The Zealot and the Emancipator by H. W. Brands

Author:H. W. Brands [Brands, H. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

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THE QUESTION OF Brown’s sanity exercised nearly everyone involved in the slavery debate. Many Southerners had long deemed abolitionists mad for trying to overturn the South’s beneficent institution, or if not certifiably mad, then hysterical in the lengths to which they took their false altruism. Other Southerners, though, reckoned that imputations of insanity would let the North off too easily. They contended that actions like Brown’s were the all-too-logical consequence of allowing the abolitionists a place at the political table.

The Republican party had a special interest in Brown. From nothing in 1854 the Republicans had become the equals of the Democrats, whose lineage ran back to Thomas Jefferson. Their first presidential candidate, John Frémont, had come close to winning the White House; their next candidate would have an even better chance, unless something unforeseen occurred.

Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry might be just that something. Republicans at once took cover. “We are damnably exercised about the effect of Old Brown’s wretched fiasco in Virginia upon the health of the Republican party!” a Chicago Republican wrote to Abraham Lincoln. “The old idiot—the quicker they hang him and get him out of the way, the better.” Republicans in Chicago were contending that Brown had nothing to do with them. “You see how we treat it,” Lincoln’s correspondent continued. “I hope we occupy the right ground.”

Some Republicans had trouble getting out of the way. William Seward was the best known of the Republicans, having been a senator from New York for a decade, starting with the Whig party. Antislavery sentiments sat well with New York voters, and Seward had indulged himself on numerous occasions, including his first speech in the Senate, in which he bearded the lions of the Whig party, Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay and Webster contended that the Constitution required what they were proposing as the Compromise of 1850; Seward rejoined that there was “a higher law than the Constitution.” Seward’s assertion didn’t scuttle the compromise, yet it helped torpedo the Whig party. And it put him at the head of Republicans looking toward the White House as the 1860 election approached.

But it also made him vulnerable to charges that his “higher law” was exactly what extremists like John Brown appealed to, and that Seward would do to the Republicans what he had already done to the Whigs. Some in the party chafed at evidence that Seward was already awarding himself the nomination. “He has forgotten everything else, even that he is a senator and has duties as such,” one of his Senate colleagues, a Maine Republican, asserted, adding that Seward affected “the airs of a president.”

Seward’s opponents allowed themselves to imagine that John Brown could save the party rather than wreck it, by denying Seward the nomination. “Since the humbug insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, I presume Mr. Seward will not be urged,” a Pennsylvania Republican wrote hopefully to Lincoln.

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