CHAPTER 12
I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
—JOHN BROWN
Fillmore ~ Buchanan ~ Tyler ~ Van Buren ~ Lincoln ~ Pierce
Defeated in his bid to return as president, Millard Fillmore resumed his comfortable retirement. He served on the board of the Mutual Life Insurance Company of New York, and entertained various invitations, such as those to celebrate the bicentennial of Norwich, Connecticut, or from the Detroit and Milwaukee Railway Company for a one-week steamship cruise on the Great Lakes to celebrate the opening of a new route.
His sister wrote, “Only yesterday we were little children by the fireside of our parents, listening to Father’s stories and songs,” while “today we are old folks, with frosted hair, weakened eyesight and impaired vigor, for us whose craft is not yet moored in the Eternal Haven. Nearly half our number have already.”
The Know Nothing Party that had exploded on the national scene in 1854 was now almost gone, its members subsumed into the other existing parties. Fillmore’s supporters were trying to figure out where they lined up, often seeking his advice. “The political parties north and south are in a great measure divided and cannot unite upon any one man,” wrote one. But he told Fillmore that his supporters “will ever look to you as the great standard bearer of our nationality. In all candor, what shall the remnant of your party do? Point out the road and we will follow it and strike it boldly.”
“I am taking no part in politics,” Fillmore wrote his friend Dorothea Dix, “but looking at the world from the outside, delighted that I have no responsibility.”
On October 16, 1859, John Brown officially brought his war against slavery from Kansas to Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. With seventeen men, he approached under the cover of darkness. Telegraph wires were cut; bridges into the city were secured. The federal armory and arsenal, worth millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition, were seized. From there Brown’s plan called for freeing slaves to join his army, and the taking of slaveowners as hostages. Two local planters, including the great-grandnephew of George Washington, were captured in their homes and along with their slaves, brought to Harper’s Ferry. News of the raid soon reached points outside the town, and local militia as well as the Jefferson Guard from Charleston quickly descended on Harper’s Ferry, seizing the entry routes. Brown sent an emissary to negotiate a truce, but the man was captured and ultimately killed. Coming out under a white flag, another of Brown’s men was shot dead while yet another was captured. Buchanan sent three companies of artillery and roughly ninety marines to Harper’s Ferry to end the standoff, putting Colonel Robert E. Lee in command. Throughout the long night, Brown, his men, and his hostages, surrounded in an engine house, watched his son die from injuries sustained earlier in the day. Brown’s grand scheme to move south, liberating slaves, increasing his army, driving into Tennessee and Alabama, would never happen. Lee planned on taking the engine house at daylight, using bayonets to avoid harming the hostages. He sent his subordinate J. E. B. Stuart to the door. Brown opened it a crack to hear Stuart ask for his surrender. Brown refused, unless permitted to leave the city. Stuart gave the signal, and the marines burst forward, using a ladder to break down the door as rifles fired at them through the walls. Two marines were killed, one shot in the face. One of Brown’s men was stabbed through with a bayonet against the wall, another as he hid under a fire engine. Brown was beaten unconscious.
The fear of a slave revolt reverberated throughout the South. Charles City County raised a cavalry unit and a company of home guards to protect themselves, with John Tyler chosen as commander. President Buchanan felt the raid “made a deeper impression on the southern mind against the Union than all former events.” Not for the act itself, “but the enthusiastic and permanent approbation of the object of his expedition by the abolitionists of the north.” Van Buren called Brown “a man of lawless . . . disposition.” Fillmore thought it a “foolish and criminal invasion of Virginia.”
An unrepentant John Brown stood upon the scaffold, his last view of earth a crowd of angry faces there to watch him die, with a military complement present to see the deed done without incident. In the last moments of his life, he betrayed no signs of nervousness or fear. He was confident in what he had done, and in the end result of the conflict that had brought him to that place. He had no final words, and if he had, his executioners would not have permitted him to speak. His final thoughts he recorded on a note and handed to a guard that morning: “I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done.” A white cap was placed over his head, and the platform beneath him opened, the noose tugging at his neck until his death. He was left hanging for forty minutes, as if to make absolutely sure that John Brown could never again disturb the peace of Virginia.
Abraham Lincoln may have been surprised by the invitations he received after his Senate campaign, to places such as Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Ohio. His forceful condemnation of slavery and its advance had captivated people throughout the country. In December 1859, he traveled throughout Kansas making a number of speeches, praising the free staters, condemning popular sovereignty and Dred Scott. There he also denounced John Brown, stating that “no man, north or south, can approve of violence or crime.” He emphasized that the ballot box was the mechanism for opposing slavery. He addressed southern threats to leave the Union if an opponent of slavery was elected president. “Old John Brown has just been executed for treason against a state. We cannot object, even though he agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason . . . So if constitutionally we elect a President, and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with.”
Lincoln’s trip to Kansas closed a busy year for him, in which he traveled four thousand miles and delivered twenty-three speeches. Shortly after returning to Illinois, he wrote Jesse Fell the autobiography he had requested, and it was printed throughout the country. He collected the transcripts of his Senate debates and had them published as Political Debates Between Hon. Abraham Lincoln and Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, in the Celebrated Campaign of 1858, in Illinois. It was an instant bestseller.
The raid of John Brown had raised tensions north and south. Hundreds of miles away in New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce had no doubt that the North was responsible for the tension. “Scarcely had we completed emancipation in our own state, before a clamor was raised for the repeal of the law, permitting citizens of other states . . . to bring with them the servants of their household.” Pierce believed “The serpent of sectional discord had cradled into this Eden, where songs of redeeming grace and dying love were sung by children of a common father together.” To Pierce, everyone was responsible but the pro-slavery forces themselves; even the churches were at fault. “Pulpits have been desecrated to the base service of sectionalism, missionaries have been sent forth to war upon slavery.”
Pierce believed that anti-slavery sentiment had caused the raid on Harper’s Ferry and lamented that it had been invested by so many “with saintly and brave and heroic virtues.” To Pierce, Brown’s time in Kansas “was marked by every species of wrong and violence . . . his pathway can be traced by bloody foot prints along the whole career from theft to murder,” yet upon his death, “bells were tolled, minute guns were fired, and gatherings were invoked, as though the spirit of a patriot or sage was about to pass from Earth to Heaven.”
In the wake of Brown’s execution, Pierce regretfully declined to attend a bipartisan meeting in Massachusetts, called to condemn the raid at Harper’s Ferry. But he offered some hopeful words. “The invasion and evil acts of treason and murder are openly justified and applauded at large meetings of men and women in your midst . . . We may all have regarded with too much indifference the startling tide of reckless fanaticism, but we are not too late to hear it now . . . I have faith, above all, that the continued favor of the God of our fathers who watched over our feeble beginnings, who preserved us through the innumerable perils of the struggle for nationality, will yet make the wrath of man subservient to the peace and durability of this Union.”
Pierce would receive similar invitations, and in his replies did not always strike such an optimistic tone. “The present status cannot be maintained,” he wrote to a group in Hartford, Connecticut. “The condition of affairs must, of necessity, soon become a great deal better or a great deal worse.” But Pierce would “rejoice in these public and timely manifestations, now being made throughout the north, bringing out the true sentiment, and the true loyalty, of so large a portion of our common country.”
Millard Fillmore believed that Pierce did not have to look far to find the party responsible for Harper’s Ferry. Writing to a group in New York City, he surmised that “in an evil hour this Pandora’s box of slavery was again opened but what I conceive to be an unjustifiable attempt to force slavery into Kansas by a repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and the flood of evils now swelling and threatening to overthrow the constitution and sweep away the foundations of the government itself and deluge the land with fraternal blood, may all be traced to this unfortunate act. Whatever might have been the motive, few acts have ever been so barren of good, and so fruitful of evil . . . the lamentable tragedy at Harper’s Ferry is clearly traceable to this unfortunate controversy about slavery in Kansas.” Fillmore credited “an Overruling Providence” with settling the Kansas question “in favor of freedom.”
These unity meetings, which sprang up throughout the North in response to the raid on Harper’s Ferry, were eager for the presence of their past presidents. On December 16, Fillmore responded to a group in New York City planning a meeting “The North and the South—Justice and Fraternity.” In his letter he would break his silence on politics, if only for a moment. The “objects of the meeting have my most hearty approval,” Fillmore wrote, “but I have long since withdrawn from any participation in politics beyond that of giving my vote for those whom I deem the best and safest men to govern the country; and I have uniformly since I was at the head of the government declined an invitation to attend political meetings; yet in view of the present stormy aspect and threatening tendency of public events, did I feel that my presence at your meeting could, in the least, tend to allay the growing jealousy between the north and the south, I should at some personal inconvenience, accept your invitation, and cordially join you in admonishing the country, north and south, to mutual forbearance towards each other; and to cease crimination and recrimination on both sides, and endeavor to restore again the fortunate feeling and confidence which have made us a good and happy people.” Fillmore said that his silence, in part, had been due to a fear of being misquoted and misunderstood. “My sentiments on the unfortunate question of slavery and the constitutional rights of the south in regard to it have not changed since they were made manifest to the whole country by the performance of a painful official duty in offering and enforcing the fugitive slave law.” But Fillmore pledged to “stand by the Constitution of my country at every hazard . . . prepared to maintain it at every sacrifice.” And then, as though changing his mind in the middle of his reply, Fillmore noted that since he left office there had been developments on which his positions were not known. The former president was about to make national news with a letter that had begun as a standard refusal.
Despite southern fears, Fillmore argued, “there are few, very few of the north who would justify in any manner an attack upon the institutions of the south which are guaranteed by the Constitution . . . We are all antislavery in sentiment, but we know that we have nothing to do with slavery in the several states, and we do not intend to interfere with it.” To the North, Fillmore said, “respect the rights of the south—assure them by your acts that you regard them as friends and brethren. Let harmony be restored between the north and the south . . . rally around the national flag and swear upon the altar of his country to sustain and defend it.”
Once the letter was published, the praise poured in for Fillmore. Various writers called the message “sound and just,” “admirable and timely,” “sentiments [that] cannot fail to meet the approbation of all right thinking men.” Another said “there was never anything better said or in better time.” Fillmore’s mailbox would continue to fill up with invitations. But in the year for choosing Buchanan’s successor Fillmore recorded his presence “very quietly and very happily at home without a single wish to be anywhere else . . . how quietly and contentedly we live.” But he acknowledged this tranquility was not evenly distributed across the land. The “ill will and jealously that has been engendered between the North and the South, growing out of this slavery agitation, is greatly to be deplored, and I greatly fear that it will eventually destroy this government.”
On February 29, Abraham Lincoln took the stage in New York City, at the Cooper Institute. The event’s promoters were auditioning him as a potential presidential alternative to William Seward. The audience was skeptical of their western guest. Despite buying an expensive new suit, Lincoln’s appearance was noticeably less polished than that of his distinguished auditors. Appearance, however, quickly yielded to substance as Lincoln utterly won them over with his defense of Republican policy, tying their thoughts about containing slavery to the Founding Fathers. He addressed southern threats to secede in the event of a Republican victory, comparing secessionists to robbers. He closed with an eloquent appeal: “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” It is hard to overstate the effect Lincoln had on his audience. Horace Greeley’s influential New York Tribune recorded it “as one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this city . . . addressed to a crowded and most appreciating audience . . . No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” One reporter called Lincoln “the greatest man since St. Paul.” The Illinois politician, whose support was soft in the Northeast, was now invited to speak throughout the region. From there Lincoln went to Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, eleven different cities in twelve days. After another event in Brooklyn before returning west, the New York Tribune put it simply: “Mr. Lincoln has done a good work and made many warm friends.”