Lincoln's Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856
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Lincoln's Pathfinder: John C. Fremont and the Violent Election of 1856
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Overview
The 1856 campaign was also run against the backdrop of a country on the move, with settlers continuing to spread westward facing unimagined horrors, a terrible natural disaster that took hundreds of lives in the South, and one of the most famous Supreme Court cases in history, which set the stage for the Civil War. Frémont lost, but his strong showing in the North proved that a sectional party could win a national election, blazing the trail for Abraham Lincoln's victory four years later.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613738009 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Lincoln's Pathfinder
John C. Frémont and the Violent Election of 1856
By John Bicknell
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 John BicknellAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-800-9
CHAPTER 1
"A New Man"
The two would-be presidents stood face to face, but this was no debate. One was there simply to invite the other to dinner.
Ohio governor Salmon P. Chase had come to a modest redbrick home on F Street near the Capitol Building in Washington to ask New York senator William H. Seward to join him the next night — Saturday, December 29, 1855 — at the home of longtime DC power broker Francis Preston Blair, "to meet some friends at his country seat," just outside the city limits.
It was the kind of get-together Seward preferred to avoid. He liked to leave the backroom dealing to his Albany amanuensis, Thurlow Weed, who relished the task. Seward, with a broad sense of humor and impeccable people skills, preferred the one on one, which he supposed was probably why Blair sent his opposite number — the humorless, all-business Chase — with a note rather than a delegation. But Seward knew better than to decline outright. Who else, he asked Chase, was going to attend? Chase had to confess that he didn't know, beyond the two of them, Blair, and Gamaliel Bailey, editor of the abolitionist journal the National Era, with whom Chase was staying while in town.
That was a giveaway. Bailey's attendance meant this would be a meeting about organizing the new Republican Party, in which Seward and Chase were the leading figures among elected officials. It was the editor's latest project, one that he and the staff of the Washington newspaper — the largest abolitionist journal published in a slaveholding territory — had thrown themselves into with gusto, in the hope of keeping the party free of nativist influence. That Blair was hosting meant there would be considerable talk not just about organizational matters, such as the proposed national preconvention planned for some time in February or March, but also about potential presidential candidates. If Blair was inviting both Chase and Seward, other potential candidates were probably on the docket as well. Seward knew that might include others like Chase who favored making common cause with the nativist elements of the coalition. Seward told Chase he would let him know, and Chase departed.
Not long afterward, another knock came at Seward's door. This time it was Bailey, bearing a guest list. The editor said that in addition to those Seward already knew about, other attendees would include a fellow New Yorker and friend, Representative Preston King, as well as fellow senator Charles Sumner and the leading anti-Nebraska candidate for Speaker of the House, Nathaniel P. Banks, a Massachusetts man like Sumner but of considerably more pliable convictions than his immutable colleague.
That sealed it for Seward. No one was sounder than Sumner on antislavery and immigration. But Chase, after some initial hesitation, favored uniting with the so-called North Americans, the northern wing of the nativist Know Nothing movement that opposed more Catholic immigration and full citizenship rights for many Catholics already in the country. Banks, on the other hand, had originally been elected as a Know Nothing in the anti-Nebraska sweep of 1854 and had demonstrated his ideological flexibility by moving back and forth as electoral circumstances dictated. He seemed to be a solid anti-Nebraska man and true opponent of the extension of slavery, but Seward did not care to be seen in the company of such men. He had made rare inroads for a Whig among the Irish Catholic leaders and voters concentrated in New York City and along the route of the Erie Canal (which they had helped build), by advocating bilingual education for newcomers (many of whom spoke Gaelic) and backing proposals to let Irish children be educated by teachers who shared their faith. He did not dare risk those relationships.
After Bailey left, Seward composed his reply to Blair, "approving of his activity" but declining the invitation. He always tried to avoid "plans or schemes for political action," Seward explained disingenuously — a ridiculous excuse for a lifetime New York pol to offer, and one that didn't mesh with Seward's blunt confession to Weed that he didn't go to Blair's meeting because he didn't want to be seen associating with anybody who had ties to the Know Nothings. Seward was the public man, and he had to maintain appearances. Weed, the backroom conniver, told Seward after the fact that he should have gone.
At the least, he likely missed a good meal.
Blair's home, Silver Spring, sat just north of the line that separated Maryland from the District of Columbia. He had named his 250-acre estate and its twenty-room, three-story home, built in 1842, after the mica-flaked pool of water he and daughter Elizabeth found during a ride in the area two years earlier. Streams and orchards dotted the land, and the political visitors on December 29 passed through an ornate entry gate, traversed a stand of pine and poplar, and continued onto a carriage road lined with chestnut trees before crossing a quaint bridge to a circular driveway that deposited them in front of the grand home.
Chase was the last to arrive, but he got there in time to enjoy the delightful spread prepared by the family's slaves under the direction of Blair's wife, Eliza, a renowned hostess. After their meal, the men gathered in Blair's study to decide the fate of the Union.
Francis Preston Blair was accustomed to power. He had come to Washington from Kentucky in 1830 at the request of President Andrew Jackson to run the administration's newspaper, the Washington Globe. He quickly became a favorite of the Democratic president, both professionally and personally. Serving as editor of the house organ, Blair wielded the kind of power that modern newspaper editors only dream of. As an informal adviser to the president, he sat in councils of state at which policy was determined, then went back to the Globe office to assign reporters to cover the news he had just helped make.
But he was more than a member of Jackson's "kitchen cabinet." The Blairs adopted the recently widowed Jackson into their family. They bought a mansion — Blair House — across the street from the White House. Eliza Blair knitted socks for the president. Daughter Elizabeth lived in the White House for part of her youth and served as part-time secretary. On his deathbed in 1845, the childless Jackson gave his wife Rachel's wedding ring to Elizabeth. Jackson was also instrumental in obtaining a West Point appointment for the eldest Blair son, Montgomery.
Blair's place at the pinnacle of national power was secure as long as Jackson was president, and he stood in good stead under the general's Democratic successor, Martin Van Buren. When the Whigs captured the presidency in 1840, Blair became editorial leader of the opposition.
But the election of Van Buren's intraparty rival James K. Polk in 1844 proved a turning point in the fortunes of both Blair and the party's northern wing. Blair held onto the editorship of the Globe until 1849, but President Polk had a different vision of the party than Blair, and the pro–Van Buren Globe was displaced as the administration organ. Blair lost his government printing contracts and was shut out of policy discussions. He would spend much of the next decade trying to reclaim the mantle.
Those efforts would prove unsuccessful, as radically proslavery southerners grew stronger and stronger within the party. When northern Democrats were decimated in the election of 1854 following passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Blair joined those disaffected Democratic losers, Whigs in search of a new party, and Free Soilers in attempting to organize a new coalition.
At first, Blair had hoped to form a splinter Democratic Party — much like Weed and Seward had hoped to hold the Whigs together shorn of their southern branch — but soon came to realize that was not going to be a viable option. In a widely circulated letter published December 1, 1855, Blair called on all northern Democrats to leave their party, as he had done, and join with Republicans to repudiate the abandonment of the Missouri Compromise. "The extension of Slavery over the new Territories would prove fatal to their prosperity," he wrote, "but the greatest calamity to be apprehended from it, is the destruction of the Confederacy, on which the welfare of the whole country reposes." To avoid such a calamity, unity was necessary, and achievable if those of like mind "can be induced to relinquish petty differences on transitory topics, and give their united voice, in the next Presidential election, for some man, whose capacity, fidelity, and courage, can be relied upon." Blair had just such a man in mind already.
The defection of such a distinguished Jacksonian as Blair — though it had been coming for a long time — caused a considerable sensation even among the cynics in Washington. The new Republican Association of Washington tried to recruit Blair to join its ranks, which the Democratic Washington Star described as "made up ... for the most part, of newly imported Abolitionists from Yankeedom."
That was only partly true. But Blair steered clear of the group, which included several members of the staff of the abolitionist National Era, including Gamaliel Bailey, while "in the main" concurring in the association's aims.
Instead, Blair preferred, as always, to work behind the scenes. By the time of his December 1 appeal, he had already been at it for some months. Now he had brought five of the leading members of any potential coalition — including a couple of potential presidential candidates — to his home to discuss what to do next.
A Wholly Different Place
The country these men hoped to lead was vastly different from the one in which they were born. At the turn of the nineteenth century, America had been an overwhelmingly rural nation. To the extent that it was tied together at all, it was by a barely serviceable system of post roads that linked the few major cities of the North and that had only begun to stretch into the even more agrarian South. A population of just over five million was squeezed in behind the Appalachians, except for a few thousand daring souls who had ventured over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee. Only those two and Vermont had been added to the original thirteen states by 1800.
Of the five million inhabitants, just under a million were enslaved blacks. But the political system cobbled together at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had largely avoided the question of slavery, except to endorse its continued existence and to account for the population by assigning the value of three-fifths of a person to each slave for the purpose of calculating representation in Congress. Aside from these enslaved descendants of Africans, and the uncounted Native Americans who still populated large swaths of the South, America was mostly a white Protestant country, English and Ulster Irish in makeup (with a smattering of German Protestants), dedicated to the idea of religious tolerance without having to deal with much religious pluralism in actual practice.
By the middle of the century, the Founders' America was a wholly different place. Middle-aged voters had grown up in a country where 90 percent of the people lived on farms or in small towns. By 1856, more than one in four lived in cities. The population had soared to more than 23 million in 1850, and was probably about 28 million by 1856. The number of slaves had grown to 3.2 million. The number of states had almost doubled, to thirty-one, with the admission of California in 1850, as the United States spread across the continent in pursuit of Thomas Jefferson's dream of an "Empire of Liberty." In doing so, the government had, for the most part, emptied the East of Native Americans, pushing them beyond the Mississippi River — often in cruel forced marches during which thousands died.
As the population increased, so did its ethnic and religious diversity. Waves of immigration from Catholic Europe — especially Ireland and Germany — had remade the demographics of America's eastern cities. Resentment among working-class Protestants had sometimes flared into violence against the aliens, who would work for less money and who practiced a religion the white Protestant natives detested.
The diverging elements of the national consensus — and, as it happened, the Whig coalition — could be encapsulated in one event in 1856: the founding of the State Industrial School for Girls in Lancaster, Massachusetts, about fifty miles west of Boston. On one hand, the country's first female reform school was a classic example of evangelical/Whiggish reform, an attempt to save girls and young women in dire straits from a sinful existence and, in the words of Boston Brahmin Charles Eliot Norton, a "sea of ignorance." On the other hand, it reflected a growing fear among polite society of the largely foreign-born urban poor. The people who ran the school were overwhelmingly Protestant. The inmates were overwhelmingly Catholic.
At the same time, Protestantism itself was undergoing a revolution, as the Second Great Awakening democratized American religion and broke the domination of the Calvinist orthodoxy that had reigned over the populace since the time of the Puritans. New sects sprang up, many teaching a kinder, gentler form of Christianity and invoking a social conscience that would have a dramatic effect on American society, most notably in the causes of temperance and abolitionism. And the first indigenous American religion — Mormonism — had established what amounted to a theocratic kingdom in the Utah territory that had been won in the war with Mexico. That kingdom, too, became an engine for immigration from Europe, gathering thousands of converts of the new religion to their Zion, and its doctrines — particularly plural marriage — posed novel challenges to the political system.
At least as dramatic as the religious awakening had been the revolutions in transportation and communication. In 1800, simply delivering a message from the new city of Washington to Baltimore, just forty miles to the north, had been an arduous, time-consuming task of a day or more. By 1856, much of the East was strung with telegraph lines that made instantaneous communication possible. Railroads moved people and goods from place to place at a rate ten or twenty times that of horse or oxen. These revolutions abetted and intertwined with others. The expansion of manufacturing that accompanied the Industrial Revolution was boosted by improvements in the technologies of transportation and communication, which in turn contributed to a market revolution that spread goods across the fast-growing country. More people had more access to more food, which made them healthier, which increased population growth, which sparked more westward immigration. And so on and so on in a prosperous circle that Americans by midcentury had come to think of as their God-given inheritance, their Manifest Destiny to spread that good fortune across the continent and the world.
"Someone Who Would Incarnate Our Principles"
The six white, Protestant men who gathered at Francis Blair's home did not reflect many of the changes that had swept across the nation in the previous five decades. But having lived through them, they recognized that even more change was afoot and were trying to confront it.
They agreed on the easy things — for instance, naming Pittsburgh as the location for a proposed national organizing convention that would begin work on a statement of principles and make plans for a nominating convention in late spring or early summer. (Ohioan Chase, however, preferred Cincinnati, but he lost the argument.) And before any national meeting anywhere could be called, all agreed that the question of who would be Speaker of the House had to be settled, preferably in favor of their member Nathaniel Banks. The haggling had already gone on for almost the entire month, and no resolution was yet in sight. They must stand fast behind Banks if they were to have any chance of becoming the dominant faction in a coalition that included nativist North Americans and disaffected Democrats.
Blair, who was just getting over a bad cold, made a raspy pitch for unity on the harder things that fell largely on deaf ears. Bailey had made plain — publicly and privately — his opposition to making common cause with the nativists, although the abolitionist editor didn't mind collaborating with Blair, who owned more than a dozen slaves. None of the others in attendance had gone as far as Bailey in their objections to joining up with the North Americans — Seward would have, but he wasn't there. Only Chase joined Blair in sounding the clarion call for fusion, which Chase had already been doing for months.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lincoln's Pathfinder by John Bicknell. Copyright © 2017 John Bicknell. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Introduction: The Pathfinder,
Prologue: "We Can't Conceive of a Greater Piece of Mischief",
1 "A New Man",
2 "A Fugitive from Freedom",
3 The First Northern Victory,
4 "Not a Mere Aggregation of Whigs, Know-Nothings, and Dissatisfied Democrats",
5 Bleeding Nebraska,
6 A Month of Violence,
7 "The Union Is in Danger",
8 "Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Men, and Frémont",
9 "The Severest Deadliest Blow upon Slavery",
10 "The Hardships That We Should Have to Endure",
11 "A Roseate and Propitious Morn Now Breaking",
Epilogue: "Does Any Man Dream That It Would Settle,
the Controversy?",
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,