“YEAR OF METEORS”
Abraham Lincoln, the man for whom the hour cried out, was not quite unknown to fame.[239] Ten years older than Whitman, and like Whitman owning to a strain of Quaker blood in his veins, he belonged by origin to the South and by adoption to the West. After six years’ service in the Illinois Legislature, and a term in the Lower House at Washington, he settled down at the age of forty to his profession as a country lawyer.
In 1854 the repeal of the Missouri compromise in favour of “squatter sovereignty” recalled him to political life, and he became the champion of Free-soil principles in his State, against the chief sponsor of the opposing doctrine, the “little giant of Illinois,” Judge Stephen Douglas. His reply to Douglas in October of that year was read and applauded by his party throughout America.
Hitherto he had been a Whig, and during Clay’s lifetime, his devoted follower, but the repeal of the compromise was followed in 1856 by the formation of a new party, and Lincoln and Whitman both became “black republicans”. “Barnburners,” Abolitionists and “Anti-Nebraska” men—those that is to say who opposed the application of the doctrine of “squatter sovereignty” to Nebraska and Kansas—had united to form a new Free-soil party. They nominated J. C. Frémont, the gallant Californian “Path-finder” for the Presidency; but, owing to the presence of a third candidate put forward by the Know-nothing Whigs—whose only policy seems to have been a “patriotic” hatred of all Catholics and foreigners—the Democratic nominee was elected for the last time in a generation. After his four years were out, a succession of Republican Presidents occupied the White House for twenty-four years.
James Buchanan, who defeated Frémont—becoming like Lincoln, his successor, a minority President—seems to have been an honourable and well-intentioned Pennsylvanian, but he was a man whose character was quite insufficient for his new office. As an injudicious, short-sighted diplomatist, he had already, when minister at St. James’s in the days of President Pierce, commended his intrigues for the annexation of Cuba.
Earlier in 1856 Chief Justice Taney, of the Supreme Court, had delivered his notorious decision in the Dred Scott case; laying it down that Congress could not forbid a citizen to carry his property into the public domain—that is to say, it could not prohibit slavery in the territories—and that, in the political sense of the word, a negro was not a “man,” but only property. This decision and the bloody scenes enacted in Kansas, where settlers from the North and South were met to struggle for the constitution which should make the new State either slave or free, greatly exasperated public opinion, and called forth, among others, the protests of Abraham Lincoln.
In 1858, while Whitman was studying oratory, Lincoln was stumping Illinois, in those ever-memorable debates which laid bare all the plots and purposes of the Southern politicians. When the votes in that contest were counted, Lincoln held an actual majority; but Douglas was returned as Senator by a majority of the electoral votes. Though thus defeated, Lincoln was no longer hidden in a Western obscurity. He was a man with a future; and America had half-unconsciously recognised him.
Towards the close of 1859, the fire which had been kindled in Kansas flashed out suddenly in Virginia. America was startled by the news of John Brown’s raid, and the capture of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry.
Brown was among the most remarkable personalities of the time; and while some saw in him a religious fanatic of the Roundhead type, who compelled his enemies to pray at the muzzle of his musket, and who for the Abolition cause would shatter the Union; others counted him a martyr for the cause of freedom. Emerson had been one of his most earnest backers when first he went to Kansas; and now his deed fired the enthusiasm of New England. Thoreau wrote: “No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any Government”; and when he was hung, it was Thoreau who vehemently declared that John Brown seemed to him to be the only man in America who had not died.[240] His high spirit quickened the conscience of the North, and two years later its sons marched into Virginia singing the song of his apotheosis.