The Fabric of America (36 page)

Three months later, Charles Robinson, a veteran of settling gold-rush claims in Californa, arrived in northern Kansas with the first New England settlers and stopped at Wakarusa, a high spur of land shortly to be renamed Lawrence that overlooked the Kansas River. Within two days they had set up a city council with a secretary, treasurer, and rules based upon the laws of Maine, meaning that not only would there be no slavery, but no liquor either, and of more immediate importance that the ground would be pre-surveyed before purchase. The same day they appointed a surveyor, A. D. Sean, to lay out the town and surrounding area. At midnight Sean went to the top of the hill with a sextant, compass, and chronometer to find true north from the Pole Star, like Andrew Ellicott and innumerable surveyors before him. The grid of streets and lots running north-south and east-west that he laid out over the following weeks remains at the heart of Lawrence to this day.

For both sets of pioneers, the need to have their unregistered claims recognized made the creation of a Territorial government an urgent necessity. Unlike other prairie states that emerged from an existing Territory, no framework of government existed in Kansas for settlers to build on. The struggle to write a constitution and elect a legislature that would validate
claims and draw county boundaries favoring one side or the other was too important to be settled easily. In 1855, the pro-slavers drew up the Lecompton constitution, endorsing slavery in the Territory, and ferrymen on the Missouri River did a roaring trade taking fake settlers into Kansas to vote for it. As the tension grew, threats and intimidating raids led to murder, culminating in John Brown's cold-blooded killing in 1856 of five pro-slavery settlers at Pottawatomie near the Missouri border, and in later years “Bleeding Kansas” was taken to be a portent of the Civil War's carnage. The records show, however, that of 157 documented killings, only one third were certainly political, and at least as many were concerned with land disputes.

Nevertheless, news of the events in Kansas confirmed the north's worst fears about the spread of federally sponsored slavery. In Beloit, Wisconsin, so recently a frontier settlement itself, young men started to volunteer to go down to help the free settlers against the slavers. To the end of a long life that continued into the twentieth century, William Brown, a college student at the time, remembered how at the town meeting before the youths left in early 1856, the most peaceful citizen in Rock County, the “lamblike Deacon Samuel Hinman, got up in front, flourishing his big bowie knife in one hand and a six shooter in the other and calling out his son, presented those weapons to him in succession saying, ‘I give you this knife and I give you this revolver so that with them you may help save Kansas for freedom.'”

When unambiguous evidence of fraudulent voting appeared, it seemed that violence would certainly spread. But Douglas's impassioned advocacy persuaded Congress to reject the Lecompton constitution in the face of President James Buchanan's plea to accept it. “No Democrat has ever opposed his party without being crushed,” Buchanan warned Douglas grimly, but the senator was not deterred. Popular sovereignty demanded an honest poll, and to the supreme deal-maker some hostility from the south was a useful means of retrieving his reputation in the north.

In the summer of 1858, Stephen Douglas agreed to a series of seven debates with his Republican opponent for the Senate, the almost unknown former Illinois congressman Abraham Lincoln, a stringy beanpole towering over him by more than a foot, but a pygmy by comparison in terms of political influence. “With
me
, the race of ambition has been a failure—a flat failure,”
Lincoln noted privately when comparing himself with Douglas. “With
him
, it has been one of splendid success. His name fills the nation; and is not unknown even in foreign lands.”

By the time the debates began, Douglas must have felt that the storm had been weathered. Kansas had adopted a free constitution, property was being registered, and few believed that cotton or slavery could flourish there. “We rely wholly upon numbers now,” remarked one relieved Kansas voter, “and not upon Sharps rifles.” Despite John Brown's foray across the Missouri border to release slaves and murder another slaveholder, a relative calm had fallen over the north, and the midterm elections offered Douglas a renewed opportunity to persuade voters that popular sovereignty was the only way to reconcile the differences between north, south, and west.

The senator had every reason to suppose that his policy would be overwhelmingly accepted. In little more than a decade, he had made possible the admittance of Texas and California as fully fledged states to the Union, the division of Oregon Territory into Washington and Oregon with the latter about to be admitted as a state, and the separation of Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota so that all three became parts of the Union. From the smoke-filled rooms of the Capitol, he and his committee had cut in half the Mormons' maverick state of Deseret that sprawled from San Diego to Denver and from Wyoming to the Mexican border. He could claim the credit for having delineated California's boundaries, given Utah Territory its southern border, created a Territory of New Mexico containing an embryonic Arizona, and—fatefully—for the double creation of Kansas Territory and a huge Nebraska Territory reaching to the Canadian border. On top of that, he was laying the foundations for the transcontinental railroads that would unify the nation and put Illinois at its heart. No Illinois Democrat could have doubted his quality as senator, and looking ahead to the 1860 presidental election, even Horace Greeley, one of the founders of the Republican Party, was prepared to support Douglas as a “more practical” way of defeating slavery than running their own candidate.

In sultry summer heat and dusty fall winds, before audiences of thousands so that each speaker would begin by asking for silence in order that all could hear him, Douglas and Lincoln hammered at the same old incompatibilities of the slavery question—that the Constitution guaranteed property,
that the Declaration of Independence promised liberty. In practical terms, there was not much between them. Both agreed that the Union must be preserved at all costs, that slaveholders could not be deprived of their property by force, and that the federal government ought not to be allowed to impose slavery on territories or states against their wishes. Lincoln did not foresee slavery ending “in less than a hundred years at least,” as he admitted in the fourth debate, while Douglas implied that economics might lead it to wither away much sooner. “We in Illinois… tried slavery,” he reminded his listeners, “kept it up for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable we abolished it for that reason.”

Their first major division was over the impact of the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in the Dred Scott case. Called on to decide whether the slave Dred Scott had been made free by being taken to live in the free state of Illinois, Chief Justice Roger Taney, writing the majority decision, had determined that he remained a slave. His ruling was made on the sweeping grounds that no federal or state laws guaranteeing citizens' liberties could apply to black Americans, whether free or slave, because the Constitution did not recognize them as citizens. Like most people, Lincoln believed that in tandem with the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision would allow slavery to spread into every state because wherever slave owners went, the United States was required to protect their property. Douglas, however, still maintained that where people were opposed to slavery, they could “by unfriendly legislation effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst.” It was to prove a damaging argument when he returned to the south, but in Illinois it did him no harm.

Old lantern slide image of 1858 debate between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas

In the fifth debate, however, Lincoln exposed the fundamental chasm dividing them when he pointed to the moral vacuity at the heart of popular sovereignty. “If you will take [Douglas's] speeches, and select the short and pointed sentences expressed by him—as his declaration that he ‘don't care whether slavery is voted up or down'—you will see at once that this is perfectly logical, if you do not admit that slavery is wrong,” Lincoln pointed out. “If you do admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.”

Douglas branded this a “base insinuation,” claiming that the remark was made during his fight to destroy the Lecompton constitution and promote democracy in Kansas. But Lincoln would not back away. “I object to [popular sovereignty] as a dangerous dalliance for a free people—a sad evidence that, feeling prosperity, we forget right; that liberty, as a principle, we have ceased to revere. I object to it because the fathers of the republic eschewed and rejected it.”

When the voting took place, the Democrats won a majority in the Illinois Assembly and, under the rules of the time, reelected Douglas as their senator. But the accumulating alienation of the north had found its champion in Lincoln. Other Republicans, William Seward and Salmon Chase for example, opposed slavery earlier and sometimes more confrontationally than Lincoln, but none could match his ability to cut through the moral emptiness that accepted that one eighth of the people in the United States could be legally owned like horses or hounds.

“If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away,” he told his
audience in Cooper Union, New York, in 1859. “If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension—its enlargement.” And in two sentences, decades of moral ambiguities were swept away.

When he argued that the Constitution had to be read in the context of the Declaration of Independence, he did so in down-to-earth terms that anyone could understand. “I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration] intended to include
all
men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal
in all respects
…They meant to set up a standard maxim for free society which should be familiar to all and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.” At once the universal significance of the Declaration became apparent, and Chief Justice Taney's ruling that it was intended to apply only to whites could be seen as simply too narrow an interpretation to be valid.

Against this, Douglas could only put forward the dry and untested legalism: “I assert that under the Dred Scott decision you cannot maintain slavery a day in a Territory where there is an unwilling people and unfriendly legislation.” It carried no weight with the Republicans, but the southern Democrats were another matter. Unexpectedly deprived of Kansas, they were determined that Dred Scott should be the key to overturning every legal impediment to the extension of slavery.

“The Supreme Court has decided that we have a right to carry our slaves into the Territories and, necessarily, to have them protected after we get there,” Senator Albert G. Brown of Mississippi declared in 1858. “We have a right of protection for our slave property in the Territories. The Constitution as expounded by the Supreme Court awards it. We demand it, and we mean to have it.”

When the new session of Congress met, the southern senators voted with the Republicans to remove Douglas from his chairmanship of the Committee on Territories, and with the removal of his power base went his policy.

In December 1860, Henry Adams went to Washington to be an assistant to William Seward, Lincoln's intended secretary of state. Ten years had passed
since his previous visit, and he was dismayed to find that the capital of the United States still showed no signs of recovery from the collusion between the commissioners and the speculators that had aborted its birth in 1793. “The same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek temples for work rooms, and sloughs for roads,” he wrote. “The Government had an air of social instability and incompleteness that went far to support the right of secession in theory as in fact; but right or wrong, secession was likely to be easy where there was so little to secede from. The Union was a sentiment, but not much more, and in December, 1860, the sentiment about the Capitol was chiefly hostile, so far as it made itself felt.”

The symbolism was unmistakable. Unity had been George Washington's overriding goal as president, and he had planned his mighty capital in the expectation that it would be achieved. He had relied on self-interest to build it, just as he had relied on self-interest to hold the Union together. But the capital remained half-built, and the Union appeared to be falling apart.

Secession certainly caused no difficulty to South Carolina. Citing a background of persistent northern antagonism to the southern way of life, shown especially by the refusal of northern states to return fugitive slaves, delegates declared at a specially summoned convention in December 1860 that Lincoln's election had finally made the original compact between the states impossible to sustain. “A geographical line has been drawn across the Union,” ran the announcement of secession, “and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” As Jefferson had argued in the days when the frontier barely existed, and Calhoun had amplified when Andrew Jackson was at the height of his autocratic power, the declaration asserted that the Union was merely a compact made by the agreement of the states. “The constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation… the Union now subsisting between South Carolina and other states under the name of the ‘United States of America' is hereby dissolved.”