In the opening year of Buchanan's administration, political prospects were brighter for the Democratic party than for several years previous. It was true that the dreaded northern sectional party had, at last, appeared with formidable strength; but, on the other hand, the forces of conservatism represented by the Democratic and American organizations equaled it in the north and outnumbered it in the country at large.
Popular sentiment, tired of the wrangles over slavery, subsided into the quietude which habitually marks the year succeeding a presidential contest. The Republican party now seemed to be undergoing a reaction; for in the local elections of 1857, it lost ground nearly everywhere, barely carrying several states which had given good majorities in 1856 and failing in New York. In Ohio, where Chase was elected in 1855 by fifteen thousand plurality, he narrowly secured a second term by a margin of 1481 votes. Democratic papers even affected to think that the Republican party was about to expire. "Black Republicanism is dead in Ohio," said one. "The strong tide of public feeling is surging against it everywhere and the Democrats have fought their last battle against it in this state and in the Union." It seemed quite within the range of possibility that if Buchanan successfully adopted towards Kansas the fair, impartial course to which he had pledged himself, he might end the whole territorial controversy and leave the Republican party with no grievance and no excuse for existence.
With such hopeful prospects before him, Buchanan took up the Kansas situation in the spring of 1857. His course was clear, marked out for him by the action of his party on the Toombs bill of 1856, by the declaration in the Democratic platform, and by his own explicit statements during and after the campaign. All that was necessary was to appoint an impartial governor, secure a fair registration of voters, provide an honest election to a convention, and furnish an opportunity for the people of Kansas to accept or reject any constitution which might be draughted. Nothing in the Dred Scott decision obstructed this program; for admitting the validity of the principle that neither Congress nor the territorial legislature could exclude slaves from a territory, the supreme court did not deny that in forming a state constitution the people of a territory could pass upon the point. "It is the imperative and indispensable duty of the government of the United States," said Buchanan in his inaugural address, "to secure to every resident inhabitant the free and independent expression of his opinion by his vote. . . . That being accomplished, nothing can be fairer than to leave the people of a territory free from all foreign interference to decide their own destiny for themselves." Still more definitely, in a letter of July, he said, "On the question of submitting the constitution to the bona fide resident settlers of Kansas, I am willing to stand or fall."
To carry out his policy, Buchanan sent Robert J. Walker, of Mississippi, to succeed Geary, whose impartial course had been so ill-supported by the Pierce administration that he resigned in disgust on March 4, 1857, and, like his predecessors, left the territory in fear for his life. Walker, to whom fell the ungrateful task, was a figure of national reputation, formerly senator from Mississippi, secretary of the treasury under Polk, and author of the tariff of 1846, an energetic, irascible man, honorable and fearless of criticism, determined, although from a slave state, to adhere strictly to the impartial course agreed upon by him with Buchanan. In his inaugural address, on May 26, he urged all the settlers to cooperate in forming a state government, announcing that the administration was pledged to secure a fair vote and that any constitution adopted would be submitted "for ratification or rejection by a majority of the then actual, bonafide settlers of Kansas."
This plan, however, encountered a serious obstacle in the form of a movement by the pro-slavery party in Kansas toward the framing of a constitution. It was seen that if the Free State party continued its policy of refusing to take part in any territorial elections, it would be easy to secure a pro-slavery constitution and ask for the admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state. Acting under this idea, the territorial legislature, after a favorable popular vote in October 1856, set June 15, 1857, for the election of delegates. Moreover, Stanton, the secretary of the territory and acting governor before the arrival of Walker, apportioned delegates upon the basis of the pro-slavery electoral registration, defective as it was, and Walker found himself confronted with a constitution-making process that altogether failed to correspond with the impartial intentions of himself and Buchanan.
In the attempt to induce the Free State men to participate in the affair, Walker was unsuccessful, and the election of delegates at this critical point drew out less than one-eighth of the voters in the territory and resulted in the choice of a unanimously pro-slavery convention. Not disheartened by this setback, Walker continued to urge the Free State party to share in the coming territorial election of October 1857, and during the summer succeeded in convincing them of his impartiality and of the wisdom of abandoning the hopeless effort to maintain the Topeka government. Many eastern Republicans approved such a change of policy, believing that the majority of Free State men was so large that they could be certain, under a fair count, of controlling the territorial election. Walker himself saw clearly that the pro-slavery element was outnumbered, but he felt sure that if Kansas were admitted as a state, free or slave, it would be controlled by the Democratic party and would furnish two more senators to aid in holding the Senate against the danger of Republican control.
By this time, however, Walker's policy had begun to evoke criticism from southern leaders. His repression of Lane and the violent Free State men did not atone in their eyes for his attempts to win the confidence of the moderate anti-slavery leaders; and his hopes for an additional Democratic state offered small compensation for the loss of an expected slave-holding community. His pledge that the constitution should be submitted to the people was termed "a breach of neutrality and an insidious and high-handed breach of faith towards the South and the Southern men in Congress." He was denounced by the Alabama senate and censured by the Democratic state convention of Mississippi, and in August the Charleston Mercury declared: "We do not believe that since the Union began there has been any question which has brought the South into more complete union than the proceedings of Governor Walker in Kansas. . . . We do not believe that a single man who sought the suffrages of our people would dare to support or defend Walker's villainy in Kansas." The danger that the Free State men might vote against a pro-slavery constitution now led the radical southern papers to urge that the pro-slavery convention already elected in the spring should enact any constitution it might draught without submitting it to popular vote, notwithstanding the unqualified pledges of both Walker and Buchanan.
In the territorial election of October 1857, Walker honorably redeemed his promises by throwing out the returns from counties where the pro-slavery party cast its usual fraudulent votes, with the result that the Free State party secured a clear majority of both Council and House of Representatives. Had Reeder or Shannon played their parts with equal firmness, this result might have been anticipated by many months, for at all times since the election of 1855, there seems to have been a Free State majority in the territory. Certainly from this moment, it was clear that Kansas could not be made a slave state except against the will of its voters. A turning point was reached.
The constitutional convention elected in the previous spring now met at the pro-slavery town of Lecompton, with the certainty that its work would be rejected if submitted to the voters. Protected from the angry Free State men by federal troops, this body, under the leadership of John Calhoun, the surveyor of the territory, played a desperate game. Not daring to follow the suggestions showered upon them by southern newspapers, that they should enact a constitution without any popular vote, they draughted a document that contained a special article on slavery and voted to submit that alone to popular suffrage. It declared that the right of property was higher and before any constitutional sanction; that the right to slave property and its increase was inviolable; and that there was no power in the state to emancipate slaves without their owners' consent, nor to prevent their entrance. If this article should be stricken out, slavery should no longer exist, except that the right of property in slaves already in the territory should not be interfered with. The vote was to be "For the Constitution with Slavery" or "For the Constitution without Slavery," and was to be conducted by officials appointed by the convention itself.
The plan was not unskilful. It certainly seemed to submit the crucial point to the people of Kansas, and thereby, if the voters were only concerned to pass upon the existence of slavery, to carry out the pledges of Buchanan and Walker. It was true that if the "Constitution without Slavery" were adopted, the slaves already in Kansas would not be freed, and an amendment would not be possible until 1864; but from the southern point of view, the main question would have been settled. The non-submission of the constitution itself did not strike a southerner as peculiar, for this method of enactment was common in the slave states.
The intense indignation in Kansas over this plan of submission was quickly communicated to the north, where the proposition was at once stigmatized as a swindle. "The pretense of submission is a fraud," said the Tribune, "and the refusal to submit the entire constitution itself an outrage." Probably the angriest person in the United States was Walker, who found all his plans thwarted. He told Calhoun plainly that if the scheme were carried through he should oppose it with all his power. Calhoun replied that Buchanan himself favored the idea, whereat Walker in a passion retorted: "I consider such a submission of the question a vile fraud, a base counterfeit, and a wretched device to keep the people from voting. ... I will not support it, but I will denounce it, no matter whether the administration sustains it or not." When the convention adjourned, leaving the vote to be taken on December 21 through its agents, the exasperated governor returned to Washington, as each of his predecessors had done, to lay the matter before the president.
A highly critical decision now lay in Buchanan's hands. In spite of recent Democratic victories and the large Democratic majority in each House of Congress, the administration trembled on the brink of a disaster as complete as that which had overtaken Pierce when his outlook seemed equally prosperous, for the cry of broken faith had wrecked Pierce and it might also ruin Buchanan. The Lecompton constitution tested the sincerity of Buchanan's pledges, for if he were to support his agent, Walker, he could not avoid repudiating that document as Walker had done. It was asserted at the time that this halfway method of submitting the constitution was a plot concocted in the cabinet by Thompson, the secretary of the interior and Calhoun's superior, but that Buchanan himself, up to this period, was innocent, seems to be proved by his correspondence with Walker. He was still free to act.
But Buchanan was never in his prime a strong-willed man, and now he was old and weak. When Walker reached Washington he found that the president had been fairly terrified by Cobb, Thompson, Davis, and other southerners into deciding to uphold the work of the Lecompton convention, and the only course for Walker was to resign, which he did in a stinging public letter. In taking this step, Buchanan committed a blunder worse even than that of Pierce when he upheld the fraudulent Kansas legislature, for Buchanan not merely furnished a grievance for the languishing opposition; he took, as it proved, the first step towards the disruption of the Democratic party.
At this juncture, the one personality upon whom most depended was Douglas, the idol of the western Democrats, the ablest senatorial debater, and the strongest single leader in the party. He had not found it hard to extenuate the pro-slavery frauds and the Missourian invasions and to uphold the territorial legislature against the Free State "Rebels" with all his powers of argument. If ambition was his guide, it seemed as though he could not hesitate to remain a stalwart defender of the administration and of the Lecompton constitution. But Douglas and his constituents understood something real by popular sovereignty. By even the narrowest construction, this must mean that the people of a territory actually should vote upon a proposed constitution, in whole, and in part, as had been done in every one of the northwestern states between 1846 and 1851. For Douglas to approve the plan of the Lecompton constitution was to put himself squarely athwart every tradition of his section, and he knew this perfectly well. Accordingly, in a dramatic interview, he told the indignant Buchanan that he should denounce it. "Mr. Douglas," said Buchanan, "I wish you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed. Beware of the fate of Tallmadge and Rives." To which Douglas pithily retorted: "Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead."
Events now moved straight to a party crisis. In his annual message, Buchanan said that the Lecompton convention was legal and that by the method of submission "every citizen shall have an opportunity of expressing his opinion by his vote whether Kansas shall be received into the Union with or without slavery, and thus the exciting question may be peacefully settled in the very mode required by the organic law. The election will be held under legitimate authority, and if any portion of the inhabitants shall refuse to vote, a fair opportunity to do so having been presented, this will be their own voluntary act and they alone will be responsible for the consequences."
Two days later Douglas rose and announced his purpose to oppose the Lecompton constitution. He asserted that the Kansas-Nebraska act had for its fundamental principle the right of the people of the territory to decide on all their "domestic concerns," not merely slavery; that the universal understanding in the country and in the territory had been that any constitution, however, framed, would have to be submitted as a whole to the bona fide voters; and that on this issue the national election of 1856 had been won. "They have a right," he said, "to judge for themselves whether they like it or not... It is no answer to tell me that the constitution is a good one and unobjectionable. . . . Whether good or bad, it is none of my business and none of yours. . . . Let me ask you why force this constitution down the throats of the people of Kansas in opposition to their wishes and in violation of their pledges.?... Frame any other bill that carries out the pledge that the people shall be left free to decide on their own domestic institutions for themselves and I will go with you. . . . But if this constitution is to be forced down our throats, in violation of the fundamental principles of free government, under a mode of submission that is a mockery and an insult, I will resist it to the last." This message and speech produced a sensation throughout the country, for it presaged a serious rupture between Douglas and the administration. While southern papers commented severely upon Douglas's position, most of the northern Democratic sheets applauded his stand and condemned the Lecompton constitution.
In Kansas the situation now developed rapidly into another deadlock; for when, on December 21, the vote on the Lecompton constitution took place, the Free State men, who opposed the document as a whole, refused to participate. Hence the results stood: for the constitution with slavery, 6226 (of which 2720 were later proved fraudulent); for the constitution without slavery, 569. Meanwhile, the territorial legislature, convened by Stanton at the urgent demand of the Free State party, had provided for another vote on January 4, 1858, in which ballots might be cast against the constitution as well as for it. Stanton was promptly punished for this indiscretion by removal, but the second vote came off with the following results: for the constitution with slavery, 138; for the constitution without slavery, 24; against the constitution, 10,226. In this confused form, the verdict of Kansas upon the Lecompton constitution came before the president and Congress.
Buchanan was by this time fully committed to the extreme southern position and had cast aside every vestige of the impartiality he had avowed in the preceding year. February 2, 1858, he sent the Lecompton constitution to Congress and recommended the admission of Kansas under it as a slave state. He stigmatized the refusal of the Free State party to vote on December 21 as part of their "treasonable system," especially unpardonable, since, at this time, "the all-important question" was submitted. If they really wished to make Kansas a free state, he concluded, the only way they could do so was by submitting to the Lecompton constitution. "It has been solemnly adjudged," he urged, "by the highest judicial tribunal, . . . that slavery exists in Kansas by virtue of the Constitution of the United States. Kansas is therefore at this moment as much a slave state as Georgia or South Carolina." By this action, the irretrievable step was taken and the fate of the administration and the Democratic party was staked on the effort to force Kansas in as a slave state. From the point of view of political expediency and of party management, no president ever made a worse mistake.