Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [106]
Passions in the South were equally aroused. To Southerners, the issue of Kansas was not merely an issue of slavery, but whether they, who had helped create and enlarge the nation with their “blood and treasure,” would be entitled to share in the territories held in common by the entire country. “The day may come,” said Governor Thomas Bragg of North Carolina, “when our Northern brethren will discover that the Southern States intend to be equals in the Union, or independent out of it!”
This time Salmon Chase assumed the leadership of the antislavery forces. Seward understood that the bill was “a mighty subject” that “required research and meditation,” but he was distracted by a multitude of issues and the demands of Washington’s social life. With “the street door bell [ringing] every five minutes,” the popular New Yorker was unable to find the time to construct a great speech or to marshal the opposition. Consequently, while Seward’s speeches against the Nebraska bill were simply “essays against slavery,” Stephen Douglas later said, “Chase of Ohio was the leader.”
Chase, along with Sumner and Ohio congressman Joshua Giddings, conceived the idea of reaching beyond the Senate to the country at large with an open “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States.” The “Appeal” was originally printed in The National Era, the abolitionist newspaper that had first serialized Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Deemed by historians “one of the most effective pieces of political propaganda ever produced,” the Appeal was reprinted in pamphlet form to organize opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
“We arraign this bill as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” the Appeal began, charging that a rapacious proslavery conspiracy was determined to subvert the old Missouri compact, which forever had excluded slavery in all the territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Passage of the Nebraska Act would mean that “this immense region, occupying the very heart” of the continent, would, in “flagrant disregard” of a “sacred faith,” be transformed into “a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” The manifesto urged citizens to protest by any means available. Its authors promised to call on their constituents “to come to the rescue of the country from the domination of slavery…for the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”
“Chase’s greatest opportunity had at last come to him,” his biographer Albert Hart observes, “for in the Kansas-Nebraska debate he was able to concentrate all the previous experience of his life.” By the time he rose to speak on the Senate floor on February 3, 1854, the country was aroused and prepared for a great battle. “By far the most numerous audience of the season listened to Mr. Chase’s speech,” the New York Times reported. “The galleries and lobbies were densely crowded an hour before the debate began, and the ladies even crowded into and took possession of, one-half the lobby seats on the floor of the Senate.”
In the course of the heated debate, Chase accused Douglas of sponsoring the bill to aid his quest for the presidency, an allegation that brought the Illinois senator to such a “high pitch of wrath” that he countered, accusing Chase of entering the Senate by a corrupt bargain. “Do you say I came here by a corrupt bargain?” Chase demanded to know. “I said the man who charged me with having brought in this bill as a bid for the Presidency did come here by a corrupt bargain,” Douglas replied. “Did you mean me? If so, I mean you.”
Seated beside his friend, Sumner watched with rapturous attention as Chase refuted Douglas’s claim that the concept of “popular sovereignty” would provide a final settlement of all territorial questions. On the contrary, Chase predicted, “this discussion will hasten the inevitable reorganization of parties.” Moreover, he asked, “What kind of popular sovereignty is that which allows one portion of the people to enslave another