Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

Going into the campaign more united than in any election since Jackson’s day, the Democrats won by a landslide.4 Pierce fulfilled southern expectations. Although his efforts to acquire Cuba failed, the administration enforced the fugitive slave law vigorously and opened the remainder of the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30’ to slavery. But it did so at great cost to domestic tranquility, to the structure of the Democratic party, and ultimately to the Union itself.

Appealed to for help, President Pierce ordered several companies of marines, cavalry, and artillery to Boston, where they joined state militia and local police to keep the peace while a federal commissioner determined Burns’s fate. “Incur any expense,” Pierce wired the district attorney in Boston, “to insure the execution of the law.” The president also ordered a revenue cutter to stand by to carry Burns back to Virginia.

The textile magnate Amos A. Lawrence said that “we went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.”6 A federal grand jury indicted Higginson, Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and four other white and black abolitionists for riot and inciting to riot. After a district judge quashed the first indictment on a technicality, the government dropped the charges because it recognized the impossibility of winning a jury trial in Massachusetts. William Lloyd Garrison publicly burned a copy of the Constitution on the Fourth of July while thousands breathed Amen to his denunciation of this document as a covenant with death.

Coming at the same time as the Anthony Burns case, this law may have been the most important single event pushing the nation toward civil war. Kansas-Nebraska finished off the Whig party and gave birth to a new, entirely northern Republican party.

So Douglas took the fateful step. He added an explicit repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’. More than that, his new version of the bill organized two territories—Nebraska west of Iowa, and Kansas west of Missouri. This looked like a device to reserve Kansas for slavery and Nebraska for freedom,

This did indeed provoke a hell of a storm that made the debates of 1850 look like a gentle shower. The first clouds blew up from the Pierce administration itself. The president feared the political consequences of repudiating a covenant sanctified by thirty-four years of national life. Except for Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and Secretary of the Navy James Dobbin of North Carolina, the cabinet opposed the repeal clause.

With Davis and Douglas they pried their way into the White House on Sunday, January 22 (Pierce disliked doing business on the Sabbath), and confronted the president with an ultimatum: endorse repeal or lose the South. Pierce surrendered. Moreover, he agreed to make the revised Kansas-Nebraska bill “a test of party orthodoxy.

Douglas insisted that repeal of the ban on slavery north of 36° 30’ was nothing new. The Compromise of 1850, he declared, had superseded that restriction by allowing popular sovereignty in former Mexican territory north as well as south of that line. Northern senators exposed the speciousness of this argument. The Compromise of 1850 applied only to the Mexican cession, not to the Louisiana Purchase, and no one at the time—Douglas included—had thought otherwise.

Adding insult to injury, southern senators killed a bill passed by a predominantly northern vote in the House to provide settlers with a 160-acre homestead grant on public lands. Such a law, explained one southerner, “would prove a most efficient ally for Abolition by encouraging and stimulating the settlement of free farms with Yankees and foreigners pre-committed to resist the participancy of slaveholders in the public domain.”

The first step was to prevent the spread of this cancer, which the fathers took with the Northwest Ordinance, the prohibition of the African slave trade in 1807, and the Missouri Compromise restriction of 1820. The second was to begin a process of gradual emancipation, which the generation of the fathers had accomplished in the states north of Maryland. Lincoln

Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. . . . If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union; but we shall have so saved it, as to make, and to keep it, forever worthy of the saving.

A majority of northern voters in 1854 seemed to agree. The elections were a stunning rebuke to the Democrats. After carrying all but two northern states in 1852, they lost control of all but two free-state legislatures in 1854. The number of northern Democrats in the House would drop from 93 to 23, who would be far outnumbered by their 58 southern Democratic colleagues. Perhaps one-quarter of northern Democratic voters deserted their party in this election.

Several causes contributed to this revival of nativism. Immigration during the first five years of the 1850s reached a level five times greater than a decade earlier. Most of the new arrivals were poor Catholic peasants or laborers from Ireland and Germany who crowded into the tenements of large cities. Crime and welfare costs soared. Cincinnati’s crime rate, for example, tripled between 1846 and 1853 and its murder rate increased sevenfold. Boston’s expenditures for poor relief rose threefold during the same period.

Natives were not necessarily the most nativist. Earlier Protestant immigrants from England, Scotland, and especially Ulster had brought their anti-Catholic sentiments with them and often formed the vanguard of anti-Irish rioters and voters in the United States. Radicals and agnostics among the Forty-eighters who had fled Germany after suppression of the 1848 revolutions carried to America a bitter enmity toward the Catholic Church which had sided with the forces of counterrevolution.

The 1848–49 revolutions and wars of unification in Italy made Pius “a violent enemy of liberalism and social reform.” He subsequently proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility and issued his Syllabus of Errors condemning socialism, public education, rationalism, and other such iniquities.

The temperance movement also exacerbated ethnic tensions. Before 1850 this movement had been primarily one of self-denial and moral suasion aimed at persuading the Protestant middle and working classes to cast out demon rum and become sober, hard-working, upward-striving citizens. As such it had enjoyed an astonishing success. But conspicuous holdouts against this dry crusade were Irish and German immigrants, for whom taverns and beer gardens were centers of social and political life.

As a political movement, the Know Nothings had a platform as well as prejudices. They generally favored temperance and always opposed tax support for parochial schools. Their main goal was to reduce the power of foreign-born voters in politics.

Competing with free blacks at the bottom of the social order, Irish Americans were intensely anti-Negro and frequently rioted against black people in northern cities. In 1846 a solid Irish vote had helped defeat a referendum to grant equal voting rights to blacks in New York state.

Republicans and Know-Nothings had succeeded in breaking down the Whigs and weakening the Democrats in most parts of the North. But in 1855 it remained uncertain which of these two new parties would emerge as the principal alternative to the Democrats. In about half of the states, Republicans had become the second major party. In the other half the American party, as the Know Nothings now named their political arm, seemed to prevail. But a development of great significance occurred in 1855. The center of nativist gravity began to shift southward.

The slavery issue soon split the Know Nothings along sectional lines.

From this time forth the party wasted away in the North while it grew stronger in the South. The logical place for antislavery Know Nothings to go was into the Republican party, which stood ready to receive them if it could do so without sanctioning nativism.

Lincoln said of the Know Nothings, “I think little better than I do of the slavery extensionists. . . . Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ’all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes.’ When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.

The process, however, crystallized his supporters as Republicans, and when the House on February 2, 1856, finally changed the rules to allow a plurality to prevail, Banks won the speakership with 103 votes on the 133rd ballot. If any one moment marked the birth of the Republican party, this was it.

Part of the answer lay in a dramatic decline of immigration, which during the years after 1854 fell to less than half of the level it had attained in the first half of the decade. But the main reason could be expressed in two words: Bleeding Kansas. Events in that far-off territory convinced most northerners that the slave power was after all a much greater threat to republican liberty than the Pope was.

In November 1854, Atchison and other prominent Missourians led an invasion of “border ruffians” into Kansas to swell the vote for the proslavery candidate.

The border ruffians won the first round. Casting more than 1,700 ballots that a subsequent congressional committee found to be fraudulent, they elected a proslavery delegate to Congress.

By January 1856 Kansas had two territorial governments: the official one at Lecompton and an unofficial one at Topeka representing a majority of actual residents.

Dragging along five cannon, they laid siege to the town on May 21. Not wishing to place themselves in further contempt of law, free-state leaders decided against resistance. The “posse” of some 800 men thereupon poured into Lawrence, demolished its two newspaper offices, burned the hotel and the home of the elected free-soil governor,

Since Republicans controlled the House, and Democrats the Senate, neither party’s Kansas bill could become law. Both parties focused on the propaganda value of the issue looking toward the presidential election. Republicans gained more from this strategy because Democratic support of proslavery excesses in Kansas offered a ready-made opportunity to dramatize yet another slave-power attack on northern rights.

This incident incensed even those Yankees who had little use for Sumner. “Bleeding Sumner” joined Bleeding Kansas as a symbol of the slave power’s iniquities.

Adding insult to injury, the South lionized Brooks as a hero. Although some southerners regretted the affair for its galvanizing effect on the North, public approval of Brooks’s act far outweighed qualms.

The Richmond Enquirer pronounced “the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence. The vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves. . . . They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! . . . The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.”

When the House voted 121 to 95 to expel him, southern opposition prevented the necessary two-thirds majority. Brooks resigned anyway and returned home to seek vindication by reelection. South Carolinians feted him and sent him back to Washington with triumphant unanimity.

Brooks’s only punishment was a $300 fine levied by a district court. Sumner’s injuries, complicated by a post-traumatic syndrome that turned psychogenic neurosis into physical debility, kept him away from the Senate most of the time for the next four years.

With four of his sons and three other men, Brown abducted five proslavery settlers from their cabins on the night of May 24–25 and coolly split open their skulls with broadswords. An eye for an eye.18 This shocking massacre went unpunished by legal process.

Four-fifths of the platform dealt with slavery; it damned the administration’s policy in Kansas, asserted the right of Congress to ban slavery in the territories, called for admission of Kansas as a free state, denounced the Ostend Manifesto, and quoted the Declaration of Independence as authority for free-soil principles.

As an organized political movement, nativism went into a long eclipse after 1856. Hostility to Romanism (as well as Rum) remained a subterranean current within Republicanism. But for mainstream Republicans the Slave Power, not Catholicism, was the danger that threatened American liberties.

Buchanan had held so many offices that he was known as “Old Public Functionary"—congressman for a decade, senator for another decade, five years in the diplomatic service as minister to Russia and to Britain, and four years as secretary of state. But Buchanan shared one political attribute with Frémont—availability. He had been out of the country as minister to Britain during the Kansas-Nebraska furor. Unlike Pierce and Douglas, the other candidates for the nomination, he carried no taint of responsibility for the mess in Kansas.

Most of Buchanan’s votes came from the North—an irony, for Buchanan would turn out to be more pro-southern than either of his rivals. As the balloting went on through more than a dozen roll calls, Pierce and then Douglas withdrew for the sake of harmony, enabling Buchanan to win on the seventeenth ballot.

The campaign evolved into two separate contests: Buchanan vs. Fill-more in the South and Buchanan vs. Frémont in the North. Electioneering was lackluster in most parts of the South because the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Though Fillmore won 44 percent of the popular vote in slave states, he carried only Maryland. Frémont won all of the upper North—New England plus Michigan and Wisconsin—with a lopsided margin of 60 percent of the popular vote to 36 percent for Buchanan and 4 percent for Fillmore.

These Yankee fanatics were a sectional party, charged Democrats. That was quite true. In only four slave states (all in the upper South) did Frémont tickets appear, and the Republicans won considerably less than one percent of the vote in these states. If Frémont won the presidency by carrying a solid North, warned Democrats, the Union would crumble. As Buchanan himself put it, “the Black Republicans must be . . . boldly assailed as disunionists, and this charge must be re-iterated again and again.”24 Southerners helped along the cause by threatening to secede if the Republicans won.

These warnings proved effective. Many old-line Whigs—including the sons of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster—announced their support for Buchanan as the only way to preserve the Union. Even Frémont’s father-in-law Thomas Hart Benton, despite his hatred of the Democratic leadership, urged his followers to vote for Buchanan.

Indiana Democrats organized a parade which included young girls in white dresses carrying banners inscribed “Fathers, save us from nigger husbands!"26

The campaign generated a fervor unprecedented in American politics. Young Republicans marched in huge torchlight parades chanting a hypnotic slogan: “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, Frémont!” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow found it “difficult to sit still with so much excitement in the air.”

The turnout of eligible voters in the North was an extraordinary 83 percent. The northern people seemed to be “on the tiptoe of Revolution,” wrote one awestruck politician, while a journalist confirmed that “the process now going on in the politics of the United States is a Revolution.”

Buchanan was a minority president in the popular vote, however, having won 45 percent of that vote nationally—56 percent in the South and 41 percent in the North.37 Southerners did not intend to let Buchanan forget that he owed his election mostly to them.

Geary was appalled. He had come to Kansas as a Democrat who “heartily despised” the “pernicious” doctrines of abolition. But he soon became convinced of the “criminal complicity of public officials” in trying to make Kansas a slave state “at all hazards.”

Geary had put down lawless elements in the nation’s toughest town, San Francisco, but Kansas proved too much for him.

Walker was his equal in courage. But he too found Kansas more than he could handle. Though a southerner, he acknowledged that the free-state men had a majority in any fair election.

Congress now had two referenda to choose from. Fire-eaters below the Potomac heated up their rhetoric to ensure the correct choice. Yancey in Alabama talked of forming committees of public safety to “fire the Southern heart” and “precipitate the cotton states into a revolution.” Governors and legislatures stood by to call conventions to consider secession if Congress refused to admit Kansas under the “duly ratified” Lecompton constitution. “If Kansas is driven out of the Union for being a Slave State,” asked South Carolina’s Senator James Hammond, “can any Slave State remain in it with honor?” The southern people, declared a Georgia congressman, intended “to have equality in this Union or independence out of it.”