Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

The Lecompton issue gripped Congress for several months. It evoked more passion than even the initial Kansas-Nebraska Act four years earlier. The lineup was the same now as then—with two significant differences: this time Douglas led the opposition; and the new Republican party dominated northern representation in the House. Douglas’s political future hung in the balance. If he had supported Lecompton, southern backing for his presidential nomination in 1860 would have been assured. But in those circumstances the nomination would have been worth little. The millstone of Lecompton would sink Democratic chances of carrying any northern state.

From the South, however, came little but eternal damnation. Southerners professed “astonishment” that the Illinoisian had turned against them. “Douglas was with us until the time of trial came,” said a Georgian, “then he deceived and betrayed us.” A South Carolinian lamented that “this defection of Douglas has done more than all else to shake my confidence in Northern men on the slavery issue, for I have long regarded him as one of our safest and most reliable friends.”

On April 1, in a dramatic roll call, 22 (of 53) northern Democrats joined the Republicans and a handful of Americans to defeat Lecompton by a vote of 120 to 112. “The agony is over,” wrote a Douglas Democrat, “and thank God, the right has triumphed!"51 To save face, the administration supported a compromise by which Kansans would vote again on acceptance or rejection of Lecompton under the guise of a referendum

Free-state Kansans organized a Republican party and elected two-thirds of the delegates to a new constitutional convention in 1859. Kansas finally came in as a free state in January 1861, joining California, Minnesota, and Oregon, whose entry since the Mexican War had given the North a four-state edge over the South. Kansas also became one of the most Republican states in the Union.

As if Kansas were not enough, the Buchanan administration, the Supreme Court, and southern Democrats ventured several other actions seemingly designed to assure Republican victory in the presidential election of 1860.

Three main questions were before the Court: 1) As a black man, was Scott a citizen with a right to sue in federal courts? 2) Had prolonged residence (two years in each place) in a free state and territory made Scott free? 3) Was Fort Snelling actually free territory—that is, did Congress in 1820 have the right to ban slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30’?

Why did the Court take this fateful step? Answers to this question have been uncertain and partisan. Only fragmentary accounts of the justices’ confidential discussions leaked out, some of them years later. One interpretation of this evidence maintains that the two non-Democrats on the Court, John McLean of Ohio and Benjamin Curtis of Massachusets, stated their intention to dissent from the narrow decision prepared by Nelson. Their dissent would not only uphold Scott’s freedom but would also affirm black citizenship and endorse the right of Congress to prohibit slavery in the territories. Not wishing these dissents to stand as the Court’s only statement on such contentious issues, the southern majority reconsidered its decision to ignore them and voted to have Chief Justice Roger B. Taney write a comprehensive ruling.

But the truth appears to be more complex. For a decade the question of slavery in the territories had threatened the Union. Politicians had been trying to pass the buck to the courts since the Compromise of 1850, which had provided for expedited appeal to the Supreme Court of any suit concerning slave property in the territories of Utah and New Mexico—a provision repeated verbatim in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854.

Eighty years old, the chief justice was frail and ill. The death of his wife and daughter two years earlier in a yellow fever epidemic had left him heart-stricken. Yet he clung to life determined to defend his beloved South from the malign forces of Black Republicanism. In his younger days Taney had been a Jacksonian committed to liberating American enterprise from the shackles of special privilege. As Jackson’s secretary of the treasury he had helped destroy the Second Bank of the United States. His early decisions as chief justice had undermined special corporate charters. But the main theme of his twenty-eight year tenure on the Court was the defense of slavery. Taney had no great love of the institution for its own sake, having freed his own slaves. But he did have a passionate commitment “to southern life and values, which seemed organically linked to the peculiar institution and unpreservable without it.”

according to historian Don Fehrenbacher; Justice Peter Daniel of Virginia was “a brooding proslavery fanatic” and the other three were “unreserved defenders of slavery.” Because of this “emotional commitment so intense that it made perception and logic utterly subservient,” the Dred Scott decision was “essentially visceral in origin . . . a work of unmitigated partisanship, polemical in spirit [with an] extraordinary cumulation of error, inconsistency, and misrepresentation.”

This was false, as Curtis and McLean pointed out in their dissents. Free blacks in 1788 and later had many legal rights (to hold and bequeath property, make contracts, seek redress in courts, among others). In five of the thirteen states that ratified the Constitution black men were legal voters and participated in the ratification process. No matter, said Taney, these were rights of state citizenship and the question at issue was United States citizenship.

Having established to his satisfaction that blacks were not citizens,10 Taney could have stopped there and refused jurisdiction because the case was not properly before the Court. That he did not do so rendered the remainder of his decision, in the opinion of many contemporaries and the earliest generations of historians, obiter dictum —a statement in passing on matters not formally before the Court and therefore without force of law. But Taney insisted that because the circuit court had considered all aspects of the case and decided them “on their merits,” the whole case including the constitutionality of the Missouri Compromise restriction on which Scott based part of his suit for freedom was properly before the Court. Modern scholars agree. Whatever else Taney’s ruling was, it was not obiter dictum.

The first Congress under the Constitution had reaffirmed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 banning slavery in the Northwest Territory. Subsequent Congresses down through 1820 excluded slavery from specific territories on four additional occasions. Many framers of the Constitution were alive during this period, and none objected to these acts. Indeed, several framers served in Congress and voted for them or, as presidents of the United States, signed them into law!

Instead of removing the issue of slavery in the territories from politics, the Court’s ruling became itself a political issue. Northern Democrats gloated that Taney’s opinion was “the funeral sermon of Black Republicanism . . . crushing and annihilating . . . the anti-slavery platform . . . at a single blow.” Southerners congratulated themselves that “Southern opinion upon the subject of Southern slavery . . . is now the supreme law of the land.” The decision “crushes the life out of that miserable . . . Black Republican organization.

Douglas had said that he cared not whether slavery was voted down or up in Kansas—his concern was that Kansas have a fair vote. This “care not” policy, said Lincoln, had been prolific of evil, for it enabled the proponents of slavery to push forward their program of expansion without effective opposition.

Lincoln’s main thrust was the accusation that Douglas had departed from the position of the founding fathers, while the Republicans were upholding that position. Like the fathers, Republicans “insist that [slavery] should as far as may be, be treated as a wrong, and one of the methods of treating it as a wrong is to make provision that it shall grow no larger.”

It was a significant triumph for the Little Giant. He confirmed his standing as leader of his party in the North and its strongest candidate for the next presidential nomination. For Lincoln the election was a victory in defeat. He had battled the famous Douglas on at least even terms, clarified the issues between Republicans and northern Democrats more sharply than ever, and emerged as a Republican spokesman of national stature.

Lecompton and Dred Scott accounted for much of this Republican gain. Once again, victories by the “slave power” had produced a backlash that strengthened its deadliest enemies in the North. Other issues also worked in favor of the Republicans. The disappearance of the American party in the North pushed most of the remaining nativists into Republican ranks because they continued to perceive Democrats as the party of Romanism. In manufacturing regions the Democratic tariff policy and the depression following the Panic of 1857 intensified voter backlash. Republicans also benefited from continued southern opposition to homestead legislation and to federal aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad.

The Panic of 1857 had both foreign and domestic roots. The Crimean War (1854–56) had cut off Russian grain from the European market. American exports mushroomed to meet the need. This intensified a surge of speculation in western lands. The decade-long expansion of all economic indices had also produced rapid rises in the prices of stocks and bonds. From 1848 to 1856 the number of banks increased 50 percent and their notes, loans, and deposits doubled. Railroad mileage and capital grew threefold from 1850 to 1857. Textile mills, foundries, and factories ran at full tilt to meet an apparently insatiable demand. California gold continued to pump millions of dollars monthly into the economy.

Much of the capital invested in American railroads, insurance companies, and banks came from Europe, especially Britain. The Crimean War plus simultaneous British and French colonial ventures in the Far East drained specie from the banks of those countries. This brought a doubling and even tripling of interest rates in Britain and France, causing European investors to sell lower-yielding American securities to reinvest at home.

By the summer of 1857 the combination of speculative fever in some parts of the economy and ominous cutbacks in others created a climate of nervous apprehension.

Financial markets in most parts of the country were now connected by telegraph; the novelty of instant communication charged these markets with a volatility that caused a rumor in one region to become a crisis somewhere else. Depositors made runs on banks, which had to call in loans to obtain specie. This caused over-extended speculators and entrepreneurs to go under. A wave of panic selling hit Wall Street. As the ripple of these failures began to spread through the country in September, a ship carrying $2 million in gold from California went to the bottom in a storm.

Unemployed workers in several cities marched in demonstrations carrying banners demanding work or bread. In New York a large crowd broke into the shops of flour merchants. On November 10 a mob gathered in Wall Street and threatened forced entry into the U.S. customs house and subtreasury whose vaults contained $20 million. Soldiers and marines dispersed them, but unrest persisted through the winter, causing more than one anxious citizen to apprehend that “a nightmare broods over society.”

California gold came east in large quantities during the fall and winter. Banks in New York resumed specie payments by December 1857, and those elsewhere followed suit during the next few months. The stock market rebounded in the spring of 1858. Factories reopened, railroad construction resumed its rapid pace, and unemployment declined. By early 1859 recovery was almost complete.

The political effects of the depression may have equaled its economic consequences. It took time, however, for political crosscurrents to settle into a pattern that benefited Republicans. The initial tendency to blame banks for the panic seemed to give Democrats an opportunity to capitalize on their traditional anti-bank posture.

Although no modern historian has attributed the depression of 1857–58 to low tariffs, Horace Greeley and his fellow protectionists did so.

The tariff issue provides an illustration of how political fallout from the depression exacerbated sectional tensions. In each of three congressional sessions between the Panic and the election of 1860, a coalition of Republicans and protectionist Democrats tried to adjust the 1857 duties slightly upward. Every time an almost solid South combined with half or more of the northern Democrats to defeat them. With an economy based on the export of raw materials and the import of manufactured goods, southerners had little interest in raising the prices of what they bought in order to subsidize profits and wages in the North.

Sectional alignments were even more clear on three land-grant measures of the 1850s: a homestead act, a Pacific railroad act, and grants to states for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical colleges. The idea of using the federal government’s vast patrimony of land for these purposes had been around for a decade or more.

But most southerners opposed these measures. The homestead act would fill up the West with Yankee settlers hostile to slavery.

Southerners also had little interest in using the public lands to establish schools most of whose students would be Yankees. Nor did they have much stake in the construction of a Pacific railroad with an expected eastern terminus at St. Louis or Chicago.

The southern checkmate of tariff, homestead, Pacific railroad, and land-grant college acts provided the Republicans with vote-winning issues for 1860. During the effort to pass the homestead bill in 1859, Republicans tangled with Democrats over another measure that would also become an issue in 1860—the annexation of Cuba.

Both Douglas and Buchanan spoke in glowing terms of Cuba; the signs seemed to point to a rapprochement of warring Democratic factions, with Cuba as the glue to piece them together. In his December 1858 message to Congress, Buchanan called for new negotiations with Spain to purchase Cuba.

This debate registered the rise in rhetorical temperature during the late 1850s. Southern aggressiveness was bolstered by self-confidence growing out of the Panic of 1857. The depression fell lightly on the South. Cotton and tobacco prices dipped only briefly before returning to their high pre-Panic levels. The South’s export economy seemed insulated from domestic downturns.

A frayed-at-the-elbows scion of a Virginia First Family, Fitzhugh wrote prolifically about “the failure of free society.” In 1854 and 1857 he gathered his essays into books entitled Sociology for the South and Cannibals All! The latter was published a few weeks before the Panic of 1857 and seemed almost to predict it. Free labor under capitalism was a war of each against all, wrote Fitzhugh, a sort of social cannibalism. “Slavery is the natural and normal condition of society,” he maintained. “The situation of the North is abnormal and anomalous.” To bestow “upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak” because “capital exercises a more perfect compulsion over free laborers than human masters over slaves; for free laborers must at all times work or starve, and slaves are supported whether they work or not.” Therefore “we slaveholders say you must recur to domestic slavery, the oldest, the best, the most common form of Socialism” as well as “the natural and normal condition of the laboring men, white or black.”

Some proslavery proponents drew a distinction between southern yeomen and northern workers or farmers. Southerners were superior because they lived in a slave society. Yankees were perhaps fit only to be slaves. To explain this, southerners invented a genealogy that portrayed Yankees as descendants of the medieval Anglo-Saxons and southerners as descendants of their Norman conquerors.

Whether or not southern superiority resulted from “the difference of race between the Northern people and the Southern people,” as the Southern Literary Messenger would have it, the vaunted virtues of a free-labor society were a sham.

Southerners claimed that free labor was prone to unrest and strikes. Of course it was, said Abraham Lincoln during a speaking tour of New England in March 1860 that coincided with the shoemakers’ strike. “I am glad to see that a system prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to (Cheers). . . . I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to, and wish it might prevail everywhere. (Tremendous applause.)”

Several southern states therefore made it a crime to circulate The Impending Crisis. This of course only attracted more attention to the book.

Most congressmen came armed to the sessions; the sole exception seemed to be a former New England clergyman who finally gave in and bought a pistol for self-defense. Partisans in the galleries also carried weapons. One southerner reported that a good many slave-state congressmen expected and wanted a shootout on the House floor:

Brown did try to attract more black recruits. In particular he urged his old friend Frederick Douglass to join him as a sort of liaison officer to the slaves. Brown met Douglass secretly in an old quarry near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in August 1859. “Come with me, Douglass,” he said. “I want you for a special purpose. When I strike, the bees will begin to swarm, and I shall want you to help hive them.” But Douglass refused. He was convinced that Brown had embarked on a suicidal mission, “an attack on the federal government” that “would array the whole country against us.”

Reaction in the South to Brown’s raid brought to the surface a paradox that lay near the heart of slavery. On the one hand, many whites lived in fear of slave insurrections. On the other, southern whites insisted that slaves were well treated and cheerful in their bondage.

Brown spurned all schemes to cheat the hangman’s rope by rescue or by pleading insanity. “I am worth inconceivably more to hang,” he told his brother, “than for any other purpose.”

But there was more to it than that. Perhaps the words of Lafayette quoted at a commemoration meeting in Boston got to the crux of the matter: “I never would have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was helping to found a nation of slaves.”

“We regard every man,” declared an Atlanta newspaper, “who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing” as “an enemy to the institutions of the South.”

John Brown’s ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened. Several historians have compared the region’s mood to the “Great Fear” that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the “King’s brigands are coming” to slaughter them.

Every barn or cotton gin that burned down sparked new rumors of slave insurrections and abolitionist invaders. Every Yankee in the South became persona non grata. Some of them received a coat of tar and feathers and a ride out of town on a rail. A few were lynched. The citizens of Boggy Swamp, South Carolina, ran two northern tutors out of the district.

The northern-born president of an Alabama college had to flee for his life. In Kentucky a mob drove thirty-nine people associated with an antislavery church and school at Berea out of the state. Thirty-two representatives in the South of New York and Boston firms arrived in Washington reporting “indignation so great against Northerners that they were compelled to return and abandon their business.”

Most southern Democrats went to Charleston with one overriding goal: to destroy Douglas.

Some lower-South Democrats even preferred a Republican president to Douglas in order to make the alternatives facing the South starkly clear: submission or secession. And they ensured this result by proceeding to cleave the Democratic party in two.

The Alabama Democratic convention took the first step in January 1860 by instructing its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories.