William Bigler, Supporter of James Buchanan and of Slavery

William Bigler was a newspaper editor turned lumberman who was active in the Pennsylvania Democratic Party faction headed by James Buchanan. Buchanan had national ambitions, and as the 1850s began he was building up a coalition to help bring him to the White House. To shore up his support in his homes state of Pennsylvania, Buchanan relied on Keystone Staters like Bigler.

In 1851, Bigler ran for governor of Pennsylvania against the Whig incumbent William Johnson. Bigler’s big campaign theme was that Johnson was soft on abolitionism and not conciliatory enough to the Southern slave interest. Bigler wanted to ride the wave of lovey-doveyness between North and South following the Compromise of 1850, seen by many Americans as a deal between the sections which averted the danger of civil war. As part of that supposed deal, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 provided for the aggressive federal pursuit of black people claimed as slaves by Southern masters. Pennsylvania’s border with the slave state of Maryland was the famous Mason-Dixon Line, and as could be expected of a border state, there were many clashes between pursued fugitives and professional and official kidnappers in Pennsylvania.

William Bigler (Library of Congress)

Shortly before the gubernatorial election, some black people in Christiana, in southeastern Pennsylvania, fought back against an official party of slave-kidnappers acting under the new Fugitive Slave Act. Edward Gorsuch, a master in pursuit of “his” slaves, was killed in the encounter. Bigler and his supporters pinned the blame for the “riot” on governor Johnson and on Johnson’s failure to full-throatedly support the Fugitive Slave Act.

Bigler defeated Johnson in the election. Buchanan modestly avowed that his protégé’s victory, more than anything else “since the commencement of the unfortunate [slavery] agitation,” would tend “to tranquilize the South, to restore peace & harmony between the Slave and the non-slave-holding States & to preserve the Union.” The key phrase here was “tranquilize the South” – the Southern rulers were the people who needed to be appeased, from Buchanan’s point of view – and from Bigler’s point of view as well.

One of Bigler’s first acts as governor was to sign a bill his predecessor had vetoed. The new law allowed alleged fugitive slaves to be imprisoned in Pennsylvania jails while waiting to be shipped South by the federal authorities acting under the Fugitive Slave Act. An earlier Pennsylvania statute, passed when the public mood was more anti-slavery, had prevented federal slave-hunters from using state jails, but in the new mood of cooperation with the south, Bigler opened the jail cells again to receive freedom-seekers.

Another early act by Governor Bigler, fulfilling a campaign promise, was to pardon an elderly professional kidnapper named George F. Alberti. This man was frequently hired by slave masters, especially in Maryland, to hunt down black people in Pennsylvania who had supposedly escaped slavery. Finally Alberti overreached, capturing and enslaving not only an alleged fugitive slave woman, but her freeborn infant child. For enslaving the child, Alberti got ten years hard labor in a Pennsylvania penitentiary.

Maryland leaders and Pennsylvania doughfaces (slavery-appeasers like Buchanan and Bigler) waxed sentimental over the sufferings of poor Alberti, who, according to the proslavery argument, had shown compassion by refusing to separate a mother and child.

Based on reasoning like this, Marylanders and doughfaces pressed for Alberti’s release, and Bigler duly granted a full pardon. Alberti was soon back in business as a slave-kidnapper. The Maryland Legislature voted its thanks to Bigler. The antislavery paper the Free Presbyterian thought that the Alberti case (plus the affair of the Parker sisters) had earned Bigler the title “The Patron Saint of Kidnappers.”

Bigler ran for a second term as governor, but he lost in 1854 to an anti-slavery, anti-Catholic candidate (it may have been a consolation that his brother John was elected to two terms as governor of California). After nursing his political wounds with a railroad management job, Bigler got to the U. S. Senate, just in time to welcome his patron James Buchanan to the White House. Bigler became a key spokesman in the Senate for President Buchanan.

Bigler defended Buchanan’s policy in the territory of Kansas. Most of the white settlers in Kansas didn’t want slavery, and Buchanan had promised to respect the votes of the whites in such cases. Nonetheless, powerful slavers wanted to impose slavery on Kansas, and Buchanan and Bigler supported the admission of Kansas as a slave state, a failed move which created a backlash in the North, helping Abraham Lincoln win the presidency.

During the Civil War, Bigler wanted “the Union as it was” – the country re-united with slavery intact. He also opposed the Lincoln administration’s censorship of Democratic dissenters.

For further reading:

R. J. M. Blackett, The Captive’s Quest for Freedom: Fugitive Slaves, the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, and the Politics of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018)

Peter Arrell Browne, The Classification of Mankind, by the Hair and Wool of Their Heads (Philadelphia: J. A. Jones, 1852)

Peter Arrell Browne, A review of the trial, conviction, and sentence, of George F. Alberti, for kidnapping ([Philadelphia?] [publisher not identified], [1851])
Philip S. Klein, James Buchanan: A Biography (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962)

Michael Todd Landis, “Old Buck’s Lieutenant: Glancy Jones, James Buchanan, and the Antebellum Northern Democracy,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Vol. 140, No. 2 (April 2016), pp. 183-210

Thomas D. Morris, Free Men All: The Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780-1861 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)

Thomas P. Slaughter, Bloody Dawn: The Christiana Riot and Racial Violence in the Antebellum North (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)

Jonathan W. White, “‘Words Become Things’: Free Speech in Civil War Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Legacies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (MAY 2008), pp. 18-23



4 Responses to William Bigler, Supporter of James Buchanan and of Slavery

  1. Excellent piece. American politics circa 1820-1860 is endlessly fascinating.

    My very large ancestral family living in central Pennsylvania were almost completely Democrat, and hated James Buchanan for his failures. They were often quoted in local newspapers on the subject. When the war began 23 young men of the family enlisted in Federal armies to fight to preserve the Union, but not to end slavery – they felt Congress should do that. 2, living in North Carolina, fought for the Confederacy.

  2. Thank you for this. When I think of Pennsylvania I think of Simon Cameron, Quakers, and the Bucktails and this is something I didn’t know. Good stuff.

    1. And Governor Curtain! Without his vision, the Pennsylvania Reserves would never have existed, and how many of its 10,000+ men would have answered when the Government called for them after rejecting them the first time? Personally, I have a nice connection to the Bucktails – my great-great-grandmother was cousin to Captain, then Major E. A. Irvin of the Bucktails, 13th PA Reserves.

  3. You might add that the town of Biglerville, just north of Gettysburg, was named after this doughface.

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