The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (review)

The controversy over the Slave Power Conspiracy divided antebellum Americans and has continued to divide historians who write about the ultimate cause of the Civil War. In this volume, a scholar of rhetoric adds his input to the ongoing controversy. The result is a study that will interest those who study the prewar years, but may receive greater attention from those in the field of rhetorical studies.

It is Michael Pfau's contention that the claim of a Slave Power Conspiracy passed out of the hands of those on the fringe of sectional division to those in the mainstream during the 1840s and 1850s, in large part due to the efforts of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. The proponents of conspiracy argued that southern slaveholders and politicians conspired with northern Democrats and Whigs to control national politics and permit the expansion of slavery and the increase of their political and economic power in the process. In so doing, the conspirators threatened the basic principles of the Republic established by the Revolutionary founding fathers. Among the earliest proponents of such a claim were the Garrisonians, who argued from a fringe position in society and who were often dismissed as irrational fanatics. Richard Hofstadter and David Brion Davis described their approach as the "paranoid style," which used arguments that, if not false, were at least questionable.

While some conspiracy theories remained the view only of extremists, others, argue Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America and, as such, entered the two-party system. Such was the direction of the Slave Power Conspiracy. Looking at the opposite poles of fringe and center, Pfau contends that the process of winning minds to the theory was a rhetorical one. Critics suggest that William Lloyd Garrison used lurid and exaggerated imagery to describe a vast and sinister effort that began with a proslavery Constitution. His was a holy war, says Pfau, which not only disdained politics but degenerated into Garrison's withdrawal and the violence of John Brown.

While this was taking place, political antislavery activists moved the debate first into third-party politics and then into the two-party system. Some might question Pfau's choice of the three leading Republicans, especially when he suggests that the three were leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860; Sumner did not seek the office, nor did he receive serious consideration.

Yet the speeches Pfau chooses to analyze are central in the Slave Power Conspiracy evolution. Beginning with Chase, Pfau shows how the Ohioan began to move away from the periphery of Liberty party politics with his 1845 "Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention in Cincinnati," distancing the party from its more reform-minded religious element in an effort to form a coalition with northern antislavery Democrats. It was a secular approach stressing civic and republican ideology, in which Chase showed how southern aristocrats had strayed from their Jeffersonian roots. By 1854, when Chase joined with five other Free Soilers in authoring the "Appeal of the Independent Democrats," the issue had become the Kansas Nebraska Act, the crowning proof of Slave Power Conspiracy. To Chase and others, the Act authored by Stephen A. Douglas repealed a solemn North–South compact, the Missouri Compromise of 1820. The Act was the work of northern and southern Democrats to perpetuate and expand slavery, and it called for a new, more effective antislavery organization to restore the principles of the Revolution.

Pfau next turns to Charles Sumner and his "Crime Against Kansas" speech of May 1856, which he argues has been overshadowed in the writings of most historians by the beating administered by Preston Brooks. In this speech, the Massachusetts Republican portrayed Douglas, President Franklin Pierce, and their southern allies as playing the role of Cicero's conspiratorial enemy Catiline or of George III in the conspiracy against freedom in Kansas...