This Hallowed Ground - Bruce Catton [2]
The senator managed to reach his conclusion the following day, reminding the presiding officer (perhaps unnecessarily) that “an immense space has been traversed,” and in closing he came back from brutish idols and obscene Aztecs to Senator Butler, from whom he had learned not to let political arguments get personal. There was not, he said, “any possible deviation from the truth” of which Butler was innocent, although fortunately these deviations were made in the heat of such passion “as to save him from the suspicion of intentional aberration.” Still, there it was: “The senator touches nothing which he does not disfigure — with error, sometimes of principle, sometimes of fact.”2
A philippic, as he had promised. No single vote had been changed by it; the Senate would decide, at last, precisely as it would have done if he had kept quiet. But he had not been trying to persuade. No one was, these days; a political leader addressed his own following, not the opposition. Sumner had been trying to inflame, to arouse, to confirm the hatreds and angers that already existed. In the North there were men who from his words would draw a new enmity toward the South; in the South there were men who would see in this speaker and what he had said a final embodiment of the compelling reasons why it was good to think seriously about secession.
At the very end Sumner had a gloomy moment of insight.
The fight over Kansas, he said, spreading from the western plain to the Senate chamber, would spread still farther; would go to a nationwide stage “where every citizen will be not only spectator but actor.”3
There is a rowdy strain in American life, living close to the surface but running very deep. Like an ape behind a mask, it can display itself suddenly with terrifying effect. It is slack-jawed, with leering eyes and loose wet lips, with heavy feet and ponderous cunning hands; now and then, when something tickles it, it guffaws, and when it is made angry it snarls; and it can be aroused much more easily than it can be quieted. Mike Fink and Yankee Doodle helped to father it, and Judge Lynch is one of its creations; and when it comes lumbering forth it can make the whole country step in time to its own frantic irregular pulse-beat.
Senator Sumner had invited it out with his fine talk. So had the eminent clergyman, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, who had told the world that a Sharps rifle was a greater moral agency than a Bible, as far as Kansas was concerned. Yet these men need not have bothered. Rowdyism was coming out anyway, having been invited by men of the South as well as by men of the North, and the spirit of rowdyism was talking in the spirit of Sumner’s and Beecher’s exhortations without the fancy trimmings. It was saying now, south of the slavery line, that “we will continue to tar and feather, drown, lynch and hang every white-livered abolitionist who dares to pollute our soil,” and in Kansas it had legislated that anyone who denied the legality of slave ownership in the territory should get five years in prison.4
In Kansas there was a town called Lawrence. It had existed for two years, and although it was so new, it was solid and substantial, with buildings of brick and stone, including a hotel that was massive enough to serve as a fort. (In point of fact, the hotel had been built with that end in mind.) The town was a piece of New England set down in the prairie, but it was a New England all distorted, as if someone were seeing bizarre dream-shapes that were slipping into nightmare. In place of white steeples and colonial doorways it had grim buildings and men who carried “Beecher’s Bibles” — Sharps rifles, named with a cynicism matching that of the reverend clergyman