J. Watson Webb, fiery as ever in spirit, still ran the Courier and Enquirer, “the Austrian organ in Wall Street,” as Raymond called it because of Webb’s hostile attitude toward Kossuth. Webb had been minister to Austria, a post for which Raymond was afterward to be nominated but not confirmed. The newspapers and the people were all pretty well satisfied with themselves. And then Stephen A. Douglas put his foot in it, and Kansas began to bleed.
Douglas had been one of the Sun’s great men, for the Sun listed heavily toward the Democratic party nationally; but it did not disguise its dislike of the Little Giant’s unhappily successful effort to organize the Territories of Kansas and Nebraska on the principle of squatter sovereignty. After the peace and quiet that had followed the Missouri Compromise, this attempt to bring slavery across the line of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes by means of a local-option scheme looked to the Sun very much like kicking a sleeping dragon in the face.
After Douglas had been successful in putting his bill through Congress, the Sun still rejected its principles. Commenting on the announcements of certain Missourians that they would take their slaves into the new Territory, the Sun said:
They may certainly take their slaves with them into the new Territory, but when they get them there they will have no law for holding the slaves. Slavery is a creation of local law, and until a Legislature of Kansas or Nebraska enacts a law recognizing slavery, all slaves taken into the Territory will be entitled to their freedom.
It was at this time that the germs of Secession began to show themselves on the culture-plates of the continent. The Sun was hot at the suggestion of a division of the Union:
It can only excite contempt when any irate member of Congress or fanatical newspaper treats the dissolution of the Union as an event which may easily be brought about. There is moral treason in this habit of continually depreciating the value of the Union.
The Sun saw that Douglas’s repeal of the Missouri Compromise was a smashing blow delivered by a Northern Democrat to the Democracy of the North; but the sectional hatred was not revealed in all its intensity until 1856, when Representative Preston S. Brooks, of South Carolina, made his murderous attack on Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, in the Senate Chamber. This and its immediate consequences were well covered by the Sun, not only through its Associated Press despatches, but also in special correspondence from its Washington representative, “Hermit.” It had a report nearly a column long of Sumner’s speech, “The Crime Against Kansas,” which caused Brooks to assault the great opponent of slavery.
That year was also the year of the first national convention of the Republican party, conceived by the Abolitionists, the Free Soilers, and the Know-nothings, and born in 1854. The Sun had a special reporter at Philadelphia to tell of the nomination of John C. Frémont, but the paper supported Buchanan. Its readers were of a class naturally Democratic, and although the paper was not a party organ, and had no liking for slavery or Secession, the new party was too new, perhaps too much colored with Know-nothingism, to warrant a change of policy.
On the subject of the Dred Scott decision, written by Chief Justice Taney and handed down two days after Buchanan’s inauguration, the Sun was blunt:
We believe that the State of New York can confer citizenship on men of whatever race, and that its citizens are entitled, by the Constitution, to be treated in Missouri as citizens of New York State. To treat them otherwise is to discredit our State sovereignty.