American Experiment (102 page)

Lincoln pondered the election results. Illinois, a microcosm, had gone Republican in the north and Democratic in the south, but had elected a Republican state ticket. Lincoln’s ability to moderate clashes among Free Democrats, old-line Whigs, disaffected Germans, unreconstructed Know-Nothings, and radical abolitionists left him as undisputed leader of the Illinois Republican party. But what about the national party? Could it both restrict slavery and preserve the Union?

“We don’t want to dissolve” the Union, he had warned his foes in a speech in Galena, “and if you attempt it,
we won’t let you
. ” The purse and the sword would not be in the Southerners’ hands, “We won’t dissolve the Union, and you shan’t.”

V
IOLENCE IN
K
ANSAS, MOBS
in Boston—but the eye of the storm was in Washington. The city was calm as President-elect Buchanan, escorted by army regulars, Marines, and state militias, rode with Pierce to the Capitol. Buchanan’s Inaugural Address reflected the placidity and quietism of the capital. Clad in a well-publicized suit of rural homespun, he deplored the incessant agitation over the slavery issue, and offered the pious injunction that things would quiet down if the nation would allow the people in the territories to decide on slavery there, and leave the institution alone where it already existed.

For a capital already confronted by overwhelming questions of peace and war, it was a curiously unfinished city through which Buchanan and his escort paraded on their way to the White House. The Capitol was imposing, even noble, some felt, with its great classic dome and pillars and porticos, though two big wings, built to accommodate an ever-expanding House and Senate, were still uncompleted—great marble blocks lay scattered around the Hill, among pendant cranes. From the Capitol the Inaugural Day visitors could see a scattering of houses and shanties still surrounded by fields. The base of the new Washington Monument looked impressive but the shaft ended abruptly 150 feet up because funds had run out. Grand plans were under discussion to beautify the Mall, which still resembled a cow pasture. Pennsylvania Avenue, down which Buchanan rode, had gas lights; outlying streets did not. Washington was a city of magnificent avenues, patriotic monuments, and high pretensions; it was also a city where people threw swill and slops into the alleys, hogs scavenged in the roads and wallowed in the muck, and people gasped for breath, through handkerchiefs pressed to their faces, when winds whipped through the dirt roads during dry periods.

It was the unfinished capital of an unfinished government. Aside from the Capitol the most imposing building was the Patent Office, a center of attention for a people constantly tinkering, inventing, experimenting. If many of the other government buildings did not look like much, they did not do much. If the capital lacked focus and coherence, so did the federal government, which remained a collection of fragmented powers,
traditional military and diplomatic functions and offices, a presidency and Congress often at odds with each other, a Supreme Court not yet confirmed in the fullness of its authority. The doctrine of states’ rights, the unceasing opposition of southern Democrats to a major federal role in internal improvements, and the vigor of some northern states in improving transportation and subsidizing industry, had left a federal government hardly able to cope with its ordinary duties, much less its extraordinary ones.

No city in America seemed more pinioned between North and South. Though the new Smithsonian building had just been built on the site of the old slave pens, Washington was still a city where one encountered slaves—where a visitor like Frederick Law Olmsted could find that the aged, bent, infirm, and overworked black man bringing in firewood for Olmsted’s hotel room was a slave hired by the hotel from the man who owned him. It was a city where “free” blacks applying for residence had to report within five days of arrival or risk a fine, the workhouse, and expulsion from the city; where secret meetings were forbidden; where after twenty-four “genteel colored men,” in the words of the police record, held a charitable, nonpolitical meeting, several were sent to the workhouse, others were fined, and one was ordered to be flogged.

If the nation’s capital appeared, all at the same time, to be monumental and unfinished, politically pretentious and socially diminished, the nation’s leadership, gathered in Washington for Buchanan’s inaugural, presented an equally mixed picture. The void left by Clay, Webster, and the other political monuments of the recent past had yet to be filled.

A still rising star, if no Calhoun, among the southern leaders in Congress was Jefferson Davis. Born in the closing year of Jefferson’s presidency, later heir to a small Mississippi plantation, Davis had led an unexceptional early life as an army officer on the northwest frontier, a tour of duty distinguished mainly by his elopement with the daughter of his commandant, Colonel Zachary Taylor. His young wife soon died of malarial fever, but Davis, after ten years as a planter and an abbreviated term in Congress, brilliantly led the Mississippi Rifles in Mexico, under the command of his former father-in-law. A states’-righter who wanted to fashion an autonomous South in an overarching Union, he won election to the Senate, backed Polk and expansion, served as Pierce’s resourceful Secretary of War, and in 1857 was about to return to the upper chamber. With his “slender, tall, and erect figure,” Carl Schurz remembered, “his spare face, keen eyes, and fine forehead,” he struck the editor with “the grace of his diction, and the rare charm of his voice—things which greatly distinguish him from many of his colleagues.” Though on Capitol Hill he was admired and feared for his lucidity, his temper, his aloofness, and his touchiness
over criticism of the South, he possessed neither a philosophical vision that might have balanced his prickly sectionalism nor a Jeffersonian confidence in the ultimate good sense of the people.

Davis’ great rival from the North was William Henry Seward of New York. Short, rustic, seedy compared to the fastidious Mississippian, Seward was talkative, good-natured, and gay-hearted in dealing with fellow senators. Long a close associate of Thurlow Weed in New York’s turbulent politics, he had risen rapidly: state senator at twenty-nine, governor at thirty-seven, senator ten years later. As governor he had brooked nativist wrath by pressing for public schools in which immigrant children could be instructed by teachers speaking the same language and professing the same faith. Now fifty-six, he was famous as a strong antislavery man, an excellent constitutional lawyer, and a moralist who had fluttered Washington dovecotes when he called for abolition of the slave system by gradual, compensated emancipation and appealed to a “higher law than the Constitution.” He was also viewed as rash and unsteady in judgment, prone to shift erratically between moralistic pronunciamentos and devious party politics.

Charles Sumner and Stephen Douglas were doubtless the best-known senators, but Sumner was still convalescing from Brooks’s attack in March 1857, and Douglas had been left isolated by the victory of Buchanan & Co. There were others: the aged John J. Crittenden of Kentucky; whose passion was the Union; the high-minded Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, broad-minded in outlook but rather too stubborn in detail; the majestic-looking Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, as statesmanlike in Washington as deficient in popular appeal back home; the ancient warrior Lewis Cass of Michigan; the South Carolinian radical and secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett; and a score of others of almost equal rank among the second cadre.

It was difficult, though, to find in Washington leaders who were equal to the deepening crisis—men with the power to appeal to the hearts and minds, to the fundamental wants and needs and aspirations of the people, able to apply steady moral and intellectual standards to the issues confronting them, able to combine moral earnestness and moderation of temper, able to live up to the leadership heritage of the founding fathers they constantly apotheosized. Washington as a capital city seemed unable to inspire and sustain that kind of leadership. Rather, it rewarded the political brokers and technicians on the Hill, the opportunistic bureaucrats in the agencies, the middlemen operating out of the endless enclaves and interstices in a fragmented system of government.

Washington simply preferred peace and quiet to extremism of any kind. After years of Jeffersonian and Democratic rule, the capital was a
southern-oriented city, under a congressionally controlled city government under, in turn, a Democratic-controlled Congress. “The fiercer the storm blew roundabout,” Constance McLaughlin Green wrote, “the greater the quiet at the center. It was like the stillness at the eye of a hurricane.” But the storm was steadily rising, among proslavery and antislavery firebrands South and North, among ambitious, anti-extension Republican politicans in the West, and among a little republic of Southerners who had long expected and hoped that that storm would burst.

Southern fire-eaters had exulted over Preston Brooks’s assault on the “blackguard” Sumner. While the South Carolina congressman was showered with tributes and gifts, northern editors and orators raged over this “ruthless attack” on “liberty of speech” and all decency. The House of Representatives passed a resolution of censure but failed to muster the two-thirds vote needed for expulsion. Brooks resigned anyway, ran in the special election in his district, won a smashing victory, and within two months was back in his old seat.

Brooks’s vindication surprised few Southerners. South Carolina had long been the most militant state in the South, the quickest to defend its honor, the proudest of its civilization, the spearhead for southern nationalism and romanticism. Brooks represented the district that had sent John Calhoun to Congress forty-six years before. Some Carolinians frowned on Brooks’s resort to violence; some of them wondered whether the congressman represented the Carolina they knew and loved.

That state defied the northern stereotype of it as merely a land of cotton plantations and slave drivers. Smaller than New York or Pennsylvania in area, South Carolina was at least as diverse physically. The most distinct section was the low country along the Atlantic, with its flatlands, placid rivers, endless tidal swamps, and sea islands strung along the coast. Thick growths of palmetto and cypress and gum, live oaks reaching out for sun and air, tangles of dangling vines and creepers, cascades of gray moss, all combined with stagnant pools and deep muck and bulbous cypress stumps to give the lowlands an air of haunting, mysterious, and ominous beauty. Fifty miles or so inland began the “middle country” of pine trees and freshwater swamps, a belt that slowly changed into a region of longleaf pine, sand hills, and a light sandy loam that made excellent cotton land. About the center of the state stretched the fall line, northwest of which lay the upland country of rolling prairies, steep hills, and rugged mountains.

South Carolinians and their economy were as variegated as their
scenery. Up-country people, an independent lot who felt well removed from the coastal nabobs, raised fruit, small grains, horses and cattle, and whatever else was manageable and profitable in their valleys and hollows. In broad reaches of the piedmont region, onetime yeomen had turned to cotton, following the bonanza resulting from Eli Whitney’s gin. Typically owning few if any slaves, the piedmonters specialized in short-staple cotton. Some of these farmers, however, were entrepreneurs who had invested heavily in slaves in order to capitalize on the cotton boom. Their dreams and aspirations turned toward the coast, where the great rice and cotton plantations lay. The lowland planters specialized in fine luxury cotton, grown and harvested by gangs of slaves. Despite northern images of South Carolina as simply a cotton kingdom, many planters made their fortunes out of rice, which grew abundantly in those tidal swamps.

South Carolina’s social pyramid consisted largely of a planter elite; a fringe of merchants, doctors, lawyers, and other upper-middle-class professionals; piedmont farmers and upland yeomanry; white mechanics, clerks, overseers, and others; free blacks; and a slave caste divided between household servants and field hands. Its social dynamics lay at the top and the bottom of this pyramid. The cotton planters along the coast and the rice planters along the rivers made up a genuine social, economic, and political elite that almost lived up to the Yankee caricature of it. Aping the airs and refinement of the English squirearchy, the rich planters, in William Freehling’s portrait of them, smoked the best Spanish cigars and drank the choicest brandies and Madeira, hunted with hound and horn, frequented horse races and cockfights, and mixed with one another in ballrooms and drawing rooms, while their wives sang or performed on the piano, played chess, and lounged in living room or library. Comprising perhaps the most cosmopolitan group in America during the early decades of the century, the planters were well educated, having attended South Carolina College or a northern institution such as Yale or Princeton; they were well traveled, spending part of the winter in Philadelphia or New York, and summering in the mountains or in the North or in Europe; they were well read, especially in novels of chivalry and courage; and they conducted extensive correspondence among themselves and with friends in the northern states, Europe, and especially England. Many planters spent little time in their country seats, preferring to live in Charleston or points north, and most deserted their plantations entirely during the summer because of the heat and the swamp diseases.

The lives of the slaves on South Carolina plantations were much like elsewhere in the slave kingdom: organized, disciplined, hard, monotonous, occasionally benign, more often nasty, brutish, and short. But
Africans in the Carolinian black belt were a special breed. After South Carolina, alone among the southern states, had allowed the reopening of the slave trade before the constitutional interdiction took effect, Yankee and southern slavers had brought in tens of thousands of blacks—so many that the slaves formed a huge work force in the rice swamps and, speaking to one another in their Gullah dialect, which was almost incomprehensible to whites, salvaged parts of their African heritage. Then too, after the Vesey conspiracy of 1822, South Carolina had been left with heightened fears and suspicions of its black population, both slave and free. But black people’s worst enemy in the swamplands was not their white masters but the malaria-carrying mosquito. One planter admitted that on his Savannah River plantation, slaves died faster than they were born.