This Great Struggle by Steven Woodworth Read Free Book Online

Americans were shocked by the news. Slavery advocates had previously murdered several abolitionists, both in Kansas and elsewhere in the country, but they were outraged that an abolitionist had finally reciprocated.
    Almost simultaneously in Washington, D.C., Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner delivered a speech titled “The Crime against Kansas,” tacitly likening the attempt to make Kansas a slave state to the crime of rape. Sumner named names, especially that of aged, proslavery South Carolina Senator Pierce Butler, who was absent that day because of illness. Two days later Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brookes of South Carolina, entered the Senate chamber and attacked Sumner with a loaded cane, leaving the Massachusetts senator lying unconscious in a pool of blood. Sumner barely survived and was unable to return to his Senate seat for several years, during which time his constituents reelected him, leaving his empty chair in the Senate as a silent witness against the brutality of the slave power.
    Meanwhile the election campaign of 1856 was in full swing. The Democrats passed over their most prominent figure, Douglas, because of his notoriety in both sections of the country on the issue of slavery. Instead, they chose aged political cipher James Buchanan, a man whose nickname, “Old Public Functionary,” neatly summarized his career. His chief qualification for office, aside from the fact that having been out of the country the past four years as an ambassador in Europe he had had little chance to make controversial statements on slavery, was that he was, like Pierce, another “northern man of southern principles.” The Republicans chose Mexican War veteran John C. Freémont, political heir of the powerful Missouri Benton family. His qualifications to govern, in terms either of experience or of temperament, were highly questionable, but he was famous and had announced a free-soil position.
    Some southern political leaders threatened to have their states secede from the Union on the election of Freémont or any “black Republican,” as they contemptuously called all members of the party. Their threats were not put to the test that year, as Buchanan edged out Freémont, but Republicans noted with hope and their opponents with apprehension that if Freémont could have carried Pennsylvania—a probable Republican state had not its native son been the Democratic candidate—and either Illinois or Indiana— both thoroughly winnable states for the Republicans—Freémont would have won the election after all. The outcome might be different in another four years.
    Meanwhile, back in Kansas, violence escalated between pro- and anti-slavery settlers, with the Missouri Border Ruffians mixing in. Skirmishes took place between rival militias as the press began to refer to the territory as “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown won recognition among antislavery circles for leading his free-state militia in several of the skirmishes. Slave-state guerrillas killed one of Brown’s sons. A number of additional deaths occurred before the federal government finally restored a reasonable degree of order in the territory.
    James Buchanan came into office in March 1857 devoutly wishing that all abolitionists would go away and stop making trouble. He saw what he thought was a chance to make that happen in a case then before the Supreme Court. Slave Dred Scott had sued for his freedom on the basis that his owner, an army doctor, had brought him to the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin. Rabidly proslavery chief justice Roger B. Taney had lined up a majority of justices to support a narrow decision dismissing Scott’s case on the grounds that, as a black man, he was not a citizen and therefore had no standing to sue. Buchanan secretly convinced Taney to broaden his decision into the nation’s first great piece of judicial legislation, a sweeping decree meant to establish once and for all the