presidential candidate, passing over more prominent names such as New York's William H. Seward and Ohio's Salmon P. Chase. Frémont's selection reflected both the fledgling party's attempt to broaden its appeal in the North and the tried-and-true Whig formula of nominating a military hero for the presidency. His lack of political experience—he was not a member of the party—placed him above the dirty fray of politics. Frémont's greatest asset was his wife, Jessie Benton Frémont, the daughter of Missouri's former Democratic senator and congressman Thomas Hart Benton. Lincoln later called her “quite a female politician.” She managed her husband's campaign, ghostwrote his rare position papers, and advised the political novice not to say a word. Frémont, handsome and youthful, also represented the new party's appeal to the West, a region that held a special place in the American imagination. For a party focused on keeping the West white and free, a western candidate made sense. The Pathfinder, as Frémont was known, had helped create the West, both in image and in fact. Here was a new party with a new man from a new place to bring a new day to America.
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The Republican platform reflected the party's origins as an amalgam of anti-slavery Democrats, Whigs, and northern Know Nothings. The platform demanded the exclusion of slavery from the territories and the admission of Kansas as a free state, though in deference to conservative former Whigs, it did not call for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.

The Democrats turned away from likely candidates out of necessity. The Kansas-Nebraska Act, followed closely by the clashes in Kansas and in the Senate, had alienated many northern Democrats against both President Pierce and Stephen A. Douglas. Facing a northern revolt and southern steadfastness against any candidate who would not support pro-slavery interests in the territories, the party turned to Pennsylvania's James Buchanan. His greatest virtue was that he had been out of the country the previous four years serving as ambassador to Great Britain. He had no established position on the slavery question. Southerners accepted him as electable. Northern Democrats hoped for the best. A blank slate was better than anyone tainted by either the Douglas bill or the war in Kansas. Buchanan was hardly a political novice, though. Unlike Frémont, Buchanan had been involved in politics for more than thirty years by the time of his nomination. He had cultivated a reputation as a friend of the South, and his closest friends were southerners. Tall and white-haired, he exuded an air of experience, though, according to one observer, he had the countenance of a “well-preserved mummy.”
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The Know Nothing movement began to disintegrate as the slavery issue took precedence. The Know Nothings split into northern and southern factions, with many in the northern wing declaring for the Republican Party despite false rumors that Frémont was a Roman Catholic. It was a shocking denouement for a party that just one short year earlier had scored significant electoral successes in several major northern and border cities, trading on the immigration issue as a primary concern of native-born urbanites. All they could muster from their shattered convention was the nomination of former president Millard Fillmore, who, like his Republican counterpart, was not even a member of the party whose standard he carried.

With the Democratic Party as the only national political organization in the race, the presidential campaign of 1856 unfolded as a series of local and regional contests directed at specific audiences, primarily in the North and in the competitive border states. The Democrats would prevail overwhelmingly in the Lower South. In the North, the Democrats tried simultaneously to shore up their immigrant base by noting the connections between the Republicans and the erstwhile Know Nothings, and to appeal to evangelicals by intimating that Frémont had received a Catholic education, had studied for the priesthood, or was himself a secret Roman Catholic. Claims also surfaced alleging that Frémont and New York's Archbishop John Hughes had, on occasion, staggered drunkenly through the streets of the city at night on their way home from evening mass. The circumstantial evidence was sufficient for Democratic papers to cry out that Frémont was “
the instrument of vice, and the foe of God and of Freedom
.” Punning on the Republican declaration of “Free Soil and Frémont,” Democratic editors quipped, “Free Love and Frémont.”
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Democrats also denounced the meddling of evangelicals in politics. The party initiated a new publication,
Political Priestcraft Exposed,
to promote this connection and unfurled a large banner in lower Manhattan portraying a priest standing on a Bible with a revolver in one hand and a rifle in the other, bearing the caption “Beecher's Command—kill each other with Sharp's Rifles.” It remains unknown what Lyman Beecher thought of his favorite son got up in the garb of a Roman Catholic priest.
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The Democrats played both sides of the religious aisle because the sectional crisis had energized northern churches, most of which had remained neutral over the issue of slavery, as a frustrated Harriet Beecher Stowe noted time and again in
Uncle Tom's Cabin
. But after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and especially with events in Kansas and the caning of Senator Charles Sumner, more evangelical ministers began to speak out on political issues, justifying their position by emphasizing the moral questions these issues raised.

The Democrats also cast the election as a referendum on the Union, especially in the North. A Republican victory, they charged, would assuredly precipitate a secessionist movement in the South. Although the Republicans disavowed abolitionism, Democrats intimated that the party's radical fringe would have greater influence in a sectional crisis, further polarizing the nation and precipitating both a race war and a civil war. Widely circulated comments by southern Democrats confirmed this view. Virginia's Democratic governor, Henry A. Wise, declared that a Republican victory “would be an open, overt proclamation of public war.” Georgia's Robert Toombs vowed that the “election of Frémont would be the end of the Union, and ought to be.”
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The importance of evangelical imagery in the political campaigns of the major parties was especially evident among the Republicans, the heirs of the revivalist free-soil movement. A participant in the party convention allowed that the gathering resembled a “Methodist conference rather than a political convention,” and another characterized the party platform as “God's revealed Word.” Delegates concluded the convention with a rousing chorus of “The Frémont Crusader's Song”: “We've truth on our side / We've God for our guide.”
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