Coming Fury, Volume 1 (4 page)

Conditions in the fall of 1859 were not of the best and they rapidly got a good deal worse. The first ballot showed the Democrats lining up behind Thomas S. Bocock of Virginia, with the Republicans backing John Sherman, of Ohio. Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, received forty-three votes and then withdrew, more than a score of ballots were listed as “scattering,” and no one was elected. But before a second ballot could be cast, Representative J. B. Clark, of Missouri, came down into the well of the House with a resolution for members to consider … “resolved, that the doctrine and sentiments of a certain book, called ‘The Impending Crisis of the South—How to Meet It,’ purporting to have been written by one Hinton Helper, are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of the country, and that no member of this House who has endorsed or recommended it or the Compend from it is fit to be Speaker of this House.”
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That did it. The book was everything Mr. Clark said it was: in fact, it was a poor book written by a man notably lacking in balance. But from the time the Missouri Congressman dropped his resolution into the hopper, the House of Representatives became completely impotent. It could not elect a speaker, it could not get itself organized, it could not even vote the pay which its members needed so badly, until it had worn itself out in hot discussion of a book which, taken by itself, was hardly even of minor importance. The row to which it gave birth settled nothing whatever. It simply registered (in terms that would be ratified in blood, a short time thereafter) the appalling height the American political fever had reached. The irrational had become wholly logical.

Hinton Rowan Helper was one more of those baffling people whose sole function, historically, seems to be to make other men angry. He was a rarity, not to say a freak: a born-and-bred Southerner who had become a violent lone-wolf abolitionist, and who either advocated or at least appeared to be advocating a Southern uprising against the planter aristocracy. He believed that many things were wrong with the South, he had assembled a great many figures (some of them badly jumbled) to prove his point, and he argued that all of these defects were the result of the slave system. Of the slaveholders themselves, he suggested—“as a befitting confession of their crimes and misdemeanors, and as a reasonable expiation for the countless evils which they have inflicted on society”—that they do penance for a season in sackcloth, after the Biblical manner, and then go and hang themselves. Curiously enough, it was no sympathy for the Negro that led Helper into this frame of mind: few Americans have ever put down in print a more passionate hymn to race hatred, and if Helper hated slavery, one reason obviously was that he began by hating the slave. Before disappearing from the scene, Helper was to indulge in much cloudy rhetoric in which the extermination of the black race would appear as a positive good, and in which Negroes would be likened to “hyenas, jackals, wolves, skunks, rats, snakes, scorpions, spiders,” and “other noxious creatures.”
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Clearly enough, Helper was an incendiary with lighted matches, the inflammatory nature of his work lying in the fact that, as a Southerner, he fought slavery because it was bad for white
Southerners rather than for the slaves themselves. But his
The Impending Crisis
, published in 1857, had not been widely read, and in the South—the only place where it could be expected to do any harm-it had hardly been read at all. Not until spring of 1859 did the book begin to emerge as a national irritant. Then, taking thought for the coming election, certain Republican leaders concluded that this book could be made the basis for a fine campaign document. Francis P. Blair, head man of the famous Blair family, an old-line Democrat who had drifted into the new party’s ranks, would prepare a pamphlet—a digest, or “compend,” of the original—and money would be raised so that 100,000 copies of the pamphlet might be placed where they would do the most good.

Concerning which the best that can be said is that it looked like a good idea at the time. Helper had spoken what sounded like good Republican doctrine. He had complained, as a Southerner, that “we have no foreign trade, no princely merchants, nor respectable artists,” and that “we contribute nothing to the literature, polite arts and inventions of the age”—the cause of all of which, of course, was slavery. He had found the Southerner dependent on the Northern manufacturer from birth to death; as a child, the Southerner was “swaddled in Northern muslin,” and at the far end of life, he was “borne to the grave in a Northern carriage, entombed with a Northern spade and memorized with a Northern slab.” All of this, he asserted, had brought Southerners “under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations,” and there was only one remedy for it: “The first and most sacred duty of every Southerner who has the honor and the interest of his country at heart is to declare himself an unqualified and uncompromising abolitionist.”
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This was saying bluntly what most Republicans believed, and since it was written by a man who came from North Carolina, every good Republican was bound to feel that it was a gift from the gods—as perhaps it would have been if American politics could still be played by the old rules, under which it was always advisable to shoot irritating darts into the opposition’s hide. Sales of
The Impending Crisis
went up as the Republicans talked about their plan, Mr. Helper found it advisable to move out of the South and take up residence quietly in New York, and spokesmen for the
cotton South discovered that there was on earth one book more detestable than
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
.

When Clark, the Congressman, urged the House to resolve that anyone who had endorsed the Helper book was unfit to be speaker, he was not taking a wild shot in the dark. Sixty-eight Republican members of the House had so endorsed it, and they included just about every Republican who could conceivably be a candidate for the speakership; included, as a matter of fact, John Sherman himself, who found himself called on to explain the inexplicable.

Sherman did his best. Gaining the floor, he recited the deal with Mr. Blair, and said that Blair had told him, after an exchange of letters with Helper, that “the obnoxious matter in the original publication” would be eliminated; it was because of this assurance, said Sherman, that eminent Republicans had given their endorsement to the scheme. As for his own part: “I do not recollect signing the paper referred to, but I presume, from my name appearing in the printed list, that I did sign it. I therefore make no excuse of any kind. I never read Mr. Helper’s book, or the compendium founded upon it. I have never seen a copy of either.… I never addressed to any Member such language as I have heard today. I never desire such language to be addressed to me if I can avoid it.”
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Since the House had not formally organized, and was presided over by a confused and ineffective clerk, there was no rule to keep members from discussing an extraneous resolution at a time when they were supposed to be balloting on the speakership. The kind of language which John Sherman deplored grew worse and worse. Congressman Clark had asked: “Do gentlemen expect that they can distribute incendiary books, give incendiary advice, advise rebellion, advise non-intercourse in all relations of life, spread such works broadcast over the country, and not be taken to task for it?”
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As one Southerner after another rose to speak on this point, Sherman learned that no man in politics ever gets very far by explaining that he lent his name without knowing precisely what the borrower intended to do with it.

Representative Shelton F. Leake, of Virginia, demanded whether he was asked to consent to the election of an official “who, while I am here in the discharge of my public duties, is stimulating my
Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my wife and helpless children.” Sherman, who confessed afterward that he had never dreamed the Helper book would kick up such an uproar, replied that he would repeat once more—having said it, on the floor of the House, five times before—that “I am opposed to any interference by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave in the slave states”; but another Virginian retorted hotly: “They do not mean to interfere with slavery in the states, and yet when a band of assassins violate the sacred soil of my native state, we hear not one word of denunciation from you.” He was followed by Lucius Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, who cried that when the spirit of the Constitution was no longer observed on the floor of the House, “I war upon your government: I am against it.” Republican William Kellogg, of Illinois, got the floor to assert that slavery was “a moral, social and political wrong” which he would resist to the end; the shorthand reporter noted that this was greeted by a mixture of applause and hisses, and there was a great deal of shouting and threatening which did not get taken down. At one point Kellogg was recorded as demanding: “Does the gentleman call me a spaniel coward?” and the clerk who was trying to preside over all of this, being called on to order the sergeant-at-arms to restore quiet, confessed that he did not know if that functionary were in the House or if he himself had the authority to give him orders in any case.
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It went on, for week after week, all business at a standstill; nothing mattered, apparently, except the single issue of slavery, and the men who spoke so hotly on this issue were not so much trying to persuade one another as to give vent to their own pent-up emotions. In the end—on January 30, 1860—John Sherman concluded that he had had enough. He withdrew his candidacy, and after a series of involved deals the House, on February 1, managed to elect a speaker—William Pennington, of New Jersey, a Republican, recently a Whig, chosen by a majority of one vote. At various places in the North, ardent Republicans celebrated, firing cannon and making jubilant speeches, as if some sort of victory had been won; and if the House had in fact discharged the unendurable emotional tension that possessed it, so that it could now get down
to business and give the nation orderly government, a celebration would have been in order.
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But nothing had been settled. One stalemate had been ended, but the greater stalemate remained: the un-digestible lump of slavery remained, and this one effort to cope with it had been a noisy and spectacular failure. Only the extremists had gained anything.

The political system clearly was being strained beyond its limit. The attempt to name a speaker had hinged, for week after week, on the question of one undistinguished book; and this question, in turn, had been discussed in the lurid, distorting light that came down from Harper’s Ferry. John Brown had underlined Helper’s confused message; his abortive uprising, quenched in blood and leading him to a scaffold, gave the whole business its cutting edge. The violence that smoldered just below the surface on the floor of the House had been terribly real at Harper’s Ferry, and it was not for a moment out of any man’s mind. Congressman McClernand, of Illinois, a devout Douglas Democrat, wrote to a friend that “our country for the first time is in serious danger of Civil Commotions,” adding that unless conservative patriotism somehow triumphed in the coming presidential election “the result must be disastrous.” The situation now was made to order for the extremists. Southerners who loved the Union and wanted it preserved were being driven into the camp of the fire-eaters. Their uneasy fears about the dire things that might happen if the slave system were tampered with seemed to have been confirmed, and they were drifting to the point where they would permit no one to touch the system in any way. The Democratic party was their party, and nothing mattered now but to retain a firm control over it. If the party was wrecked thereby, that could not be helped.

On the day after the speaker election, Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, arose in the Senate to present a series of resolutions on the slavery question. These began by reasserting the state-sovereignty doctrines of John C. Calhoun, declared that it was the Senate’s duty “to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property” in the territories, and then flatly stated that there was no power anywhere to limit slavery in the territories. Congress could not do it; its solemn duty was to protect slavery there. Residents of a territory could not do it; they could outlaw
slavery only when their territory was admitted to the Union as a state. Meanwhile, all acts of Northern individuals or states which interfered with the return of fugitive slaves were asserted to be “hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution and revolutionary in their effect.” A little later, Davis modified the resolutions slightly, but the meaning remained unchanged.
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In effect, he had presented a straight slave code as a principle for Senatorial adoption.

That the Senate would actually adopt any such code was highly improbable, as Davis knew. The real target was the approaching convention of the Democratic party. If the policy set forth in these resolutions could be made to stick as official party doctrine—and the Senate Democratic caucus, in March, endorsed it—Douglas would be in an impossible position, for he could never defend this code in the Northwest and he obviously would never try to do so. Davis was not one of the fire-eaters, and men like Yancey considered him unsound, and when in mid-May he was still arguing for his resolutions, Davis spoke optimistically about the prospects of the Federal Union: “I have great confidence in the strength of the Union. Every now and then I hear that it is about to tumble to pieces, that somebody is going to introduce a new plank into the platform and if he does the Union must tumble down.… I come to the conclusion that the Union is strong and safe-strong in its power, as well as in the affections of the people.” And yet, fighting to assure Southern control over the party, he had given Yancey and the other extremists a solid platform.
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Douglas was in the middle, and he quickly recognized the fact. Declaring that it was “the path of duty and wisdom to stand by the doctrine of non-intervention,” he asked bitterly why these resolutions should be offered in the Senate. “There is no necessity for legislation; no grievances to be remedied; no evil to be avoided; no action is necessary; and yet the peace of the country, the integrity of the Democratic party, is to be threatened by abstract resolutions, when there is confessedly no necessity for action.”
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