Two attacks on slavery occurring just before the election season of 1860 raised the nation’s emotional intensity. The first, as we have seen, was the raid led by John Brown on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, widely regarded by contemporaries as the first step in a deliberate program to attack and end slavery. In the second event, which began just as Virginia executed Mr. Brown, a contest for the speakership of the House of Representatives made the United States Congress yet again the forum in which the passions over the issue of slavery were broadcast to the nation – including the threat that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would lead to secession.
The Harper’s Ferry raid showed northern antislavery zealots actively promoting servile insurrection. Although John Brown denied that was his aim – he claimed to encourage escape rather than rebellion – southerners perceived an increase in danger from their slave property. The Washington Constitution, regarded as the public voice of the Buchanan administration, referred to the Harper’s Ferry raid as the first fruit of Senator Seward’s “dogma of ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding States”.
In late February 1860, two months after John Brown was hanged, Abraham Lincoln, speaking at the Cooper Union in New York City, denied that the Republican Party was in any sense responsible for the man’s violence. He said, “John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise…Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied,” he continued, “with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves.”
The absurdity of John Brown’s effort, Mr. Lincoln declared, “that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not succeed”, and they refused to participate. “An enthusiast broods,” said Mr. Lincoln, “over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.”
Senator Seward, addressing the United States Senate, said much the same thing two days later:
While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest though fatally erroneous convictions, yet all good citizens will nonetheless agree, that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and life.
Senator Seward said the Republicans were exonerated of the charge of hostility toward the south, but he accused the Democrats of making an assault upon the union. “The menace of disunion”, he said, “are made, though not in its name, yet in its behalf. It must avow or disavow them.” Notwithstanding the ardent abolitionist beliefs that individual members of the Republic Party might have held, the official party line was that the Republicans opposed the spread of slavery into the territories where, by their view, it did not legally exist. The party also maintained that it did not seek to challenge the existence of slavery in the states where it existed legally. No doubt this subtlety was understood and rejected out of hand. The militant defenders of slavery were increasingly unwilling to accept any restriction upon it. To the extent that they saw the restriction of the spread of slavery as detrimental to its economic well-being and to the extent that they saw the restriction of slavery detrimental to its political protection within the federal union, they were opposed.
John Brown was both a murderous inciter of servile rebellion and an abolitionist hero and martyr to his contemporaries. In the context of 1860 those perceptions were more important than any underlying reality.
Shortly after John Brown’s raid, a second attack on slavery seized national notice. The source was a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Written by a man of southern birth, the book argued that as a result of slavery, the slaveholding states were poorer than the nonslaveholding states, and nonslaveholding residents of the slave states were poorer than residents of the free states. It urged the nonslaveholders to organize and actively oppose the continuation of slavery. The Impending Crisis gained little notice when it was appeared in 1857, but the Republican Party planned to circulate a shortened version as campaign literature in the 1860 election, and 68 members of the Republican Party endorsed the book. Among them was John Sherman, a Republican representative from Ohio who was the leading candidate to be speaker of the House in December 1859. Congressman Sherman’s endorsement was brought to the attention of the House after the first vote. Numerous representatives from slave states rose during the debates to denounce as unfit for public office anyone who would endorse such incendiary material.
The Republicans held the largest bloc of seats in the House, but without a clear majority they could not construct a coalition that would elect Congressman Sherman. Similarly, the Democrats could not construct a coalition to elect a speaker from their party. The effort dragged on through many ballots from December 5, 1859, until February 1, 1860, when Congressman Sherman withdrew his name, and another Republican congressman was elected. During this extended contest, the possibility of the southern states’ secession upon the election of a Republican president was spoken of openly on the floor of House of Representatives and the Senate and published in newspapers across the nation.
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