Gamaliel Bailey and the Kansas-Nebraska Act : a study of the thought and actions of a political antislavery journalist

Abstract

American Constitutional democracy was only half a century old in the 1830's. To Americans such as Gamaliel Bailey, it was an article of faith that its destiny was to spread across the globe. Certainly, the road was anything but easy. The United States was virtually alone in a world of varying degrees of despotism. Democracy had failed and failed miserably in France and Bailey was under no illusion that the vitality of democratic ideology could capture the minds of the world populace by weight of sheer reason alone. With that practiced Yankee eye for practicality, he saw that it had to be carried into direct confrontation wherever despotism existed - no matter what its form. Nor was he so naive as to believe that democracy could be exported before it was purified and thoroughly entrenched in American society.

Obviously, he viewed the world beginning from the prejudices of his own generation. But, he was a true democrat when those prejudices were in direct conflict with the logic of democracy, he endeavored to reform them. To him, the slave/plantation system of the South was abominable. This was not primarily because it was an immoral system of race relations, but because it was like having hundreds of little monarchies in the very homeland of democracy. It could not help but to absorb that energy needed by democracy to succeed in its worldwide conquest. For that reason, it had to be removed from the American way of life. Believing in the American Federal System and Constitution, Bailey refused to advocate abolition policies which went contrary to them. Instead, he advocated a complete separation of the Federal Government from slavery, thus isolating it into the states where it existed. Thereafter, he felt that the inherent defects of slavery would quickly destroy it as a viable system.

To accomplish this "divorce," Bailey turned to politics in the mid-1830's. For the next twenty-nine years of his life, he successfully acted as a leading spokesman in the first the Liberty, then the Free Soil and finally, the Free Democratic Parties. Through "The National Era," the most widely read of his journals, he consistently strove to make his ideas on antislavery the basis of a strong national party. With the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, he used his considerable personal influence to assist political leaders in organizing the massive popular reaction into the Republican Party. Slightly over a decade later, slavery was at an end and the section that had maintained it was in shambles.