"FREMONT AND FREEDOM"
The Congress of 1855-6, divided between an administration Senate and an
opposition House, accomplished little but talk. One chapter of this talk
had a notable sequel. Charles Sumner, in an elaborate and powerful
oration in the Senate, denounced slavery, "the sum of all villainies,"
and bitterly satirized one of its prominent defenders, Senator Butler of
South Carolina. He compared Butler to Don Quixote, enamored of slavery
as was the knight of his Dulcinea, and unconscious that instead of a
peerless lady she was but a wanton. The response to the speech was made
by a nephew of Senator Butler and member of the House, Preston S. Brooks
of South Carolina. He entered the Senate chamber during a recess,
accompanied and guarded by a friend and fellow member, Lawrence Keitt;
approached Sumner as he sat writing at his desk, and without words
felled him to the ground with a heavy cane, and beat him about the head
till he was insensible. Sumner, a man of fine physique, was for a long
time an invalid from the assault, and was unable for years to resume his
place in the Senate.
It was not so much the individual act of Brooks as its treatment by his
party and section that gave the deepest significance to the deed and
produced the most lasting effect. A friendly magistrate sentenced Brooks
to a nominal fine and so forestalled further prosecution. His party
friends in Congress left all public rebuke of the deed to Republicans. A
motion to expel Brooks and Keitt from the House failed of the necessary
two-thirds vote. They resigned, and were promptly and triumphantly
re-elected. Noisy applause of the attack came from all parts of the
South, with a stack of canes marked "Hit him again." That better class
of Southerners by whom the assault was felt, as one of them expressed it
long afterward, "like a blow in the face," made no demonstration. So far
from losing caste, as a gentleman or a public man, Brooks not only kept
his place in society, but was honored a few months later with a public
banquet, at which such men as Butler and Toombs and Mason joined in the
laudations, and gave a background to the scene by free threats of
disunion if the Republicans elected their President.
This treatment of Brooks made an impression at the North far beyond the
first hot indignation at his brutal outrage. The condonation and
applause of that outrage was taken as sure evidence of a barbaric state
of opinion, the natural accompaniment of slavery. What made the matter
worse was that the assault had a technical justification under the code
of honor which it was Brooks's pride as a Southern gentleman to observe.
The code called on a man who had given offense by his words to meet the
offended man in a duel, and if he refused, he was fairly subject to
public disgrace or even physical chastisement. Such a theory and
practice, and the sentiments associated with it, stamped slavery with a
heavier condemnation than orator or novelist could frame.
This one week in May, 1856, was dark with omens of impending
catastrophe. On May 20 Lawrence was devastated; on the 22d, Sumner was
assaulted; and on the 24th took place the Pottawatomie massacre. A
shadow as of impending doom was reflected in Mrs. Stowe's second
anti-slavery novel, _Dred_, which appeared about this time. While
lacking the inspiration and power of _Uncle Tom's_ Cabin, it had in the
main a similar tone of humanity, sympathy and fairness. Again the better
element of the Southern whites was portrayed, in the benevolent
slave-holder Clayton; the brave Methodist preacher, Father Dickson; and
the book's heroine, Nina Gordon. There were realistic and graphic
pictures of the negro at his best, in Old Tiff and Milly. The
sophistries and time-serving of ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The
fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature
of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity. But the
book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who
maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an
uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might
well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe
inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader
of a servile insurrection might well be regarded as carrying fire into a
powder magazine. The moving expostulation of the Christian slave Milly
with Dred, the death of Dred, the frustration of his plans, and the
pitiful wrongs he sought to redress, veiled from the Northern reader the
suggestion of other dangers and tragedies to which the Southern reader
was keenly alive. As we read the book now, the glimpses of coming terror
and disaster in Dred's visions seem like a presage of the war which in
truth was only four years away.
But the prevailing temper of the time was as yet little clouded by any
such forebodings. It was a great wave of popular enthusiasm, sane,
resolute, and hopeful, which moved forward in the first Presidential
campaign of the Republican party in 1856. The convention met at
Philadelphia in June. Its temper was well described in a letter from
Samuel Bowles to his paper, the _Springfield Republican_,--which which
from moderate anti-slavery Whig had become ardently Republican when the
Missouri compromise was repealed.[1]
"Certainly we never saw a political convention in which there was so
much soul as in that at Philadelphia. It was politics with a heart and a
conscience in it. Cincinnati (the Democratic convention) gathered the
remains of a once powerful national party and contributed to its further
sectionalization and destruction. Philadelphia called together the
heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, to establish a
broader and juster nationality. Such a fusion of contradictory elements
was never witnessed in this country before since the times of the
Revolution. Nor could it happen now save under a great emergency, and
from a controlling necessity. Such a combination of the material and
mental forces of the republic as was represented in the Philadelphia
convention, and united in its enthusiastic and harmonious results, has
more power than any political combination ever formed before in this
country, and cannot in the nature of things be long kept in the
background. There is no law more certain than that which will throw such
a union of the moral strength, intellectual activity, and youthful
energy of the nation into supremacy, and that right speedily. It may be
delayed for a season, but its course is onward and its victory is
certain."
The declaration of principles dealt wholly with the slavery issue. It
asserted that under the Constitution, as interpreted by the Declaration
and the ordinance of 1787, slavery had no right to exist in any of the
national Territories. It called on Congress to prohibit in the
Territories "the twin relics of barbarism, slavery and polygamy." It
dwelt with great emphasis on the wrongs of the Kansas settlers; the
establishment of a Territorial Legislature by a fraudulent vote; its
outrageous statute-book; the sustaining of the usurpation by the Federal
government; the resulting disorder and violence. Congress was asked to
admit Kansas to the Union under its Free State organization. Nothing was
said as to the fugitive slave law. There was an express disclaimer of
any interference with slavery in the States. The doctrine of the party
was embodied in a phrase which became one of its mottoes: "Freedom
national, slavery sectional."
For its Presidential candidate the convention passed by all the
well-known political leaders, and chose Col. John C. Fremont of
California. Fremont, after a scientific and military education, had
distinguished himself by a series of brilliant exploring expeditions in
the farthest Northwest, marked by scientific achievement and stirring
adventure. Arriving in California at the outbreak of hostilities with
Mexico, he rallied and led the American settlers and drove the Mexicans
from the territory. He took a leading part in organizing the State, and
establishing freedom in its Constitution; and was elected to the United
States Senate as a Free-Soil Democrat. His term as Senator was too brief
to win eminence, but his career as a whole had been singularly various
and distinguished. He was young; he had manly beauty, and a rare
personal fascination. His brilliant and charming wife won favor for him.
Even his name gave aid to the cause, and "Fremont and freedom" became
the rallying cry of the campaign.
But Fremont's personality was an altogether minor element in the
strength with which the Republican party first took the field, and won,
not yet the country, but the strongholds of the North. The new party
gave expression and effect to the anti-slavery sentiment which had
become so deep and wide. It was wholly dissociated from the extremists
who had shocked and alarmed the conservatism of the country; and
Garrison and Phillips had only impatience and scorn for its principles
and measures. Its leadership included many men experienced in
congressional and administrative life, men like Seward and Sumner and
Chase and Wade and Fessenden and Banks, who had matched themselves
against the best leaders of the South and the South's Northern allies.
It brought together the best of the old Whig, Democratic, and Free Soil
parties. In its rank and file it gathered on the whole the best
conscience and intelligence of the North. After the election the
_Springfield Republican_ pointed out that the party's success had been
exactly along the geographical lines of an efficient free-school system,
and it had been defeated where public schools were deficient, as in
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Indiana, and the solid South.
The immediate and burning issue of the campaign was Kansas. Whatever the
exact right and wrong of its local broils, there was no question of the
broad facts--the fraudulent election of the Legislature, the character
of its statute-book, and its support by President Pierce's
administration. It was the wrongs of the Kansas settlers far more than
the wrongs of the Southern slaves on which the Republican speakers and
newspapers dwelt. In truth the animus of the party was quite as much
the resentment by the North of Southern political aggression as it was
regard for the slaves or thought of their future condition. The policy
of excluding slavery from the Territories, and thus naturally from the
new States, tended ultimately to its discouragement and probable
extinction where it already existed. But any such result appeared very
remote.
The opposition to the Republican party was weighty in numbers, but
inharmonious and with no definite creed. The Democratic platform was an
equivocation. It declared for "non-interference by Congress with slavery
in State or Territory." But this left it an open question whether any
one could "interfere." Could the people of a Territory exclude slavery
if they wished? Or did the Constitution protect it there, as Calhoun and
his followers claimed? An ambiguity was left which permitted Calhoun men
and Douglas men to act together against the common foe.
The Democratic candidate was James Buchanan of Pennsylvania. He was one
of those men, decent and respectable, who go through a life of
office-seeking and office-holding without a particle of real leadership,
and are forgotten the moment they leave the stage unless circumstance
throws them into a place so responsible as to reveal their glaring
incompetence. He had escaped the odium which Pierce and Douglas had
incurred, through his absence as Minister to England. There he had
distinguished himself chiefly by his part in a conference at Ostend, in
1854,--incited by President Pierce and his Secretary of State, William
L. Marcy of New York,--where he had met Mason of Virginia and Soule of
Louisiana, ministers respectively to France and Spain; and they had
issued a joint manifesto, declaring that the possession of Cuba was
necessary to the peace and security of the United States, and the island
should be obtained from Spain, with her consent if possible but without
it if necessary. This became a recognized article in the Democratic and
Southern policy. The Republican platform of 1856 denounced the Ostend
manifesto, as the doctrine that "might makes right," "the highwayman's
plea." It was left for a latter-day Republican to give to the same
doctrine the politer name of "international eminent domain."
The American or Know-nothing party nominated ex-President Fillmore and
adopted a platform inclining toward the Southern position. There was a
secession of a Northern element, which nominated Banks, but he declined
and supported Fremont. All the opponents of the Republican party laid
stress on its sectional character. Both its candidates (for
vice-president, William L. Dayton of New Jersey), were from the North;
its creed aimed solely at the restriction of the South's peculiar
institution; south of Mason and Dixon's line, it had an electoral ticket
in four States only--Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky--and
cast hardly 1000 votes. But the South itself had so completely
ostracized even the most moderate anti-slavery sentiment that free
political action was impossible. Thus, Professor Hedrick of the
University of North Carolina said in reply to a question that he favored
Fremont for President; and being denounced for this by a newspaper, he
wrote to it a letter, saying in a modest and straightforward way that he
had made no attempt to propagate his views, but he did desire to see the
slaves free. The students burned him in effigy; the college authorities
forced him to resign; a mob attacked him and he was driven from the
State. It was in the same State that a college professor's right to free
speech on a burning social question was vindicated by his students, his
colleagues, and the community, in 1903, and that Trinity College became
a leader in courageous and progressive sentiment on the questions of
the hour. Few were the men bold enough even to try the question of
personal independence in 1856. The suppression of free speech was in
itself one of the strongest possible arguments for the Republican cause.
The liberty of white men was at stake.
Conservatism, apprehension, timidity, in various phases, told against
the new party and its candidate. Northern commerce was largely bound up
with Southern interests. The threat of disunion weighed with some;
Grant, in his memoirs, says it was this that led him to vote for
Buchanan. Others shrank from trusting the helm in a tempest to hands as
untried as Fremont's. The mob who hated "niggers" swelled the opposition
vote. Taking advantage of the Know-nothing feeling, the fiction was
persistently circulated that Fremont was a Catholic. The disorder in
Kansas was pacified by the dispatch of a new Governor, Geary, to
reassure the North. Finally, money was spent on a scale unknown before
to defeat the Republican party,--itself in the stage of poverty and
virtue,--and spent probably with decisive effect in the critical October
election in Pennsylvania.
Against these disadvantages the young party made head gallantly. It
fired the youth of the North with an ardor unknown since the early days
of the republic. It inspired the poets of the people. Great crowds sang
the strains of the Marseillaise, with the refrain:
Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Fremont and victory!
The older heads were satisfied by the moderation and wisdom of the
party's principles. The reasonable element among the Abolitionists
hailed this first great popular advance, and allied themselves with it.
Whittier was the chief minstrel of the campaign. Of those to whom "the
Union" had been the talismanic word, that part which cared for nothing
better than the Union as it was, with slavery and freedom mixed,
supported Buchanan or Fillmore. The part that loved the Union as a means
to justice and freedom were for Fremont.
The October elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana showed that the first
Presidential battle was lost. November confirmed that verdict. New
England, New York, Ohio, Illinois, and the Northwest, had been
outweighed by the South and its allies, and Buchanan was the next
President. But never was defeat met with better courage or higher hopes
for the next encounter. Some unknown poet gave the battle-song:
Beneath thy skies, November,
Thy skies of cloud and rain,
Around our blazing camp-fires
We close our ranks again.
Then sound again the bugle!
Call the battle roll anew!
If months have well nigh won the field
What may not four years do?
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: A word should be said as to the frequency with which the
_Springfield Republican_ is quoted in this work. The author wrote an
earlier book, _The Life and Times of Samuel Bowles_, (Century Co.)--the
founder of the Republican. As the background of his life, a careful
study was made of the political events during his years of editorial
activity, 1844-77. The original matter for this was largely drawn from
the files of the _Republican_. In studying the whole ground afresh for
the present history, advantage was taken of this material, and further
citations were drawn from the same paper. The interpretation of current
events by an independent and sagacious newspaper yields invaluable
material for the historian; and my study of the _Republican_, from the
repeal of the Missouri compromise in 1854 to the present, has heightened
my respect for the breadth, sobriety, and moral insight with which it
judged the questions of the day.]