Team Of Rivals Part 13

The idealistic Frances accepted her husband's rationale for the eulogies but could not countenance his reluctance to resist the reactionary zeal that enveloped the country after the Compromise. When it appeared that the 1852 Whig Convention was on the verge of endorsing the Compromise in an attempt to create a moderate platform for its presidential candidate, General Winfield Scott, Frances begged her husband to come home. "I do not wish you to be held responsible for the doings of that Convention if they are to endorse the Compromise in any manner or degree," she wrote. "It will be a sad disappointment to men who are true to liberty."

Nor did she spare him whenever she detected a blatantly conciliatory tone in his speeches or writings. While she conceded that "worldly wisdom certainly does impel a person to 'swim with the tide'-and if they can judge unerringly which way the tide runs, may bring them to port," she continued to argue for "a more elevated course" that would "reconcile one to struggling against the current if necessary."

In Charles Sumner, Frances found a politician who consistently chose the elevated course she favored, even though he was often isolated as a result. Sumner, a bachelor, who, like Chase, was said to look like a statesman, with imperious, well-chiseled features, would often dine with the Sewards when Frances was in town. When she returned to Auburn, they kept up a rich correspondence. Sumner valued her unflagging confidence particularly during his early days in the Senate when his unyielding position on slavery provoked anger and ridicule. Though his attempt to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act in August 1852 garnered only 4 votes in the Senate, not including Seward's-who, like other antislavery men, refused to support it on the grounds that it would torpedo Scott's chances for the presidency-Frances stood loyally by her friend. "This fearless defense of Freedom must silence those cavilers who doubted your sincerity," she wrote. "It is a n.o.ble plea for a righteous cause."

That November, when the Southerners' candidate, Franklin Pierce, crushed Scott in what Northern Whigs considered "a Waterloo defeat," Frances fell into a state of despair. Her confidence in the mainstream political system gone, she was tempted, she told her husband, to join the abolitionists. Seward persuaded her to hold back, arguing that it would do "more harm than good" if the Seward name were attached to the abolitionist cause.

Try as he might, Seward could not persuade Frances to stay with him for more than a few months at a time in Was.h.i.+ngton. Her decision to remain in upstate New York, especially in the wretched summer months, was not unusual, but even when the weather began to cool as autumn set in, Frances remained in Auburn. "Would that I were nearer to you," he lamented from Was.h.i.+ngton on his fifty-fourth birthday; but he accepted that his "widened spheres of obligation and duty" prevented him from realizing his wishes.

Had Frances Seward enjoyed good health, the course of their marriage might have been different; everywhere Seward went he rented sumptuous homes, hopeful that she and the children might join him. Burdened with a fragile const.i.tution, Frances was increasingly debilitated by a wide range of nervous disorders: nausea, temporary blindness, insomnia, migraines, mysterious pains in her muscles and joints, crying spells, and sustained bouts of depression. A flas.h.i.+ng light, a b.u.mpy carriage ride, or a piercing sound was often sufficient to send her to bed. As her health deteriorated, she found it more and more difficult to leave her "sanctuary" in Auburn, where she was attended by her solicitous extended family.

Doctors could not pinpoint the physical origin of the various ailments that conspired to leave Frances a semi-invalid. A brilliant woman, Frances once speculated whether the "various nervous afflictions & morbid habits of thought" that plagued so many women she knew had their origin in the frustrations of an educated woman's life in the mid-nineteenth century. Among her papers is a draft of an unpublished essay on the plight of women: "To share in any kind of household work is to demean herself, and she would be thought mad, to run, leap, or engage in active sports." She was permitted to dance all night in ballrooms, but it "would be deemed unwomanly" and "imprudent" for her to race with her children "on the common, or to search the cliff for flowers." Reflecting on "the number of invalids that exist among women exempted from Labour," she suggested that the "want of fitting employment-real purpose in their life" was responsible.

Seward himself recognized that his marriage was built upon contradictions. "There you are at home all your life-long. It is too cold to travel in winter and home is too pleasant in summer to be foresaken. The children cannot go abroad and must not be left at home. Here I am, on the contrary, roving for instruction when at leisure, and driven abroad continually by my occupation. How strange a thing it is that we can never enjoy each others cares and pleasures, except at intervals."

The Sewards' relations.h.i.+p was sustained chiefly through the long, loving letters they wrote to each other day after day, year after year. In her letters, which number in the thousands, Frances described the progress of the garden and the antics of the children. She offered advice on political matters, critiqued his speeches, and expressed her pa.s.sionate opinions about slavery. She encouraged his idealism, pressing him repeatedly to consider what should be done rather than what could be done. In his letters, he a.n.a.lyzed the personalities of his colleagues, confessed his fears, discussed his reactions to the books he was reading, and told her repeatedly how he loved her "above every other thing in the world." He conjured images of the moon, whose "silver rays" they shared as they each sat in their separate homes "writing the lines" that would cross in the mail. He recollected pleasures of home, where the children played in the smoke from his cigar, and husband and wife were engaged in free and open conversation, so different from the talk of politicians.

Yet in the end, it was the talk of politicians he craved. As a result, the Sewards, to a far greater extent than the Lincolns, spent much of their married life apart.

CHASE, TOO, found himself in a dispirited state in the months that followed the Compromise. "Clouds and darkness are upon us at present," he wrote Summer. "The Slaveholders have succeeded beyond their wildest hopes twelve months ago." It seemed as if, temporarily at least, the wind had been taken out of the sails of the antislavery movement.

Moreover, Chase was isolated in the Senate, the regular Democratic Party having shut him out of committee work and political meetings. Nor could he rely on the camaraderie of the Free-Soilers, who believed he had sacrificed them to achieve his position. With time heavy on his hands, he spent hours writing to Kate at her boarding school in New York, where she had been sent when his third wife, Belle, contracted the tuberculosis that took her life.

The long years away from home must have been bleak and often difficult for the motherless child. Located at Madison Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, Miss Haines's School held the girls to a strict routine. They rose at 6 a.m. to study for an hour and a half before breakfast and prayers. A brisk walk outside, with no skipping permitted, preceded cla.s.ses in literature, French, Latin, English grammar, science, elocution, piano, and dancing. At midafternoon, they were taken out once again for an hour-long walk. In the evenings, they attended study hall, where, "without [the teacher's] permission," one student recalled, "we could hardly breathe." Only on weekends, when they attended recitals or the theater, was the routine relaxed.

Living ten months a year under such regimented circ.u.mstances, Kate yearned to see the one person she loved: her father. Though he wrote hundreds of letters to her, his correspondence lacked the playful warmth of Seward's notes to his own children. In cold, didactic fas.h.i.+on, Chase alternately praised and upbraided her, instructing her in the art of letter writing and admonis.h.i.+ng her to cultivate good habits. If her letters were well written, he critiqued her penmans.h.i.+p. If the penmans.h.i.+p was good, he criticized her flat style of expression. If both met his standards, he complained that she had waited too long to write.

"Your last letter...was quite well written," he told her when she was ten years old. "I should be glad, however, to have you describe more of what you see and do every day. Can't you tell me all about your school-mates one by one.... Take pains, use your eyes, reflect." "I wish you could put a little more life into your letters." Four years later, he was still urging improvement. "Your nice letter, my darling child, came yesterday," he wrote, "but I must say that it had rather a sleepy air. The words seemed occasionally chosen and arranged under the influence of the drowsy G.o.d."

"It will be a great advantage to you to cultivate a noticing habit," he advised. "Accustom yourself to talk of what you see and to write details, and in a conversational, & even narrative style. There is the greatest possible difference in charm between the same narrative told by one person and by another.... No doubt a large part of this difference is to be ascribed to const.i.tutional differences of temperament, but any intelligent person can greatly increase facility of apprehension & expression by careful self culture." The ascetic refrain of Chase's instruction to Kate is that an effort of will can surmount most obstacles and self-denial can lead to its own gratifications: "I know you do not like writing.... You can overcome if you will.... I dislike for example to bathe myself all over with cold water in the morning especially when the thermometer is so low as at present: but I find I can when I determine to do so overcome my feeling of dislike and even subst.i.tute a certain pleasurable sensation."

In his efforts to discipline and educate his daughter, Chase did not spare Kate his own morbid thoughts about death. "Remember, my dear child, that the eye of a Holy G.o.d is upon you all the time, and that not an act or word or thought is unnoticed by Him. Remember too, that you may die soon.... Already eleven years of your life are pa.s.sed. You may not live another eleven years.... How short then is this life! And how earnest ought to be our preparation for another!" To ill.u.s.trate his point, he described the death of a little girl just Kate's age, the daughter of a fellow senator. The Monday before her death, he had seen her in the capital, "strong, robust, active, intelligent; the very impersonation of life and health. A week after and she had gone from earth. What a lesson was here. Lay it to heart, dear Katie, and may G.o.d give you grace."

If Kate's school reports were unfavorable, Chase refused to allow her to return home for vacation. "I am sorry that you feel so lonely," he told her one summer. "I wish I could feel it safe to allow you to visit more freely, but your conversations with Miss Haines have made known to you the reasons why." He urged her to understand: "you have it in your power greatly to promote my happiness by your good conduct, and greatly to destroy my comfort and peace by ill conduct."

More often she excelled, relying on her nearly encyclopedic memory and hard work to please her exacting father. If unsparing in his criticism, he was extravagant in his praise. "To an affectionate father" nothing was more gratifying, he told her-not even the thought that he might someday "be made President"-than "a beloved child, improving in intelligence, in manners, in physical development, and giving promise of a rich and delightful future."

He rewarded her with invitations to Was.h.i.+ngton, visits she vividly recalled years later. "I knew Clay, Webster and Calhoun," she proudly told a reporter when she was in her fifties. As a small girl, she was particularly impressed by Clay, so tall that "he had to unwind himself to get up." At ease with children, Clay "made much of me and I liked him." Daniel Webster appeared to Kate an "ideal of how a statesman ought to look," the very words later used to describe her father. "He seldom laughed, yet he was very kind and he used to send me his speeches. I don't suppose he thought I would read them, but he wanted to compliment me and show that he remembered me and I know that I felt very proud when I saw Daniel Webster's frank upon pieces of mail which came to me at the New York school."

Of all her father's Senate colleagues, Charles Sumner was her favorite, as he was of Frances Seward. "He was warm-hearted and sensitive," Kate recalled. "He was full of anecdotes and was a brilliant talker." When Sumner, in turn, spoke well of little Kate, Chase was overjoyed. "You cannot think, my precious child, how much pleasure it gives me to hear you praised."

Buoyant at such moments with satisfied expectations, Chase shared with her intimate chronicles of his life in Was.h.i.+ngton, long descriptions of the protocol followed when a senator visited the president in his office, detailed accounts of dinners at the White House, amusing reports of late-night sessions in the Senate chamber, when all too many of his colleagues "have visited the refectory a little too often, and are not as sober as they should be."

"The sun s.h.i.+nes warm and clear," he wrote one beautiful June day. "The wind stirs the trees and fans the earth. I sit in my room and hear the rustle of branches; the merry twitter and song of the birds; the chirp of insects." "I should like to have you with me and we should take a ramble together."

Not surprisingly, Kate cherished the prospect of living in the nation's capital, accompanying her father wherever he went, a.s.sisting him in his daily tasks. Chase understood her desire and was careful to a.s.suage her fear that he might remarry and deprive her of her rightful place by his side. Describing a visit to the Elliotts, a Quaker family with two remarkable daughters, he confessed that "Miss Lizzie is the best looking of them all, and is really a very superior woman, with a great deal of sense and a great deal of heart. You need not however be alarmed for me, for a gentleman in New York is said to be her accepted lover, and I look only for friends among ladies as I do among gentlemen."

OF THE FOUR future presidential candidates, Edward Bates was the only one who supported the Compromise wholeheartedly. At last, with what he called the "African mania" finally subdued, he felt the American people might focus their energies once more on the vast economic opportunities provided by the ever-expanding frontier.

With equal ire, he denounced both "the lovers of free negroes in the North & the lovers of slave negroes in the South," believing that the argument over slavery was simply "a struggle among politicians for sectional supremacy," with radicals like Seward and Chase in the North, and Calhoun and Toombs in the South, exploiting the issue for personal ambition.

He specifically condemned Seward's "higher law" supposition invoked to invalidate the Fugitive Slave Law, arguing that "in Civil government, such as we have, there can be no law higher than the Const.i.tution and the Statutes. And he would set himself above these, claiming some transcendental authority for his disobedience, must be, as I deliberately think, either a Canting hypocrite, a presumptuous fool, or an arbitrary designing knave."

He exhibited similar scorn for Calhoun, who would shatter "the world's best hope of freedom for the white man, because he is not allowed to have his own wayward will about negro slaves!...Poor man, he is greatly to be pitied!...It is truly a melancholy spectacle to behold his sun going down behind a cloud so black."

In the early fifties, Bates still believed that the West could refrain from taking sides, trusting that "if we stood aloof from the quarrel & pressed the even tenor of our way, for the public good, both of those factions would soon sink to the level of their intrinsic insignificance." His hopes would quickly prove futile, for the settlement was destined to last only four years.

"A HUMAN BEING," the novelist Thomas Mann observed, "lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries...if the times, themselves, despite all their hustle and bustle," do not provide opportunity, he continued, "the situation will have a crippling effect."

More than a decade earlier, speaking to the Springfield Young Men's Lyceum, Lincoln had expressed his concern that his generation had been left a meager yield after the "field of glory" was harvested by the founding fathers. They were a "forest of giant oaks," he said, who faced the "task (and n.o.bly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves, us, of this goodly land," and to build "upon its hills and its valleys, a political edifice of liberty and equal rights." Their destinies were "inseparably linked" with the experiment of providing the world, "a practical demonstration" of "the capability of a people to govern themselves. If they succeeded, they were to be immortalized; their names were to be transferred to counties and cities, and rivers and mountains; and to be revered and sung, and toasted through all time."

Because their experiment succeeded, Lincoln observed, thousands "won their deathless names in making it so." What was left for the men of his generation to accomplish? There was no shortage of good men "whose ambition would aspire to nothing beyond a seat in Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the lion, or the tribe of the eagle." Such modest aspirations, he argued, would never satisfy men of "towering genius" who scorned "a beaten path."

In 1854, the wheel of history turned. A train of events that mobilized the antislavery North resulted in the formation of the Republican Party and ultimately provided Lincoln's generation with a challenge equal to or surpa.s.sing that of the founding fathers. The sequence began when settlers in Kansas and Nebraska called upon Congress to grant them territorial status, raising once again the contentious question of extending slavery into the territories. As chairman of the Committee on Territories, Illinois senator Stephen Douglas introduced a bill that appeared to provide an easy solution to the problem by allowing the settlers themselves the "popular sovereignty" to decide if they wished to become free or slave states. This solution proved anything but simple. Since both Kansas and Nebraska lay north of the old 36 30' line, the pa.s.sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would mean that the Missouri Compromise was null and void, opening the possibility of slavery to land long since guaranteed to freedom.

The debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened against increased antislavery sentiment in the North. Enforcement of the fugitive slave provisions contained in the Compromise of 1850 had aroused Northern ire. Near riots erupted when slaveholders tried to recapture runaway slaves who had settled in Boston and New York. Ralph Waldo Emerson expressed a common sentiment among Northerners: "I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Inst.i.tution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and, by the genius and laws of Ma.s.sachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Ma.s.sachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous."

Northern sentiment had been inflamed further by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. Less than a year after its publication in March 1852, more than three hundred thousand copies of the novel had sold in the United States, a sales rate rivaled only by the Bible. Abolitionist leader Frederick Dougla.s.s later likened it to "a flash" that lit "a million camp fires in front of the embattled hosts of slavery," awakening such powerful compa.s.sion for the slave and indignation against slavery that many previously unconcerned Americans were transformed into advocates for the antislavery cause.

Until the introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, there was no signal point around which the antislavery advocates could rally. As the Senate debate opened, Northerners were stirred into action "in greater numbers than ever," the historian Don Fehrenbacher has written, fighting "with all the fierceness of an army defending its homeland against invasion."

Pa.s.sions in the South were equally aroused. To Southerners, the issue of Kansas was not merely an issue of slavery, but whether they, who had helped create and enlarge the nation with their "blood and treasure," would be ent.i.tled to share in the territories held in common by the entire country. "The day may come," said Governor Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, "when our Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intend to be equals in the Union, or independent out of it!"

This time Salmon Chase a.s.sumed the leaders.h.i.+p of the antislavery forces. Seward understood that the bill was "a mighty subject" that "required research and meditation," but he was distracted by a mult.i.tude of issues and the demands of Was.h.i.+ngton's social life. With "the street door bell [ringing] every five minutes," the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while Seward's speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply "essays against slavery," Stephen Douglas later said, "Chase of Ohio was the leader."

Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open "Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States." The "Appeal" was originally printed in The National Era, the abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin. Deemed by historians "one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever produced," the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.

"We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge," the Appeal began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Pa.s.sage of the Nebraska Act would mean that "this immense region, occupying the very heart" of the continent, would, in "flagrant disregard" of a "sacred faith," be transformed into "a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves." The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its authors promised to call on their const.i.tuents "to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery...for the cause of human freedom is the cause of G.o.d."

"Chase's greatest opportunity had at last come to him," his biographer Albert Hart observes, "for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate all the previous experience of his life." By the time he rose to speak on the Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a great battle. "By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr. Chase's speech," the New York Times reported. "The galleries and lobbies were densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the Senate."

In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the Illinois senator to such a "high pitch of wrath" that he countered, accusing Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. "Do you say I came here by a corrupt bargain?" Chase demanded to know. "I said the man who charged me with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by a corrupt bargain," Douglas replied. "Did you mean me? If so, I mean you."

Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase refuted Douglas's claim that the concept of "popular sovereignty" would provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary, Chase predicted, "this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties." Moreover, he asked, "What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another portion? Is that the doctrine of equal rights?...No, sir, no! There can be no real democracy which does not fully maintain the rights of man, as man."

At midnight, Douglas began his concluding speech, which lasted nearly four hours. At one point, Seward interrupted to ask for an explanation of something Douglas had said. "Ah," Douglas retorted, "you can't crawl behind that free n.i.g.g.e.r dodge." In reply, Seward said: "Douglas, no man will ever be President of the United States who spells 'negro' with two gs."

"Midnight pa.s.sed and the c.o.c.k crew, and daylight broke before the vote was taken," the New York Tribune reported. The all-night session was marked by "great confusion, hard words between various Senators and intense excitement in which the galleries partic.i.p.ated." Many of the senators were observed to be "beastly drunk," their grandiloquence further inflated by "too frequent visits to one of the ante-chambers of the Senate room."

When the Senate majority cast its votes in favor of the bill at 5 a.m. on the morning of March 4, the antislavery minority was crushed. "The Senate is emasculated," Senator Benton exclaimed. As Chase and Sumner descended the sweeping steps of the Capitol, a distant cannonade signaled pa.s.sage of the bill. "They celebrate a present victory," Chase said, "but the echoes they awake will never rest until slavery itself shall die."

"Be a.s.sured, be a.s.sured, gentlemen," New York Tribune reporter James Pike warned the Southerners, that "you are sowing the wind and you will reap the whirlwind.... No man can stand in the North in that day of reckoning who plants himself on the ground of sustaining the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.... [Here is] the opening of a great drama that...inaugurates the era of a geographical division of political parties. It draws the line between North and South. It pits face to face the two opposing forces of slavery and freedom."

In the weeks that followed, ma.s.s protest meetings spread like wildfire throughout the North, fueled by the enormous reach of the daily newspaper. "The tremendous storm sweeping the North seemed to gather new force every week," writes the historian Allan Nevins. Resolutions against the law were signed by tens of thousands in Connecticut, New Hamps.h.i.+re, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Pennsylvania. In New York, the Tribune reported, two thousand protesters marched up Broadway, "led by a band of music, and brilliant with torches and banners." On college campuses and village squares, in town halls and county fairgrounds, people gathered to make their voices heard.

LINCOLN WAS RIDING the circuit in the backcountry of Illinois when the news reached him of the pa.s.sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. A fellow lawyer, T. Lyle d.i.c.key, sharing a room with Lincoln, reported that "he sat on the edge of his bed and discussed the political situation far into the night." At dawn, he was still "sitting up in bed, deeply absorbed in thought." He told his companion-"I tell you, d.i.c.key, this nation cannot exist half-slave and half-free."

Lincoln later affirmed that the successful pa.s.sage of the bill roused him "as he had never been before." It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril. The Nebraska Act "took us by surprise," Lincoln later said. "We were thunderstruck and stunned." The fight to stem the spread of slavery would become the great purpose Lincoln had been seeking.