Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo Read Free Book Online

characteristic violence.” 45
    In the light of the repeated electoral frauds in the Lecompton legislature and the refusal of the constitutional convention to submit the entire constitution for popular approval in Kansas, any congressional acceptance of the Lecompton Constitution was tantamount to repudiating the heart of popular sovereignty, as well as virtually admitting Kansas as a slave state. Stephen Douglas, righteous in his wrath against Buchanan, took his political life into his own hands and assailed the Lecompton Constitution on the floor of the Senate as a mockery of the popular sovereignty principle. When Buchanan threatened to bring down party discipline on him with all the wrath of an Andrew Jackson, Douglas belligerently replied, “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.” 46
    Furthermore, free-soil Kansans boycotted the initial referendum on Lecompton on December 21, then joined in a second referendum on January 4 where they defeated it by a clear majority. But Buchanan had committed himself to the Lecompton constitution: he accepted the resignation of the disgusted Governor Walker in December and proceeded to pull every political string a president can conceivably pull, twisting approval of the Lecompton constitution out of the Senate on March 23, 1858 by a 33–25 vote, and then out of the House on April 1—but only after another full-scale donnybrook on the floor of the House that pitted two dozen congressmen against each other.
    Unhappily for Buchanan, the House bill contained an amendment that the Senate version lacked, and the whole question was now thrown into a House-Senate conference committee for resolution. At the urging of William H. English of Indiana, one of the three House conferees, a compromise was devised that accepted Lecompton and the statehood of Kansas—provided that the Lecompton constitution was resubmitted to the people of Kansas for a federally supervised election. Douglas, however, mistrusted Lecompton no matter who supervised an election; and his enemies in Congress foolishly persuaded Buchanan that anything that Douglas opposed was the perfect thing for the president to support. The English attachment passed both House and Senate on April 30, 1858. Accordingly, the Lecompton constitution went back to the voters of Kansas for a third time, and to the hideous embarrassment of Buchanan, the voters of Kansas turned out on August 30 and rejected Lecompton by a vote of 11,812 to 1,926. 47
    Buchanan had lost one of the most vicious political struggles in the history of Congress, Southern Democrats had seriously damaged the patience of their Northern counterparts, and Buchanan loyalists in the North were unseated wholesale by upstart Republicans in the 1858 congressional elections. In the state elections a year later, Republicans seized control of the legislatures and governorships of the New England states, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Iowa. To add insult to injury, Douglas successfully won reelection to the Senate after a grueling campaign against the new rising Republican star of Illinois, Lincoln. In fact, almost the only Northern Democrats who survived Northern anger over Lecompton were anti-administration Douglasites.
    Buchanan’s troubles had only begun, and they were now about to be worsened by one of the weirdest episodes in the history of American politics. Few people outside Kansas knew anything about John Brown, and those within Kansas knew him only as the anti-slavery fanatic who had taken his own private revenge on the pro-slavery cause in the murders at Pottawatomie in May 1856. Brown raged against slavery with all the ill-controlled violence of his being. If Brown was a fanatic, he was also something of a visionary: profoundly moved by the injustice of slavery, a champion of the political equality of blacks, willing to break any man-made law in the interest of obeying a higher law of justice and right. “He was always an