Year of Meteors
If Walt Whitman had been more politically minded, he might have extended his “Year of Meteors” back to the political season of 1858. William H. Seward, a United States senator from New York, gave a speech in Rochester, New York, that apparently was intended to solidify his claim to leadership of the Republican Party. Senator Seward had previously served as his state’s governor and was spoken of as a leading contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. In his address Senator Seward said the free-labor system and the slave-labor system were mutually antagonistic, and they were being brought into ever closer contact by the growing power of the railroads and other means of internal commerce. From this intimacy collision resulted.
Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is…the work of opposing or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts to final compromise between the slave and free states, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.
Senator Seward continued by saying that to escape the designs of the slaveholders, “The democratic party must be permanently dislodged from the government.” He reviewed the history of the Democratic Party in the United States with respect to slavery – in the admission of Texas to the union precipitating the war with Mexico, in the acquisition of Mexican lands, in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and in the attempt to admit Kansas as a slave state. He continued:
Such is the democratic party…It is positive and uncompromising in the interest of slavery – negative, compromising, and vacillating, in regard to everything else. It boasts its love of equality, and wastes its strength, and even its life, in fortifying the only aristocracy known in the land…It magnifies itself for conquests in foreign lands, but it sends the national eagle forth always with chains, and not the olive branch, in his fangs.
By contrast and in conclusion, Senator Seward said the strength of the Republican Party and the secret of its assured success
lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that idea is a noble one – an idea that fills and expands all generous souls, the idea of equality – the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.
I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun, I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in congress to-day sentiments and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free state, dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and over throw by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever.
The phrase Senator Seward used – “irrepressible conflict” – would become key in the 1860 political season.
Earlier in the 1858 political season, Abraham Lincoln, the newly nominated Republican candidate to run against incumbent Illinois senator Stephan A. Douglas, had said much the same thing:
In my opinion, [the agitation to end slavery] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.
When he made these remarks, Mr. Lincoln was a Republican politician little known outside of Illinois and the surrounding states. He had served one term as a Whig congressman in the United States House of Representatives. He would obtain some national notoriety of running against and debating Senator Douglas, although much of the contemporary political interest in the race grew from the quarrel between Senator Douglas and President Buchanan over Kansas and the president’s efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to defeat Senator Douglas’ bid for reelection.
By contrast Senator Seward possessed national prominence, and what he said had national repercussions. His strong proabolitionist statements and criticism of the Democrats’ proslavery allegiance in Rochester brought criticism not only from Democrats but also from Republicans who had been Democrats, and he tried to moderate that statement several days later in a speech in Rome, New York, in which he argued that the Republicans’ quarrel was not with slaveholders but with the proponents of slavery within the free states. This was patent nonsense. A Boston correspondent of the New York Times offered the following observation:
The attacks that have been made on Mr. Seward, because of his Rome and Rochester speeches, are having a good effect on that gentleman’s prospects here. Those who thought he had been making some truculent assault on the Union, and demanding that it should be dissolved, and served up in a slaveholder’s sauce, are astonished on reading his Rome speech to find it a moderate and concise statement of the true nature of the contest that now divides the country, and differing from other men’s speeches only in its superior ability and luminous clearness.
Later in 1858 Jefferson Davis, a United States senator from Mississippi, speaking before that state’s legislature, acknowledged that the abolitionists and their allies would have control of the next House of Representatives, although he expressed his faith that the president would veto acts in violation of the Constitution. If, however, an abolitionist president were elected, Senator Davis said that “such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect.” He went on to observe:
The master mind of the so-called Republican party, Senator Seward, has in a recent speech at Rochester, announced the purpose of his party to dislodge the Democracy from the possession of the federal Government, and assigns as a reason the friendship of that party for what he denominates the slave system. He declares the Union between the States having slave labor and free labor to be incompatible, and announces that one or the other must disappear. He even asserts that it was the purpose of the framers of the Government to destroy slave property, and cites as evidence of it, the provisions for amendment of the Constitution. He seeks to alarm his auditors by assuring them of the purpose on the part of the South and the Democratic party to force slavery upon all the States of the Union. Absurd as all this may seem to you, and incredulous as you may be of its acceptance by any intelligent portion of the citizens of the United States, I have reason to believe that it has been inculcated to no small extent in the Northern mind…
I say to you…if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barriers of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.
When the southern states seceded and formed the Confederate government, Senator Davis was chosen as its president. History has observed that the fire-eaters propelled the revolution that became secession and has further observed that the selection of Jefferson Davis as the first president marked the ascendancy of the moderates over the radicals. However moderate Senator Davis might have been, by the fall of 1858 he had adopted the position espoused by the fire-eaters that the election of a Republican president was cause sufficient for the slave states to secede from the union. The essence of Senator Davis’ remarks were reported to the nation. The New York Times reprinted an article from the Vicksburg Whig and ran it under the headline “A Blood-Thirsty Fire-Eater”.
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