The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 3

Two attacks on slavery occurring just before the election season of 1860 raised the nation’s emotional intensity. The first, as we have seen, was the raid led by John Brown on the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, widely regarded by contemporaries as the first step in a deliberate program to attack and end slavery. In the second event, which began just as Virginia executed Mr. Brown, a contest for the speakership of the House of Representatives made the United States Congress yet again the forum in which the passions over the issue of slavery were broadcast to the nation – including the threat that the election of a Republican president in 1860 would lead to secession.

The Harper’s Ferry raid showed northern antislavery zealots actively promoting servile insurrection. Although John Brown denied that was his aim – he claimed to encourage escape rather than rebellion – southerners perceived an increase in danger from their slave property. The Washington Constitution, regarded as the public voice of the Buchanan administration, referred to the Harper’s Ferry raid as the first fruit of Senator Seward’s “dogma of ‘irrepressible conflict’ between the slaveholding and nonslaveholding States”.

In late February 1860, two months after John Brown was hanged, Abraham Lincoln, speaking at the Cooper Union in New York City, denied that the Republican Party was in any sense responsible for the man’s violence. He said, “John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise…Republican doctrines and declarations are accompanied,” he continued, “with a continual protest against any interference whatever with your slaves, or with you about your slaves.”

The absurdity of John Brown’s effort, Mr. Lincoln declared, “that the slaves, with all their ignorance, saw plainly enough that it could not succeed”, and they refused to participate. “An enthusiast broods,” said Mr. Lincoln, “over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.”

Senator Seward, addressing the United States Senate, said much the same thing two days later:

While generous and charitable natures will probably concede that John Brown and his associates acted on earnest though fatally erroneous convictions, yet all good citizens will nonetheless agree, that this attempt to execute an unlawful purpose in Virginia by invasion, involving servile war, was an act of sedition and treason, and criminal in just the extent that it affected the public peace and was destructive of human happiness and life.

Senator Seward said the Republicans were exonerated of the charge of hostility toward the south, but he accused the Democrats of making an assault upon the union. “The menace of disunion”, he said, “are made, though not in its name, yet in its behalf. It must avow or disavow them.” Notwithstanding the ardent abolitionist beliefs that individual members of the Republic Party might have held, the official party line was that the Republicans opposed the spread of slavery into the territories where, by their view, it did not legally exist. The party also maintained that it did not seek to challenge the existence of slavery in the states where it existed legally. No doubt this subtlety was understood and rejected out of hand. The militant defenders of slavery were increasingly unwilling to accept any restriction upon it. To the extent that they saw the restriction of the spread of slavery as detrimental to its economic well-being and to the extent that they saw the restriction of slavery detrimental to its political protection within the federal union, they were opposed.

John Brown was both a murderous inciter of servile rebellion and an abolitionist hero and martyr to his contemporaries. In the context of 1860 those perceptions were more important than any underlying reality.

Shortly after John Brown’s raid, a second attack on slavery seized national notice. The source was a book entitled The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Written by a man of southern birth, the book argued that as a result of slavery, the slaveholding states were poorer than the nonslaveholding states, and nonslaveholding residents of the slave states were poorer than residents of the free states. It urged the nonslaveholders to organize and actively oppose the continuation of slavery. The Impending Crisis gained little notice when it was appeared in 1857, but the Republican Party planned to circulate a shortened version as campaign literature in the 1860 election, and 68 members of the Republican Party endorsed the book. Among them was John Sherman, a Republican representative from Ohio who was the leading candidate to be speaker of the House in December 1859. Congressman Sherman’s endorsement was brought to the attention of the House after the first vote. Numerous representatives from slave states rose during the debates to denounce as unfit for public office anyone who would endorse such incendiary material.

The Republicans held the largest bloc of seats in the House, but without a clear majority they could not construct a coalition that would elect Congressman Sherman. Similarly, the Democrats could not construct a coalition to elect a speaker from their party. The effort dragged on through many ballots from December 5, 1859, until February 1, 1860, when Congressman Sherman withdrew his name, and another Republican congressman was elected. During this extended contest, the possibility of the southern states’ secession upon the election of a Republican president was spoken of openly on the floor of House of Representatives and the Senate and published in newspapers across the nation.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 2

Year of Meteors

If Walt Whitman had been more politically minded, he might have extended his “Year of Meteors” back to the political season of 1858. William H. Seward, a United States senator from New York, gave a speech in Rochester, New York, that apparently was intended to solidify his claim to leadership of the Republican Party. Senator Seward had previously served as his state’s governor and was spoken of as a leading contender for the party’s presidential nomination in 1860. In his address Senator Seward said the free-labor system and the slave-labor system were mutually antagonistic, and they were being brought into ever closer contact by the growing power of the railroads and other means of internal commerce. From this intimacy collision resulted.

Shall I tell you what this collision means? They who think that it is…the work of opposing or fanatical agitators, and therefore ephemeral, mistake the case altogether. It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, and it means that the United States must and will, sooner or later, become either entirely a slaveholding nation, or entirely a free-labor nation. Either the cotton and rice-fields of South Carolina and the sugar plantations of Louisiana will ultimately be tilled by free labor, and Charleston and New Orleans become marts for legitimate merchandise alone, or else the rye-fields and wheat-fields of Massachusetts and New York must again be surrendered by their farmers to slave culture and to the production of slaves, and Boston and New York become once more markets for trade in bodies and souls of men. It is the failure to apprehend this great truth that induces so many unsuccessful attempts to final compromise between the slave and free states, and it is the existence of this great fact that renders all such pretended compromises, when made, vain and ephemeral.

Senator Seward continued by saying that to escape the designs of the slaveholders, “The democratic party must be permanently dislodged from the government.” He reviewed the history of the Democratic Party in the United States with respect to slavery – in the admission of Texas to the union precipitating the war with Mexico, in the acquisition of Mexican lands, in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, and in the attempt to admit Kansas as a slave state. He continued:

Such is the democratic party…It is positive and uncompromising in the interest of slavery – negative, compromising, and vacillating, in regard to everything else. It boasts its love of equality, and wastes its strength, and even its life, in fortifying the only aristocracy known in the land…It magnifies itself for conquests in foreign lands, but it sends the national eagle forth always with chains, and not the olive branch, in his fangs.

By contrast and in conclusion, Senator Seward said the strength of the Republican Party and the secret of its assured success

lies in the fact that it is a party of one idea; but that idea is a noble one – an idea that fills and expands all generous souls, the idea of equality – the equality of all men before human tribunals and human laws, as they all are equal before the Divine tribunal and Divine laws.

I know, and you know, that a revolution has begun, I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward. Twenty senators and a hundred representatives proclaim boldly in congress to-day sentiments and opinions and principles of freedom which hardly so many men, even in this free state, dared to utter in their own homes twenty years ago. While the government of the United States, under the conduct of the democratic party, has been all that time surrendering one plain and castle after another to slavery, the people of the United States have been no less steadily and perseveringly gathering together the forces with which to recover back again all the fields and all the castles which have been lost, and to confound and over throw by one decisive blow, the betrayers of the constitution and freedom forever.

The phrase Senator Seward used – “irrepressible conflict” – would become key in the 1860 political season.

Earlier in the 1858 political season, Abraham Lincoln, the newly nominated Republican candidate to run against incumbent Illinois senator Stephan A. Douglas, had said much the same thing:

In my opinion, [the agitation to end slavery] will not cease, until a crisis shall have been reached, and passed. ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.

When he made these remarks, Mr. Lincoln was a Republican politician little known outside of Illinois and the surrounding states. He had served one term as a Whig congressman in the United States House of Representatives. He would obtain some national notoriety of running against and debating Senator Douglas, although much of the contemporary political interest in the race grew from the quarrel between Senator Douglas and President Buchanan over Kansas and the president’s efforts, ultimately unsuccessful, to defeat Senator Douglas’ bid for reelection.

By contrast Senator Seward possessed national prominence, and what he said had national repercussions. His strong proabolitionist statements and criticism of the Democrats’ proslavery allegiance in Rochester brought criticism not only from Democrats but also from Republicans who had been Democrats, and he tried to moderate that statement several days later in a speech in Rome, New York, in which he argued that the Republicans’ quarrel was not with slaveholders but with the proponents of slavery within the free states. This was patent nonsense. A Boston correspondent of the New York Times offered the following observation:

The attacks that have been made on Mr. Seward, because of his Rome and Rochester speeches, are having a good effect on that gentleman’s prospects here. Those who thought he had been making some truculent assault on the Union, and demanding that it should be dissolved, and served up in a slaveholder’s sauce, are astonished on reading his Rome speech to find it a moderate and concise statement of the true nature of the contest that now divides the country, and differing from other men’s speeches only in its superior ability and luminous clearness.

Later in 1858 Jefferson Davis, a United States senator from Mississippi, speaking before that state’s legislature, acknowledged that the abolitionists and their allies would have control of the next House of Representatives, although he expressed his faith that the president would veto acts in violation of the Constitution. If, however, an abolitionist president were elected, Senator Davis said that “such a result would be a species of revolution by which the purposes of Government would be destroyed and the observance of its mere forms entitled to no respect.” He went on to observe:

The master mind of the so-called Republican party, Senator Seward, has in a recent speech at Rochester, announced the purpose of his party to dislodge the Democracy from the possession of the federal Government, and assigns as a reason the friendship of that party for what he denominates the slave system. He declares the Union between the States having slave labor and free labor to be incompatible, and announces that one or the other must disappear. He even asserts that it was the purpose of the framers of the Government to destroy slave property, and cites as evidence of it, the provisions for amendment of the Constitution. He seeks to alarm his auditors by assuring them of the purpose on the part of the South and the Democratic party to force slavery upon all the States of the Union. Absurd as all this may seem to you, and incredulous as you may be of its acceptance by any intelligent portion of the citizens of the United States, I have reason to believe that it has been inculcated to no small extent in the Northern mind…

I say to you…if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barriers of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.

When the southern states seceded and formed the Confederate government, Senator Davis was chosen as its president. History has observed that the fire-eaters propelled the revolution that became secession and has further observed that the selection of Jefferson Davis as the first president marked the ascendancy of the moderates over the radicals. However moderate Senator Davis might have been, by the fall of 1858 he had adopted the position espoused by the fire-eaters that the election of a Republican president was cause sufficient for the slave states to secede from the union. The essence of Senator Davis’ remarks were reported to the nation. The New York Times reprinted an article from the Vicksburg Whig and ran it under the headline “A Blood-Thirsty Fire-Eater”.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 1

The subtext of most elections is change – the need for change when times are bad or the direction of the country is troubling and the need to resist change when times are good. Each voter’s assessment of the temper of the times and thus his decision whether to select one candidate over another are often discussed as rational acts, but they contain an emotional component as well, touching that voter’s hopes and fears. Our times have shown us that election campaigns seek to make both rational and emotional connections with individual voters.

Although the rhetoric of campaign speeches presents itself as reasoned discourse, the overall election experience is an appeal to emotions, and in the election of 1860 this meant catchphrases, slogans, songs, rallies, and torchlight parades. Even though a political speech in 1860 might go on for more than an hour, the more successful speakers did not attempt to educate their listeners so much as they tried to entertain and engage them. Politics in 1860 was a form of popular entertainment, and the purpose of the election campaign was as much to rally the party faithful as it was to reach out to the undecided.

The pattern of most successful election campaigns is a crescendo of emotion that peaks just before the vote, and in the normal course of events the outcome prompts elation among supporters of the victors and disappointment among supporters of the defeated candidates, each of which generally subsides in a short time and gives way to acceptance of the results. The normal course of events did not occur in 1860. The election was emotionally charged due to the decades of political controversy over slavery, which intensified just before and during the election season, and the often repeated proposition that the election of a Republican candidate as president of the United States would be sufficient cause for the southern states to secede from the federal union. Whereas southern anxiety, fear, and anger might have subsided following the election of Abraham Lincoln, it remained whipped up as the states of the lower South called secession conventions and held a second set of elections to select delegates to them. These circumstances kept emotions charged as much as the just-completed presidential election and converted southern anxiety, fear, and anger into hope, righteousness, and determination.

The prior chapters have examined the resources, capabilities, products, and processes that existed in the United States in 1860 and treated the year as a point in time, the sequence of events having relatively little importance in the discussion. When we turn to politics in 1860, and in particular to the presidential election, sequence becomes significant for two reasons. First, an election is an event that occurs at a fixed point in time: the events that precede the vote influence the result, and the election tally affects the events that follow. Second, the election of a Republican as president in 1860 was the precipitating cause of the of the secession movement. The causal connection between the election result and the Civil War is less proximate but nonetheless direct: without a Republican victory, the secession movement would not have occurred, and without a secession movement, the war would not have occurred. President Lincoln’s statement in his second inaugural address – that he “accepted” war rather than let the nation perish – is a strained interpretation of the events culminating in the attack on Fort Sumter. As discussed below, President Lincoln took a high-stakes, low-risk gamble on the predictability of human nature that brought the war.

Accordingly we will examine the sequence of several periods of time leading up to the 1860 election and from it to the start of the Civil War. These include the preliminary events to distinguish the 1860 presidential election from those that preceded it and that reinforced the conditions that led to war; the campaign preliminaries in which the political parties chose their candidates; the election campaigns that involved advocacy on behalf of the four candidates as well as agitation for secession if the Republican won; and the balloting and the election result that immediately gave rise to the secession movement and, shortly thereafter, to the formation of the Confederacy and the start of the war.