In 1803, the United States nearly doubled in size when Thomas Jefferson decided to move forward with the Louisiana Purchase, which, by the way, he wasn’t even sure was constitutional. He considered asking Congress to amend the Constitution to give the president the right to grow the nation’s territory, but ultimately he decided it was better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. The new territorial areas weren’t automatically granted statehood, though—they still had to meet the criteria, which included having a critical mass of residents who were in favor of it.
In 1820, two new states wanted to join the union: Missouri and Maine. A fierce debate erupted when Missouri applied for statehood, because the territory permitted slavery. When I say fierce debate, what I actually mean is violent debate. In her book The Field of Blood, historian Joanne B. Freeman writes about the extreme violence within the U.S. Congress during the decades leading up to the Civil War. She writes, “There seemed to be so much violence in the House and Senate chambers…. Shoving. Punching. Pistols. Bowie knives. Congressmen brawling in bunches while colleagues stood on chairs to get a good look. At least once, a gun was fired on the House floor.”[6]
Some people from the North did not want to admit Missouri, because it would tip the balance of slaveholding versus non-slaveholding states, and because the Constitution said that enslaved people were to be counted as three-fifths of a person. If they were admitted, it would give slaveholding states even more political power because of proportional representation in the House of Representatives.
The middle decades of the nineteenth century pulsed with energy about what should happen to the western territories. The acquisition of Texas and other parts of the Southwest from Mexico in 1848, the glimmering allure of the California gold rush beginning in 1849, the irresistible current of expansion that propelled a veritable cavalcade of farmers, ranchers, and gold prospectors across the country, streaming through the wilderness and the desert, over the Rockies and all the way to the Pacific. This cavalcade consisted not just of European settlers; many free African Americans were making their way west too.
The Mississippi had long functioned as a vital conduit for north-south transit. But the western states and territories yearned for something different. Not just for a river of water but for one of steel. A railroad, the artery that would connect the East with the West.
One tiny man, Stephen Douglas, who you might recognize as Abraham Lincoln’s opponent in a future presidential election, really wanted that steel river to course through Chicago. Members of Congress disagreed about which route the railroad should take: through slave territory, or entirely within the designated free soil? To get the railway of his dreams, Douglas offered a compromise in 1850.
“Let’s leave the matter of slavery to popular sovereignty,” Douglas advocated. “Let states and territories decide what they want to do for themselves when it comes to slavery.”
“Let states decide for themselves? I think not,” Charles Sumner, leader of an antislavery coalition in Congress, said.
Sumner believed allowing for popular sovereignty was the recipe for allowing new states and territories to morph into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.”[7]
“You must,” Stephen Douglas argued, “provide for continuous lines of settlement from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean.” He told the Senate not to “fetter the limbs of [this] young giant,”[8] and to let the residents of the states decide for themselves if they will be a slave state or a free state. Ultimately, Congress agreed to Douglas’s proposal. The Missouri Compromise, which restricted slavery in the Louisiana Purchase to south of the 36th parallel, and admitted Maine as a free state while Missouri retained the right to enslave people, was repealed. Popular sovereignty became the new law of the land, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was signed in 1854 by President Franklin Pierce.
Pierce was perhaps the most tragic of our presidents. His wife, Jane, hated his political aspirations and begged him to resign his position as senator, which he did. The Pierces had a baby son who died after a few days of life. They then had two more sons, Frank and Benny. When Frank was four, he died of typhoid, leaving only two-year-old Benny.
Shortly after resigning from the Senate, and over Jane’s strenuous objections, Pierce accepted his party’s nomination for president. He won the election. His victory was Jane’s worst nightmare, and a sense of dread about her impending fate enveloped her. Soon, she would be forced to move to Washington, D.C., pretending to support her husband’s vanity project: the presidency. In January 1853, two months before his inauguration, Franklin, Jane, and Benny were traveling to New Hampshire via train. Benny was standing up to look out the window when the axle of the train broke, causing the train to tumble down an embankment. The sounds of Jane’s screams as the train rolled off the tracks sounded like a whisper in comparison to what Franklin heard once the train had stopped and they discovered that their son Benny had been crushed and nearly decapitated.
Pierce said it was his life’s greatest regret that he couldn’t stop Jane from glimpsing the body of their son, their only remaining child. Jane fully believed Benny’s horrific death was God punishing them for Franklin’s vain political pursuits.[9]
When Pierce assumed the presidency, huge crowds gathered, the largest of any inauguration to date. As he ascended the Capitol steps, the audience commented on how handsome he was. But his countenance was bleak. Jane refused to attend.
Pierce declined to swear an oath on the Bible, choosing instead to affirm his duties as president. He memorized a solemn speech that said, in part: “My countrymen: it is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself…. I ought to be, and am, truly grateful for this rare manifestation of the nation’s confidence; but this, so far from lightening my obligations, only adds to their weight. You have summoned me in my weakness; you must sustain me by your strength.”[10]
For years, Jane made no public appearances at all and remained cloaked in mourning clothes. She cloistered herself upstairs at the White House, writing letters and talking to her dead son, Benny. Her first official White House role didn’t come until nearly two years after Pierce took office.
Pierce was getting little support from his wife, but also no support at all from his vice president, William Rufus King. King was so sick with tuberculosis in the weeks leading up to his scheduled inauguration that he traveled to Cuba for a change of air, hoping the warm climate and sunshine would help him recover.
Congress granted a special dispensation for King to be sworn in as vice president from Cuba, and he finally took the oath twenty days after Pierce became president.
After languishing in Cuba for weeks, King realized his health was not improving, and he needed to try to make it back to the United States. He pulled it together, boarded a boat, and arrived at his Alabama plantation. A few days after he arrived home, William Rufus King died. He never made it to Washington during his vice presidency.
At that time, the Constitution had no provision to replace the vice president. Franklin Pierce had three dead sons, a wife who was in such poor mental and physical health that she couldn’t leave her room, an absent and (shortly thereafter) dead vice president, and the first bubbles of a civil war fast becoming a simmer.
So it was this sad sack, Franklin Pierce, a northern Democrat trying in vain to hold a fracturing nation together, who signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The bill birthed two new territories, but it also ignited a brutal uprising known as Bleeding Kansas, in which groups from other states that opposed enslavement and groups that demanded its legality flooded the territory in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the game of popular sovereignty.
Pierce turned to alcohol for solace, and soon, his drinking spiraled out of control. He lost control of his party, and at the end of his term in office, he failed to be renominated by the Democrats. Jane died from tuberculosis a few years after leaving the White House. Pierce died a few years after Jane, in 1869, from cirrhosis of the liver caused by his excessive drinking.
After Pierce left office, a new Democratic president moved into the White House in 1857. James Buchanan was the only bachelor president…or was he? Multiple historians believe Buchanan and William Rufus King, Pierce’s dead vice president, were lovers. King and Buchanan lived together for thirteen years. They were frequently teased for their effeminate mannerisms. Andrew Jackson referred to them as “Miss Fancy and Aunt Nancy,” which were nicknames that probably suggested exactly what you think they suggested.[11]
Buchanan and King openly dreamed of being president and vice president together. William Rufus King came from a remarkably wealthy family, enslavers of over five hundred people. In fact, King helped found a city you may have heard of because of the civil rights movement: Selma, Alabama.
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The pithy National Park Service regards Bleeding Kansas like this: “During Bleeding Kansas, murder, mayhem, destruction, and psychological warfare became a code of conduct in Eastern Kansas and Western Missouri.”[12]
Most of the inhabitants of Kansas were not slaveholders; they were poor, and slaves were expensive. Proslavery Missourians flooded across the border to vote illegally in elections. Abolition groups funded and sent settlers to the region to try to create a critical mass of people who would oppose enslavement. More than four dozen people died in political killings. Homes and businesses were looted, burned, and destroyed.[13]
Murder, mayhem, destruction, and psychological warfare hung thick in the air as Clara Brown arrived in Kansas. What was happening there was a microcosm of the nation as a whole: the anger wound itself ever more tightly inside the chests of men until it broke with an audible pop, and the country was soon thrust into civil war.
Back in Congress in May 1856, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina was enraged. As an enslaver himself, he abhorred antislavery sentiment, and said, “The fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue. If Kansas becomes a hireling [free] state, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missouri…[and] abolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment. So with Arkansas; so with upper Texas.”
Preston Brooks was provoked by antislavery Senator Charles Sumner when Sumner gave a speech denouncing Stephen Douglas and another senator named Andrew Butler. Sumner called Douglas a “noisesome, squat, nameless animal,” and publicly accused Butler of having taken a mistress. Butler’s mistress, Sumner asserted, was a “harlot,” who was “ugly to others, but lovely to him.”[14]
That mistress was the enslavement of Africans.
Andrew Butler was Preston Brooks’s cousin. And even though Brooks was in the House and Sumner was in the Senate, Brooks heard about Sumner’s “harlot” speech. Three days went by, until May 22, 1856, when Brooks waited for the Senate to conclude its business for the day. Brooks entered the chamber, walked up behind Charles Sumner, who was getting ready to mail out some copies of his speech, and started beating him with a cane.
Preston Brooks struck Charles Sumner again and again, blows raining down with sickening thuds, until Sumner was unconscious, bleeding profusely, and severely injured.
Considering his message delivered, Brooks left the Senate chamber. Charles Sumner was so gravely wounded that he was not able to resume his seat in Congress for three years. Three years.
Meanwhile, Congress investigated Preston Brooks for the assault, but they failed to censure him. As in, they couldn’t even pass a resolution saying, “Yeah no, that was not cool, we shouldn’t be beating people in Congress.” They couldn’t even do that.
Brooks resigned from Congress in July 1856. And was then immediately reelected one month later.
So no, America is not “the worst it’s ever been” today, despite what some news anchors might be trying to convince you of, because if they can make you afraid, they can gain your attention and your money. Has anyone been beaten half to death on the floor of the Senate over the topic of whether it’s cool to enslave people this week? No? Okay.
If it makes you feel any better at all, Preston Brooks died of croup, choking violently to death before he could take his seat after his reelection. He was only thirty-seven.[15] But the aftershocks of the beating lived on. The stage was set for the outbreak of the Civil War.
Three
Clara BrownColorado, 1870s
