The nation has probably never been more divided, more filled with outright hatred, than it was in 1856 and the ensuing years.
The political party that came to be known as the Know Nothings had been formed a couple years earlier and its primary raison d’être was its opposition to immigrants, Irish immigrants and people of the Catholic persuasion in particular.
But of course the main issue dividing the nation was slavery.
In 1856 Roger Taney, a Maryland slave owner who was the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and by common consent the worst Chief Justice of the Supreme Court before John Roberts, wrote the infamous Dred Scott decision which claimed that slavery was a state issue, not a federal one, and the states could damn well do whatever they pleased. Taney somehow thought this would settle the slavery issue once and for all. In a pig’s eye.
Meanwhile there was trouble brewing in the Kansas Territory between proslavery “border ruffians” and antislavery “free-staters” with 56 documented political killings, although the total may have been as high as 200. In May Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner delivered a fiery anti-slavery speech on the senate floor entitled “The Crime Against Kansas”.
James McPherson described what happened next in Battle Cry of Freedom:
Sumner’s speech produced an uproar—in the Senate, where several Democrats rebuked him, and in the press, where even Republican praise was tempered by reservations about the rhetoric. The only thing that prevented some southerner from challenging Sumner to a duel was the knowledge that he would refuse. Besides, dueling was for social equals; someone as low as this Yankee blackguard deserved a horsewhipping—or a caning. So felt Congressman Preston Brooks, a cousin of Andrew Butler. Two days after the speech Brooks walked into the nearly empty Senate chamber after adjournment and approached the desk where Sumner was writing letters. Your speech, he told the senator, “is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.” As Sumner started to rise, the frenzied Brooks beat him over the head thirty times or more with a gold-headed cane as Sumner, his legs trapped under the bolted-down desk, finally wrenched it loose from the floor and collapsed with his head covered by blood.
This incident incensed even those Yankees who had little use for Sumner. “Bleeding Sumner” joined Bleeding Kansas as a symbol of the slave power’s iniquities. The South, declared one newspaper, “cannot tolerate free speech anywhere, and would stifle it in Washington with the bludgeon and the bowie-knife, as they are now trying to stifle it in Kansas by massacre, rapine, and murder.” “Has it come to this,” asked William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, “that we must speak with bated breath in the presence of our Southern masters? . . . Are we to be chastised as they chastise their slaves? Are we too, slaves, slaves for life, a target for their brutal blows, when we do not comport ourselves to please them?”
Adding insult to injury, the South lionized Brooks as a hero. Although some southerners regretted the affair for its galvanizing effect on the North, public approval of Brooks’s act far outweighed qualms. Newspapers in his own state expressed pride that Brooks had “stood forth so nobly in defense of . . . the honor of South Carolinians.” The Richmond Enquirer pronounced “the act good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequence. The vulgar Abolitionists in the Senate are getting above themselves. . . . They have grown saucy, and dare to be impudent to gentlemen! . . . The truth is, they have been suffered to run too long without collars. They must be lashed into submission.” A Louisiana planter and former army officer, Braxton Bragg, wrote that the House should pass a vote of thanks to Brooks. “You can reach the sensibilities of such dogs” as Sumner, wrote Bragg, “only through their heads and a big stick.” Brooks himself boasted that “every Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts.” When the House voted 121 to 95 to expel him, southern opposition prevented the necessary two-thirds majority. Brooks resigned anyway and returned home to seek vindication by reelection. South Carolinians feted him and sent him back to Washington with triumphant unanimity. From all over the South, Brooks received dozens of new canes, some inscribed with such mottoes as “Hit Him Again” and “Use Knock-Down Arguments.”
And in the midst of all this hatred the Democrats nominated Pennsylvanian James Buchanan to run for president, apparently because he was the most “unobjectionable” choice.
And alas, he won.
Unlike some of his predecessors, he didn’t just sit around and no nothing. It’s just that everything he did made the divisions worse.
He actually meddled in the Dred Scott decision by convincing a fellow Pennsylvanian judge to join in the majority decision.
He tried to make Kansas a slave state against the wishes of a majority of its inhabitants.
He was an awful president, perhaps the worst that this country has ever had.