Abraham Lincoln: a History Volume Ii Part 8

The members respected the private pledge they had given him to engage in no general legislation; but provided by law for an investigation of the Oxford and McGee frauds, and for an election to be held on January 4, 1858 (the day fixed by the Lecompton Const.i.tution for the election of State officers and a State legislature), at which the people might vote for the Lecompton Const.i.tution or against it. Thus in the course of events two separate votes were taken on this notorious doc.u.ment.

The first, provided for in the instrument itself, took place on the 21st of December, 1857. Detachments of troops were stationed at several points; the free-State men abstained from voting; the election was peaceable; and in due time Calhoun proclaimed that 6143 ballots had been cast "for the const.i.tution with slavery," and 589 "for the const.i.tution with no slavery." But the subsequent legislative investigation disclosed a gross repet.i.tion of the Oxford fraud, and proved the actual majority, in a onesided vote, to have been only 3423. The second election occurred on January 4, 1858, under authority of the legislative act. At this election the pro-slavery party voted for the State officers, but in its turn abstained from voting on the const.i.tution, the result being--against the Lecompton Const.i.tution, 10,226; for the Lecompton Const.i.tution with slavery, 138; for the Lecompton Const.i.tution without slavery, 24.[12]

This emphatic rejection of the Lecompton Const.i.tution by a direct vote of the people of Kansas sealed its fate. We shall see further on what persistent but abortive efforts were made in Congress once more to galvanize it into life. The free-State party were jubilant; but the pro-slavery cabal, foiled and checked, was not yet dismayed or conquered. For now there was developed, for the first time in its full proportions, the giant pro-slavery intrigue which proved that the local conspiracy of the Atchison-Missouri cabal was but the image and fraction of a national combination, finding its headquarters in the Administration, first of President Pierce, and now of President Buchanan; working patiently and insidiously through successive efforts to bring about a practical subversion of the whole theory and policy of the American Government. It linked the action of Border Ruffians, presidential aspirants, senates, courts, and cabinets into efficient cooperation; leading up, step by step, from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, through the Nebraska bill, border conquest, the Dred Scott decision, the suppression of the submission clause in the Toombs bill, and the extraordinary manipulation and machinery of the Lecompton Const.i.tution, towards the final overthrow of the doctrine that "all men are created equal," and the subst.i.tution of the dogma of property in man; towards the judicial construction that property rights in human beings are before and above const.i.tutional sanction, and that slavery must find protection and perpetuity in States as well as in Territories.

[Sidenote] Ca.s.s to Stanton, December 2, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc.

No. 8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. I., pp. 112-13.

[Sidenote] Ca.s.s to Stanton, December 8, 1857. Ibid., p. 113.

[Sidenote] Ca.s.s to Denver, December 11th, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No.

8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. I., p. 120.

The first weather-sign came from Washington. On the day after Acting Governor Stanton convened the October Legislature in special session, and before news of the event reached him, Secretary Ca.s.s transmitted to him advance copies of the President's annual message, in which the Lecompton Const.i.tution was indorsed in unqualified terms. A week later he was admonished to conform to the views of the President in his official conduct. At this point the State Department became informed of what had taken place, and the acting Governor had short shrift. On December 11 Ca.s.s wrote to J.W. Denver, Esq.: "You have already been informed that Mr. Stanton has been removed from the office of Secretary of the Territory of Kansas and that you have been appointed in his place." Ca.s.s further explained that the President "was surprised to learn that the secretary and acting Governor had, on the 1st of December, issued his proclamation for a special session of the Territorial Legislature on the 7th instant, only a few weeks in advance of its regular time of meeting, and only fourteen days before the decision was to be made on the question submitted by the convention. This course of Mr. Stanton, the President seriously believes, has thrown a new element of discord among the excited people of Kansas, and is directly at war, therefore, with the peaceful policy of the Administration. For this reason he has felt it his duty to remove him."

Walker, already in Washington on leave of absence, could no longer remain silent. He was as pointedly abandoned and disgraced by the Administration as was his subordinate. In a dignified letter justifying his own course, which, he reminded them, had never been criticized or disavowed, he resigned the governorship. "From the events occurring in Kansas as well as here," he wrote, "it is evident that the question is pa.s.sing from theories into practice; and that as governor of Kansas I should be compelled to carry out new instructions, differing on a vital question from those received at the date of my appointment. Such instructions I could not execute consistently with my views of the Federal Const.i.tution, of the Kansas and Nebraska bill, or with my pledges to the people of Kansas." "The idea entertained by some that I should see the Federal Const.i.tution and the Kansas-Nebraska bill overthrown and disregarded, and that, playing the part of a mute in a pantomime of ruin, I should acquiesce by my silence in such a result, especially where such acquiescence involved, as an immediate consequence, a disastrous and sanguinary civil war, seems to me most preposterous."[13]

The conduct and the language of Walker and Stanton bear a remarkable significance when we remember that they had been citizens of slave States and zealous Democratic partisans, and that only hard practical experience and the testimony of their own eyes had forced them to join their predecessors in the political "graveyard." "The ghosts on the banks of the Styx," said Seward, "const.i.tute a cloud scarcely more dense than the spirits of the departed Governors of Kansas, wandering in exile and sorrow for having certified the truth against falsehood in regard to the elections between Freedom and Slavery in Kansas."

[1] January 12, 1857, Wilder, p. 113. Bell, Speech in Senate, March 18, 1858. Appendix "Globe," p. 137.

[2] Geary to Marcy, Feb. 21, 1857, Senate Ex. Doc. No. 17, 1st Sess.

35th Cong. Vol. VI., p. 178.

[3] Bigler, Senate Speech, Dec. 9, 1857. "Globe," p. 21. See also Bigler, Dec. 21, 1857. "Globe," p. 113.

[4] Walker, Testimony before the Covode Committee. Reports of Committees H.R. 1st Sess. 36th Cong. Vol. V., pp. 105-6.

[5] "These fifteen counties in which there was no registry gave a much larger vote at the October election, even with the six months'

qualification, than the whole vote given to the delegates who signed the Lecompton Const.i.tution on the 7th November last."--[Walker to Ca.s.s, December 15, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.

Vol. I, p. 128.]

[6] Walker to Buchanan, June 28, 1857. Report Covode Committee, pp.

117-19.

[7] Buchanan to Walker, July 12, 1857. Report Covode Committee, p.

112.

[8] The ingenuity which evolved 1600 Kansas votes from an old Cincinnati directory and 1200 more from an uninhabited county, was not exhausted by that prodigious labor. The same influences, and perhaps the same manipulators, produced a companion piece known by the name of the "candle-box fraud." At the election of January 4, 1858, for officers under the Lecompton Const.i.tution, the returns from Delaware Agency underwent such suspicious handling that an investigating commission of the Legislature, by aid of a search-warrant, found them secreted in a candle-box buried under a woodpile near Calhoun's "surveyor-general's office" at Lecompton. A forged list of 379 votes had been subst.i.tuted for the original memorandum of only forty-three votes which had been cut from the certificate of the judges; the votes on the forged list being intended for the pro-slavery candidates.

During the investigation Calhoun was arrested, but liberated by Judge Cato on _habeas corpus_, after which he immediately went to Missouri, and from there to Washington. The details and testimony are found in House Com. Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong. Vol. III, Report No. 377.

[9] Minority Report, Select Com. of Fifteen. Report No. 377, page 109, Vol. III., H.R. Reports, 1st Sess. 35th Cong.

This "missing link," no less than the remaining portion of the journal printed in the proceedings of the investigating committee, is itself strong circ.u.mstantial proof of the imposture underlying the whole transaction. Many sections of the completed const.i.tution are not even mentioned in the journal; it does not contain the submission clause of the schedule, and the authenticity of the doc.u.ment rests upon the signature and the certificate of John Calhoun without other verification.

[10] "Dr. Tebbs and General Whitfield a month since left very strong letters for publication with the editor of the 'Union' which he promised to publish. His breach of this promise is a gross outrage. If not published immediately our success in convention materially depends on my getting an immediate copy at Lecompton. My friends here all regard now the 'Union' as an enemy and encouraging by its neutrality the fire-eaters not to submit the const.i.tution. Very well, the facts are so clear that I can get along without the 'Union,' but he had no right to suppress Dr. Tebbs's letter. I shall in due time expose that transaction."--Extract from a letter of Robert J. Walker to James Buchanan, dated October, 1857.

[11] For this autograph letter and other interesting ma.n.u.scripts, we are indebted to General Duncan S. Walker, a son of the Governor, now residing in Washington, D.C.

[12] Under an Act of Congress popularly known as the "English Bill,"

this same Lecompton Const.i.tution was once more voted upon by the people of Kansas on August 2, 1858, with the following result: for the proposition, 1788; against it, 11,300.--Wilder, "Annals of Kansas,"

pp. 186-8.

[13] Walker to Ca.s.s, Dec. 16, 1857. Senate Ex. Doc. No. 8, 1st Sess., 35th Cong. Vol. I., pp. 131, 130.

CHAPTER VII

THE REVOLT OF DOUGLAS

The language of President Buchanan's annual message, the summary dismissal of Acting Governor Stanton, and the resignation of Governor Walker abruptly transferred the whole Lecompton question from Kansas to Washington; and even before the people of the Territory had practically decided it by the respective popular votes of December 21,1857, and January 4,1858, it had become the dominant political issue in the Thirty-fifth Congress, which convened on December 7, 1857. The att.i.tude of Senator Douglas on the new question claimed universal attention. The Dred Scott decision, affirming const.i.tutional sanction and inviolability for slave property in Territories, had rudely damaged his theory. But we have seen how in his Springfield speech he ingeniously sought to repair and rehabilitate "popular sovereignty" by the sophism that a master's abstract const.i.tutional right to slave property in a Territory was a "barren and a worthless right unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations," which could only be supplied by the local Territorial Legislatures; and that the people of Kansas thus still possessed the power of indirect prohibition.

[Sidenote] 1857.

To invent and utter this sophism for home consumption among his distant const.i.tuents on the 12th of June (a few days before the Lecompton delegates were elected), and in so un.o.btrusive a manner as scarcely to attract a ripple of public notice, was a light task compared with that which confronted him as Senator, at the meeting of Congress in December, in the light of John Calhoun's doings and powers, of the scandal of the Oxford fraud, and of the indignation of Northern Democrats against the betrayal of Walker and Stanton.

One of his first experiences was a personal quarrel with Buchanan.

When he reached Washington, three days before the session, he went to the President to protest against his adopting the Lecompton Const.i.tution and sending it to Congress for acceptance. Buchanan insisted that he must recommend it in his annual message. Douglas replied that he would denounce it as soon as it was read. The President, excited, told him "to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed. Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives."

[Sidenote] Douglas, Milwaukee Speech, October 13, 1860.

"Mr. President," retorted Douglas, "I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead."

In the election of Mr. Buchanan as President the South had secured a most important ally for the work of pro-slavery reaction. Trained in the belief that the South had hitherto been wronged, he was ready on every occasion to appear as her champion for redress; and Southern politicians were now eager to use his leadership to make their views of public policy and const.i.tutional duty acceptable to the North.

Respectable in capacity but feeble in will, he easily submitted to control and guidance from a few Southern leaders of superior intellectual force. In his inaugural, he sought to prepare public opinion for obedience to the Dred Scott decision, and since its publication he had undertaken to interpret its scope and effect.

Replying to a memorial from certain citizens of New England, he declared in a public letter, "Slavery existed at that period, and still exists in Kansas, under the Const.i.tution of the United States.

This point has at last been finally decided by the highest tribunal known to our laws. How it could ever have been seriously doubted is a mystery."[1] In the same letter he affirmed the legality of the Lecompton Convention, though he yet clearly expressed his expectation that the const.i.tution to be framed by it would be submitted to the popular vote for "approbation or rejection."

[Sidenote] 1857.

But when that convention adjourned, and made known its cunningly devised work, the whole South instantly became clamorous to secure the sectional advantages which lay in its technical regularity, its strong affirmance of the "property" theory, and the extraordinary power it gave to John Calhoun to control the election and decide the returns.

This powerful reactionary movement was not lost upon Mr. Buchanan. He reflected it as unerringly as the vane moves to the change of the wind. Long before the meeting of Congress, the Administration organ, the "Washington Union," heralded and strongly supported the new departure. When, on the 8th of December, the President's annual message was transmitted and read, the Lecompton Const.i.tution, as framed and submitted, was therein warmly indorsed and its acceptance indicated as the future Administration policy.

[Sidenote] Buchanan, Annual Message, December 8, 1857.

The language of this message discloses with what subtle ingenuity words, phrases, definitions, ideas, and theories were being invented and plied to broaden and secure every conquest of the pro-slavery reaction. An elaborate argument was made to defend the enormities of the Lecompton Const.i.tution. The doctrine of the Silliman letter, that "slavery exists in Kansas under the Const.i.tution of the United States," was a.s.sumed as a conceded theory. "In emerging from the condition of territorial dependence into that of a sovereign State,"

the people might vote "whether this important domestic inst.i.tution should or should not continue to exist." "Domestic inst.i.tutions" was defined to mean slavery. "Free to form and regulate their domestic inst.i.tutions"--the phrase employed in the Kansas-Nebraska act--was construed to mean a vote to continue or discontinue slavery. And "if any portion of the inhabitants shall refuse to vote, a fair opportunity to do so having been presented, ... they alone will be responsible for the consequences." "Should the const.i.tution without slavery be adopted by the votes of the majority, the rights of property in slaves now in the Territory are reserved.... These slaves were brought into the Territory under the Const.i.tution of the United States and are now the property of their masters. This point has at length been finally decided by the highest judicial tribunal of the country."

However blind Buchanan might be to the fact that this extreme interpretation shocked and alarmed the sentiment of the North; that if made before the late Presidential campaign it would have defeated his own election; and that if rudely persisted in, it might destroy the Democratic ascendency in the future, the danger was obvious and immediately vital to Douglas. His senatorial term was about to expire.

To secure a reelection he must carry the State of Illinois in 1858, which had on an issue less p.r.o.nounced than this defeated his colleague Shields in 1854, and his lieutenant Richardson in 1856. But more than this, his own personal honor was as much involved in his pledges to the voters of Illinois as had been that of Governor Walker to the voters of Kansas. His double-dealing caucus bargain had thus placed him between two fires--party disgrace at Washington and popular disgrace in Illinois. In such a dilemma his choice could not be doubtful. At all risk he must endeavor to sustain himself at home.

[Sidenote] Douglas, Senate Speech, December 9, 1857. "Globe," p. 18.

He met the encounter with his usual adroitness and boldness. a.s.suming that the President had made no express recommendation, he devoted his speech mainly to a strong argument of party expediency, repelling without reserve and denouncing without stint the work of the Lecompton Convention. "Stand by the doctrine," said he, "that leaves the people perfectly free to form and regulate their inst.i.tutions for themselves, in their own way, and your party will be united and irresistible in power. Abandon that great principle and the party is not worth saving, and cannot be saved after it shall be violated. I trust we are not to be rushed upon this question. Why shall it be done? Who is to be benefited? Is the South to be the gainer? Is the North to be the gainer? Neither the North nor the South has the right to gain a sectional advantage by trickery or fraud.... But I am told on all sides, 'Oh! just wait; the pro-slavery clause will be voted down.'

That does not obviate any of my objections; it does not diminish any of them. You have no more right to force a free-State const.i.tution on Kansas than a slave-State const.i.tution. If Kansas wants a slave-State const.i.tution she has a right to it; if she wants a free-State const.i.tution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up. Do you suppose, after the pledges of my honor that I would go for that principle and leave the people to vote as they choose, that I would now degrade myself by voting one way if the slavery clause be voted down, and another way if it be voted up? I care not how that vote may stand.... Ignore Lecompton; ignore Topeka; treat both those party movements as irregular and void; pa.s.s a fair bill--the one that we framed ourselves when we were acting as a unit; have a fair election--and you will have peace in the Democratic party, and peace throughout the country, in ninety days. The people want a fair vote. They will never be satisfied without it.... But if this const.i.tution is to be forced down our throats in violation of the fundamental principle of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and insult, I will resist it to the last."