The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 9

The situation at the time of President Lincoln’s inauguration was as follows. First, the seven states of the lower south seceded with wide support. Some residuum of pro-union sentiment persisted, but the hope that it would assert itself in any meaningful way was unrealistic. Secession in the lower south would not be undone voluntarily, which meant that war was all but certain if the federal government acted to preserve the union.

Second, the states of the upper south had not seceded, and the steps they had taken toward secession were halting and indicated a lack of wide support. Military action to preserve the union would push some or perhaps all of those states into secession; the more that seceded, the more difficult the task of preserving the union. Even after the war had begun, the problem of retaining the states of the upper south in the union was a concern that influenced the actions of the federal government. In a private letter written in September 1861 – after the war had begun and Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia had joined the Confederacy – President Lincoln said, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland. These all against us, and the job on our hands is too large for us.”

Third, opinion in the northern states was divided. The display of enthusiasm when President Buchanan attempted to resupply Fort Sumter suggested a willingness of the people to support the federal union. The debates in Congress and the discussions of the Peace Conference showed substantial interest in a constitutional compromise as a nonmilitary means of attempting to preserve the union. Others were prepared to acquiesce to secession. In a speech delivered on January 20, 1861, in Boston, abolitionist Wendell Phillips celebrated secession as the annulment of the “covenant with death” and a breaking of the “agreement with hell”. On February 23, 1861, just days before Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration, the New-York Tribune stated:

We have repeatedly said, and we once more insist, that the great principle embodied by Jefferson, in the Declaration of American Independence, that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, is sound and just; and that, if the Slave States, the Cotton States, or the Gulf States only, choose to form an independent nation, they have a clear moral right to do so.

Although logic dictated that the national government’s response to the secession of the lower south would make war inevitable, the people of the north generally did not hold any shared belief about what might happen or what should happen.

Crisis and compromise had become the accustomed although irregular features in the governance of the United States. Secession following the presidential election of 1860 appeared to be another of these events. To the advocates of compromise, providing constitutional guarantees of slavery appeared to be a better alternative than either disunion or civil war. Yet compromise was not a solution that the secessionists or the Republicans would have been willing to entertain. At least since the formation of the Republican Party, and in some cases for decades before that, the fire-eaters had looked forward to the formal separation of the slave states from the federal union and to the formation of their own independent confederation. In March 1861 that goal had been substantially achieved. With seven states already seceded, the fire-eaters hoped the remaining eight slave states of the upper south would eventually follow. The circumstances that saw secession become an established fact were not unique, but they might not have occurred again in the immediately foreseeable future. After seizing the opportunity of secession, the fire-eaters were not about to give it up. The formation of a confederacy consisting solely of slaveholding states substantially reduced domestic opposition to the institution of slavery. More important, acceptance of a compromise that restored the union with constitutional guarantees of slavery removed the immediate threat to slavery, but it left the long-term threat to slavery in place.

From the point of view of the Republican Party, which was soon to be in control of the federal government, the analysis of the situation was remarkably similar. As President-elect Lincoln pointed out, agreeing to a compromise that guaranteed to slavery everything it demanded negated the Republican Party’s achievement of winning control of the federal government. The circumstances that permitted that to happen were not unique, but by agreeing to constitutional amendments to protect slavery, the conditions that were needed to repeal those amendments would not occur anytime soon.

Inasmuch as the principal purpose of the Republican Party was to limit the spread of slavery, constitutional amendments that guaranteed the continued existence of slavery and its existence in the territories would have written the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision into the text of the Constitution and rendered the goals of the Republican Party – and thus the party itself – a nullity. To acquiesce to the fact of disunion might have been a less painful alternative to civil war, but unlike President Buchanan, President Lincoln asserted the right of sovereign nations to self-preservation – not only to external threats such as war waged by other nations but also from internal threats that proposed to diminished the nation by secession of some of its states. Eventually the Confederate government made a similar judgment – it determined that the maintenance by a hostile foreign power’ (the United States’) of a military presence (the federal garrison in Fort Sumter) within its borders was an intolerable affront to Confederate national sovereignty, and therefore, in the name of self-preservation, the Confederate government ordered the army to fire upon and force the surrender of Fort Sumter.

In his March 4, 1861, inaugural address, President Lincoln announced the policy of the national government. He repeated the Republican Party position that the government lacked the power to interfere with slavery in the states. He asserted nonetheless that the union was perpetual, and he emphasized that the president, as the chief magistrate, was charged with the execution of the nation’s laws. He denied that secession was a lawful process, and he asserted that acts of violence against the United States constituted unlawful rebellion. President Lincoln stated that he intended no menace, but he asserted that the national government would defend and maintain itself and would “hold, occupy and possess” the properties (Fort Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola) belonging to it. On March 5, the day after his inauguration, President Lincoln learned that the garrison at Fort Sumter was short on supplies and could be expected to hold out for no more than about six weeks.

William Howard Russell, a correspondent for the London Times, arrived in New York City in mid-March, and from there he traveled to Washington City. In both his reports printed by the Times and his observations published later as a diary of his American travels, he observed in those two cities a calm that belied the ongoing political crisis. He said the excitement in a European city during a comparable crisis would be palpable. Although he heard rumors and reports (always proven false) that Fort Sumter would or had surrendered, he was reassured by new secretary of state William H. Seward that the federal government stood by the policy that President Lincoln had set forth in his inaugural address and therefore came to the conclusion that surrender was unlikely, and war was probable. Mr. Russell said to his readers in the Times:

Be satisfied of this – the United States Government will give up no power or possession which it has at present got. By its voluntary act it will surrender nothing whatever. No matter what reports may appear in the papers or in letters, distrust them if they would lead you to believe that Mr. Lincoln is preparing either to abandon what he has now, or to recover that which he has not.

President Lincoln took steps to reinforce Fort Sumter. On April 6 he sent a messenger to inform the governor of South Carolina that the national government intended to resupply Fort Sumter with provisions unless the fort or the supply convoy was attacked, in which case men, arms, and ammunition would be put into the fort. The president’s message was delivered on April 8. On April 9 the Confederates decided to attack and reduce the fort before the supply convoy arrived at Charleston. They opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12. The lead elements of the supply convoy arrived that day to find the artillery duel in progress. Fort Sumter surrendered on April 13, and the garrison was evacuated two days later.

On April 15 President Lincoln declared the existence of an insurrection that was too powerful to be put down by the means at hand, and he called for volunteers. The news of the attack on Fort Sumter was an electric shock to public opinion in the northern states. It banished ideas of compromise and acquiescence to disunion and left in their place the substantial (but not unanimous) resolve that the union had to be preserved.

After the war was over, former Confederate President Jefferson Davis and former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens both argued that by creating a situation that forced the Confederates to attack Fort Sumter, President Lincoln was the aggressor since he was responsible for having fired the first shot of the Civil War. The allegation was accurate but irrelevant. The significance of the events was that President Lincoln gambled both how the Confederate government would react to the information that the national government intended to resupply the fort and how the citizens of the northern states would respond to the fact the Confederates had fired the first shot. It brought the weight of northern opinion behind the government’s policy that the union must be preserved. That this was the intended result was indicated by a letter President Lincoln wrote shortly after the war began to the commander of the supply convoy vessels that had been sent to Fort Sumter. The president acknowledged that circumstances had prevented the commander’s plan from being tested, and he assured the commander that the attempt had heightened the president’s estimation of him. In concluding President Lincoln said, “You and I both anticipated that the cause of the country would be advanced by making the attempt to provision Fort-Sumpter, even if it should fail; and it is no small consolation now to feel that our anticipation is justified by the result.”

Artemus Ward, the humorous persona created by author Charles F. Browne, saw this immediately and expressed the coalescing northern opinion. A story published in the May 11, 1861, issue of Vanity Fair told how he had taken his sideshow into the south when the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, and the authorities confiscated his show, arrested him, and sent him to Montgomery, Alabama, the Confederate capital, where he was questioned by Jefferson Davis, “the president of the Southern Conthieveracy.” President Davis told him he was free to go, saying, “we hav many frens in the North, who sympathise with us, and won’t mingle with this fight”, to which Artemus Ward replied:

J. Davis, there’s your grate mistaik. Many of us was your sincere frends, and thought certin parties amung us was fussin about you and meddlin with your consarns intirely too much. But J. Davis, the minit you fire a gun at the piece of dry-goods called the Star-Spangled Banner, the North gits up and rises en massy, in defence of that banner. Not agin you as individooals, – not agin the South even – but to save the flag. We should indeed be weak in the knees, unsound in the heart, milk-white in the liver, and soft in the hed, if we stood quietly by and saw this glorus Govyment smashed to pieces, either by a furrin or a intestine foe.

President Lincoln’s call for volunteers to suppress the rebellion in the southern states sparked a third wave of secession: in Arkansas and North Carolina the legislatures voted to secede, and in Tennessee and Virginia the question was submitted to the voters. They chose secession. Kentucky and Missouri resolved to be neutral.

The Civil War had begun.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 8

Election, Secession, and War

Mr. Lincoln won the election by taking 180 of the 303 electoral votes. He won a simple majority in every free state except California and Oregon, where he won by pluralities, and New Jersey, where Senator Douglas won the popular vote. (A fusion ticket had been organized in New Jersey to oppose the election of Mr. Lincoln. Under the arrangement three electors were committed to Senator Douglas and two electors each were committed to Vice President Breckinridge and Mr. Bell. Senator Douglas’ supporters did not support the fusion arrangement, and they cast votes for the three electors committed to Douglas and four of the electors committed to Mr. Lincoln. As a result Mr. Lincoln received four electoral votes in New Jersey, and Senator Douglas received three.) The election result was robust: if all the votes cast for Senator Douglas, Vice President Breckinridge, or Mr. Bell had been won by a single candidate, Mr. Lincoln still would have carried fifteen free states. His loss of California, New Jersey, and Oregon would have cost him eleven electoral votes, reducing his total from 180 to 169 votes, which was still more than the 152 votes needed to win. The election took place on November 6, and although returns were not complete, news of Mr. Lincoln’s election as the sixteenth president of the United States crossed the contiguous states in the eastern part of the country by telegraph and was reported in the eastern newspapers on November 7.

Mr. Lincoln gained 39.9 percent of the popular vote nationwide – an impressive result in a four-way election. Senator Douglas received 29.5 percent of the popular vote, Vice President Breckinridge 18.1 percent, and Mr. Bell 12.6 percent. Voter participation was high: nationwide more than 80 percent of eligible voters were estimated to have cast ballots.

The news of Mr. Lincoln’s election spread the enthusiasm for secession in the south, and each additional step toward that end – each rally, each act of the legislature, each election, and each secession convention – increased the general excitement. South Carolina acted first. Its legislature met on November 7 and passed resolutions calling for an election on January 8 of delegates to a convention to be held a week later to consider whether South Carolina should secede. Then on November 10, the South Carolina legislature advanced the election to December 6 and the convention to December 17.

Stock prices on the New York exchange had rallied slightly on November 7 based on the news of Mr. Lincoln’s election but closed lower both that day and the next. They dropped about 20 percent on November 9. By November 12 a new financial panic had set in.

Calls for elections and secession conventions also took place in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. All seven states had set elections and scheduled secession conventions by December 4. Emotions charged by the presidential election campaign remained elevated by the possibility of secession and the election campaigns related to it. Whereas during the presidential election, secession merely was spoken of as a possible consequence of the outcome of a Republican victory, the newly called elections put secession squarely on the agenda for the seven states of the lower south. By January 8 all of them had held their elections and chosen delegates to the secession conventions. By February 1 all seven conventions had approved secession. The South Carolina convention approval was unanimous, and the other conventions acted by large majorities. The conventions in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi all defeated motions for voters to ratify secession. In Texas private initiative rather than governmental action started the secession process, and to assure that the convention’s decision appeared legitimate, it agreed to voter ratification.

President-elect Lincoln maintained his silence after the election in the belief that any statement he made was only likely to inflame the situation further. When inaugurated he would inherit the situation President Buchanan left, but while President Buchanan remained in office, statements by the president-elect would only bring criticism onto himself.

Congress reconvened on December 3, 1860. In his annual message delivered to Congress that day, President Buchanan acknowledged that the southern people lived with the fear of servile insurrections, and he acknowledged that if this fear became general, disunion would become inevitable. He stated that slavery was a matter solely within the power of the states. President Buchanan also denied that a right to secede existed. Reason and history dictated that the union created by the Constitution was permanent, not a voluntary association that could be set aside at will. Thus President Buchanan concluded, since war could not preserve the union but would almost certainly destroy it, the only solution was a series of constitutional amendments to recognize the right of property in slaves, to protect the rights of slaveholders to bring their slave properties into the territories, and to declare the invalidity of all laws purporting to interfere with the fugitive slave laws.

Reactions in the north and the south were largely critical of the president’s message. The north saw the president as evading his responsibilities to enforce the laws, and the south protested his denial of the right of secession.

President Buchanan was urged to employ military force to confront and suppress the secession. But the secretary of war, John B. Floyd, opposed the use of force. When President Buchanan declined to use force, his secretary of state, Lewis Cass, resigned. Instead the president declared that January 4, 1861, would be a day of prayer, fasting, and humiliation. In his message to the nation, he said in part, “Let us, with deep reverence, beseech Him to restore the friendship and good will which prevailed, in former days, among the people of the several states; and, above all, to save us from the horrors of civil war and ‘blood-guiltiness.’”

Republican Governor William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, which had voted heavily for Mr. Lincoln, endorsed President Buchanan’s call and enlarged upon his exhortation in a pointed fashion:

they implore Him to give courage to magistrates to enforce all laws for the protection of the obedient and the punishment of the disobedient; that He will incline this whole people to abide by and perform their constitutional obligations; that He will cause all questions which now disturb our peace and threaten our prosperity to be adjusted upon the basis of equity and justice…

This day of prayer occurred after South Carolina seceded and as the other states of the lower south were beginning to vote for secession delegates.

Further resignations from President Buchanan’s cabinet permitted the appointment of officers with pro-union outlooks, but these changes did not assure the financial community. When the federal Treasury sought a $5 million loan at the end of December, it received only $2.5 million in bids, some of them with interest running as high as 36 percent. The price of slaves declined sharply as well. In December the Argus of Romney, Virginia, reported the sale for $800 of a valuable mechanic who in 1859 would have brought $1,500. The New York Times noted that the few sales that took place were consummated at prices that twelve months earlier “would have been considered ridiculously inadequate.” Prices quoted in South Carolina had dropped by at least 35 percent.

On the night of December 26, 1860, six days after the convention in South Carolina approved its secession resolution, the Army garrison under the command of Major Robert Anderson that was stationed at Fort Moultrie, a low fort defending the Charleston harbor, secretly moved his garrison to Fort Sumter – newly built on an artificial island in the middle of the harbor and a more secure position. Southerners demanded that President Buchanan order Major Anderson to return to Fort Moultrie, but the president refused. On December 31 the president ordered General Winfield Scott, general-in-chief of the Army, to prepare to resupply the garrison at Fort Sumter with the sloop of war USS Brooklyn. The general concluded that speed was more important to the mission than arms, so with the president’s acquiescence he sent the unarmed steamer Star of the West to Charleston.

The Star of the West arrived on the night of January 8, 1861, but fire from batteries near the mouth of the harbor drove her off. On January 9 President Buchanan informed Congress of his attempt to resupply the garrison. He repeated that the federal government did not have the right to wage war against a state, but he also asserted the right to use military force against those who resisted the execution of the law and to protect government property. News of the failed Star of the West mission led to an outpouring of northern sentiment against secession. Along with further changes to the cabinet, the attempted resupply also restored the confidence of the financial markets in the government. A further $5 million loan was offered, and soon the Treasury had received nearly $20 million in bids, and it accepted bids with average rates of 10.5 percent. President Buchanan’s brief surge of popularity diminished as inaction became federal government policy again.

On January 10, 1861 – the day that the Florida convention passed its secession resolution – the Army garrison in Pensacola removed to Fort Pickens, a position that offered greater security. Florida state representatives gave assurances to President Buchanan’s administration that Fort Pickens would not be attacked as long as no attempt was made to reinforce it. Although the USS Brooklyn soon arrived off Pensacola with reinforcements, the secretaries of war and the navy ordered the reinforcements not to land.

Starting in December 1860, Congress took up the process of seeking a compromise, and the House of Representatives established a committee of 33 members to review the various proposals. The committee reported that no proposal received unanimous support, but all of those recommended at least a majority of the quorum the present. The full House rejected all but three of the proposals. One was a declaratory resolution to the effect that the states should not interfere with the enforcement of the fugitive slave law, that slavery was a lawful institution based on state law, and that the national government lacked the authority to interfere with slavery in the states. Another was a proposed amendment to the Constitution that prohibited any further amendment that gave the Congress the power to interfere with slavery in any state. (The Senate also approved this measure, and it was sent to the states for ratification, which never occurred.) The third was an amendment to moderate some of the unfairness perceived in the 1850 fugitive slave law.

The Senate also considered and rejected a number of proposals. Notable among these was the package of several constitutional amendments and declaratory resolutions presented by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and known to history as the Crittenden Compromise. The amendments would have permitted slavery in the southern portion of the federal territories and forbidden Congress to interfere with slavery in the states, and the resolutions discouraged resistance to the fugitive slave law, proposed to correct the unfairness of that law, and vowed enforcement of the laws against the international slave trade.

The congressional efforts at compromise were supplemented by a nongovernmental conference of delegates from 21 states – none from the deep south – that convened in Washington City in February 1861. It was referred to as the Peace Conference, and the delegates included former governors, former senators, former representatives, former cabinet officers, and one former president. The Peace Conference adopted a program similar to the Crittenden Compromise. The Senate declined to consider these proposals, and the House did not vote on it.

President-elect Lincoln kept his public silence while these deliberations were proceeding, but in the midst of them he was prevailed upon to address the issue privately. On January 11, 1861, he wrote to a Republican congressman:

We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before taking office. In this they are attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government.

On February 4, 1861, representatives of the seceded states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America. The delegates adopted a provisional constitution on February 7.

The enthusiasm for secession in the upper south was less than in the lower south, and events proceeded there more slowly. The legislatures in Arkansas, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia held their elections from February 4 through February 28, 1861 – after the states of the lower south had seceded. Voters in those states chose a majority of pro-union delegates, and in Tennessee they rejected the call for a convention. However, there were conventions in Arkansas, Missouri, and Virginia, and they rejected secession resolutions. Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland did not take any definitive step toward secession.

Through the winter and into the spring, President-elect Lincoln and the men he gathered around him apparently believed that wells of pro-union sentiment existed in the south and that a spontaneous pro-union reaction would set in. They read newspaper reports of pro-union sentiment in the slave states, but aside from the reports of antisecession or pro-union meetings in Georgia and Vicksburg, Mississippi, these reports were from the upper south, where secession was stalled. The expectation of a spontaneous pro-union reaction was wishful thinking.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 7

A number of states had scheduled elections for state offices in advance of the federal Election Day, and the Republican victories in the northern states – in particular Pennsylvania, which the Democrats had carried in the 1856 presidential election – indicated the strength of the Republicans there and increased the likelihood that they would win the presidency. The stock market was trending lower through October but recovered some at the end of the month.

The climax of the Republican campaign in New York City on the Friday evening before the Tuesday election featured an address by Senator Seward, candidate Lincoln’s best-known proxy, in the Palace Garden, a venue for entertainment located on the north side of Fourteenth Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues that included a hall measuring 50 by 200 feet. The hall was decorated with flags and posters with the names of Republican candidates. The following quotation from Henry Clay appeared at the back of the stage: “As long as God allows the vital current to flow through my veins, I will never, never, never, by word or thought, by mind or will, aid in admitting one rood of free territory to the everlasting curse of human bondage” – words spoken during the debate that preceded the Compromise of 1850. The hall was filled to overflowing, and on three speaker stands outside, orators addressed the many who had not been able to gain entry. Inside, the crowd pressed together, as the New York Times described, “until the undulating surface of sweltering heads resembled a vast measure crammed with well-ripened fruit.” When Senator Seward appeared, he was greeted by “thunders of applause”.

Senator Seward began by extolling the metropolis New York City had become, emphasizing that the greatness and prosperity of the city was linked to the greatness and prosperity of New York state. He contrasted that greatness with the comparative modesty of the city, state, and nation at the turn of the century when the African slave trade still existed and the influx of African Negroes that dissuaded white immigrants from coming to the United States. When he used the phrase “irrepressible conflict”, the crowd responded with “tremendous cheering”. The opportunity to abolish slavery, he continued, was available to all thirteen states, but only seven had adopted that “wise…the pious policy”. Over the course of sixty years, the city, the state, and the nation grew and prospered. “What remains”, he continued, “is to consider what is needful to secure that future for the city, as well as for the country for which you as well as myself are necessarily and naturally and justly so ambitious.” The answer was

to leave things to go on just exactly as they have gone on hitherto; to leave slavery to be gradually, peaceably circumscribed and limited hereafter, as it has been hitherto, and to leave the increase of our own white population, and the increase by foreign immigration to go on just exactly as they are already going on, and to leave the canals and railroads in full operation as they are, and to leave your systems of education and toleration to stand on the basis on which they now rest. There, if you please, is what I understand by republicanism. I do not know what complexion it wears to your glasses, but I do know that men may call it black, or green, or red, but to me it is pure, unadulterated republicanism and Americanism.

Senator Seward said, “That is the whole question in this political canvass. There is no more.” If elected, President Lincoln and a Republican Congress would leave slavery where it was and leave freedom where it was – keeping freedom in the United States and in “every foot and acre of the public domain”.

In contrast to the states that had embraced freedom and grown large and prosperous, the states that retained slavery had not prospered to the same extent. The slave states, Senator Seward observed, blamed that failure on not being able to extend slavery into the territories (as noted above), and to enable this expansion they demanded the reopening of the African slave trade. Furthermore they threatened to secede and dissolve the union if their demands were not met. Senator Seward then explored the arguments for secession and concluded they were not reasonable. He considered the effects of secession and determined they would be more harmful than helpful to the slave states. He finished by saying:

I do not doubt but that these southern statesmen and politicians think they are going to dissolve the Union, but I think they are going to do no such thing; and I will tell you in a very few words why. He who in this country thinks that this government and this constitution can be torn down, and that this Union of states can be dissolved, has no faith – first, in the constitution; he has no faith in the Union, no faith in the people…of the Union…I am not unwilling to see the members of that class of the American people brought up, so that we may see them altogether. For my part, I, on the contrary, have faith in the constitution, faith in the Union, faith in the people…of the Union, faith in freedom, faith in justice, faith in virtue, and faith in humanity. The constitution and the Union have stood eighty years only upon the foundation of such a faith existing among the American people. It will stand and survive this presidential election, and forty presidential elections after; aye, I trust a hundred and a thousand, because the people, since the government was established, have grown wiser, more just, humane and virtuous than they were when it was established.

The New York Times reported “Long and enthusiastic cheering.” Afterward the Republican Glee Club sang “Dixie”, and Old Abe’s Choir sang “Ain’t we glad Abe’s going to the White House?” The meeting adjourned, and the spectators joined the Wide Awakes in the street for the honor of escorting Senator Seward back to the Astor House. The procession moved through the streets with banners, badges, torches, and transparencies.

The same Friday evening was the climax in New York City of the of the Fusion Party – the New York supporters of Senator Douglas, Vice President Breckinridge, and Mr. Bell who had joined to oppose the election of Mr. Lincoln. The three speakers were Democratic politicians from New York, Mississippi, and Ohio. They called the Republicans a party of abolitionists who had blinded and misled the voters as they rose to power. They stated that the Constitution and the government were neither antislavery nor proslavery, and they denied the propriety of the antislavery Republicans imposing their beliefs upon the slave states. They expressed the belief that if Mr. Lincoln were elected the following Tuesday, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and South Carolina would secede from the union. And they stated that if the inauguration of Mr. Lincoln “was to be the inauguration of the principles of the Republican Party”, then every southern state ought to withdraw immediately from the union. Thus the union was in danger, and they called upon the people of New York “to roll back the tide of fanaticism that threatened to overwhelm the country, and to save the Union from destruction.” The meeting broke up with nine cheers for the Fusion ticket.

The Presidential Election of 1860 - Part 6

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.