Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (33 page)

13
.
Charleston Courier
, Aug. 29, 1856, quoted in Avery O. Craven,
The Growth ofSouthern Nationalism 1848–1861
(Baton Rouge, 1953), 233;
Richmond Enquirer
, June 9, 1856, quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 222.

14
. Bragg quoted in Donald,
Sumner
, 305; Brooks quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 221; the mottoes on the canes quoted in John Hope Franklin,
The Militant South 1800–1861
(Cambridge, Mass., 1956), 54–55.

they had "never before seen anything at all like the present state of deep, determined, & desperate feelings of hatred, & hostility to the further extension of slavery, & its political power."
¹⁵

Brooks's only punishment was a $300 fine levied by a district court. Sumner's injuries, complicated by a post-traumatic syndrome that turned psychogenic neurosis into physical debility, kept him away from the Senate most of the time for the next four years.
¹⁶
During that time the Massachusetts legislature reelected him as a symbolic rebuke to the "barbarism of slavery." A good many Yankees wanted to go beyond such passive protest. "If the South appeal to the rod of the slave for argument with the North," wrote a New York clergyman in his diary, "no way is left for the North, but to strike back, or be slaves."
¹⁷
Out in Kansas lived a fifty-six-year-old abolitionist who also believed in this Old Testament injunction of an eye for an eye. Indeed, John Brown looked much like the Biblical warrior who slew his enemies with the jawbone of an ass—though Brown favored more up-to-date weapons like rifles, and, on one infamous occasion, broadswords.

The father of twenty children, Brown had enjoyed little success over the years in his various business and farming enterprises. In 1855 he joined six of his sons and a son-in-law who had taken up claims in Kansas. A zealot on the subject of slavery with an almost mesmeric influence over many of his associates, Brown enlisted in a free-state military company (which included his sons) for service in the guerrilla conflict that was spreading during the spring of 1856. On their way to help defend Lawrence against the Missourians in May, this company learned that the unresisting town had been pillaged. The news threw Brown into a rage at the proslavery forces and contempt for the failure of Lawrence men to fight. That was no way to make Kansas free, he told his men. We must "fight fire with fire," must "strike terror in the hearts of the proslavery people." When further word reached Brown's party of the caning of Sumner in Washington, Brown "went crazy—
crazy,"
according to witnesses. "Something must be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights," Brown declared. He reckoned that proslavery men had murdered at least five free-soilers in Kansas since the troubles began. Brown conceived of a "radical, retaliatory measure" against "the slave hounds" of his own neighborhood near Pottawatomie

15
. All quotations from Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 231, 234, 235.

16
. See the thorough and persuasive analysis in Donald,
Sumner
, 312–47.

17
. Henry Dana Ward quoted in Gienapp, "The Crime Against Sumner," 232.

Creek—none of whom had anything to do with those murders. With four of his sons and three other men, Brown abducted five proslavery settlers from their cabins on the night of May 24–25 and coolly split open their skulls with broadswords. An eye for an eye.
¹⁸

This shocking massacre went unpunished by legal process. Federal officials did manage to arrest two of Brown's sons who had
not
taken part in the affair, while proslavery bands burned the Brown homesteads. The twin traumas of Lawrence and Pottawatomie escalated the bushwhacking war in Kansas. One of Brown's sons was among some two hundred men killed in this conflict. Considering themselves soldiers in a holy war, Brown and his other sons somehow evaded capture and were never indicted for the Pottawatomie killings. And despite strenuous efforts by the U.S. army to contain this violence, the troops were too few to keep up with the hit and run raids that characterized the fighting.

As news of the Pottawatomie massacre traveled eastward, a legend grew among antislavery people that Brown was not involved or that if he was he had acted in self-defense.
¹⁹
Not surprisingly, Republican newspapers preferred to dwell on the "barbarism" of border ruffians and Preston Brooks rather than on the barbarism of a free-state fighter. In any event, the Pottawatomie massacre was soon eclipsed by stories of other "battles" under headlines in many newspapers featuring "The Civil War in Kansas." More than anything else, that civil war shaped the context for the presidential election of 1856.

II

It was by no means certain when the year opened that the Republicans would become the North's second major party. The American party

18
. Stephen B. Oates,
To Purge This Land with Blood: A Biography of John Brown
(New York, 1970), 126–37; quotations from 128–29, 133, based on later testimony by men in Brown's military company. A substantial part of the huge historical literature on John Brown focuses on the Pottawatomie massacre. Although some contemporaries denied Brown's role in the affair, historians accept it while disagreeing about motives and details. The account here is based on that in Oates's biography, the most recent and reasonable analysis of the massacre. Fuller details with a different slant on many matters can be found in James C. Malin,
John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-six
(Philadelphia, 1942), a frustrating book because of its sprawling, structureless format, but based on an astonishing amount of research in Kansas history.

19
. Malin,
John Brown and the Legend of Fifty-six
, contains an exhaustive account of the various filters through which contemporaries and later historians viewed and distorted the Pottawatomie massacre.

held a national convention in February with hopes of healing its sectional breach of the previous year. Some of the northern delegates who had walked out in June 1855 returned. But once more an alliance of southerners with New York and Pennsylvania conservatives defeated a resolution calling for repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Seventy Yankee delegates thereupon exited to organize a "North American" party. The remaining delegates nominated Millard Fillmore as the American party candidate for president.

The North Americans called a convention to meet a few days before the Republican gathering in June. Their intent was to nominate an antislavery nativist whom the Republicans would be compelled to endorse in order to avoid splitting the antislavery vote. But the outcome demonstrated the impossibility of the nativist tail wagging the antislavery dog. Once again Nathaniel Banks, who had just consolidated Republican control of the House by his election as speaker, served as a stalking horse for Republican absorption of North Americans. Still in good standing among nativists, Banks allowed his name to be put in nomination as the North American presidential candidate. After the Republicans nominated their candidate, Banks would withdraw in his favor, leaving the North Americans little choice but to endorse the Republican nominee. Several delegates to the North American convention were privy to this plot. It worked just as planned. Banks received the nomination, whereupon all eyes turned to Philadelphia, where the Republicans convened their first national convention.

Republican leaders like ex-Whig Thurlow Weed of New York and ex-Democrat Francis Preston Blair of Maryland were shrewd men. Recognizing that old loyalties would inhibit some political veterans from attending a "Republican" conclave, they did not use that label in the call for a convention. Instead they invited delegates "without regard to past political differences or divisions, who are opposed to the repeal of the Missouri Compromise [and] to the policy of the present Administration." The platform and candidate would have to be carefully crafted to attract as many and alienate as few voters as possible. Especially delicate was the task of winning both nativists and immigrants (at least Protestant immigrants). Almost as difficult was the fusion of former Whigs and Democrats. The platform pursued these goals by concentrating on issues that united disparate elements and ignoring or equivocating on those that might divide them. Four-fifths of the platform dealt with slavery; it damned the administration's policy in Kansas, asserted the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories, called for admission of Kansas as a free state, denounced the Ostend Manifesto, and quoted the Declaration of Independence as authority for free-soil principles. Two brief planks echoed the ancient Whig program of government financing for internal improvements by endorsing such aid for a transcontinental railroad and for rivers and harbors improvements—projects that would also attract Democratic support in areas benefitting from them (Pierce had vetoed three rivers and harbors bills). The final plank, relating to nativ-ism, was a masterpiece of ambiguity. By opposing all legislation that might restrict "liberty of conscience and equality of rights among citizens," the platform seemed to rebuke nativism. But by specifying "citizens" it apparently did not preclude the Know-Nothing plan (which Republicans had no real intention of carrying out) to lengthen the waiting period for naturalization to twenty-one years. And "liberty of conscience" was also a code phrase for Protestants who resented Catholic attempts to ban the reading of the King James Bible in public schools.
²⁰

Because the Republican party was new, its platform was more important than usual in American politics. But of course the candidate would do even more to shape the party's image. Seward and Chase were the most prominent possibilities. But each had made enemies among groups that Republicans needed to attract: nativists, antislavery Democrats, or conservative Whigs. Besides, Seward and his adviser Thurlow Weed doubted the chances for Republican victory in 1856 and preferred to wait for better odds in 1860. The most "available" man, precisely because he had almost no political experience and therefore no record to defend, was John C. Frémont. The dashing image of this "Pathfinder" of the West was a political asset. Frémont would win votes, predicted one Republican strategist, "from the romance of his life and position."
²¹
His marriage to the headstrong Jessie Benton, daughter of the legendary Jacksonian Thomas Hart Benton, who was an enemy of the Atchison faction in Missouri, provided Frémont with important connections among ex-Democrats. His role in promoting a free California in 1849 and his endorsement of a free Kansas in 1856 gave him good antislavery credentials. Frémont thus won the nomination on the first

20
. The call for the convention is quoted in Gienapp, "Origins of the Republican Party," 864; the platform is reprinted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed.,
History ofAmerican Presidential Elections
1789–1968, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1039–41.

21
. Richard H. Sewell,
Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States
1837–1860 (New York, 1976), 283.

ballot. Ex-Whigs received a sop with the selection of New Jersey's William Dayton for vice president.

Dayton's nomination threatened to upset the delicate scheme to secure North American endorsement of the Republican candidates. Banks declined the North American nomination as planned, but in return for backing Frémont the nativists expected Republican endorsement of their vice-presidential nominee. When the Republicans refused, North Americans made angry noises for a time but finally accepted Dayton. Their endorsement of the Republican ticket required them to swallow an extra-large slice of humble pie, for Frémont's father had been a Catholic and the Pathfinder had been married by a priest. False rumors circulated during the campaign that Frémont himself was a secret Catholic. Some embittered North Americans, especially in Pennsylvania, vowed to support Fillmore, but that candidate offered them cold comfort because he was only a nominal Know Nothing and his main backing came from southern ex-Whigs who could not bring themselves to affiliate with Democrats.

As an organized political movement, nativism went into a long eclipse after 1856. Hostility to Romanism (as well as Rum) remained a subterranean current within Republicanism. But for mainstream Republicans the Slave Power, not Catholicism, was the danger that threatened American liberties. "You are here today," the party chairman had told delegates to the Republican convention, "to give direction to a movement which is to decide whether the people of the United States are to be hereafter and forever chained to the present national policy of the extension of slavery."
²²

In all respects the Democratic candidate was Frémont's opposite. The Pathfinder at forty-three was the youngest presidential nominee thus far; James Buchanan at sixty-five was one of the oldest. While the colorful Frémont and his ambitious wife had made numerous enemies as well as friends over the years, the dour Presbyterian bachelor Buchanan seemed colorless and safe. While Frémont had served in public office only three months as senator from California, Buchanan had held so many offices that he was known as "Old Public Functionary"—congressman for a decade, senator for another decade, five years in the diplomatic service