Mr. Tilden was now back in the Democratic party, and acting in harmonious accord with Mr. Kelly. Not so Mr. Lucius Robinson. This gentleman, whose famous gubernatorial contest with Mr. Kelly twenty-three years later attracted national attention, and operated disastrously on the fortunes of Mr. Tilden, now left the Democrats and joined the Republican party. At a Fremont convention held at Syracuse, New York, July 25, 1856, resolutions denouncing the Democratic conventions, State and National, were adopted. The committee reporting these resolutions, of which Lucius Robinson was a member, also submitted an address which was adopted. “Mr. Buchanan,” it was said in this address, “the candidate of the Cincinnati Convention, stands pledged to make the resolutions of that convention his rule of practice. Such a candidate, under such circumstances, we cannot support. Mr. Fremont, who has been nominated by the Republicans, is an acceptable choice. In his hands the Presidential office will be vigorously and justly administered. We have, therefore, nominated him for the Presidency, and his associate Mr. Dayton, for the Vice-Presidency, and will use every honorable effort to secure their election, that we may rescue the Presidential office from the degradation into which it has fallen, and the politics of the country from the corruption which is fast undermining our best institutions.” Mr. Robinson’s committee also arraigned President Pierce for the “deplorable misrule of the present administration.”
For twenty years Lucius Robinson continued to be an active Republican. In 1876 when Mr. Tilden insisted on that gentleman’s nomination as Democratic candidate for Governor of New York, Mr. Kelly called Mr. Tilden’s attention to the record of his candidate, and advised against his nomination. As Mr. Tilden still insisted, and was himself the Democratic candidate for President, Mr. Kelly gave Mr. Robinson his support, in order not to weaken the national ticket. Robinson was elected Governor. His administration will long be memorable for the proscriptive policy adopted by the Governor against a respectable and powerful wing of the Democratic party. He surrounded himself with an inner council, or star chamber, and stretched the Executive prerogative of arraigning and removing Democratic officials to the verge of tyranny. It soon became evident that no Democrat, howsoever irreproachable in the walks of life, who did not belong to the Governor’s faction, and who might be reached by Mr. Robinson, could count on his safety in office, or feel himself secure for an hour from the vengeance of the Executive. To follow John Kelly, or to adhere to the Tammany Hall Democracy, became an atrocious crime in the estimation of Lucius Robinson. The revolt against Robinson which soon took place, cleared the moral atmosphere wonderfully, and proved that the spirit of manhood which De Witt Clinton half a century earlier infused into the politics of New York, when he rebelled against a similar tyranny, was still to be relied upon in an emergency.
The rise of political Abolitionism presents a curious study, and this rapid outline of its genesis has been deemed necessary. Mr. Kelly at the juncture now reached was in a position to take an important and conservative part in the great anti-slavery controversy, about which so many angry passions have been lashed, and whose true history has not yet been written. The Democratic party of the State of New York has always been a quarrelsome family. De Witt Clinton and Van Buren were leaders of rival factions; Wright and Marcy renewed the controversy; and Tilden and Kelly, in the present generation, inherited the local feuds and marshalled the contending hosts of their party in the State. Settled first by the Dutch, New York was more rapidly colonized by the Puritans, and later by the Irish and Germans. Contrarieties of race sped the growth and power of the Empire State, but produced those antagonisms among its people, which have been more intense there than in any other State in the Union. Clinton, sprung from Irish stock, was at war with Van Buren, who, although of Dutch blood, became the leader of the New York Puritans. In the days of Jackson and Calhoun the quarrel was revived over the disputes in which those two celebrated national leaders, theretofore devoted friends, were embroiled by Martin Van Buren about the year 1830. Calhoun was supplanted in Jackson’s affections, and Van Buren, thanks to Peggie O’Neil, succeeded to the Presidency. But Calhoun’s retributive blows in 1840 and 1844 prostrated Van Buren, and destroyed his ascendency in the Democratic party. Stripped of dear bought power, Van Buren resolved on revenge, and in 1848 turned on the National Democratic party itself, of which Mr. Calhoun was then the powerful leader. Persons of a retrospective imagination may indulge in day dreams over what might have been the destiny of the United States, and over what other and happier story the Muse of History might have related, had Martin Van Buren restrained his feelings, and not rushed headlong into the camp of the Abolitionists. Pursuing the same pleasing train of reflection, they might say—if the Van Buren bolt had not occurred, the supreme calamity of disunion and war, which Henry Clay and Daniel Webster by the most marvellous exercise of statesmanship averted in 1850, might not have taken place in 1860. But this is all idle speculation, like the saying that if Richard Cromwell had possessed the genius of his father, he would have fixed the Protectorate in his family, which Count Joseph de Maistre brushes away with the pithy remark, that “this is precisely the same as to declare, if the Cromwell family had not ceased to rule it would rule still.”[14]
John Kelly was trained in the school of William L. Marcy, who, in consideration of his pre-eminent abilities, was chosen Secretary of State by General Pierce, and as the New Hampshire organ of the President, the Concord Patriot declared, because Mr. Marcy had “completely succeeded in re-uniting the Democracy of New York.” Mr. Kelly occupied a similar position to that taken by Horatio Seymour in relation to African slavery. Regarding slavery as an evil, Kelly believed, if the principles of Jefferson should be allowed to work out their legitimate results without infraction of the compromises of the Constitution, that the Southern States themselves in time would adopt the policy of emancipation. This was the sentiment Washington and Jefferson[15] had often expressed, and which John Randolph put in practice by emancipating his four hundred slaves. Charles Fenton Mercer, a Virginia statesman whose zeal for the negro was no less ardent than that of Dr. Channing, the Boston philanthropist, devoted his life to the extinction of slavery in Virginia. In 1836 John Letcher and Charles James Faulkner championed a bill for gradual emancipation in the Legislature of the same State. The Emancipationists did their share in the interest of the black man, long before the Abolitionists began their agitation. In estimating the influence of the two forces upon the destinies of the negro race, greater sobriety of statement than that of partisans will be required for the purposes of history. Whether the views of Senator Ingalls of Kansas on John Brown are more correct than those of Mr. Daniel B. Lucas of West Virginia on John Randolph, or whether the verdict of posterity will pronounce both eulogists at fault, it is beyond the power of any man of this generation satisfactorily to decide. “Scholars,” Ingalls says, “orators, poets, philanthropists play their parts, but the crisis comes through some one whom the world regards as a fanatic or impostor, and whom the supporters of the system he assails crucify between thieves or gibbet as a felon. It required generations to arouse the conscience of the American people to the enormous iniquity of African slavery. The classical orators, the scholarly declaimers and essayists performed their work. They furnished the formulas for popular use and expression, but old John Brown, with his pikes, did more in one brief hour to render slavery impossible than all the speechmakers and soothsayers had done in a quarter of a century, and he will be remembered when they and their works are lost in dusty oblivion.”[16]
“In regard to African slavery,” Lucas says, “which has played so important a part in our political history, Randolph was an Emancipationist as distinguished from an Abolitionist. This distinction was a very broad one; as broad as that between Algernon Sidney and Jack Cade. It was the difference between Reason and Fanaticism. On this subject Randolph and Clay concurred; both were Emancipationists, and both denounced the Abolitionists, as did also Webster and all the best, wisest and purest men of that day. Randolph was right in his denunciation of the Abolitionists. They were a pestilent class of agitators who, for the most part, with little or no stake in the community, mounted their hobby-horses, Hatred and Fanaticism, and rode them, like Ruin and Darkness, the steeds of Lucifer in Bailey’s “Festus,” over the fairest portion of our Republic. An exhaustless empire of land has enabled the nation to survive this substitution of the methods of Abolition for those of Emancipation; but the eternal truth remains the same, that the one was legitimate and the other internecine; and to justify the Abolitionists, because Emancipation followed their efforts would be to justify the crime of the Crucifixion because Redemption followed the Cross.”[17]
The Democratic party in New York, after the Buffalo Convention, became divided upon the subject of slavery, and the Wilmot Proviso tended to widen the breach. Barnburners who trained under Van Buren, and Hunkers who followed the lead of Marcy, although all claimed to be Democrats, were more bitter against each other than against those of the opposite party. The election of Franklin Pierce in 1852, upon a platform which proclaimed the inviolability of the Compromise Measures of 1850, served to soften the asperities existing in the Democratic party of New York. Before that time, Marcy and Seymour, both Hunkers, had declared “that opinions upon slavery should not be made a test” of party loyalty. Daniel S. Dickinson, then a Democratic extremist, who afterwards became a Republican extremist, took opposite ground, and refused to unite with the Barnburners. This led to the division of the New York Democracy into “Hards” and “Softs.” And it is here, after these divisions had taken shape, that John Kelly came forward, and acted an interesting and conspicuous part in this great sectional controversy. His action and influence in the Soft Shell Conventions of August 29, 1855, and January 10, 1856, although he was not a delegate to the latter Convention, proved him to be a statesman of commanding abilities.
The New York Soft Shell Democratic Convention of 1855 was composed of gentlemen who represented three distinct factions in the Democratic party.
First, of those who had not recanted their Free-soil sentiments of 1848, and were still simon-pure Barnburners, utterly opposed to any compromise with slaveholders, or the admission of another State into the Union with the institution of slavery recognized in its constitution.
Secondly, of those who had previously occupied the same ground as the first class, but who now enjoyed the patronage and favor of the Pierce administration in New York, and who had abandoned their Buffalo platform, and accepted the principles of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, prohibiting slavery in all territories, except Missouri, lying north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude.
Thirdly, of those who accepted the Webster-Clay Compromise of 1850 as a settlement “in principle and in substance” of the slavery question in all the territories, and who, therefore, acquiesced in the legislation of 1854 in re-affirmation of that memorable compromise.