Schism

Preview - R.F.H. Chapter 1 Ending Slavery part 1

Though these stretches of political truth, and the other backroom deals that enabled the amendment’s passage, are uncharacteristic of Abraham Lincoln, they were necessary.  They were necessary because Lincoln, and those who stood with him, were engaged in a war that was older than the one between north and south.  They were fighting a war that was older than written history.  Lincoln stood against a power that he had believed unconquerable earlier in his career, even though he despised it.  It was a force that had controlled entire economies and civilizations, one that had kept the majority of citizens in many countries as property.  But, if he succeeded, made it illegal, then the power of slavery would be dealt a loss that it would never recover from.  While some other countries still held on to the ancient practice of owning and controlling other human beings, from the moment of his signature on the Thirteenth Amendment, Abraham Lincoln won the decisive battle in a war that had lasted for thousands of years across the globe and for nearly a century in the United States.

SLAVE POWER

Since the birth of the United States, its Congress had been one of the primary battlefields in the fight between slavery and freedom, but never so obviously as on May 22, 1856.

That afternoon, shortly after the Senate had adjourned for the day, three young men, Preston Brooks, Laurence Keitt and Henry Edmundson strode into the Senate chamber, canes in hand.  The first two were members of the House of Representatives from South Carolina and Edmundson was a Representative from Virginia.

As Keitt, the youngest of the three at 31, hung back with Edmundson, Brooks advanced on Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts, who was busy writing at his wooden desk.  Two days earlier, Sumner had finished an inflammatory speech about the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law which had created a situation where pro and anti-slavery forces were fighting to determine the future of the Kansas Territory when it became a state.  In the Senate Chamber, Sumner had condemned the violence that was spreading and said, “It is the rape of a virgin territory, compelling it to the hateful embrace of slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved desire for a new slave state, hideous offspring of such a crime, in the hope of adding to the power of slavery in the National Government.”  Sumner’s speech had taken two days to deliver and had included personal attacks on South Carolina Senator Andrew Butler.

Preston crossed the semi-circular room, stopped in front of Sumner’s desk and took only a moment to accuse the Senator of libel before he raised his hand.  In it, he held a thick black cane, topped with gold. 

Perhaps Brooks had been emboldened by news of the attack on Laurence, Kansas the day before, when pro-slavery forces had looted and destroyed much of the Free-State town, or perhaps Brooks needed no push to make him feel entitled to do what he did next.  He might have felt that it was not only his obligation, but his right.

He swung the cane down onto Sumner’s head.  The Senator raised his arms to block the subsequent blows, but they came too fast and too hard.  Sumner fell to the floor, partially under his desk and was followed by Brooks, who kept hammering down with the cane.

As other Senators rushed in to stop the attack, Representative Keitt raised his own cane and warned them to stay back.  Brooks pressed on, striking over and over, so hard that his cane broke on Sumner’s head, leaving several two inch gashes in the scalp that went down to the bone.

Brooks was finally pulled away, saying that he had only meant to whip Sumner.  The Senator, though able to testify against Brooks less than two weeks later, suffered from the trauma for years. 

Edmundson, though he had attempted to attack another Representative in 1854, was not censured after the assault on Sumner.  There was a motion in Congress to expel Brooks and Keitt, but it failed to gain the necessary votes.  Instead, both men resigned from the House, only to be immediately re-elected.  Brooks paid a three hundred dollar fine for the assault and hundreds of southerners sent him new canes to replace the one he had broken.

This was the height of Slave Power in America.  The idea that a member of Congress could physically assault another and walk away with no real repercussions seems utterly alien to us now, but that is the level of power that the institution of slavery held at that time.  That is the power that President Lincoln was up against.

Though Lincoln never used the terms Slave Power Conspiracy or Slaveocracy, he argued against what these terms stood for: the disproportionate power that slave states had in the federal government.  Of the first twelve Presidents, ten were slave owners either before or during their presidency.  The two exceptions were John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams.  Prior to Lincoln’s election in 1860, the presidency had been free of ties to slavery for only ten years.  But even with this bond between slavery and the executive branch of government, the work done by slave owners in the legislative branch was much more significant in entrenching and expanding the rights of slave holders.

In 1787, Congress included the Three-Fifths Compromise as part of the Constitution.  It granted slave states more power in the House of Representatives by counting three out of every five slaves in the population figures used to calculate the number of representatives their states received, even though not one of those slaves was able to vote.

Also in that year, the Northwest Ordinance was passed.  Though it established the territory around the Great Lakes as free, it also set national precedent that escaped slaves there had to be returned to their masters.  This precedent was strengthened with the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, which stated that all runaway slaves in the entire country must be returned to their masters.

While the Missouri Compromise of 1820 drew a line that limited slave states to the south, the real power play at the time was the unwritten compromise in Congress that for every free state admitted to the union, a slave state must also be added.  But this limiting factor of the north/south division was erased with the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which eventually fueled Sumner’s provoking speech.  This law, co-written by Stephen Douglas, who Lincoln would repeatedly debate in Illinois, allowed new states to decide whether they would be free or slave no matter where they were located.

Some argue that the Slave Power Conspiracy was a myth, but political and personal attacks like these need not involve clandestine meetings in smoke-filled rooms.  A simple enough explanation is that those who enjoyed the economic benefits of slavery were anxious to keep the power and money that were in their hands.  No organized conspiracies were necessary for them to use whatever leverage they could to hold on to what they valued.

But the reasons that the slave states fought so hard to keep this power that they would secede from the United States are not just about the power and money that slavery brought.  Part of this struggle for power was the fact that slavery had met so little organized resistance over its history.  And that history stretches back farther than any of us can know.

(Author's note:  Up next...The beginnings of slavery and the earliest opposition to it.  And keep heart...this is the dark part of the history of slavery...soon we'll dive into the other heroes who fought against it and are winning this battle forever.)