CHAPTER 9
If this sectional party succeeds it leads inevitably to the destruction of this beautiful fabric reared by our forefathers, cemented by their blood, and bequeathed to us, a priceless inheritance.
—MILLARD FILLMORE
Lincoln ~ Buchanan ~ Fillmore ~ Tyler ~ Pierce
On May 29, 1856, the Republicans of Illinois had their first state convention in Bloomington. After a long list of speakers, the crowd called for remarks from Abraham Lincoln. “A tall figure rose in the back of the audience and slowly strode down the aisle,” reported the Chicago Tribune. The expression on his face was one “of intense emotion.” His hands on his hips, he walked toward the front of the stage, “his eyes blazing, his face white with passion, his voice resonant with the force of his conviction.” People wept and cheered.
“The audience rose to its feet en masse, applauded, stamped, waved handkerchiefs, threw hats in the air, and ran riot for several minutes.” Lincoln “looked like the personification of political justice.”
Joseph Medill, the Tribune’s managing editor, was too absorbed to write anything down. Once “calm had succeeded the tempest, I waked out of a sort of hypnotic trance.” Worried that he would be “scooped” by his competitors, he was relieved to know “that each had been equally carried away by the excitement caused by the wonderful oration.” John Scripps wrote: “Never was an audience more completely electrified by human eloquence. Again and again during its delivery they sprang to their feet and upon the benches and testified, by long continued shouts and the waving of hats, how deeply the speaker had wrought upon their minds and hearts.” Another witness said “that is the greatest speech ever made in Illinois, and puts Lincoln on the track for the Presidency.”
As the Democrats prepared to nominate a presidential candidate, Buchanan had written to Robert Tyler, one of his campaign managers. “I fully appreciate your friendly services, and they are recorded in my heart . . . I say to you now, what I would not have said to you last night, that should the ‘Old Dominion’ stand firm, it is my opinion my friends will succeed in Cincinnati,” site of the upcoming convention.
Pierce had led his party to a landslide defeat and proved unequal to managing affairs in Kansas. For this he would be denied re-nomination, the first and last elected president to suffer this fate. Buchanan led him on every ballot with increasing decisiveness. The convention adjourned for the night after fourteen ballots. In the morning, the chair of the New Hampshire delegation withdrew Pierce’s name, deferring to what the delegates saw as “the more practicable method of advancing cherished principles . . . an offering upon the altar of our common cause.” New Hampshire then endorsed Douglas. The latter withdrew after two more ballots where he demonstrated serious strength but badly trailed Buchanan. To have any hope of victory, the beleaguered Democrats needed someone free of Kansas-Nebraska.
On June 10, John Tyler wrote his son, “I suppose this will reach you rejoicing in the glories of your trip to Cincinnati. If rumor speaks truly, Pennsylvania has a prospect of giving a President to the United States. I hope it may be all realized, my opinion being that if the Democratic party shall succeed in giving the factions a good sound drubbing, it will go further towards settling the distractions of the country than all else combined. The Know Nothing party will entirely melt away, and the Black Republicans will either have to rush into the embraces of the Abolitionists . . . or go into so violent and rabid a course as to abandon and disgust all reflecting men.”
Robert wrote back, “Mr. Buchanan is nominated, and he is clearly indebted to Virginia for the nomination.” He told his father “your name was mentioned always with praise and admiration,” while lamenting that his current financial status was preventing his own entry into politics. “If I were a rich man, and the Union does not ‘slide,’ I might be something yet. But as it is, I float helplessly on the waves of doubt and debt.”
Lincoln was at court in Urbana while the first national Republican Convention met in Philadelphia. That morning, like every morning, the innkeeper had roused his guests at dawn by banging a gong, whose reverberations summoned them to breakfast. The judges and lawyers of the Eighth Judicial Circuit concluded that “the offending instrument” had to be removed. His colleagues voted Lincoln as the man for the job. Shortly before noon, Lincoln slipped out of the courthouse and stealthily into the dining room of the hotel. Undetected, he grabbed the gong, hid it under his coat, and began his getaway. In his escape he encountered David Davis and another lawyer, who was holding a copy of the Chicago Tribune, whose pages brought the news that Lincoln had won 110 votes and was the runner-up for the vice presidential nomination in Philadelphia.
“Great business this,” said Davis about Lincoln’s obvious thievery, “for a man who aspires to be Vice President of the United States.”
Days later, Fillmore returned to New York, addressing enthusiastic crowds on his way to Buffalo. In Albany, the Know Nothing nominee for president touted his ability to “rise above sectional prejudice, and look to the welfare of the whole nation.” Fillmore warned of the Republican nominees, men from free states committed to preventing the expansion of slavery. He wondered whether “they have the madness or the folly to believe that our southern brethren would submit to be governed by such a chief magistrate.” Fillmore asked his listeners to consider what would happen if the South had a majority of the electoral votes, and elected a president and vice president exclusively from slave states. “Do you think we would submit to it? No, not for a moment,” he declared. “If this sectional party succeeds it leads inevitably to the destruction of this beautiful fabric reared by our forefathers, cemented by their blood, and bequeathed to us, a priceless inheritance.”
President Pierce had meanwhile ordered the army to break up the free state legislature in Topeka. The force’s commanding officer, mounting the rostrum in the Kansas free-state House of Representatives, announced that while it was “the most painful duty of my whole life,” he must “command you to disburse.” In response to the recent murders, some three to four hundred pro-slavery forces converged on the town of Osawatomie, killing an unsuspecting Frederick Brown, son of John. John Brown and a much smaller contingent held them off before evacuating the town, which was burned and looted.
Such engagements were increasingly common. Free staters attacked Fort Titus, a pro-slavery stronghold, outside of Lecompton. It has been said that making peaceful protest impossible makes violent protest inevitable. Never was this more true than in the attack on Fort Titus, which free staters bombarded with cannonballs melted down from the newspaper presses in Lawrence, which had been destroyed during the siege. Above the din of cannon fire, the leader of the free state forces shouted, “This is the second edition of The Herald of Freedom. How do you like it?”
That fall yet another governor was appointed for Kansas. John Geary had been the first mayor of the rough and tumble boomtown of San Francisco. Surely, he thought, he was prepared for whatever he saw in Kansas. He was eager to make peace, appealing to “Men of the North—men of the South—of the East, and of the West . . . Will you not suspend fratricidal strife?” Outside of Lawrence, Geary disbursed a band of Missourians who were planning on a second sacking of the town, promising them that they would have to fight the army first. The departing mob murdered a man who worked in his fields as they left.
On November 6, at his Wheatland estate, James Buchanan addressed a group that had come to congratulate him on winning the presidency. He thanked them, adding, “It is my sober and solemn conviction that Mr. Fillmore uttered the words of soberness and truth when he declared that if the Northern sectional party should succeed, it would lead inevitably to the destruction of this beautiful fabric reared by our forefathers, cemented by their blood, and bequeathed to us as a priceless inheritance.” To a great extent, such was the Democratic message in 1856. The party responsible for undoing the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, for the oppression of the people of Kansas at the hands of an illegitimate pro-slavery government, ultimately prevailed because the public understood that things could get a good deal worse. Buchanan had been held to 45 percent of the popular vote in this three-way race, far from an endorsement of Democratic policy. Fillmore had won 28 percent of the vote nationally, but 48 percent in the border states (carrying Maryland) and 43 percent in the South. As one biographer noted, a shift of eight thousand votes would have swung three more states to Fillmore, casting the race into the House of Representatives, where he may have stood the best chance of being chosen president.* Fremont, as the first Republican nominee, had swept New England, captured the biggest prize of New York, and won Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio. If the next Republican nominee could carry Buchanan’s Pennsylvania, plus Indiana or Illinois, he would win the White House without any support from the border states or the South.
* When the House chooses a president, every state has equal suffrage. The Know Nothing Party controlled a number of delegations outright, had the majority in others, and carried widespread support throughout the country. On account of this strong starting position, his standing as a former president, and as the second choice for most Republican/Opposition members, it is easier to see a path for Fillmore than either of his competitors in this scenario.
In Kansas, the pro-slavery legislature scheduled the election of delegates to the constitutional convention at Lecompton. An early cutoff was established for registering, so that anyone who wished to move to Kansas to influence the election was more likely to come from Missouri. The census to determine voter eligibility did not include half of the counties in Kansas. Free state voters were omitted from the rolls. No polling place was established at Lawrence.
After the presidential election, Abraham Lincoln addressed a Republican banquet in Chicago. The chair of the meeting toasted, “First the Union—the north will maintain it—the south will not depart therefrom.” Lincoln said that he “could most heartily endorse the sentiment,” defending the party against charges of being enemies to the Union. Interrupted frequently by cheers and applause, he mocked Pierce’s revelry in Buchanan’s victory, comparing him to “a rejected lover, making merry at the wedding of his rival.” Lincoln noted that Buchanan had received less than a majority of the popular vote and predicted the future success of the Republican Party.
“All of us who did not vote for Mr. Buchanan, taken together, are a majority of four hundred thousand. But, in the late contest we were divided between Fremont and Fillmore. Can we not come together, for the future? Let every one who really believes, and is resolved, that free society is not,and shall not be, a failure, and who can conscientiously declare that in the past contest he has done only what he thought best—let every such one have charity to believe that every other one can say as much. Thus let bygones be bygones. Let past differences, as nothing be; and with steady eye on the real issue, let us reinaugurate the good old ‘central ideas’ of the Republic. We can do it. The human heart is with us—God is with us. We shall again be able not to declare, that ‘all States as States, are equal,’ nor yet that ‘all citizens as citizens are equal,’ but to renew the broader, better declaration, including both these and much more, that ‘all men are created equal.’”
Pierce’s political obituary appeared in the New York Herald, which reported “the worst of the United States presidents will retire into private life. He has satisfied no one and disgusted all.” His friend Nathaniel Hawthorne recorded him “without one true friend, or one man who will speak a single honest word about him.” It was hard for Pierce’s friends to reconcile this public attitude with their personal experiences with the man. Varina Davis, wife of the secretary of war, was surprised one evening to find the president of the United States as a guest. Pierce walked for hours in a blizzard and through six feet of snow, and showed up unannounced after hearing she was unwell. Nobody doubted him when he said, “I am so tired of the shackles of presidential life that I can scarcely endure it.” Throughout his life, honors he had sought, honors he had not sought, were his, often at a younger age than anyone before him. Now, when he needed his magic the most, he was despised, abandoned, isolated, and utterly unable to control events around him, the first and only elected president in American history to be denied re-nomination by his own party.
The last redoubt of Pierce supporters may have been within his own cabinet, the only one to remain intact over a four-year term. Jefferson Davis wished that his “days be many, your happiness great and your fame be in the minds of posterity as elevated and pure as the motives which have prompted your official action.”
Pierce replied, “I can scarcely bear the parting from you who have been strength and solace to me for four anxious years and never failed me.”
President-elect James Buchanan arrived in Washington on the day Preston Brooks’s funeral was held in the House. The Boston Atlas called Brooks’s death “a signal instance of Divine retribution,” to which the Richmond Whig responded that they thought death was sacred, and had supposed not even “the most fanatical party . . . could so far forget what is due to our common humanity as to cast reproach and insult upon the pale tenants of the grave.”
“After the White House,” Franklin Pierce reflected, “What is there to do but drink?” Charles Mackay, the Scottish author, was traveling the United States, carrying a letter of introduction from Nathaniel Hawthorne to the former president. Finding that he was in Boston at the same time, Mackay presented the letter, and Pierce “very cordially” received him. Mackay remembered him as a “man of polished and courtly manners, of a cultivated mind, and of wide and varied information.” Pierce invited him to dinner the following evening, but he declined, having already engaged to dine at the private monthly meeting of an exclusive social club. Pierce indicated that he too would like to come, and perhaps Mackay could ask the gentleman who had invited him to include him? Mackay saw the host that day, and he agreed to invite Pierce. At the dinner, Mackay noticed thirty or forty guests, many of whom asked to be introduced to him. “Not one, however, made any attempt to obtain an introduction to Mr. Pierce, whom they suffered to enter the room unwelcomed, and almost unobserved, and some few were rude enough to turn their backs upon him, in so unmistakable and offensive a manner that it could not fail to attract his notice.” Pierce “took an early opportunity” to make his exit. Mackay was astounded; in such social environs with such refined guests, he had never seen such a thing. Was this how Americans treated their ex-presidents?