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