Buchanan Elected President--The Dred Scott Decision--Douglas's
Springfield Speech, 1857--Lincoln's Answering Speech--Criticism of Dred
Scott Decision--Kansas Civil War--Buchanan Appoints Walker--Walker's
Letter on Kansas--The Lecompton Constitution--Revolt of Douglas
The election of 1856 once more restored the Democratic party to full
political control in national affairs. James Buchanan was elected
President to succeed Pierce; the Senate continued, as before, to have a
decided Democratic majority; and a clear Democratic majority of
twenty-five was chosen to the House of Representatives to succeed the
heavy opposition majority of the previous Congress.
Though the new House did not organize till a year after it was elected,
the certainty of its coming action was sufficient not only to restore,
but greatly to accelerate the pro-slavery reaction begun by the repeal
of the Missouri Compromise. This impending drift of national policy now
received a powerful impetus by an act of the third coördinate branch,
the judicial department of the government.
Very unexpectedly to the public at large, the Supreme Court of the
United States, a few days after Buchanan's inauguration, announced its
judgment in what quickly became famous as the Dred Scott decision. Dred
Scott, a negro slave in Missouri, sued for his freedom on the ground
that his master had taken him to reside in the State of Illinois and
the Territory of Wisconsin, where slavery was prohibited by law. The
question had been twice decided by Missouri courts, once for and then
against Dred Scott's claim; and now the Supreme Court of the United
States, after hearing the case twice elaborately argued by eminent
counsel, finally decided that Dred Scott, being a negro, could not
become a citizen, and therefore was not entitled to bring suit. This
branch, under ordinary precedent, simply threw the case out of court;
but in addition, the decision, proceeding with what lawyers call _obiter
dictum_, went on to declare that under the Constitution of the United
States neither Congress nor a territorial legislature possessed power to
prohibit slavery in Federal Territories.
The whole country immediately flared up with the agitation of the
slavery question in this new form. The South defended the decision with
heat, the North protested against it with indignation, and the
controversy was greatly intensified by a phrase in the opinion of Chief
Justice Taney, that at the time of the Declaration of Independence
negroes were considered by general public opinion to be so far inferior
"that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
This decision of the Supreme Court placed Senator Douglas in a curious
dilemma. While it served to indorse and fortify his course in repealing
the Missouri Compromise, it, on the other hand, totally negatived his
theory by which he had sought to make the repeal palatable, that the
people of a Territory, by the exercise of his great principle of popular
sovereignty, could decide the slavery question for themselves. But,
being a subtle sophist, he sought to maintain a show of consistency by
an ingenious evasion. In the month of June following the decision, he
made a speech at Springfield, Illinois, in which he tentatively
announced what in the next year became widely celebrated as his Freeport
doctrine, and was immediately denounced by his political confrères of
the South as serious party heterodoxy. First lauding the Supreme Court
as "the highest judicial tribunal on earth," and declaring that violent
resistance to its decrees must be put down by the strong arm of the
government, he went on thus to define a master's right to his slave in
Kansas:
"While the right continues in full force under the guarantees of the
Constitution, and cannot be divested or alienated by an act of Congress,
it necessarily remains a barren and a worthless right unless sustained,
protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local
legislation prescribing adequate remedies for its violation. These
regulations and remedies must necessarily depend entirely upon the will
and wishes of the people of the Territory, as they can only be
prescribed by the local legislatures. Hence, the great principle of
popular sovereignty and self-government is sustained and firmly
established by the authority of this decision."
Both the legal and political aspects of the new question immediately
engaged the earnest attention of Mr. Lincoln; and his splendid power of
analysis set its ominous portent in a strong light. He made a speech in
reply to Douglas about two weeks after, subjecting the Dred Scott
decision to a searching and eloquent criticism. He said:
"That decision declares two propositions--first, that a negro cannot sue
in the United States courts; and secondly, that Congress cannot prohibit
slavery in the Territories. It was made by a divided court--dividing
differently on the different points. Judge Douglas does not discuss the
merits of the decision, and in that respect I shall follow his example,
believing I could no more improve on McLean and Curtis than he could on
Taney.... We think the Dred Scott decision was erroneous. We know the
court that made it has often overruled its own decisions, and we shall
do what we can to have it overrule this. We offer no resistance to
it.... If this important decision had been made by the unanimous
concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partizan bias, and
in accordance with legal public expectation and with the steady practice
of the departments throughout our history and had been in no part based
on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or if, wanting in
some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had
there been affirmed and reaffirmed through a course of years, it then
might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, not to
acquiesce in it as a precedent. But when, as is true, we find it wanting
in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it
is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having
yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country....
"The Chief Justice does not directly assert, but plainly assumes, as a
fact, that the public estimate of the black man is more favorable now
than it was in the days of the Revolution. This assumption is a mistake.
In some trifling particulars the condition of that race has been
ameliorated; but as a whole, in this country, the change between then
and now is decidedly the other way; and their ultimate destiny has never
appeared so hopeless as in the last three or four years. In two of the
five States--New Jersey and North Carolina--that then gave the free
negro the right of voting, the right has since been taken away; and in
the third--New York--it has been greatly abridged; while it has not
been extended, so far as I know, to a single additional State, though
the number of the States has more than doubled. In those days, as I
understand, masters could, at their own pleasure, emancipate their
slaves; but since then such legal restraints have been made upon
emancipation as to amount almost to prohibition. In those days,
legislatures held the unquestioned power to abolish slavery in their
respective States, but now it is becoming quite fashionable for State
constitutions to withhold that power from the legislatures. In those
days, by common consent, the spread of the black man's bondage to the
new countries was prohibited, but now Congress decides that it will not
continue the prohibition and the Supreme Court decides that it could not
if it would. In those days, our Declaration of Independence was held
sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the
bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed and sneered
at and construed, and hawked at and torn, till, if its framers could
rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the
powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him,
ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is
fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison-house; they have
searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after
another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him; and now they
have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can
never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key--the keys in the
hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred
different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what
invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to
make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."
There is not room to quote the many other equally forcible points in Mr.
Lincoln's speech. Our narrative must proceed to other significant events
in the great pro-slavery reaction. Thus far the Kansas experiment had
produced nothing but agitation, strife, and bloodshed. First the storm
in Congress over repeal; then a mad rush of emigration to occupy the
Territory. This was followed by the Border Ruffian invasions, in which
Missouri voters elected a bogus territorial legislature, and the bogus
legislature enacted a code of bogus laws. In turn, the more rapid
emigration from free States filled the Territory with a majority of
free-State voters, who quickly organized a compact free-State party,
which sent a free-State constitution, known as the Topeka Constitution,
to Congress, and applied for admission. This movement proved barren,
because the two houses of Congress were divided in sentiment. Meanwhile,
President Pierce recognized the bogus laws, and issued proclamations
declaring the free-State movement illegal and insurrectionary; and the
free-State party had in its turn baffled the enforcement of the bogus
laws, partly by concerted action of nonconformity and neglect, partly by
open defiance. The whole finally culminated in a chronic border war
between Missouri raiders on one hand, and free-State guerrillas on the
other; and it became necessary to send Federal troops to check the
disorder. These were instructed by Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of
War, that "rebellion must be crushed." The future Confederate President
little suspected the tremendous prophetic import of his order. The most
significant illustration of the underlying spirit of the struggle was
that President Pierce had successively appointed three Democratic
governors for the Territory, who, starting with pro-slavery bias, all
became free-State partizans, and were successively insulted and driven
from the Territory by the pro-slavery faction when in manly protest they
refused to carry out the behests of the Missouri conspiracy. After a
three years' struggle neither faction had been successful, neither party
was satisfied; and the administration of Pierce bequeathed to its
successor the same old question embittered by rancor and defeat.
President Buchanan began his administration with a boldly announced
pro-slavery policy. In his inaugural address he invoked the popular
acceptance of the Dred Scott decision, which he already knew was coming;
and a few months later declared in a public letter that slavery "exists
in Kansas under the Constitution of the United States.... How it ever
could have been seriously doubted is a mystery." He chose for the
governorship of Kansas, Robert J. Walker, a citizen of Mississippi of
national fame and of pronounced pro-slavery views, who accepted his
dangerous mission only upon condition that a new constitution, to be
formed for that State, must be honestly submitted to the real voters of
Kansas for adoption or rejection. President Buchanan and his advisers,
as well as Senator Douglas, accepted this condition repeatedly and
emphatically. But when the new governor went to the Territory, he soon
became convinced, and reported to his chief, that to make a slave State
of Kansas was a delusive hope. "Indeed," he wrote, "it is universally
admitted here that the only real question is this: whether Kansas shall
be a conservative, constitutional, Democratic, and ultimately free
State, or whether it shall be a Republican and abolition State."
As a compensation for the disappointment, however, he wrote later direct
to the President:
"But we must have a slave State out of the southwestern Indian
Territory, and then a calm will follow; Cuba be acquired with the
acquiescence of the North; and your administration, having in reality
settled the slavery question, be regarded in all time to come as a
re-signing and re-sealing of the Constitution.... I shall be pleased
soon to hear from you. Cuba! Cuba! (and Porto Rico, if possible) should
be the countersign of your administration, and it will close in a blaze
of glory."
And the governor was doubtless much gratified to receive the President's
unqualified indorsement in reply: "On the question of submitting the
constitution to the _bona fide_ resident settlers of Kansas, I am
willing to stand or fall."
The sequel to this heroic posturing of the chief magistrate is one of
the most humiliating chapters in American politics. Attendant
circumstances leave little doubt that a portion of Mr. Buchanan's
cabinet, in secret league and correspondence with the pro-slavery
Missouri-Kansas cabal, aided and abetted the framing and adoption of
what is known to history as the Lecompton Constitution, an organic
instrument of a radical pro-slavery type; that its pretended submission
to popular vote was under phraseology, and in combination with such
gigantic electoral frauds and dictatorial procedure, as to render the
whole transaction a mockery of popular government; still worse, that
President Buchanan himself, proving too weak in insight and will to
detect the intrigue or resist the influence of his malign counselors,
abandoned his solemn pledges to Governor Walker, adopted the Lecompton
Constitution as an administration measure, and recommended it to
Congress in a special message, announcing dogmatically: "Kansas is
therefore at this moment as much a slave State as Georgia or South
Carolina."
The radical pro-slavery attitude thus assumed by President Buchanan and
Southern leaders threw the Democratic party of the free States into
serious disarray, while upon Senator Douglas the blow fell with the
force of party treachery--almost of personal indignity. The Dred Scott
decision had rudely brushed aside his theory of popular sovereignty, and
now the Lecompton Constitution proceedings brutally trampled it down in
practice. The disaster overtook him, too, at a critical moment. His
senatorial term was about to expire; the next Illinois legislature would
elect his successor. The prospect was none too bright for him, for at
the late presidential election Illinois had chosen Republican State
officers. He was compelled either to break his pledges to the Democratic
voters of Illinois, or to lead a revolt against President Buchanan and
the Democratic leaders in Congress. Party disgrace at Washington, or
popular disgrace in Illinois, were the alternatives before him. To lose
his reëlection to the Senate would almost certainly end his public
career. When, therefore, Congress met in December, 1857, Douglas boldly
attacked and denounced the Lecompton Constitution, even before the
President had recommended it in his special message.
"Stand by the doctrine," he said, "that leaves the people perfectly free
to form and regulate their institutions for themselves, in their own
way, and your party will be united and irresistible in power.... If
Kansas wants a slave-State constitution, 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 down or voted up. Do you suppose, after the pledges of my honor
that I would go for that principle and leave the people to vote as they
choose, that I would now degrade myself by voting one way if the
slavery clause be voted down, and another way if it be voted up? I care
not how that vote may stand.... Ignore Lecompton; ignore Topeka; treat
both those party movements as irregular and void; pass a fair bill--the
one that we framed ourselves when we were acting as a unit; have a fair
election--and you will have peace in the Democratic party, and peace
throughout the country, in ninety days. The people want a fair vote.
They will never be satisfied without it.... But if this constitution is
to be forced down our throats in violation of the fundamental principle
of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and
insult, I will resist it to the last."
Walker, the fourth Democratic governor who had now been sacrificed to
the interests of the Kansas pro-slavery cabal, also wrote a sharp letter
of resignation denouncing the Lecompton fraud and policy; and such was
the indignation aroused in the free States, that although the Senate
passed the Lecompton Bill, twenty-two Northern Democrats joining their
vote to that of the Republicans, the measure was defeated in the House
of Representatives. The President and his Southern partizans bitterly
resented this defeat; and the schism between them, on the one hand, and
Douglas and his adherents, on the other, became permanent and
irreconcilable.