In Defense of Union and White Supremacy: The Democratic Alternative to Free Soil, 1847-1860

Before April 1861, no one saw the Civil War as inescapable. Cumberland County Democrats, like most northern Democrats, opposed the nation's division over slavery and tried to placate the South without alienating their constituents. Their strategy was avoidance or "nonintervention."¹ As their most important paper wrote, "We are opposed to all sectional sentiments, regarding the interests of all the States as identical, and union of the States as of more value than all else besides."² While Free Soil men wanted to shut slavery out of the western territories regardless of what the South thought, Union-minded Democrats argued for "popular sovereignty," that settlers, not Congress, ought to decide whether they would own slaves. After the debates of 1850, Democrats added to popular sovereignty the powerful ad hominem arguments that Free Soil men advocated "negro equality" and that they provoked disunion. Unfortunately for Cumberland County Democrats, their cause was defeated by dissension in their ranks and by a surge of support for Free Soil Republicanism between 1858 and 1860.

To a very large degree the views of Cumberland County Democracy during these years were the views of John B. Bratton, editor of the American Volunteer before 1846 and long after 1860. Bratton was more than an editor. He served a term on Carlisle's Borough Council as its president and represented Cumberland County on the small multi-county committees that chose the 1854 and 1858 Democratic congressional nominees.³ He once received a Democratic county convention's endorsement as candidate for state canal commissioner.⁴ Appointed Carlisle's postmaster by Presidents Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, Bratton carried the prestige and the burden of speaking for those administrations.⁵  There was no one with such persistent influence in the Whig or Republican parties.

Popular sovereignty surfaced during the Mexican war as an alternative to Congress banning slavery in all the new territories (as proposed by Pennsylvania Congressman David Wilmot) or even part of them. Remarking on a controversy between New York Democrats—"Hunkers" and "Barnburners—over whether to give the South more slave territory by extending the Missouri Compromise line or to support the Wilmot proviso, the Volunteer asserted both sides were wrong. Slavery policy belonged to each state by virtue of its sovereignty. Congress had no power, "to declare where slavery shall exist, or where it shall not exist, in the acquisition of any territory by the Union." If it had such power, argued the Volunteer, it could abolish slavery in the states themselves. Why should Democrats quarrel over a non-issue? "The people of the acquired territory will decide that matter for themselves at last."⁶ This opinion's timing showed that John B. Bratton had connections at the highest levels of the Democratic party. The same day it appeared, the Washington Union printed a letter by Michigan governor and presidential candidate Lewis Cass announcing popular sovereignty to the entire nation.⁷ A little over two years later the Volunteer assured readers, "We would deprecate the extension of slavery as much as any one. But we had better wait until there is real and actual danger, before we estrange our southern brethren by a wild course of insult on this question." Even were there such a danger, "it is a matter that we have nothing to do with ... each State is just as sovereign in her character as either Great Britain or America."⁸

At their meetings county Democrats repeatedly committed themselves to popular sovereignty.⁹ Few bucked their party to embrace free soil, as shown by the tiny 0.4% of votes cast in 1848 for the Free Soil party. One of these few was William Mateer, co-proprietor with Jerome K. Boyer of Harrisburg of the American Democrat, Carlisle's other Democratic paper. Boyer had recently withdrawn from his partnership with Bratton in the Volunteer.¹⁰ The Democrat cannot speak for itself today because all issues before 1851 are missing, but the Whig (later Republican) Carlisle Herald noted, "Our neighbor of the 'Democrat' leans considerably toward the [Wilmot] Proviso .. . "¹¹ It was denounced at least twice by the Volunteer as "The American Democrat, alias Abolition Organ." A purported letter to the Volunteer from ''A Buchanan Man" recalled the, "course pursued by that paper during the past summer [1847] in lending itself to promulgate Abolition sentiments .. .. " However, the Democrat fell into line with the party after 1847 and supported popular sovereignty.¹²

Read the entire article