American Experiment (100 page)

It is probable that, on the way to Lawrence, Brown was told of another assault by the “slave power,” far away in Washington. This news could hardly have tempered his passion, nor explained his action. Brown was an enigma to his neighbors in Pottawatomie Creek, and would remain so long after: was he a fanatical moralist who as a boy had seen a young slave beaten with a shovel by his master, a stern Calvinist who had dedicated his life to a merciless effort to extirpate the evil of slavery; or was he simply a homicidal lunatic from a family of lunatics?

Each incident in Kansas provoked storms of oratory in Congress as both chambers became caldrons of sectional hatred and hyperbole. “Truly—truly—this is a godless place,” Sumner lamented early in 1856. No one writhed under the oratorical lashes of Douglas and southern senators with a greater desire for vengeance than the Massachusetts lawmaker. Carefully he planned his climactic attack on the moral wickedness, the supreme sinfulness, of slavery. From his first words when he gained the floor in mid-May—”Mr. President, you are now called to redress a great transgression”—to his final reference to Virginia, “where human beings are bred as cattle for the shambles,” his speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” was studded with provocative and offensive personal attacks on his foes. He attacked the phalanx, especially Butler, charging that the South Carolinian had chosen a mistress who, “though ugly to others, is always lovely to
him…the harlot, Slavery.…” When Douglas answered him in kind, Sumner ranted: “…no person with the upright form of man can be allowed—” He paused.

“Say it,” Douglas shot back.

“I will say it—no person with the upright form of man can be allowed, without violation of all decency, to switch out from his tongue the perpetual stench of offensive personality. …The noisome, squat, and nameless animal, to which I now refer, is not a proper model for an American Senator. Will the Senator from Illinois take notice?”

“I will,” Douglas replied, “and therefore will not imitate you, sir.”

This was not the kind of grand Senate debate in which senatorial gladiators harangued each other on the floor and then walked through the cloakroom arm in arm. These adversaries loathed one another. As the bonds of civility snapped, as allies and constituents egged the antagonists on, Congress trembled on the edge of violence. Preston S. Brooks, a thirty-six-year-old congressman from South Carolina, a Mexican War veteran considered to be a moderate and agreeable man, had listened to some of Sumner’s remarks. Incensed by Sumner’s “insults” to South Carolina and to Brooks’s admired uncle, Senator Butler, Brooks carefully planned vengeance. He would not challenge Sumner to a duel, because that would imply acceptance of the Massachusetts man as his social equal. He would simply thrash him, as he would any other inferior guilty of wrongdoing.

After gallantly waiting for some women visitors to leave the Senate lobby, Brooks strode up to Sumner’s desk, where the senator was busy with correspondence, and rained twenty or thirty blows on Sumner’s head with a gold-knobbed gutta-percha cane. Sumner rose convulsively, wrenching his bolted desk from the floor, and reeled about as Brooks broke his cane on his head and kept on striking him, until bystanders dragged the assailant away. Almost insensible, his head covered with blood, Sumner, with the help of friends, stumbled out of the Capitol into a carriage a painful convalescence—and martyrdom.

Sacking a defenseless town, dragging helpless men out of their homes and hacking them to death, bloodying a United States senator pinioned under his desk—this explosion of baleful events sent new and irresistible shocks into the American conscience. Thirty months of rising conflict, culminating in these violent days of May, were arousing Americans to a consciousness of slavery as the supreme issue transcending all the others. The hurricane was whipping through the mainstream of American politics,
washing out old waterways and carving new channels, wrenching people from ancient political moorings and leaving them adrift or clutching new ones.

Fundamental economic and social forces, as well as bitter conflict, seemed to be transforming America during the 1850s. The economic boom roared on through the middle of the decade, both satisfying needs and raising expectations. Population soared under the impact of foreign immigration and domestic fecundity. Rising prices altered long-established relationships among groups and classes. Massive immigration caused new anxieties and tensions. Intense railroad building not only was altering the face of the land but causing social dislocation, as the jobs of draymen and teamsters and rivermen evaporated in one place and employment for railroad builders and trainmen and telegraphers suddenly materialized hundreds of miles away.

The few Americans who were reading Karl Marx in the 1850s might have expected sweeping political change to follow economic and social, especially in the wake of the storm over slavery. A major political change indeed was in the making, as a few Americans tried a major political experiment—to create a new political party that would challenge the existing two-party system in elections. This had never been done. Earlier the Democratic party had gradually grown out of the old Republican party; the Whigs had never had to challenge a full-bodied Federalist party. Many politicians doubted that this new party—anti-Nebraska, or Fusion, or Republican, or People’s—would have any more success than Liberty-ites or Free-Soilers. Only a Republican zealot would have dreamed in 1854 that the isolated protest meetings of that year would start the formation of what would become the dominant party for three-quarters of a century.

The question for Republicans by the end of 1854, indeed, was whether their movement would even survive. They faced not only the familiar Whigs and Democrats, Free-Soilers and Know-Nothings, but “Temperance men, Rum Democrats, Silver Gray Whigs, Hindoos, Hard Shell Democrats, Soft Shells, Half Shells,” and assorted others, in David Potter’s listing. Of the third parties, the Know-Nothings seemed most ascendant. In November 1854 they swept Massachusetts, scored well in New York and Pennsylvania, and elected a large number of representatives to the national House; after they won more victories the next year, some predicted that the nativists would take the presidency in 1856. Know-Nothings and anti-slavery representatives had enough in common in the new Congress to elect as Speaker Nathaniel P. Banks, a Massachusetts nativist and antislavery man who was once a Democrat, more recently a Know-Nothing, and now on his way to Republicanism.

All the parties indeed seemed immobilized by 1856. The Democrats, claiming to be the only truly national party, were bleeding at both ends as proslavery extremists deserted them in the South and “Free Democrats” seceded in the North. Whigs, still torn between conscience and cotton, were walking a tightrope on nativism, as they watched Democrats making inroads among immigrants and Catholics, and Know-Nothings exploiting bigotry. Some Whig leaders followed the high road; invited to address an anti-alien organization, Edward Everett not only declined but lectured his would-be host on the need to greet newcomers “in a spirit not of exclusiveness but of fraternal welcome.” Other Whig leaders were less high-minded. The Know-Nothings, even in the flush of their victories, comprised the weakest party of all, for they were deeply divided over slavery. When the party adopted a proslavery platform in its convention in June 1855, northern delegates withdrew, and the party was on the road to extinction.

The parties were immobilized because their top leadership was immobilized, and the leaders were immobilized because they were enmeshed in state and local politics. If the leaders could have fought in one great arena, some bold and committed spirit might have taken an advanced position against slavery—even in favor of emancipation—knowing that someday the people would catch up with him. But the national politicians of the day had to fight their battles within the states, and within key cities and counties in those states. Men like Sumner or Chase or Seward did take the lead, but only when local conditions permitted. No great national leader arose to rally Whigs or Democrats behind a daring commitment to halt and eventually abolish slavery; rather, month after month and year after year, state and sectional leaders calculated, advanced here, retreated there, compromised, adjusted, as they competed with rivals within and outside their parties, and tried to survive in the three-dimensional maze of American electoral and party politics.

The task of party invigoration, of creative political response to the hurricane of events and the social dynamics of the 1850s, would fall on a cadre of activists who, amidst all the murk, had a clear vision of what they believed in, where they wanted to go, and how they proposed to get there. No state demonstrated their problems and their progress more vividly than Illinois.

Illinois seemed the distillation of America. Though it opened on the Great Lakes to the north and flanked hundreds of miles of the Mississippi
on its west, already it was the quintessential heartland. Both its industry and its agriculture were booming in the 1850s, the two meeting in Chicago’s grain elevators and McCormick’s reaper factory. Illinois embraced sections and cultures: Chicago teemed with Irish and Germans; northern Illinois was dotted with towns more Yankee than Dedham; southern Illinois, touching Kentucky and reaching farther south than Richmond, was a land of people who still talked and thought as Virginians and Kentuckians. No one—no European traveler, no nationally ambitious politician, no immigrant heading west along the northern routes, no businessman looking for profit—could ignore Illinois.

If Chicago was the economic capital of Illinois in the 1850s, Springfield was the legal and political. Like Bloomington and Peoria and a dozen other places in central Illinois, it was a boom town, with its brand-new railroad connection to Chicago and New York, its population that was doubling while land valuation tripled. This town smack in the middle of the state was also the capital, with a proud new statehouse built of buff-colored stone that had been dragged by teams of twelve oxen from a nearby quarry. Springfield was still in part an unfinished frontier town: on a wet day people could sink to their knees in the prairie mud of the unpaved sidewalks; hogs ran wild in the streets, and in the business district imposing three-story shops stood next to ramshackle houses. The public square was crowded with buggies and sometimes by “movers” headed west in their covered wagons. Yet Springfield also had its aristocracy, dominated by wealthy old Whig families like the Stuarts, Edwardses, and Todds.

One of the Todds, Mary, a small and refined woman of quick temper, had married below her station in accepting a local lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, a man of tall frame, easygoing manner, hollowed cheeks, huge arms and hands, coarse black hair, and dowdy garb. Even after Lincoln was making good money as a lawyer, he could be seen currying his horse and milking his cow.

If you wanted to find Abe Lincoln in Springfield, you would look for a battered sign,
LINCOLN
&
HERNDON,
swinging on rusty hinges outside an office building downtown. You would climb a narrow flight of stairs, cross a dark hallway, and enter an office filled with a long, creaking sofa, a few old cane-bottomed chairs, and desks piled high with papers that overflowed the pigeonholes. If Lincoln wasn’t there, his partner, William Herndon, might be. Billy seemed almost the opposite of Abe: youthful, nervous, verbose, something of a dandy, but admiring, of “Mr. Lincoln.” Lincoln might be down at the courthouse or the capitol, or visiting another law office, or some place where you might find him telling jokes that had a
crowd in stitches—“he could make a cat laugh,” someone said—or he might be sitting by himself in a state of such utter melancholy that no one would dare approach him.

If Lincoln was not in town, he was probably out riding circuit. Gone were the days when he might ride horseback through rain and snow for thirty miles or so. Now he could take trains, with his free pass, or drive a horse and buggy. In earlier times he had been lucky to find a farmhouse where he could put up overnight in the extra room; now he could often stay at a newly built hotel. He often traveled with other lawyers, and with David Davis, circuit judge of the judicial district, a huge man of three hundred pounds, cherubic face, and sharp, penetrating mind. At night Lincoln might have to share a bed with another attorney, but the judge had his own bed, as tribute to the principle of separating bench and bar.

Life on the circuit was hard but educational. Lincoln, arguing every kind of case under every kind of law, constitutional, patent, admiralty, and common, came to know virtually every economic interest and human problem in the heart of Illinois.

He became a respected lawyer, trusted with important responsibilities, arguing many cases involving human problems, including divorce, rape, murder, and both sides in fugitive-slave cases. But most of his cases dealt with property: disputed wills, railroad rights-of-way, foreclosures, debt collection, patent infringements, trespass violations, mortgages, property damages. While early in his career he represented rivermen against bridge and railroad enterprises, later he took so many cases for railroads—he represented the Illinois Central in eleven appeals to the Illinois Supreme Court—that by the mid-1850s he was known as a railroad lawyer. Yet he also sued the Illinois Central when they offered him a fraction of the fee he billed them, and won. A Whig, a man of property, he prospered in the economic boom of capitalist Illinois. He believed in individual liberty, initiative, and enterprise. It was best, he said, “to leave each man free to acquire property as fast as he can.” Some would get rich, but a law to prevent that would do more harm than good.

But Lincoln was much more than an attorney for capitalism. A onetime state legislator, a Whig congressman in 1845-47, an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate, he had repeatedly subordinated his law practice to his desire to run for office. Herndon marveled at this man who could be so relaxed and casual at times but who seemed “totally swallowed up” in his greed for office. His ambition, Herndon said, “was a little engine that knew no rest.”