Race and Liberty in America: The Essential Reader

2. The Republican Era (1854–1876)

45 The Republican Era 1854–1876 2 W IT H T HE ELECTOR A L SUCCESS of the newly formed Republican Party (established in 1854), many classical liberals joined the party because of its opposition to slavery. Republicans, including Abraham Lincoln, declared slavery to be a moral wrong yet confined the political issue to whether slaves ought to exist in the territories of the United States. This expediency, or fear of getting ahead of public opinion, disillusioned classical liberals, who hoped for a firmer stance against slavery. When southern states seceded from the Union (1860–1861), President Lincoln backed his party’s passage of a constitutional amendment that would have inserted the right to own slaves within the federal Constitution. At the outset, Lincoln seemed willing to do anything to appease southerners and bring them back into the Union. In a published letter to newspaper editor Horace Greeley (August 19, 1862), Lincoln stated, “My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or to destroy slavery . If I could save the union without freeing any slave, I would do it—if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it—and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”1 Lysander Spooner and Frederick Douglass criticized Lincoln for not making emancipation the centerpiece of his administration. Readers will find a trio of documents below contrasting the views of Lincoln, Spooner, and Douglass on slavery and the Civil War. After the war, with North and South still divided over race, Republicans faced off against southern Democrats for generations to come. Despite its temporizing , the Republican Party was arguably the party of civil rights, as seen in many of the documents below. The Democratic Party was simply “wrong on race,” as 46 | Race and Liberty in America Bruce Bartlett argues in a book by that title.2 Notwithstanding the Republican Party’s failings, many civil rights activists agreed with Frederick Douglass that “for colored men the Republican party is the deck—all outside is the sea.”3 Slavery, a Relic of Barbarism Members of the newly formed Republican Party were deeply split over tactics : some favored colonization (sending blacks to Africa or Latin America), others immediate emancipation, and still more restriction of slavery in the western territories. The territorial issue was critical because the North and South had compromised to maintain the Union: beginning with the “Missouri Compromise ” (1820), Congress created an even balance of slave and free territories. This balance unraveled in the 1850s. Senator Stephen A. Douglass (D-IL) advanced the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” to remove the issue from congressional debate . Embodying this new doctrine, the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) stated that residents of the newly created territories would decide whether to accept slavery . In the Kansas Territory, a proslavery faction fought for a majority against antislavery settlers. Partisans from free and slave states rushed into the territory to join the guerilla warfare (1855–1858). The pitched battles were so violent that the territory became known as “bleeding Kansas.” The two sides drafted competing constitutions, but the issue was not resolved until 1861, when Congress accepted a favorable vote for admission as a free state. However, by then, southern states were seceding from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. The infamous Dred Scott decision (1857), rendered by a southern-dominated U.S. Supreme Court, had ended the possibility of compromise. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Congress had no power to limit slavery in the territories or elsewhere. Taney claimed that those who wrote the Constitution never intended African Americans to have any rights because blacks were “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”4 This extreme view ignored the existence of free blacks, the unanimous passage of the Northwest Ordinance (1787) barring The Republican Era | 47 slavery north of the parallel 36°30', and other relevant historical facts. Moreover, Dred Scott declared the Republican Party to be at odds with the Constitution. “Bleeding Kansas” and Dred Scott explain the outrage evident in the Republican Party platforms. 2 Republican Party Platforms (1856, 1860) Republican Party 1856 That, with our Republican fathers, we hold it to be a...