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

them to death with old surplus artillery broadswords that Brown had thoughtfully bought up and brought from Ohio. “God is my judge,” Brown explained with an eerie self-assurance. “It was absolutely necessary as a measure of self-defence, and for the defence of others.”49

The second event happened almost at the same time as Brown’s raid, but it took place on the floor of the United States Senate. On May 19, 1856, the anti-slavery senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner, rose and delivered what turned out to be a two-day diatribe: “The Crime Against Kansas.” The principal burden of Sumner’s complaint was directed at the attack on Lawrence, Kansas, which he portrayed in the most livid terms as the anteroom to civil war. The attack on Lawrence amounted to “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous off-spring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of Slavery in the National Government.” The ultimate meaning of the “rape” of Lawrence was the evidence it afforded that “the horrors of intestine feud” were being planned “not only in this distant Territory, but everywhere throughout the country. Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon, threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with, the mutterings of civil war.”50

This was far from the first time the elegant but pompous Sumner had thrown rhetorical caution to the winds in attacking slavery. The Southern poet William Grayson lampooned Sumner in Augustan couplets as the “supple Sumner, with the Negro cause,” playing “the sly game for office and applause.”

What though he blast the fortunes of the state

With fierce dissension and enduring hate?

He makes the speech, his rhetoric displays,

Trims the neat trope, and points the sparkling phrase

With well-turned period, fosters civil strife,

And barters for a phrase a nation’s life.51

But “The Crime Against Kansas” had been prepared by Sumner with unusually knife-edged care, and in the body of his speech, Sumner took time to unleash some particularly nasty personal insults at a number of Southern senators, including Andrew Butler of South Carolina. Butler, Sumner declared in some of the most virulently personal language used on the Senate floor, “has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight… the harlot, Slavery.” Butler was full of “incoherent phrases, discharged from the loose expectoration of his speech… He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder”—which was a particularly cruel play on the mild stroke that had affected Butler’s speech.

Two days after Sumner finished his speech, South Carolina representative Preston Brooks, a relative of Butler’s, entered the almost empty Senate chamber and found Sumner alone at his desk, franking copies of the speech for free distribution by mail. “Mr. Sumner, I have heard your speech with care and as much impartiality as was possible,” Brooks said, “and I feel it my duty to tell you that you have libeled my State and slandered a relative who is aged and absent and I am come to punish you for it.” Brooks then raised a gold-headed gutta-percha cane he had carried for precisely this purpose and began beating Sumner over the head, giving him “about 30 first rate stripes.” Sumner, pinned into place by his desk, sank under the rain of blows until Brooks’s cane broke and Brooks could only hit him with the butt end of it.

Sumner tore himself free and was rescued by New York congressman Edwin B. Morgan, but his injuries would keep him out of political life for three years. This act of wanton violence on the floor of Congress appalled the Northern states fully as much as Brown’s Raid appalled the South with its equally wanton barbarism. The House of Representatives opened an inquiry into the assault, but in the end Brooks paid only a $300 fine.52

Both incidents were testimony to the fact that popular sovereignty, the great guarantee of the Compromise of 1850, would breed only violence, not peace. Assuming that the passage of six years had made neither the Wilmot Proviso nor Calhoun’s “common property” doctrine any more appealing than they had been in 1850 as a way of dealing with the extension of slavery in the territories, the last possible option in Congress might be a return to some form of the Missouri Compromise.

Congress was not to have any further say in the matter.

DRED SCOTT AND THE SLAVE POWER

Kansas was a double misfortune for Stephen Douglas. The Little Giant believed with all his heart that popular sovereignty was the golden key that locked up the peaceful settlement of the territories, and he had made promises to both North and South about the settlement that Kansas had shown he could not keep. Now Northerners distrusted him as the man who had carelessly torn down the old safeguard of the Missouri Compromise and allowed slavery into Kansas, and Southerners mistrusted him because the uncertainty over Kansas’s future was preventing Kansas from entering the ranks of the slave states.

Douglas’s reputation suffered less in the wake of Bleeding Kansas than did the reputations of the two national political parties. The Whigs had gone into the election of 1852 in poor shape to begin with. Both of their most recent presidents, Harrison and Taylor, had died in office, and in 1852 their two greatest standard-bearers, Clay and Webster, died as well. For some of the Southern Whigs, of course, those deaths could not have come sooner. Southern Whigs were especially bitter over Taylor, a slave owner and Southerner who had betrayed both slave owners and Southerners by advocating the free-state admission of California and New Mexico. So even though the Whigs still had a sitting president