A hell of a storm, p.14
A Hell of a Storm, page 14
Several days later, however, in a private communication, he betrayed a less upbeat impression, sensing the inevitable destruction of the existing system before a new and sharper partisanship that promised, so he wrote, to “array the Country upon the one question of Slavery.”7
On the seventeenth Seward delivered his own riposte to the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, in language far less conciliatory than Everett’s. He frankly informed the South of its ancillary status in the “eternal struggle between conservatism and progress; between truth and error; between right and wrong.” The slave drivers, that is to say, stood—alongside feudalism, the pope, and crazy King George III—on the wrong side of history. Chattel servitude managed to stumble into the nineteenth century, but the institution, an embarrassing heirloom of pharaonic days, failed to match free labor’s splendid energy; the size of northern cities, economies, and surpluses attested to this fact and nothing a mere congress might do in regard to a territorial bill affecting a distant spot on a flat map could change that. Adopting a variation of his notorious assertion made during the Compromise of 1850 debates that a “higher law” than the Constitution determined events, Seward now declared, “Man proposes and God disposes. You may legislate and abrogate and abnegate as you will; but there is a superior Power that overrules all your actions, and all your refusals to act; and I fondly hope and trust overrules them to the advancement of the greatness and glory of our country.”8
These arresting sentiments, informed by an evangelical age’s deep impress, pushed Seward miles to the left of Everett, his fellow Whig. But the debate had hardly crested and all of Washington, covered now in a deep winter white, anticipated the speech of a certain Byronic senator. Seward too looked on with great interest. “We are snowed under,” he wrote a colleague shortly after delivering his South-baiting address, “the ground is covered with a mantle eighteen inches thick. Mr. Sumner’s fame has gathered a bright array of ladies in the gallery; and we are waiting for him to begin.”9
Making his way before the bright array, Sumner began on the twenty-first. Considering Douglas’s bill “already amply refuted by Senators who have preceded me,” he felt at liberty to range broadly as the subject, the crowd, and the moment moved him. In short, the Founders, so he said, were protoabolitionists, Douglas (“that human anomaly—a Northern man with Southern principles”) had betrayed his section, and popular sovereignty broke against the nation’s most sacred assumptions. “I am unwilling to admit, Sir,” he said, facing the full chamber, “that the prohibition of Slavery in the Territories is in any just sense an infringement of the local sovereignty. Slavery is an infraction of the immutable law of nature, and, as such, cannot be considered a natural incident to any sovereignty, especially in a country which has solemnly declared, in its Declaration of Independence, the inalienable right of all men to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Appropriating the wrong-side-of-history argument proffered by Seward and others, he declared slavery merely a sectional institution, certain to give way, already giving way, to the irrepressible demands of freedom. “Nothing,” he closed, “can be settled which is not right.”10
Sumner’s speech electrified the Northeast. A print edition circulated by the Boston Commonwealth quickly sold out, while separate versions appeared in the New York Times and Greeley’s Tribune. Hirelings in at least one Massachusetts factory were read the address, a paean to free labor, as they worked. Staid Charles Francis Adams, son of John Quincy Adams, informed Sumner of polite Boston’s approval of his rhetorical war on the planters: “Since the introduction of this infamous bill into the Senate, your position here has undergone a most sensible change, even those who have been most opposed to you, now acknowledge that you speak the voice of Massachusetts.”11 The conservative Bay State, quite willing to go along with the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, appeared, in light of slavery’s potential extension, willing to go along no longer.
Four days after Sumner’s address, the lengthening debate passed over to the Democrats. For a week several men from both sections spoke in favor of Douglas’s bill trying, with uneven results, to court consensus. A critical mass of observers, including the distinguished New York lawyer George Templeton Strong, remained wary—“Nebraska or Nebrascal controversy raging,” Strong informed his diary on March 2. Beginning late the following evening Douglas, repeatedly stung during the previous month’s debate by the slings of Sumner and others, wound up the deliberation by attacking his attackers in a heated three-hour address that spilled over into the following morning. Though the hour grew late, the galleries remained packed with a rapt audience entranced by the unfolding political theater and the rare raw emotions Douglas so liberally displayed. In the course of flaying those senatorial critics of popular sovereignty, he unleashed a slew of “by Gods” and “God damns” that bounced about the august chamber. Turning angrily to Chase and Sumner, he fairly barked, “You degrade your own States,” and held them accountable for the bill’s many northern critics. “You have stimulated [the people] to these acts,” he claimed, and called them “disgraceful to your party, and disgraceful to your cause.”12
That morning, at 4:55, Douglas’s bill passed the Senate by a comfortable if sectionally divided 37–14 margin; the slave states went 23–2 while their northern colleagues split 14–12. In what some undoubtedly took as a weak gesture, Everett, citing illness, avoided the vote. His resignation a few weeks later seemed a portent of moderate politics’ declining fortunes in America. More determined partisans, however, regarded the bill’s passage as a provocation, and as Chase left the Capitol building with Sumner immediately following the vote, the rumble of distant cannon fire announcing Douglas’s triumph to a sleepy city, he turned to his companion and promised a coming struggle: “They celebrate a present victory, but the echoes they awake will never rest till slavery itself shall die.”13
* * *
Now the bill moved on to the House, and with it a sharpening sense of urgency among a growing number of northerners that a crisis loomed. The Latrobe-designed lower chamber (used from 1819 to 1857), the current National Statuary Hall, featured a Greek Revival design that made it look like an amphitheater from antiquity complete with a double-sunk coffered wooden ceiling and fluted marble columns. Members occupied desks organized in tiered, semicircular rows that faced a raised Speaker’s podium adorned with a red-draped canopy. As a debating stage, the room proved a beautiful disaster. Noise reverberated, voices echoed, and the acoustics of congressional discretion proved challenging.
Shaken by the fierce battle in the Senate, wary Democratic House managers, possibly hoping to cool emotions, held on to the bill for two weeks before introducing it to their colleagues. But when the lavishly sideburned William Richardson, an Illinois representative, Douglas ally, and chairman of the Committee on Territories, moved on March 21 to proceed, he immediately ran into trouble. Hoping to ensure party unity with a minimum of infighting, he proposed to his colleagues a binding caucus—all to go with the majority. But several northern Democrats, noting the imminent autumn elections and apparently interested in keeping their jobs, wanted the flexibility, should their constituencies show definite signs of discontent, to jump ship and cast career-saving “noes.” This raised real questions about the bill’s likelihood of success. On paper there seemed to be no doubt of its passage. Democrats enjoyed an immense 158 to 76 advantage in the House, though 92 of these men represented Yankee districts. With anti-Kansas-Nebraska momentum building above the Mason-Dixon Line—Harriet Beecher Stowe, for one, financed a campaign at this time that flooded Congress with the signatures of over three thousand clergymen opposed to the proposal—Richardson realized he faced an unmistakable struggle.14
Several of his more vulnerable colleagues demanded a strong statement emphasizing the bill’s intent to promote popular sovereignty. Up to this point free-soil sentiment had all too successfully stressed the act’s elimination of the Missouri Compromise and its potential benefit to the Slave Power. This endangered those incumbents who wished to engage their respective electorates with a positive narrative of self-government advancing across the frontier. Equally problematic for some representatives was the inclusion of inflammatory language in the bill—the Clayton amendment—which “excluded unnaturalized… immigrants from political participation in the organization of the territories.” The Democratic Party’s northern wing included a conspicuous foreign-born constituency, however, and this proviso struck many of these members as little shy of suicidal.15
Accordingly, Douglas’s bill (designated S. 22) went not to Richardson’s small Committee on Territories, where it was expected to receive fast-track attention, but rather, and following a 110–95 vote dominated by 66 Yankee Democrats, to the Committee of the Whole, meaning the entire House would debate and amend the measure. Moreover, it now lay buried beneath more than fifty other proposals on the cluttered House calendar; an outmaneuvered Richardson worried that it would be “kill[ed]… by indirection.” This tactic caused a general kerfuffle in the chamber and Francis B. Cutting, a New York Democrat who had made the motion to sink the bill, nearly tumbled into a duel with Kentucky Democrat John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as a result. The latter, supposing the South deceived, had publicly called Cutting’s gambit “the act of a man who throws his arm in apparently friendly embrace around another saying, ‘How is it with thee brother?’ and at the same time covertly stabs him to the heart.” Cutting replied by calling Breckinridge’s comments “unbecoming of a Congressman.” From there the tenor of the dustup intensified, with both men claiming injury from “personal attack.” Cutting finally went a word too far—accusing Breckinridge of “skulking”—and a duel seemed inevitable. Each man considered himself the challenged party and thus took the initiative of choosing weaponry—western rifles for Breckinridge, pistols for Cutting. This farce mercifully collapsed with the judicious aid of friends on both sides, though as a performative exercise it confirmed Yankee suspicions of southern bullying.16
Newspapers took great interest in the commotion, of course, with the Newark Daily Advertiser roaring at one point: “CUTTING REPORTED KILLED,” before more accurately acknowledging (in far smaller font) that it had no evidence of Cutting so much as stubbing his toe. Though no affair of honor had transpired, Cutting received the grateful encomiums of northerners who, so the Albany Evening Journal reported, were bone tired of those “fiery braggarts” from the South, “accustomed to swagger in the House.” Down in Dixie, the Richmond Examiner criticized Breckinridge for playing to type: “Already are the demagogue press of Northern Abolitionism railing out against Southern ‘bullyism.’ Already are the passions of the populace invoked against Southern hauteur and violence…. The populace at the North is in danger of being excited to a pitch that will make [their congressional] members more fearful than ever to stand by the South.”17
Despite Democratic majorities in thirteen northern state delegations, the unprecedented flux in American politics—with Whigs, Free-Soilers, nativists, and growing clusters of anti-Nebraska coalitions in varying degrees of ebb and flow—cast serious doubts on the party’s cohesion. All New England along with New York and New Jersey, Ohio and Wisconsin, appeared to be in revolt. While this jockeying ensued, Douglas and the administration worked furiously behind the scenes, applying pressure and patronage to reconcile the irreconcilables in their camp and angle the bill to a vote. With Georgia Whig (and future Confederate vice president) Alexander H. Stephens conducting operations in the lower chamber and Douglas tigerishly managing strategy—“He has every man in the House… marked and numbered,” noted one correspondent—momentum built for taking up the act. The fifty-some bills impeding its progress were, in a series of roll calls over a fifteen-day period, individually laid aside until, on May 8, it moved to the top of the list.18
Debate on the bill began auspiciously in an exhausting thirty-six-hour session on the eleventh that spilled over into the following day. An imperious Douglas offended more than a few congressmen by shouting out orders, browbeating the Speaker, and parading about the House floor as if he were actually a House member. As the deliberations pressed interminably on, some of the parched representatives thought it prudent to fortify themselves with alcohol, which did remarkably little to improve the quality of the debate. A minor fracas, rather, broke out late in the evening of the twelfth when Ohio’s Lewis Campbell whetted the frustration of Henry Edmundson, an impatient Virginia Democrat, by conducting a filibuster. Said to be “very drunk and heavily armed,” Edmundson attempted to provoke a fight with Campbell. Some men surged to separate the would-be combatants; others stood on their desks to better view the chaos while insults flew about the chamber until the sergeant at arms restored some semblance of order. At that point the House mercifully adjourned.19
Over the next few days the nation’s papers reported, speculated, and ruminated on the odd rumblings coming out of Congress. “The contest has begun,” the Chicago Tribune related on the twelfth, “we rejoice to see the spirit and determination with which [Douglas’s] opponents enter upon the task of strangling the [popular sovereignty] monster.” Three days later the Richmond Enquirer, eager to throttle an altogether different kind of beast, counseled a hard push to put down a presumed free-soil minority in Congress. “Extreme cases demand extreme remedies,” the paper declared, “and it becomes the duty of the majority, if necessary, to repel violence by violence, and to trample under foot the arbitrary formalities of parliamentary law, rather than suffer them to be converted into an engine in the hands of faction for the overthrow of the government.”20 Such casual encouragement by the cavalier set to squash, elide, or otherwise set aside the practice of “parliamentary law,” however, only played to type, and the following day the Hartford Daily Courant weighed in, offering a fresh take on the old Slave Power conspiracy:
A dark spot now arises in the history of our country. The South, having elected a Northern President [Pierce] devoted to their interests… have stept over the boundary of the Compromises and insist upon the abrogation of that of 1820, by which a violent contest was pacifically settled. They have obtained their share of the benefits of this Compromise [with Arkansas and Missouri safely in the Union] and now demand of us to relinquish ours. By doing so they have aroused a spirit which will not easily be quieted. This movement has shown that there can be no faith kept by them—and that no terms of contract and no compromise are felt binding upon them when they can be changed by a vote of Congress or bullied out of the North.21
Deliberations, often fractious, resumed in Congress until the evening of the twenty-second when, after a few hours of negotiating, Richardson suddenly proposed House bill S. 22 without the noxious Clayton amendment. The way was now clear for northern Democrats to support a vote. This put the opposition in a panic and it tried desperately to adjourn—in each instance beaten back. By 11:00 p.m. the Kansas-Nebraska Act had passed, 113 to 100. Coming out in force, southern Democrats voted 57 to 2 in favor of the bill, while the party’s divided northern wing split nearly evenly, 44 to 42. The Whigs evinced an equally stark sectionalism; its slim southern branch voted 12 to 7 for the bill, while all 45 northern Whigs opposed it. Over the coming weeks and months some of these men in the latter camp, and more importantly their constituents, would become Republicans. But Douglas proved deaf to this gathering danger. “Nebraska is through the House,” he rejoiced. “I took the reins in my hand, applied whip and spur, and brought the ‘wagon’ out…. Glory enough for one day.”22
The House version of the bill anticlimactically went to the Senate, which accepted it, complete with the deletion of the Clayton amendment. Pierce then signed the legislation into law. His secretary, Sidney Webster, recognized the extreme degree of administrative purchase it took to see the contentious deed done—“The President is and will be more than heretofore embarrassed,” he wrote, “by the inducements held out during the pendency of Nebraska.”23
Though a great struggle had just concluded, the real fight over popular sovereignty had only begun. Chase saw this clearly and, in the shadow of Douglas’s celebration, urged “Freemen and lovers of freedom to stand upon their guard and prepare for the worst events.” This fatalistic tone now became vogue. The reliably sober New York Times, for one, broke form and called the bill’s passage “part of [a] great scheme for extending and perpetuating the supremacy of the Slave Power,” while the conservative George Templeton Strong, among many thousands, could sense his once reflexive political allegiances in flux: “I’m resisting awful temptations to avow myself a Free-Soiler. Think I shall come out on the platform at last, a unit in the great Northern party the consummation of this swindle will call into being.”24
Douglas, by contrast, presumed all to be well. “The storm will soon spend its fury,” he wrote to former Georgia governor Howell Cobb that spring, “and the people of the north will sustain the measure when they come to understand it.” But as the season and the year wore on just the opposite occurred. Greater acquaintance with the provocative act and its threat to enlarge slavery’s domain fostered a fierce reaction. An angry Sumner caught this restive mood when speaking (ironically) to the Senate on the fateful night the House squeezed Douglas’s measure through: “Sir, it is the best bill on which Congress ever acted; for it annuls all past compromises with Slavery, and makes any future compromises impossible. Thus it puts Freedom and Slavery face to face, and bids them grapple.” Predicting a coming perdition for a political system that, so he argued, had long injured Yankee constituencies, Sumner welcomed the day “when, at last, there will really be a North, and the Slave Power will be broken.”25
9 Bibles and Guns
