3: The Politicians and the New Day
<< 2: The Party of Political Evasion || 4: The Crisis >>
The South had thus far been kept in line with the cause of
political evasion by a small group of able politicians, chief
among whom were Robert Toombs, Howell Cobb, and Alexander H.
Stephens. Curiously enough all three were Georgians, and this
might indeed be called the day of Georgia in the history of the
South.
A different type of man, however, and one significant of a
divergent point of view, had long endeavored to shake the
leadership of the Georgian group. Rhett in South Carolina,
Jefferson Davis in Mississippi, and above all Yancey in Alabama,
together with the interests and sentiment which they represented,
were almost ready to contest the orthodoxy of the policy of
"nothing doing." To consolidate the interests behind them, to
arouse and fire the sentiment on which they relied, was now the
confessed purpose of these determined men. So little attention
has hitherto been given to motive in American politics that the
modern student still lacks a clear-cut and intelligent perception
of these various factions. In spite of this fact, however, these
men may safely be regarded as being distinctly more intellectual,
and as having distinctly deeper natures, than the men who came
together under the leadership of Toombs and Cobb, and who had the
true provincial enthusiasm for politics as the great American
sport.
The factions of both Toombs and Yancey were intensely Southern
and, whenever a crisis might come, neither meant to hesitate an
instant over striking hard for the South. Toombs, however,
wanted to prevent such a situation, while Yancey was anxious to
force one. The former conceived felicity as the joy of playing
politics on the biggest stage, and he therefore bent all his
strength to preserving the so-called national parties; the
latter, scornful of all such union, was for a separate Southern
community.
Furthermore, no man could become enthusiastic about political
evasion unless by nature he also took kindly to compromise. So,
Toombs and his followers were for preserving the negative
Democratic position of 1856. In a formal paper of great ability
Stephens defended that position when he appeared for reelection
to Congress in 1857. Cobb, who had entered Buchanan's Cabinet as
Secretary of the Treasury, and who spoke hopefully of making
Kansas a slave state, insisted nevertheless that such a change
must be "brought about by the recognized principles of carrying
out the will of the majority which is the great doctrine of the
Kansas Bill." To Yancey, as to the Republicans, Kansas was a
disputed border-land for which the so-called two nations were
fighting.
The internal Southern conflict between these two factions began
anew with the Congressional elections of 1857. It is worth
observing that the make-up of these factions was almost a
resurrection of the two groups which, in 1850, had divided the
South on the question of rejecting the Compromise. In a letter
to Stephens in reference to one of the Yancey men, Cobb
prophesied: "McDonald will utterly fail to get up a new Southern
Rights party. Burnt children dread the fire, and he cannot get up
as strong an organization as he did in 1850. Still it is
necessary to guard every point, as McDonald is a hard hand to
deal with." For the moment, he foretold events correctly. The
Southern elections of 1857 did not break the hold of the
moderates.
Yancey turned to different machinery, quite as useful for his
purpose. This he found in the Southern commercial conventions,
which were held annually. At this point there arises a vexed
question which has, of late, aroused much discussion. Was there
then what we should call today a slave "interest"? Was organized
capital deliberately exploiting slavery? And did Yancey play
into its hands?(1) The truth seems to be that, between 1856 and
1860, both the idealist parties, the Republicans and the
Secessionists, made peace with, shall we say, the Mammon of
unrighteousness, or merely organized capital? The one joined
hands with the iron interest of the North; the other, with the
slave interest of the South. The Republicans preached the
domination of the North and a protective tariff; the Yancey men
preached the independence of the South and the reopening of the
slave trade.
(1) For those who would be persuaded that there was such a slave
interest, perhaps the best presentation is to be found in
Professor Dodd's Life of Jefferson Davis.
These two issues Yancey, however, failed to unite, though the
commercial convention of 1859 at last gave its support to a
resolution that all laws, state or federal, prohibiting the
African slave trade ought to be repealed. That great body of
Northern capital which had dealings with the South was ready, as
it always had been, to finance any scheme that Southern business
desired. Slavers were fitted out in New York, and the city
authorities did not prevent their sailing. Against this somber
background stands forth that much admired action of Lewis Cass of
Michigan, Buchanan's Secretary of State. Already the slave trade
was in process of revival, and the British Navy, impelled by the
powerful anti-slavery sentiment in England, was active in its
suppression. American ships suspected of being slavers were
visited and searched. Cass seized his opportunity, and declaring
that such things "could not be submitted to by an independent
nation without dishonor," sent out American warships to prevent
this interference. Thereupon the British government consented to
give up trying to police the ocean against slavers. It is indeed
true, therefore, that neither North nor South has an historical
monopoly of the support of slavery!
It is but fair to add that, so far as the movement to reopen the
slave trade found favor outside the slave barons and their New
York allies, it was advocated as a means of political defense, of
increasing Southern population as an offset to the movement of
free emigration into the North, and of keeping the proportion of
Southern representation in Congress. Stephens, just after Cass
had successfully twisted the lion's tail, took this position in a
speech that caused a sensation. In a private letter he added,
"Unless we get immigration from abroad, we shall have few more
slave states. This great truth seems to take the people by
surprise. Some shrink from it as they would from death. Still,
it is as true as death." The scheme, however, never received
general acceptance; and in the constitution of the Southern
Confederacy there was a section prohibiting the African slave
trade. On the other of these two issues—the independence of the
South—Yancey steadily gained ground. With each year from 1856
to 1860, a larger proportion of Southerners drew out of political
evasion and gave adherence to the idea of presenting an ultimatum
to the North, with secession as an alternative.
Meanwhile, Buchanan sent to Kansas, as Governor, Robert J.
Walker, one of the most astute of the Democrats of the opposite
faction and a Mississippian. The tangled situation which Walker
found, the details of his attempt to straighten it out, belong in
another volume.* It is enough in this connection merely to
mention the episode of the Lecompton convention in the election
of which the Northern settlers refused to participate, though
Walker had promised that they should have full protection and a
fair count as well as that the work of the convention should be
submitted to a popular vote. This action of Walker's was one
more cause of contention between the warring factions in the
South. The fact that he had met the Northerners half-way was
seized upon by the Yancey men as evidence of the betrayal of the
South by the Democratic moderates. On the other hand, Cobb,
writing of the situation in Kansas, said that "a large majority
are against slavery and...our friends regard the fate of Kansas
as a free state pretty well fixed...the pro-slavery men, finding
that Kansas was likely to become a Black Republican State,
determined to unite with the free-state Democrats." Here is the
clue to Walker's course. As a strict party man, he preferred to
accept Kansas free, with Democrats in control, rather than risk
losing it altogether.
* See Jesse Macy, "The Anti-Slavery Crusade". (In "The
Chronicles of America".)
The next step in the affair is one of the unsolved problems in
American history. Buchanan suddenly changed front, disgraced
Walker, and threw himself into the arms of the Southern
extremists. Though his reasons for doing so have been debated to
this day, they have not yet been established beyond dispute.
What seems to be the favorite explanation is that Buchanan was in
a panic. What brought him to that condition may have been the
following events.
The free-state men, by refusing to take part in electing the
convention, had given control to the slaveholders, who proved
they were not slow to seize their opportunity. They drew up a
constitution favoring slavery, but this constitution, Walker had
promised, was to be submitted in referendum. If the convention
decided, however, not to submit the constitution, would not
Congress have the right to accept it and admit Kansas as a Mate?
This question was immediately raised. It now became plain that,
by refusing to take part in the election, the free-state Kansans
had thrown away a great tactical advantage. Of this blunder in
generalship the Yancey men took instant advantage. It was known
that the proportion of Free-Soilers in Kansas was very great—
perhaps a majority—and the Southerners reasoned that they should
not be obliged to give up the advantage they had won merely to
let their enemies retrieve their mistake. Jefferson Davis
formulated this position in an address to the Mississippi
Legislature in which he insisted that Congress, not the Kansas
electorate, was entitled to create the Kansas constitution, that
the Convention was a properly chosen body, and that its work
should stand. What Davis said in a stately way, others said in a
furious way. Buchanan stated afterward that he changed front
because certain Southern States had threatened that, if he did
not abandon Walker, they would secede.
Be that as it may, Buchanan did abandon Walker and threw all the
influence of the Administration in favor of admitting Kansas with
the Lecompton constitution. But would this be true to that
principle of "popular sovereignty" which was the very essence of
the Kansas-Nebraska Act? Would it be true to the principle that
each locality should decide for itself between slavery and
freedom? On this issue the Southerners were fairly generally
agreed and maintained that there was no obligation to go behind
the work of the convention. Not so, however, the great exponent
of popular sovereignty, Douglas. Rising in his place in the
Senate, he charged the President with conspiring to defeat the
will of the majority in Kansas. "If Kansas wants a slave state
constitution," said he, "she has a right to it; if she wants a
free state constitution, she has a right to it. It is none of my
business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not
whether it is voted up or down."
There followed one of those prolonged legislative battles for
which the Congress of the United States is justly celebrated.
Furious oratory, propositions, counter-propositions, projected
compromises, other compromises, and at the end nothing positive.
But Douglas had defeated the attempt to bring in Kansas with the
Lecompton constitution. As to the details of the story, they
include such distinguished happenings as a brawling, all-night
session when "thirty men, at least, were engaged in the
fisticuff," and one Representative knocked another down.
Douglas was again at the center of the stage, but his term as
Senator was nearing its end. He and the President had split
their party. Pursued by the vengeful malice of the
Administration, Douglas went home in 1858 to Illinois to fight
for his reelection. His issue, of course, was popular
sovereignty. His temper was still the temper of political
evasion. How to hold fast to his own doctrine, and at the same
time keep to his programme of "nothing doing"; how to satisfy the
negative Democrats of the North without losing his last hold on
the positive men of the South—such were his problems, and they
were made still more difficult by a recent decision of the
Supreme Court.
The now famous case of Dred Scott had been decided in the
previous year. Its bewildering legal technicalities may here be
passed over; fundamentally, the real question involved was the
status of a negro, Dred Scott. A slave who had been owned in
Missouri, and who had been taken by his master to the State of
Illinois, to the free territory of Minnesota, and then back to
Missouri, now claimed to be free. The Supreme Court undertook to
decide whether his residence in Minnesota rendered him free, and
also whether any negro of slave descent could be a citizen of the
United States. The official opinion of the Court, delivered by
Chief Justice Taney, decided both questions against the
suppliant. It was held that the "citizens" recognized by the
Constitution did not include negroes. So, even if Scott were
free, he could not be considered a citizen entitled to bring suit
in the Federal Courts. Furthermore, he could not be considered
free, in spite of his residence in Minnesota, because, as the
Court now ruled, Congress, when it enacted the Missouri
Compromise, had exceeded its authority; the enactment had never
really been in force; there was no binding prohibition of slavery
in the Northwestern territories.
If this decision was good law, all the discussion about popular
sovereignty went for nothing, and neither an act of Congress nor
the vote of the population of a territory, whether for or against
slavery, was of any value whatsoever. Nothing mattered until the
newmade state itself took action after its admission to the
Union. Until that time, no power, national or local, could
lawfully interfere with the introduction of slaves. In the case
of Kansas, it was no longer of the least importance what became
of the Lecompton constitution or of any other that the settlers
might make. The territory was open to settlement by slaveholders
and would continue to be so as long as it remained a territory.
The same conditions existed in Nebraska and in all the Northwest.
The Dred Scott decision was accepted as orthodox Democratic
doctrine by the South, by the Administration, and by the
"Northern men with Southern principles." The astute masters of
the game of politics on the Democratic side struck the note of
legality. This was law, the expression of the highest tribunal
of the Republic; what more was to be said? Though in truth there
was but one other thing to be said, and that revolutionary, the
Republicans, nevertheless, did not falter over it. Seward
announced it in a speech in Congress on "Freedom in Kansas," when
he uttered this menace: "We shall reorganize the Court and thus
reform its political sentiments and practices."
In the autumn of 1858 Douglas attempted to perform the acrobatic
feat of reconciling the Dred Scott decision, which as a Democrat
he had to accept, with that idea of popular sovereignty without
which his immediate followers could not be content. In accepting
the Republican nomination as Douglas's opponent for the
senatorship, Lincoln used these words which have taken rank among
his most famous utterances: "A house divided against itself
cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure
permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union
to be dissolved. I do not expect the house to fall but I do
expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing
or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the
further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall
rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate
extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall
become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new—North
as well as South."
No one had ever so tellingly expressed the deathgrapple of the
sections: slavery the weapon of one, free labor the weapon of the
other. Though Lincoln was at that time forty-nine years old, his
political experience, in contrast with that of Douglas, was
negligible. He afterward aptly described his early life in that
expressive line from Gray, "The short and simple annals of the
poor." He lacked regular schooling, and it was altogether from
the practice of law that he had gained such formal education as
he had. In law, however, he had become a master, and his
position, to judge from the class of cases entrusted to him, was
second to none in Illinois. To that severe yet wholesome cast of
mind which the law establishes in men naturally lofty, Lincoln
added the tonic influence of a sense of style—not the verbal
acrobatics of a rhetorician, but that power to make words and
thought a unit which makes the artist of a man who has great
ideas. How Lincoln came by this literary faculty is, indeed, as
puzzling as how Burns came by it. But there it was, disciplined
by the court room, made pungent by familiarity with plain people,
stimulated by constant reading of Shakespeare, and chastened by
study of the Bible.
It was arranged that Douglas and Lincoln should tour the State
together in a series of joint debates. As a consequence there
followed a most interesting opposition of methods in the use of
words, a contest between the method formed in Congress at a time
when Congress was a perfect rhetorical academy, and that method
of using words which was based on an arduous study of Blackstone,
Shakespeare, and Isaiah. Lincoln issued from the debates one of
the chief intellectual leaders of America, and with a place in
English literature; Douglas came out a Senator from Illinois.
But though Douglas kept his following together, and though
Lincoln was voted down, to Lincoln belonged the real strategic
victory. In order to save himself with his own people, Douglas
had been forced to make admissions that ruined him with the
South. Because of these admissions the breach in the party of
political evasion became irreparable. It was in the debate at
Freeport that Douglas's fate overtook him, for Lincoln put this
question: "Can the people of a United States territory, in any
lawful way, against the wish of any citizen of the United States,
exclude slavery from its limits, prior to the formation of a
state constitution?"
Douglas answered in his best style of political thunder. "It
matters not," he said, "what way the Supreme Court may hereafter
decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not
go into a territory under the Constitution; the people have the
lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for
the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour anywhere
unless it is supported by local police regulations. Those police
regulations can only be established by the local legislatures;
and if the people are opposed to slavery, they will elect
representatives to that body who will by unfriendly legislation
effectually prevent the introduction of it into their midst. If,
on the contrary, they are for it, their legislation will favor
its extension. Hence, no matter what the decision of the Supreme
Court may be on that abstract question, still the right of the
people to make a slave territory or a free territory is perfect
and complete under the Nebraska Bill."
As to the moral aspect of his actions, Douglas must ultimately be
judged by the significance which this position in which he placed
himself assumed in his own mind. Friendly critics excuse him: an
interpretation of the Dred Scott decision which explained it away
as an irresponsible utterance on a subject outside the scope of
the case, a mere obiter dictum, is the justification which is
called in to save him from the charge of insincerity. His
friends, today, admit that this interpretation was bad law, but
maintain that it may have been good morals, and that Douglas
honestly held it. But many of us have not yet advanced so far in
critical generosity, and cannot help feeling that Douglas's
position remains political legerdemain—an attempt by a great
officer of the government, professing to defend the Supreme
Court, to show the people how to go through the motions of
obedience to the Court while defeating its intention. If not
double-dealing in a strict sense, it must yet be considered as
having in it the temper of double-dealing.1This was, indeed, the
view of many men of his own day and, among them, of Lincoln. Yet
the type of man on whom the masters of the game of politics
relied saw nothing in Douglas's position at which to be
disturbed. It was merely playing politics, and if that absorbing
sport required one to carry water on both shoulders, why—play
the game! Douglas was the man for people like that. They cheered
him to the echo and sent him back to the Senate. So well was
this type understood by some of Lincoln's friends that they had
begged him, at least according to tradition, not to put the
question at Freeport, as by doing so he would enable Douglas to
save himself with his constituency. Lincoln saw further,
however. He understood better than they the forces then at work
in America. The reply reported of him was: "If Douglas answers,
he can never be President, and the battle of 1860 is worth a
hundred of this."
Well might Yancey and his followers receive with a shout of joy
the "Freeport Doctrine," as Douglas's supreme evasion was called.
Should Southerners trust any longer the man who had evolved from
the principle of let-'em-alone to the principle of
double-dealing? However, the Southerners were far from
controlling the situation. Though the events of 1858 had created
discord in the Democratic party, they had not consolidated the
South. Men like Toombs and Stephens were still hopeful of
keeping the States together in the old bond of political evasion.
The Democratic machine, damaged though it was, had not yet lost
its hold on the moderate South, and while that continued to be
the case, there was still power in it.
1There are three ways of regarding Douglas's position: (1) As a
daring piece of evasion designed to hold all the Democrats
together; (2) as an attempt to secure his locality at all costs,
taking his chances on the South; (3) as a sincere expression of
the legal interpretation mentioned above. It is impossible in
attempting to choose among these to escape wholly one's
impression of the man's character.
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