American Founding Son: John Bingham and the Invention of the Fourteenth Amendment

4. Republican Congressman

t 39 4 republican congressman We are happy to announce the nomination of Mr. Bingham, of Cadiz, as the Anti-Nebraska candidate for Congress from the 21st district, composed of Carroll, Columbiana, Harrison and Jefferson. We have great confidence in his election. Two years ago, the Whig and Free Soil vote was 8,105, while the [Democratic] vote was 7,423. We have no doubt this vote will be united, and that Bingham will have a handsome majority. He is an able lawyer, an eloquent debater, and a true friend of the North. Daily Cleveland Herald, 1854 The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened the door for John Bingham’s rise to power. In January 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois proposed a bill to allow slavery in those territories if the inhabitants there so desired and thereby repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which excluded human property from any territory north of 36.5 degrees latitude (36°30´).1 This provocative expansion of slavery convinced many moderates in the North that compromise with the South was now impossible.2 Bingham seized on this shift in public sentiment and severed his ties with the Whigs to run as a Republican. Soon after his arrival on Capitol Hill in 1855, he became one of the party’s leading lights and spent the next four years articulating an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution that became the nucleus of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. The 1854 Congressional Election Feelings ran high in Cadiz following the introduction of the KansasNebraska bill. On March 14, Bingham spoke out at a town meeting 40 s republican congressman that endorsed a series of resolutions opposing the legislation and stating that from now on the community would “oppose any compromise on the subject of slavery, and we now affirm uncompromising hostility to slavery and slavery apologists.”3 After the act was signed into law, another meeting was held at the courthouse in support of resistance to the settlement of Kansas by slaveholders “in whatever manner it be possible for us to as men and Christians.”4 Bingham addressed this gathering as well, and a Democratic paper in Cadiz reported that he had now gone “completely over to the abolitionists.”5 In July 1854, more than a thousand Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soil delegates united by their anger at the Kansas-Nebraska Act met in Columbus at what was the first Ohio Republican Party Convention, though they called themselves the “Anti-Nebraska” party.6 Bingham won a seat on the convention’s Central Committee and immediately began campaigning for the Anti-Nebraska congressional nomination from the district containing Cadiz. When the local party convened in September, he was chosen on the eighth ballot (defeating, among others, his brother-in-law Josiah Scott).7 Democrats charged that Bingham was a Johnny-come-lately who had supported slaveholding candidates and had campaigned against Free Soil advocates in previous elections.8 This attack was true, but he also had a consistent record of opposing the expansion of slavery. When the Kansas -Nebraska Act crossed that line, Bingham’s position became a rallying point for a majority of Ohio voters. In a letter to the Cadiz Republican, Bingham kicked off his campaign by arguing that the existence of slavery within the southern states was “not by virtue of the United States Constitution, but independent of it,” and that he was “opposed to any further extension of slavery.”9 This was not a departure from his view that Congress lacked the power to abolish slavery in a state, though his new formulation dodged the question of whether the Constitution actually endorsed slavery. With respect to the Fugitive Slave Act, Bingham reversed his position, now declaring that the statute was “violative alike of the Constitution and of that justice which it was intended to secure.”10 Moreover, he now held that the Constitution did not give Congress the “power to pass any law authorizing slavery in any Territory of the United States,” which meant that neither the Missouri Compromise nor the Compromise of 1850 was constitutional.11 While Bingham clearly believed that slavery should not republican congressman t 41 be extended, politically he had to do more than seek a repeal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act because his Democratic opponent, Andrew Stuart , had voted against the act.12 Besides, Bingham needed to reassure more radical anti-slavery voters who were...