Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [123]
Unlike Seward, Chase, and Lincoln in 1856, Edward Bates refused to desert the divided and much-diminished Whig Party. While he joined with Republicans in vigorous opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the sacred Missouri Compromise, he feared that the Republican focus on slavery would lead to an irreparable divide between North and South. After some indecision, he agreed to preside over the shrunken Whig National Convention of July 1856. The Whigs gathered in Baltimore and ultimately decided to support Millard Fillmore for president. Fillmore ran as a member of the American Party (a more palatable title for the old Know Nothing Party) on a platform that denounced both Republicans and Democrats for agitating the slavery issue at the risk of the nation’s peace.
Though not a fanatical nativist, Bates considered the American Party, with its emphasis on issues other than slavery and a support base drawn from all sections of the country, the best hope for preserving the Union. “I am neither North nor South,” he said in a final plea before the convention, “I repudiate political geography…. I am a man believing in making laws and then whether the law is exactly to my liking or not, enforcing it—whether it be to catch a runaway slave and bring him back to his master or to quell a riot in a disordered territory.”
The general election resulted in a three-way race between the Republican Frémont, the Southern-leaning Democrat James Buchanan, and American Party candidate Millard Fillmore. When the votes were counted, Weed’s advice to Seward proved correct. Though the Republican Party showed considerable strength throughout the North in its first national effort, winning eleven states, the South threw its strength behind Democrat James Buchanan, who emerged the victor. In addition to his overwhelming strength in the South, Buchanan captured four Northern states—Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey—the states destined to be the battleground in the 1860 election. Fillmore and the American Party captured only tiny Maryland.
AS THE DAY of Buchanan’s inauguration approached, the Supreme Court was drafting a decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, which had originated in Missouri eleven years earlier. Scott, a slave, was suing for his freedom on the grounds that his master, an army doctor, had removed him for several years to military bases in both the free state of Illinois and the Wisconsin Territory before returning to the slave state of Missouri. The case wound its way through state and federal courts until it finally reached the Supreme Court for argument in 1856, with Francis Blair’s son, Montgomery, representing Dred Scott and the celebrated Reverdy Johnson from the slave state of Maryland representing Scott’s owners. The court was headed by Chief Justice Roger Taney of Maryland, “an uncompromising supporter of the South and slavery and an implacable foe of racial equality, the Republican Party, and the antislavery movement.”
Seward was among the thousands of spectators gathered at the Capitol on March 4, 1857, to witness James Buchanan’s inauguration. “Bright skies and a deliciously bland atmosphere” relieved the blustery weather of the previous two days. In his inaugural address, Buchanan conceded that a “difference of opinion” had arisen over the question of extending slavery into the territories. However, this vital question, which had figured in the formation of the Republican Party, was not a political issue, he claimed, but “a judicial question, which legitimately belongs to the Supreme Court of the United States.” A decision in the Dred Scott case bearing on this very issue was pending before that august body. To that decision, Buchanan pledged: