Lecompton in the House
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LECOMPTON IN THE HOUSE.
The interminable anticipations and speculations of newspaper correspondents and politicians generally are dissolved in event. By a vote of 120 to 112 the Crittenden amendment1 has been substituted in the House for the original bill. The influence and patronage of the President2 have succumbed before the public opinion which he believed he could afford to despise and outrage.
To have risked the reputation and prestige of his administration on the passage of the Lecompton bill,3 was, on the part of the President, worse than a crime—it was a blunder. A bare success which was the utmost he could hope for, would not atone for the ignominy to be encountered; but the defeat, superadded to the ignominy, reduces this administration to the level of the last.
Buchanan, like Pierce,4 has labored with might and main in the interests of slavery, and like those of his predecessor, his exertions have recoiled upon those whom he wished to befriend, and rendered them weaker than before. Pierce created the Republican party, by his concessions to the South. Buchanan has elevated it from a sectional to a national, from a defeated to a triumphant party, by following in the footsteps of his predecessor. As Senator Seward5 remarked in a recent speech, the turning point of the contest between Freedom and Slavery has been passed, and henceforth the black tide is on the ebb.
Notes:
1. Proposed by Kentucky politician and former governor John J. Crittenden (1787–1863), the failed Crittenden amendment, or the Crittenden Compromise, aimed to write federal protections of slavery into the constitution and made its federal abolition illegal. [back]
2. James Buchanan (1791–1868) was the fifteenth President of the United States (1857–1861). Late in life Whitman still considered Buchanan "perhaps the weakest of the President tribe—the very unablest" (With Walt Whitman in Camden, Monday, November 5, 1888). For more information on Whitman and his disdain for Buchanon, see also Bernard Hirschorn, ""To a President" (1860)," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
3. The Lecompton Constitution of 1857 was written by pro-slavery forces in Kansas. President Buchanan supported it and it was eventually approved by the Senate, but dismissed by the House. Ultimately, Kansas held another local election which resulted in the Constitution’s final rejection. [back]
4. Franklin Pierce (1804–1869) was the fourteenth President of the United States. He served from 1853 to 1857. For context, see also Frederick Hatch, "Presidents, United States," Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). [back]
5. William H. Seward (1801–1872) served as a New York State senator in 1830, and U.S. senator in 1849. He would run, unsuccessfully, for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860 and instead became Secretary of State from 1861 to 1869 under Presidents Lincoln and Johnson. Whitman would clerk for Seward during the Civil War, a job he obtained with the help of a recommendation letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson. [back]