美国内战与重建美国内战与重建transcript09.doc

Civil War and Reconstruction: Lecture 9 TranscriptFebruary 12, 2008 backProfessor David Blight: On a morning in the second week of March, 1857, Americans grew up living-they didnt all quite understand it yet-but they grew up living in the land of the Dred Scott decision. And if you were African-American, that really meant something. Now 1857 is, of course, the final year of the playing out of Bleeding Kansas and well return to that in just a second. And were going to discuss mostly today the story of one abolitionist; you could say the most famous abolitionist, certainly the most notorious American abolitionist, John Brown. John Brown never made it easy for people to love him. In some ways he wasnt very lovable, until he died on the gallows, and the gallows made him heroic-at least to some people-and it made him all but the devil to others. There are catalytic events in history, that is, events around which ideas, forces, movements, problems coalesce. Unfortunately, they often have a lot to do with violence, and well come back to this point at the end today. But John Brown was far, far, far, far more important dead than hed ever been alive. Poets, songwriters, lyricists, biographers, those who would come to love him, those who would come to hate him, and those who cannot quite figure out what to do with him, would never stop writing about him. And we still havent. And were in the midst right now of a John Brown biography revival. Thats in part because next year is the 150th anniversary of the Harpers Ferry raid. Almost all major African-American poets in the twentieth century attempted their John Brown poem. So did Stephen Vincent Bent in a famous and classic lyric, epic poem called John Browns Body, published in the 1920s. And embedded in that poem is this verse where Bent, I think, captured the dilemma of John Brown. John Brown-its not easy to decide-was he a heroic revolutionary or a midnight terrorist? This is Bents verse, embedded in a 250-page epic poem. The law is our yardstick and it measures well, oh well enough when there are yards to measure. Measure a wave with it, measure fire, cut sorrow up in inches, weigh content. You can weigh John Browns body well enough, but how and in what balance do you weigh John Brown? He had no gift for life, no gift to bring life, but his body and a cutting edge, and he knew how to die. More on old John Brown coming up. The year before John Browns raid the most important, the most exhilarating, and by far the most substantively interesting political debates in American history would occur in Illinois, when Abraham Lincoln runs for the U.S. Senate against Stephen Douglas-Stephen Douglas, the same Stephen Douglas, author of the Kansas-Nebraska Act; parliamentarian genius of the Compromise of 1850; the man most associated with the Democratic Partys theory of popular sovereignty for Kansas and Nebraska and the whole of the West. And this guy, Abe Lincoln, with one term in the U.S. House of Representatives and then a failed attempt at re-election, a guy with very little experience when he ran for President. In the opening of his campaign he decided to open it in the Legislative Hall of the old State House in Illinois. It was on the outside steps of that State House where Barack Obama began his campaign almost exactly a year ago. But inside, Lincoln gave his now famous House Divided speech. Now in your reader, your Lincoln Reader, edited by Mike Johnson, you have the House Divided speech, but read past the first page. Dont just read that first lyrical, biblical paragraph, read what Lincoln goes on the argue. The speech is about the Dred Scott decision. The speech is his opposition to the Dred-to the Supreme Court case that had just been passed the year before. The speech is his opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act. His speech is a warning. Its the warning of a moderate Republican, but nevertheless a moderate, anti-slavery, free soil Republican who throws down the gauntlet, in the wake of Dred Scott. This is a sentence on the fifth page of the House Divided Speech, page 68 in your reader if you look it up. We shall lie down soon, said Abraham Lincoln, pleasantly dreaming that the people of Missouri are on the verge of making their State free, and we shall awake the next morning to the reality instead that the Supreme Court has made Illinois a Slave State. Get his drift. The Dred Scott decision, in his view, and the view now of most in this new, extraordinary coalition, the Republican Party, believes the Dred Scott decision now threatens everybody-north, south, and west-with the presence of slavery, and slave labor, and all that goes with it. Its the opening of that speech though, of course, that the world always remembers, and we love to return to this in our political culture, in our political history, whenever we feel great polarization and great division. Are we a house divided again, against ourselves? If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending-this is so Lincoln; he kind of meanders in a bit of a homespun way into a very serious argument-we could then better judge what to do and how to do it. We are now far into the fifth year since a policy was initiated-Kansas-Nebraska-with the avowed object and confident promise of putting an end to the slavery agitation. Under the operation of that policy that agitation has not only not ceased but has constantly augmented. In my opinion it 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. Southerners never forgot that sentence. 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 a course of ultimate extinction-and those two words, more than anything else Lincoln had uttered before the Civil War, Southern Democrats would never forget-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. Have we no tendency to the latter condition? Let anyone who doubts carefully contemplate that now almost complete legal combination, piece of machinery so to speak-and here hes arguing the slave-power conspiracy, without naming it-compounded of the Nebraska doctrine and the Dred Scott decision, let him consider not only what work the machinery is adapted to do and how-the machinery-and how well adapted. But also let him study the history of its construction and trace, if he can, or rather fail if he can, to trace the evidences of design and concert of action among its chief bosses, from the beginning. Its all there; the Republican Party coalition of ideas and fears is all there. Well, what was everybody so angry about over the Dred Scott decision? Its just a Supreme Court decision. Well, I left you the other day hanging in abeyance. Dred Scott was, as I said, an old, old man by the time this thing finally got before the- got on the docket in 1854, finally was argued in late 1856 and early 1957. And when the court brought down its decision, literally two days, forty-eight hours after the inauguration of James Buchanan as President in 1857, his case was now, his name would now become almost a household word across the country. Now a measure of how important this case was as it was developing largely in legal secrecy was the kind of lawyers who argued it. Montgomery Blair and George Ticknor Curtis for Scott. Montgomery Blair was from the famous Blair family from Missouri, moderate anti-slavery leaning Republicans by this point in time, Member of Congress; George Ticknor Curtis, a former attorney-general, a very important, famous trial lawyer. And for the Government, another former U.S. Attorney General, Reverdy Johnson, and a U.S. Senator, Henry Geyer, were the layers. Reverdy Johnson made the startling statements in the arguments before the Supreme Court and called for a-he made startling statements and he called for a broader pronouncement from the court. He urged Justice Taney, the Chief Justice, and the court to render a big decision here and try, once and for all, to put this-as Lincoln called it-slavery agitation, this whole slavery in the Western Territories problem to rest. The Supreme Court after all is supreme. Reverdy Johnson said-I quote him-This is a case that shall determine whether slavery shall live forever. Forever; whether preservation of slavery was the only way to preserve the Union. The decision came on the 6th of March 1857, and here was the decision. Taney and the majority in the court did not have to go as far as they did. This is now legendary and famous, Taney developing his majority. And it was ultimately a six to three decision. And lest you think the Supreme Court doesnt really matter in our political history, please remember the Dred Scott decision. Number one part of the-there were three parts of the decision. The first was jurisdiction. Did Dred Scott as a black person have the right to sue-this is the first question they were asked to settle-the right to sue for anything in a Federal Court? Could a non-citizen, because he was a Negro-which was the language used then-sue in Federal Court? Two, did Scotts residence on free soil-remember his four years with Dr. Emerson, his former owner, from 1834 to 1838, living in Minnesota Territory-did his residence on free soil entitle him to freedom? Or, if a slave was taken by his owner to Free states or Free territories, was it the law of the State the master came from that always had jurisdiction? In other words, was it the law of Missouri that took precedent here, or the law of Minnesota? And the third question before the court-they didnt have to take this one up but they sure did-was Congresss right to determine slavery in the Western Territories.The pressures on the court were tremendous, as I said, to move for a broad decision, to try to put this thing to rest. Well the decision, of course, six to three. And at that point there were five southern born justices, five either slaveholders or former slaveholders on the Supreme Court. The sixth judge who voted with them was Greer of Pennsylvania, forming a majority against the three northern born justices who voted against it. The decision was, one, Scott had no right to sue in a Federal Court. Two, his residence on free soil did not give him his freedom, the law of Missouri was in place. And third, and by far most important, the court ruled-trying to put to rest now nearly forty years of this problem that had been compromised this way and compromised that way and argued with that principle and that principle and that principle, as weve seen-it ruled that Congress had no authority to exclude slavery from any U.S. territory because it would be, just as Southerners had been arguing now for two generations, a violation of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, a persons right to life, liberty, and property. If someone ever wants to doubt that American history is about its ironies, just note that language. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise Line, that so-called sacred pledge that had now been violated, said Northerners, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had never been constitutional to begin with; that any attempt to prevent slaverys expansion anywhere would be unconstitutional. Now, Taney not only went that far, but in his opinion, in his own written opinion, he famously went a step further and he argued-or he said, quote, that blacks, or negroes is the word he used, had-Im quoting-had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, so far inferior that they had no rights, which the white man was bound to respect. Some of the most infamous words ever in an American Supreme Court decision. Now, the decision, six to three, was issued. For this new Republican Party coalition in the North, in some ways this was horrible news and in some ways it was good political news, because nothing crystallized this Republican coalition now quite like this case. They will crystallize in resistance to it, as I just tried to demonstrate, from quoting from Lincolns famous House Divided speech. But most importantly here, Id argue-the hook to hang your hat on here-is that the Dred Scott decision, its not once and for all. The war is not necessarily now inevitable. Contingencies are always there, theyre always laying there to happen. But what the Dred Scott decision did almost once and for all, is that it destroyed compromise. It destroyed almost any conception now of consensus or compromise. Or put another way, it ruined moderation. Moderate politicians, former Democrats like David Wilmot from Pennsylvania, racist to the core, but free soiler whos joined the Republican Party. Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, got his own racial problems, but a much more advanced sort of anti-slavery thinker, but still a moderate-he didnt like abolitionists, hed never been a member of an Abolitionist Society and never would be-believed there were Constitutional restraints on what Congress could actually do about slavery. But it will bring together now some strange bedfellows in this Republican coalition who cannot find anymore any middle ground with their foes. And thats when you see danger-you more than see danger-in American political history. Its when the side that loses a debate cannot accept the result. Now, there are many ways to try to demonstrate the importance of that Dred Scott case as it sunk in. Now its sinking in now in the summer of 1857 as a depression hits the country. Wages in America, North, in northern cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia and so on, drop forty and fifty percent in six months. The estimate is that 100,000 workers in New York City were thrown out of work by the end of 1857; about 50,000 in Philadelphia. The prices of wheat go plummeting, practically overnight. The United States had one of its first significant stock market crashes. Theres a lot to be feared here. And on both sides of this, North and South, theyre going to blame each other. Southerners are going to blame Northerners for over-speculation, for the over-issuing of credit by banks. And, of course, theyre right about that. There were no controls on banks in these years. There was no Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; you only got that from the New Deal in the twentieth century. And Northerners are going to blame Southerners because of their belief in King Cotton and this kind of dependence on a single export. Theyre going to throw blame all over the place. If you were African-American you now lived in the land of the Dred Scott decision, which had said what? It said you will never be a citizen of the United States. You have no rights which the white man has to respect, which means the white mans Constitution, which means the white mans society. It means you live in the land of the Dred Scott decision that said you have no future in the United States. In the wake of the Dred Scott case, about a month after it, Frederick Douglass gave a speech, which was a bit uncustomary for him. In the 1850s Frederick Douglass was learning his politics, he was really was-he was getting his feet as a political thinker and even as a politician. He was trying to sidle up to this Republican Party, even though it was kind of a half-baked loaf of bread to him; it wasnt real abolitionism. This case drove him further into their laps. But he gave a speech, largely to a black audience, in the wake of Dred Scott. And so typical of Douglasss brilliance as an orator, he started to discuss how he saw fear on the horizon, and trouble and dread on the horizon, and he said he saw what he called the manifold discouragements of my people everywhere I go. I quote him. They fling their broad and gloomy shadows across the pathway of every thoughtful colored man in this country. And then he ended with this lament. I see them-these are discouragements-I see them clearly and feel them sadly with an earnest, aching heart. I have long looked for the realization of the hope of my people, standing as it were, barefoot, and treading upon the sharp and flinty rocks of the present and looking out upon the boundless sea of the future. I have sought in my humble way to penetrate the intervening mists and clouds and per chance to see in the distance, a time at which the cruel bondage of my people should somehow end, and the long entombed millions rise from their foul grave of slavery and death. But of that time I can now know nothing, and you can know nothing, and all is uncertain at this point. I walk by faith and not by sight. Thats Douglasss beautiful and terrible way of expressing that hes now told, as an African-American, you have no future in the United States. All right, so who was John Brown? That picture-Im going to show you just a couple of images here. John Brown, of course, has been a fascination for artists, to say the least. I dont want to take too much time with this. But this is a black and white version now-I dont know if you can see the rope up here. This is one of the 22 panels in Jacob Lawrences magnificent series on John Brown. Jacob Lawrence, a great African-American painter. He painted this in the 1930s. And at least 20 of the 22 images in Lawrences incredible series on John Brown, you will find some image of a crucifix, of execution, a hanging. When I was teaching at Amherst College, I dont know, eight or nine years ago, we had Jacob Lawrence for an Honorary Degree, and I got to spend like two days with him. It was one of the greatest thrills of my life. And the mu