Massachusetts & South Carolina in the Sectional Crisis, Part 4: Kansas-Nebraska and the Disruption of the Political Order

Even before Douglas’s plan reached the floor of Congress, Sumner and two other powerful Northern senators Salmon Chase and Joshua Giddings were working with three anti-slavery congressmen to draft an attack on it.

Titled ‘Shall Slavery Be Permitted in Nebraska” it pungently accused this new state as ‘a gross violation of a sacred pledge’. While in regard to the new territory, it’s argument of slavery taking hold were unlikely to do the climate and cultural sensibilities, it was on firmer ground tracing the history of the Missouri Compromise and how this would destroy its foundation.

On January 23 Douglas proposed a new bill declaring the Missouri Compromise had been superseded by the Compromise of 1850 and was declared inoperative. Nebraska was to be divided into two territories: Nebraska and Kansas. Some committee members protested not having sufficient time to study the bill’s new provisions or even read them. Douglas rebuffed those concerns and presented them on the Senate floor the next day.

On the Senate floor that Monday Chase slyly rose and requested for a delay of a week to study the bill. Douglas acquiesced, agreeing to take up the measure on the 30^th. That same day the appeal was published in The National Era, the major abolitionist paper in Washington. The Baltimore Sun speculated that the bill would likely clear the Senate but it would struggle in the House. Rhett’s Charleston Mercury complained that the renewed anti-slavery agitations of the north proved the 1850 compromise was merely a ‘hollow truce’.

When debate began on the 30^th an enraged Douglas took the Senate floor. Before an overflowing galleries he erupted with an invective primary at Chase and Sumer who he referred to as the ‘Abolitionist confederates’. Castigating them as acting in bad faith he argued that the Compromise of 1850 did in fact supersede the Missouri and that the issue extended to a ‘higher and more solemn obligation related to ‘that great fundamental principle of Democracy.”

During February Douglas constantly met with Democratic party leaders to debate strategy, occasionally invited Southern Whigs to the discussion. Chase, Sumner and Seward were the major opposition while Butler and his F Street Mess took the key roles in supporting the bill they’d helped draft.

Sheer numbers were enough to get the bill through the Senate as it passed by a margin of 37 to 14. When it reached the House, its crafty opponents managed to bypass the Committee on Territories and assigned it to the Committee of the hole. It languished for weeks behind fifty other measures until the administration and congressional supporters managed enough votes to get it released. Finally on May 30^th, floor manager Alexander Stephens of Georgia brought it to a vote. It narrowly passed 113-100. Pierce signed into law on May 30^th.

The results were felt almost immediately as the fragile peace that had held for nearly 33 years flared at the reversal of turning free territory into a possible slave state. The larger consequences were for the Democratic Party nationally. Almost since its foundation the South had been guided by the succor of the fact that it had been guided by a party sympathetic to their needs. The 1854 elections devastated it nationally. The Democratic Party lost an enormous 69 seats in Congress and was now almost exclusively a Southern institution.

Indeed the 1854 elections showed that the two-party system that had held for nearly two decades was falling apart. A part known solely as the Anti-Nebraska party gained 22 seats throughout the northeast and the so-called People’s party gained nine in Indiana. But the biggest shattering of the status quo was felt in Massachusetts.

The Whig Party had managed to hold together in the state after the 1852 elections. There had been a conflict between Charles Francis Adams of the Free Soilers and Henry Wilson of the Whigs. The bigger problem that his state faced was a new movement.

Set up as a secret society of nativist sentiment who responded to queries about their organization simply “I know nothing” a new party had formed that one very clear policy – xenophobia. An influx of a 100,000 Irish migrants entering the state that now consisted of 25 percent of Worcester’s population and half of Boston’s, their mere presence was a symbol of transforming an unwilling New England. Based on future events, one wonders if New England would have been such a bastion for abolition had their biggest city been similarly proliferate with free slaves.

Curiously for elements of a party that was fundamentally xenophobic it also took positions that the far left would later not be uncomfortable with. These including hostility to exploitive industry, entrenched elites, government intervention to ensure the rights of workers, temperance, women’s suffrage – and a strong anti-slavery.

During 1854 as Congress was pushing the Kansas Nebraska Act towards passage, the Know-Nothings gained strength in Massachusetts as more and more citizen gravitated to the party banner – including large numbers of Free Soilers. Henry Wilson himself joined a Know-Nothing Lodge as a means of educating himself on the movement and gaining access to its leaders.

In the state there was now a new fault-line: those who were willing to compromise to deal with the rising force of the Know-Nothings and those who abhorred. The biggest members of the latter were the old aristocracy including men like Robert Winthrop and Edward Everett, one of the old style Whigs of the state. The latter included Henry Wilson, one of the Free Soilers.

Of all the Massachusetts figures Wilson may have been the most attuned to the idea of what would become known as realpolitik. He was just as devoted to the idea of antislavery as men like his rival Adams but he also knew well enough how relatively small the Free Soil constituency was, He understood that the power that mattered was derived from the votes of the citizens, pooled from whatever resources were it hand, and dealmaking, maneuvering and compromising – words that men like Sumner in particular had little use for. And that meant accepting the inevitable rise of Know Nothings in his home state.

Indeed trying to serve as a counterweight to Sumner to try and control him, his fellow Senator Edward Everett quickly learned that this was impossible. After being pressed by both Sumner and his increasingly anti-slavery constituency for not being strong enough on the issue, he resigned late that month.

During this period Wilson had been capitalizing on the internal tensions in the Whig Party to try and build a coalition. In July of 1854 he and a small group of Free Soil Officials called a party convention in Worcester to attempt to lure anti-slavery Whigs and disaffected Democrats to their cause. This by and large was a failure. What was more significant was the adoption of the new name ‘Republican’, aligning themselves with a group of anti-slavery fusionists in Wisconsin and nominated Wilson as its candidate for governor.

Wilson had been negotiating with a local Know-Nothing to leader for a fusion movement of his own. While he didn’t received an endorsement for governor, they were willing to do so for him to be the new Republican Senator. He would bow out in early November in what was considered a backroom deal to put him in the Senate when the Know-Nothings prevailed. They did so that fall. Meanwhile they would capture every seat in the State Senate and almost all in the State House. The entire Congressional delegation for the state of Massachusetts would be made up of those who had been endorsed by Know-Nothings, including seven Republicans Wilson had put forward as nominees

Massachusetts state wide power structure had been completely overhauled in less than two years. The Democratic Party and the Whig Party were essentially dead in the state, and in the Senate were two of the country’s most prominent anti-slavery figures.

South Carolina was dealing with a different issue during this period: not so much political chaos as drift. The state was now defined politically not by what it stood for but what it didn’t. It was going to secede in the immediate future and it wouldn’t alone but no one knew if the peace would last. Political torpor filled South Carolina, underscored by the man who chose to fill the seat that Rhett had vacated. The legislature would replace him with a sixty-seven year old Senator named Josiah Eveans, a man who held strong unionist sentiments. He had been supporting by the two leading unionists in the state: Benjamin Perry and James Orr.

The two men had offered an antidote to the South’s predicament. They knew the South couldn’t compete with the north, which left them with just two responses to the anti-slavery agitation: secession or submission, The plantation owners wanted it that way because they favored secession and the planters could enforce because they enjoyed a disproportionate amount of power relative to its actual size. But the South wouldn’t be locked in this position if it would expand and diversify its industrial base, modernize its financial system and its outdated agricultural practices, improve education and bust up the planter oligarchy. In a sense Perry and Orr were offering a vision for a ‘New South’ which included the state becoming more aligned with the Democratic Party.

This idea was abhorrent to Rhett in every way possible. But at this point he no longer seemed to have any leverage in the legislature. Rhett’s name was placed into nomination by his friends for the Senate seat. He received a mere seven votes on the first ballots and none thereafter. Rhett withdrew from politics for a time.

So much of Rhett’s behavior seemed to be based in the belief of an independent southern empire that would reemerge as a slave state imperative in the face of the North. He saw that the South only had two choices: independence or ruin. And when they chose ruin, he would no doubt be turned to for leadership. That seemed unlikely even as the crisis over Kansas began to flare up.

When the new Congress met in December of 1855, they were in a position they had been in back in 1849: they couldn’t elect a Speaker. A stand off in 1849 had taken three weeks. This one took more than 3 months.

The Democrats controlled just a third of the seats in the House. There were 108 Republicans and 43 Know-Nothings. But these broad categories had so many subcategories including ‘straight Whig, Know Nothing/Whig, Know Nothing Democrat, Know Nothing Free Soil and Anti-Nebraska fusionists many of whom sought an exclusively Northern – and overtly Anit-Southern Republican Party, To get to a majority of 118 votes seemed difficult – and it was impossible.

As in 1849 the members agreed to a plurality outcome. On February 2 Nathaniel Banks, Massachusetts Free-Soiler who would soon become a Republican captured the Speakership on the 133^rd ballot 103 votes to 100. Banks didn’t receive a single vote from the South.

After the vote William Aiken of South Carolina, who had been the primary opponent of Banks, demonstrated his amiability by escorting his rival arm-in-arm to the Speaker’s chair. It was a scene as a strong signal of Republican assent which well outdid the stature of the man. Even a Boston paper published that Banks ‘changed his politics with as little remorse as he would change his flannels’. Within three years he had been ‘a Democrat, a Know Nothing and a Free Soiler, and had betrayed each. Far more troubling to the South was the rise of a party that was founded on the cause of abolition and, more frightening, a purely Northern party. The larger problem as a Congressman pointed out was the idea of a Speaker being chosen purely by sectional votes. No such party could claim to be national by that definition but even as a regional party it was supplanting the fading Whigs as the primary opposition to the Democrats, themselves struggling with their national identity. In just a year the new Republican Party had become one of serious contention.

In the next article I will deal with how the struggle over Kansas led to one of the most notorious moments in Congressional history – one of which Massachusetts and South Carolina were at the center of.