The campaign against the Republicans in the south was meant to incite fears there of what a Republican victory would bring, based upon expectations of what the Republicans could do in power rather than limited by what they said they would not or could not do. While such an approach to evaluating the threat posed by an opponent may appear to be alarmist, it was entirely justified. The Republicans intended to calm the fears of a portion of the electorate, but their assurances did not limit the actions they might take once in power.
Senator Seward’s 1858 oratorical flourish “irrepressible conflict” became the catchphrase of the 1860 political season. Senator Douglas, who apparently had an ear for such things, used the phrase in a speech in Cincinnati on September 9, 1859, but the use of “irrepressible conflict” in politics and the press picked up after the Harper’s Ferry raid in October 1859. During 1860 the New York Times ran thirteen articles with the phrase in the headline, although not all of the stories involved slavery, the presidential election, or national politics. Dozens of additional stories during the year used the expression, many of them reporting on speeches delivered during the campaign.
De Bow’s Review, a monthly journal of southern and western commerce edited and largely written by James D. B. De Bow, a noted fire-eater, used the phrase nineteen times in nine articles published in 1860. The article with the most uses was published in the November 1860 issue, written before the results of the election were known but in anticipation of a Republican Party victory. (The same volume saw the phrase “house divided” used only once.) The attractiveness of “irrepressible conflict” to political orators and the pointedly political newspapers of the day was that it had become a ready symbol of what the proslavery and antislavery forces criticized in one another. Moreover, inasmuch as the phrase was irrepressibly identified with Senator Seward, who was better known than Mr. Lincoln and recognized for having more extreme views, it was a useful proxy to demonize the Republican Party.
Once Mr. Lincoln became the Republican candidate, secessionists urged northern voters to vote against him by warning of dire consequences if he were elected. Republican speakers ridiculed the notion of secession as a scare tactic that was being used to extract concessions, compromises, and guarantees that they could not secure through more ordinary political processes. At the same time, they declared that a Republican government would not acquiesce in secession. Carl Schurz, a member of the Republican National Committee, warned that war would ensue should the south carry through with the threat of secession; war, he continued, would tax the ability of the slave states to keep their slave property.
Slaveholders of America, I appeal to you. Are you really in earnest when you speak of perpetuating slavery? Shall it never cease? Never? Stop and consider where you are and in what days you live.
This is the nineteenth century. Never since mankind has a recollection of times gone by, has the human mind disclosed such wonderful powers. The hidden forces of nature we have torn from their mysterious concealment and yoked them into the harness of usefulness; they carry our thoughts over slender wires to distant nations; they draw our wagons over the highways of trade; they pull the gigantic oars of our ships; they set in motion the iron fingers of our machinery; they will soon plow our fields and gather our crops. The labor of the brain has exalted to a mere bridling and controlling of natural forces the labor of the hand; and you think you can perpetuate a system which reduces man, however degraded, yet capable of development, to the level of a soulless machine?
This is the world of the nineteenth century. The last remnants of feudalism in the old world are fast disappearing. The Czar of Russia, in the fullness of imperial power, is forced to yield to the irresistible march of human progress, and abolishes serfdom. Even the Sultan of Turkey can no longer maintain the barbarous customs of the Moslem against the pressure of the century, and slavery disappears. And you, citizens of a Republic, you think you can arrest the wheel of progress with your Dred Scott decisions and Democratic platforms? (Enthusiastic cheers.)
Mr. Schurz used the phrase “irrepressible conflict” seven times in his speech.
Supporters of Vice President Breckinridge posed two questions to Senator Douglas, and he responded in a speech in Norfolk, Virginia. To the question “If Abraham Lincoln be elected president of the United States, will the Southern states be justified in seceding from the Union?” Senator Douglas responded, “emphatically, no.” To the question “If they, the Southern states, seceded from the Union upon the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln, will you advise or vindicate resistance by force to their secession?” Senator Douglas answered that it was the duty of the president to enforce the laws and to maintain the supremacy of the laws “against all resistance to them, come from whatever quarter it might.” After addressing the same two questions at a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina, Senator Douglas went on to say:
On the other hand…I am in favor of the enforcement of the law, under all circumstances and in every contingency. (Applause.) If Lincoln be elected President for the United States, or Breckinridge, and any man, after such election should attempt to violate the Constitution of the country, or infringe on any law or right under it, I would hang him higher than Haman, according to law. (Great applause.) I would have no more hesitation in hanging such a man than Virginia felt on hanging John Brown when he invaded her dominion. (Applause.)
Senator Douglas used the phrase “irrepressible conflict” only once during the speech at Raleigh.
Senator Douglas challenged Vice President Breckinridge to respond to the same two questions, but the vice president and his supporters hedged their replies. In noting they had evaded the questions, the Washington correspondent of the New York Times observed that the vice president’s supporters had to avoid answering because a candid response one way or the other would cost the vice president supporters in one section or the other. William L. Yancey, a fire-eater and supporter of the vice president, addressed the question less obliquely:
I am asked, whether if any portion of the South secedes, I will aid the government in maintaining the integrity of the Union. Yes, my friends, the integrity of the Union. (Cheers.) I am now struggling for it and shall struggle for it to the date of election. The integrity of the Union shall I struggle for with my life’s blood, if required. (Enthusiastic cheers.) But if this questioner meant by the integrity of the Union the preservation of any administration that shall trample on any portion of the rights of the South, I tell him that I will aid my state in resisting it to the blood. (Great cheering.)
Mr. Yancey used the phrase “irrepressible conflict” fourteen times in his speech.
The views expressed by Mr. Schurz, Senator Douglas, and Mr. Yancey on maintaining the integrity of the union were conditioned upon the government of that union acting in a manner that was consistent with the Constitution and the laws promulgated under it. This begged the question of whose interpretation of the Constitution and the laws was to prevail: the Breckinridge Democrats generally believed that the Constitution protected slavery; the Douglas Democrats believed that the Constitution permitted slavery; and the Republicans believed that the Constitution tolerated slavery. This array of views would yield differing judgments as to when the Constitution and laws had been violated.
Before the political conventions of 1860, most of the newspapers in the southern states advocated a southern rights position – they believed that southern institutions were being challenged and southern rights were at risk, and they opposed the election of a Republican president, although the intensity of their opinions might range from militant to moderate. Only a small number of southern newspapers favored immediate secession or declared themselves unwavering in their commitment to the union. The southern newspapers started making endorsements after the conventions selected the candidates. Vice President Breckinridge received a majority of newspaper endorsements in six southern states and received more than Mr. Bell, his closest rival, in four more southern states, with Senator Douglas ranking a distant third. As the election neared and the possibility of Mr. Lincoln becoming the president grew more substantial, a number of the southern newspapers that had supported states’ rights but had denied secessionist tendencies said that the Republican victory would be sufficient cause for the southern states to leave the union.
Nature and circumstances conspired to further agitate a volatile climate when a number of fires broke out in Texas during a heat wave in July 1860. The supposition is that the combination of the persistent heat and the unstable chemical composition of match heads – matches were manufactured by no less than 75 firms across the nation – caused the matches to combust spontaneously. The reports of fires grew into rumors of arson and were enlarged into slave insurrections and attempts to poison large numbers of people by pouring strychnine into wells. These led to a number of hangings in Texas, adding to the tension and alarm felt around the south.
Perhaps inspired by the reports out of Texas, and perhaps in response to the approaching election, on which the fire-eaters had laid such importance, the grassroots violence in the south that had risen following the Harper’s Ferry raid renewed and continued during the election campaign and persisted as the election agitation turned into secession agitation. Stories in the newspapers told of violence in the south directed at people because they were northerners or were suspected of holding antislavery beliefs – they were menaced, whipped, tarred and feathered, and on occasion hanged by vigilance committees. Whatever the source and literal truth of the stories, the publication of these reports in newspapers both indicated the existence of an excited temperament in the south and probably served to excite that temperament further.
In the second week of October, the Charleston Mercury published its view of the probable “consequences of a submission of Southern States to the rule of Abolitionism at Washington”. If, after all the threats of resistance and disunion, the southern states were to acquiesce, the demoralization of the south would be complete. The Republicans would consolidate power based upon their strength in the north with the assistance of 94,000 patronage jobs and $80 million of spending annually. A new protective tariff would plunder the south for the benefit of the north. Slavery would be in immediate danger in the upper south. The fugitive slave law would be repealed, and the underground railroad would be permitted to operate openly.
Slaves in the upper south would be sold to the cotton states, so the thinking continued, and the states of the upper south would align themselves with the northern states. The Republicans would organize in the south, so the contest over slavery would cease to be between the north and the south and would become instead a contest among the people within the south. Attacks upon the south, like the John Brown raid, would multiply possibly with the patronage of the federal government.
The south’s uneasiness over the future of slavery would cause the value of slave property to decline, and in turn the value of all other southern property would decline. Inasmuch as slave property was the foundation of all other property in the south, the insecurity of slave property would cause men to sell out and leave the south. If the south submitted to the installation of a Republican president, the south would make the triumph of the abolitionists complete, enabling them to consolidate and wield power for the destruction of the south. Armed with the power of the general government, the abolitionists would “use the sword” for the subjugation of the south. The ruin of the south by the emancipation of her slaves would be “the loss of liberty, property, home, country – everything that makes life worth having.” In other words the terrors of submission would be “ten-fold greater even than the terrors of disunion”.
Various opponents and proponents of slavery stated their belief that the institution would wither unless it could be extended into new lands. As discussed in Chapter Nine, the immediate focus was on the territories because they were already under American control, but the Democrats had made the acquisition of Cuba an element of their platform, and the filibusters, who sought to seize control of other lands in the Western Hemisphere, also were understood to have acted in the name of slavery. The political threat to slavery within the context of the federal union is clear: the free states were growing populous and numerous at a faster rate than the slave states. If this trend continued, the national government eventually would possess both the power and the inclination to forbid slavery as a domestic institution of the individual states. The argument for sustaining the economic viability of slavery through expansion is less clear. Over time increased slave populations might have exceeded the lands suitable for slave agriculture; increasing the amount of land open to slave agriculture would have provided motivation for reopening the slave trade.
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