Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859

9. War to the Knife: Images of the Coming Fight

305 9 War to the Knife IMAGES OF THE COMING FIGHT The antislavery consensus that the Dred Scott decision was a link in a chain of portentous events—by which the Slave Power escalated its claims that the Constitution protected slavery in perpetuity—soon found a≈rmation in Kansas . Railing against the proslavery Lecompton constitution that had been forced on Kansans, Congressman John Bingham, a prominent Ohio Republican , declared in a January 25, 1858, speech that the Lecompton government and the Dred Scott ruling embodied the same ‘‘precise principle’’ and the same ‘‘stupendous lie’’: that ‘‘one class of men have no rights which another are bound to respect.’’ The Kansas and Supreme Court ruses alike, Bingham insisted, were the workings of a ‘‘base conspiracy’’ to perpetuate ‘‘the wild and guilty fantasy of property in man.’’∞ When Bingham delivered his speech to Congress in January 1858, the Lecompton controversy had been steadily escalating for a year. Back in January 1857 the proslavery legislature of Kansas, in defiance of territorial governor John W. Geary, had called for a constitutional convention to be held that September in Lecompton. Free staters boycotted the election of delegates to the convention, to the frustration of Geary’s replacement, Robert J. Walker of Mississippi. President Buchanan, hoping that Walker could uphold popular sovereignty to pacify Kansas, had handpicked him after Geary resigned in a 306 Δ 1851–1859 hu√. Walker, who had justified Texas annexation with his ‘‘di√usion’’ argument (that westward expansion would di√use the slave population to the Southwest and eventually into Latin America) in the mid-1840s, revived that rationale now, only to meet with ‘‘instant outrage’’ from Southern Democrats . As William Freehling succinctly puts it: ‘‘1857 was not 1844. Now, Southerners prospered. Now, they needed more slaves, not a safety valve for excess slaves.’’≤ Popular sovereignty was conspicuously absent during the convention itself , as the free-state boycott had left proslavery delegates in charge. With Walker hoping to salvage credibility (and the chance that Kansas might enter the Union as a Democratic state) by having the new constitution submitted for popular ratification, and with the convention in the hands of ‘‘antisubmission ’’ forces, the stage was set for another showdown. On October 5, 1857, during the constitutional convention’s recess, Kansans voted to create a territorial legislature. Despite the fact that free staters had heeded Walker this time and turned out to cast ballots, voting fraud resulted in an ostensible proslavery victory. Walker invalidated the false returns and declared a victory for the free staters, and they, in turn, demanded that the illegitimate constitutional convention be aborted. But the convention resumed its deliberations, declared the rights of slaveowners to be ‘‘inviolable,’’ and fashioned a cynical response to Buchanan and Walker’s calls for a ratification vote: a referendum would be held on December 21, 1857, in which voters could support ‘‘the Constitution with slavery’’ or the ‘‘Constitution with no Slavery.’’ There was no true free-state option, Nicole Etcheson explains. A vote for ‘‘no slavery’’ only prohibited ‘‘future importations of slaves, not the holding of slaves already in Kansas, and no future amendment could a√ect the right to existing property in slaves.’’≥ To the horror of Walker, Buchanan accepted this ‘‘partial submission,’’ and, invoking the Dred Scott precedent on the inviolable property rights of slaveowners, made public his support for the Lecompton constitution in his December 8, 1857, annual message. The president had been forewarned by Stephen Douglas, who had met with him on December 3, that many Northern Democrats, following Douglas’s lead, would view the Lecompton constitution as a travesty of popular sovereignty. But Buchanan banked on the Democratic majority in both houses of Congress—both the president pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House were slaveholding Images of the Coming Fight Δ 307 Southerners—and persisted in his fantasy that free staters might be induced to lend sanction to partial submission by weighing in at the polls in December . Free staters truculently avoided this trap: they once again refused to participate in what they justly regarded as a rigged election, and the December 21 ‘‘referendum’’ resulted in a resounding proslavery victory. The new free-state territorial legislature countered with its own January 4, 1858, referendum— this one duly boycotted by proslavery men—that overwhelmingly rejected the Lecompton constitution. It would now fall to Congress to decide which referendum—the Lecompton vote...