Boston, Springfield and Civil War Massachusetts
Ted Clarke
Published by Ted Clarke at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 by Ted Clarke
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Boston, Springfield and Civil War Massachusetts
By Ted Clarke
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction
1. Anti-Slavery and Abolition
2. John Brown--Angel of Light
3. The Bay State--Bulwark of Union
4. Ghosts, Bodies and Battle Hymns
5. Military Strategy, Massachusetts Generals
6. African-Americans and the Bay State
7. Arsenal of the Union
8. Women, Minorities and the War
9. Shifting Attitudes and Final Victory
Bibliography
Introduction
Boston and Massachusetts had been prime movers in bringing on the Revolution and Independence, and persuading the other colonies to follow in their train.
Though seldom voiced or printed, one can make the point, and I will, that Massachusetts, and certain of its people pushed their strong beliefs and followed them with actions that led to the Civil War as well.
A tight cadre of people had been there at every turn as rebellion turned to revolution in the 1770s due to tightening British rule. It was also a small group that stirred opinions and led to actions that stood in the vanguard less than a century later when the country was torn in two.
In these pages we'll recall the people and events that placed the state in this forward position and will look closely at their follow through to see what kind of support they gave to the fighting and the winning of the war.
As you read about the people who moved and shook events you may notice a network of links since the leading people operated at the same time in nearly the same space, and they interacted, reinforcing their individual actions.
Names like Andrew, Garrison and Brown lie below the surface of history's etchings for the most part. The letters that form these names lack the chiseled strength of their Revolutionary-era counterparts, names like Adams, Hancock and Revere. But in their era they swung the hammers of history with equal heft.
The impression they made led to the deep divisions that became the Civil War. This war (1861-1865) was fought between the states, North against South, brother against brother. It was known in the North as the Civil War. It was a war fought first to preserve the Union as its stated cause. But just below the surface was an important but often unproclaimed reason for conflict. That issue was the morality or immorality of slavery.
The differences between North and South, were usually garbed in the costume of Sectional divisions, economic differences, tariffs on foreign trade, manufacturing versus agriculture and some sharp cultural differences between North and South.
But as the tide of division swirled ever deeper, swimming just below the surface, like a hungry shark, ready to draw blood, was that underlying flash-point of conflict between the sections -- the question of slavery. That sub-surface issue would send the nation on a course of bloody fraternal strife that would last four long years.
At the outset, few of the soldiers in the Union or Confederate armies would have said they were fighting for or against slavery, in fact many would not have fought for that reason. However, on reflection, it's clear that had there been no slavery, there would have been no war.
While slavery did not play a part in the lives of average people in either section, it meant a great deal to the leaders of both. Even a moderate like Abraham Lincoln wanted mostly to avoid war and would have let slavery die a slow death in the states where it already existed, but the radicals on each side would give no ground. They were willing to go to war to prolong or end slavery. We had people like that in Boston and elsewhere in Massachusetts.
Those on the fringes of the question got their way by convincing others using arguments other than those concerning slavery. Southern leaders argued that the North was threatening their way of life, while Northern leaders convinced others that if the South seceded as they threatened to do, it would destroy democratic government.
Just before the war began, Alexander Stephens, vice-president of the new Confederate States of America (CSA), gave what became known as the "Cornerstone Speech", declaring that the “proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization” was “the immediate cause of the late rupture.”
He said that the Cornerstone of the CSA "… rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior race is the natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”
Confederate
President Jefferson Davis, a major slaveholder, justified secession
in 1861 as " … an act of self-defense against the incoming
Lincoln administration.” Abraham Lincoln’s policy of excluding
slavery from the territories, Davis said, would make “property in
slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless thereby
annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of
dollars.”
South Carolina’s 1860 declaration on the cause of
secession mentioned slavery, slaves or slaveholding eighteen separate
times.
Lincoln himself had said earlier, "I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free." At Gettysburg he spoke about a war to decide whether a nation built on the idea that all men are created equal can "long endure". That idea had long been questioned on Beacon Hill and in the Bay State.
Chapter One - Anti-Slavery and Abolitionism
Just as Charleston and South Carolina with its Ft. Sumter, were the heart of the South and the place where secession started, Boston was central to abolition, anti-slavery and holding the Union together. It even formed a Union Club on Beacon Hill during the war, bringing together the wealthy and notable in the cause of continuing the federation,
In Massachusetts, anti-slavery provided emotional fuel. The signs were all there, even in backwater towns in the pre-war period. Feelings ran strong throughout Massachusetts where a growing groups of people boarded the anti-slavery bandwagon. Bay Staters like John Quincy Adams and Charles Sumner were among the elected officials who did their best to de-rail or decapitate slavery. On Boston's Beacon Hill a rabid band of anti-slavery advocates became increasingly vocal.
F
ew
realized where these high-running emotions would lead them. But as
far back as the 1830s, the evidence was there for the visionary to
discern. The warp and woof of the strands that wove that war came
from a movement that made itself known in Boston as long as
twenty-five years earlier. Its name was
Abolitionism, and its preceptors were often unwelcome in Boston. The
abolitionists provided the emotional underpinning that is usually
required for an all-out war that has popular backing.
The anti-slavery movement began well before the Civil War, and its seedbed was Beacon Hill. The primary progenitor of the movement was William Lloyd Garrison. Born in Newburyport, he had lived in Baltimore where he had been jailed for remarks stemming from his anti-slavery views, then moved to Boston where he had been editor and principal writer for a newspaper called The Liberator, which he published for thirty-five years, until 1865, and also headed the American Anti-Slavery Society, demanding immediate emancipation of slaves in the U.S.
Garrison
At first, The Liberator had about 3,000 subscribers, most of them African-Americans, but it grew in strength and influence, mostly because Garrison was unrelenting in his positions. He would not compromise -- as many other anti-slavery proponents would -- in his advocacy of "immediate and complete emancipation of all slaves."
The newspaper had to stand up to contumely and even threatened violence from both local and southern groups. A Southern organization offered a reward to any who would reveal the identities of people who distributed the paper in their locales. This offer of a reward was an early example of a threat to freedom of speech.
Maria Weston Chapman served as assistant editor for Garrison's weekly, and took the heat for it while becoming ever more immersed in the cause as we shall see.
Garrison was relentless in his position, spoke everywhere, was apparently fearless and attracted adherents as radical in their time as he. Today, Garrison would doubtless be a blogger with avid followers issuing viral visuals and sound bites.
At first, Garrison was viewed as a radical. Even those who opposed slavery did not believe it could be immediately stopped. Some tried to halt its expansion, many believed it would eventually die out. They may have been anti-slavery, but they were not abolitionists.
Enmity did not come just from southern people or pro-slavery groups. Many of the wealthiest of Bostonians wanted to marginalize or even abolish the Abolitionist movement. Boston merchants at that time were deeply into the textile industry and the manufacture of their cloth depended on a steady influx of cotton -- from the South. They were therefore, hesitant about criticizing the institution of slavery and certainly not about to support those who wanted to destroy it.
Some in the South would come to believe that Garrison was espousing popular views. But his opinions were not the views of most mill owners. The so-called "Lords of the Loom" were allied in this profit-driven way with the "Lords of the Lash", as slave-owners were called. Interlopers like Garrison as well as Frederick Douglass and even Weymouth's Maria Weston Chapman were saying things that were beginning to influence those who might otherwise have been neutral.
The mood in Boston then was ambivalent, and it was often hostile to Garrison and his allies. At one rally of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the British abolitionist, George Thompson, was supposed to be the speaker, but had to cancel. Garrison took his place. A mob tried to storm the building to get Thompson, whom they thought was inside.
The mayor and police were able to get the female members to leave, but the mob followed Garrison through the streets and he had to be saved from lynching by being kept overnight in jail and then leaving the city of Boston for a protracted period.
Garrison's views differed radically from those of other opponents of slavery, and were far removed from those of the Beacon Hill mill-owners.
That didn't faze him. He believed slavery was evil and wanted everyone to work to rub it out. Slaveholders, in his view, had no rights over these other human beings and he wanted slavery to end at once. Others believed they could reach that point gradually by using peaceful means like legislation and the courts.
He had allies, however, some of them with influence.
Maria Weston Chapman who served as assistant editor for Garrison's weekly was one of these early allies. Just as Garrison had been attacked by a Boston mob that included wealthy citizens and had to be rescued by having the mayor arrest him and put him in jail, Weymouth's Chapman had her own bad experience at this same meeting with a Boston mob and stood up bravely in its face.
“If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere.” Those were the words of the stalwart Chapman in 1835 when she was under attack from this enraged mob, who were outraged by her extreme anti-slavery views and words and who were screaming and shaking their fists in her face.
Maria and twelve other women were trying to hold a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society which Chapman, three of her sisters and eight other women had just founded in a determination to bring a complete and quick end to slavery. The mob was trying to disrupt the meeting. Maria's sister Deborah Weston described it as "the day when 5,000 men mobbed 45 women."
This when the famous British abolitionist, George Thompson was traveling through New England stirring up support and arousing anger among those who depended on the cotton industry. These angry men thought that Thompson was attending this meeting in the office of The Liberator. They stormed the meeting, but Maria and the others wouldn't budge. They started their meeting with a reading from the Bible, but the mayor of Boston, fearing for their safety, asked them to leave the building. fter making her speech about dying there as well as anywhere, she allowed the women to be escorted through the hissing crowd to continue their meeting at her house, which was nearby.
They were not forgotten, however, and danger remained. A few days later three men hissed at and harangued Maria and Deborah as they left their house, and it soon became impossible for Maria to go anywhere without hearing taunts and epithets by ordinary Bostonians. Like the blacks whose cause she supported, in these men's minds this woman didn't know her place.
Nor was that Maria's only run-in with a hostile mob. In Philadelphia, her life was threatened at the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1838 where she was speaking in front of an interracial crowd. The meeting was threatened by a large mob which came back the next day and burned down Pennsylvania Hall, the building where the meeting had been held.
M
aria
Weston Chapman, as we have seen, was single-minded and stubborn.
Others who wanted to do away with slavery favored more moderate
views, The abolition movement itself was no monolith. Even those who
had the same goals eventually found themselves at odds with one
another, Maria among them. She was not just an abolitionist. She was
also pushing for women's rights, and that rankled some supporters.
In 1839, Chapman published the pamphlet, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts, in which she argued that differences in opinion about women's rights were at the center of the divisions among various groups of abolitionists that were starting to appear.
To understand this hostility one must realize that Maria and Garrison and those who believed as they did were viewed as extremists much as the radicals of the '60s were seen by those who feared they would destroy the democratic society they opposed.
While people could see their point of view, they tended to sympathize more readily with those who tried to bring about the demise of slavery through persuasion or economic pressure or those who sought to contain in within the southern states. These radicals were likely, in their view, to cause harm rather than any benefit.
But, as with many rebellions, it took the vanguard of extremists, willing to face isolation and even physical danger to break down barriers which more moderate people could then more readily pass through.
But how could a young woman who couldn't even vote, gain such enmity from hostile mobs in Boston and in Philadelphia?
Mary Weston (or Maria as she was commonly known) was born in Weymouth in 1806, the oldest of six daughters and two sons of Warren Weston and Anne Bates Weston. The Westons were a prominent, though not a wealthy Weymouth family with longstanding colonial roots. Maria lived in the same house as her cousin Joshua Bates who became wealthy and prominent as a London banker and merchant and who paid for the English education of his intelligent younger cousin.
While in England, she lived with Joshua Bates's family. She was well-educated, and upon returning to America in 1828, she became principal for two years of
the Young Ladies' High School in Boston. Her marriage in 1830 to Henry Grafton Chapman, a wealthy Boston merchant, brought her into abolitionist circles.
Henry's father, John Grafton, was a hard-core abolitionist. Unlike some other Unitarians, Maria's father-in-law refused to participate in the lucrative cotton trade and supported Garrison's radical call for immediate abolition of slavery.
Maria was the only sister in her family to marry, and that bridal path turned out to be the route to radicalism as well. Prior to this, the strong-minded Maria had not become involved in anything political, but this changed rapidly when her life in Boston took hold. She not only took up the abolitionist cause, but worked for three decades, as a writer, speaker and organizer, as well as an editor of the Liberator, to end slavery.
For Maria, it wasn’t as easy as just showing up at meetings. We have to recall the cultural changes Maria had gone through just prior to this time. She had been schooled in England and lived among the upper classes. She understood fashion and style and upper class manners, and when she first appeared at an anti-slavery meeting in her stylish garb with what people must have viewed as an affected way of speaking, people found it hard to believe that she had sympathy for Negro slaves. She was suspected of being a spy.
Appearances can be deceiving, and here was a good example. Maria Weston Chapman could not easily be pushed aside, however, and they would learn that. Nothing would keep this formal-looking woman from going after what she wanted, and she had thrown in with the abolitionists. Three of her sisters from Weymouth would soon join her.
Her venture had at least one false start. Along with the other Chapmans, Maria at first belonged to a Unitarian congregation, the Federal Street Church with its renowned minister William Ellery Channing.
She would learn that not all Unitarians were on her side. Writing years later, Maria referred to the mob scene in Boston, saying, "The members of Dr. Channing's congregation were the mob." They were unlikely to have made up the entire mob, but Maria realized that many at the Federal Street Church did not sympathize with her or her in-laws, and that included Rev. Channing who could perhaps be described as an "extreme moderate".
Channing allowed that slaves could hot rightly be viewed property, but he dragged his feet on immediate emancipation and opposed anti-slavery groups. Maria said of him, "Above all he deprecated the admission of the coloured race to our ranks."
Maria and her sisters attended several of the churches in Boston, and found many of them wanting. Afterwards they would discuss whether and how well the minister had preached on slavery. Deborah Weston had this to report: "I was completely exhausted, listening to his [Rev. Mr. Francis Parkman's] villainy. Went in the afternoon to the free church, heard Mr. Parker (Rev. Theodore Parker). He preached very well, speaking extempore."
Later Deborah praised Maria for getting a guest minister at Federal Street Church to announce a meeting of their anti-slavery society that was forthcoming. The announcement caused a great stir in the congregation. Deborah wrote that one man said, "no one but Mrs. Chapman would have the impudence to do this." Another replied, "If Mrs. Chapman will insult the congregation, she must expect to be insulted herself."
Their time at Federal Street was coming to an end. By 1840 the Chapmans and the Westons no longer went there. Maria found an affinity for an abolitionist minister, Rev. Theodore Parker, while her sisters responded to John Pierpont a poet/minister who spoke against slavery at Boston's Hollis Street Church. To Maria, these churches were more gathering places than occasions to meet the Holy Spirit. Whatever contact she had with the almighty had little to do with congregations or houses of worship.
Her words were: "Eternity and infinity come in like a flood whenever I open the gates," she wrote, "although God and immortality never were much to me."
And Maria was, indeed, insulted and she was certainly reviled. She was also revered. Boston was not, however, the only venue for speeches and rallies by people like Garrison, Douglass and Chapman.
Maria and her sisters continued to be active in the anti-slavery movement. Caroline and Ann taught in Boston and Deborah in Weymouth. Their homes were often centers of activity as they entertained those in the abolitionist movement. Their guests included what they called "coloured" visitors, and they often housed people from out of town.
In fact, Weymouth was the locale of abolitionist speakers such as Garrison, Parker and Douglass. The Unitarian-Universalist Church, which in 1863 hired Olympia Brown as the first woman pastor in the U.S., promoted these meetings, and they were often held at Liberty Hall in Weymouth Landing. These visitors were safer and were received better in Weymouth than they were in Boston, as we have seen.
However, the freed black, Frederick Douglass, while welcomed in Weymouth by Maria Weston Chapman and others, had to be transported by a private horse and wagon since public conveyances were not open to him. In a January 1846 letter to William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass recounted how in his travels, wherever he went he was told "We don't allow N__ s here."
"A week or two before leaving the United States, I had a meeting appointed at Weymouth, the home of that glorious band of true abolitionists, the Weston family, and others. On attempting to take a seat in the Omnibus to that place, I was told by the driver, (and I never shall forget his fiendish hate,) "We don't allow N___s here."
When her husband, Henry, died, the abolitionist Wendell Phillips became guardian of the Chapman children -- they had a boy and two girls. In 1848 Maria decided to take them to Europe to be educated as she had been. Maria planned to work with anti-slavery groups on the other side of the ocean, and she enrolled Henry in the university at Heidelberg, Germany while her daughters were schooled in Paris. Caroline joined Maria there living among anti-slavery advocates.
Maria and Caroline made many French converts and found financial backers for her annual book the Liberty Bell and they sent home to Anne in Boston items that could be sold at the anti-slavery fairs that were used as fund-raisers for the movement.
By the time her son, Henry, had completed his education, his sister Elizabeth had married a French abolitionist, and the other Weston sisters had joined the Paris group. In 1855 Maria returned to her hometown, where she lived for the rest of her life. She made extended visits to her son in New York City and worked in his brokerage office. Her grandson, John Jay Chapman, long remembered the creative games she invented for her grandchildren.
When the Civil War began, her sisters joined her in Weymouth. With emancipation in 1863, Maria agreed with Garrison that it was time to close down the anti-slavery organizations. She devoted herself to education for the former slaves.
When Maria met Frederick Douglass, the free black man had already built a reputation. He was a compelling speaker with a genuine first-hand tale to tell. He could recount what it was like to live as a slave and could compare the life he lived now with the degenerating existence of life on the farms and docks of slave states. He not only spoke effectively, but Douglass also wrote against slavery as editor of the Northern Star, his weekly newspaper.
An extensive black community lived on the north slope of Beacon Hill in an enclave that extended across Cambridge Street to the West End. The people who lived there, in many cases for many years, became better organized in the years before the Civil War, and learned to cooperate with white groups like the abolitionists who were, in fact, their neighbors on the south side of the hill.
Among these white supporters of abolition was an imposing, handsome man who was also an eloquent speaker and a dogged foe of slavery. He was Senator Charles Sumner, and he was no shrinking violet. Charles Sumner did not limit himself to remote, sterile speeches in the nation's capital. He brought the issues that faced Washington to the neighborhood where he lived. Sumner criticized his Beacon Hill neighbors who relied on plantation cotton and thus condoned slavery, but turned on their abolitionist neighbors, making Boston's streets unsafe for them.
Sumner believed the slave states were trying to gain control of the federal government, an outcome he believed would be disastrous. When the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, Sumnre made a fiery anti-slavery speech in the Senate "The Crime Against Kansas" attacking its sponsors including Andrew Butler, for which he was beaten with a cane by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the floor of the senate. This shocking violence only solidified positions. Sumner was years in recuperating, but returned to the Senate when the war started.
In contrast with Garrison, Sumner and Wendell Phillips, the Rev. William Ellery Channing took a more moderate tone. However, he occasionally spoke out more forcefully, and when he did he influenced other moderates.
Channing was in position, as the leading American Unitarian minister, to play a key role in the anti-slavery movement. But his beliefs and moderate principles worked against this possibility. He has been described as a "romantic racist". While he opposed slavery, he also believed that slaves were inferiors who would need overseers once they were free.
He also did not approve the zeal of the abolitionists and did not wish to join a reform movement since this would limit his freedom. That freedom usually wound its way to the middle ground, and this lack of intensity kept him from having as strong an influence on events as he had on religion.
Garrison's beliefs and his willingness to act on them could not be mistaken. His manner of dealing with things usually met with the approval of Frederick Douglass who said that Garrison "… moved not with the tide but against it… His zeal was like fire, and his courage like steel."
His resolve, too, was tough as steel. Indeed, abolition had only one side as far as Garrison was concerned. He said, "On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. . . . I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD." (Even then, all capital letters indicated strong-mindedness or shouting.) Even his supporters, however, drew the line on his extreme beliefs. Many blacks who agreed with him on emancipation did not agree with Garrison's radical views of the Constitution, which he considered an evil document because it permitted slavery. Blacks saw the Constitution as their hope for gaining equal rights. Those had concrete value, whereas, Garrison's philosophical musings seemed to be ephemeral, even self-defeating.
All this heat and fire became part of a manufacturing process that helped to bend and shape public opinion, albeit gradually. Their tenaciousness and single-mindedness presented a stability, while events changed the views of the moderates. Some of the most telling and absorbing were the trials of blacks who were repossessed by the Fugitive Slave Act, imposed on states by the federal government as part of the 1850 Compromise. Public opinion began to shift.
The Fugitive Slave Act posed additional difficulties for those involved with the Underground Railroad, an important avenue for runaways. It was neither underground nor a railroad. It was hidden or subversive, and therefore "underground" and it used railroad terminology like "stations", which were safe houses or churches and "conductors" who were often abolitionists or free blacks. Their job was to direct the runaway to the next station in most cases, but some were free blacks who posed as slaves on a southern plantation and helped others to escape during the dark of night and head in the right direction. Some of the abolitionists were "stockholders" who provided funding for food, supplies and transportation.
The western Massachusetts location of Springfield on the Connecticut River, not far from New York State, made it ideal for the "Railroad". It had a whole network of secret escape routes and hiding places. It had conductors who were white, others who were black, and they kept runaways in their attics and cellars, hidden rooms, sheds and barns. Thousands of slaves made their way through Springfield stations to freedom in the northern states and parts of Canada -- which had outlawed slavery, but did not necessarily welcome blacks.
Like most of Massachusetts, which had banned the slave trade in 1788, Springfield was a leader in the anti-slavery movement. The last slave in Springfield was a fugitive. Her owners came for her, but twenty-one residents bought her and freed her. She stayed in town.
However, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 allowed slave hunters to capture runaways in the North. They could come right into Boston or Springfield and demand help from the police and courts in restoring their "property" to them.
Worse than that, the new law made it a crime to harbor or help slaves who were trying to escape. Abolitionists and free blacks defied the law, which, to them, made northern states partners in the pernicious practice of slavery.
Whites were putting themselves in danger by breaking the law, and so were freed blacks who could not give testimony in court to prove that they had been set free. An "owner" just had to swear out an oath to a magistrate and he could take the person south with him. No proof was needed.
The injustice of this brought home to some moderates the injustice of slavery itself, and this law would, in fact, backfire since it brought the matter into the public glare in northern states, and people became witnesses to free persons becoming enslaved right in their own cities. This had more impact than the thought of people laboring at the bidding of others on some faraway plantation as they may have read about in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The resistance now evident in the northern states brought resentment in the south and was one more step towards conflict.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived in Boston for a while and whose book was published there, told a stirring tale of slaves and slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin. It had raised awareness among the general population, and that made it easier to relate to these taking of freedoms closer at hand --like on the streets and in the courts of Boston, Springfield and elsewhere.
The book, published in 1852 sold 300,000 copies in that year alone and sold more in the 19th century than any book but the Bible. Its negative stereotypes of blacks have outlived its impact as a historic novel. The long-suffering Christian and faithful servant, Uncle Tom, its main character, has been especially reviled.
There were other things that led to changing opinions as well. Some people had found a comfortable niche by favoring the limitation of slavery to the southern states that already had it. They opposed extension to new territories, believing that slavery would gradually succumb to industrial growth or new technology as we would call it. Free states were already gaining a slight edge on slave states, and that came in handy when it came to sectional disputes. For example, the southern states threatened a boycott of Northern goods. This would have to be a state by state effort since they didn't have the votes in Congress any longer to impose things like tariffs.
At the same time, new territories acquired in the 1800s by the United States were becoming ripe for settlement and growth. The Northwest Ordinance had opened the area that would become Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin to settlement, and homesteads were being snatched up fast as these territories became states.
Then there was the vast Louisiana Territory, purchased from Napoleon in 1803. Many states would be carved out of this huge parcel, as well as from The Northwest, the Spanish Southwest, Texas and California.
These were all potential battlegrounds between slave owners and free soilers as to whether the new states would be free or slave. The first battle line came with the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the brainchild of Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who would win his Senate race against Abraham Lincoln, but face him again when both became candidates for president in 1860.
This act had ramifications that rumbled all the way back to Massachusetts -- back to those abolitionists; back especially to John Brown the radical who would involve people from Boston and Concord as we shall see.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed settlers within those territories to decide for themselves whether slavery would be permitted when they became states. This concept was called "popular sovereignty." That sounds harmless and perhaps fair, but it set up conflicts, particularly in Kansas, which was settled first.
Massachusetts was involved here, too Kansas was settled by people who came there in order to make it a free state or a slave state, people from such places as Massachusetts and by those in nearby Missouri with its slave owners who wanted to extend their influence to the new territory. Oh, by the way, Kansas happened to be excellent farmland.
Like many laws, this one had unintended consequences. It was originally supposed to allow building a transcontinental railroad through the area, but the notion of popular sovereignty was added to it. Douglas had hoped that the opportunity for choice would ease tensions between north and south, but instead it resulted in land grabs, armed hostilities and all kinds of political ramifications including, it can be argued, a march toward civil war. Debate was heated in both houses of Congress, and weapons were brandished on the floor of the House or Representatives.
The measure was passed in a close vote, with most southerners voting in favor, as did most Democrats, even in the North. An immediate effect was the strengthening of the Republican Party, which aimed to prevent the expansion of slavery to the territories.
Politically, that was the right stance at the right time. The new act even drove the moderates in places like Massachusetts closer to the abolitionists because they didn't want to see slavery extended. Even the Irish, who were certainly not in favor of emancipation, did not want to see the institution of slavery spread to new places.
Those immigrants, primarily Irish, opposed abolition. Their newspaper, the Pilot, noted that by contrast, slaves were better clothed, fed and housed than the Irish immigrants. In the view of these immigrants, the Boston abolitionists were from a class of people that resembled the English who had stolen their lands back in Ireland.
They had nothing in common with Beacon Hill Brahmins who obviously looked down their noses on them. Moreover, to the Irish, these people were hypocrites who didn't care about the slaves but wanted, instead, to promote their liberal ideas. Garrison, after all, had labeled the Constitution a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell." What did he know about the aspirations of the disenfranchised black or the friendless immigrant?
The Pilot had views that you hear in some quarters even today. They opposed people who chose which laws they wanted to obey based on their own ideas and their own opinions of right and wrong.
It's hard to overstate what was happening here, especially in the Bay State. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, promoted by Stephen Douglas, was a deal breaker. It nullified the Compromise of 1850, brought slavery back into politics, aroused both sides and drove the Boston business community closer to the abolitionists.
It wasn't the end of events and pronouncements that led America closer to Civil War. In 1857 Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney handed down the Dred Scot decision declaring blacks were not protected by the Constitution, had no rights and were not citizens. The decision also held that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories. The view was that slaves were inferior.