Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

This pervasive anxiety not to provoke Southerners guaranteed that Buchanan’s skills as a diplomat would serve to hobble rather than help him. Anxious to obtain peace in Kansas, Buchanan allowed himself to be intimidated by the violence of Southern threats of disunion; once intimidated by the Southerners in his cabinet and in Congress, he grew spiteful and resentful when Northern Democrats—especially Stephen A. Douglas—balked at his proposals to concede virtually every demand made by the South.

Settling the bloody mess in Kansas was Buchanan’s first chore. He was assisted—or so he thought—in dictating a settlement by the Dred Scott decision, which apparently relieved Washington of any responsibility to see that Kansas would choose slavery or freedom. However, Kansas insisted on making trouble for him anyway. The old territorial governor under President Pierce, John W. Geary, had brought a measure of peace to Kansas by the end of 1856, but the rest of the territorial government was still split between two rival legislatures, each claiming to be the legal voice of the people of Kansas. One of these was the “official” legislature, a pro-slavery body elected by fraud in 1855 and sitting in the town of Lecompton; the other was a free-soil assembly, sitting in Topeka.

On February 19, 1857, just before Buchanan’s inauguration, the Lecompton legislature, anticipating that the new president would probably appoint a new territorial governor, decided to get the jump on the appointment process. The Lecomptonites authorized the election of a constitutional convention that would draw up a state constitution for Kansas, a constitution that would then be submitted to Congress for its approval and for the admission of Kansas to the Union. Geary vetoed the convention bill, rightly accusing the pro-slavery legislature of attempting to stampede a rush to statehood on pro-slavery terms. The Lecompton legislature overrode Geary’s veto, however, and as soon as James Buchanan was inaugurated as president, Buchanan fired him.

Buchanan replaced Geary with a Mississippian, Robert J. Walker, which delighted the pro-slavery elements in Kansas. But Walker was no pro-slavery fire-eater. A friend of Stephen A. Douglas, Walker was convinced that slavery had no practical future in Kansas and that the territory ought to be admitted as a free state. Walker’s appointment only fed the determination of the Lecompton legislature to nail together a pro-slavery state constitution as quickly as possible, and in November 1857 a constitutional convention approved a document that had something in it to offend nearly everyone. In addition to protecting the 200 slaves then in Kansas, the Lecompton Constitution placed restrictions on the chartering of banks, banned free blacks from the state, and prohibited any amendments to the constitution for seven years. As a sop to the idea of popular sovereignty, the new constitution allowed for the calling of a public referendum, but only on the question of whether new slaves could be brought into Kansas, which effectively guaranteed Kansas’s admission as a slave state no matter what. Even more amazing was President Buchanan’s response to the Lecompton constitution. Browbeaten by Southern congressional delegations and the Southern members of his cabinet, Buchanan decided to endorse the Lecompton constitution and recommended it favorably in his first annual presidential message (his State of the Union address, as it would be called now) to Congress on December 8, 1857.

“This message,” complained the unhappy Buchanan afterward, gave rise to exactly the opposite of what he had hoped: “a long, exciting, and occasionally violent debate in both Houses of Congress, between the anti-slavery members and their opponents, which lasted for three months,” in which “slavery was denounced in every form which could exasperate the Southern people, and render it odious to the people of the North; whilst on the other hand, many of the speeches of Southern members displayed 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