CHAPTER 10
In 1855, after proslavery Kansas settlers (including one-day settlers) unexpectedly secured an enslaved territory, dreams of an enslaved slave state multiplied. Dreamers knew that if the statehood decision came at the usual time, when 90,000 settlers of all ages, sexes, and colors inhabited a territory, the more numerous Yankees would flood the plains. Then the majority of the maybe 35,000 adult white males would choose a free labor state. But if the strike for statehood came prematurely, say in 1857, Southerners just might be a majority of the maybe 20,000 voters. The 1856–57 campaign for a slave state thus began with Southwide appeals for immediate white male adult migrants.
– 1 –
In 1857, around 5000 newly migrating southern citizens, if added to the 5000 already in Kansas, could match the 10,000 Yankee voters. The 5000 proslavery newcomers could mock every supposed reason why Kansas could never become a slave state. The fact that the North contained millions more whites would become irrelevant. So would the fact that Kansas, at the moment of decision, contained only around 200 slaves and under a hundred slaveholders. Slaves did not vote, and nonslaveholders often voted for slavery.1 If only one in every 400 voting southern citizens came and brought a proslavery attitude, the unexpected slave territory of 1855 could blossom into a still more unexpected slave state in 1857. Then slaves could safely come.
Emboldened by the surprising possibilities, the South’s Kansas devotees ardently sought to attract southern entrepreneurs. The Charleston Courier declared that “a negro could … sow wheat” in Kansas latitudes “as well as in Tennessee.” The Richmond Southargued that enslaved Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and most of Virginia and Tennessee all lay “in the same latitude” as Kansas. That Border South latitude, pointed out the New Orleans Delta, was “not adjacent to the North Pole.”2
By swarming on the Kansas borderlands, continued pleas for settlers, slaveholders could gain not only profits for themselves but also two new U.S. senators for the South. If a free labor Kansas triumphed, however, the North would gain four senators: Kansas’s immediately and Missouri’s soon. In 1856–57, prospects for that double defeat mounted. St. Louis free soilers elected Frank Blair, Jr., as their congressman and John Wimer as their mayor.
“Enemy Inside the Walls,” warned the New Orleans Delta. After the enemy’s “cry of ‘Free Kansas,’” their “next shout … will be ‘Free Missouri.’” The Richmond South predicted that the “conquest of Missouri … will open the way through Kentucky and Tennessee” to “Maryland and Virginia.” If Kansas became free soil, concluded the Richmond Enquirer, “the very center of the southern column [would] be pierced.”3
Southern morale would also be pierced. Yankees decry slavery as too barbarous for Kansas, stormed the Montgomery Advertiser. We must meet the insult “like men, or shrink from it like cowards.” The South “can not flinch,” added the Richmond Enquirer, except with “the penalty of everlasting disgrace. … Every impulse of pride, every instinct of policy, every calculation of policy” demands our “prompt and effective aid to the slaveholders of Kansas.” Otherwise, a “multitudinous horde of barbarians from the North” will pervert “Kansas into a free negro state” and leave Missouri “too exhausted … to defend its institutions.”4
Such pleas invaded private mailboxes as well as public newspapers. Slaveholding migrants to Kansas, Alexander Stephens wrote a prominent Georgia judge in early 1857, will “immediately and without doubt double their property.” They will also win a referendum in “favor of their institutions.” Let slaveholding entrepreneurs realize that “Kansas is the place they should go.”5
Instead, planters considered the Southwest the place where they should go. Slaveholding entrepreneurs no longer suffered the impoverished 1840s, when they had urged Texas annexation as a safety valve for excess blacks. Now, cotton boomed. Now, excess Texas and Arkansas bottomlands beckoned. Perhaps, as propagandists fantasized, the Kansas hemp fields also offered rich profits. But southwestern cotton magnates preferred a certain killing at their own business in their own latitudes.
The risks of the Kansas latitudes also deterred southwestern investors. “Capital is proverbially timid,” wrote Edmund Ruffin, and “of all capital, that in slaves is (for obvious reasons) the most timid.” When an entrepreneur could profitably move hundreds of slaves to Texas, hundreds of miles from the nearest incendiary, he would be “mad” to move ten negroes within ten miles of Bleeding Kansas. Or as the New Orleans Commercial Bulletin inquired, who would “take negro property” to “such precarious circumstances,” when every available slave was “wanted for more profitable labor further South”?6
As that inquiry indicated, slaveholding entrepreneurs’ desire for fresh land was not much involved in Kansas, the territorial controversy of the 1850s. The Kansas controversy had major practical political roots, especially the drive to save Missouri and to secure two more U.S. senators. But a fierce border battleground as a practical spot for investments in slaves—well, almost all slaveholding capitalists preferred secure virgin land in the safer U.S. tropics.
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With slavery too risky on cooler and warring plains, slaveholders preferred to send poor men to wage rich men’s fight. Let us finance nonslaveholding yeomen’s migration to Kansas, went the most viable southern strategy of 1856–57. Then our hired settlers will secure the state and buttress Missouri.
Jefferson Buford of Eufalia, Alabama, led this rescue effort. A gentle scholar when not raising his fists, this combative ex-Whig lawyer displayed no softness when defying either insulting Yankees or compromising Democrats. Similar contempt for the Democracy drove many ex-Whigs in the socalled Eufalia Regency toward disunion. In contrast, Buford’s contempt for Democratic Party posturing drew him toward Alabama State’s Rights Whigs, to expose Democrats as proslavery phonies.
Like most ex–Deep South Whigs in the crude Southwest but unlike Virginia’s refined Thomas Flournoy, Alabama foes of the Democracy relished crass electioneering. The Bufords used coarse oratory to teach rednecks that the Democratic Party offered gaudily wrapped proslavery presents, empty inside. Democrats’ supposedly proslavery Kansas-Nebraska Act, urged these ex-Whigs, illustrated the emptiness. Southern Democrats’ alleged victory for slave labor could yield only a free labor Kansas. But ex–Southern Whigs, prayed Jefferson Buford, could push southern settlers toward Kansas and reap genuine proslavery coin.
Jefferson Buford put his money where his rhetoric directed his auditors. He sold forty slaves. He pledged three-fourths of the proceeds to take hundreds of nonslaveholders to Kansas. Before departing for the plains in April 1856, he toured the Lower South, begging more rich men to send more poor men to the territory.
Buford called Kansas our “great outpost.” He warned that “a people who will not defend their outposts have always succumbed to the invader.” Once abolitionist invaders had Missouri “surrounded on three sides, they would begin their assaults on her, and as fast as one State gave way, attack another.” So southern patriots would storm Kansas, “unless public virtue has decayed, and therefore we have become unequal to the successful defense of our rights.”
As befitted a rich white who financed poor whites, Buford claimed to defend not so much property in black men as “the supremacy of the white race.” “Rich and poor” whites, he declared, equally dreaded sinking “to the level of the Ethiopian” and clasping “him in the fond embrace of political and social equality and fraternity.” Was he “mad for periling my estate,” to “transmit conservative institutions to my children?” Or were “you mad,” for eagerly gathering “wealth” so “that free negro drones may have… it”?7
On April 6, 1856, 500 citizens of Montgomery, Alabama, gave Buford’s 415 supposed madmen their sendoff.8 A band of Negro (!) musicians played. Each Bufordite received a Bible. The holy soldiers elected Buford their general. Then they paraded onto the steamship Messenger, waving banners conveying Buford’s twin messages: “The Supremacy of the White Race” and “Kansas the Outpost.” These latest ruffians arrived in Kansas on May 2, 1856, in time for the bloodiest Kansas wars. Buford bought horses for his warriors. They gained renown as members of Buford’s Cavalry. Buford here proved a point that the Civil War would reinforce: Southern poor men would kill Yankees to keep blacks ground under.
Still, Buford’s poor men had come to farm rather than to kill. Here the cavalier on horseback let the commoners down. Buford offered to pay for half his troops’ homesteads but not for their hotels while they searched for land. The homeless poor men knew neither where to search for farms nor how to finance the farming. Buford knew little about the locale of the best land and cared less. Within a few weeks, he dashed off for less grimy adventures in Washington. His dusty cavalrymen mostly milled around, then also left. Buford returned for a few weeks in late 1856, then departed for good in early 1857. He left behind half of his financial stake and few Alabamians.
Buford’s debacle showed what the South most lacked, to place an additional 5000 voters in Kansas: not the potential (nonslaveholding) settlers, not the potential (slaveholders’) funds, but the remotest equivalent of northern entrepreneurial acumen at settling newcomers, after they arrived. Buford badly played the other section’s game. Northern capitalists excelled at buying cheap land, luring free laborers to it, financing yeomen’s purchases, and reaping a developer’s fortune. Eli Thayer’s New England Emigrant Aid Society exuded these northern entrepreneurial skills. Thayerites bought prime Kansas land and guided settlers to the holdings.
In contrast, Buford’s southern development skills involved forcing slaves to work virgin acres. Like a cavalier instead of like a free labor capitalist, he brought the soldiers and a pocket full of cash ($5000 of which was promptly stolen). But he possessed no land for the recruits and no patience to find it for them. The verdict on Jefferson Buford (how he would have loathed this one): if only the southern-style knight had been a northern-style materialist.
Yet this misplaced knight still partially triumphed. Buford widened southern perceptions of potential Kansas warriors. Before Buford’s Cavalry, Lower South leaders had seen Kansas as Missourians’ game to win or lose and slaveholders as the necessary players. After Buford, and after few slaveholders would risk slave laborers in Kansas, southern communities beyond Buford’s stepped up, to finance nonslaveholders’ migration to the plains.
Mississippi’s U.S. Senator Albert Gallatin Brown epitomized the change. “When the Kansas bill passed,” Brown correctly recalled, “very few of us expected Kansas to become a slave state, and very few of us cared much whether it did.” But in November 1855, after Missourians had made Kansas a slave territory, Brown believed that in twelve months Buford-style migrants could establish “a slave colony in Kansas.” Then, “all the abolitionists in the Union could not expel” the heroes. Mississippi should accordingly tax each slaveholder one dollar per slave owned. The state should send 300 slaveless yeomen to Kansas and buy each a slave. If all fifteen southern states adopted the plan, 4500 poor migrants, each given a slave and a ticket to Kansas, would do all “the necessary voting, and if need be, the fighting.”9
Both Alabama and Mississippi legislators turned down proposals such as Brown’s. The lawmakers preferred that private citizens finance private migrants. The decision illustrated a southern-style repugnance for governmental intervention in citizens’ affairs. Brown’s rejection also avoided a southern-style debacle, for the Mississippi senator’s quixoticism outdid Jefferson Buford’s. Imagine, 4500 poor whites, each with a gun in the back of one black, all scrounging around for forty acres to farm, with not one dollar to buy one acre heaven knows where in Kansas.
With neither Brown’s nor Buford’s organized (sort of) scheme working, the task fell to villages’ unsynchronized efforts. Itinerant publicists brought Buford’s message to many Lower South towns in early 1856. Major Warren D. Wilkes, for example, spoke in twenty South Carolina villages in thirty nights in 1856, urging each spot to send five migrants. The contest, declared Wilkes, marks “the turning point in the destinies of Slavery and Abolitionism. … If the North secures Kansas,” neighboring slaveholding states “will gradually become abolitionized.”10
The potential Kansas turning point impelled Lower South and Virginia associations toward fundraising. The results were impressive, not in number of dollars raised (maybe $50,000 in all of the South) but in numbers of fundraisers and contributors (well over a thousand Southrons, including prominent communal leaders). Jefferson Buford received almost $14,000 in contributions, mostly in dribbles of ten dollars here, fifty dollars there. The Charleston Kansas Aid Association’s $100 dribbles added up to $9000, financing seventy migrants. Savannah, Georgia, enthusiasts raised $1114 in a day; Aberdeen, Mississippi, patriots $4000 in a week. South Carolina Congressman Robert F. W. Allston sent $100 to Buford and another $100 to a South Carolina migrant, for we must save “our beautiful country” from “the ravages of the black race and amalgamation with the savages.”11 Or as Judge Samuel J. Gholson claimed during his fifteen-day blitz of fifteen northern Mississippi hamlets, “If the abolitionists accomplish their hellish designs, many” whites “will be compelled to take the place of the slaves.” The white mudsills will “be found blacking boots, or with long aprons around their necks, waiting on the tables of their superiors.”12
Having doled out contributions and dispatched poor men to save all white men, communities eagerly consumed their mercenaries’ news. Joshua Halbert, for example, reported back to Aberdeen, Mississippi, that “northern fanatics sought to make” Kansas “the grand depot for all their underground railroads.” If “emissaries … steal” their slaves, Missourians will ship blacks southward by the “thousands, ’till none are left.”13
While folks back home became vicariously involved in saving the Kansas outpost, uncoordinated communities became as ineffective as Buford’s misplaced cavalry. Once in Kansas, poor folk, including Halbert, wondered where to go. Only 500 of them were on the ground. The 500 wonderers did not balloon to 5000, nor did enough twenty-five dollar contributions swell to $2500, nor could the unorganized South organize the migrants. South Carolina’s John Townsend lamented a paralyzing “want of hopefulness in the cause.” People told him that “they would give” more, “but the North is richer than we, and can give more, and drive us from the ground.”14
There spoke a touchy folk, swift to battle to save interests and reputation but not fully engaged in this uncertain enterprise. By early 1857, Southerners, having failed to settle those extra 5000 voters in Kansas, hunted for a scapegoat for the failure.
– 3 –
The scapegoat arrived in Kansas in the form of President Buchanan’s appointed territorial governor, Robert J. Walker. The new governor bore the president’s hopes, similar to Buchanan’s prayers when intervening in Dred Scott deliberations. The president and his new governor would oust the territorial issue from national contention, this time not by congressional surrender to a Supreme Court decision but by settlers’ surrender to the climate.
The weather, thought the borderland Northerner in the White House, would slowly drain slavery southward from Kansas’ Border South zone, just as climate had slowly drained the dwindling system from his own Border North zone. Let Kansas voters, in a referendum on their constitution, ratify geography’s decree against slavery in their northerly area. Then sweating slaveholders and shivering Yankees could celebrate a Union based on tolerance of weather impelled differences.
By sending Robert Walker to be Kansas territorial governor, Buchanan chose the ideal messenger to spread this isothermal message. Walker, the native Pennsylvanian who had been a U.S. senator from Mississippi, had used his Border North mentality to become a southern hero during the annexation of Texas. Back in the economically depressed 1840s, Southerners had applauded when Walker championed Texas as an escape valve for superfluous black barbarians, who would all supposedly drain from North America down to South America.15
On May 27, 1857, Walker’s inaugural address as Kansas territorial governor reasserted his previously popular viewpoint. Proslavery voters could afford to reject a proslavery constitution, declared this tiny, sickly agitator, for the healthy location of slavery could “no more be controlled by the legislation of man than any other moral or physical law of the Almighty.” God’s “isothermal line, … regulating climate, labor and productions, and, as a consequence profit and loss,” barred slavery from Kansas.16
Southerners’ instant outrage at this isothermal outburst revealed how profoundly the South had changed, not only since Robert Walker had pronounced the theory in Texas times but also since the first half of the nineteenth century. The slow drain of slavery from cooler to hotter climes had been an American constant longer than Walker’s auditors could remember. The institution had crept downward, sinking altogether out of Buchanan’s Border North, partly out of the Border South, and someday, Walker prayed, out of America.
In the 1830s, Virginia’s Thomas Dew, in a supposed defense of permanent slavery, had called the Old Dominion “too far North” for perpetual servitude. At midcentury, Border South abolitionists, including Cassius Clay and Frank Blair, Jr., had applied Dew’s too far North verdict to their states. They had claimed that a cooler climate, with a nudge from the legislature, could emancipate Kentucky and Missouri from slavery (and blacks). Walker in the 1840s, by declaring that an annexed Texas would draw down North American slaves and then send slaves to slavocracies south of the United States, had simply given new voice to an old theory—to a supposedly inevitable isothermal process that had drawn multiple cheers from Jefferson and from the Upper South apologists who perpetuated his tradition.17
In the 1850s, Southern Democrats no longer cheered. Robert Walker’s latest isothermal eruption represented just the step backward, into the bad old Jeffersonian apologies and acceptance of slavery’s doom northward, that the South’s Kansas struggle sought to repudiate. The Charleston Mercury called Walker “the greatest Abolitionist in Kansas.” The Jackson Mississippian labeled him a “treacherous appointee.” Men angrily recalled, wrote Francis Pickens of South Carolina, that Walker had wished to use Texas annexation to “redeem … the South from slavery.” Now, the governor would use his isothermal theory to reconcile slaveholders to the surrender of Kansas and of the whole Border South.18
Privately, Walker, having surrendered his temporary status as southern resident, conceded that he hoped to reconcile Southerners to the surrender of slavery everywhere. In his inaugural address, he bragged to Buchanan, he had “reintroduced the Negro theory of my old Texas letter, and reopened the true safety valve of abolition”—the diffusion of blacks to areas south of America. He furthermore hoped, Walker whispered, that the diffusion of blacks to Africa “on a large scale” would hasten U.S. abolition.19
That private confession confirmed that Walker’s public position could no longer be southern orthodoxy. 1857 was not 1844. Now, Southerners prospered. Now, they needed more slaves, not a safety valve for excess slaves. Now, Missourians battled to stop border slaves from draining to the deeper South. By now endorsing the isothermal impossibility of slavery in Kansas (and therefore in the entire Border South), Walker in effect advised Southerners not to come rescue Kansas’s (or Missouri’s) allegedly unsalvageable slavery. That pronouncement led to a great hue and cry that Walker had caused too few whites to come. The South had found its scapegoat for its own failure to bring the proslavery voters.
– 4 –
Most Southern Democrats protested still more angrily against Robert Walker’s version of Popular Sovereignty theory, also announced in his inaugural. All Democrats, North and South, affirmed Popular Sovereignty’s basic premise: that local settlers, not far-off congressmen, must decide whether to allow slavery in their territory. Before Walker’s speech, Democrats’ only Popular Sovereignty division had concerned when local voters could decide to abolish slavery. Southerners thought that settlers could not abolish the institution until the moment before the territory became a state. Northerners retorted that local voters could abolish slavery anytime, including when the first settlers entered a territory.
Robert Walker’s inaugural address raised another, previously undetected controversial aspect of Popular Sovereignty: not only when but how? How must local settlers decide about slavery, when they adopted their constitution? One possibility: After the people selected delegates to a constitutional convention, the people’s convention could make the final decision. Another possibility: After the people’s convention decided, the people had to reaffirm their representatives’ decision in a popular referendum.
Both choices would follow American precedent. When the people of an American state made a constitution, a convention, elected by the people, drafted a fundamental text. Then the state’s convention customarily decided whether the populace must reratify the constitution that their convention delegates had ratified.
During the aristocratic Founding Fathers’ years, the people’s conventions had ratified, without the people reratifying. Of the original thirteen colonies, only the Massachusetts convention had submitted its state constitution to the people for reratification. Moreover, only state conventions had ratified the U.S. Constitution. In the nineteenth century, however, as a more popular, less elitist version of republicanism took hold, the people’s delegates to the state conventions customarily decided that the people must reratify, in a popular referendum on the convention’s constitution.
Except in the South. As of 1858, the people in all but one of the northern states, but in only seven of the fifteen southern states, had reratified their convention’s constitutions. The slave-based section, more prone to denounce direct popular rule as mob rule, more often insisted that the popular will must be filtered through their representatives’ decisions, in constitution making no less than in lawmaking. Northern fanatics’ Jacobinical notion that the people must reratify their delegates’ ratification, declared the Charleston Courier, exemplified Yankee infatuation with “wild democracy and mere numerical ascendancy.”20
Kansas proslavery zealots’ last chance to save a proslavery commonwealth depended on scuttling wild democracy, alias the northern theory that the people must reratify their own convention’s ratification of a state constitution. In 1855, one-day Kansans had elected proslavery legislators for only a two-year term. In the October 1857 election, Kansas’s now more numerous free soilers figured to win the territorial legislature. So in February 1857, the expiring proslavery legislature called a popular convention, charged with writing a constitution for a state before a free laborers’ territorial legislature could convene. Popular elections for delegates would take place on June 15 for a mid-September convention. The people’s state convention, after writing and ratifying a constitution, would decide whether to submit its handiwork back to the people for reratification. If by some subterfuge, proslavery Kansans won a convention majority but the proslavery convention had to send the proslavery constitution back to primarily antislavery settlers for reratification, the Kansas popular majority would have a (probably fatal) second chance to kill the institution.
The Yankee president had no desire to kill slavery in Kansas. James Buchanan only craved escape from a (probably fatal) national controversy over whether Kansans wished slavery to live or die. He prayed for a Kansas popular referendum that would preclude congressional dispute over Kansans’ wishes.
So before Robert Walker left for Kansas and for months thereafter, Buchanan reiterated the northern slant on Popular Sovereignty. He urged any Kansas convention to submit its constitution to the Kansas people for final approval. Robert Walker, in his inaugural address, transcended mere urging. He declared that the convention must resubmit the constitution to “all the actual residents of Kansas.” Otherwise, “the constitution will be and ought to be rejected by Congress.”
Walker’s ultimatum inflated the stakes in the Kansas struggle. More was now at issue than continued Kansas bondage for 200 slaves, more even than the southern boon of a sixteenth slave state, more even than antislavery danger to embattled Missouri. By dictating to a sovereign state convention, this federal agent threatened the very core of state’s rights ideology and thus slaveholders’ final line of defense.
The threatened state’s rights principle transcended whether the federal government possessed power over this or that, whether over tariffs or whatever. The issue involved whether any mere government possessed the slightest authority over the supreme American sovereign, a people’s state convention, when that absolute authority engaged in the highest American act, writing and consenting to a constitution. The sacred state’s rights distinction between all-powerful state constitution makers and potentially powerless federal agents slammed the door against federal antislavery or any other alleged federal tyranny. A state convention could withdraw its consent from any government. Then no governmental inferior could coerce the departing superior.
Walker’s ultimatum, coming from a mere government agent, would instead dictate to an almighty sovereign convention, and on the principle of how it could make constitutions! From Walker’s proposed enslavement of the Kansas convention could follow future enslavement of secession conventions. The president, only a mere federal agent just like Walker, could deny a sovereign state convention’s right to withdraw its consent to the U.S. Constitution.
The southern politics of loyalty precluded surrender of this ultimate state’s rights principle. In the Lower South especially, seething ex-Whigs remained at large, ready to pounce on their Democratic Party tormentors’ slightest tendency to ease off southern insistence. Thus any true blue Southerner, screamed ex-Whigs’ Lower South newspapers, must affirm the sovereign Kansas convention’s sole right to decide how to write and ratify its constitution. Otherwise, the phony prosouthern party would plead guilty of treason to slavery.21
A few Lower South and more Middle South Buchanan supporters still dared to stand up for Governor Walker, including the New Orleans Picayune, the Richmond Enquirer, and Virginia’s Governor Henry Wise. But other respected voices worried Buchanan’s southern Directory. Howell Cobb had hailed “our friend and kinsman” Lucius Q. C. Lamar’s imminent election to Congress, for “I shall have some good friends in the next House.”22 But Lamar, writing Cobb as “a friend whose heart will be true to you till its latest throb,” warned that “dear as you are to me, I would have to cling to principles,” if Cobb clung to “Walker’s shameless abandonment of our right.” Lamar could not “entertain the thought that you would oppose the admission of a slave state, merely because her constitution was not submitted to the people.” The people’s sovereign convention, declared Cobb’s southern friend, must decide such matters, not a federal agent trespassing on forbidden ground. That opinion “pervades the whole mass of the Democracy here.”23
Cobb’s reply demonstrated how profoundly the slavery and state’s rights issues now endangered the Union. The secretary of the treasury was too proud of his immersion in the Lamar clan, thanks to wife Mary Ann, and too entangled in southern postulates, thanks to his huge slaveholding interests, to deny his in-law’s assumptions. Lucius Lamar was correct, Howell Cobb conceded, that Robert Walker had no right, as a mere federal agent, to present ultimatums to that imminent absolute sovereign, the coming Kansas people’s convention.
But the imminent absolutist might be persuaded, added Cobb, to hold a popular referendum on the whole constitution. After a definitive postconvention popular referendum on what the settlers desired, Congress would have to accept the indisputable popular voice. But without a popular referendum, congressional disputes over whether the Kansas convention truly represented the Kansas voters would devastate the administration, the party, and the Union. James Buchanan passionately concurred.24
Given the overriding importance the president and the supreme member of the Directory placed on a Kansas popular referendum, why would not Cobb insist, Robert Walker style, that a Kansas constitutional convention must authorize that vote? Because this passionate opponent of the expediency of secession, like the vast majority of Southerners, accepted a state’s right to secede. The acceptance precluded any right to insist on anything when advising that final authority, a sovereign state convention. According to the marrow of southern state’s rights assumption, the almighty body could decide everything about anything, and especially about how to write and consent to constitutions. Since Cobb could not deny that southern orthodoxy, he could not join that mere federal agent, Governor Walker, in federal ultimatums to an invincible state convention.
– 5 –
In Kansas, the mere agent still pressed his ultimatum. Governor Walker, although an ex–U.S. senator from Mississippi, now acted more like the native Pennsylvanian who had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and lately had haunted New York City commercial houses. He would defy the southern gospel of a state convention’s absolute sovereignty. He would order the allegedly almighty convention to behave. If the delegates disobeyed his command, he would rally Congress to deny Kansas statehood, with, so he said, the president’s blessings.
During the nineteen days between Walker’s inaugural and the Kansas populace’s June 15 selection of convention delegates, the governor also promised to ensure a fair election. But ever since one-day Kansans had fraudulently won control of the first territorial legislature, northern settlers had shunned that government’s elections. Instead, free soilers had elected their own government, a shadow regime that met in Topeka. Since free soilers abstained from the other government’s elections, fraud could never again defeat them. Since they participated in the Topeka fraud-free elections, Yankees proved that they had many more voters than did Southerners.
Now, free soilers doubted that Governor Walker could stop Southerners’ election fraud or force a fraudulent convention to hold a popular referendum on its constitution. So Yankees again stayed home on Election Day. The abstainers enabled the Kansas minority of Southerners to elect every delegate to the Lecompton Convention (so called because it would deliberate in Lecompton, on the Kansas River some forty miles west of the Missouri border).
The Lecompton Constitutional Convention met for three days in mid-September 1857. Then delegates recessed, to observe the October 5–6 election for Kansas Territory’s second legislature. This time, northern voters braved the Kansas polls. But as in the first election of territorial legislators, fraud defeated them. In Oxford, for example, containing only six houses near the Missouri boundary, proslavery legislators received 1628 votes (or 271 voters per residence).
Robert Walker investigated. He found that the Oxford election returns consisted of a fifty-foot-long list of names, copied in one man’s handwriting from an 1855 Cincinnati directory. The governor threw out the Oxford and other fraudulent returns, thus awarding free soilers control of Kansas’s new territorial legislature.25
Proslavery delegates to the Lecompton Convention, now the last gasp of the 1855–57 proslavery territorial regime, thus would lose if they submitted a proslavery constitution to the heavily free soil electorate for reratification, particularly if Robert Walker ensured a fair election. Yet if they refused to hold a popular referendum on the state convention’s constitution, the national congressional majority, especially if led by the president, might refuse to admit the state to the Union. Then the newly elected free soil territorial legislature would take over Kansas Territory. After two years of guarding slavery in Kansas and thus in Missouri, the Lecompton crowd had little time and scant options left.
– 6 –
When the Lecompton Convention reconvened on October 19, 1857, Howell Cobb and Jacob Thompson sent a special messenger to plead with the supposed unlimited sovereign one last time for a popular referendum on any Lecompton Constitution. The Directory’s emissary, Henry L. Martin of Mississippi, a clerk in Thompson’s Department of the Interior, delivered a letter from his superior, conceding the absolute sovereign’s sole right to decide whether to submit its constitution for popular reratification.
But Martin also delivered Thompson’s appeal and an even stronger appeal from Howell Cobb, advising that a popular referendum would be highly expedient in pushing a constitution through Congress. At first, the convention delegates fastened on Thompson’s concession that they could refuse all referendums. Rejecting Cobb’s and Thompson’s advice, conventioneers narrowly voted to send their whole constitution to Congress, with no popular referendum whatsoever.
But then Henry L. Martin’s pleading helped bring off a revote and a subsequent 27-25 victory for a compromise, one that had the Directory’s agent’s blessings. The barely passed bargain sanctioned a popular referendum, scheduled for December 21, on only Article Seven of the proposed Lecompton Constitution. Among that article’s many protections of slavery, one attracted all the controversy: that future slaves could be imported into the state.26
If a popular majority rejected Article Seven, declared the convention, “slavery shall no longer exist in the State of Kansas, except that the right of property now in this Territory, shall in no manner be interfered with” (emphasis mine). If voters rejected Article Seven, in other words, the some 200 slaves then in Kansas, but no additional bondsmen, could labor in the state. To supervise the referendum on whether a future enslaved Kansas could contain more than its present 200 slaves and their descendants, the convention appointed its president (and not Governor Walker!).27
When news of this partial referendum appeared in the nation’s newspapers, predictably different northern and southern responses exploded. Most Northerners (and all Northern Republicans) denounced the December 21 referendum. They pointed out that Kansans could reject neither nonslavery aspects of the constitution nor slavery’s continued presence. Moreover, the president of the Lecompton Convention, as supervisor of the referendum voting, could allow fraudulent voters to force future slave imports on the Kansas majority. In every way, Yankees protested, the Lecompton outcome violated the spirit of Popular Sovereignty.
Southerners responded that the Lecompton decision had followed the letter of Popular Sovereignty procedure. The Lecompton Convention delegates had been legitimately elected. True, Yankee voters had been absent. But according to the letter of democratic procedure, as Robert Walker had pointed out in his inaugural address, “absentees are as much bound … by the act of the majority of those who do vote, as if they had participated in the election.”
After this legitimate Kansas election, continued the southern position, the people’s absolutely sovereign convention had the sole right to decide whether to submit the constitution back to the people. The convention had decided to submit the slave importation essence of the slavery issue for popular decision. If Kansas voters rejected future slave imports, they would render the Peculiar Institution almost extinct.
As for the 200 slaves remaining after voters killed slave imports, continued the southern plea, the trace of slavery would simply repeat the northern example. After the 1787 Northwest Ordinance and after northern states’ antislavery laws, slaves on the ground before the edicts remained enslaved. The December 21 Kansas referendum on Article Seven thus allowed voters to affirm or reject the Yankee path to eventual abolition.
– 7 –
Buchanan’s southern Directory applauded the Article Seven compromise that Cobb’s and Thompson’s agent, Henry Martin, had with difficulty helped secure. Howell Cobb cheered that the Kansas voters could decide the most important “question at issue,” the future expansion of a minuscule amount of slavery. Thus “the material point has been attained.” The Directory pled that case to the president. Buchanan swiftly proclaimed the coming December 21 referendum on Article Seven a legitimate test of Popular Sovereignty.28
Supposedly, he thereby blundered. Actually, he no longer had a choice. After Buchanan’s favorite members of the Directory had sent their own agent to the Kansas convention, and after that agent had triumphantly secured a compromise, and after the Directory had hailed the bargain as an acceptable referendum, the president would have lost most of his cabinet and most of his Lower South supporters if he had rejected his own men’s handiwork.
If the president blundered, the mismanagement came before the Directory’s agent entered the Lecompton Convention. If Buchanan had insisted, to Robert Walker’s delight and Howell Cobb’s horror, that any agent of his executive department must require the convention to hold a full popular referendum, not advise it to do so, he would have intervened before his window of opportunity slammed shut. Why did he instead allow the Directory’s agent to restrict intervention to mere advice?
Posterity only definitively knows that in mid-July, six weeks after Robert Walker’s late May inaugural but three months before the Directory’s mid-October advice to the Lecompton Convention, Buchanan wrote Walker that “on the question of submitting the constitution to the bona fideresident settlers, I am willing to stand or fall.”29 But a privately expressed willingness to stand remains a long stride short of a publicly expressed pledge to deliver. After his mid-July letter to Walker, Buchanan neither strode toward insistence nor aborted the Directory’s stride toward advice. Again, why?
Speculations must begin with the fact that during the long hot summer of 1857, as before and after, the president practically lived for conversations about politics, particularly with his favorite cronies. Buchanan and Howell Cobb especially loved to exchange the latest political gossip. Thus Buchanan almost surely knew that Cobb went out of his way, and as far as the secretary felt he could go, toward defending Walker’s inaugural against southern critics such as Lucius Lamar. The president also almost surely knew that Cobb, like almost all Lower South Democrats, considered a federal ultimatum to a limitless state sovereign absolutely forbidden. So Buchanan almost surely knew that as a mere federal agent dictating to an alleged absolute sovereign, he would alienate (and perhaps lose) Cobb—the vital center of that alliance between Border Northerners and moderate Southerners that the president considered perpetual Union’s best prayer. The president furthermore almost surely knew that Cobb and Thompson sent Henry Martin as a merely persuading agent, and Buchanan almost surely (and likely reluctantly and silently) concurred in their strategy of noninsistence.
The president may also have seen insufficient practical reason to defy Cobb. Cutting past theories about state’s rights, the practical issue was whether imperious ultimatums or respectful advice would best stir a stubborn Kansas convention. Buchanan, a master at cutting deals in country lawsuits and political crises, may well have found Cobb more strategically plausible. Walker’s imperious dictations could force proud Kansans’ backs to go straight on up. In contrast, Cobb’s respectful persuasions could lure selfrespecting frontiersmen toward accommodations. Moreover, if the administration sought to force the convention’s hand, Southerners might rise up against the enslavement of the sovereign.
Buchanan had married his Union-saving mission to Cobb, the most amiable, most conscientious, most powerful, most committed unionist among Lower South Democrats. Like all enduring marriages, this political partnership sometimes required accommodations, especially when one partner felt that a holy principle was at stake. So the president, runs the guess here, knowingly acquiesced in his partner’s prayer that the Directory’s special envoy to the Lecompton Convention would be sufficiently persuasive.
Buchanan thereby surrendered the initiative to a pack of frontier rowdies, free to heed or ignore Washington’s preferences. So might history’s path have swerved at least temporarily toward sectional peace if the Buchanan administration’s word to the Kansas convention had been Do, not Please do?
The guess here is that proslavery convention desperadoes would have plotted some way around any administration intervention, whether the intrusion involved advice or insistence. The delegates’ passion to save slavery in Kansas (and thus, so they thought, slavery in Missouri) seems too consistent, and a fair referendum on slavery seems too obviously a slaveholders’ loser, for a convention surrender without a last proslavery hurrah. So too, Lower South Democrats’ opposition to federal coercion of the state sovereign seems too intransient for Buchanan’s heavily southern coalition to have survived a presidential ultimatum to the Lecompton Convention.
Yet an alternative guess certainly has its plausibility. A Buchanan ultimatum possibly could have precluded the climactic Lecompton disruption, and Lower South Democrats possibly would have begrudgingly acquiesced. If faced with a presidential insistence, Lecompton desperadoes might have decided that a full popular referendum offered their only (slim) hope of securing a sixteenth slave state. So too, Lower South Democrats might have decided that even a soiled Buchanan administration offered their only hope of regaining slaveholders’ national control. If this happier outcome can be deemed plausible, Buchanan’s retreat from intervening in the Lecompton Convention proceedings damaged the Union as much as did his advance toward intervening in the Supreme Court’s so-called Dred Scott proceeding.30
The possibility that a Buchanan ultimatum could have yielded a better Kansas finale, plus the probability that Howell Cobb pushed the president away from Walker’s ultimatum, makes the Georgian’s state’s rights religion especially important. That theory, so directly responsible for restraining Cobb from a federal insistence to a state convention, probably thereby restrained Buchanan, too. The state’s rights gospel of sovereignty would soon again demonstrate its power to ensnare southern unionists and thereby to decimate the Union.
– 8 –
Whether or not Buchanan blundered before the Lecompton Convention, afterward he saw only the opportunity to stay the course. The president had to announce his support of the partial referendum swiftly, on the chance he could prod Kansans to the polls on December 21. If the Kansas free soil majority shunned the Lecompton polls, the minority of southern voters would save Article Seven. Then Northern Democrats would have to swallow not just 200 slaves but also a slave-importing state. In contrast, if Yankees in Kansas defeated Article Seven and slave importation on December 21, Northern Democrats would only have to stomach a barely enslaved state (containing only one-tenth of the slaves in barely enslaved Delaware).
Northerners in Kansas deplored the Lecompton Constitution, with or without Article Seven, and they doubted that referendum votes on Article Seven would be fairly counted. So they shunned the Lecompton polls on December 21. Their absence allowed the southern minority, by a vote of 6266–567, to affirm Article Seven and seek admission to the Union, with constitutional protection for future slaves to join the lonely 200.
On January 4, 1858, the Topeka free soiler crowd held its own referendum on the Lecompton Constitution. Topeka voters chose among the constitution with Article Seven, the constitution without Article Seven, and no constitution at all. No constitution at all secured 10,226 votes to 162 for any Lecompton Constitution. Combining the Lecompton and Topeka tallies, 6428 Kansans voted for the Lecompton Constitution and 10,793 against it.31
Stephen A. Douglas did not need this mathematical proof to repudiate the Lecompton referendum. A month and a day before the Topeka crowd thumpingly rejected the Lecompton Constitution, he descended on the White House to denounce the sellout of Popular Sovereignty. No witness recorded the curses exchanged, but the final epithets seem clear enough. Buchanan declared that like President Andrew Jackson, he would destroy any Democratic Party senator who dared to oppose a Democrat’s administration. “Mr. President,” spat back the senator, “General Jackson is dead.”32
The insult inaugurated a showdown between two irreconcilable northern warriors. Where Buchanan considered Popular Sovereignty a treasured weapon to keep slavery controversy out of Congress, Douglas considered local selfgovernment itself the treasure. Where Buchanan, a narrowly practical lawyer, demanded that the letter of a legal process be legitimate, Douglas, a charismatic seer, insisted that the spirit of democracy be sustained. Where Buchanan had to have his southern support, Douglas had to have his northern constituents. The Illinois senator, up for reelection in 1858, would be finished as a national politician if he lost at home. He could never win in Illinois if he endorsed Lecompton’s desecration of the spirit of Popular Sovereignty.
By consistently refusing to trample on Popular Sovereignty, Douglas served as both the midwife of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and a slayer of its Lecompton fruits. In 1854, Southern Democrats had insisted that Douglas would no longer be Douglas unless he authorized Kansas/Nebraska settlers to decide on their local institutions. In 1857–58, Illinois constituents insisted that Douglas would no longer be Douglas if he allowed the Kansas minority to enslave the majority. If the Lecompton Constitution “is to be forced down our throats,” Douglas responded, he would “resist … to the last.”33
Considering all that Buchanan had to resist—Douglas’s revolt, the Topeka referendum’s proof that most Kansans loathed the Lecompton Constitution, the inclusion of the notorious Article Seven in an already iniquitous democratic swindle (so most Northerners considered everything coming out of Lecompton)—considering in short how tainted was his cause in the North, this powerful political infighter swung a remarkable percentage of Northern Democratic members of the House of Representatives, fully 60 percent, behind the Lecompton Constitution. That topped the percentage of Northern Democratic congressmen that Douglas had rallied behind the Kansas-Nebraska Act, barely over 50 percent. This continued Northern Democratic appeasement of the South illuminated again why the minority South had long controlled the majoritarian republic: The Democratic Party was the nation’s majority party, and the South was the party’s majority section. Buchanan never forgot that reality. Douglas now defied it.
Unfortunately for Buchanan, Yankees had grown obsessed with stopping the Slave Power minority from ruling the northern majority. Stoppage demanded obliterating the appeasing Northern Democrats. Where eighty-one Northern Democrats had served in the Kansas-Nebraska House, only fiftythree Northern Democrats remained in the Lecompton House. Fifty percent of eighty-one Northern Democrats had been enough to pass the Kansas-Nebraska Act by eleven votes, even with thirteen Southern Whigs voting no. In contrast, 60 percent of fifty-three Northern Democrats could approve the Lecompton Constitution only if all but one Southerner voted yes.
Southern congressmen ardently sought this unanimity. They displayed none of the half effort that had crippled attempts to pour nonslaveholders into Kansas. Failures such as Buford’s had demonstrated Southerners’ scant ability at free labor migrating ventures and at uniting migrants from scattered communities. But when Southerners massed in Washington, D.C., and faced Yankee insulters, they could better forge the necessary united front.
“I am nothing like as well satisfied here, as I was in Richmond,” first-term congressman (and future Virginia governor) John Letcher privately wrote. “In Richmond,” we were “personally attached to each other, however divided we were politically.” But in Congress, we are “thrown into association with people… for whom we care not” and who “care as little for us.” Worse, “many of them are bitterly prejudiced against us, and our institutions.”34
As Howell Cobb’s brother, Thomas R. R. Cobb, described the bitter prejudices that spawned divided packs of congressional warriors, Southerners’ “contempt” for northern maligners bred our “overbearing conduct,” which in turn bred “a rancorous hatred of the South. …Vast numbers” of Northerners “believe us to be Tyrants. …To believe us humane & just would grate not only on their prejudices but on their pride.” We must proudly scream back that we will not be treated as inferiors.35
In 1856, proud screaming had provoked the Brooks-Sumner mugging. In 1858, a bloodless clash, more comic than tragic, demonstrated that consuming hatreds had become no laughing matter. Near midnight on February 4, 1858, exhausted members of the House of Representatives tensely debated the Lecompton Constitution. Galusha M. Grow, a Pennsylvania free soiler, trenched on the Democratic Party’s side of the aisle. Laurence Keitt, the South Carolina ultra who had blocked John Crittenden from stopping Preston Brooks’s swings of the gutta cane, lay sprawled over two seats, one shoe off. “Go back to your side of the House, you Black Republican puppy,” snarled Keitt. Grow retorted that a white man could stand where he pleased, “and no nigger driver is going to come up from his plantation and crack his whip about my ears.”
South Carolina’s slave driver responded that we’d see about that, as soon as “I put on my shoe on.” Keitt fastened the buckle. He charged. He grasped Grow’s throat. Then he strode away (unlike Preston Brooks!).
“You can’t come from your slave plantation and expect to apply the lash to me,” squealed Grow. Keitt seized the Yankee’s throat again. Others dove into the melee. The two dozen combatants included two huge men, Barksdale of Mississippi and Washburne of Illinois. Washburne’s awkward blow sent Barksdale’s wig flying. The Mississippian’s heretofore unsuspected hairpiece disappeared amidst trampling feet. Calmer sorts separated the fighters, with Barksdale’s toupee the only casualty and the Mississippian sputtering about his shame.36
The shaming felt grievous. The Grow/Keitt comedy epitomized the power of self-respect and self-esteem to cleave lawmakers, whatever the practicalities at stake. The vocabulary of Grow and Keitt—Black Republican puppy, nigger driver, Keep your despotic hands off a white man, I’ll go wherever I want in freedom’s chamber—all these words bespoke a national schism over more than whether Kansans could enslave 200 blacks and over more than whether slaveholders, to protect slavery, could dictate to white majorities. Two packs of white men fought over who were really republicans, really equals, really Christians. On character assassination, the South could almost unite.
Thus did the Lecompton finale illuminate how minuscule minorities’ initial concerns ballooned into unmanageable majoritarian crises. The tiny fraction of Missouri slaveholders who lived near the Kansas border, comprising a tinier fraction of the South and a still tinier fraction of the Union, had demanded their chance to protect the southern hinterlands. Southerners in Congress (unlike potential settlers in the countryside) flew to the aid of their fighting outpost, both in the Kansas-Nebraska Act and in the Lecompton proceedings. Both times, Northerners loathed the southern minority for demanding that the white majorities, whether in Kansas or in Congress, kowtow to Slave Power tyrants. Southerners loathed Northerners for calling them tyrants. The mutual loathing had helped doom one national party, imperil the other, and threaten the minority’s control over majoritarian Union. That control would snap over Lecompton unless almost every southern House member rose against the Yankee majority.
– 9 –
Enslaved Kansas lost all hope for a saving southern unanimity on March 23, 1858, when the Senate voted 33–25 to admit Kansas to the Union under the Lecompton Constitution.37 While the South triumphed, two Upper South ex-Whigs, John Bell of Tennessee and John Crittenden of Kentucky, voted against Lecompton. An equivalent percentage of Upper South ex-Whig congressmen, by following these two anti-Lecompton senatorial leaders when the House voted a week hence, would doom slaveholders’ proposed sixteenth state.
On April 1, the House in effect rejected the Lecompton Constitution, 120–112.38 The victors included all Northern Republicans, 40 percent of Northern Democrats, and the pivotal killers, six Upper South ex-Whigs. The South had almost pulled off the necessary unanimity. All Southern Democrats, all Lower South congressmen, and all but one of the Middle South congressmen (an ex-Whig) massed behind Lecompton. But a fatal five of the eight Border South ex-Whig congressmen emulated John Bell’s and John Crittenden’s anti-Lecompton example.
Southerners had never before lost on a major slavery issue. This time, their Border South Achilles’ heel failed them. “None of the” deserters, noted the Charleston Mercury, “are from the Cotton-growing states. All represent States where slavery may be gradually and safely abolished without ruin. … The unsoundness of these states on the slavery question killed Lecompton.”39
The John Crittendens and John Bells declared themselves perfectly “sound.” They plausibly argued that Southern Democrats damaged slavery and Union by pushing Northern Democrats over the edge. Better to accept inevitable defeat and contain the damage, thought Crittenden, Bell, and the five allegedly disloyal House members. The Charleston Mercury correctly saw another reason for the Border South ex-Whigs’ uncommon southern disposition: “We believe that … between the Union and the institution,” these sensibly asouthern Southerners “would not hesitate to choose the former.”40
That diagnosis of southern disunity discounted the South’s remarkable coming together throughout the Lecompton crisis. Southerner after Southerner had swallowed doubts that Kansas was worth the turmoil. Time after time, they had voted the South’s way, proving themselves true blue to their own folk. “I stood out to the last against it,” Congressmen Guy M. Bryan of Texas wrote his brother, then “said, ‘because the South votes aye, I vote aye.’”41
Ninety-four percent of southern U.S. House members voted aye in the Kansas crunch. So too, whatever Davy Atchison’s worry about slavery’s staying power in Missouri (the concern that had first sparked this four disastrous years of Kansas turmoil), Atchison’s supporters overwhelmingly prevailed except in Missouri’s cities. And so too, whatever Howell Cobb’s wish that proslavery Kansans would compromise a little, such southern unionists accepted disunionists’ uncompromising theory of a state convention’s absolute sovereignty. That acceptance crippled the administration’s best unionist strategy for blocking the Lecompton Convention’s disruptions. To like effect, Dred Scott’s moderate judges accepted southern extremists’ theory of slaveholders’ property rights. That acceptance propelled a Union-smashing Supreme Court decision. This culture had a unity problem?!
Yes. True, the minority South long prevailed in the Union and long lasted on Civil War battlefields partly because a proud, touchy culture largely massed against outsiders. But some softness weakened the culture’s northern edges; the Kansas turmoil had started as a way to harden the hinterlands; and those very outposts had rallied insufficiently in the climactic House vote on the Lecompton Constitution. Precisely those peripheral areas would put slavery most at risk if Southern Republicans, emboldened by federal patronage, attacked from inside the exposed hinterlands.
Border South ex-Whigs’ anti-Lecompton votes, when contrasted with Lower South ex-Whigs’ pro-Lecompton pressures, indicated again that the more extreme northern and southern Souths were different worlds, generating different politics. In the Kansas affair, the Lower South’s Whiggish political brawlers, including Jefferson Buford and all the politicians who stuck it to the Democrats over Robert Walker’s inaugural address, stood for arousing proslavery zealotry. In the Lecompton climax, however, Border South Whiggish compromisers stood for soothing the Union. So a fraction of the peripheral hinterlands had deserted the core of the South in the climactic struggle within the Union. That result would be repeated on Civil War battlefields.
– 10 –
After Lecompton’s defeat, the losers sought to place a face-saving mask over their fiasco. Two Democrats, Indiana’s William English and Georgia’s Alexander Stephens, championed the disguise—the so-called English Bill. The Lecompton Convention had asked for an uncommonly large grant of virgin federal land, upon their slave state’s admission into the Union. The English Bill offered Kansas voters admission under the Lecompton Constitution, if they would accept 84 percent less land (approximately the land grant normally given to new states). If voters rejected this normal land grant (and the Lecompton Constitution), Kansas could not enter the Union until the territory possessed a more normal new state population (about three times more people than inhabited Kansas in 1858).
The English Bill allowed Kansas voters to reject the Lecompton Constitution by seeming to reject only the shriveled land grant. Northern Republicans disdained this subterfuge. So did Stephen A. Douglas, the South’s newest bête noir. But on April 30, the House and Senate passed the face-saving compromise. On August 30, Kansas voters rejected the shrunken land grant (and the Lecompton Constitution), 11,812–1926. Kansas would remain a territory until after the Lower South seceded.42
After the cosmetics came the postmortems. To a huge majority of Northerners, spreading beyond Republicans to anti-Lecompton Douglas Democrats, Congress had barely turned back a gigantic Slave Power Conspiracy to bend white men’s majoritarianism to slavemasters’ dictatorial needs, first in Kansas and then in Congress. The almost victorious supposed swindle, atop the Dred Scott supposed fraud, showed that white men must put down the southern-dominated Democracy, once and for all. Almost all Yankees still repudiated an antislavery intervention in the South. But a bipartisan Yankee surge meant to sweep over Washington, to ensure that a Slave Power minority never again enslaved white majorities.
When James Buchanan took the oath of office, the ninety-two Northern Republicans already outnumbered the fifty-three Northern Democrats in the House of Representatives. In the congressional elections of 1858, the fifty-three Northern Democrats shrank to thirty-two, twelve of them anti-Lecompton, anti-Buchanan Democrats. Thus the president’s northern House backers sank to twenty of 145 Yankees. Worse, voters flushed away Buchananites in the only northern subsection that the Democracy had saved in 1856—the Border North. New Jersey and Illinois voters returned no supporters of Lecompton among their fourteen congressmen. Indiana voters selected only two of eleven, and Buchanan’s fellow Pennsylvania citizens but two of twenty-five.
Northern Democrats’ only bright spot looked gloomy to Buchanan. In 1858, the president’s hated new opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, defeated the Republicans’ Abraham Lincoln in the newly elected Illinois state legislature. So the Little Giant stayed in the U.S. Senate. Yet pro-Douglas legislative candidates garnered only 121,090 popular votes, compared to 125,275 for pro-Lincoln candidates. Douglas’s victory thus defied the Illinois popular majority—an ironic triumph for a preacher of Popular Sovereignty. But that irony scarcely comforted the president, who suffered the fact that Douglas’s defiance of the southern minority and the Buchanan administration had spread throughout the Border North. How, then, could the Border North’s president save the Democratic Party or the Union in 1860?
In the South, Kansas postmortems also could yield dismay. Southerners usually blamed the six Upper South ex-Whigs or Stephen A. Douglas for the loss of Kansas. But they occasionally ate their words about Robert Walker’s isothermal predictions. A few of them even declared that Kansas and the entire Border South might indeed be too far north for slavery.
C. C. Woolworth, for example, a southern itinerant book dealer, traversed the Kansas-Nebraska-Missouri area during the 1855–58 years. Kansas, he conceded in May 1857, “may commence her history as a slave state. But the tremendous free state majority,” he argued, “will immediately change it.” The “immense …throng of travelers seeking new homes in the Missouri Valley” have also “virtually” settled Missouri’s “question of slavery in favor of Emancipation.” In “five years, Missouri will be freed” and “Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee are likely to follow.” Woolworth disliked northern abolitionists “as heartily as any Southron can.” But “the law of political economy … ultimately will manage” the question, “in spite of politicians,” in spite “of justice and humanity.”43
Woolworth’s demographic determinism, like Walker’s geographic determinism, may have been correct. Slaveholders may have faced impersonal doom immediately in Kansas, soon in the Border South, and eventually in the whole South, however much they railed against their fate. Since southern unionists dominated the Kansas and Dred Scott affairs, and since the likes of Howell Cobb and Roger B. Taney ironically hastened disunion, these slaveholders did bear the aspect of pygmies, defying gigantic forces that they only made more destructive.
The mass of Southerners cheered such defiances. They staged one of America’s most colorful histories because they remained aggressive defenders, determined to go out with a splash if they went out at all. After the Kansas failure, only a tiny minority of them whined, in the spirit of Woolworth and Walker, that climate or anything else trapped them. Rather, they sought better escapes from history’s traps.
Thus Kansas frustrations encouraged a rising campaign to reopen the African slave trade. Many imported Africans, so southern ultras dreamed, could correct all slaveholder weaknesses. More slaves could be sent to some future Kansas, to seize a slaveholding empire. Fewer slaves would have to be drained from the Border South, to develop the Lower South.
The Kansas debacle also spurred a widening disunion movement. Kansas proslavery warriors had shrewdly scheduled the statehood showdown before northern numbers became overwhelming. In that spirit, disunionists prayed that an early secessionist showdown could barricade the South in a southern nation, before Southern Republicans surged over the borderlands.
A less extreme strategy could turn Walker’s isothermics to the South’s advantage. Instead of defying the weather northward, the New Orleans Louisiana Courier argued, our “finger of destiny” should point southward. If “half the discussion, time and brain-work that have been wasted” on Kansas had been lavished on “southern progressive enterprise” in Caribbean climes, we would have had “acquisitions a thousand fold more important to the South than Kansas.”44 With slavery still seeping downward in the continent, southern expansion still farther down in the tropics looked ever more enticing.