Team of Rivals_ The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln - Doris Kearns Goodwin [92]
The issues and declamations of politics were carried to the people by newspapers—the media of the time. The great majority of papers were highly partisan. Editors and publishers, as the careers of Thurlow Weed and Horace Greeley illustrate, were often powerful political figures. Newspapers in the nineteenth century, author Charles Ingersoll observed, “were the daily fare of nearly every meal in almost every family; so cheap and common, that, like air and water, its uses are undervalued.”
“Look into the morning trains,” Ralph Waldo Emerson marveled, which “carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, workyards and warehouses.” Into every car the newsboy “unfolds his magical sheets,—twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs—and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast.” A European tourist was amazed at the central role newspapers played in the life of the new nation. “You meet newspaper readers everywhere; and in the evening the whole city knows what lay twenty-four hours ago on newswriters’ desks…. The few who cannot read can hear news discussed or read aloud in ale-and-oyster houses.”
Seventeen years before the decade had begun, President Andrew Jackson had prophesied: “The nullifiers in the south intend to blow up a storm on the slave question…be assured these men would do any act to destroy this union and form a southern confederacy bounded, north, by the Potomac river.”
And now the storm had come.
The slavery issue had been a source of division between North and South from the beginning of the nation. That difference was embodied in the Constitution itself, which provided that a slave would be counted as three fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation and which imposed an obligation to surrender fugitive slaves to their lawful masters. Although slavery was not named in the Constitution, it was, as antislavery Congressman John Quincy Adams said, “written in the bond,” which meant that he, like everyone else, must “faithfully perform its obligations.”
The constitutional compromise that protected slavery in states where it already existed did not apply to newly acquired territories. Thus, every expansion of the nation reignited the divisive issue. The Missouri Compromise had provided a temporary solution for nearly three decades, but when Congress was called upon to decide the fate of the new territories acquired in the Mexican War, the stage was set for the renewal of the national debate. “If by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people,” Robert Toombs of Georgia warned, “I am for disunion.” Mississippi called for a convention of Southern states to meet in Nashville for the defense of Southern rights.
The issue of slavery could no longer be put aside. It would dominate the debates in Congress. As Thomas Hart Benton once colorfully observed: “We read in Holy Writ, that a certain people were cursed by the plague of frogs, and that the plague was everywhere! You could not look upon the table but there were frogs, you could not sit down at the banquet but there were frogs, you could not go to the bridal couch and lift the sheets but there were frogs!” A similar affliction infested national discourse as every other topic was subsumed by slavery. “We can see nothing, touch nothing, have no measures proposed, without having this pestilence thrust before us. Here it is, this black question, forever on the table, on the nuptial couch, everywhere!”
Of course, slavery was not the only issue that divided the sections. The South opposed protective tariffs designed to foster Northern manufacturing and fought against using the national resources for internal improvements