CHAPTER 30

The Kansas-Nebraska Act, I: Confrontation in Missouri

In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act demonstrated William L. Yancey’s prescience. Slavery ultras could indeed find action aplenty in the National Democratic Party. For a decade and a half, southern competition between Democrats, Disunionists, Calhounites, and Whigs to press hardest for slavery had pushed the Democracy in pro-southern directions. But usually before opponents could carp about the party’s victories.

No southern warrior could complain about the Kansas-Nebraska Act. This time, Southern Democrats’ overwhelming success disheartened the competition. After the Democracy’s triumph, long-vulnerable Southern Whigs had to repudiate the National Whig Party. Congressional victory also left Disunionists wondering if maybe, just maybe, the Democratic Party could save slavery and Union too.

1

Southern Democrats’ drive for the Kansas-Nebraska Act came after tests of whether the faction’s latest triumph, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, was an empty victory. The tests yielded southern conviction that the fugitive triumph was as useless as previous gag rule victories. Yankee hostility supposedly nullified the return of runaways.

We now know that 90% of the 332 fugitives tried under Mason’s juryless Fugitive Slave Law were despatched southwards.1 Still, contemporaries’ myth may convey a more significant reality than posterity’s count. Newspapers publicized the few Yankee defiances of the law. The many undramatic compliances went unnoticed. Thus Northerners appeared determined to rob Southerners.2

Appearances counted most. The Fugitive Slave Law could only achieve its founders’ objective, consolidation of border slavery, if potential fugitives thought the North forbidding. Southern blacks and whites had more reason to think Yankees were helping fugitives, given what they read in the newspapers.

Consider these famous headline stories. Shadrack, a Virginia slave, was arrested in Boston in early 1851. A mob tore the defendant from the courtroom and despatched him to Canada. Eight of Shadrack’s liberators were indicted. None was convicted.3

In September 1851, Edward Gorsuch of Baltimore County, Maryland, and some relatives went after two slaves in Christiana, Pennsylvania. Blacks and two whites massed to defy Gorsuch. Gunfire crackled. Gorsuch was killed and his son badly wounded. Still another crowd freed Gorsuch’s slaves. Forty-five whites were arrested. No one was convicted.4

Later in the fall of 1851, a Missouri slave known as Jerry was arrested in Syracuse, New York. A mob rescued Jerry from the police station and sent him to Canada. Twenty-six of Jerry’s rescuers were indicted. Thirteen escaped to Canada before being tried. Only one liberator was convicted.5

The most notorious fugitive case occurred simultaneously with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In May of 1854, Anthony Burns, escapee from Virginia, was arrested in Boston. Important Yankee intellectuals, including Theodore Parker, Thomas Higginson, and Wendell Phillips, designed an attack on the courthouse. Higginson called the ensuing melee “one of the very best plots that ever failed.”6 Burns remained a slave.

Still, one of Burns’s guards was killed. None of Burns’s would-be rescuers was convicted. It cost an estimated $100,000 for a brigade of Massachusetts militia, a phalanx of policemen, a United States infantry company, and a detachment of artillery to return a solitary slave to Virginia.

The slave did not stay south or enslaved. A few months later, Yankees bought and freed the failed fugitive. Anthony Burns’s owner received what he would have under Thomas Pratt’s proposed amendment to the Fugitive Slave Law: a few hundred dollars for a slave a Yankee community was loathe to return.7

In the light of hindsight and with awareness of some 300 runaways returned to slavery under the Fugitive Slave Law, posterity can deride these nation-straining cases as press sensationalism. But Southerners correctly saw that the message coming back from the North, to slaveholders and slaves alike, was that when a fugitive faced extradition, Yankees just might free the accused. One moral seemed clear. Insofar as federal law could shore up hinterlands, the Slavepower had better secure ironclad edicts. That lesson would not be lost on Southerners who pushed Stephen A. Douglas in the Kansas-Nebraska proceedings.

2

With southern pressing of Douglas on Kansas, as with previous slavery crises, analysis of that vague entity, southern pressure, should begin by asking what Southerner first pressured, and why? That strategy recognizes that events grow not out of thin air but from a precipitator’s action. Emphasis on the initial actor also yields insights lingering after analysis shifts to how and why others reacted to the precipitator. Thus James Hammond’s provocation of the gag rule crisis highlights unsteady nerves amongst Carolinians wandering between Calhoun’s tactics and Cooper’s. William Cost Johnson’s insistence on an airtight gag rule shows how southern slavery politics made sometimes-warriors of National Whigs. Abel P. Upshur’s desperate moves for a Texas treaty reveals the elitist republican at bay against egalitarian republicanism. James Mason’s introduction of the juryless fugitive slave bill illuminates distrust of Yankee neighborhoods on southern fringes. So too the southern senator most responsible for nudging Stephen A. Douglas southwards during the Kansas-Nebraska proceedings was a Missourian with a recurrent border vision. Senator Davy Atchison feared that schemes to replace slaves with whites might gain favor inside his not-so-enslaved, underpopulated Missouri frontier—the locale bordering on projected Kansas-Nebraska territories.

In two dozen lightly enslaved spots over two score years, beginning with Edward Coles’s Illinois in Northwest Ordinance times, the underlying problem had always been the same. Slavery could not on every frontier solve—could in some scantily populated places make worse—that New World labor shortage which had led Africans to be imported in the first place. By the nineteenth century, too few blacks had been imported for full exploitation of southern resources. Closure of the African slave trade had rendered the slave labor shortfall permanent. Particularly in bad times in black belts, Southerners obscured the problem with their talk of too many blacks, not enough work, racial claustrophobia. But in whiter belts and in better times, Southerners saw truer realities: that blacks were too scarce to go cheaply around, that slaves were slowly being shifted towards the securest and richest and most tropical natural resources, that less tropical or more exhausted or more exposed places increasingly required alternatives to slave labor.

The seductive alternative sporadically voiced in exposed southern hinterlands, whether the speaker was Henry Brawner in Maryland or Thomas Jefferson Randolph in Virginia or Pearl Andrews in Texas or Cassius Clay in Kentucky, was to stop fighting demography, to go with the historical flow, to speed up sales of slaves out so that whites would more speedily come in.8 Missouri, where that heresy worried Davy Atchison in the early 1850s, was the most exposed southern hinterland. All border states, by definition, had free labor neighbors to the north, Iowa in Missouri’s case. But only Missouri also had a free labor neighbor to the east, Illinois, and an uninhibited area to the west, the Louisiana Purchase territory soon to be known as Kansas. Should Kansas be opened for settlement and peopled exclusively with free white laborers, enslaved Missouri would break its own record for number of hostile neighbors.

The most surrounded southern state contained the most severely outnumbered slaveholders, except for Delaware. Compared with Henry Brawner’s Maryland or Cassius Clay’s Kentucky, Missouri’s slavery system in 1850 was by almost any measure scantier: less slaves, lower percentage of slaves, narrower and less enslaved black belts, wider and whiter white belts. No Missouri soil so extensively invited plantations as did the Bluegrass counties running diagonally down Kentucky.

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Nor are any of Missouri’s bodies of water so extensively enriching as the Chesapeake Bay in South Maryland. Missouri’s narrow river system largely delineates the state’s edges. The Mississippi River marks Missouri’s eastern boundary. The Missouri River establishes the northern third of the state’s western edge before turning and streaming southeast across Missouri to join the Mississippi River at St. Louis.

Narrow river deltas in Missouri were usually spottily enslaved. The fewest river-bound slaves worked up north on the Missouri River, along Missouri’s western border. Only after the river swerved southeastward could slave percentages in the 20% range be found; and at the Missouri River’s eastern edge, near St. Louis, percentages of blacks dropped below that middling figure again. As for Mississippi River counties, no southern state witnessed such paltry enslavement of the stream’s lush banks. Missouri’s whitish black belts might well be called gray belts.

Whiteness surrounded gray belts. Almost totally white Missouri counties to the north and south sandwiched those most enslaved Missouri River counties running across the state. Mississippi River planters in Missouri were caught between lily-white free Illinois on the east and almost-white Missouri counties to the west. The relatively few planters who worked Missouri River bottom lands along the state’s western borders were hemmed between almost slaveless Missouri counties to their east and vacant Kansas territory across the river.9

Missouri’s slim percentage of slaves in 1850, 13% compared with Kentucky’s 21%, was more comparable to colonial New York’s. That once-enslaved area, also with percentages of slaves in the middle teens, had had such a spottily concentrated and numerically insignificant black population that potential white migrants had considered slavery no deterrence. Late eighteenth-century New York’s flood of incoming whites had driven black relative percentages downwards and sentiment for emancipation upwards. Mid-nineteenth-century Missouri was undergoing a similar whitening process. Between 1830 and 1860, the state’s relative slave percentage was cut in half, to under 10% on the eve of the Civil War.

St. Louis, cultural and economic hub of Missouri, illustrated how white immigrants could make slave labor unimportant. In 1830, the city’s approximately 2500 slaves formed around 20% of the urban population. Twenty years later, slave numbers were about the same while white population had ballooned almost five times, lowering the percentage of slaves to 3.4%. In the next decade, slave population shrunk a little, and white numbers almost doubled, leaving St. Louis less than 1% an enslaved city on the eve of the Civil War.10

The change in St. Louis was a potential archetype, a way of securing white labor’s triumph over black serviles without much said against slavery. When blacks were seldom seen or discussed, slavery could seem, as in St. Louis and colonial New York, too inconsequential to deter migrants. Then newcomers could make slaves an ever more dispensable solution to labor shortage.

The trick was to make potential farmers join potential city dwellers in thinking Missouri’s relatively small amount of slavery was superfluous. In Cassius Clay’s Kentucky, thick black belts made political contention to remove slaves seem a precondition for attracting whites. In Missouri, thin gray belts made debate about blacks perhaps counterproductive. Let the word go out that Missourians considered slavery too unimportant to discuss. Then nonslaveholders might arrive en masse, making slaves and slaveholders ever more superfluous.

3

Silence on slavery was the gospel of an especially charismatic Southerner. Missouri’s leading foe of agitations about slavery was no anti-establishment heretic, no Cassius Clay. In Thomas Hart Benton, pillar of national and state establishments and supreme enemy of Davy Atchison, slaveholders faced a popular hero capable of winning any statewide election.11

Thomas Hart Benton believed that his southwestern state was essentially western, with only a trace of southernness. Slavery was not so much wrong (although Benton thought it an evil), not so much a candidate for removal (although he thought its silent evaporation would be salutory) but not worth contending about, especially when contention itself victimized nonslaveholder interests. A statesman must accordingly agitate for free lands, for better railroads, for sounder banks, for anything to promote yeomen’s migration. If national politics instead became consumed with slavery, the especially disastrous threat would be to the Union, the last best hope of free citizens. If the Missouri political scene grew rank with Slavepower agitations, the most intolerable consequence would be that yeomen would not come to Missouri.

Benton’s life had been a tale of frontier migration. Disgraced after pilfering small sums from roommates at North Carolina College, Benton had moved in the early nineteenth century to Andrew Jackson’s Cumberland Valley frontier. There he had become one of the toughest bear hunters, tomahawk throwers, and duelists near Nashville. Andrew Jackson was for a time delighted with this fellow spirit. Then the two tempestuous outdoorsmen were drawn into a barroom brawl between Benton’s younger brother and one of Jackson’s friends. Thomas Hart Benton told off the great man. Jackson challenged. Benton accepted. Both titans drew, aimed, blazed. Benton’s sleeve was torn. Jackson’s arm was punctured. Old Hickory soaked two mattresses with blood. Thomas Hart broke Jackson’s sword in two before the crowds.

Seldom has a victor been so ripe to be vanquished. Shooting Jackson in Jacksonland was like knifing the Pope in the Vatican. Having been driven west from North Carolina as a consequence of dishonorable disgrace, Benton was now driven west from Tennessee as a consequence of pugnacious pride. In 1815, with $400 in pocket, the migrant arrived at the western outpost of St. Louis.

No Missouri bobcat cut a swath so quickly. Benton’s savage aggression and rude sophistication were the perfect combination for a frontier cultural oasis. The duelist strode around town dressed like the groom at a wedding. The dandy was no less a fighter with his pen. Possessed of a superb memory and literary style, Benton wrote newspaper editorials and history books that raised partisan invective to a high art. When Missouri entered the Union in 1820, Benton entered the United States Senate. Missourians kept him there longer than Clay or Webster or Calhoun.

The tiny Senate chamber seemed almost too cramped for Thomas Hart Benton. The western hero often paced back and forth, reminding observers of a caged lion. His frame, the same 5′11″ height as the cadaverous Henry Wise’s, carried twice the poundage. Benton’s head was large, his shoulders wide, his chest like a barrel. His mouth was usually turned down in fierce frown. His eyes were often naked with hate. He had slain a man in St. Louis for calling him a puppy. His senatorial vendettas earned him the nickname Big Bully Bottom Benton.

Big Bully commenced each day with ice-cold baths, featuring merciless scrubbing with the thick brush. He then donned ruffled shirt, winged collar, and formal cloth. His gold eye-glass perched on his chest, hinting at learning never known to be displayed lightly. “Senator,” a man once addressed His Eminence, “this boy walked 200 miles to hear you.” “Young man,” Benton replied, “you did right.”12

In the Senate, the Westerner gained the palm he had thrown away in Nashville. He became Jackson’s confidante and chief defender. To Benton, Jacksonian mission meant securing a white man’s paradise, stretching across the continent and over the seas to encompass Columbus’s trade route to India. Only two American sorts would be personae non gratis. Benton would tolerate neither paper money banks, with their debilitating panics, nor agitators for slavery, with their allegedly disunionist conspiracies.

Benton never doubted the allegation that Calhounite conspirators provoked every slavery crisis. The Missourian came to conspiratorial certitudes while watching John C. Calhoun during the tariff and gag rule wars of the 1830s. There, as Benton saw it, stood the Union-loving, black-hating North, decorating William Lloyd Garrison with a rope around the neck. There stood the Carolinian, screaming that Yankees were about to strangle slavery. Calhoun could hardly expect to save slavery by infuriating Northerners. The conspirator could only care about breaking up the Union.

The further Jackson receded from center stage, the more Benton carried the war to Calhoun. Southern drives for Texas, denunciations of the Wilmot Proviso, diatribes against free California—they were a Nullifiers’ plot against non-slaveholders’ beloved Union. Benton was all for Texas, especially if nonslaveholders were guaranteed half ot it. The senator relished President Zachary Taylor’s plan for two new free states, not least because agitators for slavery would be banned from the newest West.

Northerners lauded Benton as one Southerner who was an American first. Missouri slaveholders called him a secret freesoiler and abolitionist. At the climax of annexation, the Missouri legislature instructed the senator to drop his mutilation of enslaved Texas. Benton sort of acquiesced. In 1849 the Missouri legislature passed anti-Benton resolutions, applauding Calhoun’s Southern Address and instructing Missouri’s congressional delegates to stand by the South. This time Benton renounced his instructions. He would teach southwestern constituents that western mission demanded silencing southern agitators.

The campaign of 1849 was Benton’s most notorious. The old battler, belying his 68 years, galloped on horseback over dusty, rutted roads, thousands of miles under the relentless Missouri sun. He would arrive at some remote slaveholders’ outpost, mount the podium before hostile eyes, doff his white beaver hat and black silk gloves.

He came, he would say, “to destroy a falsehood … and to expose a conspiracy.” The “din about northern aggression and encroachment, Wilmot Proviso, abolition of slavery, is only to stir up the people to that deplorable point which precedes all divorces.” John C. Calhoun was all “too successful.” His “fundamental falsehood … pervades this state, and all the slaveholding states.” Despite abolitionist temples burned in Philadelphia, anti-abolitionist mobs triumphant in Boston, an abolitionist editor murdered in Illinois, Southerners had been brainwashed into believing Northerners would abolish slavery. Calhoun’s henchmen were alive and well in Missouri. They threatened to transform a western paradise of free white labor into a southern inferno of nullification agitation. Well, abolitionists hardly threatened slaveholders. Instead, slaveholders’ agitations drove nonslaveholding settlers elsewhere. A champion of western yeomen could not allow nullifying legislators to instruct him to emit Calhoun’s disastrous screeches.

Was he loyal to slavery? More loyal than obsessed Nullifiers. His slavery policy was peace and quiet, silence, “no agitation.” He understood how easily slaveholders imbibed “groundless apprehensions.” He would not “contribute to alarm the country by engaging in discussions which assert or imply danger.”

His “personal sentiments,” he conceded, are against “slavery, and against” introducing the “evil” where “it does not exist. If there was no slavery in Missouri today, I should be opposed to its coming in.” But he saw no remedy, save the healing balm of centuries. He scorned sanctimonious outsiders. He owned slaves. He was “not the least afraid that Congress will pass any law to affect this property.” He feared that Nullifiers pretending to be afraid would agitate the Union to death. The West, the Union, slavery itself needed silence. “If that could not be done,” he would at least silence himself.13

To slaveholding listeners, Benton’s silence came too soon, before his future course was clear. At the very least, Benton’s demands for quiet on the subject, if successful, would signal to potential emigrants that Missourians would say or do nothing to protect the institution. Slaveholders feared worse. Benton’s argument that defense of slavery repelled slaveless migrants from coming to Missouri seemed uncomfortably close to Cassius Clay’s argument that slavery itself repelled yeomen from migrating to Kentucky. Slaveholders worried that after incoming whites made all of Missouri like St. Louis, St. Louis’s hero would urge silence no longer. Once non-agitation about slavery had rendered slaveholders supine and superfluous, Thomas Hart Benton would agitate to deport blacks and attract still more whites. That was precisely Abel P. Upshur’s fear about a stream of non-agitating Englishmen descending on Texas.

The sequel would demonstrate that Missouri slaveholders’ suspicions were half-right. After 1854, Benton himself would remain determined never to speak for or against slavery. But some key Benton followers would soon be agitating, Cassius Clay-style, for legislative action that would force Missourians to sell blacks southwards.

Earlier, in the pre-Kansas-Nebraska period, everything about Benton, his supporters, and his slavery posture remained a sphinx. James L. Green, one of Benton’s most prominent opponents, caught the mystery perfectly in an 1849 pamphlet.13 On a prospect so “sickening and heartrending” as abolition, Green declared, “ambiguity” was unacceptable. Benton, complained Green, has never made “himself understood.” I believe his calls for silence mask a freesoiler. But “many good and worthy citizens” disagree. “To my certain knowledge some of his friends consider him committed to the [Wilmot] Proviso, and others consider him against it.”14

In 1850, Green and kindred fellows momentarily unseated the sphinx. When Senator Benton came up for re-election, Democrats from the gray belt deserted to the Whigs’ candidate, Henry S. Geyer. Benton’s ouster was intended as a red flag. Missourians who hoped for a free labor commonwealth, however camouflaged, would not speak for the state.

Benton emulated John Quincy Adams. He would speak from a lowly freshman congressman’s post. In 1852, he won election to the national House of Representatives from St. Louis. In 1853, his St. Louis supporters, led by Frank Blair, Jr., sought unsuccessfully to repeal the Missouri legislature’s anti-Benton Resolutions of 1849.

Blair Junior was a young political apprentice whose father, Frank Blair, Sr., had warned Jackson to disinherit Calhoun rather than Van Buren over Texas. Blair Junior had come to Missouri to learn the anti-Calhoun Jacksonian trade at Benton’s feet. Junior stayed on as Old Bullion’s protégé. When Junior’s mouth moved, everyone believed, Benton’s words came forth.

For a moment in 1853, Blair’s lips emitted Cassius Clay’s rhetoric. Since Missouri’s white laborers outnumber slaveholders “by about five to one,” proclaimed the younger Blair, “interests of the vast majority” must “prevail.” A bar to slave expansion best served majority interests. Did siding with the people against the rich make him a freesoiler? He would not “take pains to deny it.”15

Slaveholders cheered Junior’s lack of pains. At last, an advocate of present silence on slavery had let future agitation against the institution be seen through the disguise. Alas for the slavocracy’s case, young Blair usually remained behind the mask. Benton himself gave off no evidence that he would ever agitate to end slavery. Benton’s newspaper, The St. Louis Democrat, agitated only against agitations for or against slavery. Any alleged intention to rise up against the institution was here well camouflaged—and in the southern state most vulnerable to hidden subversion.

Benton’s followers considered Missouri’s other senator the real saboteur. Davy Atchison, charged Thomas Hart Benton, was a poorly disguised Calhounite who agitated to break up the Union. Old Dave, or Bourbon Dave as rednecks called him, was up for re-election in 1855. A showdown with Benton likely loomed. The prospect was daunting. Atchison, champion of the slavocracy in western Missouri River gray belts, understood Benton’s power as champion of western nonslaveholders.16

Atchison, a quarter-century younger than Benton, had arrived in Missouri not from neutralist Nashville but from Bluegrass plantationland. Bourbon Dave had established himself not in rather cultivated St. Louis but in Missouri’s crudest West. Atchison’s Missouri River Valley was no place for Bentonian airs—and cussin’ Davy had none. A man cherished whiskey to keep warm—and Old Dave was warmer than most. “Niggers” on the bottom lands helped secure profits—and Atchison wished more whites would exploit more blacks. He was tall, florid, coarse. His face was somewhere between imposing and ugly. His personality ranged from swaggering to ferocious.

Damning slavery to his face brought out the ferociously ugly in him. His Missouri River Valley, angry that Benton considered slavery non-essential in the state, believed westernness required southernness. White migrants had not supplied sufficient labor to work river bottom lands. Slaves were needed. Statesmen must protect the vulnerable institution in the border. So believing, Atchison strode into the Senate in 1843.

In Washington, Atchison followed characteristic southwestern trails from Jackson towards Calhoun. A Jacksonian Democrat on economic matters, he got on well with Benton, until Texas matters showed they lived in different Missouris. Atchison would protect Texas hinterlands from alleged English antislavery intent. Benton denied such intent existed. If Slavepower agitators would cease connecting Texas and slavery, declared Benton, Northerners would go for annexation of a not-very-enslaved western area. Then nonslaveholders would stream in. Atchison called that pitch for nonslaveholder support a disguised formula for hemming in slaveholders like lepers. South Carolina Senator George McDuffie called Big Bully the South’s worst traitor.

Benton was traitor to southern slaveholders! Atchison was traitor to western nonslaveholders! So raged the argument, whether the issue was Texas or fugitives or Wilmot. In 1853–4, Kansas-Nebraska territories drew the controversy like a magnet. Benton brought great advantages to the Kansas imbroglio. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had declared future Kansas and Nebraska areas, because north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase Territory, off-limits for slaveholders, once settlers were allowed to enter. A Congress determined not to talk about slavery had only to establish territorial government, extinguish Indian titles, and invite settlers.

This silence on slavery would place an exclusively nonslaveholding population across the Missouri River from Atchison’s slaveholding constituents. Still, political danger loomed in any southern attempt to repeal the Missouri Compromise ban. Northerners, erupting over southern reneging on a sacrosanct compromise, might vote to keep Kansas closed to all settlers rather than allow slaveholders to enter. Atchison supporters might re-emerge as Benton had painted them in the Texas struggle: Calhounites whose proslavery priorities devastated national peace and denied nonslaveholders access to virgin turf.

In trouble on Kansas whether he did or did not agitate against the Missouri Compromise, Atchison long opted for his own form of silence. He led southern congressmen in defeating bills opening Kansas for white settlement, not because slaveholders would be banned but because Indians had not yet been removed. This transparent stall played into Benton’s hands. At a time when Missouri nonslaveholders coveted Kansas lands, Atchison said Halt, ostensibly because of Indians but really because the slaveholder minority could not also enter. That was no way to turn the Missouri majority against the very popular Benton. Atchison, champion of Missouri’s not-so-numerous slaveholders, was running out of options.17

5

No one monitored Atchison’s discomfort more closely than the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the Territories, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois. Douglas cared little about whether slaves entered this or any territory. He cared passionately about opening the whole West for white settlement. Like Benton, this western Jacksonian wished the continent Americanized from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Indian control over plains between Missouri and the Rockies seemed to him a travesty on white men’s Manifest Destiny. “How are we to develop, cherish, and protect our immense interests and possessions on the Pacific,” Douglas asked, “with a vast wilderness 1500 miles in breadth, filled with hostile savages, and cutting off all direct communication?” To Douglas, removing the “Indian barrier” and establishing white government were “first steps” towards a “tide of emigration and civilization.”18

A second step, a centrally located transcontinental railroad, would serve the population surge.19 Douglas might profit from shares in a central railroad’s Illinois branch. That prospect was pleasant but incidental. Douglas’s hope of riding the territorial issue to the White House was even more pleasant, but still incidental. Furthering white settlement of territories, like furthering his career as railroad entrepreneur and political aspirant, would providentially sustain white men’s democratic and entrepreneurial mission—and would providentially revitalize the Democratic Party.

On Kansas-Nebraska, Douglas could best secure white settlers by avoiding his own doctrine of how migrants should be governed. Like Lewis Cass, this Popular Sovereignty advocate preferred that frontiersmen choose their own institutions. Far-off Washington, D.C., solons, Douglas often emphasized in the classic Jacksonian vein, could not wisely or democratically rule remote prairies.

But in the case of Kansas-Nebraska, the far-off national government had long since intrusively barred slavery north of 36°30′ in the Louisiana Purchase Territory, whatever future settlers might wish. Restoring settlers’ right to decide would require repealing the Missouri Compromise. Slaveholders and blacks might then enter a domain reserved since 1820 for Douglas’s constituents: black-hating nonslaveholders. Douglas could either repeal a sacred compromise and incense Illinois voters or do nothing about a congressional ban and evade his Popular Sovereignty principles.

Evasion triumphed. For ten years, the Little Giant reported out of his Senate Committee on the Territories bill after bill opening Kansas-Nebraska for white settlement. These bills mentioned neither settlers’ rights to decide nor the previous congressional decision, thus leaving the Missouri Compromise proscription silently intact. Southern Democrats stopped these bills in the South-dominated Senate. Kansas-Nebraska remained Indian turf.

In March of 1853, Douglas almost replaced reds with whites. The House of Representatives, despite Deep South grumbling, passed a bill organizing the territory with the Missouri Compromise untouched. Douglas tried to jam the evasive coup through the Senate on the session’s last night, in helter-skelter, ill-attended moments before adjournment. He received astounding help. Davy Atchison surrendered.

The Missouri Compromise prohibition of slavery in neighboring Kansas, Atchison told the Senate, ranked with the Northwest Ordinance’s outlawing of slavery in neighboring Illinois as the two greatest “errors committed in the political history of this country.” But he saw “no hope of a repeal.” Slaveholders “might as well agree” to be barred “now as next year, or five or ten years hence.” His nonslaveholder constituents demanded territorial access. “You cannot restrain them much longer.” Slaveholders must “submit” to the “irredeemable.”

Why did Atchison submit to the proscription of slaveholding settlers? Perhaps Atchison expected slaveholding ruffians to invade Kansas, whatever the Missouri Compromise said. Davy’s subsequent extra-legalism makes this hypothesis plausible. Or perhaps Atchison wilted before Benton’s escalating charges that slavery-obsessed Calhounites were nullifying nonslaveholders’ access to virgin Kansas. Political realities in overwhelmingly nonslaveholder Missouri makes that hypothesis more plausible still. Perhaps also Bourbon Dave was drunk. The late hour, Atchison’s reputation, and senatorial titters when he confessed mouthing off too much all make the alcoholic hypothesis only dimly outrageous.

Whatever the solution to this mystery, Atchison’s turnabout did not turn around national history. All southern senators save those from Missouri balked at Douglas’s stampede and Atchison’s surrender. Douglas lost 23–17. The South voted against him 19–2.20

The defeat augured imminent victory. Southern senators urged delay, not defiance. They spoke not of repealing the Missouri Compromise but of renegotiating Indian treaties as a precondition for acquiescence. With Davy Atchison now an extinct volcano, the proslavery eruption necessary to light up Douglas’s evasion of Popular Sovereignty was nowhere to be seen.

6

Then Atchison returned home and rediscovered what his attitudes entailed. His softening, he found, had hardened Benton’s position. Instead of hailing Atchison’s surrender as better late than never, Benton followers scoffed that Atchison had forfeited any claim to Missourians’ support. Slaveholders, gloated Benton’s newspapers, now knew that Old Dave was a southern turncoat. Nonslaveholders, declared Old Bullion, remembered that Bourbon Dave had stymied their entrance into Kansas for a decade. Even a surrendering Atchison, Benton pointed out, had failed to remove southern senators’ Kansas blockade. Benton urged Missouri farmers now to negate Atchison’s stalling southern friends. Nonslaveholders should spill over the Missouri River and seize Kansas land.

While Benton was trumping Atchison’s ace on the pro-western side of the Kansas question, pro-southern Missourians were greeting their senior partner with consternation. Old Dave found his Missouri River Valley loathe to surrender a shot at a Kansas slaveholding regime. Surrender meant conceding that slaveholders were too morally despicable to cross their own river. Surrender meant giving Yankee slave-stealers a base of operations near lightly enslaved Missouri neighborhoods. Surrender meant signaling that Missouri slaveholders lacked the spirit to withstand ambiguous Benton attitudes. Atchison’s supporters’ pro-southern insistences, when combined with Benton’s pro-western blitz, left Old Dave nowhere to go if he wanted someone’s support. Nowhere to go, except back to agitation against the Missouri Compromise ban on slaveholders.

He traveled backwards in a hurry. In a tear across the state to rival Benton’s, Atchison swore that he would never again give an inch on Kansas. His constituents were not depraved. Slaveholders had as much right as Northerners to take their property to American territories. Missouri River masters could not passively accept an attempt to “jeopardize our slave interest” by bounding us “on three sides by Free States or Territories.” Slaveholders must try to avoid living close to “a pious and philanthropic class of men” who “think that they are rendering God’s good service in stealing their neighbor’s negroes.” The Kansas side of the Missouri River must be “open to the slaveholder as well as the nonslaveholder.”21

Atchison’s resurrection as slaveholders’ champion served such obvious partisan necessity that some will think explanation need go no further. Cynics about Atchison’s partisanship might admit that Benton’s partisanship was as much at “fault.” Old Bullion surely helped destroy silence on slavery by screaming so triumphantly when his foe for once fell quiet.

But neither titan was playing politics as usual. Each saw himself locked in an epic contest between a West where slavery was vital and a West where slavery was superfluous. Benton thought—with good reason—that the Union was doomed if Atchison insisted on Slavepower entrance into Kansas. Atchison thought—with good reason—that border slavery was doomed if spottily enslaved areas submitted to encirclement.

Lest Atchison again contemplate passiveness, correspondents reminded him why slaveholders demanded action. E. A. Hannegan of Covington, Missouri, wrote that “masterly inactivity” would allow Missourians to relax about Benton’s activities. Mastery required unending alarms that Bentonian silence on slavery has done “more for the cause of Abolition than all its open, reckless, and God defying advocates.” Atchison must agitate on Kansas to alert the public to the “thousands” of “covert” abolitionists in Missouri, “who now from policy hide their hellish designs.”22

Claiborne Fox Jackson emphasized the other reason why Atchison’s Missouri River domain rejected non-agitation on repealing the Missouri Compromise. “Fox” Jackson, author of the 1849 anti-Benton resolution and future proslavery Civil War governor of the state, preferred letting “Indians have” Kansas “forever” to permitting “infernal restrictions” on slavery. Indians, scribbled the Fox, “are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight. If this is to become ‘free nigger’ territory, Missouri must become so too, for we can hardly keep our negroes here now.”23Blatant slave kidnapping from free labor Kansas, western nonslaveholders pouring into not-so-enslaved Missouri, insidious sabotage from Missourians who ostensibly favored silence—this was the claustrophobic noose vivid in Missouri slaveholders’ imagination as Atchison descended on Washington, rededicated to safeguarding another exposed southern hinterland.

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