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CHAPTER OUTLINE

• Kansas and the Rise of the Republican Party • Immigration and

Nativism • Bleeding Kansas • The Election of 1856 • The Economy

in the 1850s • The Lincoln-Douglas Debates

THEWOUNDScausedbythe1850battleoverslaveryintheterritorieshadbarely

healed when they were reopened. This time the strife concerned the question of

slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territory, an issue presumably settled 34 years earlier by the Missouri Compromise of 1820.

The Compromise of 1820 had admitted Missouri as a slave state but had

banned slavery from the rest of the Purchase north of 36°300. To obtain southern

support for the organization of Kansas and Nebraska as territories, Senator Stephen Douglas consented to the repeal of this provision. Northern outrage at this repudiation of a “sacred contract” killed the Whig Party and gave birth to the antislavery Republican Party. In 1857, the Supreme Court added insult to injury with the Dred Scott decision, which denied Congress the power to restrict slavery from the territories. The ominous reorientation of national politics along sectional lines was

accompanied by a bloody civil war in Kansas and a raid on the federal arsenal at

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, by John Brown and his followers.

KANSAS AND THE RISE OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY

By 1853, land-hungry settlers had pushed up the Missouri River to its confluence

with the Kansas and Platte rivers, and entrepreneurs were talking about a railroad across the continent to San Francisco. But settlement west of Missouri and land surveys for a railroad required the organization of this region as a territory. Accordingly, in 1853 the House passed a bill creating the Nebraska Territory, embracing the area north of Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) up to the Canadian

470

Kansas and the Rise of the Republican Party

471

CHRONOLOGY

1852

Plenary Council of Catholic Church seeks tax support for parochial

schools

1853

American Party (“Know-Nothings”) emerges

1854

Crimean War begins ◆ Congress passes Kansas-Nebraska Act

◆ Republican Party organized ◆ Antebellum immigration reaches peak

1855

Ethnic riots in several cities ◆ “Border Ruffian” legislature in

Kansas legalizes slavery

1856

Civil war in Kansas ◆ Preston Brooks canes Charles Sumner on

Senate floor ◆ Crimean War ends ◆ Buchanan wins three-way

presidential election

1857

Supreme Court issues Dred Scott decision ◆ Lecompton

constitution written in Kansas ◆ Congress enacts lower tariff

◆ Panic of 1857 ◆ Helper’s Impending Crisis published

1858

Kansas voters reject Lecompton constitution ◆ Lincoln-Douglas

debates

1859

Congress defeats federal slave code for territories ◆ John Brown’s

raid at Harpers Ferry

1860

Shoemakers’ strike in New England ◆ Buchanan vetoes

Homestead Act

border. But the House bill ran into trouble in the Senate. Under the Missouri Compromise, slavery would be excluded from the new territory. Having lost California, the pro-slavery forces were determined to salvage something from Nebraska.

Missourians were particularly adamant, because a free Nebraska would leave

them almost surrounded on three sides by free soil. Senator David R. Atchison of

Missouri vowed to see Nebraska “sink in hell” before having it become free soil.

As president pro tem of the Senate, Atchison wielded great influence. A pro-

fane, gregarious man, he had inherited Calhoun’s mantle as leader of the

southern-rights faction. In the 1853–54 session of Congress, he kept raising the asking price for southern support of a bill to organize the Nebraska Territory. The

sponsor of the Senate bill was Stephen A. Douglas, chairman of the Senate Commit-

tee on Territories. Only 5 feet 4 inches tall, Douglas had earned the nickname Little Giant for his parliamentary skill, which he had demonstrated most dramatically in helping pass the Compromise of 1850 through Congress. In Douglas’s opinion, the

application of popular sovereignty to the slavery question in New Mexico and Utah had been the centerpiece of the compromise. The initial draft of his Nebraska bill merely repeated the language used for those territories, specifying that when any portion of the Nebraska Territory came in as a state, it could do so “with or without slavery, as its constitution may provide.”

This was not good enough for Atchison and his southern colleagues. After talk-

ing with them, Douglas announced that because of a “clerical error,” a provision calling for the territorial legislature to decide on slavery had been omitted from the draft.

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Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

But Atchison raised the price once again, insisting on an explicit repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Sighing in response, Douglas stated that this action “will raise a hell of a storm,” but he nevertheless agreed. He further agreed to divide the area in question into two territories: Kansas west of Missouri and Nebraska west of Iowa and Minnesota. To many northerners this looked suspiciously like a scheme to mark Kansas out for slavery and Nebraska for freedom. Douglas then joined Jefferson Davis, Atchison, and other southern senators on a visit to the White House, where they twisted President Pierce’s arm to give the revised Kansas-Nebraska bill the administration’s support and to make its approval “a test of [Democratic] party orthodoxy.”

The Kansas-

The bill did “raise a hell of a storm.” Contemporaries and

Nebraska Act

historians have speculated endlessly on Douglas’s motives.

Some thought he wanted to win southern support for the

presidential nomination in 1856. Perhaps, but he risked losing northern support.

Others point out that Douglas’s real estate holdings in Illinois would have

increased in value if a transcontinental railroad were to traverse the Nebraska

Territory and that southern opposition could block this route. The most likely

reason, however, was Douglas’s passionate belief in Manifest Destiny, in filling up the continent with American settlers and institutions. “The tide of immigration and civilization must be permitted to roll onward,” he proclaimed. For this, he was

willing to pay the South’s price for support of his Kansas-Nebraska bill. He failed to recognize the depth of northern opposition to the “slave power” and to the

expansion of slavery. Douglas had no firm moral convictions about slavery. He

said that he cared not whether the settlers voted slavery up or down; the important thing was to give them a chance to vote.

But many Americans did care. They regarded the expansion of slavery as a

national question, and one that was too important to be left to territorial voters.

One of them was an old acquaintance of Douglas, Abraham Lincoln. An antislav-

ery Whig who had served four terms in the Illinois legislature and one term in

Congress, Lincoln was propelled back into politics by the shock of the Kansas-

Nebraska bill. He acknowledged the constitutional right to hold slave property in the states where it already existed, but he believed slavery was “an unqualified evil to the negro, the white man, and to the state.... There can be no moral right in connection with one man’s making a slave of another.” Lincoln admitted he did not

know how to bring this deeply entrenched institution to an end. He understood

that race prejudice was a powerful obstacle to emancipation. Still, he believed that the country must face up to the problem. It must stop any further expansion of

slavery as the first step on the long road to its “ultimate extinction.”

Lincoln excoriated Douglas’s “care not” attitude toward whether slavery was

voted up or down. He branded Douglas’s assertion that slavery would never be

imported into Kansas because of the region’s supposedly unsuitable climate a

“LULLABY argument.” The climate of eastern Kansas was similar to that of the

Missouri River Valley in Missouri, where slaves were busily raising hemp and

tobacco. Missouri slaveholders were already poised to take their slaves into the

Kansas River valley. “Climate will not … keep slavery out of these territories,”

said Lincoln. “Nothing in nature will.” Many of the founding fathers had looked

Kansas and the Rise of the Republican Party

473

Abraham Lincoln.

Nominated to oppose

Stephen A. Douglas’s

reelection to the Senate

from Illinois in 1858,

Abraham Lincoln was not

yet a national figure. But

his status would change

dramatically with the

Lincoln-Douglas debates

of 1858, which focused

on the issue of slavery.

Lincoln’s eloquence in

this series of debates

propelled him into

national prominence.

Resource,

Adoc-photos/Art©

forward to the day when slavery would no longer exist in republican America.

Instead, the United States had become the world’s largest slaveholding society, and Douglas’s bill would permit slavery to expand even further. In a political speech at Peoria, Illinois, in October 1854, Lincoln insisted:

The monstrous injustice of slavery deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites.… Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.... If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

With these eloquent words, Lincoln gave voice to the feelings rising up against

the Kansas-Nebraska bill. Abolitionists, Free-Soilers, northern Whigs, and even

many northern Democrats held impassioned meetings to form anti-Nebraska coali-

tions, but they could not stop passage of the bill. It cleared the Senate easily, supported by a solid South and 15 of the 20 northern Democrats. In the House, it

passed by a vote of 113 to 100.

Death of the

These proceedings completed the destruction of the Whigs as

Whig Party

a national party. Southern Whigs had been disappearing ever

since Zachary Taylor had “betrayed” them on the issue of a

474

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

free California. After the presidential election of 1852, few Whigs remained in the cotton South. In that year, the Whig Party nominated General Winfield Scott for

president. Although he was a Virginian, Scott, like Taylor, took a national rather than a southern view. He was the candidate of the northern Whigs in the national

convention, which nominated him on the 53rd ballot after a bitter contest between the northern and southern wings of the party. A mass exodus of southern Whigs

into the Democratic Party enabled Franklin Pierce to carry all but two slave states in the election. The unanimous vote of northern Whigs in Congress against the

Kansas-Nebraska bill was the final straw. The Whig Party never recovered its

influence in the South.

Whig strength seemed to be on its last legs in the North as well. Antislavery

Whig leaders, such as Seward and Lincoln, hoped to channel the flood of anti-

Nebraska sentiment through the Whig Party, an effort akin to containing Niagara

Falls. Free-Soilers and antislavery Democrats spurned the Whig label. Political coalitions arose spontaneously in the North under various names: anti-Nebraska, Fusion, People’s, Independent. The name that caught on evoked memories of America’s first fight for freedom in 1776: Republican. The first use of this name seems to have

occurred at an anti-Nebraska rally in a Congregational church at Ripon, Wisconsin, in May 1854. Soon, most of the congressional candidates fielded by anti-Nebraska

coalitions ran their campaigns under the Republican banner.

The 1854 elections were disastrous for northern Democrats. One-fourth of

Democratic voters deserted the party. The Democrats lost control of the House of

Representatives when 66 of 91 incumbent free-state Democratic congressmen went

down to defeat. Combined with the increase in the number of Democratic congress-

men from the South, where the party had picked up the pieces of the shattered

Whig organization, this rout brought the party under southern domination more

than ever.

But who would pick up the pieces of old parties in the North? The new

Republican Party hoped to do so, but it suffered a shock in urban areas of the

Northeast. Hostility toward immigrants created a tidal wave of nativism that

threatened to swamp the anti-Nebraska movement. “Nearly everybody appears

to have gone deranged on Nativism,” reported a Pennsylvania Democrat, while a

Whig in upstate New York warned that his district was “very badly infected with

Know-nothingism.” Described as a “tornado,” a “hurricane,” a “freak of political

insanity,” the Know-Nothings won landslide victories in Massachusetts and

Delaware, polled an estimated 40 percent of the vote in Pennsylvania, and did

well elsewhere in the Northeast and border states. Who were these mysterious

Know-Nothings? What did they stand for?

IMMIGRATION AND NATIVISM

During the early 19th century, immigration was less pronounced than in most other periods of U.S. history. The volume of immigration (the number of new immigrants

in proportion to the whole population) was little more than 1 percent in the 1820s, increasing to 4 percent in the 1830s. Three-quarters of the newcomers were Protestants, mainly from Britain. Most of them were skilled workers, farmers, or members of white-collar occupations.

Immigration and Nativism

475

In the 1840s, a combination of factors abruptly quadrupled the volume of immi-

gration and changed its ethnic and occupational makeup. The pressure of expanding population on limited land in Germany and successive failures of the potato crop in Ireland impelled millions of German and Irish peasants to emigrate. A majority came to the United States, where recovery from the depression of the early 1840s brought an economic boom and an insatiable demand for labor. During the decade after

1845, three million immigrants entered the United States—15 percent of the total

American population in 1845, the highest proportional volume of immigration in

American history. Many of them, especially the Irish, joined the unskilled and semiskilled labor force in the rapidly growing eastern cities.

450

400

350

Revolution

Germany

300

250

Thousands 200

Potato

Famine

in Ireland

150

100

Civil War

0 1830 1840

1850

1860

1870

Immigration to the United States

476

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

Most of the new arrivals were Roman Catholics. Anti-Catholicism had

centuries-deep roots in Anglo-American Protestantism. Fear of the pope and of the Roman Church as autocratic and antirepublican was never far below the surface of

American political culture, and scurrilous anti-Catholic literature circulated during the 1830s. Several ethnic riots between Protestant and Catholic workers over the

years culminated in pitched battles and numerous deaths in Philadelphia in 1844.

In several eastern cities nativist political parties sprang up in the early 1840s with the intent of curbing the political rights of immigrants.

Nativism appeared to subside with the revival of prosperity after 1844, but the

decline was temporary. Established Americans perceived more recent arrivals as

responsible for an increase of crime and poverty in the cities. They also viewed immigrant customs with suspicion. The social and political life of both the Irish and the Germans revolved around taverns and beer parlors at a time when the temperance

crusade had sharply curtailed drinking among native-born Protestants (see Chapter 11).

Immigrants

The growing political power of immigrants became a bone of

in Politics

contention. In Boston, for example, the number of foreign-

born voters (mostly Irish) increased by 200 percent from 1850

to 1855, whereas the number of native-born voters grew by only 14 percent. Most of the immigrants became Democrats, because that party welcomed or at least tolerated them and many Whigs did not. Foreign-born voters leaned toward the pro-slavery

wing of the Democratic Party, even though seven-eighths of them settled in free

states. Mostly working-class and poor, they rubbed shoulders against the small

northern black population; Irish American mobs sometimes attacked black neigh-

borhoods and rioted against black workers. They supported the Democratic Party as the best means of keeping blacks in slavery and out of the North. These attitudes sparked hostility toward immigrants among many antislavery people, some of whom

equated slavery with Catholicism as a backward, despotic, repressive institution.

The Roman Catholic hierarchy did little to allay that hostility. Pope Pius IX

(1846–78) led the Church into a period of reaction against secular liberalism. The Church sided with the counterrevolutionary forces that crushed the European uprisings of 1848, which sought greater political and social democracy. In the United

States, the leading Catholic prelate, Archbishop John Hughes of New York, taking

his cue from the pope, attacked abolitionists, Free-Soilers, and various Protestant reform movements as akin to the Red Republicanism of Europe. In 1850, in a

widely publicized address titled “The Decline of Protestantism and Its Causes,”

Hughes noted proudly that Catholic Church membership in the United States had

grown three times faster than Protestant membership over the previous decade,

and he predicted an eventual Catholic majority.

Attitudes toward immigrants had political repercussions. Two of the hottest

issues in state and local politics during the early 1850s were temperance and schools.

The temperance crusaders had grown confident and aggressive enough to go into

politics. The drunkenness and rowdiness they associated with Irish immigrants

became one of their particular targets. Beginning with Maine in 1851, 12 states had enacted prohibition laws by 1855. Although several of the laws were soon weakened by the courts or repealed by legislatures, they exacerbated ethnic tensions.

Immigration and Nativism

477

So too did battles over public schools versus parochial schools. Catholics resented the Protestant domination of public education and the reading of the King James Bible in schools. Archbishop Hughes flayed the public schools as purveyors of “Socialism, Red Republicanism, Universalism, Infidelity, Deism, Atheism, and Pantheism.” The

Church began to build parochial schools for the faithful, and in 1852, the first Plenary Council of American bishops decided to seek tax support for these schools or tax relief for Catholic parents who sent their children to them. This effort set off heated election contests in numerous northern cities and states. Anti-Catholic “free school”

tickets won most of these elections on a platform of defending public schools against the “bold effort” of this “despotic faith” to “uproot the tree of Liberty.”

The Rise of the

It was in this context that the Know-Nothings (their formal

Know-Nothings

name was the American Party) burst onto the political scene.

This party was the result of the merger in 1852 of two secret

fraternal societies that limited their membership to native-born Protestants: the Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the Order of United Americans. Recruiting

mainly young men in skilled blue-collar and lower white-collar occupations, the

merged Order had a membership of 1 million or more by 1854. The Order sup-

ported temperance and opposed tax support for parochial schools. Members

wanted public office restricted to native-born men and sought to lengthen the naturalization period before immigrants could become citizens. Members were also

pledged to secrecy; if asked about the order, they were to reply, “I know nothing.”

This was the tornado that swept through the Northeast in the 1854 elections.

Although the American Party drew voters from both major parties, it cut more

heavily into the Whig constituency. Northern Whigs who had not already gone

over to the Republicans flocked to the Know-Nothings.

When the dust of the 1854 elections settled, it was clear that those who op-

posed the Democrats would control the next House of Representatives. But who

would control the opposition—antislavery Republicans or nativist Americans? In

truth, some northern voters and the congressmen they elected adhered to both po-

litical faiths. A Know-Nothing convention in Massachusetts resolved that “there

can exist no real hostility to Roman Catholicism which does not also abhor

slavery.” In New England, several Know-Nothing leaders were actually Republi-

cans in disguise who had jumped on the nativist bandwagon with the intention of

steering it in an antislavery direction.

But many Republicans warned against flirting with religious bigotry. In a letter

to a friend, Abraham Lincoln asked:

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading

classes of white people? ... 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 pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

Other Republicans echoed Lincoln. Because “we are against Black Slavery,

because the slaves are deprived of human rights,” they declared, “we are also

478

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

against … [this] system of Northern Slavery to be created by disfranchising the Irish and Germans.”

The Decline

In 1855, Republican leaders maneuvered skillfully to divert

of Nativism

the energies of northern Know-Nothings from their crusade

against the pope to a crusade against the slave power. Two

developments helped them. The first was turmoil in Kansas, which convinced many

northerners that the slave power was a greater threat than the pope. The second

was an increase of nativist sentiment in the South. The American Party won elec-

tions in Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee and polled at least 45 percent of the

votes in five other southern states. Violence in several southern cities with large immigrant populations revealed a significant streak of nativism in the South.

These developments had important implications at the national level. Southern

Know-Nothings were pro-slavery, whereas many of their Yankee counterparts were

antislavery. Just as the national Whig party had foundered on the slavery issue, so did the American Party during 1855 and 1856. At the party’s first national council in June 1855, most of the northern delegates walked out when southerners and

northern conservatives joined forces to pass a resolution endorsing the Kansas-

Nebraska Act. A similar scene occurred at an American Party convention in 1856.

By that time, most northern members of the party had, in effect, become Republi-

cans. When the House of Representatives elected in 1854 convened in December

1855, a protracted fight for the speakership again took place. The Republican candidate was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a former Know-Nothing who now

considered himself a Republican. Banks finally won on the 133rd ballot with the support of about 30 Know-Nothings who thereby declared themselves Republicans.

By that time, nativism had faded. The volume of immigration suddenly

dropped by more than half in 1855 and stayed low for the next several years. Eth-

nic tensions eased, and cultural issues such as temperance and schools receded.

Although the Republican Party took on some of the cultural baggage of nativism

when it absorbed many northern Know-Nothings, party leaders shoved the baggage

into dark corners. The real conflict was not the struggle between native and immigrant, or between Protestant and Catholic, but between North and South over the

extension of slavery. That conflict led to civil war—and the war seemed already to have begun in the territory of Kansas.

BLEEDING KANSAS

When it became clear that southerners had the votes to pass the Kansas-Nebraska

Act, William H. Seward stood up in the Senate and told his southern colleagues:

“Since there is no escaping your challenge, I accept it in behalf of the cause of freedom. We will engage in competition for the virgin soil of Kansas, and God give victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.” Senator David

Atchison of Missouri was ready for the expected influx of Free-Soil settlers to the new Kansas Territory. “We are playing for a mighty stake,” he wrote. “If we win

we carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean; if we fail we lose Missouri, Arkansas, Texas and all the territories; the game must be played boldly.”

Bleeding Kansas

479

Atchison did play boldly. At first, Missouri settlers in Kansas posted the stron-

ger numbers. As the year 1854 progressed, however, settlers from the North came

pouring in. Alarmed by this influx, bands of Missourians, labeled “border ruffians”

by the Republican press, rode into Kansas prepared to vote as many times as necessary to install a pro-slavery government. In fall 1854, they cast at least 1,700 illegal ballots and sent a pro-slavery territorial delegate to Congress.

When the time came for the election of a territorial legislature the following

spring, Atchison led a contingent of border ruffians to Kansas for the election.

“There are eleven hundred coming over from Platte County to vote,” he told his

followers, “and if that ain’t enough, we can send five thousand—enough to kill

every God-damned abolitionist in the Territory.”

His count was accurate. Nearly 5,000 came and voted illegally to elect a pro-

slavery territorial legislature. The territorial governor pleaded with President Pierce to nullify the election, but Pierce listened to Atchison and removed the governor.

Meanwhile, the new territorial legislature legalized slavery and adopted a slave

code that even authorized the death penalty for helping a slave to escape.

The so-called Free State party, outraged by these proceedings, had no intention

of obeying laws enacted by this “bogus legislature.” By fall 1855, they constituted a majority of bona fide settlers in Kansas. They called a convention, adopted a free-state constitution, and elected their own legislature and governor. By January 1856, two territorial governments in Kansas stood with their hands at each other’s throats.

#FK2.83*15

Society,

Historical

State

Kansas

Free-State Men Ready to Defend Lawrence, Kansas, in 1856. After pro-

slavery forces sacked the free-state capital of Lawrence in 1856, Northern settlers decided they needed more firepower to defend themselves. Somehow they got hold of a six-pound howitzer. This cannon did not fire a shot in anger during the Kansas troubles, but its existence may have deterred the “border ruffians.”

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Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

Kansas now became the leading issue in national politics. The Democratic Sen-

ate and President Pierce recognized the pro-slavery legislature meeting in the town of Lecompton, while the Republican House of Representatives recognized the antislavery legislature in the town of Lawrence. Southerners saw the struggle as crucial to their future. “The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor,” wrote Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina. “The fate

of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue.” On the other side, Charles

Sumner of Massachusetts gave a well-publicized speech in the Senate on May 19

and 20 entitled “The Crime against Kansas.” “Murderous robbers from Missouri,”

charged Sumner, “from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization” had

committed the “rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery.” Among the southern senators Sumner singled out for special condemnation and ridicule was a cousin of Congressman Brooks, Andrew Butler of South

Carolina. Butler was a “Don Quixote,” said Sumner, “who had chosen a mistress

to whom he has made his vows ... the harlot, Slavery.”

The Caning

Sumner’s speech incensed southerners, none more than Preston

of Sumner

Brooks, who decided to avenge his cousin. Two days after the

speech, Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and began

beating Sumner with a heavy cane. His legs trapped beneath the desk that was bolted to the floor, Sumner wrenched the desk loose as he stood up to try to defend himself, whereupon Brooks clubbed him so ferociously that Sumner slumped forward, bloody

and unconscious.

News of the incident sent a thrill of pride through the South and a rush of rage

through the North. Charleston newspapers praised Brooks for “standing forth so nobly in defense of ... the honor of South Carolinians.” Brooks resigned from Congress after censure by the House and was unanimously reelected. From all over the South came gifts of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again” and

“Use Knock-Down Arguments.” But in the North, the Republicans gained thousands

of voters as a result of the affair. It seemed to prove their contentions about “the barbarism of slavery.” “Has it come to this,” asked the poet William Cullen Bryant, editor of the New York Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the

presence of our Southern masters? ... Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves?” A veteran New York politician reported that he 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.”

Republicans were soon able to add “Bleeding Kansas” to “Bleeding Sumner” in

their repertoire of winning issues. Even as Sumner was delivering his speech in

Washington, an “army” of pro-slavery Missourians, complete with artillery,

marched on the free-state capital of Lawrence, Kansas. On May 21, they shelled

and sacked the town, burning several buildings. A rival force of free-state men

arrived too late to intercept them. One of the free-state “captains” was John

Brown, an abolitionist zealot who considered himself anointed by the Lord to

avenge the sins of slaveholders. When he learned of the murder of several free-

state settlers and the sack of Lawrence, he “went crazy—crazy,” according to one

of his followers. We must “fight fire with fire,” Brown declared. “Something must

The Election of 1856

481

Resource,

Library/Art

Public

York

New

The©

The Caning of Sumner. This drawing by an antislavery Northerner shows pro-slavery Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beating Senator Charles Sumner of

Massachusetts with a heavy cane on the floor of the Senate on May 22, 1856. It portrays the inability of the South to respond to the power of Northern arguments, symbolized by the pen in Sumner’s right hand and a speech in his left hand, except with the unthinking power of the club. Note other southern senators in the background smiling on the scene or preventing northern senators from coming to Sumner’s aid. The caning of Sumner was the worst of several instances of North–South violence or threatened violence on the floor of Congress in the 1850s, presaging the violence on the battlefields of the 1860s.

be done to show these barbarians that we, too, have rights.” Leading four of his

sons and three other men to a pro-slavery settlement at Pottawatomie Creek on

the night of May 24–25, 1856, Brown dragged five men from their cabins and split

open their heads with broadswords.

Brown’s murderous act set off a veritable civil war in Kansas. One of Brown’s

sons was among the estimated 200 men killed in bushwhacker raids. Not until

President Pierce sent a tough new territorial governor and 1,300 federal troops

to Kansas in September 1856 did the violence subside—just in time to save the

Democrats from possible defeat in the presidential election.

THE ELECTION OF 1856

By 1856, the Republicans had become the largest party in the North. With the old

Free-Soilers as their radical core, they had recruited about three-fourths of the former Whigs and one-fifth of the Democrats. They were also the first truly sectional party in American history because they had little prospect of carrying a single

county in the slave states. At their first national convention, the Republicans wrote a platform that focused mainly on that “relic of barbarism,” slavery. The platform also incorporated the old Whig program of federal aid to internal improvements,

including a railroad to California. For its presidential nominee, the party steered away from its most prominent leaders, who were identified with the old parties,

and turned instead to John C. Frémont. This “Pathfinder of the West” had a dash-

ing image as an explorer and for his role in the acquisition of California. With little 482

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

Popular and Electoral Votes in the 1856 Presidential Election

Free States

Slave States

Total

Candidate

Popular

Electoral

Popular

Electoral

Popular

Electoral

Buchanan

1,227,000

607,000

112

1,833,000

174

(Democrat)

Frémont

1,338,000

114

1,338,000

114

(Republican)

Fillmore

396,000

476,000

872,000

(American)

political experience, he had few political enemies, and his antislavery credentials were satisfactory.

The Democrats chose as their candidate James Buchanan, a veteran of 30 years

in various public offices. The Democratic platform endorsed popular sovereignty

and condemned the Republicans as a “sectional party” that incited “treason and

armed resistance in the Territories.”

This would be a three-party election because the American Party was still in the

field. Having become mainly a way station for former southern Whigs, the party

nominated ex-Whig Millard Fillmore. The three-party campaign sifted out into a

pair of two-party contests: Democrats versus Americans in the South and Demo-

crats versus Republicans in the North. Fillmore, despite a good showing of 44 percent of the popular vote in the South, carried only Maryland. Considering

Buchanan colorless but safe, the rest of the South gave him three-fourths of the electoral votes he needed for victory.

The real excitement in this election showed itself in the North. For many Re-

publicans, the campaign was a moral cause, an evangelical crusade against the sin of slavery. Republican “Wide Awake” clubs marched in torchlight parades chanting “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!” A veteran politician in Indiana

marveled: “Men, Women & Children all seemed to be out, with a kind of fervor I have never witnessed before in six Pres. Elections in which I have taken an active part.” The turnout of eligible voters in the North was a remarkable 83 percent.

One awestruck journalist, anticipating a Republican victory, wrote, that “the process now going on in the United States is a Revolution.”

Not quite. Although the Republicans swept New England and the upper parts

of New York state and the Old Northwest—both settled by New Englanders, where

evangelical and antislavery reform movements had taken hold—the contest in the

lower North was close. Buchanan needed only to carry Pennsylvania and either In-

diana or Illinois to win the presidency, and the campaign focused on those states.

The immigrant and working-class voters of the eastern cities and the rural voters of the lower Midwest, descendants of upland southerners who had settled there,

were antiblack and anti-abolitionist in sentiment. They were ripe for Democratic

propaganda that accused Republicans of favoring racial equality. “Black

The Election of 1856

483

Republicans,” declared an Ohio Democratic newspaper, intended to “turn loose ...

millions of negroes, to elbow you in the workshops, and compete with you in fields of honest labor.” A Democrat in Pennsylvania told voters that “the one aim” of the Republicans was “to elevate the African race in this country to complete equality of political and economic condition with the white man.” Indiana Democrats organized parades with young girls in white dresses carrying banners inscribed:

“Fathers, save us from nigger husbands.”

The Republicans in these areas denied that they favored racial equality. They

insisted that the main reason for keeping slavery out of the territories was to enable white farmers and workers to make a living there without competition from black

labor. But their denials were in vain. Support for the Republican Party by promi-

nent black leaders, including Frederick Douglass, convinced hundreds of thousands of voters that the Black Republicans were racial egalitarians. For the next two

Frémont

(Republican)

Buchanan

(Democrat)

Fillmore

(American)

No returns,

unsettled, etc.

Learning

Cengage©

MAP 14.1 Counties Carried by Candidates in the 1856 Presidential Election

This map illustrates the sharp geographical division of the vote in 1856. The pattern of Republican counties coincided almost exactly with New England and the portions of other states settled by New England migrants during the two preceding generations.

484

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

decades, that sentiment would be one of the most potent weapons in the Demo-

cratic arsenal.

The charge that a Republican victory would destroy the Union was even more

effective. Buchanan set the tone in his instructions to Democratic Party leaders:

“The Black Republicans must be ... boldly assailed as disunionists, and the charge must be re-iterated again and again.” It was. And southerners helped the cause by threatening to secede if Frémont won. Fears of disruption caused many conservative ex-Whigs in the North to support Buchanan, who carried Pennsylvania, New

Jersey, Indiana, Illinois, and California and won the presidency.

But southerners did not intend to let Buchanan forget that he owed his elec-

tion mainly to the South. “Mr. Buchanan and the Northern Democracy are

dependent on the South,” wrote a Virginian after the election. “If we can succeed in Kansas ... and add a little more slave territory, we may yet live free men under the Stars and Stripes.”

The Dred

The South took the offensive at the outset of the Buchanan

Scott Case

administration. Its instrument was the Supreme Court, which

had a majority of five justices from slave states led by Chief

Justice Roger B. Taney of Maryland. Those justices saw the Dred Scott case as an

opportunity to settle once and for all the question of slavery in the territories.

Dred Scott was a slave whose owner, an army surgeon, had kept him at mili-

tary posts in Illinois and in Wisconsin Territory for several years before taking him back to Missouri. After the owner’s death, Scott sued for his freedom on the

grounds of his prolonged stay in the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery had been

outlawed by the Missouri Compromise. The case worked its way up from Missouri

courts through a federal circuit court to the U.S. Supreme Court. There it attracted attention as a test case of Congress’s power to prohibit slavery in the territories.

The southern Supreme Court justices decided to declare that the Missouri Com-

promise ban on slavery in the territories was unconstitutional. To avoid the appearance of a purely sectional decision, they sought the concurrence of a northern

Democratic justice, Robert Grier of Pennsylvania. President-elect Buchanan played an improper role by pressing his fellow Pennsylvanian to go along with the southern majority. Having obtained Justice Grier’s concurrence, Chief Justice Taney issued the Court’s ruling stating that Congress lacked the power to keep slavery

out of a territory, because slaves were property and the Constitution protects the right of property. For good measure, Taney also wrote that the circuit court should not have accepted the Scott case in the first place because black men were not

citizens of the United States and therefore had no standing in its courts. Five other justices wrote concurring opinions. The two non-Democratic northern justices

dissented vigorously. They stated that blacks were legal citizens in several northern states and were therefore citizens of the United States. To buttress their opinion that Congress could prohibit slavery in the territories, they cited Congress’s Constitutional power to make “all needful rules and regulations” for the territories.

Modern scholars agree with the dissenters. In 1857, however, Taney had a

majority, and his ruling became law. Modern scholars have also demonstrated

that Taney was motivated by his passionate commitment “to southern life and

The Election of 1856

485

values” and by his determination to stop “northern aggression” by cutting the ground out from under the hated Republicans. His ruling that their program to exclude

slavery from the territories was unconstitutional was designed to do just that.

Republicans denounced Taney’s “jesuitical decision” as based on “gross perver-

sion” of the Constitution. Several Republican state legislatures resolved that the ruling was “not binding in law and conscience.” They looked forward to the election

of a Republican president who could “reconstitute” the Court and secure a reversal of the decision. “The remedy,” said the Chicago Tribune, “is the ballot box.… Let the next President be Republican, and 1860 will mark an era kindred with that

of 1776.”

The Lecompton

Instead of settling the slavery controversy, the Dred Scott

Constitution

decision intensified it. Meanwhile, pro-slavery advocates,

having won legalization of slavery in the territories, moved

to ensure that it would remain legal when Kansas became a state. That required

deft maneuvering, because legitimate antislavery settlers outnumbered pro-slavery settlers by more than two to one. In 1857, the pro-slavery legislature (elected by the fraudulent votes of border ruffians two years earlier) called for a constitutional convention at Lecompton to prepare Kansas for statehood. Because the election for delegates was rigged, Free Soil voters refused to participate. One-fifth of the registered voters thereupon elected convention delegates, who met at Lecompton and

wrote a state constitution that made slavery legal.

Then a nagging problem arose. Buchanan had promised that the Lecompton

constitution would be presented to voters in a fair referendum. The problem was

how to pass the pro-slavery constitution, given the antislavery majority of voters.

The convention came up with an ingenious solution. Instead of a referendum on

the whole constitution, it would allow the voters to choose between a constitution

“with slavery” and one “with no slavery.” The catch was that the constitution

“with no slavery” guaranteed slave owners’ “inviolable” right of property in the

200 slaves already in Kansas and their progeny. It also did nothing to prevent

future smuggling of slaves across the 200-mile border with Missouri. Once in Kansas, they, too, would become “inviolable” property.

Free-state voters branded the referendum a farce and boycotted it. One-quarter

of the eligible voters went to the polls in December 1857 and approved the constitution “with slavery.” Meanwhile, in a fair election policed by federal troops, the antislavery party won control of the new territorial legislature and promptly submitted both constitutions to a referendum that was boycotted by pro-slavery voters.

This time, 70 percent of the eligible voters went to the polls and overwhelmingly rejected both constitutions.

Which referendum would the federal government recognize? That question

proved even more divisive than the Kansas-Nebraska debate four years earlier.

President Buchanan faced a dilemma. He had promised a fair referendum. But

southerners, who dominated both the Democratic Party and the administration

(the vice president and four of the seven cabinet members were from slave states), threatened secession if Kansas was not admitted to statehood under the Lecompton

constitution “with slavery.” “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave 486

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

State,” thundered Senator James Hammond of South Carolina, “can any Slave

State remain in it with honor?” Buchanan caved in. He explained to a shocked

northern Democrat that if he did not accept the Lecompton constitution, southern

states would “secede from the Union or take up arms against us.” Buchanan sent

the Lecompton constitution to Congress with a message recommending statehood.

Kansas, said the president, “is at this moment as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina.”

What would Stephen Douglas do? If he endorsed the Lecompton constitution,

he would undoubtedly be defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate in 1858.

And he regarded the Lecompton constitution as a travesty of popular sovereignty.

He broke with the administration on the issue. He could not vote to “force this

constitution down the throats of the people of Kansas,” he told the Senate, “in

opposition to their wishes and in violation of our pledges.”

The fight in Congress was long and bitter. The South and the administration had

the votes they needed in the Senate and won handily there, but the Democratic ma-

jority in the House was so small that the defection of even a few northern Democrats would defeat the Lecompton constitution. The House debate at one point got out of hand, and a wild fistfight erupted between Republicans and southern Democrats.

“There were some fifty middle-aged and elderly gentlemen pitching into each other like so many Tipperary savages,” wrote a bemused reporter, “most of them incapable, from want of wind and muscle, from doing each other any serious harm.”

When the vote was finally taken, two-dozen northern Democrats defected, provid-

ing enough votes to defeat Lecompton. Both sides then accepted a compromise pro-

posal to resubmit the constitution to Kansas voters, who decisively rejected it. This meant that while Kansas would not come in as a slave state, neither would it come in as a free state for some time yet. Nevertheless, the Lecompton debate had split the Democratic Party, leaving a legacy of undying enmity between southerners and

Douglas. The election of a Republican president in 1860 was now all but assured.

THE ECONOMY IN THE 1850S

Beginning in the mid-1840s, the American economy enjoyed a dozen years of

unprecedented growth and prosperity, particularly for the railroads. The number

of miles in operation quintupled. Railroad construction provided employment for

many immigrants and spurred growth in industries that produced rails, rolling

stock, and other railroad equipment. Most railroad construction took place in

the Old Northwest, linking the region more closely to the Northeast and continu-

ing the reorientation of transportation networks from a north-south river pattern to an east-west canal and rail pattern. By the mid-1850s, the east-west rail and

water routes carried more than twice as much freight tonnage as the north-south

river routes. This closer binding of the western and eastern states reinforced the effect of slavery in creating a self-conscious “North” and “South.”

Although the Old Northwest remained predominantly agricultural, rapid ex-

pansion of railroads there laid the basis for its industrialization. During the 1850s, industrial output in the free states west of Pennsylvania grew at twice the rate of Northeast industrial output and three times as great as the rate in the South. The Northwest urban growth rate tripled that of the Northeast and quadrupled that of

The Economy in the 1850s

487

the South. Chicago became the terminus for 15 rail lines in the 1850s, during which its population grew by 375 percent. In 1847, two companies that contributed to the rapid growth of agriculture during this era built their plants in Illinois: the McCormick reaper works at Chicago and the John Deere steel-plow works at Moline.

According to almost every statistical index available from that period, eco-

nomic expansion considerably outstripped even the prodigious pace of population

increase. While the number of Americans grew by 44 percent during these 12 years

(1844–56), the value of both exports and imports increased by 200 percent; mined

coal tonnage by 270 percent; banking capital, industrial capital, and industrial output by approximately 100 percent; farmland value by 100 percent; and cotton,

wheat, and corn harvests by about 70 percent. These advances meant a significant

increase of per capita production and income, although the distance between rich

and poor was widening—a phenomenon that has characterized all capitalist econo-

mies during stages of rapid industrial growth.

By the later 1850s, the United States had forged ahead of most other countries to become the second-leading industrial producer in the world, behind only Britain. But the country was still in the early stages of industrial development. Agricultural product processing and raw materials still played the dominant role. By 1860, the four leading industries, measured by value added in manufacturing, were cotton textiles, lumber products, boots and shoes, and flour milling. Iron and machinery, industries typical of a more mature manufacturing economy, ranked sixth and seventh.

“The American

The United States had pioneered in one crucial feature of

System of

modern industry: the mass production of interchangeable

Manufactures”

parts. This revolutionary concept had begun with the man-

ufacture of firearms earlier in the 19th century and had

spread to many products by the 1850s. High wages and a shortage of the skilled

craftsmen who had traditionally fashioned guns, furniture, locks, watches, and

other products had compelled American entrepreneurs to seek alternative methods.

“Yankee ingenuity,” already world-famous, came up with an answer: special-

purpose machine tools that would cut and shape an endless number of parts that

could be fitted together with other similarly produced parts to make whole guns,

locks, clocks, and sewing machines in mass quantities. These products were less

elegant and less durable than products made by skilled craftsmen, but they were

also less expensive and thus more widely available to the “middling classes” of a society that professed to be more democratic than Europe in its consumer economy

as well as in its politics.

Such American-made products were the hit of the first World’s Fair, the Crystal

Palace Exhibition at London in 1851. British manufacturers were so impressed by

Yankee techniques, which they dubbed “the American system of manufactures,”

that they sent two commissions to the United States to study them. The British

also invited Samuel Colt of Connecticut, inventor of the famous six-shooting

revolver, to set up a factory in England stocked with machinery from Connecticut.

In testimony before a parliamentary committee in 1854, Colt summed up the Amer-

ican system of manufactures in a single sentence: “There is nothing that cannot be produced by machinery.” Although the British had a half-century head start over

488

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

Americans in the Industrial Revolution, Colt’s testimony expressed a philosophy

that would enable the United States to surpass Britain as the leading industrial

nation by 1880.

The British industrial commissions cited the American educational system as an

important reason for the country’s technological proficiency. “Educated up to a far higher standard than those of a much superior grade in the Old World,” reported

the 1854 commission, “every [American] workman seems to be continually devising

some new thing to assist him in his work, and there is a strong desire ... to be

‘posted up’ in every new improvement.” By contrast, the British workman, trained

by long apprenticeship “in the trade,” rather than in school, lacked “the ductility of mind and the readiness of apprehension for a new thing” and was therefore “unwilling to change the methods he has been used to.”

Whether this British commission was right in its belief that American schooling

encouraged the “adaptative versatility” of Yankee workers, it was certainly true

that public education and literacy were more widespread in the United States than in Europe. Almost 95 percent of adults in the free states were literate in 1860, compared with 65 percent in England and 55 percent in France. The standardization

and expansion of public school systems that had begun earlier in New England

had spread to the mid-Atlantic states and into the Old Northwest by the 1850s.

Nearly all children received a few years of schooling, and most completed at least six or seven years.

This improvement in education coincided with the feminization of the teaching

profession, which opened up new career opportunities for young women. By the

1850s, nearly three-quarters of the public school teachers in New England were

women (who worked for lower salaries than male teachers), a trend that was

spreading to the mid-Atlantic states and the Old Northwest as well.

The Southern

In contrast to the North, where 94 percent of the entire

Economy

population could read and write, 80 percent of the free

population and only 10 percent of the slaves in the South

were literate. This was one of several differences between North and South that

antislavery people pointed to as evidence of the backward, repressive, and perni-

cious nature of a slave society.

Still, the South shared in the economy’s rapid growth following recovery from

the depression of 1837–43. Cotton prices and production both doubled between

1845 and 1855. Similar increases in price and output emerged in tobacco and

sugar. The price of slaves also doubled during this decade. Southern crops provided three-fifths of all U.S. exports, with cotton alone supplying more than half.

But a growing number of southerners deplored the fact that the colonial econ-

omy of the South was so dependent on the export of agricultural products and the

import of manufactured goods. Northern or British firms owned the ships that car-

ried southern cotton; Yankees or Englishmen provided most of the financial and

commercial services. In the years of rising sectional tensions around 1850, many

southerners began calling for economic independence from the North. How could

they obtain their rights, they asked, if they were “financially more enslaved than our negroes?” Yankees “abuse and denounce slavery and slaveholders,” declared a

The Economy in the 1850s

489

southern newspaper in 1851, yet “we purchase all our luxuries and necessaries

from the North…. Our slaves are clothed with Northern manufactured goods and

work with Northern hoes, ploughs, and other implements.... The slaveholder

dresses in Northern goods … and on Northern-made paper, with a Northern pen,

with Northern ink, he resolves and re-resolves in regard to his rights.”

Southerners must “throw off this humiliating dependence,” declared James D. B.

De Bow, the young champion of economic diversification in the South. In 1846,

De Bow had founded in New Orleans a periodical eventually known as De Bow’s

Review. Proclaiming on its cover that “Commerce is King,” the Review set out to

make this slogan a southern reality. De Bow took the lead in organizing annual

commercial conventions that met in various southern cities during the 1850s. In its early years, this movement encouraged southerners to invest in shipping lines, railroads, textile mills (“bring the spindles to the cotton”), and other enterprises. “Give us factories, machine shops, work shops,” declared southern proponents of King

Commerce, “and we shall be able ere long to assert our rights.”

Economic diversification in the South did make headway during the 1850s. The

slave states quadrupled their railroad mileage, increased the amount of capital invested in manufacturing by 77 percent, and boosted their output of cotton textiles by 44 percent. But northern industry was growing even faster. In 1860, the North

had five times more industrial output per capita than the South, and it had three times the railroad capital and mileage per capita and per thousand square miles.

Southerners had a larger percentage of their capital invested in land and slaves in 1860 than they had had 10 years earlier. Some 80 percent of the South’s labor force worked in agriculture—the same as 60 years earlier. By contrast, while farming remained, at 40 percent, the largest single occupation in the North, the northern

economy developed a strong manufacturing and commercial sector whose com-

bined labor force almost equaled that of agriculture by 1860.

The Sovereignty

A good many southerners preferred to keep it that way.

of King Cotton

“That the North does our trading and manufacturing mostly

is true,” wrote an Alabama planter in 1858. “We are willing

that they should. Ours is an agricultural people, and God grant that we may con-

tinue so. It is the freest, happiest, most independent, and with us, the most powerful condition on earth.” In the later 1850s, the drive for economic diversification in the South lost steam. King Cotton reasserted its primacy over King Commerce as

cotton output and prices continued to rise, suffusing the South in a glow of prosperity. “Our Cotton is the most wonderful talisman on earth,” declared a planter.

“By its power we are transmuting whatever we choose into whatever we want.” In

a speech that became famous, James Hammond of South Carolina told his fellow

senators in 1858 that “the slaveholding South is now the controlling power of the world…. No power on earth dares to make war on cotton. Cotton is king.”

Even the commercial conventions in the South seem to have embraced this

gospel. In 1854, they merged with a parallel series of planters’ conventions, and thereafter the delegates heard as much about cotton as they did about commerce.

By the later 1850s, one of the main goals of these conventions was to reopen the

African slave trade, prohibited by law since 1808. But many southerners rejected

490

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

that goal, partly on moral grounds and partly on economic grounds. Older slave

states such as Virginia, which profited from the sale of slaves to the booming cotton frontier of the Deep South, objected to any goal that would lower the price of their largest export. The conventions also lobbied for the annexation of Cuba,

which would bring a productive agricultural economy and 400,000 more slaves

into the United States.

Nowhere in the South, said defenders of slavery, did one see such “scenes of beg-

gary, squalid poverty, and wretchedness” as one could find in any northern city.

Black slaves, they insisted, enjoyed a higher standard of living than white “wage slaves” in northern factories. Black slaves never suffered from unemployment or

wage cuts, they received free medical care, and they were taken care of in old age.

This argument reached its fullest development in the writings of George

Fitzhugh, a Virginia farmer-lawyer whose newspaper articles were gathered into

two books published in 1854 and 1857, Sociology for the South and Cannibals All.

Free-labor capitalism, said Fitzhugh, was a competition in which the strong

exploited and starved the weak. Slavery, by contrast, was a paternal institution

that guaranteed protection of the workers. “Capital exercises a more perfect com-

pulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves,” wrote Fitzhugh, “for

free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether

they work or not.... What a glorious thing is slavery, when want, misfortune, old age, debility, and sickness overtake [the slave].”

Labor

How true was this portrait of poverty and starvation among

Conditions in

northern workers? Some northern labor leaders did complain

the North

that the “slavery” of the wage system gave “bosses” control

over the hours, conditions, and compensation of labor. But

there is no evidence that a northern workingman ever offered to change places with a southern slave. Average per capita income was about 40 percent higher in the

North than in the South. Although that average masked large disparities between

rich and poor—even between the middle class and the poor—those disparities were

no greater, and probably less, in the North than in the South.

To be sure, substantial numbers of recent immigrants, day laborers, and young

single women in large northern cities lived on the edge of poverty—or slipped over the edge. Many women seamstresses, shoe binders, milliners, and the like, who

worked 60 or 70 hours per week in the outwork system, earned less than a living

wage. Some of them resorted to prostitution in order to survive. The widespread

adoption of the newly invented sewing machine in the 1850s did nothing to make

life easier for seamstresses; it only lowered their per-unit piecework wages and

forced them to turn out more shirts and trousers than before. Many urban

working-class families could not survive on the wages of an unskilled or semi-

skilled man. Women had to take in laundry, boarders, or outwork, and one or

more children also had to work. Much employment was seasonal or intermittent,

leaving workers without wages for long periods, especially during the winter. The poverty, overcrowding, and disease in the tenement districts of a few large cities—

especially New York City—seemed to lend substance to pro-slavery claims that

slaves were better off.

The Economy in the 1850s

491

PERCENTAGE OF SLAVES IN

TOTAL POPULATION, 1860

NEBRASKA

TERRITORY

UTAH

TERRITORY

KANSAS

TERRITORY

INDIAN

NEW MEXICO

TERRITORY

Areas without slaves,

or unsettled

Under 10 percent

10 to 30 percent

30 to 50 percent

50 percent and over

PENN.

N.J.

PRINCIPAL STAPLE CROP REGIONS

MD.

OF THE SOUTH, 1860

INDIANA

OHIO

DEL.

ILLINOIS

KANSAS

VIRGINIA

TERRITORY

MISSOURI

KENTUCKY

NORTH CAROLINA

INDIAN

TENNESSEE

TERRITORY

ARKANSAS

SOUTH

CAROLINA

ATLANTIC

GEORGIA

OCEAN

MISSISSIPPI

ALABAMA

Cotton

TEXAS

Sugar

LOUISIANA

Rice

FLORIDA

Tobacco

Learning

Hemp

Gulf of Mexico

Cengage©

MAP 14.2 Slavery and Staple Crops in the South, 1860

Note the close correlation between the concentration of the slave population and the leading cash crops of the South. Nothing better illustrates the economic importance of slavery.

492

Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

But they were not—even apart from the psychological contrast between being

free and being a slave. New York City’s poverty, although highly concentrated

and visible, was exceptional. In the North, only one-fourth of the people lived in cities or towns of more than 2,500 people. Wages and opportunities for workers

were greater in the North than anywhere else in the world, including the South.

That was why 4 million immigrants came to the United States from 1845 to 1860

and why seven-eighths of them settled in free states. It was also why twice as many white residents of slave states migrated to free states than vice versa.

The Panic

In fall 1857, the relative prosperity of the North was inter-

of 1857

rupted by a financial panic that caused a short-lived but

intense depression. When the Crimean War in Europe

(1854–56) cut off Russian grain from the European market, U.S. exports had

mushroomed to meet the deficiency. After the Crimean War ended, U.S. grain

exports slumped. The sharp rise in interest rates in Britain and France, caused by the war, spread to U.S. financial markets in 1857 and dried up sources of credit.

Meanwhile, the economic boom of the preceding years had caused the American

economy to overheat: Land prices had soared, railroads had built beyond the capacity of earnings to service their debts, and banks had made too many risky loans.

This speculative house of cards came crashing down in September 1857. The

failure of one banking house sent a wave of panic through the financial community.

Banks suspended specie payments, businesses failed, railroads went bankrupt, con-

struction halted, and factories shut down. Hundreds of thousands of workers were

laid off, and others went on part-time schedules or took wage cuts, just as the cold winter months were arriving. The specter of class conflict such as had occurred

during the European revolutions of 1848 haunted the public. Unemployed workers

in several northern cities marched in parades carrying banners demanding work or

bread. A mob broke into the shops of flour merchants in New York City. On

November 10, a crowd gathered on Wall Street and threatened to break into the

U.S. customs house and sub-treasury vaults, where $20 million was stored. Soldiers and marines had to be called out to disperse the mob.

But the country got through the winter with little violence. No one was killed in the demonstrations—in contrast to the dozens who had been killed in ethnic riots a few years earlier and the hundreds killed in the guerrilla war in Kansas. Class conflict turned out to be the least threatening of the various discords that endangered society in the 1850s. Charity and public works helped tide the poor over the winter, and the panic inspired a vigorous religious revival. Spontaneous prayer meetings

arose in many northern cities, bringing together bankers and seamstresses, brokers and street sweepers. They asked God’s forgiveness for the greed and materialism

that, in a self-flagellating mood, they believed had caused the panic.

The depression was short-lived. By early 1858, banks had resumed specie pay-

ments; the stock market rebounded in the spring; factories reopened; railroad construction resumed; and by spring 1859, recovery was complete. The modest labor

union activities of the 1850s revived after the depression, as workers in some industries went on strike to bring wages back to pre-panic levels. In February 1860, the shoemakers of Lynn, Massachusetts, began the largest strike in U.S. history up to The Economy in the 1850s

493

that time, eventually involving 20,000 workers in the New England shoe industry.

Despite the organization of several national unions of skilled workers during the 1850s, however, less than 1 percent of the labor force was unionized in 1860.

Sectionalism

The Panic of 1857 intensified sectional animosities. The

and the Panic

South largely escaped the depression. Its export-driven econ-

omy seemed insulated from domestic downturns. After a brief

dip, cotton and tobacco prices returned to high levels and production continued to increase: The cotton crop set new records in 1858 and 1859. Southern boasts about the superiority of the region’s economic and labor systems took on added bravado.

“Who can doubt, that has looked at recent events, that cotton is supreme?” asked

Senator James Hammond in March 1858. “When thousands of the strongest com-

mercial houses in the world were coming down,” he told Yankees, “what brought

you up?... We have poured in upon you one million six hundred thousand bales of

cotton.... We have sold it for $65,000,000, and saved you.”

Northerners were not grateful. In fact, many of them blamed the South for

causing the depression or for blocking measures to ease its effects in the North.

Southern congressmen had provided most of the votes for a new tariff in 1857

that brought duties to their lowest levels in 40 years. Some northern Republicans blamed the tariff for causing the panic and wanted to revise certain duties upward to help hard-hit industries, especially Pennsylvania iron, which were being undercut by cheaper imports. They directed their arguments to workers as much as to manufacturers. “We demand that American laborers shall be protected against the pau-

per labor of Europe,” they declared. Tariff revision would “give employment to

thousands of mechanics, artisans, laborers, who have languished for months in un-

willing idleness.” In each session of Congress from 1858 through 1860, however, a combination of southerners and about half of the northern Democrats blocked

Republican efforts to raise tariffs. In the words of one bitter Pennsylvania Republican, this was proof that Congress remained “shamelessly prostituted, in a base subservi-ency to the Slave Power.” Republicans made important gains in the Pennsylvania

congressional elections of 1858, setting the stage for a strong bid in a state that they had to carry if they were to win the presidency in 1860.

Three other measures acquired additional significance after the Panic of 1857.

Republicans supported each of them as a means to promote economic health and to

aid farmers and workers, but southerners perceived all of them as aimed at helping northern farmers and workers and used their power to defeat them. One was a

homestead act to grant 160 acres of public land to each farmer who settled and

worked the land. Believing that this bill “would prove a most efficient ally for Abolition by encouraging and stimulating the settlement of free farms with Yankees,”

southern senators defeated it after the House had passed it in 1859. The following year both houses passed the Homestead Act, but Buchanan vetoed it and southern

senators blocked an effort to pass it over his veto. A similar fate befell bills for land grants to a transcontinental railroad and for building agricultural and mechanical colleges to educate farmers and workers. In the Old Northwest, where these measures were popular, Republican prospects for 1860 were enhanced by southern

and Democratic opposition to them.

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Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

The Free-Labor

By the later 1850s, the Republican antislavery argument had

Ideology

become a finely honed philosophy that historians have

labeled a free-labor ideology. It held that all work in a free

society was honorable, but that slavery degraded the calling of manual labor by

equating it with bondage. Slaves worked inefficiently, by compulsion; free men

were stimulated to work hard and efficiently by the desire to get ahead. Social

mobility was central to the free-labor ideology. Free workers who practiced the

virtues of industry, thrift, self-discipline, and sobriety could move up the ladder of success. “I am not ashamed to confess,” Abraham Lincoln told a working-class

audience in 1860, “that twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer, mauling rails, at work on a flat-boat—just what might happen to any poor man’s son!” But in

the free states, said Lincoln, a man knows that “he can better his condition.... The free labor system opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”

Lincoln drew a rosy picture of northern reality, for large numbers of workers in

the North had little hope of advancing beyond the status of wage laborer. Still, he expressed a belief that was widely shared in the antebellum North. “There is not a working boy of average ability in the New England states, at least,” observed a visiting British industrialist in 1854, “who has not an idea of some mechanical invention or improvement in manufactures, by which, in good time, he hopes to better his condition, or rise to fortune and social distinction.” Americans could point to numerous examples of men who had achieved dramatic upward mobility. Belief in this “American dream” was most strongly held by Protestant farmers, skilled workers, and white-collar workers who had some real hope of getting ahead. These men tended to support the

Republican Party and its goal of excluding slavery from the territories.

For slavery was the antithesis of upward mobility. Bondsmen were “fatally

fixed in that condition for life,” as Lincoln noted. Slaves could not hope to move up the ladder of success, nor could free men who lived in a society where they had to compete with slave labor. “Slavery withers and blights all it touches,” declared an Iowa Republican. “It is a curse upon the poor, free, laboring white men.” In the United States, social mobility often depended on geographic mobility. The main

reason so many families moved into new territories was to make a new start, to

get ahead. But, declared a Republican editor, if slavery goes into the territories,

“the free labor of all the states will not. If the free labor of the states goes there, the slave labor of the southern states will not, and in a few years the country will teem with an active and energetic population.”

Southerners contended that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of

course it was, said Lincoln in a speech to a New England audience during the shoemakers’ strike of 1860. “I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England

under which laborers can strike when they want to (Cheers).... I like the system

which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere

(Tremendous applause).” Strikes were one of the ways in which free workers could

try to improve their prospects. “I want every man,” said Lincoln, “to have the

chance—and I believe a black man is entitled to it—in which he can better his

condition.” That was why Republicans were determined to contain the expansion

of slavery, because if the South got its way in the territories, “free labor that can strike will give way to slave labor that cannot!”

The Economy in the 1850s

495

The Impending

From the South came a maverick voice that echoed the Re-

Crisis

publicans. Hinton Rowan Helper considered himself a

spokesman for the nonslaveholding whites of the South.

Living in upcountry North Carolina, a region of small farms and few slaves, he had brooded for years over slavery’s retarding influence on southern development. In

1857, he poured out his bitterness in a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South. Using selective statistics from the 1850 census, he pictured a South mired in economic backwardness, widespread illiteracy, poverty for the masses, and great

wealth for the elite. He contrasted this dismal situation with the bustling, prosperous northern economy and its near-universal literacy, neat farms, and progressive institutions. What caused this startling contrast? “Slavery lies at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny, and imbecility of the South,” he wrote. Slavery monopolized the best land, degraded all labor to the level of bond labor, denied

schools to the poor, and impoverished all but “the lords of the lash [who] are not only absolute masters of the blacks [but] of all nonslaveholding whites, whose

freedom is merely nominal, and whose unparalleled illiteracy and degradation is

purposely and fiendishly perpetrated.” The remedy? Nonslaveholding whites must

organize and use their votes to overthrow “this entire system of oligarchical

despotism.”

No southern publisher dared touch this book. Helper lugged his bulky manu-

script to New York City, where a printer brought it out in summer 1857. The

Impending Crisis was virtually banned in the South, and few southern whites

read it, but it made a huge impact in the North. Republicans welcomed it as con-

firmation of all they had been saying about the evils of slavery and the virtues of free labor. The Republican Party subsidized an abridged edition and distributed

thousands of copies as campaign documents. During the late 1850s, a war of

books (Helper’s Impending Crisis versus Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All) exacerbated

sectional tensions. Fitzhugh’s book circulated freely in the North, whereas the

sale or possession of Helper’s book was a criminal offense in many parts of the

South. The New England Antislavery Society even invited Fitzhugh to New Haven

to debate the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Fitzhugh expressed surprise at his

courteous reception in the North, aware that Phillips and other abolitionists could not set foot in the South without peril to their lives. Northern spokesmen did not hesitate to point out the moral: A free society could tolerate free speech and a free press, but a slave society could not.

Southern

How accurate was Helper’s portrayal of southern poor

Nonslave-

whites degraded by slavery and ready to revolt against it?

holders

The touchy response of many southern leaders suggested that

the planters felt uneasy about that question. After all, slave-

holding families constituted less than one-third of the white population in slave states, and the proportion was declining as the price of slaves continued to rise.

Open hostility to the planters’ domination of society and politics was evident in the mountainous and upcountry regions of the South. These would become areas of

Unionist sentiment during the Civil War and of Republican strength after it.

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Chapter 14 The Gathering Tempest, 1853–1860

A Southern Yeoman

Farmer’s Home. This

modest log cabin on the

edge of a small clearing,

with the farmer’s wife

drawing water from a well

in the foreground, was

typical of nonslaveholders’

farms in the backcountry

of the South. Often

stigmatized as poor

whites, many of these

families were in fact

comfortable by the

standards of the day.

They did not feel the

sense of oppression by

the planter class that