Volume II Part 15 (1/2)

The Kansas disclosures had the effect of drawing into closer communion the various shades of anti-slavery opinion in New York. Early in the summer, the question was earnestly considered of enlisting all men opposed to the aggressions of slavery under the banner of the Republican party, a political organisation formed, as has been stated, at Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. Horace Greeley had suggested the name ”Republican” as an un.o.bjectionable one for the new party; and, within a week after its adoption at Jackson, it became the name of the Free-soilers who marshalled in Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, Vermont, and Ma.s.sachusetts. The anti-Nebraska convention of New York, which rea.s.sembled in Auburn on the 27th of September, 1854, also adopted the name, calling its executive committee ”the Republican state committee.” It was not a new name in the Empire State. Voters in middle life had all been Republicans in their early years; and long after the formation of the National Republicans in 1828, and of the Whig party in 1834, the designation had been used with approval by the Regency. In 1846, Silas Wright spoke of belonging to ”the Republican party;” and, in 1848, Horace Greeley suggested ”Taylor Republicans” as a subst.i.tute for Whigs. But for twenty years the name had practically fallen into disuse, and old questions a.s.sociated with it had died out of popular memory.

After full conferences between the Whig and Republican state committees, calls were issued for two state conventions to meet at Syracuse on September 26. This meant an opportunity for the formal union of all anti-slavery voters. Of the two hundred and fifty-six delegates allotted to the Republican convention, over two hundred a.s.sembled, with Reuben E. Fenton as their presiding officer. Fenton, then thirty-six years old, was serving his first term in Congress. He was a man of marked intellectual vigour, unquestioned courage, and quiet courtesy, whose ability to control men was to give him, within a few years, something of the influence possessed by Thurlow Weed as a managing politician, with this difference, perhaps, that Fenton trusted more to the prevalence of ideas for which he stood. He kept step with progress. His reason for being a Barnburner, unlike that of John A. Dix,[462] grew out of an intense hatred of slavery, and after the historic break in 1847, he never again, with full-heartedness, co-operated with the Democratic party. Fenton studied law, and, for a time, practised at the bar, but if the dream and highest ambition of his youth were success in the profession, his natural love for trade and politics quickly gained the ascendant. It is doubtful if he would have become a leading lawyer even in his own vicinage, for he showed little real capacity for public speaking. Indeed, he was rather a dull talker. The _Globe_, during his ten years in Congress, rarely reveals him as doing more than making or briefly sustaining a motion, and, although these frequently occurred at the most exciting moments of partisan discussion, showing that he was carefully watching, if not fearlessly directing affairs, it is evident that for the hard blows in debate he relied as much as Weed did upon the readiness of other speakers.

[Footnote 462: ”He never became unduly excited about slavery. He had no sympathy for the religious or sentimental side of abolitionism, nor was he moved by the words of the philanthropists, preachers, or poets by whom the agitation was set ablaze and persistently fanned. He probably regarded it as an evil of less magnitude than several others that threatened the country.”--Morgan Dix, _Memoirs of John A. Dix_, Vol. 1, p. 338.]

The Whigs, who had represented only a meagre minority of the voters of the State since the Know-Nothing defection, now responded to the call with a full quota of delegates, and elected John A. King president.

King was nearly double the age of Fenton. He had been a lieutenant of cavalry in the War of 1812 and an opponent of DeWitt Clinton in the early twenties. The two men presented a broad contrast, yet King represented the traditions of the past along the same lines that Fenton represented the hopes of the future. One looked his full age, the other appeared younger than he was, but both were serious.

Whatever their aspirations, they existed without rivalry or ill-feeling, the desire for the success of their principles alone animating leaders and followers.

Each convention organised separately, and, after adopting platforms and dividing their tickets equally between men of Whig and Democratic antecedents, conference committees of sixteen were appointed, which reported that the two bodies should appoint committees of sixteen on resolutions and of thirty-two on nominations. These committees having quickly agreed to what had already been done, the Whigs marched in a body to the hall of the Republican convention, the delegates rising and greeting them with cheers and shouts of welcome as they took the seats reserved for them in the centre of the room.

The occasion was one of profound rejoicing. The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders during the next half-century doubtless had a period of feebleness in the first months of its existence; but never in its history has it had stronger or more influential men in its ranks, or abler and more determined leaders to direct its course. Horace Greeley reported its platform, demanding that Congress expressly prohibit slavery in the territories, and condemning the doctrines and methods of the Know-Nothings; John A.

King, Edwin D. Morgan, and Reuben E. Fenton, destined to lead it to victory as its candidate for governor, sat upon the stage; Henry J.

Raymond occupied a delegate's seat; and, back of the scenes, stood the great manager, Thurlow Weed, who had conferred with the Free-soil leaders, and antic.i.p.ated and arranged every detail. Present in spirit, though absent in body, was William H. Seward, who, within a few weeks, put himself squarely at the head of the new organisation in a speech that was read by more than half a million voters.

After the enthusiasm had subsided the two chairmen, John A. King and Reuben E. Fenton, standing side by side, called the joint convention to order. This was the signal for more cheering. One delegate declared that not being quite sure which convention he ought to attend, he had applied to Seward, who wrote him it didn't make any difference. ”You will go in by two doors, but you will all come out through one.” Then everything went by acclamation. Speaker Littlejohn of the a.s.sembly moved that the two conventions ratify the platforms pa.s.sed by each convention; Elbridge G. Spaulding moved that the presidents of the two conventions appoint a state central committee; and John A. King moved that the names of the candidates, at the head of whom was Preston King for secretary of state, be given to the people of the State as the ”Republican Ticket.” Only when an effort was made to procure the indors.e.m.e.nt of liquor prohibition did the convention show its teeth.

The invitation, it was argued, included all men who were disposed to unite in resisting the aggressions and the diffusion of slavery, and a majority, by a ringing vote, declared it bad faith to insist upon a matter for which the convention was not called and upon which it was not unanimous.

The Know-Nothing state convention met at Auburn on September 26. It was no longer a secret society. The terrors surrounding its mysterious machinery had vanished with the exposure of its secrets and the exploiting of its methods. It was now holding open political conventions and adopting political platforms under the t.i.tle of the American party; and, as in other political organisations, the slavery question provoked hot controversies and led to serious breaks in its ranks. At its national council, held at Philadelphia in the preceding June, the New York delegation, controlled by the Silver-Gray faction which forced Daniel Ullman's nomination for governor in 1854, had joined the Southern delegates in carrying a pro-slavery resolution abandoning further efforts to restore the Missouri Compromise. In this action the anti-slavery members of other Northern States, led with great ability and courage by Henry Wilson of Ma.s.sachusetts, refused to acquiesce, preferring to abandon the Order rather than sacrifice their principles. The contest in New York was renewed at the state council, held at Binghamton on August 28; and, after a bitter session, a majority resolved that slavery should derive no extension from the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. The convention at Auburn now took similar ground. It was not a great victory for the anti-slavery wing of the party; but it disproved the a.s.surances of their delegates that the Americans of New York would uphold the pro-slavery action at Philadelphia, while the fervent heat of the conflict melted the zeal of thousands of anti-Nebraska Know-Nothings, who soon found their way into the Republican party.

But the main body of the Americans, crushed as were its hopes of national unity, was still powerful. It put a ticket into the field, headed by Joel T. Headley for secretary of state, and greatly strengthened by George F. Comstock of Syracuse for judge of the Court of Appeals. Headley was a popular and prolific writer. He had been educated for the ministry at Union College and Auburn Theological Seminary, but his pen paid better than the pulpit, and he soon settled down into a writer of melodramatic biography, of which _Napoleon and His Marshals_ attained, perhaps, the greatest popularity. Possibly little interest now clings to his books, which ordinarily rest on the high shelf with Abbott's _History of Napoleon_; but, in their day, it was far pleasanter to read the entertaining and dramatic pages of Headley, with their impa.s.sioned, stirring pictures of war and heroism, than the tame, tedious biographies that then filled the libraries.

Headley's _History of the War of 1812_ immediately preceded his entrance to the a.s.sembly in 1854, where his cleverness attracted the attention of his party and led to his selection for secretary of state. George F. Comstock, now in his forty-first year, had already won an enviable reputation at the Onondaga bar. Like Headley he was a graduate of Union College. In 1847, Governor Young had appointed him the first reporter for the Court of Appeals, and five years later President Fillmore made him solicitor of the Treasury Department. He belonged to the Hards, but he sympathised with the tenets of the young American party.

There were other parties in the field. The Free Democracy met in convention on August 7, and the Liberty party, a.s.sembling at Utica on September 12, nominated Frederick Dougla.s.s of Monroe, then a young coloured man of thirty-eight, for secretary of state, and Lewis Tappan of New York for comptroller. Dougla.s.s' life had been full of romance.

Neither his white father nor coloured mother appears to have had any idea of the prodigy they brought into the world; but it is certain his Maryland master discovered in the little slave boy the great talents that a hard life in Baltimore could not suppress. Dougla.s.s secretly began teaching himself to read and write before he was ten years of age, and three years after his escape from slavery at the age of twenty-one, he completely captured an audience at an anti-slavery convention in Nantucket by his brilliant speaking. This gave him employment as an agent of the Ma.s.sachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and four years later brought him crowded audiences, in England, Scotland, and Ireland.

Frederick Dougla.s.s was a favourite everywhere. He had wit and humour, and spoke with the refinement of a cultivated scholar. He did not become a narrow and monotonous agitator. The variety of his intellectual sympathies, controlled by the constancy of a high moral impulse, wholly exempted him from the rashness of a conceited zealot; and, though often brilliant and at times rhetorical, his style was quiet and persuasive, reaching the reason as easily as the emotions.

Coming as he did, out of slavery, at a time when the anti-slavery sentiment was beginning to be aggressive and popular in New England and other free States, Dougla.s.s seemed to be the Moses of his race as much as Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton in these later years. Englishmen raised one hundred and fifty pounds and bought his freedom in 1846. The next year, as a Garrisonian disunionist, he began the publication of a weekly journal in Rochester; but he soon renounced disunionism, maintaining that slavery was illegal and unconst.i.tutional. In the year the Liberty party nominated him for secretary of state, his publishers sold eighteen thousand copies of his autobiography, ent.i.tled _My Bondage and My Freedom_.

Before the campaign was far advanced it became evident that the Republican party was not drawing all the anti-slavery elements to which it was thought to be ent.i.tled; and, on the 12th of October, Seward made a speech in Albany, answering the question, ”Shall we form a new party?” The hall was little more than two-thirds filled, and an absence of joyous enthusiasm characterised the meeting. Earnest men sat with serious faces, thinking of party ties severed and the work of a lifetime apparently snuffed out, with deep forebodings for the future of the new organisation. This was a time to appeal to reason--not to the emotions, and Seward met it squarely with a storehouse of arguments. He sketched the history of slavery's growth as a political power; he explained that slave-holders were a privileged cla.s.s, getting the better of the North in appropriations and by the tariff. ”Protection is denied to your wool,” he said, ”while it is freely given to their sugar.” Then he pointed out how slavery had grasped the territories as each one presented itself for admission into the Union--Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama, almost at the very outset of the national career; then Florida, when acquired from Spain; then as much of the Louisiana Purchase as possible; then Texas and the territory acquired from Mexico--all the while deluding the North with the specious pretence that each successive seizure of free soil was a ”compromise” and a final settlement of the slavery question. This opened the way to the matter in hand--how to meet slavery's aggressiveness. ”Shall we take the American party?” he asked. ”It stifles its voice, and suppresses your own free speech, lest it may be overheard beyond the Potomac. In the slave-holding States it justifies all wrongs committed against you. Shall we unite ourselves to the Democratic party? If so, to which faction? The Hards who are so stern in defending the aggressions, and in rebuking the Administration through whose agency they are committed? or the Softs who protest against the aggressions, while they sustain and invigorate the Administration? What is it but the same party which has led in the commission of all those aggressions, and claims exclusively the political benefits? Shall we report ourselves to the Whig party? Where is it? It was a strong and vigorous party, honourable for energy, n.o.ble achievement, and still more n.o.ble enterprises. It was moved by panics and fears to emulate the Democratic party in its practised subserviency; and it yielded in spite of your remonstrances, and of mine, and now there is neither Whig party nor Whig south of the Potomac. Let, then, the Whig party pa.s.s. It committed a grievous fault, and grievously hath it answered it. Let it march off the field, therefore, with all the honours....

The Republican organisation has laid a new, sound, and liberal platform. Its principles are equal and exact justice; its speech open, decided, and frank. Its banner is untorn in former battles, and unsullied by past errors. That is the party for us.”[463]

[Footnote 463: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 256. For full speech, see _Seward's Works_, Vol. 4, p. 225.]

When the meeting ended the people went out satisfied. The smallness of the audience had been forgotten in the clear, homely arguments, and in the glow kindled in every heart; nor did they know that the speech spoken in their hearing would be read and pondered by half a million voters within a month. Richard H. Dana p.r.o.nounced it ”the keynote of the new party.”[464] But though sown in fruitful soil, insufficient time was to elapse before election for such arguments to root and blossom; and when the votes were counted in November, the Know-Nothings had polled 146,001, the Republicans 135,962, the Softs 90,518, and the Hards 58,394. Samuel L. Selden, the candidate of the Hards and Softs for judge of the Court of Appeals, had 149,702.

George F. Comstock was also declared elected, having received 141,094, or nearly 5000 less than Headley for secretary of state. In the a.s.sembly the Republicans numbered 44, the Know-Nothings 39, and the Hards and Softs 45.

[Footnote 464: _Diary of R.H. Dana_, C.F. Adams, _Life of Dana_, Vol.

1, p. 348.]

”The events of the election,” wrote Seward, ”show that the Silver-Grays have been successful in a new and attractive form, so as to divide a majority of the people in the cities and towns from the great question of the day. That is all. The rural districts still remain substantially sound. A year is necessary to let the cheat wear off.”[465] To a friend who was greatly alarmed at the success of the Know-Nothings, he wrote: ”There is just so much gas in any ascending balloon. Before the balloon is down, the gas must escape. But the balloon is always sure not only to come down, but to come down _very quick_. The heart of the country is fixed on higher and n.o.bler things.

Do not distrust it.”[466]

[Footnote 465: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 258.]

[Footnote 466: _Ibid._, p. 259.]