Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War Hardcover – Bargain Price by Tony Horwitz Read Free Book Online Page A

hoop skirts, and endless rows of cotton was, in reality, new, and its bloom lasted for only the final decades of slavery’s 246-year history in North America. But it gave little sign of withering in the years before the Civil War. To the contrary, slaveholders sought ceaselessly to expand their reach, proclaiming it the nation’s manifest destiny to annex still more lands beyond those taken from Mexico and native tribes.
    “Cuba must be ours,” declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become “a basin of water belonging to the United States.” His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. “I want these countries for the spread of slavery,” he said. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.”
    In the 1850s, proslavery partisans known as “filibusters” invaded Cuba. They failed, but another filibuster, William Walker, briefly established the “Republic of Baja California” after seizing the peninsula from Mexico. Two years later, he led a private army into Nicaragua, installed himself as president, and reinstituted slavery (which had ended there in 1824).
    Walker’s dictatorship even won recognition from the White House, which was occupied in the 1850s by three of the weakest presidents in U.S. history. Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan were all Northerners who supported or appeased southern interests, a breed derisively known as “doughfaces”—half-baked and malleable in the hands of slave holders. This pliability was all the more exasperating to antislavery Northerners because of their region’s dominance in other realms. By mid-century, the North was home to roughly 70 percent of the nation’s free population and more than 80 percent of its industry.
    This rapid expansion only heightened the South’s insecurity—and the brashness of its leaders’ demands for more slaveholding territory and even for the resumption of the transatlantic slave trade, outlawed by Constitutional decree since 1808. “Slavery,” Horace Greeley wrote in the New York Tribune , “loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of ‘unclean’ will keep from intrusion into uninfected company.”
    GREELEY’S WORDS, in early 1854, were directed at a new and explosive threat to the nation’s tenuous unity. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois (a powerful booster of the railroad, the Midwest, and himself) introduced a bill to open for settlement a vast stretch of prairie and plains comprising today’s Kansas and Nebraska, as well as parts of six other western states. All of this territory lay north of the line demarcated in the Missouri Compromise, above which slavery was to be “forever prohibited.” But to win southern votes in Congress, Douglas agreed to repeal the 1820 pact.
    If the settlers of the new territories so chose, slavery might now extend across a swath of land reaching from Iowa and Minnesota to the Rockies. Signed into law by a compliant President Pierce in May 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act ignited a firestorm so intense that its author acknowledged, “I could travel from Boston to Chicago by the light of my own effigy.”
    President Pierce poured more oil on the flames that May by sending federal troops to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act against Anthony Burns, a runaway slave who had been captured and put under guard in a Boston courthouse. Abolitionists tried to free Burns by charging the courthouse with a battering ram. When this failed, he was taken under heavy guard to Boston Harbor, for shipment back to Virginia aboard a U.S. Navy vessel.
    Political cartoon, showing Douglas and Pierce at left
    The bald spectacle of federal forces aiding in the return of a fugitive to bondage—and in Boston, the cradle of