The Southern moderates in 1859 form one of those political groups,
numerous enough in history, who at a crisis arrest our imagination
because of the irony of their situation. Unsuspecting, these men went
their way, during the last summer of the old regime, busy with the
ordinary affairs of state, absorbed in their opposition to the Southern
radicals, never dreaming of the doom that was secretly moving toward
them through the plans of John Brown. In the soft brilliancy of the
Southern summer when the roses were in bloom, many grave gentlemen
walked slowly up and down together under the oaks of their plantation
avenues, in the grateful dusk, talking eagerly of how the scales
trembled in Southern politics between Toombs and Yancey, and questioning
whether the extremists could ride down the moderate South and reopen the
slave trade. In all their wondering whether Douglas would ever come back
to them or would prove the blind Samson pulling down their temple about
their ears, there was never a word about the approaching shadow which
was so much more real than the shades of the falling night, and yet so
entirely shut away from their observation.
In this summer, Stephens withdrew as he thought from public life.
With an intensely sensitive nature, he had at times flashes of strange
feeling which an unsophisticated society would regard as prophetic
inspirations. When he left Washington "on the beautiful morning of the
5th of March, 1859, he stood at the stern of the boat for some minutes
gazing back at the capital." He had announced his intention of not
standing again as a Representative, and one of his fellow-passengers
asked jokingly whether he was thinking of his return as a Senator.
Stephen's reply was full of emotion, "No, I never expect to see
Washington again unless I am brought here as a prisoner of war." During
the summer he endeavored to cast off his intuition of approaching
disaster. At his plantation, "Liberty Hall," he endeavored to be content
with the innumerable objects associated with his youth; he tried to feel
again the grace of the days that were gone, the mysterious loveliness of
the Southern landscape with its immense fields, its forests, its great
empty spaces filled with glowing sunshine. He tried to possess his
troubled soul with the severe intellectual ardor of the law. But his
gift of second sight would not rest. He could not overcome his intuition
that, for all the peace and dreaminess of the outward world, destiny
was upon him. Looking out from his spiritual seclusion, he beheld what
seemed to him complete political confusion, both local and national. His
despairing mood found expression a little later in the words: "Indeed
if we were now to have a Southern convention to determine upon the true
policy of the South either in the Union or out of it, I should expect to
see just as much profitless discussion, disagreement, crimination, and
recrimination amongst the members of it from different states and from
the same state, as we witness in the present House of Representatives
between Democrats, Republicans, and Americans."
Among the sources of confusion Stephens saw, close at home, was the
Southern battle over the reopening of the slave trade. The reality
of that issue had been made plain in May, 1859, when the Southern
commercial congress at Vicksburg entertained at the same time two
resolutions: one, that the convention should urge all Southern States
to amend their constitutions by a clause prohibiting the increase
of African slavery; the other, that the convention urge all the
Legislatures of Southern States to present memorials to Congress asking
the repeal of the law against African slave trade. Of these opposed
resolutions, the latter was adopted on the last day of the convention*,
though the moderates fought hard against it.
*It is significant that the composition of these Southern
commercial congresses and the Congress of the whole Southern
people was strikingly different in personnel. Very few
members of the commercial congresses reappear in the
Confederate Congress.
The split between Southern moderates and Southern radicals was further
indicated by their differing attitudes toward the adventurers from
the United States in Central America. The Vicksburg Convention
adopted resolutions which were thinly veiled endorsements of southward
expansion. In the early autumn another Nicaraguan expedition was nipped
in the bud by the vigilance of American naval forces. Cobb, prime factor
in the group of Southern moderates as well as Secretary of the Treasury,
wrote to Buchanan expressing his satisfaction at the event, mentioning
the work of his own department in bringing it about, and also alluding
to his arrangements to prevent slave trading off the Florida coast.
But the spirit of doubt was strong even among the moderates. Douglas was
the target. Stephens gives a glimpse of it in a letter written during
his last session in Congress. "Cobb called on me Saturday night," he
writes. "He is exceedingly bitter against Douglas. I joked him a good
deal, and told him he had better not fight, or he would certainly be
whipped; that is, in driving Douglas out of the Democratic party.
He said that if Douglas ever was restored to the confidence of the
Democracy of Georgia, it would be over his dead body politically. This
shows his excitement, that is all. I laughed at him, and told him he
would run his feelings and his policy into the ground." The anger
of Cobb, who was himself a confessed candidate for the Democratic
nomination, was imperiling the Democratic national machine which Toombs
was still struggling so resolutely to hold together. Indeed, as late as
the autumn of 1859 the machine still held together.
Then came the man of destiny, the bolt from the blue, the end of the
chapter. A marvelous fanatic--a sort of reincarnation of the grimmest
of the Covenanters--by one daring act shattered the machine and made
impossible any further coalition on the principle of "nothing doing."
This man of destiny was John Brown, whose attack on Harper's Ferry took
place October 16th, and whose execution by the authorities of Virginia
on the charges of murder and treason occurred on the 2nd of December.
The incident filled the South with consternation. The prompt
condemnation of it by many Republican leaders did not offset, in the
minds of Southerners, the fury of praise accorded by others. The South
had a ghastly tradition derived chiefly from what is known as Nat
Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, a tradition of the massacre of white
women and children by negroes. As Brown had set opt to rouse a slave
rebellion, every Southerner familiar with his own traditions shuddered,
identifying in imagination John Brown and Nat Turner. Horror became rage
when the Southerners heard of enthusiastic applause in Boston and of
Emerson's description of Brown as "that new saint" who was to "make the
gallows glorious like the cross." In the excitement produced by remarks
such as this, justice was not done to Lincoln's censure. In his speech
at Cooper Institute in New York, in February, 1860, Lincoln had said:
"John Brown's effort...in its philosophy corresponds with the many
attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors.
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people, until he fancies
himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt
which ends in little else than in his own execution." A few months
afterwards, the Republican national convention condemned the act of
Brown as "among the gravest of crimes."
An immediate effect of the John Brown episode was a passionate outburst
from all the radical press of the South in defense of slavery. The
followers of Yancey made the most of their opportunity. The men who
voted at Vicksburg to reopen the slave trade could find no words to
measure their hatred of every one who, at this moment of crisis, would
not declare slavery a blessing. Many of the men who opposed the slave
traders also felt that, in the face of possible slave insurrection,
the peril of their families was the one paramount consideration.
Nevertheless, it is easy for the special pleader to give a
wrong impression of the sentiment of the time. A grim desire for
self-preservation took possession of the South, as well as a deadly fear
of any person or any thing that tended directly or indirectly to incite
the blacks to insurrection. Northerners of abolitionist sympathies were
warned to leave the country, and in some cases they were tarred and
feathered.
Great anger was aroused by the detection of book-agents who were
distributing a furious polemic against slavery, "The Impending Crisis
of the South: How to Meet It", by Hinton Rowan Helper, a Southerner of
inferior social position belonging to the class known as poor whites.
The book teemed with such sentences as this, addressing slaveholders:
"Do you aspire to become victims of white non-slave-holding vengeance by
day and of barbarous massacres by the negroes at night?" It is scarcely
strange, therefore, that in 1859 no Southerner would hear a good word of
anyone caught distributing the book. And yet, in the midst of all this
vehement exaltation of slavery, the fight to prevent a reopening of
the slave trade went bravely on. Stephens, writing to a friend who was
correspondent for the "Southern Confederacy", in Atlanta, warned him in
April, 1860, "neither to advocate disunion or the opening of the slave
trade. The people here at present I believe are as much opposed to it
as they are at the North; and I believe the Northern people could be
induced to open it sooner than the Southern people."
The winter of 1859-1860 witnessed a famous congressional battle over
the speakership. The new Congress which met in December contained
109 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and 27 Know-Nothings. The Republican
candidate for speaker was John Sherman of Ohio. As the first ballot
showed that he could not command a majority, a Democrat from Missouri
introduced this resolution "Whereas certain members of this House, now
in nomination for speaker, did endorse the book hereinafter mentioned,
resolved, That the doctrines and sentiments of a certain book, called
'The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It', are insurrectionary
and hostile to the peace and tranquillity of the country, and that no
member of this House, who has indorsed or recommended it, is fit to be
speaker of the House."
During two months there were strange scenes in the House, while the
clerk acted as temporary speaker and furious diatribes were thundered
back and forth across the aisle that separated Republicans from
Democrats, with a passage of fisticuffs or even a drawn pistol to add
variety to the scene. The end of it all was a deal. Pennington, of the
"People's Party" of New Jersey, who had supported Sherman but had not
endorsed Helper, was given the Republican support; a Know-Nothing was
made sergeant-at-arms; and Know-Nothing votes added to the Republican
votes made Pennington speaker. In many Northern cities the news of his
election was greeted with the great salute of a hundred guns, but at
Richmond the papers came out in mourning type.
Two great figures now advanced to the center of the Congressional
stage--Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, a lean eagle of a man
with piercing blue eyes, and Judah P. Benjamin, Senator from Louisiana,
whose perpetual smile cloaked an intellect that was nimble, keen, and
ruthless. Both men were destined to play leading roles in the lofty
drama of revolution; each was to experience a tragic ending of his
political hope, one in exile, the other in a solitary proscription amid
the ruins of the society for which he had sacrificed his all. These men,
though often spoken of as mere mouthpieces of Yancey, were in reality
quite different from him both in temper and in point of view.
Davis, who was destined eventually to become the target of Yancey's
bitterest enmity, had refused ten years before to join in the secession
movement which ignored Calhoun's doctrine that the South had become a
social unit. Though a believer in slavery under the conditions of the
moment, Davis had none of the passion of the slave baron for slavery at
all costs. Furthermore, as events were destined to show in a startlingly
dramatic way, he was careless of South Carolina's passion for state
rights. He was a practical politician, but not at all the old type of
the party of political evasion, the type of Toombs. No other man of the
moment was on the whole so well able to combine the elements of Southern
politics against those more negative elements of which Toombs was the
symbol. The history of the Confederacy shows that the combination which
Davis now effected was not as thorough as he supposed it was. But at the
moment he appeared to succeed and seemed to give common purpose to the
vast majority of the Southern people. With his ally Benjamin, he struck
at the Toombs policy of a National Democratic party.
On the day following the election of Pennington, Davis introduced in
the Senate a series of resolutions which were to serve as the Southern
ultimatum, and which demanded of Congress the protection of slavery
against territorial legislatures. This was but carrying to its logical
conclusion that Dred Scott decision which Douglas and his followers
proposed to accept. If Congress could not restrict slavery in the
territories, how could its creature, a territorial legislature do so?
And yet the Douglas men attempted to take away the power from Congress
and to retain it for the territorial legislatures. Senator Pugh of Ohio
had already locked horns with Davis on this point, and had attempted to
show that a territorial Legislature was independent of Congress. "Then
I would ask the Senator further," retorted the logical Davis, "why it is
he makes an appropriation to pay members of the territorial legislature;
how it is that he invests the Governor with veto power over their acts;
and how it is that he appoints judges to decide upon the validity of
their acts."
In the Democratic convention which met at Charleston in April, 1860, the
waning power of political evasion made its last real stand against the
rising power of political positivism. To accept Douglas and the idea
that somehow territorial legislatures were free to do what Congress
could not do, or to reject Douglas and endorse Davis's ultimatum--that
in substance was the issue. "In this convention where there should be
confidence and harmony," said the "Charleston Mercury", "it is plain
that men feel as if they were going into a battle." In the committee on
resolutions where the States were equally represented, the majority were
anti-Douglas; they submitted a report affirming Davis's position that
territorial legislatures had no right to prohibit slavery and that the
Federal Government should protect slavery against them. The minority
refused to go further than an approval of the Dred Scott case and a
pledge to abide by all future decisions of the Supreme Court. After
both reports had been submitted, there followed the central event of the
convention--the now famous speech by Yancey which repudiated political
evasion from top to bottom, frankly defended slavery, and demanded
either complete guarantees for its continued existence or, as an
alternative, Southern independence. Pugh instantly replied and summed up
Yancey's speech as a demand upon Northern Democrats to say that slavery
was right, and that it was their duty not only to let slavery alone but
to aid in extending it. "Gentlemen of the South," he exclaimed, "you
mistake us--you mistake us--we will not do it."
In the full convention, where the representation of the States was not
equal, the Douglas men, after hot debate, forced the adoption of the
minority report. Thereupon the Alabama delegation protested and formally
withdrew from the convention, and other delegations followed. There was
wild excitement in Charleston, where that evening in the streets Yancey
addressed crowds that cheered for a Southern republic. The remaining
history of the Democratic nominations is a matter of detail. The
Charleston convention adjourned without making nominations. Each of
its fragments reorganized as a separate convention, and ultimately
two Democratic tickets were put into the field, with Breckinridge of
Kentucky as the candidate on the Yancey ticket and Douglas on the other.
While the Democrats were thus making history through their fateful
break-up into separate parties, a considerable number of the so-called
best people of the country determined that they had nowhere politically
to lay their heads. A few of the old Whigs were still unable to
consort either with Republicans or with Democrats, old or new. The
Know-Nothings, likewise, though their number had been steadily melting
away, had not entirely disappeared. To unite these political remnants
in any definite political whole seemed beyond human ingenuity. A common
sentiment, however, they did have--a real love of the Union and a
real unhappiness, because its existence appeared to be threatened.
The outcome was that they organized the Constitutional Union Party,
nominating for President John Bell of Tennessee, and for Vice President
Edward Everett of Massachusetts. Their platform was little more than
a profession of love of the Union and a condemnation of sectional
selfishness.
This Bell and Everett ticket has a deeper significance than has
generally been admitted. It reveals the fact that the sentiment of
Union, in distinction from the belief in the Union, had become a real
force in American life. There could be no clearer testimony to the
strength of this feeling than this spectacle of a great congregation of
moderate people, unable to agree upon anything except this sentiment,
stepping between the sectional parties like a resolute wayfarer going
forward into darkness along a perilous strand between two raging seas.
That this feeling of Union was the same thing as the eager determination
of the Republicans, in 1860, to control the Government is one of those
historical fallacies that have had their day. The Republican party
became, in time and under stress of war, the refuge of this sentiment
and proved sufficiently far-sighted to merge its identity temporarily in
the composite Union party of 1864. But in 1860 it was still a sectional
party. Among its leaders Lincoln was perhaps the only Unionist in the
same sense as Bell and Everett.
Perhaps the truest Unionists of the North, outside the Constitutional
Union Party, in 1860, were those Democrats in the following of Douglas
who, after fighting to the last ditch against both the sectional
parties, were to accept, in 1861, the alternative of war rather than
dissolution. The course of Douglas himself, as we shall see hereafter,
showed that in his mind there was a fixed limit of concession beyond
which he could not go. When circumstances forced him to that limit,
the sentiment of Union took control of him, swept aside his political
jugglery, abolished his time-serving, and drove him into cooperation
with his bitterest foes that the Union might be saved. Nor was the pure
sentiment of Union confined to the North and West. Though undoubtedly
the sentiment of locality was more powerful through the South, yet when
the test came in the election of 1860, the leading candidate of the
upper South, in Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was John Bell, the
Constitutional Unionist. In every Southern State this sentiment was able
to command a considerable part of the vote.*
*A possible exception was South Carolina. As the
presidential electors were appointed by the legislature,
there is no certain record of minority sentiment.
Widely different in temper were those stern and resolute men whose
organization, in perfect fighting trim, faced eagerly the divided
Democrats. The Republicans had no division among themselves upon
doctrine. Such division as existed was due to the ordinary rivalry
of political leaders. In the opinion of all his enemies and of most
Americans, Seward was the Republican man of the hour. During much of
1859 he had discreetly withdrawn from the country and had left to his
partisans the conduct of his campaign, which seems to have been going
well when he returned in the midst of the turmoil following the death
of John Brown. Nevertheless he was disturbed over his prospects, for he
found that in many minds, both North and South, he was looked upon
as the ultimate cause of all the turmoil. His famous speech on the
"irrepressible conflict" was everywhere quoted as an exultant prophecy
of these terrible latter days.
It was long the custom to deny to Seward any good motive in a speech
which he now delivered, just as it was to deny Webster any good motive
for his famous 7th of March speech. But such criticism is now less
frequent than it used to be. Both men were seeking the Presidency;
both, we may fairly believe, were shocked by the turmoil of political
currents; each tried oiling the waters, and in the attempt each
ruined his candidacy. Seward's speech in condemnation of John Brown
in February, 1860, was an appeal to the conservative North against the
radical North, and to many of his followers it seemed a change of front.
It certainly gained him no new friends and it lost him some old ones, so
that his star as a presidential candidate began its decline.
The first ballot in the Republican convention surprised the country.
Of the votes, 233 were necessary for a choice. Seward had only 173 1/2.
Next to him, with 102 votes, stood none of the leading candidates, but
the comparatively obscure Lincoln. A gap of more than 50 votes separated
Lincoln from Cameron, Chase, and Bates. On the second ballot Seward
gained 11 votes, while Lincoln gained 79. The enemies of Seward, finding
it impossible to combine on any of the conspicuous candidates, were
moving toward Lincoln, the man with fewest enemies. The third ballot
gave Lincoln the nomination.
We have seen that one of the basal questions of the time was which new
political group should absorb the Whig remainder. The Constitutional
Union party aimed to accomplish this. The Republicans sought to
out-maneuver them. They made their platform as temperate as they could
and yet consistent with the maintenance of their opposition to Douglas
and popular sovereignty; and they went no further in their anti-slavery
demands than that the territories should be preserved for free labor.
Another basal question had been considered in the Republican platform.
Where would Northern capital stand in the reorganization of parties?
Was capital, like men, to become frankly sectional or would it remain
impersonal, careless how nations rose or fell, so long as dividends
continued? To some extent capital had given an answer. When, in the
excitement following the John Brown incident, a Southern newspaper
published a white list of New York merchants whose political views
should commend them to Southerners, and a black list of those who
were objectionable, many New Yorkers sought a place in the white list.
Northern capital had done its part in financing the revived slave trade.
August Belmont, the New York representative of the Rothschilds, was one
of the close allies of Davis, Yancey, and Benjamin in their war upon
Douglas. In a word, a great portion of Northern capital had its heart
where its investments were--in the South. But there was other capital
which obeyed the same law, and which had investments in the North;
and with this capital the Republicans had been trafficking. They had
succeeded in winning over the powerful manufacturing interests of
Pennsylvania, the pivotal State that had elected Buchanan in 1856.
The steps by which the new party of enthusiasm made its deal with the
body of capital which was not at one with Belmont and the Democrats are
not essential to the present narrative. Two facts suffice. In 1857 a
great collapse in American business--"the panic of fifty-seven"--led
the commercial world to turn to the party in power for some scheme of
redress. But their very principles, among which was non-intervention in
business, made the Democrats feeble doctors for such a need, and
they evaded the situation. The Republicans, with their insistence on
positivism in government, had therefore an opportunity to make a new
application of the doctrine of governmental aid to business. In the
spring of 1860, the Republican House of Representatives passed the
Morrill tariff bill, consideration of which was postponed by the
Democratic Senate. But it served its purpose: it was a Republican
manifesto. The Republicans felt that this bill, together with their
party platform, gave the necessary guarantee to the Pennsylvania
manufacturers, and they therefore entered the campaign confident they
would carry Pennsylvania nor was their confidence misplaced.
The campaign was characterized by three things: by an ominous quiet
coupled with great intensity of feeling; by the organization of huge
party societies in military form--"Wide-awakes" for Lincoln, numbering
400,000, and "Minute Men" for Breckenridge, with a membership chiefly
Southern; and by the perfect frankness, in all parts of the South, of
threats of secession in case the Republicans won.
In none of the States which eventually seceded were any votes cast for
Lincoln, with the exception of a small number in Virginia. In almost all
the other Southern States and in the slave-holding border States, all
the other candidates made respectable showings. In Virginia, Tennessee,
and Kentucky, Bell led. But everywhere else in the other slave-holding
States Breckinridge led, excepting in Missouri where Douglas won by a
few hundred. Every free State except New Jersey went for Lincoln.
And yet he did not have a majority of the popular vote, which stood:
Lincoln, 1,866,459; Douglas, 1,376,957; Breckinridge, 849,781; Bell,
588,879*. The majority against Lincoln was nearly a million. The
distribution of the votes was such that Lincoln had in the Electoral
College, 180 electors; Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; Douglas, 12. In
neither House of Congress did the Republicans have a majority.
*The figures of the popular vote are variously given by
different compilers. These are taken from Stanwood, "A
History of the Presidency".