Transcript
Black Crepe
May 24 – June 2, 1854
Boston · June 2, 1854
About fifty thousand people lined Boston's streets to watch one man walk to the harbor.
His name was Anthony Burns. About twenty, he had escaped slavery in Virginia. The federal government sent soldiers, marines and a cannon to take him back.
A week earlier, abolitionists had stormed the Court House to free him.
A guard, James Batchelder, was stabbed to death. He had been sworn in that day.
That same week, the House passed the Kansas–Nebraska bill. At Faneuil Hall, Boston heard the two stories as one.
Amos Lawrence, a Boston cloth merchant, wrote to his uncle:
Amos A. Lawrence We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whigs & waked up stark mad Abolitionists.
Within months, a town in Kansas was named for him.
Congress, the settlers, a new party and the Supreme Court each tried to settle slavery in the West. Every try made things worse. Why?
Inoperative and Void
January–May 1854
Stephen Douglas of Illinois stood about five foot four. People called him the Little Giant.
He wanted a railroad from Chicago to the Pacific. The land in between had no government yet.
Southerners wanted a southern route. Washington had just agreed to buy a strip of Mexico for it.
Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, slavery was banned in all of it. Southern senators wouldn't vote to organize it unless that changed.
Douglas had an answer that sounded like pure democracy.
Stephen A. Douglas …will you allow the people to legislate for themselves upon the subject of slavery? Why should you not?
Section 14 of the Kansas–Nebraska Act declared the Missouri line 'inoperative and void.' Settlers would be 'perfectly free' to decide about slavery for themselves.
It split the land into Kansas and Nebraska. The old line went out.
The land wasn't empty. Starting in the 1820s, the government had moved the Shawnee, Delaware and others there.
That spring, officials in Washington signed nine treaties with the nations there and took most of their land.
The House passed it in May, 113 to 100. President Franklin Pierce signed it on May 30.
Northern towns burned him in effigy.
Stephen A. Douglas I could then travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigies…
The Race for Kansas
1854–1856
Amos Lawrence helped pay for the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which sent antislavery settlers west. Its first town in Kansas took his name.
Lawrence began as a camp of tents thatched with prairie hay. But most Kansas settlers came from Missouri and the Midwest. They wanted land more than a cause.
Across the line, western Missouri grew hemp and tobacco with enslaved labor. Missourians feared a free Kansas next door, and Eastern money shipping in voters. Many decided to vote there themselves.
Sara T. D. Robinson The Missourians, for some days, have been passing into the territory… They go armed and provisioned.
On March 30, 1855, Kansas elected its first legislature.
Across Kansas, the census had counted 2,905 voters. The polls took 6,307 ballots. Proslavery candidates won almost every seat.
Governor Andrew Reeder threw out several districts and held new elections. The legislature seated the first winners anyway. Free-staters called it the bogus legislature.
Its slave code made it a felony even to say slavery wasn't legal in Kansas. In a territory where the people were supposed to decide, one side of the argument was now a crime.
Free-staters wrote their own constitution at Topeka and chose their own governor. Kansas now had two governments.
The same voters, 1,287 to 453, told their legislature to keep free Black people out of Kansas. Most free-staters wanted Kansas free, and white.
Rifles went west in crates marked “Books.” A paper reported that the preacher Henry Ward Beecher said one rifle had more moral power than a hundred Bibles. People called them Beecher's Bibles.
Last of the Whigs
1854–1856
For twenty years, Whigs and Democrats held the country together. Each party needed voters in both North and South.
Every Northern Whig in the House voted no. Southern Whigs voted yes, 12 to 7. The party never recovered.
Northern voters punished Northern Democrats. Democrats won 91 free-state House seats in 1852. After the 1854 and 1855 elections, they held 25.
Fear of immigrants drew many voters to the Know-Nothings. By 1856, slavery had split that party too.
A new party formed to stop slavery's spread. Ripon, Wisconsin, says it began in a schoolhouse. Jackson, Michigan, says under the oaks. Both still do.
The House needed two months and 133 ballots to choose a Speaker. Nathaniel Banks, a Know-Nothing on his way to becoming a Republican, finally won.
In 1856, Republicans promised to keep slavery out of the territories. They did not promise to end it in the South.
The new party had almost no voters in the South. Southerners called them “Black Republicans.”
Six Days in May
May–November 1856
On May 19 and 20, Senator Charles Sumner spoke on “The Crime Against Kansas.” He aimed it at Andrew Butler of South Carolina, who wasn’t there.
He even mocked the way Butler spoke.
Charles Sumner Of course he has chosen a mistress … I mean the harlot, Slavery.
On May 21, a proslavery posse of about 800 rode into Lawrence. It shelled and burned the new hotel and wrecked the presses.
On May 22, after the Senate adjourned, Sumner stayed at his desk. Congressman Preston Brooks, Butler’s cousin, beat him with a cane until the cane broke.
Sumner tore his desk from the floor trying to stand. He wouldn’t return to the Senate full-time for three and a half years.
Northern printers sold this picture of it. The title sets Sumner’s argument against Brooks’s club.
Preston S. Brooks I wore my cane out completely but saved the Head which is gold. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts.
Admirers sent him new canes. One was engraved “Hit him again.” The House fell short of the two-thirds it needed to expel him.
On the night of May 24, the abolitionist John Brown led a small band to Pottawatomie Creek in Kansas.
They took five proslavery men from their cabins and killed them.
Northern papers called it Bleeding Kansas. A historian who counted found fifty-six political killings by 1861.
In November, Democrats ran James Buchanan, who’d spent most of the Kansas fight in London. The Republican, John C. Frémont, carried eleven of the sixteen free states, with almost no Southern votes.
Add Pennsylvania and Illinois, and he’d have been president.
Speedily and Finally
March 1857
At his inauguration, James Buchanan made a promise about the Supreme Court.
James Buchanan …will, it is understood, be speedily and finally settled. To their decision… I shall cheerfully submit, whatever this may be…
He already knew where the Court was headed. He'd been trading letters with two of the justices.
Two days later, the Court ruled in a low, vaulted room right under the Senate floor.
Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott were enslaved in St. Louis.
An army surgeon had taken Dred to free Illinois, then to Fort Snelling, where Congress had banned slavery. In 1846, each of them sued for freedom.
Chief Justice Roger Taney, seventy-nine, read for about two hours. First: Black Americans, enslaved or free, could not be citizens. So Scott could not sue in federal court.
Roger B. Taney …so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect…
Taney claimed the founders saw Black Americans that way. His Court made it the law.
Justice Benjamin Curtis dissented, and checked the history.
Benjamin R. Curtis …in five of the thirteen original States, colored persons then possessed the elective franchise…
Second: Congress could not ban slavery in any territory. The Court called enslaved people property, protected by the Fifth Amendment. Third: the Missouri Compromise had been unconstitutional all along.
Southern Democrats cheered. Republicans saw their whole program ruled unconstitutional.
Frederick Douglass …no thanks to the slaveholding wing of the Supreme Court, my hopes were never brighter than now.
If Congress couldn't keep slavery out of a territory, could the settlers?
Voted Down or Voted Up
1857–1858
Free-staters boycotted the vote for delegates, so a proslavery convention wrote Kansas a constitution.
The ballot offered two choices: “Constitution with Slavery,” or “Constitution with no Slavery.” Either way, the people already enslaved in Kansas stayed enslaved.
Free-staters stayed home again, and “with slavery” won. Two weeks later, in a vote they ran, 10,226 people voted against the whole thing.
Buchanan asked Congress to admit Kansas under it anyway. His own governor there, Robert Walker, had resigned rather than back it.
Douglas had already broken with him.
Stephen A. Douglas It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up.
He wanted a fair vote. Southern Democrats saw a traitor who was blocking a slave state.
Congress offered a deal: take Lecompton and join now, or wait. Kansans voted it down again in August 1858. Kansas wrote four constitutions in five years.
A House Divided
June 1858 – January 1859
In June 1858, Illinois Republicans chose a Springfield lawyer to challenge Senator Douglas.
Abraham Lincoln "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.
It will become all one thing, or all the other.
Abraham Lincoln It will become all one thing, or all the other.
He said four men had framed one house, piece by piece:
Abraham Lincoln …Stephen, Franklin, Roger and James, for instance…
Douglas, Pierce, Taney and Buchanan. Nobody has found a master plan. But Buchanan really had written to two justices.
The two men held seven debates. At Freeport, about fifteen thousand people stood in a cold, damp grove. Republicans brought Lincoln in an old farm wagon behind six horses. Douglas's friends dropped their white-horse carriage, and Douglas walked.
Lincoln answered the seven questions Douglas had asked at Ottawa. Then he asked four of his own.
On September 17, 1858, Dred Scott died in St. Louis. He had been free for sixteen months. The next day, at Charleston, Illinois, Lincoln told the crowd:
Abraham Lincoln …I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races…
Stephen A. Douglas I believe this Government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever…
Neither man called for social and political equality. But Lincoln called slavery a wrong. Douglas left it to each territory.
Abraham Lincoln The real issue in this controversy is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong,
Abraham Lincoln and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.
Republicans won more votes statewide. But legislatures chose senators then, and Illinois's kept Douglas, 54 to 46. Lincoln lost. But Northern newspapers had reprinted the debates, and his name now reached far beyond Illinois.
Cannot Stand
January 1859 → January 1861
On January 4, 1859, the Senate left its old chamber for good.
John C. Breckinridge The Senate is assembled for the last time in this Chamber.
Sumner's seat was still empty. He was in Europe, still recovering from Brooks's cane.
Every fix caused the next fight. Underneath them all sat the same question: was slavery wrong?
Leonard Grimes, a Black minister in Boston, raised $1,300 and bought Burns's freedom in 1855. His old church in Virginia expelled him for running away.
Anthony Burns God made me a man—not a slave; and gave me the same right to myself that he gave the man who stole me to himself.
He studied at Oberlin, became a minister in Canada, and died there in 1862. He was about twenty-eight.
Kansas joined the Union as a free state in January 1861. By then, six states had already left the Union.
Two years earlier, John Brown had left Kansas, raising money for something bigger.
Abraham Lincoln It will become all one thing, or all the other.