• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 7433 0

In the end it was the center—the Kansas-Nebraska Territory—that failed to hold. On January 4, 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas (Democrat from Illinois) introduced a bill looking toward the entry of the territory into the Union, which left the question of its slave or free status entirely up to a vote by local residents. This sounded democratic (“popular sovereignty” he called it), but in fact it shredded the old Compromise of 1820 in which Congress had banned slavery in that part of the continent no matter what the desires of its residents. This (to Free Soil eyes) treacherous blow, together with ensuing proslavery initiatives such as the 1857 Supreme Court Dred Scott decision, which barred Congress from forbidding the transport of slaves to northern states, seemed conclusive evidence of a Slave Power design to make slavery lawful in all the states, North as well as South.

Free Soilers decided that if slavery in Kansas was to be decided by its residents they would rush northern settlers to the territory in time for the vote. Southerners countered with their own westward race. In short order, rival groups of settlers, in a kind of election riot writ large, were shooting their way toward majoritarian status. It was in outraged response to the bloodbath in Kansas that the Republican Party had crystallized—a definitively sectional organization that fused antislavery Whigs and Democrats. It also had a strong (though not dominant) nativist streak. Republicans tended to see the Roman Church and the Slave Power as corporate monoliths that restricted individual freedom and to condemn Irish immigrants and white planters alike for lack of economic enterprise or self-discipline.

The new party ran General John C. Fremont for president in 1856 on a platform dedicated to northern capitalist and small farmer interests (tariffs, homesteads) and the extirpation of the “twin relics of barbarism” (slavery and Mormon polygamy). Fremont lost, but the party picked up powerful adherents. New York’s William Seward signed on; the Whig senator had been an early opponent of the Slave Power and by 1858 was convinced that “an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces” was at hand.

The idea of an irrepressible conflict between North and South did not warm many hearts in New York, that most southern-connected of northern cities, and the metropolis would prove to be a fierce opponent of Republicanism-with-a-capital-/?. But the new party’s antisouthern militancy did attract two strategically placed constituencies, whose affiliation would have resounding local impact: the tiny African-American community and a small but extremely influential coterie of professionals and businessmen.

BLACK REPUBLICANS

In 1860 the city’s 12,574 African Americans had no territorial base, no cultural stronghold. The Irish had pushed them out of the Five Points, and they were strewn about the city in isolated, vulnerable clumps. Some had migrated east to streets abutting the East River docks. Others (perhaps about five thousand) had drifted north to the area bounded by Houston on the north and Canal on the south, concentrating in Greenwich Village streets—Minetta Lane, Bleecker, Thompson, Sullivan, and MacDougal—near to jobs as servants for the Washington Square gentry. Others still, perhaps fifteen hundred, had pressed on farther, into blocks west of Sixth Avenue between 23rd and 40th streets, or to Seneca Village before it was dismantled to make way for Central Park.

In Brooklyn more than a hundred black families had trekked out to Weeksville and Carrville, the settlements begun on former farmland back in the 1830s and 1840s, to Crow Hill (the future Crown Heights), and to Fort Greene, where work was to be found in the nearby shipyards. Here too the black population was dwarfed by the inrush of white immigrants: where in 1800 one of every three people in Kings County had been black, by 1860 the proportion had dropped to less than one in fifty. In Staten Island a black community grew up at Sandy Ground (near today’s Woodrow) in the late 1830s, after free blacks