Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (31 page)

The slavery issue soon split the Know Nothings along sectional lines. At the first national council of the American party, in June 1855 at Philadelphia, Henry Wilson led a bolt of most northern delegates when southerners and northern conservatives passed a plank endorsing the Kansas-Nebraska Act. From this time forth the party wasted away in the North while it grew stronger in the South. The logical place for antis-lavery Know Nothings to go was into the Republican party, which stood ready to receive them if it could do so without sanctioning nativism. Abraham Lincoln voiced the Republican dilemma in this matter. "Of their principles," Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, "I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that
'all men are created equal.'
We now practically read it 'all men are created equal,
except negroes.'
When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read 'all men are created equal, except negroes,
and foreigners, and catholics.'
When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy." Nevertheless, in central Illinois the Know Nothings "are mostly my old political and personal friends." Without them "there is not sufficient materials to combat the Nebraska

50
. Overdyke,
The Know-Nothing Party in the South
, 21–22, 24.

51
.
Ibid
., passim; Baker,
Ambivalent Americans
, passim; James H. Broussard, "Some Determinants of Know-Nothing Electoral Strength in the South,"
Louisiana History
, 7 (1966), 5–20.

democracy." Lincoln was willing "to 'fuse' with anybody I can fuse on ground which I think is right." The only hope of carrying Illinois was to "get the elements of this organization" on our own terms after "Know-Nothingism has . . . entirely tumbled to pieces."
⁵²

In Ohio, Salmon P. Chase showed how this might be done. After winning all of the congressional districts in 1854, the Ohio anti-Nebraska coalition looked forward to electing Chase governor in the state elections of 1855. But could they do it without Know-Nothing support? Militant free soilers like Joshua Giddings thought so. The nativists, he said, were "unjust, illiberal, and un-American. We will never unite with such a party, in any compact whatever." Chase seemed to agree. "I cannot proscribe men on account of their birth," he wrote. "I cannot make religious faith a political test." He therefore recognized in January 1855 that the strength of "the Know-Knothing movement . . . may make the election of a man in my position impossible."
⁵³

But Chase's ambition soon caused him to waffle. He privately expressed a willingness to work with antislavery Know Nothings if he could do so without "sacrificing principle." "It seems to me you have said enough against the Kns, and had better hold up," he told a journalistic ally in February 1855. "My idea is to fight nobody who does not fight us." We might acknowledge "that there was some ground for the uprising of the people against papal influences & organized foreignism" so long as we insist on "the importance of keeping the anti-slavery idea paramount."
⁵⁴
In effect, Chase wanted Republicans to spurn nativist
policies
while recognizing nativism as a cultural impulse. In particular, he was willing to make a gesture toward anti-Catholicism but not to alienate Protestant immigrants, especially the large German vote, whose support Republicans wanted and needed. This shading toward anti-Romanism but away from a generalized nativism became a way for Republicans

52
. Lincoln to Owen Lovejoy, Aug. 11, 1855, Lincoln to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855,
CWL
, II, 316, 323.

53
. Giddings quoted in William E. Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism, and the Formation of the Republican Party in Ohio,"
Ohio History
, 93 (1984), 11; Chase quoted in Trefousse,
Radical Republicans
, 84, and in Stephen E. Maizlish,
The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844–1856
(Kent, Ohio, 1983), 207.

54
. Chase to E. S. Hamlin, Nov. 21, 1854, Feb. 9, Jan. 22, 1855, quoted in Maizlish,
Triumph of Sectionalism
, 206, 208, and in Gienapp, "Salmon P. Chase, Nativism," 10.

to absorb some Know Nothings without feeling that they were "sacrificing principle."

Chase managed to walk this tightrope without falling. The conservative Know Nothings nominated a separate ticket in Ohio. Radical free soilers threatened to do the same if Chase made any concessions to the nativists. The Republican state convention nominated Chase on an an-tislavery platform that, in the candidate's words, did not "contain a squint toward Knism." The nominees for other state offices, however, were men of Know-Nothing background—though Chase considered them "honest men . . . sincerely opposed to slavery" who "adhere but slightly to their order." Proclaiming that "there is nothing before the people but the vital issue of slavery," Chase privately predicted that Know Nothing-ism would "gracefully give itself up to die."
⁵⁵

Perhaps. In any case, the main ethnocultural issue in the campaign was anti-black racism injected by the Democrats, who rapidly perfected the technique of tarring "Black Republicans" with the brush of Negro equality. Labeling the Chase candidacy "Sambo's State Ticket," Ohio Democrats proclaimed that Republicans intended to sacrifice "the interests of more than twenty millions of people . . . to those of three millions of blacks." The Republican policy of limiting the expansion of slavery would inevitably become a program of emancipation, which would let loose "three to five millions of uncivilized, degraded, and savage men . . . to roam the country" and take bread from the mouths of white laboring men.
⁵⁶

Chase survived these onslaughts and won the governorship with 49 percent of the vote to 43 percent for the Democrats and 8 percent for the separate American ticket. Though they could not have won without Know-Nothing support, Republicans came to power in Ohio committed to an antislavery platform and not bound by promises to nativists. They demonstrated this political legerdemain once again in the prolonged battle over the speakership of the national House of Representatives that convened in December 1855.

The chaos of parties at the opening of this Congress reflected the devastation wrought by the 1854–55 elections. Most estimates counted somewhere in the neighborhood of 105 Republican congressmen, 80 Democrats, and 50 Americans. Of the last, thirty-one came from slave

55
. Gienapp, "Chase, Nativism," 22, 24, 26.

56
. Maizlish,
Triumph of Sectionalism
, 220.

states and a half-dozen of the rest were conservatives on the slavery question. Of the Democrats, only twenty-three came from free states and a few of these were uncomfortable in the traces with southern colleagues. Of the Republicans (not all of whom yet acknowledged that label), perhaps two-thirds had at least a nominal connection with Know-Nothingism, though half or more of these placed a higher priority on antislavery than on nativism. One of the latter was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a onetime Democrat and then a Know Nothing who like his colleague Henry Wilson in the Senate now wanted to harness the Know-Nothing cart to the Republican horse. The Republicans nominated Banks for speaker, but in ballot after ballot during two increasingly tense months Banks fell short of the 118 votes needed for election. The process, however, crystallized his supporters as Republicans, and when the House on February 2, 1856, finally changed the rules to allow a plurality to prevail, Banks won the speakership with 103 votes on the 133rd ballot. If any one moment marked the birth of the Republican party, this was it.

What made possible this remarkable eclipse of Know Nothings and surge of Republicans to become the North's majority party within less than two years? Part of the answer lay in a dramatic decline of immigration, which during the years after 1854 fell to less than half of the level it had attained in the first half of the decade. But the main reason could be expressed in two words: Bleeding Kansas. Events in that far-off territory convinced most northerners that the slave power was after all a much greater threat to republican liberty than the Pope was.

5
The Crime Against Kansas

I

Having lost the battle in Congress for a free Kansas, antislavery men determined to wage the war on the prairie itself. "Since there is no escaping your challenge," William H. Seward told southern senators on May 25, 1854, "I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right."
¹
In Massachusetts the erstwhile conservative Amos Lawrence was chief financial backer of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, formed in the summer of 1854 to promote free-soil settlement of Kansas. Few New Englanders actually went there, but the company did provide aid to farmers from midwestern states who began to trickle into Kansas. Lawrence's role was reflected in the name of the town that became headquarters of the free-state forces in the territory.

At the outset, however, Missourians from just across the border were stronger in numbers than the free soilers and at least equal in determination. "We are playing for a mighty stake," Senator David Atchison of Missouri assured Virginia's Robert M. T. Hunter. "The game must be played boldly. . . . If we win we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean, if we fail we lose Missouri Arkansas Texas and all the territories." Fifteen years earlier Missourians had harried and burned the Mormons out of

1
.
CG
, 33 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 769.

the state; Atchison was confident of their ability to give free soilers the same treatment in Kansas. "We are organizing," he told Jefferson Davis. "We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to 'Mormonize' the Abolitionists."
²

Atchison did his best to fulfill this promise. When Andrew Reeder, a Pennsylvania Democrat, arrived in Kansas as territorial governor in the fall of 1854 he called an election for a delegate to Congress. This became the first of many Kansas elections in which the normal rowdiness of frontier politics was magnified a hundredfold by the contest over slavery. In November 1854, Atchison and other prominent Missourians led an invasion of "border ruffians" into Kansas to swell the vote for the proslavery candidate. Derided as "Pukes" by northern-born settlers, many of these lank, unshaven, unwashed, hard-drinking Missourians had little material interest in slavery but even less love for "those long-faced, sanctimonious Yankees" devoted to "sickly sycophantic love for the nigger."
³
The border ruffians won the first round. Casting more than 1,700 ballots that a subsequent congressional committee found to be fraudulent, they elected a proslavery delegate to Congress.

They probably could have won in a fair election. Governor Reeder took a census in preparation for the next election (of a territorial legislature) in March 1855. Of 8,501
bona fide
residents (including 242 slaves), 2,905 were legal voters, of whom three-fifths had come from Missouri and other slave states. Nevertheless Atchison wanted to make sure of victory. "Mark every scoundrel among you that is the least tainted with free-soilism, or abolitionism, and exterminate him," the senator's lieutenant in Missouri exhorted a crowd at St. Joseph. "To those having qualms of conscience . . . the time has come when such impositions must be disregarded, as your lives and property are in danger. . . . Enter every election district in Kansas . . . and vote at the point of a

2
. Atchison to Hunter, quoted in James A. Rawley,
Race and Politics: "Bleeding Kansas" and the Coming of the Civil War
(Philadelphia, 1969), 81; Atchison to Davis, Sept. 24, 1854, quoted in William E. Gienapp, "The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1980, pp. 570–71.

3
. The stereotypes of each other held by Yankees and Pukes are analyzed in Michael Fellman, "Rehearsal for the Civil War: Antislavery and Proslavery at the Fighting Point in Kansas, 1854–1856," in Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman, eds.,
Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists
(Baton Rouge, 1979), 287–307; quotation from p. 300. The phrase "border ruffians" was coined by Horace Greeley but proudly adopted by the Missourians.