The Life of Lyman Trumbull

On the eighth call, Matteson gained two votes, Lincoln fell to 27, and Trumbull received 18. On the ninth and tenth, Matteson had 47, Lincoln dropped to 15, and Trumbull rose to 35.

The excitement deepened, for it was believed that the next vote would be decisive. Matteson wanted only three of a majority, and the only way to prevent it was to turn Lincoln's fifteen to Trumbull, or Trumbull's thirty-five to Lincoln. Obviously the former was the only safe move, for none of Lincoln's men would go to Matteson in any kind of shuffle, whereas three of Trumbull's men might easily be lost if an attempt were made to transfer them to the Whig leader. Lincoln was the first to see the imminent danger and the first to apply the remedy. In fact he was the only one who could have done so, since the fifteen supporters who still clung to him would never have left him except at his own request. He now besought his friends to vote for Trumbull. Some natural tears were shed by Judge Logan when he yielded to the appeal. He said that the demands of principle were superior to those of personal attachment, and he transferred his vote to Trumbull. All of the remaining fourteen followed his example, and there was a gain of one vote that had been previously cast for Archibald Williams. So the tenth and final roll-call gave Trumbull fifty-one votes, and Matteson forty-seven. One member still voted for Williams and one did not vote at all. Thus the one hundred members of the joint convention were accounted for, and Trumbull became Senator by a majority of one.

This result astounded the Democrats. They were more disappointed by it than they would have been by the election of Lincoln. They regarded Trumbull as an arch traitor. That he and his fellow traitors Palmer, Judd, and Cook should have carried off the great prize was an unexpected dose; but they did not know how bitter it was until Trumbull took his seat in the Senate and opened fire on the Nebraska Bill.

Lincoln took his defeat in good part. Later in the evening there was a reception given at the house of Mr. Ninian Edwards, whose wife was a sister of Mrs. Lincoln. He had been much interested in Lincoln's success and was greatly surprised to hear, just before the guests began to arrive, that Trumbull had been elected. He and his family were easily reconciled to the result, however, since Mrs. Trumbull had been from girlhood a favorite among them. When she and Trumbull arrived, they were naturally the centre of attraction. Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln came in a little later. The hostess and her daughters greeted them most cordially, saying that they had wished for his success, and that while he must be disappointed, yet he should bear in mind that his principles had won. Mr. Lincoln smiled, moved toward the newly elected Senator, and saying, "Not too disappointed to congratulate my friend Trumbull," warmly shook his hand.

Lincoln's account of this election, in a letter to Hon. E. B. Washburne, concludes by saying:

I regret my defeat moderately, but I am not nervous about it. I could have headed off every combination and been elected had it not been for Matteson's double game—and his defeat now gives me more pleasure than my own gives me pain. On the whole, it was perhaps as well for our general cause that Trumbull is elected. The Nebraska men confess that they hate it worse than anything that could have happened. It is a great consolation to see them worse whipped than I am. I tell them it is their own fault—that they had abundant opportunity to choose between him and me, which they declined, and instead forced it on me to decide between him and Matteson.

There is no evidence that Trumbull took any steps whatever to secure his own election in this contest.19

If Lincoln had been chosen at this time, his campaign against Douglas for the Senate in 1858 would not have taken place. Consequently he would not have been the cynosure of all eyes in that spectacular contest. It was Douglas's prestige and prowess that drew him into the limelight at that important juncture, and made his nomination as President possible in 1860.

CHAPTER IV

THE KANSAS WAR

Trumbull took his seat in the Senate at the first session of the Thirty-fourth Congress, December 3, 1855. His credentials were presented by Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky. Senator Cass, of Michigan, presented a protest from certain members of the legislature of Illinois reciting that the constitution of that state made the judges of the supreme and circuit courts ineligible to any other office in the state, or in the United States, during the terms for which they were elected and one year thereafter; affirming that Trumbull was elected judge of the supreme court June 7, 1852, for the term of nine years and entered upon the duties of that office June 24, 1852; that the said term of office would not expire until 1861; and that, therefore, he was not legally elected a Senator of the United States. The papers were eventually referred to the Committee on the Judiciary, but in the mean time Trumbull was sworn in. Before the question of reference was disposed of, however, Senator Seward contended that no state could fix or define the qualifications of a Senator of the United States. He instanced the case of N. P. Tallmadge, who had been elected a Senator from New York while serving as a member of the legislature of that state, although the constitution of New York disqualified him and all other members from such election. Tallmadge was nevertheless admitted to the Senate and served his full term. Trumbull's right to his seat was decided in accordance with that precedent by a vote of 35 to 8, on the 5th of March, 1856. Senator Douglas did not vote on this question, nor did he take part in the argument on it.

The subject of burning interest in Congress was the condition of affairs in Kansas Territory. When the bill repealing the Missouri Compromise was pending, the opinion had been generally expressed by its supporters that slavery never would or could go into that region. Several Southern Senators and most of the Northern Democrats had held this view. Hunter, of Virginia, considered it utterly hopeless to expect that either Kansas or Nebraska would ever be a slaveholding state. Badger, of North Carolina, said that he had no more idea of seeing a slave population in either of them than he had of seeing it in Massachusetts. Dixon, of Kentucky, held a similar view. Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of these men. Apparently the only Southern Senator who then cherished a different belief was Atchison, of Missouri, whose home was on the border of Kansas and whose opinions were based upon personal knowledge and backed by self-interest.

President Pierce appointed Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania, governor of Kansas Territory. Reeder was not unwilling to coöperate with the South in establishing slavery in an orderly way, but was quite unprepared for the tactics which had been planned by others to expedite his movements. He called an election for a delegate in Congress to be held on the 29th of November, 1854. An organized army of Missourians marched over the Kansas border, seized the polling-places, and cast 1749 fraudulent votes for a pro-slavery man named Whitfield. This was a gratuitous and unnecessary act of violence, since the bona-fide settlers from Missouri outnumbered the Free State men and the latter were, as yet, unorganized and unprepared. Governor Reeder confirmed the election and thus gave encouragement to the invaders for their next attempt.

A few immigrants had already gone into the territory from the New England States, moved by the desire of bettering their condition in life. Some of them had been assisted by the Emigrant Aid Company of Worcester, Massachusetts, a society started by Eli Thayer for the purpose of furnishing capital, by loans, to such persons for traveling expenses and for the building of hotels, sawmills, private dwellings, etc. These settlers from the East were as little prepared as Reeder himself for the sudden swoop of Missourians, and although they wrote letters to Northern Congressmen and newspapers protesting against the election of Whitfield as an act of invasion and a barefaced fraud, nothing was done to prevent him from taking his seat.

The next election (for members of the territorial legislature) was fixed for the 30th of March, 1855. What kind of preparations for it had been made in the mean time in Missouri was plainly indicated by the following letter, dated Brunswick, Missouri, April 20, 1855, published in the New York Herald:

From five to seven thousand men started from Missouri to attend the election, some to remove, but most to return to their families with an intention, if they liked the territory, to make it their permanent home at the earliest moment practicable. But they intended to vote. The Missourians were many of them Douglas men. There were one hundred and fifty voters from this county, one hundred and seventy-five from Howard, one hundred from Cooper. Indeed, every county furnished its quota, and when they set out it looked like an army. They were armed. And as there were no houses in the territory they carried tents. Their mission was a peaceable one—to vote, and to drive down stakes for their future homes.

After the election some 1500 of the voters sent a committee to Mr. Reeder to ascertain if it was his purpose to ratify the election. He answered that it was, and said that the majority at an election must carry the day. But it is not to be denied that the 1500, apprehending that the governor might attempt to play the tyrant, since his conduct had already been insidious and unjust, wore on their hats bunches of hemp. They were resolved, if a tyrant attempted to trample on the rights of the sovereign people, to hang him.

It was not conscious brigandage that prompted this movement, but the simplicity of minds tutored on the frontier and fashioned in the environment of slavery. The fifteen hundred Missourians, who gave Governor Reeder to understand that they would hang him on the nearest tree if he did not ratify their invasion of Kansas, had homes, farms, and families. They supported churches and schools of a certain kind and considered themselves qualified to civilize Africans. They were types of the best society that they had any conception of. Far from concealing anything that they had done, they boasted of it openly in their newspaper organ, the Squatter Sovereign, which published the following under the date of April 1:

Independence, Mo., March 31, 1855.—Several hundred emigrants from Kansas have just entered our city. They were preceded by the Westport and Independence brass bands. They came in at the west side of the public square and proceeded entirely around it, the bands cheering us with fine music, and the emigrants with good news. Immediately following the bands were about two hundred horsemen in regular order. Following these were one hundred and fifty wagons, carriages, etc. They gave repeated cheers for Kansas and Missouri. They report that not an anti-slavery man will be in the Legislature of Kansas. We have made a clean sweep.20

This invasion was as needless as the former one, since the Free State men were still in the minority, counting actual settlers only; but the pro-slavery party were determined to leave nothing to chance. Senator Atchison, in a speech at Weston, Missouri, on the 9th of November, 1854, had told his constituents how to secure the prize:

When you reside in one day's journey of the territory, and when your peace, your quiet, and your property depend upon your action, you can, without an exertion, send five hundred of your young men who will vote in favor of your institution. Should each county in the state of Missouri only do its duty, the question will be decided quietly and peaceably at the ballot-box. If you are defeated, then Missouri and the other Southern States will have shown themselves to be recreant to their interests, and will deserve their fate.21

A little later we find him writing letters like the following to a friend in Atlanta, Georgia:

Let your young men come forth to Missouri and Kansas. Let them come well armed, with money enough to support them for twelve months and determined to see this thing out! I do not see how we are to avoid a civil war;—come it will. Twelve months will not elapse before war—civil war of the fiercest kind—will be upon us. We are arming and preparing for it.

Atchison was constantly spurring others to deeds of lawlessness and violence, but he always stopped short of committing any himself. He was probably restrained by the fear of losing influence at Washington. It was by no means certain that President Pierce would tolerate everything. The sad fate of one of the companies recruited in the South for immigration to Kansas is narrated in the following letter, addressed to Senator Trumbull by John C. Underwood, of Culpeper Court House, Virginia:

Soon after the repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, in the neighborhood of Winchester and Harper's Ferry the project of sending a company of young men to Kansas to make it a slave state was much agitated. Subscriptions for that purpose were asked, and the duty of strengthening our sectional interest of slavery by adding two friendly Senators to your honorable body, was urged with great zeal upon my neighbors. This was long before I had heard of any movement of the New England Aid Co., or of anybody on the part of freedom. It was my understanding at the time that Senator Mason was the main adviser in the project. This may not have been the case. The history of this company will not be soon forgotten. Its taking the train on the Baltimore and Ohio R. R. at Harper's Ferry, its exploits in Kansas up to the fall of its leader (Sharrard) at the hands of Jones, the friend of the Democratic Gov. Geary, are all still well remembered. The return of the company with the dead body of their leader, and the blasted hopes of its sanguine originators, was a gloomy day in our beautiful valley, and created a sensation throughout the country.

Another letter among the Trumbull papers deserves a place here, the author of which was Isaac T. Dement, who (writing from Hudson, Illinois, January 10, 1857) says that he was living in Kansas the previous year and had filed his intention on one hundred and sixty acres of land where he had a small store and a dwelling-house:

On the 3d of September last [he continues] a band of armed men from Missouri came to my place, and after taking what they wanted from the store, burned it and the house, and said that if they could find me they would hang me. They said that they had broken open a post-office and found a letter that I wrote to Lane and Brown asking them to come and help us with a company of Sharpe's rifles (this is a lie); and also that I had furnished Lane and Brown's men with provisions (a lie), and that I was a Free State man (that is so).

Mr. Dement hoped that Congress would do something to compensate him for his losses.

Governor Reeder ought to have been prepared for the second invasion. He had had sufficient warning. Unless he was ready to go all lengths with Atchison and Stringfellow, he ought to have declared the entire election invalid and reported the facts to President Pierce. But he did nothing of the kind. He merely rejected the votes of seven election districts where the most notorious frauds had been committed, and declared "duly elected" the persons voted for in others. Eventually the members holding certificates organized as a legislature and admitted the seven who had been rejected by Reeder. The latter took an early opportunity to go to Washington City to make a report to the President in person. He stopped en route at his home in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he made a public speech exposing the frauds in the election and confirming the reports of the Free State settlers. Stringfellow warned him not to come back. In the Squatter Sovereign of May 29, 1855, he said:

From reports received of Reeder he never intends returning to our borders. Should he do so we, without hesitation, say that our people ought to hang him by the neck like a traitorous dog, as he is, so soon as he puts his unhallowed feet upon our shores. Vindicate your characters and the territory; and should the ungrateful dog dare to come among us again, hang him to the first rotten tree. A military force to protect the ballot-box! Let President Pierce or Governor Reeder, or any other power, attempt such a course in this, or any portion of the Union, and that day will never be forgotten.

The "Border Ruffian" legislature proceeded to enact the entire slave code of Missouri as laws of Kansas. It was made a criminal offense for anybody to deny that slavery existed in Kansas, or to print anything, or to introduce any printed matter, making such denial. Nobody could hold any office, even that of notary public, who should make such denial. The crime of enticing any slave to leave his master was made punishable with death, or imprisonment for ten years. That of advising slaves, by speaking, writing, or printing, to rebel, was punishable with death.

Reeder was removed from office by President Pierce on the 15th of August, and Wilson Shannon, a former governor of Ohio, was appointed as his successor.

The Free State men held a convention at Topeka in October, 1855, and framed a state constitution, to be submitted to a popular vote, looking to admission to the Union. This was equivalent merely to a petition to Congress, but it was stigmatized as an act of rebellion by the pro-slavery party.

On the 24th of January, 1856, President Pierce sent a special message to Congress on the subject of the disturbance in Kansas. He alluded to the "angry accusations that illegal votes had been polled," and to the "imputations of fraud and violence"; but he relied upon the fact that the governor had admitted some members and rejected others and that each legislative assembly had undoubted authority to determine, in the last resort, the election and qualification of its own members. Thus a principle intended to apply to a few exceptional cases of dispute was stretched to cover a case where all the seats had been obtained by fraud and usurpation. "For all present purposes," he added feebly, the "legislative body thus constituted and elected was the legitimate assembly of the Territory."

This message was referred to the Senate Committee on Territories. On the 12th of March, Senator Douglas submitted a report from the committee, and Senator Collamer, of Vermont, submitted a minority report. This was the occasion of the first passage-at-arms between Douglas and his new colleague. The report was not merely a general endorsement of President Pierce's contention that it was impossible to go behind the returns of the Kansas election, as certified by Governor Reeder, but it went much further in the same direction, putting all the blame for the disorders on the New England Emigrant Aid Company, and practically justifying the Missourians as a people "protecting their own firesides from the apprehended horrors of servile insurrection and intestine war." Logically, from Douglas's new standpoint, the New Englanders had no right to settle in Kansas at all, if they had the purpose to make it a free state. To this complexion had the doctrine of "popular sovereignty" come in the short space of two years.

Two days after the presentation of this report, Mr. Trumbull made a three hours' speech upon it without other preparation than a perusal of it in a newspaper; it had not yet been printed by the Senate. This speech was a part of one of the most exciting debates in the annals of Congress. He began with a calm but searching review of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, dwelling first on the failure of the measure to fix any time when the people of a territory should exercise the right of deciding whether they would have slavery or not. He illustrated his point by citing some resolutions adopted by a handful of squatters in Kansas as early as September, 1854, many months before any legislature had been organized or elected, in which it was declared that the squatters aforesaid "would exercise the right of expelling from the territory, or otherwise punishing any individual, or individuals, who may come among us and by act, conspiracy, or other illegal means, entice away our slaves or clandestinely attempt in any way or form to affect our rights of property in the same." These resolutions were passed before any persons had arrived under the auspices, or by the aid, of the New England Emigrant Aid Company; showing that, so far from being aroused to violence by the threatening attitude of that organization, the Missourians were giving notice beforehand that violence would be used upon any intending settlers who might be opposed to the introduction of slavery.

Douglas had wonderful skill in introducing sophisms into a discussion so deftly that his opponent would not be likely to notice them, or would think them not worth answering, and then enlarging upon them and leading the debate away upon a false scent, thus convincing the hearers that, as his opponent was weak in this particular, he was probably weak everywhere. It was Trumbull's forte that he never failed to detect these tricks and turns and never neglected them, but exposed them instantly, before proceeding on the main line of his argument. It was this faculty that made his coming into the Senate a welcome reinforcement to the Republican side of the chamber.

The report under consideration abounded in these characteristic Douglas pitfalls. It said, for example:

Although the act of incorporation [of the Emigrant Aid Company] does not distinctly declare that it was formed for the purpose of controlling the domestic institutions of Kansas and forcing it into the Union with a prohibition of slavery in her constitution, regardless of the rights and wishes of the people as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States and secured by their organic law, yet the whole history of the movement, the circumstances in which it had its origin, and the professions and avowals of all engaged in it rendered it certain and undeniable that such was its object.

Here was a double sophistry: First, the implication that, if the Emigrant Aid Company had boldly avowed that its purpose was to control the domestic institutions of Kansas and bring it into the Union as a free state, its heinousness would have been plain to all; second, that the Constitution of the United States, and the organic act of the territory itself, guaranteed the people against such an outrage. But the declared object of the Nebraska Bill was to allow the people to do this very thing by a majority vote. Mr. Trumbull brought his flail down upon this pair of sophisms with resounding force. In debate with Senator Hale, a few days earlier, Toombs, of Georgia, had had the manliness to say:

With reference to that portion of the Senator's argument justifying the Emigrant Aid Societies,—whatever may be their policy, whatever may be the tendency of that policy to produce strife,—if they simply aid emigrants from Massachusetts to go to Kansas and to become citizens of that territory, I am prepared to say that they violate no law; and they had a right to do it; and every attempt to prevent them from doing so violated the law and ought not to be sustained.22

By way of justifying the Border Ruffians the report said that when the emigrants from New England were going through Missouri, the violence of their language and behavior excited apprehensions that their object was to "abolitionize Kansas as a means of prosecuting a relentless warfare on the institution of slavery within the limits of Missouri."

What! [said Trumbull,] abolitionize Kansas! It was said on all sides of the Senate Chamber (when the Nebraska bill was pending) that it was never meant to have slavery go into Kansas. What is meant, then, by abolitionizing Kansas? Is it abolitionizing a territory already free, and which was never meant to be anything but free, for Free State men to settle in it? I cannot understand the force of such language. But they were to abolitionize Kansas, according to this report, and for what purpose? As a means for prosecuting a relentless warfare on the institution of slavery within the limits of Missouri. Where is the evidence of such a design? I would like to see it. It is not in this report, and if it exists I will go as far as the gentleman to put it down. I will neither tolerate nor countenance by my action here or elsewhere any society which is resorting to means for prosecuting a relentless warfare upon the institution of slavery within the limits of Missouri or any other state. But there is not a particle of evidence of any such intention in the document which professes to set forth the acts of the Emigrant Aid Society, and which is incorporated in this report.23