1858 (11 page)

The two loudest opponents of the ruling were Abraham Lincoln, rumored to be the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Illinois in the fall of 1858, and William Seward, the Republican New York senator who was the leading candidate of his party for president in 1860. Both complained that the ruling was not merely an affirmation of slavery for Dred Scott and others like him, but a signal that the Supreme Court, the White House, and the Democratic Congress were all part of a massive slave conspiracy that would turn the United States into a slave nation.

Lincoln charged that the
Dred Scott
decision was a precedent that would be used often to promote slavery. The proponents of slavery, he said, would “push it forward till it shall become lawful in all the states…North as well as South.” They would accomplish that goal, he said, “Simply by the next
Dred Scott
decision.” Since precedent had now been set, “it is merely for the Supreme Court to decide that no state under the Constitution can exclude it, just as they have already decided that…neither Congress nor the Territorial Legislature can do it.” Lincoln added, too, that since the Supreme Court had ruled that slaves were property, no state legislature or state court could overrule it.

Lincoln predicted that soon the Supreme Court would start ruling that thousands of Southerners could move to Northern states with their slaves, and that one morning he and his neighbors “shall awake to the reality that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a slave state.”
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Southerners dismissed Lincoln’s remarks as just more Republican agitation on the slavery issue, but he was one of hundreds of Republicans, many important elected officials, who agreed. They all looked at the legal precedent: if slaves were property, then no state could ever abolish slavery because they could not abolish property holding. Even state legislatures, such as New York’s, issued pronouncements in which dozens of members declared that they honestly feared the
Dred Scott
decision would soon make them slave states.
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Seward was even angrier, accusing Buchanan of conspiring with the justices. He said that the president had “received them as graciously as Charles I did the judges who had, at his insistence, subverted the statutes of English liberty.”
¹⁵²

President Buchanan seemed pleased with the
Dred Scott
decision, often referring to it when approving of slavery in the territories or the Southerners’ right to maintain the institution. As late as December of 1859, less than a year before he would leave office, Buchanan was extolling the
Dred Scott
decision in his annual message to Congress, telling members that “the right has been established of every citizen to take his property of any kind, including slaves, into the common territories belonging equally to all the states of the confederacy and to have it protected there under the Federal Constitution. Neither Congress nor a territorial legislature nor any human power has any authority to annul or impair this rested right.” Following several more paragraphs of support for the
Dred Scott
decision, Buchanan happily told both houses of Congress of the case, “Fortunate has this been for the prosperity of the territories, as well as the tranquility of the states.”
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After one year of debates over the
Dred Scott
decision, Buchanan was hopeful that the anniversary, and the entire slavery issue, would pass quietly. It would not. The first anniversary of the
Dred Scott
decision, coming on March 6, 1858, fell right in the middle of the acrimonious debates in Congress over the newly passed, proslavery Kansas Constitution, defended by Buchanan and Jefferson Davis and opposed by Stephen Douglas and others. The
Dred Scott
ruling had not ended anything, as Buchanan and the Southerners had anticipated.

One year later, the
Dred Scott
decision had become a political albatross around James Buchanan’s neck. It had not solved anything and had merely reminded Northerners that, despite what Buchanan frequently said about national harmony, he was in the Southern camp on slavery. On March 6, 1858, President Buchanan and everyone else in America realized that the
Dred Scott
decision was never going to go away—as the president had blithely hoped that crisp March day twelve months before when Chief Justice Taney had whispered what appeared to be such good news into the president’s ear.

Chapter Four

On February 4, 1858, the same week that his old boss, Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, delivered his rousing speech on the Kansas issue, Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived on horseback at White House, one of his wife’s Custis family plantations in central Virginia. White House, a historic 5,100-acre farm, was the home of Martha Washington during her marriage to Daniel Custis, who died when she was twenty-six. Exactly one hundred years prior to Colonel Lee’s arrival at White House that day, in the winter of 1758, George Washington had proposed to Martha in that same home and she accepted, marrying him ten months later and leaving White House for Mount Vernon, her new husband’s home on the southern banks of the Potomac River.

All of the grandeur of White House, the scene of so many elegant parties in the eighteenth century, was gone now. The main house was in disrepair, the lawns were unkempt, and the outbuildings nearby were in even worse shape. The slave quarters were in need of repair. Lee wrote in his diary, “Found the buildings dilapidated, no funds, no corn for sale.” Nearly all the plantation homes that belonged to the Custis family, including Romancoke (4,656 acres), were in shambles in 1858, the victims of neglect by the stepgrandson of George Washington, George Washington Parke Custis, Lee’s father-in-law. Lee scribbled in his diary, “Went to Romancoke—found that things there were more dilapidated than at White House—nothing looks well.” On further inspection of Romancoke, he noted that the wheat for the spring was “unpromising” and that the mill dam had not been repaired in months.
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Everyone at the plantations—slaves, overseers, hired white workers, domestics—knew when Lee had arrived to tour their farms. He was a handsome man whom several friends later wrote was the novelist’s hero come to life, the man of the marble statues. He was fifty-one years old that winter, but appeared much younger. Lee was a superb horseman, a tall, trim man, nearly six feet in height, who carried himself in a way that made him appear even taller. His eyes were dark brown, animated, and caught the attention of all who were introduced to him. Lee possessed thick, wavy black hair, a neatly trimmed moustache (his fabled gray beard would not appear until 1862). Those who knew him said he was a man of elegance and poise, the perfect soldier. “His limbs, beautiful and symmetrical, looked as though they had come from the turning lathe, his step was elastic as if he spurned the ground upon which he trod,” wrote a classmate at West Point.

Walter Taylor, later a military confidant of Lee’s, wrote that the colonel was “admirably proportioned, of graceful and dignified carriage, with strikingly handsome features, bright and penetrating eyes, his iron-gray hair closely cut, his face cleanly shaved except for a moustache, he appeared every inch a soldier and a man born to command.”

One man who met him said that when Lee entered a crowded room he immediately looked like the most important man in it; women flirted with Lee all of his life. It was not just the middle-aged men or ladies who were impressed by his handsome demeanor, though. Even young men were struck by his elegance. “He is the handsomest man in the army,” gushed one young lieutenant about Lee when the colonel was forty-eight.

Another individual who met him, Paul Hayne, wrote that he could see Lee approaching because he was much taller than any of the men around him. Lee was, Hayne wrote, “the most striking figure we had ever encountered, as erect as a poplar, yet lithe and graceful, with broad shoulders well thrown back, a fine, justly proportioned head
posed
in unconscious dignity, clear, deep, thoughtful eyes and the quiet, dauntless step of one every inch the gentleman and soldier. Had some…stone in Westminster Abbey been smitten by a magician’s wand and made to yield up its legendary knightly tenant restored to his manly vigor, with a chivalric soul beaming from every feature, some grand old crusader…we thought that thus would he have appeared.”
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Robert E. Lee was the descendant of not one, but three great American families. He was the youngest son of “Lighthorse Harry” Lee, who commanded Lee’s Legions under General Nathanael Greene in the Revolution and afterward served as governor of Virginia. Prior to the Revolution, the Lees had become wealthy planters and were influential in the government of the Virginia colony and scions of its social scene. His mother was Anne Hill Carter, the daughter of Charles Carter and the descendant of Robert “King” Carter, the largest land owner and slaveholder in the South. The Carters were the leaders of the vast and enormously prosperous tobacco industry in Virginia and had, over the years, sent several members of the family to the colony’s state legislature and, prior to the Revolution, maintained cordial relations with Virginia’s many Royal Governors.

Lee, who had two brothers, a half brother, and two sisters, had married into America’s greatest family, the Washingtons. Mary Custis was the daughter of George Washington Parke Custis, the stepgrandson of the nation’s first president. He and his sister were brought up by George and Martha Washington after their father Jackie Custis died in the Revolution. When President Washington and his wife died, Custis was left a considerable amount of land, buildings, and money. He became a moderately successful planter and amateur landscape painter, although his fortunes had declined as he aged.

Lee had previously visited some of the other Custis farms in his February 1858 inspection tour and was exasperated at the condition of what had once been one of the most impressive collection of plantations in the United States. Disheartened at what he saw on his inspections, Lee wrote his cousin, Anna Fitzhugh, “Dear Cousin Anna, what am I to do? Everything is in ruins and will have to be rebuilt.”
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What was he to do?

On October 21, 1857, Colonel Lee had received a telegram at his barracks in Camp Cooper, in San Antonio, Texas, informing him that Custis, his father-in-law, who was seventy-seven, had died ten days before. Lee’s wife Mary and several of his children were at Custis’s side when he slipped away.

Colonel Lee requested a furlough and came home as soon as he heard the news of Custis’s death. He arrived at Arlington House in deep mourning. Lee wrote in his diary, “Found all sad, suffering, and sick…who had always met me with fraternal kindness and affection vacant.”
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He had learned that the old man, who always admired Lee, had designated him as the executor of his estate; he had also been informed that Custis had left an extraordinarily complicated will that would eventually require Lee to spend substantial time back home in Virginia to sort out.

The colonel, who had fought gallantly in the Mexican War in 1846 and later served as an able superintendent at the United States Military Academy at West Point under then Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, was overwhelmed by the paperwork of the will. The will required him to apportion lands and money to every single member of the family and pay off the large debt left by Custis, who died owing more than $10,000, a considerable sum at that time.

He was also overwhelmed by the chance, suddenly presented to him in the winter of 1858, to leave the U.S. Army forever and live the comfortable life of a rich Virginia planter, something he had always dreamed about. The old man’s will was complex, but local attorneys and judges he talked to carefully pointed out to him that although he was technically bequeathed only a small lot in Washington, DC, there were simple steps that he could take that would make him the manager of all the Custis properties, assets, and the family’s 150 slaves. Properly run by a skilled administrator like himself, these properties and businesses could make him a wealthy man and permit him to live comfortably among the gentry of his beloved Virginia. Robert E. Lee, tired of the army, could forsake the grimy military outposts and desolate plains where he had spent much of his adult life and enjoy mornings riding through the rolling countryside of Virginia and evenings sitting on the porch of Arlington House, the magnificent Custis home that overlooks the Potomac on one side and Washington, DC, on the other side, a drink in his hand and his loving family at his side.