Lessons of 1856
History is, at its root, a grand painting of human nature in all its ugly colors and forms, a Greek tragedy that shows us at our best and worst. America in 1856 was one such window into the national soul at a time when it was being ripped apart at the molecular level. It was a year when America faced a pivotal choice: unite around all that united Americans or be recalcitrant and let divisions tumble the country down the path toward civil war and ruin.
When Charles Sumner rose in the sweltering Senate chamber on Monday, May 19, 1856, he did so with Kansas on his mind. By that time, Kansas was a war zone marked with battle lines drawn by two rival territorial governments each representing, poetically and ominously, the pro-slavery and anti-slavery aspirations of a country that seemed to be stuck in a twilight period, haunted perennially by the specter of human bondage.
Erected fraudulently by the pro-slavery “border ruffians” of Missouri, the “official” and recognized government took up at Lecompton, where they imposed rigid laws making it illegal to question slavery and a capital offense to aid fugitive slaves. At Topeka, defiant settlers resolved that the territory should be preserved as free soil unsullied by the “peculiar institution.”
The result was division but also a strange fervor for violence. “We will engage in a competition for the virgin soil of Kansas,” the abolitionist William Seward told the Senate, “and God give the victory to the side which is stronger in numbers as it is in right.”
In a similarly holy-war-like tone, Missouri’s vehement defender of slavery expansion, David Atchison, remarked, “We are playing for a mighty stake; if we win we carry slavery to the Pacific… the game must be played boldly.”
Throughout the struggle for Kansas, both sides committed atrocities. John Brown led a posse under the cover of night and killed, by sword and gunfire, five pro-slavery settlers in front of their families. Then, pro-slavery militants executed a similar number of anti-slavery men and wounded several others in a ravine.
Just two examples, they display the degree to which thoughts and words tended to blend with action, blurring the line between right and wrong causes, and leading some to question if they were living in the end years of the American experiment. What started as a war of words, a diplomatic contest of ideas, quickly descended into a holy war of honor, destiny, and supremacy.
Things didn’t fare any better in the halls of Congress. There, dignity, reason, restraint, and respect were said to reign. Yet when Preston Brooks almost beat Charles Sumner to death on the Senate floor for the latter’s overt criticisms of Southern civilization (including its leading statesmen and “peculiar” institutions), the question had to be asked: What on earth had gotten into America?
Throughout the country, the response to Brooks’s attack displayed all too well the deep-seated divisions that, although had laid somewhat dormant below the surface, had come to light, illuminating with uncomfortable clarity the enormous chasm that lay between people who not one hundred years earlier had mutually pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to establish self-rule in the land of hope.
“Outraged by unprincipled Abolitionists,” a Richmond newspaper applauded Brooks’s conduct, adding, “It was a proper act, done at the proper time and in the proper place.” Students at the University of Virginia gifted Brooks a new cane whose head bore a crack, much like that of Sumner’s. In Richmond, it was preached that the “vulgar abolitionists,” like black slaves, “must be lashed into submission.”
Northward, chants of war thundered. The Massachusetts legislature called the attack “brutal and cowardly,” a blow struck at “the decencies of civilized life.” Meetings took place where the offended expressed “indignation” at their Union with the slavocracy. Brooks was hanged and burned in effigy, and William Cullen Bryant asked, “Are we too slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?”
By Election Day, all thoughts and things were split. The rhetoric was heightened beyond comparison; the election showed just how far America had come and how much it could not agree on first principles. South of the Potomac, the Declaration was a white man’s document, and the Constitution was a contract one could unilaterally quit if things did not go their way. Northward, the Declaration demanded fulfillment, the Constitution was a deal with the devil they knew, whose conditions included perpetuating slavery, and it was contemplated that disunion from the South was perhaps a high moral course.
At least overwhelming to one side—the white South—the election results mattered little: they would, as Lincoln would say in 1860, “rule or ruin in all events.” Southerners saw the first Republican candidate for president, John C. Fremont, as the “mere personification of Black Republicanism, the bearer of the black flag.” Should the anti-slavery Republicans secure the White House, Virginia’s governor vowed to see it as “an overt act and declaration of war” and pledged to raise an army and take Washington by force.
In Ohio, a Republican newspaper hailed the cause as a battle for “free speech, free labor, free territory, and free men,” while James Buchanan and the slavocrat Democrats waged “the battles of the South—of slavery” and the “slave democracy.” The election, as Massachusetts’s Henry Wilson recalled, “took color and character from the disturbed condition of affairs.”
Ultimately, Buchanan won, and the Union was doubtless spared the turmoil of Southern reaction to a Fremont presidency. Yet in four years, Lincoln’s election triggered the unimaginable. Far from an isolated incident, the secession crisis and subsequent war in 1861 were the climax of a story arc plagued act after act by America’s worst instincts, by a stubborn willingness to see one another as mortal enemies rather than as friends and neighbors.
Today, as ever, the lessons of 1856 are painfully clear.