CHAPTER 17
As southern congressmen journeyed toward Washington, D.C., in early December 1859, eager for the first congressional session after John Brown’s raid, Brown swung from the gallows and Yankee church bells saluted the martyr. Incensed Southerners aspired to prove that Northern Republicans had dispatched Brown and might send more insurrectionists. At the beginning of the session, they established that previously mentioned investigatory committee, chaired by U.S. Senator James Mason from western Virginia.
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Before Mason’s committee reported, southern congressmen pressed their own investigations. With their needling rhetoric on the House floor, southern representatives sought to sting Republicans into admitting that their party had supported John Brown and would fortify future Browns. Republicans’ credible denials, however, cooled the prosecutorial ardor. Northern Republicans confessed that they hated slavery. They conceded that they meant to place the institution on the road to ultimate extinction. But they meant to triumph legally and peacefully, without servile insurrections.
Once Republicans’ direct support for Brown seemed nonexistent, southern congressmen fell back on Henry Wise’s conception of indirect complicity. Yankees’ spirit of wild individualism, Southerners charged, nourished Brown’s convulsion, even if anarchical spirits disowned this particular anarchist. Republicans “may now disclaim all sympathy with that old traitor,” exclaimed Arkansas’s Congressman Thomas Hindman. “They may say again and again that they contributed nothing to his enterprise, either in men, money, arms or favorable wishes.”
Yet Republicans’ “maddening and furious abuse of slavery and slaveholders … set on fire the brain of that old fanatic. Had there been no Republican Party, there would have been no invasion of Harper’s [sic] Ferry.” Because there would continue to be a Republican Party, southern watchmen must be on the alert for the foe’s next, more auspicious invader.1
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One congressman pressed an especially promising inquiry into Republicans’ probable next invasion. On December 5, the House of Representatives convened and commenced to elect its Speaker (presiding officer). Immediately, Missouri’s Congressman John Clark introduced a resolution, declaring that “the doctrines and sentiments of a certain book, called ‘The Impending Crisis of the South—How to Meet It’ … are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of this country.” Therefore, “no member of this House who has endorsed and recommended it, or the compend [Compendium] from it, is fit to be Speaker of the House.” Clark noted that sixtyeight Republican congressmen had endorsed the Compendium, including the party’s candidate for Speaker, Ohio’s John Sherman (then more famous than his brother, future General William Tecumseh Sherman).2
Although the House never passed John Clark’s resolution, all Southern Democrats instantly enlisted in the Missourian’s surprise war against John Sherman. The resulting unanticipated confrontation paralyzed the House for fifty-eight days. During the forty-four ballots before a Speaker could be elected, Republicans had to switch their Speakership votes from Sherman to a party unknown (and nonendorser of the Compendium). Before the Republican retreat, John Brown faded from the limelight, the Compendiumattracted the spotlight, pistols filled representatives’ pockets, and South Carolina’s governor conspired to send secessionist troops to Washington if bullets replaced ballots in the House. Thus did an obscure congressman’s unexpected motion set off the climactic presecession congressional crisis over slavery.
The road to disunion abounded in surprise crises. These unexpected confrontations always raised two questions. First, why did the initiator spring the destructive surprise on the weakening Union? Second, why did surprised folk turn a momentary shock into a sustained controversy? The answers form patterns that illuminate why a civil war approached.
Initiators started to weave destructive patterns a quarter century before secession. In 1835, U.S. Congressman James Hammond of South Carolina sprang the unexpected issue of gagging congressional discussion of slavery on a Congress that expected to discuss slaveholders’ censoring of the U.S. mails. In 1843, Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur of eastern Virginia imposed the unexpected issue of annexing Texas on a presidential campaign that had featured less dangerous discussions. So it went, with increasing frequency in the presecession decade: western Virginia’s James Mason in 1850, shoving the draconic Fugitive Slave Law on congressmen who anticipated a more soothing version; the South Carolina lowcountry’s Leonidas Spratt in 1853, blasting the closure of the African slave trade, when almost everyone considered the commerce thankfully sealed; western Missouri’s Davy Atchison in 1854, insisting that the Kansas and Nebraska territories be opened to slavery, after almost everyone thought that the previous prohibition had been (begrudgingly) accepted (including by Atchison); Atchison again in 1855, leading one-day Kansans to elect a proslavery government for a territory that few thought could be enslaved; tidewater Maryland’s Curtis Jacobs in 1857, shocking almost everyone by urging that freed blacks be reenslaved; and now Missouri’s John Clark, deflecting surprised southern congressmen from the Republicans and Brown to the Republicans and the Compendium.3
Two locales spawned these precipitators. Both regions trained the eye to see dangers that other Southerners initially thought came out of nowhere. The oldest, eastern South nurtured one group: Hammond, Upshur, Spratt, and Jacobs (plus, climactically, the leading South Carolina disunionists). All these reactionaries feared that egalitarian mobocracy would shatter aristocratic slavery. All conceived that the newer South’s white men’s egalitarianism led to myopic vision. All believed that only their ancient elitist viewpoint led to proper perception of such perils as antislavery congressional petitions, British influence in unannexed Texas, a closed overseas slave trade, and multiplying Maryland free blacks (plus, climactically, the immediate menace in Lincoln’s election).
The western borderlands nourished the second group of precipitators: Mason, Atchison, and now John Clark. All these noneasterner borderites worried that the relatively unconsolidated northwestern South lay too close to Yankee contaminators. All conceived that slaveholders in the deeper South lived too far away to see the full peril in border slaves’ flight, in a free soil Kansas, in John Underwood, in Frank Blair, Jr., and in Hinton R. Helper. The western borderites, like the eastern reactionaries, meant to correct deficiencies in perception.
John Clark lived in the best spot to see the Compendium’s menace. This Missouri precipitator much resembled the last one, Davy Atchison. Both Missouri Democrats faced perpetual showdowns with the Thomas Hart Benton/Frank Blair, Jr., sometimes-antislavery wing of their state party. Both proslavery zealots led a rare Missouri cluster of enslaved counties along the Missouri River. Atchison ruled Missouri’s western border, across the river from Kansas. Clark flourished in the Missouri River black belt counties in the center part of the state. Counties with few slaves surrounded both Missouri River magnates’ slender black belt domains. Both felt the power of white immigrants’ rush toward almost lily-white counties to Clark’s east (the Benton/Blair, St. Louis terrain) and to Atchison’s west (the Kansas terrain).
Both deplored the drooping percentage of Missouri’s blacks in the 1850s. Both realized that nonslaveholding newcomers, sharing much of John Underwood’s entrepreneurial mentality, helped Frank Blair, Jr., to win two out of three congressional elections in St. Louis District between 1856 and 1861. In their attempts to stymie the only southern antislavery congressman and the most committed, powerful southern antislavery faction, the two western Missourians embodied the most committed, powerful, border proslavery faction.
As befit warriors from the Border South’s embattled western frontier, Clark and Atchison ranked among the most blustering, backslapping congressional chauvinists. But similarity bred contempt. Clark fought one of his several duels with Atchison. Thereafter, Atchison reveled in the Senate’s spotlight, while Clark fumed in the House of Representatives’ shadows. Congressman Clark’s square, red face epitomized his mood: lividly jealous of a political colossus whom he considered his inferior.4
In some ways, the unknown congressman did outstrip the famous senator. Clark drank more liquor, swore more profanely, slapped more backs, and womanized more undeniably (if in fact Atchison womanized at all; as for Clark, he attempted to seduce the mistress that General Albert Pike had seduced). Clark also owned many more slaves than did Atchison (if in fact Atchison owned any at all; as for Clark, he commanded twenty-seven blacks near Fayette in 1860, putting him in the top 1 percent of Missouri slaveholders.) Clark led the most enslaved Missouri terrain, Howard County in center state, with slaves numbering 37 percent of its population. Atchison led Platte County on Missouri’s western edge, only 18 percent enslaved.
Despite Clark’s larger stake in slavery, Atchison possessed a larger source of influence among cronies: endearing charm (if Clark could be called charming at all; no one else suffered expulsion from both the U.S. and the Confederate congresses during the Civil War). Since Atchison emerged as the more engaging frontiersman, he sat in the right place, the U.S. Senate, at the right time, the Kansas-Nebraska moment, to become the shover of Stephen A. Douglas. Then Atchison resided in the right place, on Missouri’s Kansas edge, to become the border ruffian.
In the late 1850s, Clark relished his chance to come out from under Atchison’s shadow. This time, Atchison could not be found in Congress. Bourbon Dave had become too controversially proslavery to win statewide senatorial election in a Missouri torn between proslavery and antislavery factions, while Clark only had to win election in his own congressional district. This time, the congressman occupied the right observation tower, half a state closer to Frank Blair’s spreading base of antislavery support. In the 1850s, while Clark’s Howard County grew 25 percent blacker with slaves (and Clark’s own slave labor force doubled), whites doubled in population east of Clark’s surrounded speck of proslavery counties. Meanwhile, the Missouri antislavery movement crept westward from Blair’s St. Louis stronghold to within fifty miles of Clark’s plantation, sweeping Jefferson City’s municipal elections.
John Clark knew that John Underwood’s dream, transporting Northerners to vacant borderlands, had already become a slaveholder’s nightmare in eastern Missouri. The embittered congressman noticed that Hinton R. Helper’s book sounded like Congressman Frank Blair, Jr.’s speeches. Clark observed that Helper’s Compendium listed Blair as a collector of northern congressmen’s endorsements. Since Blair successfully marshaled Republican support for Helper, he could collect Republican patronage for his Missouri faction. With that added political muscle, St. Louis’s congressman might become too powerful for the Atchisons and Clarks to contain.
The underappreciated (so he thought) John Clark now nursed a heightened sense of grievance. All those unjustly more famous southern congressmen, having long mistakenly regarded Davy Atchison as the most important Missouri proslavery Democrat, now erroneously regarded John Brown as the most important emblem of Republican plans to invade the South. The blunderers had obviously not read the Compendium. John Clark would train their eyes to see that Northern Republicans meant to empower Southern Republicans. He would thereby save his world and, in the saving, ascend to his proper station, above Atchison and below no proslavery defender. With his motion on the Speakership, John Clark showed again, as Davy Atchison had twice before, why slavery’s special vulnerability in its northwestern hinterlands, and especially in Missouri, made bitterly divisive local factional warfare and even more bitterly divisive borderland slavery issues ever more inescapable in national politics.
Location, location, location. In modern times, a mediocre house in a great location sells for millions. A great house in a mediocre location fetches less. So too, in the mid-nineteenth century, an obscure issue or book possessed little consequence, unless infuriating an inflammable spot. Neither the Compendium nor a free soil Kansas initially made sense as an angry sore on the national body politic, except high up in Dixie. In that unusual locale, proslavery diehards sounded the first alarms about Kansas free soilers just outside, Southern Republicans creeping inside, and hinterland slavery in danger of ebbing.
– 3 –
Southerners’ response to initiators of surprise crises, like the initiators themselves, fell into repetitive, revealing patterns. Over and over again, whatever the unexpected issue, initiators’ partial emphasis on northern insult ensured that southern compatriots would enlist, at least for a short term, in a war for slaveholders’ honor and pride. By adding hate-streaked headlines to Helper’s hate-filled text, the Republicans’ Compendium raised defamation to nasty heights. Southerners, being Southerners, spitefully screeched back.
John Clark initiated the screeching as well as the controversy. Along with my slaveholding constituents, the wounded Christian protested, I am “equal in intelligence, equal in patriotism, and equal in morals to that of any other gentlemen in this House.” Yet “gentlemen have advised” my nonslaveholding constituents “to have no intercourse with me,” even to shun any “church where I worship.” If I “failed to utter … my condemnation” of these slurs, I would be “recreant to my own self respect.”5
As usual, self-respecting Southerners applauded a compatriot’s crusade for equality, honor, and self-esteem. We refuse to be stigmatized, Virginia’s Roger Pryor warned, “as outlaws against the moral government of the world.” Virginia’s Sheldon F. Leake promised that “we will revenge” the “deliberate and intentional insult” involved in “the election to the Speakership of a man who signed that book.” Arkansas’s Albert Rust added that Republicans’ “insulting and dishonoring …hatred” in their “infamous” Compendium demonstrated not our unpardonable sin but their “groveling, sordid, and very acquisitive natures.”6 Such steaming at insult showed that divided southern whites could temporarily fuse in rage at Yankee struts of superiority—a righteous We against the insufferable They.
Pre–Civil War storms persisted longest when practical danger to slavery accompanied theoretical attack on slaveholders’ honor. The Compendium’s headlines obviously deprecated slaveholders’ Christian credentials. But how would John Sherman’s Speakership endanger slavery’s survival?
A political scientist might answer that the Speaker held almost monopolistic power over committee assignments and House procedures. A Speaker thus could enhance or cripple Republicans’ congressional agenda. The Speaker would also preside over the 1860 decision on the presidency, if no candidate received an Electoral College majority. Then the House would decide an Abraham Lincoln’s fate.
Yet that objective peril, so palpable in retrospect, elicited no alarm in the House during the Speakership Crisis. Southerners scarcely mentioned a Republican Speaker’s potential procedural power. They instead emphasized that they would (as they ultimately did) accept a Republican Speaker, so long as the presiding officer did not endorse Hinton R. Helper. It was as if the slaveholders shouted at posterity: Read our speeches on the Compendium, instead of using your political science models, to discern our intentions. Then you will understand why we considered Republicans’ endorsement of Helper dangerous as well as insulting.
John Clark saw the Compendium as the smoking gun, demonstrating weapons infinitely more promising than John Brown’s pikes. Two days later, Virginia’s Representative M.R.H. Garnett demanded to know if Republicans repudiated Helper’s dangerous mode of attack. You say that you “do not mean to interfere with slavery in the States,” noted Congressman Garnett. But you mean to bar us everywhere outside our states, hemming “us in, as with a wall of fire.” You mean “to render the institution valueless upon the borders, by running off the slaves” and supporting a “war between the citizens of the South.” We do not mean to stay in the Union, warned Garnett, “until you have converted the border States into free States, and so demoralized and enervated our strength.”7
Southerners turned the House proceedings into an inquiry. They sought to discover whether Republicans and especially John Sherman would disown or support Helper’s assaults inside the Border South. In response, John Sherman disowned neither the Impending Crisis nor the Compendium. He denied that he had ever “read” either publication. He could not “recollect” signing any endorsement. He presumed that a friend had secured his signature, after promising that the text would be cleansed of Helper’s offensive sentences. Even if the published Compendiumbelied his friend’s promise, his blind signature counted for less than his highly visible avowal that he opposed “any interference whatever by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave in the Slave states.”8
Southerners derided Sherman’s avowal. Did the Republicans’ candidate for Speaker now oppose Republican financing of southern politicians who spoke against slavery? Would he now aid the Helper-Underwood-Blair-Clay strategy of developing a Southern Republican Party, with Northern Republicans’ support?
Sherman answered that “I am now willing to have that Helper book read, page by page, and then avow or disavow every sentiment contained in it.” But first, John Clark must withdraw his “offensive resolution.” Any gentleman with an honorable “sense of manhood,” Sherman explained, must have his “lips … in a great measure sealed” rather than lower himself to answer the charge of being a dishonorable monster.
Southerners, considering themselves the experts on honor, called Sherman’s posture of “insulted honor … no escape for a manly man.” When Republicans answered that Sherman had “distinctly stated five times on this floor, that he would not interfere with the relations of master and slaves,” Southerners reiterated that “there are different ways of operating on slavery.” Granted, John Sherman “would not march into the slave States; he would not legislate in regard to that subject.” But “does he disclaim the doctrines of the Helper book?” Would he deploy cash and patronage to support Helper and his allies? On that subject, “the gentleman is dumb, … dumb as an oyster.”9
With Sherman’s lips sealed, Southerners sought to pry open the attitudes of other Republicans who had signed the Compendium. James L. Pugh of Alabama demanded to know whether Republicans intend “to convince the non-slaveholder at the South that his condition as a white laborer would be vastly improved by the absence of slavery? … And when you attempt to reeducate him,” don’t you “hope … for an anti-slavery organization in the southern states, which will ultimately strike down slavery?”10
Pugh received several answers, all but one of them clipped, all of them hinting at support of the South’s own debate over slavery’s moral worth. Elijah Babbitt of Pennsylvania, who had not signed the Compendium, indicated that he would sign if asked. “I do not know a Republican,” declared Babbitt, “who claims the right to interfere with slavery in the States where it now exists. I do not know a Republican who does not repudiate all forcible interference. Not one of them … would interfere with it, except by moral suasion.”11
Except moral suasion! That except dominated the remarks of Illinois’s Congressman John Farnsworth, the only Republican endorser of the Compendium who fully explained his endorsement before the House elected a Speaker. When John Reagan of Texas challenged Farnsworth to “answer, like a man,” whether he “endorses or repudiates … the doctrines of the Helper book,” the Illinois Republican answered that he rejected “any passages” that can “be fairly construed into the advocacy of servile insurrections, or a raid upon the Slave states,” or “the use of violence by nonslaveholders against the slaveholders.”
But I do “advocate an enlightenment of the nonslaveholders,” Farnsworth said. I would “inculcate such doctrines as would lead to a peaceful emancipation.” I do “thank God that we have nothing in our part of the country that will not stand free criticism and free discussion and a free press.” While “I do not believe that Congress has the constitutional authority to legislate against it,” I will support Southerners who advocate “unfriendly legislation” in their own states. In that sense, I endorse the book.12
That endorsement vindicated John Clark’s accusation. Republicans repudiated Brown’s violent methods of arousing the slaves (and they would deliver no pikes to insurrectionists). But they endorsed Helper’s nonviolent methods of educating the nonslaveholders (and they would shower patronage on the educators). A climactic exchange between Sherrard Clemens of Tennessee and Thad Stevens of Pennsylvania illuminated the discovery.
Stevens laid out the conventional Republican argument. While “Republicanism is founded in love of universal liberty, and in hostility to slavery,” declared the Pennsylvania representative, “the Constitution of the United States gives us no power to interfere … with sister states.” But where the Constitution throws “the responsibility of government” to Congress, in “the Territories, the District of Columbia, the navy-yards and the arsenals, … we do claim the power … to abolish slavery.” In areas beyond the South, when slavery “can be safely and justly abolished,” Republicans will “do so.”
Tennessee’s Clemens responded with the southern question. Did Northern Republicans really think that containing slavery, plus supporting Southern Republicans inside the contained area, would have no impact on slave states? If the gentleman’s “policy is carried out,” asked Clements, and “if not a single new slave State is admitted” to the Union, and “if slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia, in the Territories, in the arsenals, dockyards, and forts, and if in addition to that, his party grasps the power of the Presidency, with the patronage attached to it,” to foster a Southern Republican Party, “wouldn’t he have slavery surrounded like a camp in a prairie or a scorpion with fire,” and wouldn’t it then “sting itself to death?”
Stevens slyly answered that “I do not know, not being” a prophet. The House laughed. When laughter ceased, Stevens thrust in the knife: “The gentleman knows better than I do” whether slavery would endure uninhibited southern debate.13
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Expanded Border South debates on slavery, southern congressmen emphasized, would enhance the possibility that Frank Blair, Jr.’s swelling wave of Missouri nonslaveholders would someday outvote John Clark’s contracting crew of slaveholders. Restive slaves also would have enhanced possibilities. Southern Republicans’ agitation might inspire more blacks to flee. More black Celias might also murder more masters at midnight, even if assassins again failed to burn the corpse to a crisp. I will not abide a House Speaker, declared Virginia’s Sheldon Leake, who endorses doctrines that will stimulate “my Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my wife and helpless children.”14
Posterity might consider Leake paranoid about Southern Republicans’ (including Helper’s) influence on slaves. The Impending Crisis hardly advised domestics to brandish knives or torches. Hinton R. Helper solely addressed fellow whites. In the solitary passage that mentioned blacks’ attitudes, Helper warned that whites ought to abolish slavery peacefully, lest blacks less peaceably strike. Had John Sherman’s opponents, like Sherman himself, failed to read the book?
Yes, as Shelton Leake admitted. While the congressional confrontation might seem to be a curious tiff over a book that few had read, congressmen actually battled over the sequel to the book. While few southern congressmen had opened the Impending Crisis, most witnessed the more incendiary outbursts in the Compendium, for John Clark read the pamphlet’s most offensive passages into the congressional record. Clark’s quotations featured not only Helper’s words but also the added headlines that Republicans, unbeknownst to the Compendium’s readers, had inserted into Helper’s original text. In the Congressional Globe even more than in the Compendium, big black headlines screamed that “REVOLUTION MUST FREE THE SLAVES” and that we seek “REVOLUTION—PEACEFULLY if we can, VIOLENTLY if we must.”15
Some horrifying news, devastating one of their own, helps explain why southern congressmen trembled at those incendiary words. Politicians, like all folk, quaver the more at abstract peril when concrete illustrations ravage their intimate circle. Thus in 1850, during discussions of James Mason’s fugitive slave bill, the Virginian’s theories about borderland runaways received a provoking confirmation. Alexander Stephens’s and Robert Toombs’s supposedly adoring house servants absconded from the congressmen’s Washington, D.C., dwellings.16 So too, during the Speakership Crisis, agony afflicted a star member of the capital’s little community of southern congressmen. A bulletin reduced South Carolina Congressman Laurence Keitt, of all people, to inert silence. A slave, Keitt heard, had slaughtered his brother in Florida.17
Never before had Laurence Keitt looked shriveled. Keitt had first swelled into American consciousness when serving as Preston Brooks’s bodyguard, demanding that Charles Sumner’s would-be rescuers stand back, lest he savage them. He would depart this life when commanding Kershaw’s Brigade of South Carolina Civil War soldiers. He would demand that gentlemen suicidally charge against the suicidally charging Ulysses S. Grant, during Virginia’s awful battle of Cold Harbor. Keitt would crash from his beloved iron-gray charger, a musket ball having exploded against his liver.18
The assaulter who charged once too often usually exuded a seemingly indestructible virility. In an age when most men observed the clean-shaven niceties, the towering Keitt was among the first to grow a beard (a profusion that he flaunted by pulling at the roughage). In an age when Native American so-called savages displayed most of the pigtails, Keitt swept his hair back, then twisted the braids into a lionesque mane. His warrior’s frock coat, with its rich blue lining and its fancy arrow shooting up the sleeve, remains, a century and a half later, a fashion diamond in Richmond’s lush Museum of the Confederacy.
This fighting dandy would usually only come to rest on a chair edge, where he reminded observers of a leopard about to spring. When on his feet and verbally assaulting the Yankees, he seemed more akin to a posturing actor. His brow, with its deep scar from an old dueling wound, furled in frown. His feet, one flung before the other, plus his hands, convulsively rubbing together when they were not tugging the beard, plus his arms, shaking as if in spasms, made him seem connected to an electrical apparatus. An enemy, weary of the flamboyant exaggeration, declared that “he has probably long since convinced himself that he was a terrible fellow.”
The posture of terrible foe personified Keitt’s ambition for South Carolina. The state’s warriors had continually only threatened to escape the Union. Keitt, in his midthirties, epitomized youths who meant to carry out their elders’ threats. His every movement declared that South Carolina’s new knights would be endlessly aggressive, demanding out of a poisonous nation that no manly man could abide.
This was the man, infamous for energy “of the southern polytechnic kind,” who slumped as if mortally stricken after reading the awful telegram in early 1860. His ailing brother William, a wealthy Florida state senator, had been murdered in his sickbed at midnight. A slave had slit the convalescent’s throat.
Several days later came the better tidings (or more accurately, Laurence Keitt revealed a skittish side of the southern ruling class, by considering the news better). I have been “relieved” to hear, Keitt privately wrote, that a recently purchased slave rather than a longtime servant had drawn the blade across the jugular.19
Relieved! That whispered word reverberated with deeper meaning than all Keitt’s previous and subsequent shouts. “Relieved” connoted that southern masters almost never feared that armies of field hands would rise with guns in hand (much less with John Brown’s pikes on their shoulders). “Relieved” declared that the dissimulating Cuffee to be feared was the solitary house servant, living right there in the Big House, with total access to slumbering whites.
Southern patriarchs often conceded that even if almost all their slaves were family friends, a stray black could have a mysterious look. They admitted that even if blacks naturally loved nurturing patriarchs, any impressionable primitive might be corrupted. They knew that one stray servant could savage a household. They believed that one stray sentence could turn one gullible inferior’s head. But what could a wary paternalist do about the unspeakable peril, turn a genial home into a despotic dungeon?!
That unacceptable solution yielded a suppression of fear, the more fearful because suppressed. Yet the undercover anxiety burst out in rare, jewel-like expressions. One such gem emerged in 1822, at the time of Denmark Vesey’s Conspiracy. The accused slave conspirators’ Charleston judges published every supposed finding about dozens of blacks allegedly plotting to seize the public streets. The judges censored only the news that a solitary house servant meant to sneak poison into “his” white family’s water!20 No wonder, then, that Laurence Keitt and fellow Southerners, when debating the supposedly insurrectionary Compendium, were “relieved” that no ancient family retainer had been the one to slit open William Keitt’s jugular.
The dead man’s blood still underlined a critical reason why relieved slaveholders wanted no Southern Republican Party. The South’s schizophrenic world of democracy and slavery could only genially thrive when white voters could discuss everything except slavery, and black Cuffees could hear nothing except slaveholders’ commands. Slaveholders possessed awesome weapons to silence democratic discussion: lynch mobs to expel open heretics, charges of disloyalty to silence secret dissenters.
But an open democracy mitigates against dictatorial closures. Frank Blair, Jr., and Cassius Clay had periodically pried open a little discussion where debate could be most damaging, in the northern hinterlands. The House of Representatives’ Speakership Crisis brought potential consequences of increased Southern Republican agitation up close and personal. Even so unrelenting a brawler as Laurence Keitt had sunk to his knees, praying that a family friend had not ambushed inside the home.
The Republicans who signed the Compendium pleaded innocent of intending to arouse servants to savage masters. Signees distinguished between Brown the violent raider and Helper the nonviolent persuader. Southerners decried that distinction, for a persuader could produce violence. No more Browns might come South. No slaves might rise in group insurrection. But Republicans intended to encourage internal southern debate, and one impressionable domestic might be listening. Never had the difference over white men’s republicanism seemed so naked, so chilling, as when Republicans conceded that they would support Southerners’ republican discussion inside the South. Never had civil war seemed so close as when congressmen debated whether an advocate of unlimited republican speech, South as well as North, should be (appropriate word!) Speaker.
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With their apprehensions about prospective Southern Republicans doubling their fury at insulting Northern Republicans, Southern Democrats took to arriving in the House of Representatives with more than threatening words. Sharpened sabers bulged under their waistcoats. Cocked pistols filled their pockets.21 Rumors surfaced that that the gunslingers secretly plotted to drive an elected Republican Speaker from the House. The 1859–60 drama had started with an antislavery raider seeking to turn a federal arsenal into a liberating fortress. Would the show now end with slavery’s defenders turning liberty’s chamber into a shooting gallery?
A fleeting, aborted, almost unbelievable secret plot highlighted that question. The extremists’ intrigue involved (who else?) the South Carolinians. In December 1859, William Porcher Miles wished to ensure that if he and South Carolina’s other representatives started a disunion revolution in Washington over the Speakership Crisis, folks back home would send the troops. If Sherman is elected Speaker and we forcibly expel the Black Republican from House chambers, Charleston’s representative secretly asked South Carolina’s Governor William Gist, would you sustain our rebellion?
Miles’s impolitic plot came naturally to an antipolitician who had won Charlestonians’ hearts an antioperator’s way. Where other American congressmen earned their spurs by maneuvering inside national political parties, Miles secured Charleston’s adoration by racing to nurse the sick. Upon hearing that smallpox had decimated Norfolk, Virginia, the nonslaveholding mathematics professor at the College of Charleston plunged into the miasmatic city, where he volunteered in a deadly hospital.
Miles survived to secure a Virginia gold medal. Back home, upper-class admirers elevated the medal winner to Charleston’s congressional seat, without hearing the new titan’s position on anything. For gentlemen who loathed mobocracy, detested the two national parties, and worshipped the disinterested aristoi, a saint without political calculation seemed just the hero for Congress.
Charleston’s apolitical hero would represent the city in the U.S. and Confederate congresses. In 1863, this nonslaveholding champion of the slavocracy would win the heart of a Virginia/Alabama heiress. After the war, the once impoverished academic would become president of South Carolina College, then manager of his wife’s family’s thirteen Louisiana plantations. Thus the impolitic conspirator of 1859, having climbed the most apolitical American ladder, would become one of the Old South’s richest surviving politicians.22
Miles survived his own 1859 impolitic impulse because, unlike Laurence Keitt at Cold Harbor, he had the postnullification South Carolina instinct to seek assurances before the wild charge. After Miles secretly wrote Governor Gist, asking for assurances that sufficient aid would arrive if the state’s delegation forcibly ousted an elected Speaker, South Carolina’s governor replied that, if South Carolina congressmen “decide to make the issue” by “ejecting the Speaker-elect by force, … write or telegraph me, & I will have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time.” But Gist counseled Miles to take care before risking a “bloody revolution” in Washington. “An act of violence,” warned the governor, “might prejudice us in the eyes of the world.” In the event that “Sherman is elected Speaker, in consequence of his having endorsed Helper,” Gist suggested two more measured secession strategies. The South Carolina delegation should secede from Washington. Or the representatives should urge their constituents to secede from the Union. The governor had “little doubt” that Miles’s constituents would sustain either plan, even if “withdrawing alone” would be South Carolina’s scary fate.
Gist added a final note of caution. If the House should reject Sherman and then elect a Black Republican who had not committed the “overt act” of endorsing Helper, the governor feared that “our state would hesitate, & you might not be sustained.”23 After Gist’s warning, Charleston’s apolitical congressman paused. He had better wait to discover whether the new Speaker would be Sherman or a less provocative alternative.
With South Carolinians once again secretly conspiring about (and hesitating about) Separate State Secession, more cautious gentlemen brought the state’s long-standing alternative to the fore. In 1859–61 as in 1850–52, the South Carolina question involved not whether but how the state should secede. Separate State Secessionists wished South Carolina to act first and alone. Cooperative State Secessionists urged instead that the state should leave the Union only in cooperation with several states.
Cooperationists feared that Separatists would repeat the nullification trauma of 1832–33, leaving the state alone against all other states. They had sold that qualm to the states’ voters in 1852. Now, with a dangerous separate state action again under consideration, cautious Cooperationists devised a plan to prove that this time, they could rally several states to share South Carolina’s gamble.
On December 22, 1859, the Cooperationists’ Christopher G. Memminger urged the plan on South Carolina secessionists of all persuasions. We all agree, Memminger reminded fellow state legislators, that “this Union” provided “no safety for South Carolina.” We also all agree that if our state secedes and no other state follows, South Carolinians would face unacceptable peril. Instead of intolerable Union or unwinnable revolution, South Carolina legislators should unite in favor of a safe rebellion. We should appropriate $100,000 to arm the state. We should call a southern convention, “to concert measures for united action.” And we should dispatch a commissioner from sovereign South Carolina to sovereign Virginia, to urge John Brown’s victims to join with us in summoning all southern sovereigns to a southern convention.24
Separate State Secessionists lost nothing by backing Memminger’s cooperative plan. They found their own remedy scary in late 1859. So why not let Cooperationists try (and fail!) to secure theirs? If Separatists dropped back for a moment with Memminger, he might be compelled to step forward with them, after he inadvertently proved that Cooperative State Secession meant a failed southern convention or, worse, a failure to assemble the South in convention.
To avoid a failure that might destroy Cooperationism, Memminger counted on the state’s commissioner to persuade Virginians to summon a southern convention. To maximize the persuasiveness of an ambassador from activist South Carolina to laggard Virginia, Governor Gist appointed the ideal commissioner, Memminger himself. If Gist had selected a young hotspur such as Laurence Keitt or William Porcher Miles, he would have widened the gulf between South Carolina and Virginia gentlemen. But no other South Carolina leader more embodied the dependability of a mature old aristocracy than Christopher G. Memminger.25
Irony abounded in Memminger’s flawless rendition of that hoary part. True, the commissioner to Virginia possessed the necessary age, being twenty years older than Keitt or Miles. Memminger equally projected the right oligarchic appearance, with his ramrod-straight posture, his quiet, clipped manner, and his long, forbidding head. Memminger also assumed the right antiegalitarian frostiness. He forbade colleagues from dropping by without an invitation. He disdained co-workers who paused from labor to chat. His severity won him few pals but many admirers and ultimately more political power, in snobby South Carolina, than most glad-handers possessed.
Yet no South Carolina patriarch had been farther from the manor born than this future Confederate secretary of the treasury. The G in Memminger’s middle name stood for Gustavus, perfect for an impoverished lad born in the Duchy of Württemberg. Arriving in America at age three, the destitute ward landed in the Charleston Orphanage a year later. Only one other member of Jefferson Davis’s future Confederate cabinet would be foreign born, and none other would be orphanage reared.
Still, the orphan’s ascent revealed more about upper-class paternalism than did the well-born Keitt or Miles. Memminger’s rise to paternalistic power resembled the trajectory of South Carolina’s greatest theorist of proper paternalism, the Reverend James Henley Thornwell. Both Memminger and Thornwell were born in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Both suffered severe impoverishment as youths. Both afflicted adolescents intrigued a benevolent patron.
Both benefited from South Carolina’s racially unlimited paternalism. Most Southerners elsewhere thought that paternalism must stop at the door of white adult males, egalitarians all and in no need of a better’s uplifting care. The South Carolina upper crust, scorning white men’s egalitarianism, thought that the best men in legislature assembled must hand law and ethics to all those lesser. Benevolent stewards must also elevate penniless white youths who gave promise of becoming jewels of the patriarchal class.
Memminger and Thornwell became the most successful white beneficiaries of uplifting paternalism. For both, gratitude to paternalistic saviors swelled into obsession with perfecting paternalism itself. Thornwell’s evangelical proslavery theology emphasized that slavery would be biblically sanctioned, if patriarchs lived up to their Christian obligations. Memminger’s patron, Governor Thomas Bennett, had famously lived up to obligations in the Denmark Vesey Controversy, where he had destroyed his political career by seeking patriarchal justice for perhaps falsely accused slave conspirators.
Bennett, also a leading member of the South Carolina Unionist Party in nullification times, served as a trustee of Memminger’s orphanage. When Christopher was a preteen, the patriarch took the precocious youngster into his home, then formally adopted him, then saw him through legal training. From the benefactor, the ward received not only food and shelter but also an education in paternalists’ highest obligations.
Because of his Bennett connections and his own talents, Memminger became a star of the Charleston bar. The risen titan accumulated $200,000 worth of property by 1860, including fifteen slaves. But for Thomas Bennett’s ex-ward, materialistic success did not alone justify a patriarch’s faith. In Bennett’s tradition (and Thornwell’s too), the ex-orphan outdid the mentor in assaults on imperfect paternalism. As a member of the Episcopal establishment, Memminger sought church curbs on masters whose slave sales split black families. As a state legislator, he sought legal curbs on bankers who spewed out paper money rather than lending gold or silver coin. As a practicing lawyer, he sought court curbs on whites who would oust free blacks from the city. Above all, as a custodian of Bennett’s cautious response to South Carolina hotheads, he sought to curb fire-eaters who would throw away South Carolina’s ancient traditions in an ill-considered, ill-prepared revolution against the Union, with not one other state pledged to cooperate.
Like most Charleston Cooperationists, Memminger agreed with the hotspurs that divorce from mobocratic Union should be obtained. But in both 1832 and 1852, he urged that a suicidal Separate State Secession would drown the state in democratic excesses. In 1859, as commissioner to Virginia, he meant to prove that Cooperative State Secession would pave gentlemen’s cautious path to paternalistic stability in a safe new southern Confederacy.
As he prepared his address to the Virginians, Memminger received colliding suggestions about how to move reluctant Virginians toward responsible disunionism. William Porcher Miles, deploying a young fire-eater’s coarse image, instructed his elder to impregnate blushing Virginia with South Carolina’s ravishing seed. Memminger should force “a Southern Confederacy…to spring from the loins of the Palmetto State!”26
From Miles’s almost rapist view of how Memminger should jam South Carolina disunionism on Virginia temporizers, the spectrum of state opinion swung toward less heavy-handed domineering. Francis Pickens, imminent governor of the state, hoped that Memminger could coax George Washington’s state to call another venerable national constitutional convention. Like the Philadelphia gathering of 1787, the new convention should remake a failed Union. Suppose that “after a full and truthful hearing,” Yankees rejected “new securities and guarantees.” Subsequently, “Southern States would stand right before the world and posterity” if they sought an alternate government.27
Where future governor Pickens hoped that a national convention might reconstruct the Union, present governor William Gist prayed that a southern convention might refortify slavery. The governor urged Memminger to inspire Virginia to “save the Union by taking the lead in resistance to this warfare upon our institutions.” Then “the South will follow her & an united South can dictate the terms … & the North will yield. If however I am mistaken in this, Virginia can unite the South out of the Union.”28
Congressman William W. Boyce moved still further from Miles’s image of South Carolina forcing herself on Virginia. Do not offend “the sensibility of Virginia,” Boyce advised Memminger, “by seeming to take the lead. Some people have to be led, by letting them suppose that they are leading.” Tell your hosts that we will “receive your directions.” If you direct us to “struggle in the Union, we acquiesce.” If you direct us to seek constitutional guarantees, fine. If, after guarantees fail, you direct us to secure disunion, excellent. “That indeed is our present idea but we are willing to defer to your superior wisdom.”29
Memminger found Boyce’s strategy convincing, despite sharing Miles’s conviction that no southern or national convention could save the Union. He would offer cooperation with any Virginia remedy. Then, after South Carolina fell back with the compatriot, and after a southern convention’s unionism failed, Virginia laggards would have to catch up with South Carolina sprinters.
Memminger knew that his trap for the Virginians resembled Separate State Secessionists’ trap for him. South Carolina fire-eaters fell back with the frosty commissioner because they believed that the Cooperationists’ southern convention would fail and then the laggard would have to embrace Separatists’ disunion tactics. Memminger gambled the fate of South Carolina Cooperationism on his persuasive powers when he traveled to Virginia at the start of a frightening new year.
– 6 –
Memminger’s overnight train from Charleston chugged into Richmond’s Union Station on January 12, 1860. In a fine symbolic gesture, South Carolina’s commissioner brought his charming daughter along, as if to emphasize, in this male chauvinist age, that his would be the soft tone of the pleader. In another fine gesture, a special committee of the Virginia Assembly met the train and swept the Memmingers toward the city’s elegant Ballard House. The procession emphasized that a sovereign state’s commissioner must be treated like a prince.
The next day, the minister extraordinaire dispatched his credentials to new Virginia Governor John Letcher. Memminger received in return an invitation to address an historic joint session of the Virginia legislature six days hence, on January 19. In the interim, the debate over John Sherman raged so hot in Washington that Miles dared not come down to confer, lest he miss a physical brawl in Congress.
In Richmond, banquets drove out thoughts of Washington brawling. The visiting potentate enjoyed several state dinners. When it came time for the speaking to replace the feasting, two companies of finely dressed militia escorted Memminger and his daughter from the Ballard House to the state capitol. Flags decorated the streets. Citizens cheered the parade. As the commissioner strode into the legislative hall, applause cascaded from the two galleries, packed with ladies, and from the delegates themselves, almost crowded from their seats by still more ladies. For the next three and a half hours, in this age when historic oratory kept crowds enchanted, Virginia’s finest drank in a republican spectacle fit for opera houses.30
The commissioner had come, he told his co-sovereigns, to make common cause with Virginia. Even as he spoke, Memminger pointed out, Northerners’ antipathy for the South had spilled past the pro-Brown church bells. Now, Republicans demanded a Speaker who endorsed Hinton R. Helper. The travesty climaxed northern outrages that had offended innocent Southerners since Missouri Compromise times. The forty years of outrage (and Memminger exhaustively recalled each insult) had left the South “without any protection from the Constitution,” at the mercy “of a sectional party who regard our institutions as sinful” and who consider abolition “only a question of time.”
The emergency, urged Memminger, required the South to counsel together. Sovereign South Carolina had called a southern convention. Sovereign Virginia must come and request all other southern sovereigns to join us. The gathering of sovereigns will empower us to save the Union, if we can, and to prepare for disunion, if we must.
My state, admitted Memminger, believes that a southern convention’s efforts to save the Union will fail. But “if our [disunion] pace is too fast for some, we are content to walk slower,” so “that all may keep together.” We will consent to any Southwide decision to move forward. We cannot, however, consent “to stand still.”31
Virginians’ cheers for his effort did not fool Memminger. After days of conversations in Richmond, he knew that his hosts would indeed stand still, even though he thought late events should have pushed them far ahead of South Carolinians.32 John Brown and John Underwood had invaded the Old Dominion, not South Carolina. Slave runaways had led slaveholders to shrink from Virginia’s northern border. The Lower South suffered from no such nearby portal to freedom.
Memminger’s Virginia listeners of all persuasions worried about Virginia’s vulnerability. Henry Wise declared that “if you allow such helpers of Helper to play incendiaries with torches as flaming as those that were found at Harpers Ferry,” antislavery will leave our borderland in ashes. Representative John T. Anderson warned that the Republican Party will deploy “all kinds of machinations to incite our slaves to insurrection, and … to unite the non-slaveholders with them in cutting our throats and our children’s and in ravishing our wives and daughters.”33 James Barbour concurred that Virginians must no longer submit to “indirect assault” on our border. Already, Yankee aid to fugitives has “struck a fatal blow to us” in western Virginia. There, 200,000 whites owned only 8000 slaves because laws do not stop Yankee forays into our northernmost terrain. We must demand a remedy “or bow down and submit.”34
But where most South Carolinians called disunion the remedy, most Virginians relished Henry Wise’s motto: “Fighting in the Union.” Virginians’ favorite remedy in the Union, cutting off trade with the North, would strike, in John Anderson’s words, at Yankees’ “pocket nerve.” If all “southern states agree to shut their ports” against northern commerce, explained James Seddon, Yankee materialists will stifle Republican appeals. Economic nonintercourse thus offered “the only way to save the Union.”35
But where John Anderson and James Seddon wished a southern convention to shutter the ports, James Barbour wished Virginia alone to shut off Yankee commerce. Where Anderson and Seddon feared that separate Virginia action would wreck Virginia’s economy, Barbour feared that a southern convention would wreck the Union. The competing visions of wreckage paralyzed the Virginia legislature. Fighting in the Union came to mean no fight at all.
An exasperated Memminger gathered up his daughter and fled home in mid-February 1860. Both the commissioner and South Carolina’s equally disappointed governor explained Cooperation’s failure with classic South Carolina logic. Virginia, unlike more aristocratic South Carolina, suffered from national parties and mobocratic demagogues. “Distinguished southern men,” cried Governor Gist, became “absorbed in the Presidential election, to the neglect of … southern rights.” Memminger agreed, asking rhetorically, “With three candidates here [in Richmond] in the field for the Presidency, how is it possible to make the people work outside of the Union?”36
Memminger knew that he had inadvertently advertised that Virginia would not move forward. The commissioner had meant what he said. He could not tolerate standing still. If only Separatists would push ahead, a Separatist he would reluctantly become. After his failure as Cooperationist, he concluded that his advanced state must make “the issue alone” and take “our chance for the other states to join us.” He now even pressed Miles’s coercive language on Miles himself: “We further South will be compelled to act and drag after us these divided states.”37
Memminger’s surrender did not spread beyond Charleston’s finest drawing rooms. But John Brown’s failed raid had indirectly led to Memminger’s demoralizing failure and on to an ominous strategic swerve amidst a critical part of the cautious Charleston establishment. Sober gentlemen now plotted not how to reattempt Cooperationism but how to appropriate Separatism from wilder spirits. These unlikely revolutionaries now ached to lead South Carolina soberly and safely out of the Union, at first all by the tiny state’s lonely self.
Yet John Brown had also indirectly reared up a new tactical obstacle to Charleston’s wealthy fraction of ex-Cooperationists. Before Memminger’s humiliating debacle and his faction’s conversion to Separatism, he had led his Cooperationist brethren in urging a southern convention on Lower South laggards—all too successfully. The Mississippi legislature had endorsed the Memminger initiative. The legislators had invited the whole South to a mid-April conclave in Atlanta. The state had also dispatched its own commissioner, Peter Starke, to Richmond with the invitation.
This Mississippi venture fizzled. The Atlanta convention never met. Commissioner Starke’s appeal fell as flat as Memminger’s in Richmond. But Starke never tried a Memminger-style all-or-nothing public spectacle in Virginia. The Mississippian only conferred privately with Virginia sluggards. He thus never suffered Memminger’s infuriating loss of face.
Starke came away from Richmond still on South Carolina’s (now partially disowned) southern convention bandwagon. Starke wrote Governor John Pettus that despite the temporary setback, Lower South Cooperationists must not “take any step backwards, after the stand they have taken.” If a Black Republican wins the presidency, we must reissue our call for all the South to assemble. Otherwise, we must “prepare ourselves for destruction in the Union and the overthrow of our peculiar institutions.”
But if South Carolina, Mississippi, and Alabama could convene a post–presidential election southern conference, continued Starke, “I verily believe” that “the patriotic and good people of the North” will “say to their fanatical neighbors, we intend to … stop your mad career against our southern brethren.” Only if a southern convention fails to secure this “most desirable result” should we “prepare for the last great extremity.” With the Mississippi resolution for a southern convention still on the legislative books, Governor John Pettus concurred that the remedy should be tried again, if Republicans won the White House. So too, Alabama’s Governor Andrew B. Moore wrote South Carolina’s Governor Gist that his state expects “a meeting of the proposed southern convention,” if a Black Republican is elected.38
Thus where crucial Charleston Cooperationists came away from the Richmond disappointment (and from John Brown) disillusioned with their own southern convention remedy, some pivotal Mississippi and Alabama leaders still clung to the strategy. This potentially paralyzing Lower South disagreement over Separatist versus Cooperationist tactics would lead to a brief interstate conspiratorial correspondence at crunch time for disunion. That old conspirator John Brown would have chuckled at this last indirect consequence of the havoc that his failed raid had spread in the South.
– 7 –
With the commissioner phase over in Richmond, the focus shifted back to Washington for the resolution of the crisis that Hinton R. Helper (and John Clark) had spread in Congress. The first forty-three ballots for Speaker showed that all provocative candidates would lose. Republicans needed five votes from Democrats and/or Southern Oppositionists to win. But not even five non-Republicans would vote for John Sherman or any other endorser of the Compendium.
Democrats needed all party members to form a base for a triumphant coalition. But not even the prospect of party victory could unite all Southern Democrats and all Northern anti-Lecompton (and pro–Stephen A. Douglas) Democrats. Thus was prefigured the split of the party in its national conventions several months later.
Those likely kingmakers in the standoff between Republicans and Democrats, the Southern Oppositionists, almost secured the throne for one of their own, William Smith of North Carolina. But not even the coalition of non-Republicans behind Smith could secure more votes than John Sherman garnered. Only an uncontaminated Republican nonsigner of the Compendium could prevail.
On the forty-fourth ballot, transpiring on February 1, 1860, just enough representatives found their uncontaminated Republican. All the voting Republicans, plus nine Northern Democrats, plus one Southern Oppositionist lifted William Pennington, New Jersey’s obscure freshman congressman, into the Speaker’s chair. The southern lone ranger, Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, sought to resurrect ex–Southern Whigs’ failed fusionist strategy of 1856. He would support Pennington, a noncontroversial Republican who had said nothing about this particular slavery issue, in hopes that a new national party against the Democrats, agitating about everything except slavery, would reunite all fragments of grand old Whiggery.39
Southern Democrats screamed, in their usual loyalty politics vein, that the latest borderland “traitor” must be soft on slavery. The accusers pointed out that Henry Winter Davis had no idea whether William Pennington would remain safely silent on slavery. The Marylander, like everyone else, only knew that Pennington, only recently a Republican convert, had not yet endorsed or repudiated the Compendium. Still, after Pennington secured the most powerful congressional procedural position, this Speaker indirectly proved Henry Winter Davis innocent of treason. The New Jersey congressman neither accelerated nor impeded Republican antislavery legislation. A Georgian captured his blandness in a cruel phrase: “Old Miss Pennington.”40
Cruelty aside, this controversy had never involved the Speaker’s potential antislavery procedural power. Missouri’s John Clark and all subsequent Southerners had focused instead on the antislavery potential in Northern Republicans’ support for the Blairs, Cassius Clays, Underwoods, and Helpers. In that sense, John Clark deserved his cry of glee, the day before his (more than Pennington’s) triumph: My resolution has “smoked out before the American people the fact that an endorser of the Helper book cannot be Speaker of this House.”41
Still, the slaveholders’ victory over Sherman broke the southern record for empty triumph. The Fugitive Slave Law had yielded at least a few hundred returned slaves. The Kansas-Nebraska Act had come close to yielding the (slightly) enslaved state of Kansas. In contrast, the southern blockage of Sherman yielded only a Republican nonendorser of Helper; and no one could say what Old Miss Pennington might endorse in the future.
Worse, no Northern Republican president would be deterred from building a Southern Republican Party, just because Sherman had lost the Speakership. A Republican president would likely give patronage positions inside the South to his closest southern ideological allies, including Cassius Clay, Frank Blair, Jr., and John Underwood. He could scarcely shower southern posts on Yankees (that would enrage the South) or on Republicans’ opponents (that would enrage the president’s allies). A Northern Republican president’s appointive power explains all by itself why the Republicans’ invasive strategy, with its fingerprints all over the Compendium, had alarmed the Southerners, even though they discounted the Speaker’s procedural power.
The mischief in Congress surrounding “the election of Pennington,” Georgia’s U.S. Senator Robert M. Toombs wrote Alexander Stephens eight days after the empty victory over Sherman, shows why we cannot permit Black Republicans to wield the presidency. “It would abolitionize Maryland in a year, raise a powerful abolition party in Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri in two years, and foster and rear up a free labor party in the whole South in four years. Thus the strife will be transferred from the North to our own friends. Then security and peace in our borders is gone forever.” Thus did the last congressional presecession crisis point toward a climactic crisis over the presidency.42
– 8 –
Toombs’s words showed again that a wider drama than John Brown’s had greased a slide toward secession. Brown’s raid did hand secessionists an infuriating image of loathsome Yankees’ sympathy for would-be devastators of slaveholders’ homes. But Brown’s failed raid supplied no image of how Yankee hatred would effectively be transported south. The Compendium controversy, coming after Brown’s, Fee’s, and Underwood’s false starts, finally indicated how Republicans meant to carry the war to the slaveholders. Neither a lone ranger bearing pikes nor an evangelist bearing Christ’s spirit nor a developer bringing Yankee laborers but instead a national party bearing patronage would spread northern scorn for slavery inside the South. Not just stray words in the air that had aroused a Keitt slave toward murder but also Southern Republican appeals on southern campaign trails would make slavery and republicanism incompatible.
As the Brown/Helper winter faded into memory, a two-headed image survived. On one side, Brown glowed with Northerners’ hatred. On the other side, Helper’s Compendium glistened with Republicans’ tactics. The combination handed disunion propagandists the target of a Republican immediate menace that fused dishonor and danger.
Despite that boon, secessionists faced hard and uncertain work. In February 1860, most southern leaders and followers preferred, in Henry Wise’s very popular words, to fight in the Union. Despite Helper, despite Underwood, despite Fee, despite Brown, secessionists had suffered yet another defeat: Memminger’s. So too, while John Brown’s spirit marched on in northern hearts, his pikes, sent around the South by Edmund Ruffin, lay moldering in southern legislatures’ storage bins. Even that momentary symbol of southern withdrawal, the Philadelphia medical schools’ empty desks, filled right back up. When courses resumed in the fall of 1860, Southerners formed as high a percentage of the Philadelphia medical students as ever.
First John Brown, then secession? It was not that simple. Rather first John Brown, then Transcendentalists’ cheers, then a series of northern alternative invasions during the presecession winter, with the Compendium emerging to leaders such as Robert Toombs as the plausible Republican route inside a contained South. Yet most Southerners, as the Virginians had shown, still greeted the springtime with hopes that secessionists could be kept at bay.
In mid-1860, the disunionist lately reduced to shrunken silence best articulated South Carolinians’ latest frustration. As he gained some perspective on the congressional winter (and discovered that the spot of his brother’s murder appeared on John Brown’s map), the chastened Laurence Keitt regained his old roaring self. “Northern men,” Keitt warned, must not “get access to our Negroes to advise poison and the torch.” Nor could we allow a Republican president to do “irreparable damage” by “sowing division among us.” Keitt feared that “a Union party at the South now means an abolition party—not at first it may be but through quick transitions.”
Whether in the North or in the South, whether Republicans infected lower-class blacks or whites, Keitt believed that the Yankees who had cheered John Brown’s anarchism “will develop the wildest democracy ever seen on this earth—unless it shall have been matched in Paris in 1789. What of conservatism?—What of order?—What of social security or of financial prosperity can withstand Northern Republican license? A drunken and licentious soldier would be hardly as bad.”43
Alas for Keitt and fellow South Carolina reactionaries, most Southerners continued to think that disunionists were as unreliable as drunkards. Despite congressmen’s pistol-laden pockets, ballots rather than bullets still figured to control this democratic nation’s future. But if the election of 1860’s proceedings smashed the National Democratic Party and elevated a Republican to the White House, South Carolina fire-eaters might push a very reluctant southern majority into revolution, especially if those classy Christopher Memmingers, ominously disillusioned with Cooperationism, added a sober respectability to Separatists’ unruly rebelliousness.