Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (icecream ebook reader txt) 📗

Uncle Tom’s Cabin began as a serial in the anti-slavery newspaper National Era on June 2, 1851, and ran until April 1, 1852. When it was issued in book form, 3,000 of the first 5,000 copies flew from booksellers’ stalls on the first day of publication; within two weeks it had exhausted two more editions, and within a year it had sold 300,000 copies.39

The controversial captures of runaways and the sensational impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the Fugitive Slave Law into the Achilles’ heel of the Compromise of 1850. Northerners who were otherwise content to leave slavery where it was so long as it stayed where it was now found themselves dragooned into cooperation with the South in supporting and maintaining slavery. And as they turned against the Fugitive Slave Law, they began to question the entire Compromise of 1850.

They had good reason, too, especially as the much-vaunted cure-all, popular sovereignty, increasingly came to seem more like a placebo. Initially, the Compromise had allowed the organization of the New Mexico and Utah territories by the popular vote of the people of the territory, which gave some superficial hope that popular sovereignty might be the key of promise; that, in turn, tempted politicians such as Stephen Douglas to talk a little too confidently from both sides of their mouths. Although Douglas personally had little desire to see slavery taken into the territories, popular sovereignty allowed him to tell Southerners that they had no one but themselves or the climate of the territories to blame if slavery failed to take root there; while to Northern audiences Douglas could claim that since New Mexico and Utah were poor candidates for cotton growing and would be unlikely to apply for statehood for another hundred years, popular sovereignty was the safest guarantee that slavery would not be transported to the territories. To both North and South, Douglas could promise that popular sovereignty would ensure a normal and democratic result to the process of territorial organization.

It was this apparent ease with which popular sovereignty promised to charm away all difficulties that led Douglas to carry it one step too far. Eager to open up the trans-Mississippi lands to further settlement (and, incidentally, position Douglas’s Illinois as a springboard for a new transcontinental railroad), Douglas and the Senate Committee on Territories (which he chaired) presented a new bill to the Senate on January 4, 1854, which would organize another new territory—Nebraska—on the basis of popular sovereignty, with “all questions pertaining to slavery in the Territories, and in the new states to be formed therefrom… to be left to the people residing therein, through their appropriate representatives.” (After some brief reflection, Douglas agreed to split the proposed Nebraska Territory into two separate territories, with the southernmost section to be known as the Kansas Territory.)40

This proposal dismayed Northern congressional leaders, not only because they remained uneasy about popular sovereignty but also because the proposed Kansas and Nebraska Territories both lay within the old Louisiana Purchase lands and above the old 36°30′ line, in the area the Missouri Compromise had forever reserved for free settlement. The compromisers of 1850 had agreed to use popular sovereignty as the instrument for peacefully organizing the territories acquired in the Mexican Cession; no one had said anything in 1850 about applying the popular sovereignty rule to the Louisiana Purchase territories. The state of Iowa, for example, had been organized as a free territory and admitted as a free state in 1846 precisely because it lay within the Missouri Compromise lands and above 36°30′, and there were many in Congress who assumed that Kansas and Nebraska ought to be organized under the same, older rule.

By 1854 popular sovereignty had whetted Southern appetites for more. Douglas knew well that the South would balk at the organization of two more free territories in the area the Missouri Compromise reserved for free settlement. They would balk even more as soon as they realized that if the proposed Kansas and Nebraska Territories were organized on the Missouri Compromise basis as free soil, the slave state of Missouri would be surrounded on three sides by free territory. It would become nearly impossible for Missouri to keep its slave population from easily decamping for freedom, and that would tempt Missouri slaveholders to cut their losses, sell off their slaves, and allow Missouri to become a free state that would block further slave state expansion westward. “If we can’t all go there on the string, with all our property of every kind, I say let the Indians have it forever,” wrote one Missouri slaveholder. “They are better neighbors than the abolitionists, by a damn sight.”41

Douglas also knew equally well that Northerners would howl at the prospect of scuttling the Missouri Compromise and opening Kansas and Nebraska to so much as the bare possibility, through popular sovereignty, of slavery. Salmon P. Chase, the anti-slavery Democratic giant of Ohio, tore into Douglas’s Kansas-Nebraska bill with “The Appeal of the Independent Democrats” in the National Era on January 24, 1854, savagely attacking Douglas and accusing him of subverting the Missouri Compromise in the interest of opening Kansas and Nebraska to slavery. “The thing is a terrible outrage, and the more I look at it the more enraged I become,” Maine senator William Pitt Fessenden confessed. “It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.” Mass protest meetings were held in Boston’s Faneuil Hall, in New York City, and in Detroit, as well as in Lexington, Ohio, and Marlborough, Massachusetts—at least 115 of them across the North—and resolutions attacking the Kansas-Nebraska bill were issued by five Northern state legislatures.42

Douglas was a gambler, and he was gambling that the song of popular sovereignty would lull enough anti-slavery sensibilities to get the Kansas-Nebraska bill through Congress. He was right. He had the ear of the Pierce administration and the whip handle of the Democratic Party in Congress, and on March 3, 1854, he successfully bullied