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Volume CXXXIII, Number 10 |
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Hyde's beliefs and the coming war
KID WONGSRICHANALAI
STAFF WRITER
As America headed towards the fateful presidential election
of 1860, an amazing amount of hostility was in the air. Northerners and
Southerners blamed the opposite side for everything. There was even name
calling in the Senate. Stephen A. Douglas, Democratic Senator from Illinois,
known as the Little Giant, opponent to Lincoln in a number of famous debates,
spear-header of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and champion of the popular sovereignty
idea, was a known enemy of Republican Senator William Pitt Fessenden of
the Bowdoin class of 1823. When Douglas lashed out at the Republicans,
Fessenden responded.
"We call ourselves 'Republicans,'" Pitt Fessenden
thundered, "the senator from Illinois never speaks of us without
calling us 'Black Republicans;' …the senator never speaks of us without
calling us 'Abolitionists.' … If gentlemen call themselves Democrats,
I call them so…it only shows that there are individuals in the Senate
who forget the first principles recognized between gentlemen and attempt
to eke out an argument by affixing names upon persons or parties."
Fessenden also went on to fight against Southern bullying in the Senate.
When Democrats accused Republicans of being abolitionists and "agitation,"
Fessenden responded, "If we are disposed to be quiet you call us
craven; we are afraid to speak, we have not spirit enough to protect or
defend ourselves. If we speak out, we are agitators and desire to rake
open the coals of discord throughout this great country." By that
he meant simply, what else do you expect us to do?
For years the Democrats with their strong Southern base
had fought hard at keeping the North silent. The threat of disunion had
been so incomprehensible that the Northerners had been forced for decades
to fight a retreating battle. Now however, new crimes against the fundamental
rights of human beings and free government - namely the strengthening
of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 and the caning of Massachusetts Senator
Charles Sumner - stirred up new vigor in the North. It was only a matter
of time before the Potomac and the Ohio Rivers became barriers between
a nation at war with itself.
In the years of 1857 to 1859 Fessenden would hotly debate
a number of bills in the Senate. One of those was the Lecompton Constitution,
drawn up by Southern sympathizers from Kansas who hoped to bring the state
into the Union as a slave-holding one. Another issue was one that involved
the expansion of the army. Fessenden and most of the Republicans opposed
this for both ideological and financial reasons. By that time Fessenden
had been placed on the Senate Finance Committee and for the remainder
of his career, he would be employed here (aside from a brief stint as
the Secretary of the Treasury).
In the meantime, however, his duels with hotheaded Southerners
continued. Fessenden would wrestle words with Robert Toombs of Georgia
and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. Coincidentally (and later to the great
embarrassment of Bowdoin College) in 1858 Davis, a former Secretary of
War and soon to be the first and only President of the Confederate States
of America, received an honorary degree from Bowdoin College. The biggest
criminal of the time, as far as Fessenden was concerned, was President
James Buchanan. Referring to Buchanan's cabinet Fessenden wrote, "A
more inferior looking set of men, including their chief, I never saw together.
Most of them are not only ordinary, but positively ugly. They are, in
fact, very mean men, having a very small degree of talent among them,
and I fear very little integrity…"
Without the vigor of youth in his blood, (by this time Fessenden
was nearing fifty years of age and Washington life had always wounded
his health) Fessenden awaited the coming of the War. Tragedy would strike
him in 1857 when his wife of a quarter of a century passed away. Fessenden
buried himself in work to block out the pain. True, the senator's sons
could probably have eased his suffering, but they were all growing up
and he suffered his sadness in silence. In 1858 Fessenden wrote:
I have no daughters, and my sons will soon leave me on
their several paths of life. What is to become of me if I live to old
age? It is to be hoped that I shall not. But it is useless to anticipate.
I will meet the events and changes of life as well as I can and try to
retain my manhood until the curtain falls.
Meanwhile at Fessenden's alma mater, Thomas Worchester Hyde
was at the peak of his college career. In early 1859 the Bath native wrote
about physical rigorousness. In it Hyde described how British society
was ideal because of its combination of physical and academic disciplines.
Hyde wrote:
The greatest need of the present generation is Physical
Training…The great fundamental principle, that by exercise all our
faculties are improved, should always be born in mind. The intellect,
if it is not constantly kept at work, takes a backward path….We spend
a large portion of out lives in discipline of knowledge…but do we
make a corresponding advance in our physical nature to support the straining
operation….It is devoutly to be hoped that…Americans may emphatically
become a healthy people.
And so, while the nation prepared for civil war and as William
Pitt Fessenden wrestled with the effects of loneliness in the Senate,
a young and enthusiastic Thomas Hyde was busily arguing for more exercise
in American culture.
Next Week: Thomas Hyde clerks for the Lincoln Campaign.
Some editing (by the Orient staff) may have occurred before
this piece was published. To view a full version of the entire series
(including source citations) please visit my website. (This site includes
the Chamberlain and Howard Series and is updated weekly during the school
year) at: http://www.bowdoin.edu/~kwongsri
Also, please send comments and ideas to: kwongsri@bowdoin.edu