On December 5, 1859 the thirty-sixth congress of the United States. 237 members of the House of Representatives took their seats and started on their first duty as representatives, electing the Speaker of the House. This election had been a mere formality of the majority party in the House for much of the history of the United States but in the last few turbulent years it had come to be more and more of an acrimonious duty. In 1859 it was to set a new benchmark for hostility. The Speakers position was the most powerful position in Congress and could control committee appointments as well as agendas for action. The Democratic party had long held superior numbers in the house but in 1859 they were the minority party. The new Republican party boasted 109 members in the House to the Democrats 101. The American party, a holdover from the defunct Whig and Know-nothing parties held the balance with 27 members.
The Republican party, still a rather loose coalition, put forth John Sherman of Ohio as their candidate for Speaker. Sherman who had already served a couple of terms in the House was the brother of an instructor at a rather obscure military institute in Lousiana at the time named William T. Sherman who was later to come to no small amount of fame as a General in the approaching war.
The Democratic party put forth Thomas S. Bocock of Virginia as their candidate. Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania was also nominated but he quickly withdrew after the first ballot. On the first ballot Bocock received 86 votes, Sherman 66, and Grow 43. A majority of the votes was needed for election so all candidates were well short of election.
At this time Representative John B. Clark of Missouri rose to propose a resolution, The Clark Resolution, that was to throw the House into turmoil for the next 8 weeks:
“Whereas certain members of this House now in nomination for Speaker, did endorse and recommend the book hereinafter mentioned,
Resolved, that the doctrines and sentiments of a certain book called the ‘Impending Crises of the South- How to Meet It, purporting to have been written by one Hinton R. Helper, are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of the country, and that no member of this House who has endorsed and recommended it, or the compend from it, is fit to be chosen to be Speaker of the House.”
The House exploded in an uproar while Clark was still on his feet. Men rushed about the floor yelling and threatening each other while the temporary Clerk of the House looked on helplessly. What was this book and why did the House erupt so violently at its very mention? A little background is in order to explain.
In 1856 incoming President James B. Buchanan had temporarily stilled the boiling tempest that was Washington by appealing to north and south alike to abide by the Supreme Court and it’s upcoming decision regarding the question of slavery in the territories. The Dred Scot decision had been handed down shortly afterwards by Chief Justice Taney. Basically, the Supreme Court had ruled the slaves as non-citizens did not have the right to claim their freedom just because they were residing in a territory that did not sanction slavery. The decision effectively made it illegal to declare a territory free. It made the Missouri Compromise a moot point and backed up the Fugitive Slave laws, which the north found so offensive. State laws that negated the Fugitive Slave laws were declared unconstitutional and federal marshals began to enforce them. Instead of solving the problem the decision only exacerbated it by putting the northern states in the position of either complying with these laws or defying the United States Government. It made the Popular Sovereignty that Kansas had been settled under unconstitutional and led to even worse bloody conflicts in Kansas itself between the Free-Soilers and pro-slavery settlers.
Congress erupted in partisan divisions over the slavery issue yet again. There were fights on the floor of Congress and in the galleries. Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into unconsciousness on the floor of the Senate while Representative Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina and Henry Edmunson of Virginia stood guard to make sure noone interfered. Sumner had made violent and smearing speech against Senator Butler of South Carolina 2 days before and Brooks was incensed.
On October 16, 1869 John Brown and a band of eighteen followers had attacked Brown’s Ferry in the hopes of inciting a slave revolt. His plan was to take over the arsenal at Brown’s Ferry and issue the arms to the slaves in the area so that they could revolt. He brought a wagonload of Medieval style pikes made in a blacksmith shop in Massachusetts to aid in the bloody insurrection. They made it as far as the Armory after slaughtering several innocent civilians of the town who had the bad luck to be on the street that day before a band of marines under Robert E. Lee stormed the engine house where they were located killing Brown’s two sons and wounding him. On December 2, 1859 John Brown was hung for treason and murder at Charlestown, Virginia.
Many in the north praised his murderous actions and a funeral expedition of his body into the north was met with great support as it traveled northwards. The south was incredulous. Here was a murderer of innocent civilians who confessed to trying to stir the slaves they legally owned into bloody insurrection, and he was seen as a hero to many in the north. He was a known consort of the same Senator Sumner who had been caned the year before and rumor was rampant that he had other supporters in Congress as well.
In 1857 the aforementioned book, The Impending Crises, was released to much acclaim in abolition sections of the north. The author, an obscure North Carolina poor white man, urged direct warfare on the institution of slavery “be the consequences what they may.”
Helper drew a picture of the south ruled by a rich minority living in splendor, luxury, and culture while the great majority of southerners lived in hovels, poor and illiterate, all because of slavery. He asserted that the institution of slavery had plunged the south into a state of “comparative imbecility” and advocated it’s violent other-throw by bloody insurrection in a chapter under the heading “Revolution Must Free Slaves.” In this book was the proof of what many southerners believed was the aim of all abolitionists; violent revolt. The following is an excerpt from one of the pamphlets abolitionists were attempting to distribute written from the book itself:
“Teach the slaves to burn their master’s buildings, to kill their cattle and horses, to abandon labor in seedtime and harvest an let crops perish. To make slaveholders objects of contempt by flogging them………”
The book itself, while lurid and violent in its descriptions and methods, would have caused little stir in the south except for the many in the Republican Party had taken it up as a campaign document in the recent elections. A group of 68 representatives from the Republican Party had signed an endorsement of a condensed version of the book and it’s violent insurrectionary principles. This group included the aforementioned John Sherman, put forward as a candidate for Speaker of the House. These same Representatives had gone further and appealed for funds to broadcast 100,000 free copies of the compendium of the book in the south.
This was too much for the south when news of these dealings hit the floor. The goals of the book in question were clearly unconstitutional and dangerous to the south. One can only wonder at the sense of men who would endorse it as public policy.
The House itself became and armed camp. “Every man on the floor of both Houses is armed with a revolver- some with two revolvers and a Bowie knife,” declared Senator Hammond of South Carolina. Senator Ben Wade of Ohio put a sawed-off shotgun ostentatiously in his desk, making sure that it was observed by all. “The members of both sides are armed with deadly weapons,” wrote Senator Grimes of Iowa, “and the friends of both are armed in the galleries”. Both sides rushed into the well of the House on at least 2 occasions in the ensuing debates over the next eight weeks, forcing the sergeant at arms to clear the floor. Pistols were drawn, bowie knives unsheathed and blows exchanged.
The house was deadlocked as neither side could muster a majority. On January 30th, after the 39th undeciding ballot it became obvious that a combination of southern democrats and some of the free soil leftover representatives were close to breaking the deadlock. Rather than lose the Speaker position to the Democrats, Sherman stepped aside in favor of William Pennington of New Jersey. Pennington was a Republican but he had not signed the odious endorsement of Helper’s book. On February 1, 1860 Pennington was elected on the forty-fourth ballot. Pennington was a first time Representative and was to prove himself completely incompetent as Speaker but the south had won its first battle of the session in keeping Sherman out.
The following is a letter from William T. Sherman to his brother John written when the debate was at its hottest and answered after the election was over by John Sherman in the second letter below.
“I have watched the dispatches and hoped your election would occur without the usual excitement, and believe such would have been the case had it not been for you signing for that Helper’s book. Of it I know nothing, but extracts made copiously in Southern papers show it to be not only abolition, but assailing.
Now I hoped you would be theoretical and not practical; for practical abolition is disunion, civil war, and universal anarchy on this continent, and I do not believe that you want that.
Write me how you came to sign that book.”
John Sherman’s reply, sent after the fiasco was over follows:
“You ask why I signed the recommendation for the Helper book. It was a thoughtless, foolish, and unfortunate act. Everybody knows that the ultra sentiments in the book are as obnoxious to me as they can be to anyone; in the proper circumstances I would distinctly say so, but under the threat of the Clark Resolution, I could not, with self-respect, say more than I have.”
Obviously, Sherman could not disavow his signature without either admitting that he did not in fact know what he was signing at the time or admitting that he was in favor of the sentiments expressed in the book. The very fact that the leaders of the Republican Party would ask for such a pledge from prospective candidates says a lot towards the particular goals of at least some of the party leaders. Is it any wonder that the south felt that not only their institution of slavery was threatened, but their very lives as well.
Shelton Leake of Virginia may have put it best in this excerpt from a speech he made concerning the odious pledge on the floor of the House.
Responding to hisses from the Republican side of the House that interrupted his speech;
“I beg gentlemen when they hiss to remember that Rome was saved when the geese cackled. I understand the Abolition candidate for the Speakership to admit that he signed that recommendation, and puts in a special plea of NON EST FACTUM- that he signed it without knowing its contents.
We, on this side, are entitled to know who it is that we are to elect Speaker, whether we are to elect a man, who, while I am here in the discharge of my public duties, is stimulating my Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my wife and helpless children. He has not disavowed it; nor has anybody in this House disavowed the sentiment yet.
Mr. Clerk, upon the 9th day of March last, this publication in relation to Helper’s book, was written with that gentleman’s signature affixed to it, in which he is pledged to revolution in the South, to throttle slavery, and to abolish the institution- peaceably if he can, forcibly if he must. That was his pledge.
We hold that a man who endorses the sentiments of that Helper pamphlet if unfit to be Speaker, unfit to hold any office, unfit to hold a seat upon this floor, because he comes here sworn to destroy the Constitution and everything that we hold dear.”
blackirish  |
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