Money and organization were key ingredients in conducting an election campaign – money to finance activities and organization to provide the manpower to organize events, remain in touch with voters, get out the campaign message, and encourage its partisans to go to the polls. The Republicans came into the election with their organization intact and with the general belief that they were favored in the election, which facilitated their fundraising. They concentrated their funds in the states where they had prospects of doing the most good – nominal amounts went to the border states, and larger amounts went to northern states in which they perceived weakness.
Initially the Republicans appeared strong in New York, so money collected there was directed elsewhere. Later in the campaign, however, the supporters of Senator Douglas, Vice President Breckinridge, and Mr. Bell agreed to cooperate in their opposition to Mr. Lincoln – called a “fusion” movement – which caused worry about the Republicans’ ability to carry the state. The Republicans thus sent multiple speakers into New York to address this concern. As for the Democratic Party, the Breckinridge faction probably claimed the loyalty of the party organization in the southern states, and President Buchanan’s antipathy for Senator Douglas might have given the Breckinridge Democrats the first call upon the party organization in the northern states as well. Senator Douglas had trouble raising funds for his campaign.
The tradition for presidential candidates at the time was to remain out of the public eye and let others campaign on their behalf – a genteel notion that the office should seek the man instead of the other way around. Mr. Lincoln followed that tradition. He did attend a Republican rally in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. Prevailed upon to make some remarks, he limited himself to saying how honored he was that so many had shown up in support of him, and he repeated his remarks to another portion of the crowd at a second speaker’s platform at the same rally. The event was notable because the speaker’s stand collapsed under him while he was speaking.
Senator Douglas broke with tradition and pursued an active schedule of traveling and speaking across the county. He began tentatively – the announced purpose of the travels was to visit and look after family business – but he was flooded with invitations, and he often addressed several crowds each day. When he took a break from the campaign in mid-August, the New York Times observed that “Mr. Douglas has stopped talking.” Resuming an active campaign in late August, the senator continued to travel until the election.
The Republicans and the Democrats took divergent positions on economic issues, and the two factions of the Democratic Party were alike in most respects. The Republicans favored using federal funds for river and harbor improvements, and the Democrats opposed it. The Republicans favored a protective tariff that benefitted domestic manufacturers, and the Democrats opposed it. The Republicans had proposed a homestead act that would have given federal lands free of charge to anyone who settled on them and a further grant of federal lands to the states (known as land grants) to support the creation and operation of agricultural and technical schools. In defeating these proposals, the Democrats had been critical of the extravagance of giving away so much of the valuable resources held by the federal government. And politicians from the southern states had traditionally opposed homestead legislation in the belief that the primary beneficiaries would be free-state voters.
The Democrats and Republicans also disagreed on naturalization: the Democrats opposed the intolerance shown to the Catholics and the foreign born while the Republicans opposed any change (that is to say, relaxation) in the naturalization laws. The Democrats and the Republicans both supported a railroad to the Pacific coast.
A significant factor in the campaign, although not specifically an issue, was the widespread disruption caused by the Panic of 1857, which occurred during President Buchanan’s administration. The panic probably hurt the election prospects of both Democratic Party candidates even though President Buchanan was not seeking reelection. The Republicans made an issue of governmental corruption during President Buchanan’s administration. As mentioned previously a select committee of the House of Representatives determined that excessive amounts paid under government contracts had been used to influence certain congressional elections in 1858, and “outrageously high prices” were being paid for purchases made “with the sanction of the President”. The investigation did not lead to indictments or proceedings for impeachment, but the revelations of corruption and abuse of power within the administration obtained wide dissemination during the campaign.
Nonetheless, the election was predominantly about slavery and the prospects for dissolving the union. The Republicans’ position on slavery was the most nuanced and therefore the most vulnerable to attack. The Republicans deplored both John Brown’s raid – “the gravest of crimes” – and the threats of disunion. They acknowledged that slavery in the states was a matter to be determined by the individual states and supported the notion that the residents of a new state were at liberty to decide whether to permit slavery, but they opposed permitting it to be extended into the territories and denied that Congress had the power to authorize it there. To their opponents the Republicans’ opposition to any manifestation of slavery was understood to be wholesale opposition to it.
People in the north held various opinions about the importance of slavery. People who were lukewarm in their antislavery opinions and would have been alarmed by a candidate like Senator Seward or Governor Chase, people who held strong abolitionist views, were comforted by the relatively conservative antislavery views ascribed to Mr. Lincoln. Wendell Phillips, a noted abolitionist orator, gave his appraisal of Mr. Lincoln immediately after the election. Speaking to a crowd in Boston, Mr. Phillips said that the president-elect was “Not an Abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man.” Mr. Phillips went on to lampoon what he said were Mr. Lincoln’s opinions:
It is a noble idea, – equality before the law, – a mark which an old Greek declared two thousand years ago, distinguished freedom from barbarism. Mark it, and let us question Mr. Lincoln about it.
Do you believe, Mr. Abraham Lincoln, that the negro is your political and social equal, or ought to be? Not a bit of it.
Do you believe he should sit on juries? Never.
Do you think he should vote? Certainly not.
Should he be considered a citizen? I tell you frankly, no.
Do you think that, when the Declaration of Independence says, ‘All men are created equal,’ it intends the political equality of black and whites? No, sir.
Still, even in the north the issue of slavery and the possibility that Southern states might secede as a result of the election kept returning to the center of the news. The Southern states looked upon the election of a Republican not as a challenge to the long-term viability of the institution of slavery but as an event that signified the threat of imminent abolition with its attendant economic and social horrors – the uncompensated loss of wealth represented by slave property and having to live in a racially mixed society on terms other than those of master and slave.
The Douglas Democrats maintained a position on slavery that was consistent with the mainstream Democratic position throughout the decade of the 1850s – that the Compromise of 1850 should be an enduring settlement on the issue, that slavery was not a question to be debated within Congress, that slavery in the states was a matter to be determined by the states, and that its extension into the territories should be resolved by popular sovereignty when the territories sought admission as states. In his campaign Senator Douglas continued to advocate the popular sovereignty. His declared position on slavery was to wish for an end to all public debate on the subject. In this vein he said, “I am for putting down the Northern abolitionists but am also for putting down the Southern secessionists…I believe that the peace, harmony, and safety of this country depend upon destroying both factions.”
The Republicans attacked Senator Douglas for being agnostic on the moral issue of slavery. One campaign document – which a century and a half later appears to be an effective piece of advertising – read in part as follows:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” – Declaration of Independence.
“I don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.” – Stephen A. Douglas.
“It is among my first wishes to see some plan by which slavery may be abolished by law.” – George Washington.
“I don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.” – Stephen A. Douglas.
“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probably by supernatural interference; the Almighty has no attribute which can take sides with us in such a contest.” – Thomas Jefferson.
“I don’t care whether slavery is voted up or voted down.” – Stephen A. Douglas.
We may question the tactical wisdom of such attacks inasmuch as they obscured the nuance of the Republicans’ position and confirmed their opponents’ claim that they were purely antislavery, but two important perspectives must be considered in this regard. First, the Republicans were waging a northern-state strategy. As discussed above, the party was strong in the north, barely present in the upper south, and nonexistent in the lower south, although the northern states possessed sufficient electoral votes to carry the election. Attacking slavery itself as a moral issue might have resonated with northern voters; if not slavery itself, then slave power or slave power potential offered potent proxy targets. Since the party was not courting southern voters, it did not need to worry about offending their sensibilities. Second, if they won, the Republicans would need to govern the entire country, which meant they would need to instill within the population of the southern states some basis to trust in the Republicans’ good-faith statement that they would not challenge “domestic institutions”, which militated against attacking slavery and in favor of maintaining the nuanced positions set forth in the platform. In balancing these two perspectives, the Republicans might have considered that in order to govern, they first needed to win.
The Douglas Democrats’ position on slavery might have been satisfactory to most people who held proslavery views in 1850 or 1856, but it had ceased to be satisfactory in 1860 because Senator Douglas placed more value upon voter self-determination than upon slavery, and as a result he lost Kansas. At the same time, his proslavery opponents attacked him for being an apostate with respect to slavery.
The Breckinridge Democrats held the proslavery high ground. The proslavery elements of their platform were similar elements of the Douglas Democrats’ platform except in the important distinction that the Breckinridge Democrats asserted the right of citizens to bring their slave property into the territories. An unspoken subtext of the Breckinridge Democrat position was a threat of secession if their candidate were not elected and their position on slavery not adopted. To have openly advocated secession would have been unbecoming – if not unpatriotic – for an incumbent vice president and a presidential candidate. (To advocate secession was not treason, which is why it was discussed openly, including on the floor of Congress. According to the Constitution, “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, and giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”)
The Constitutional Union platform, although stated in terms of preserving the federal union, was for all practical purposes a proslavery agenda that consisted of defeating the Republicans, offering an alternative to both of the Democratic candidates, and obtaining a further compromise between proslavery and antislavery forces in order to resolve the anticipated secession crisis.
The party platforms represented only four of the five agendas being pursued in the election. The fifth agenda belonged to the fire-eaters – the secessionists who looked upon the 1860 election as an occasion to bring the southern states out of the federal union and into a national government of their own. The secessionist campaign rallied southern voters to select Vice President Breckinridge as the sole acceptable proslavery choice, warned voters of the hard times that would befall the south if the Republicans won, and assured voters that secession was the only practical means of countering the effect of a Republican victory.
No comments:
Post a Comment