A hell of a storm, p.13
A Hell of a Storm, page 13
Days after writing to Greeley, Bovay, eager to attack Douglas’s bill, summoned a public gathering: “Nebraska: A meeting will be held at 6:30 o’clock this Wednesday evening at the Congregational Church in the Village of Ripon to remonstrate against the Kansas-Nebraska swindle.” Convening on March 1, this small caucus, following the aforesaid remonstrating, passed a resolution denouncing the “impudent audacity, treachery and meanness” involved in overturning the Missouri Compromise, “a solemn compact held as sacred as the constitution.” A further measure promised that should the noxious bill pass the Senate the Riponese there assembled would “throw away old party organizations and form a new party.” They did not have long to wait. Only three days later, at the ungodly hour of five in the morning, following an uninterrupted session that had begun at noon the previous day, the Senate saw the bill through. Douglas had managed the drama adeptly, one Massachusetts Whig conceded, dominating the proceedings with an extended speech “able, adroit [and] defiant.”13
Just days after the Senate vote, on March 7, Bovay received a cautious reply from Greeley, apparently shaken by the upper chamber’s acquiescence. “I am a beaten, broken-down, used-up politician,” he strained to affect folksy, “and have the soreness of many defeats in my bones. However, I am ready to follow any lead that promises to hasten the day of Northern emancipation. Your plan is all right if the people are ripe for it.” Uncertain just how primed the people were, he confided to Bovay of suspecting Yankees innumerable—Garrisonians and Emersonians to the contrary—of secretly coveting their own “good plantation and Negroes in Alabama—or even Kansas.” To the extent that these ease-dreaming farmers, wage earners, and mechanics could be reached, he continued, “we will try and do what we can. But remember that editors can only follow where the people’s heart is already prepared to go.”14 Qualifying, equivocating, and waiting to gauge rather than lead public opinion, Greeley held back, refusing to mention Ripon’s resolutions to the Tribune’s 150,000 readers.
Pressing on, Bovay and Ripon’s disaffected organized a second meeting specifically to form a new party. They gathered at the Little White Schoolhouse—forevermore a GOP shrine—on the southeast corner of Blackburn and Blossom Streets. The building, a simple single-story framed structure with gabled roof and chalky clapboard exterior, opened its doors on the evening of March 20 to dozens of citizens. “I went from house to house and from shop to shop and halted men on the street,” Bovay later recalled. Ecumenical in affiliation, the attendees included Whigs, Democrats, and Free-Soilers. “The hour was late and the candles burned low,” one participant reported, “it was a cold, windy night at the vernal equinox. But in the end all but two or three gave in and we formed our organization.” By vote, the town committees of the Whig and Free-Soil parties were ceremoniously dissolved and a new party—Republican—was fashioned. Its leadership consisted of three former Whigs, a sometime Democrat, and a lapsed Free-Soiler.15
Bovay believed, correctly as things turned out, that once the question of slavery’s expansion “dominated everything else,” American politics would enter a radical phase and upend the old partisan patterns formerly advanced by compromisers like Clay and Webster. “There was one great overshadowing pro-slavery organization, the Democratic party; there must also be one great anti-slavery party to antagonize it,” he argued. “The Whig party was not this party, and could not be…. It stood there a great, useless, lifeless thing, awaiting some possible political earthquake, which would be violent enough to shake it to pieces.” Ripon’s Republicans had not, of course, created a new national party, but rather a single body—in doing so, however, they anticipated a score of other groups, factions, and coalitions that coalesced in 1854 into a growing northern movement.16
In early June, Bovay wrote to Greeley, again pressing the editor to use the power of his newspaper to popularize “Republican” in the public imagination. On the twenty-fourth Greeley, no longer qualifying, equivocating, or waiting, finally complied in an editorial titled “Party Names and Public Duty.” Downplaying nomenclature, his piece proclaimed: “We should not much care whether those thus united were designated ‘Whig,’ ‘Free Democratic,’ or something else; though we think some more simple name like ‘Republican’ would more fitly designate those who had united to restore our union.”17 Greeley’s opinion—and his paper—mattered. Just three months earlier, in a letter to Carlyle, an observant (and perhaps mildly jealous) Emerson had wryly noted of the neck-bearded editor’s striking influence in the western states:
Greeley of the New York Tribune is the right spiritual father of all this region; he prints and disperses one hundred and ten thousand newspapers in one day,—multitudes of them in these [Wisconsin and Michigan] very parts. He had preceded me [on a middle western] lecture tour by a few days, and people had flocked together, coming thirty and forty miles to hear him speak; as was right, for he does all their thinking and theory for them, for two dollars a year.18
Many years later, in 1884, Bovay’s wife, Caroline, loyally criticized Greeley’s failure, in the now-famous June editorial, to credit her husband with coining the new party’s name. “I was not at all satisfied with the gingerly way in which it was done,” she allowed, “and thought it not worthy of Greeley.” Neither did she appreciate his continued silence when, following the Civil War, “Republican” had become the most potent political brand in the land: “I felt aggrieved that Greeley, after the name was accepted and grew famous and strong, never so much as alluded to whence the suggestion came.” At least he had the good taste, she granted, not to claim the title as his own invention—“Had he done so, I should have made a fuss.”19
Greeley, of course, had come late to the game, waiting to make sure, as he had told Bovay, that “the people are ripe for it.”20 And while he cautiously paused, other constituencies had moved on. That spring Gamaliel Bailey of the National Era, the Washington paper known for serializing Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and for printing Chase’s “Appeal,” joined former New York congressman Preston King in pressing northern House Democrats and Whigs to form a new coalition. Before noon on May 9 about thirty of them did just that, brought together by first-term Maine congressman Israel Washburn and meeting at a Mrs. Cratchett’s boardinghouse just east of the Capitol building. There, in two packed rooms, this conclave agreed to call themselves Republicans.21
Several weeks later, under a ripening grove of oak trees, an assembly of more than one thousand in Jackson, Michigan, too large to cram into a local hall, became the first state convention to adopt the Republican moniker. Even more clearly than in tiny Ripon did the citizens of Jackson take on the institutional apparatus of partisanship, by nominating officers, organizing committees, and drafting a platform. The latter explained, in martial-like language eerily anticipatory of the desperate war years to come, the crucial name change: “In view of the necessity of battling for the first principles of Republican government and against the schemes of an aristocracy, the most revolting and oppressive with which the earth was ever cursed or man debased, we will co-operate and be known as ‘Republicans’ until the contest terminated.”22
More generally a series of antislavery coalitions began to blossom that spring and summer in several northern states including Massachusetts and Vermont, Ohio, Indiana, and Iowa. Some of these assemblies avoided the name “Republican,” opting for something less partisan such as “Union,” “Independent,” and “People’s.” In the Upper Midwest antislavery sentiment proved particularly strong. Wisconsin Republicans, wedded to the Missouri Compromise, demanded slavery’s restriction to those states where it currently existed, while Michigan’s Republican convention more aggressively called for both the repeal of the Fugitive Slave Law and abolition in the District of Columbia.23
In more populated and powerful states such as New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, however, Whiggery retained a residual following that allowed it, for the time being, to limp along. And Dixie-hugging northern border states such as Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, though critical of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, still thought of themselves as fundamentally Jeffersonian. Still, the mottled process of turning the section’s Whigs, Free-Soilers, and even some Democrats into something other continued throughout the year. The degree of antislavery sentiment among groups and regions mixed invariably with more minute individual allegiances and loyalties to make this process both chaotic and cumbersome. Some wished for nothing more than a restoration of the pre-1854 territorial situation, while an ultraminority wanted to see the end of slavery in their lifetime. Pushed along by the disturbing specter of future Nebraskas, these clashing opinions and preferences gradually began to find common ground.
But it would take time. During this season of uncertainty Abraham Lincoln, still scrupulously Whig, watched the welling Republican movement from the Springfield, Illinois, law office he shared with William H. Herndon. There he read the local and Chicago papers along with Greeley’s Tribune, which carried news of the new party, congressional debates, and the mounting attacks on Douglas. He may even have sifted through Herndon’s scattered copies of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. At this point, one scholar notes, with partisan loyalties in play, “it was not clear how Lincoln could make any meaningful intervention.”24 But clarity and the fall elections were coming.
8 Forging a North
The Revolution is accomplished, and Slavery is king! How long shall this monarch reign? This is now the question for the Northern people to answer.
New-York Tribune, May 1854
The fugitive dream of northern nationhood vibrated lightly through the Ripon assembly, as well as those many Yankee-populated political meetings that quickly emanated in its wake. Their intent to create new parties, movements, and pride was by nature regional in its resolve. The Democracy and its Whig other, after all, were national organizations, with offices and supporters stretching from Maine to Mississippi, Shreveport to Chicago. To renounce allegiance to these established entities, to declare defiantly for free labor in the territories with no appetite for quiescence or compromise, could only mean commitment to a partisanship bereft of southern ties. The past pointed suggestively in this direction. The old Essex Junto, averse to planter rule under the Jeffersonians, fancied a confederacy of its own—an ideal not entirely unknown to those disgruntled Hartford conventioneers who, not long after, proposed alterations to the Constitution designed to reduce the Virginia squirearchy’s prevailing power. More recently the Liberty and Free-Soil parties advocated causes favorable to thin tiers of northern public opinion. Now fear of slavery’s entrance into the nation’s frontier sparked a fresh Yankee reply, but, unlike the earlier outbursts, with numbers enough to remake the electoral landscape.
Fueling this fire, a divided Congress waged a bitter war over Douglas’s bill through the winter and early spring. The struggle began in the Senate, where five tense weeks of debates took place before attentive audiences and a restive nation. Designed by the British-American neoclassical architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe following the War of 1812, the two-story upper chamber, a semicircular room covered by a sound-bouncing half dome, reeked of Parisian inspiration. Along the eastern wall ran a decorous visitors’ balcony, supported by eight mock Grecian marble columns—the stone quarried from the nearby Potomac River. The bowed western wall, added in 1828 and featuring wrought-iron railing, offered a second seating area known informally as the “Ladies’ Gallery.” A curved table residing on an elevated platform near the center of the room was occupied by the vice president (president of the Senate); an elaborate canopy, crowned by a gilt eagle and shield, covered the dais. The chamber’s several skylights were accentuated by a brass chandelier procured from the Philadelphia firm Cornelius and Company, while an 1823 portrait of George Washington by Rembrandt Peale sat high above the east balcony.1
This gracious space became, in the winter of 1854, a forum for prickly exchanges, veiled threats, and the random mutual contempt. Having brought his contentious bill before the Senate, Douglas now sought to defend it before a buzzing crowd on January 30. Though giving the appearance of being alone in the arena, he in fact enjoyed certain unassailable advantages—solid southern backing, Pierce’s considerable support, and a significant Democratic majority. Entering the fray and eager to face his “Appeal” nemeses, he attacked both Chase and Sumner as rash and irresponsible, exhibiting in these eruptions, so one observer noted, a “defiant tone and pugnacious attitudinization” that released “the terrific tornado raging within him.” Chase desperately attempted to cut in, but Douglas—“I will yield the floor to no Abolitionist”—would have none of it. Instead, he defended the principle of popular sovereignty as having already superseded previous agreements. And this form of territorial democracy, he continued, ultimately counted for more than what any Congress could say or do regarding slavery’s future. “Let all this quibbling about the Missouri Compromise, about the territory acquired from France, about the Act of 1820, be cast behind you; for the simple question is, will you allow the people to legislate for themselves upon the subject of slavery?”2 Such an argument served Douglas well. He could say to southerners that the frontier, formerly closed to bondage, would now be open if “the people” wished it, all the while winking to northerners that an uncooperative climate made cotton cultivation an impossible proposition for the plains.
Leaving nothing to chance and signaling to Yankee moderates, Douglas cannily identified the “Appeal’s” signatories as dangerous incendiaries. Nearly a dozen times he described Chase and Sumner as “abolition confederates,” while more generally condemning Free Soilism as an extreme ideology. “I do not like, I never did like,” he said, “the system of legislation on our part, by which a geographical line, in violation of the laws of nature… should be run to establish institutions for a people.”3 He thus portrayed the Missouri Compromise, revered by many Americans for keeping the West open for free labor, as a mistake that had limited the people’s freedom—the freedom, apparently, to choose slavery.
Three days later Chase replied to Douglas in his own Senate address. As the resident parent of the “Appeal,” he assumed leadership for opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska bill, even as he understood its passage to be merely a matter of time. He played for a larger audience, rather, seeking to expose for northerners the act’s possible catastrophic significance for future white western settlement. He further hoped to rally the doubts of more moderate Whigs in threefold fashion: by poking holes in Douglas’s dubious notion that the Compromise of 1850 was designed to supersede the Missouri Compromise, by summoning the Founders’ presumed desire to put slavery on the road to extinction (“I invoke Jefferson as a witness”), and by mocking the morality of popular sovereignty—“What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights? Is that exact justice? Is that the teaching of enlightened, liberal, progressive Democracy?” Capping a bravura performance, Chase closed on a note that his southern colleagues could only have taken as a threat: “Methinks I see in my mind a great and puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks.”4 Given the times, the cause, and the congressman, one could only suppose that he spoke of a stirred and rising Yankee kingdom.
A few days later, on the eighth, Massachusetts’s Edward Everett, a moderate Whig sent to Washington by Cotton Bostonians eager to leaven Sumner’s radicalism, took the floor. As he was the only northern Whig on the Senate territorial committee, his views were highly anticipated. A classic New England divine—preacher, politician, and professor (he instructed Emerson at Harvard)—Everett anxiously strode the Senate floor, suddenly eclipsed by circumstances. The forbearance he embraced, the Unitarianism he once proclaimed, and the ancient Greek literature he formerly taught were all emblems of the past, a nod to the quaint relics of an old republic now coming undone. Dressed gravely in black with receding salt-and-pepper hair, a pronounced jawline, and a direct if sensitive gaze, he enjoyed the respect of the men he now faced; Douglas he considered a friend. On this day he spoke smoothly, gently, and even-temperedly. “With great regret,” he explained, he could not favor the Kansas-Nebraska Bill as it sought to circumvent Congress’s duty to organize the territories; he thought popular sovereignty “an absurdity.” Addressing his colleagues and an absorbed audience, he seemed both embarrassed and confused, unable to make sense of the breach that now threatened to break the nation in two. Aching for conciliation, he assured the chamber’s southern contingent that he wished only for “moderation… and harmony between the two great sections of the country,” openly, if a little patronizingly, crediting the planters and their congressional satellites with “honest[y] and purity of motive.”5
These sugared words left little impression. Neither did Everett’s shallow, tacked-on, and on the whole unpersuasive “back to Africa” assurances carry conviction. Sounding a little like Stowe, he predicted a humane, even heroic ending for all concerned if the races simply parted:
I believe… that the fate of that great and interesting continent in the elder world, Africa, is closely intertwined and wrapped up with the fortunes of her children in all the parts of the earth to which they have been dispersed, and that at some future time, which is already in fact beginning, they will go back to the land of their fathers the voluntary missionaries of Civilization and Christianity.6
