A World on Fire_ Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War - Amanda Foreman [28]
1.8 The East Coast–based Free-Soilers, whose slogan was “Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men,” initially competed with the Republican Party, which was born in the Midwest in 1854 and also opposed slavery, and then became absorbed by their newer rival.
TWO
On the Best of Terms
The Dred Scott case—William Seward visits London—The Liberals come to power—John Brown’s raid—The Prince of Wales tours America
Seward was delighted when many Southern newspapers suggested that he ought to be next in line for a caning. With Sumner recuperating in Europe, Seward hoped to appeal to radical antislavery voters in the Republican Party. His chance to shine came just two days after Sumner set sail and the Democrat James Buchanan was sworn in as president. On March 6, 1857, the Supreme Court handed down its opinion on the notorious Dred Scott case. Scott was a former slave who had been taken by his late master from Missouri, where slavery was legal, to Illinois, which had abolished slavery in 1818. Scott had sued for his freedom, but the Southern-dominated Court decided that the federal government had no right to decide matters pertaining to slavery in any part of the United States, whether free or unfree.
The Court’s decision wrecked the thirty-seven-year-old Missouri Compromise, which had ensured that as more territories joined the Union there would always be an even balance between the slave and free-soil states. Worse still, the Court declared that black people were not citizens, and were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Blacks were no more entitled to citizenship than horses or sheep; they could not vote, own a passport, or apply to the courts. Seward denounced the Dred Scott decision at every opportunity, accusing President James Buchanan and Chief Justice Rodger B. Taney of having colluded over the ruling. Northern public opinion supported Seward’s attacks, since it was widely believed above the Mason-Dixon Line that there was a slave-power conspiracy afoot to spread slavery throughout the United States.
In the fall of 1857, six months after the Dred Scott ruling, the collapse of the largest insurance company in the country sparked a catastrophic economic crisis throughout the North. During the financial panic that followed, prices on the New York Stock Exchange plunged by 45 percent, hundreds of banks failed, railroads went bankrupt, factories closed, and seemingly overnight there was mass unemployment running into the hundreds of thousands. The Panic of 1857 spread to Britain, too—where investors held, among other securities, £80 million worth of railroad stocks and bonds.1 Only the Southern cotton-growing states escaped the panic largely unscathed, apparently vindicating the superiority of a slave system over the factory-based economy of the North. In a speech to the Senate on March 4, 1858, Senator James Hammond of South Carolina boasted that Southern cotton exports had saved the economy from total collapse during the 1857 panic, and for this reason the South had the right to dictate terms to the whole of the United States. “Cotton is King.… What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her, save the South.” Hammond and the other Southern senators fiercely resisted subsequent attempts by the Northern states to protect their domestic industrial base by imposing high tariffs on foreign imports.
Seward’s language became increasingly violent whenever he discussed the differences between the two sections of the country. By the end of 1858 he was arguing that the Dred Scott case should mark the end of all Northern concessions to the South. During