Salmon P. Chase: “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

The issue Chase would use to advance his ideas came in 1854, when Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois began pushing a piece of legislation to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories as part of his larger effort to secure a transcontinental rail line that would run through his home state. Douglas's effort to get the law through Congress required the support of southern legislators, who had their own ideas about where a rail line should run. As a concession to them, Douglas's bill repealed the antislavery provision of the Missouri Compromise—an agreement struck in 1820 between northern and southern legislators that allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state in exchange for closing to slavery all the other federal territory (then held) that lay north of 36°30′ latitude (Missouri's southern border). Douglas's concession potentially opened all this territory to slavery and violated what Chase considered to be a sacred agreement between the slave and free states (although he had earlier criticized the compromise as a capitulation to the South).

Interpreting this legislation as an act of pro-slavery aggression, Chase, together with his antislavery colleagues Senator Charles Sumner and Representatives Joshua R. Giddings, Edward Wade, Gerrit Smith, and Alexander DeWitt, published their “Appeal of the Independent Democrats in Congress to the People of the United States” and articulated the threat facing the North's citizens. The “Appeal,” which some historians have characterized as one of the most successful works of political propaganda in American history, restated themes that had appeared in Chase's Reclamation of Fugitives from Service but did so in a way emphasizing that the expansion of slavery would strangle the free states.

Chase describes the pending Kansas-Nebraska bill as an imminent threat. He describes the bill “as a gross violation of a sacred pledge,” and declares it “as part and parcel of an atrocious plot to exclude from a vast unoccupied region, immigrants from the Old World and free laborers from our own States, and convert it into a dreary region of despotism, inhabited by masters and slaves.” Pro-slavery legislators sought a huge region—“larger, by thirty-three thousand square miles, than all the existing free states excluding California.” And that region, moreover, had historically been considered as reserved to the free states by a great sectional compromise. Now, Douglas's bill offered to open this territory to slavery “in flagrant disregard of sound policy and sacred faith.”

The breach of faith occurred because the Kansas-Nebraska bill permitted the extension of slavery in violation of what Chase considered to be the original policy of the United States. The Northwest Ordinance had set out the principles of nonextension in the 1780s, although Congress failed to adhere to them in 1803 when it refused to abolish slavery in the territory acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and in 1812 when it allowed Louisiana to join the Union as a slave state. The Missouri Compromise constituted a restoration of the original policy. Missouri petitioned Congress in 1818 to enter the Union as a slave state, and opponents of the petition overcame fierce opposition in the House of Representatives to pass a measure that would gradually abolish slavery in the new state and close the federal territories to slavery. The measure then failed to pass the Senate, but at the next session Congress reached the compromise and established the 36°30′ line. This compromise represented a sectional agreement. President James Monroe's cabinet, which included such prominent southern politicians as William Wirt of Virginia, William Crawford of Georgia, and John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, gave the compromise written support. Northern members of Congress, Chase continues, would have never dropped their opposition to Missouri's admission without the prohibition on the extension of slavery.

But the North gained little from this arrangement. Three slave states—Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas—had emerged in the territory south of the 36°30′ line, but only a single free state—Iowa—had emerged in the northern portion. The free states, Chase writes, upheld their end of the agreement, but the slave states, which had nothing more to gain from the compromise, now sought repeal. Acquiescing to southern demands would amount to an act of dishonor, and Chase predicts dire consequences if the bill were to pass. Indeed, the railroad sought by Douglas might never be built. The presence of slavery would drive free laborers away, for “labor cannot be respected where any class of laborers is held in abject bondage.” The exclusion of the free states' “energetic and intelligent masses” would defeat American's original vision of this territory. “Patriotic statesmen … anticipated … a free, industrious, and enlightened population,” consisting of “freedom-loving emigrants from Europe, and energetic and intelligent laborers of our own land,” who would together “extract abundant treasures of individual and public wealth” from the territorial soil. If Congress allowed “the blight of Slavery” to “cover the land,” such developments would not take place. Free laborers simply would not migrate to the region. “Freemen, unless pressed by a hard and cruel necessity, will not, and should not, work beside slaves.”

Of course, the threat posed by this act extended well beyond the territories of Kansas and Nebraska. The bill formed part of an effort to impose slavery throughout the Union. Chase describes the bill as “a bold scheme against American Liberty, worthy of an accomplished architect of ruin.” If the bill passed, slave territory would stretch from Texas's southern border to Canada, and new free states and territories such as California and Oregon would be cut off from their counterparts to the east. That division went to the crux of the plan:

It is hoped … by compelling the whole commerce and the whole travel between the East and West to pass for hundreds of miles through a slaveholding region … and by the influence of a Federal Government controlled by a Slave Power, to extinguish Freedom and establish Slavery in the States and Territories of the Pacific, and subjugate the whole country to the yoke of a slaveholding despotism.

This bill demanded fierce resistance. Giving in would destroy the cause of liberty and justice, which was what the Union had stood for since its founding. Chase and his fellow signatories here vow to fight and to persist even in defeat because “the cause of human freedom is the cause of God.”

The arguments presented in the “Appeal” helped transform American politics in the 1850s. Part of that transformation resulted from Chase's impeccable timing. He had asked Douglas, the bill's sponsor, to delay debate so that he could study the text, but his request was primarily a pretext for him to buy time to allow publication of the “Appeal” to be the opening shot in the debate. The “Appeal” also employed new political tactics by framing issues in terms of moral absolutes and by denouncing supporters of slavery as inherently evil men who could not be trusted. Douglas's bill was not poor policy; it was a “violation of a sacred pledge,” part of “an atrocious plot,” and “a bold scheme against American Liberty.” Douglas and those who helped him craft the bill were “architect[s] of ruin” connected to a “Slave Power” determined to force slavery into the federal territories and even into California.

This argument—that a conspiracy of corrupt politicians would stop at nothing to expand slavery throughout the Union and would respect no agreement that stood in their way—would become an article of faith for the new Republican Party, which organized in the wake of the debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Later events such as the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision (1857), which held the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional, and the debate over the Lecompton Constitution (1857), Kansas's second attempt at a constitution, which tried to force Kansas into the Union as a slave state over the wishes of its inhabitants, convinced a majority of northern voters that Chase and his colleagues were right. Indeed, Chase advanced his political career considerably during this period as he moved from the Senate to the governorship of Ohio, emerged as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 1856 and 1860, served as President Abraham Lincoln's Treasury secretary through most of the Civil War, and then became chief justice of the United States.