Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  Douglas and the Northern Democrats were unwilling to acquiesce in a legislative program for the destruction of popular sovereignty in the territories, and certainly not for the purpose of pandering to Southern anxieties about John Brown and slavery. The stakes were made all the higher since Buchanan, bowing to Democratic tradition and weary of the burdens of the presidency, had announced his intention not to seek reelection. This left Douglas as the single most obvious candidate for the Democrats to run for the presidency in 1860. Douglas’s defense of popular sovereignty and his defiance of Lecompton in the teeth of Buchanan’s rage had made Douglas the champion of the Northern Democracy, and the only acceptable presidential candidate to the Northern half of the party. Moreover, Northern Democrats were convinced that only Douglas, and not the Southern fire-eaters, had the national stature to carry both Northern and Southern states in the presidential election of 1860. Consequently, they regarded Douglas as the only one capable of retaining Democratic control of the presidency and, with that, the entire apparatus of the federal bureaucracy.

  The Northern Democracy’s unwillingness to follow the demands of the Southern ultras, and their determination to see Douglas nominated by the Charleston convention, together with Southern demands for renewal of the slave trade and slave protection in the territories, made the destruction of the Democratic Party inevitable. Douglas “held out to us here, when we advocated and supported the Kansas-Nebraska bill… that the Democratic party should be a unit on the question,” complained Louisiana senator Judah P. Benjamin, “but when he goes home, and is pressed in a local contest”—namely, the debates with Lincoln—“and he sees the glittering prize of a seat in this Chamber slipping from his grasp, he tells his people, as he says he has told them a hundred times before,” that “he has, in the Kansas-Nebraska act, obtained … a perfect right to make a free Territory of every Territory in the Union, notwithstanding the decision of the court.”59

  When the Charleston convention assembled in April 1860, Southern radicals led by William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama stood for seven days agitating for a pro-slavery platform, and when it became clear that they would not get it from the Douglas men, all of the Deep South delegations except that of Georgia walked out of the convention. The Southern withdrawal made it statistically impossible for Douglas to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote for the nomination, and the shattered convention adjourned, to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18. But when the Democrats met again, the convention split once again, with still more Southern withdrawals, and Douglas, still short of the two-thirds majority of delegates, had to be nominated by the convention as part of a resolution. The same day, the Southern ultras nominated their own candidate, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, for president, thus making the party split a political reality.

  Then, as if things were not already bad enough for the Democrats, a compromise movement, composed largely of old-time Southern Whigs and calling down a pox on both Douglas and Breckinridge, met in Baltimore and nominated yet another presidential candidate, the colorless Tennessean John Bell. The end result was that Douglas captured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but both Southern support and the Democratic Party collapsed under him. “It is an utterly futile and hopeless task to re-organize, re-unite and harmonize the disintegrated Democratic party, unless this is to be done by a total abandonment of principle,” editorialized the Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel. “No, sensible people might as well make up their minds to the fact that the Democratic party is dissolved forever, that new organizations must take its place.”60

  The Republicans viewed the splintering of the Democrats with glee, for the collapse of Democratic unity between Douglas and Breckinridge, and the unwillingness of Bell’s supporters to vote for either as an acceptable Southern candidate, opened the way to a Republican victory in November. But precisely because victory was now within their grasp, the Republicans instantly began to hesitate about nominating their most ultra-anti-slavery standard-bearers, such as William H. Seward of New York. Seward was a longtime Whig who had once stiffened Zachary Taylor’s back against slave expansion, and who was regarded by Northern Democrats as a reckless radical. Nominating Seward might be perceived as too violent an anti-slavery gesture by the Republicans, costing them the votes of the moderates within the party; even more serious, his championship of the Whig economic agenda in the Senate and as governor of New York might drive Northern and Southern Democrats back into each other’s arms, depriving the Republicans of as much as a quarter of the votes they had won from Democrats in the 1856 presidential campaign.

  The Republicans who assembled in Chicago in May 1860 for their national nominating convention would be looking for an anti-slavery man and a Whig economist who had managed to avoid making himself nationally notorious on either of those points, the kind of man Horace Greeley described in a letter to a friend: “I know the country is not Anti-Slavery. It will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening. An Anti-Slavery man per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River-and-Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery.”61 Greeley thought this might mean the Missouri Whig Edward Bates, but the man who best fit Greeley’s description was already at hand in Illinois in the person of Abraham Lincoln.

  Lincoln’s run against Douglas for the Illinois senate seat in 1858 had won him national attention. Despite his defeat, Lincoln had nearly managed to stage the political upset of the century, and Republicans across the North remembered him. “Mr. Lincoln is a man of very great ability; few men in the nation would willingly encounter him in debate,” wrote the National Era two weeks after the election. “We have heard many men in all parts of the Union, and think, for clear statement, the simplifying of difficult points, taking into consideration his rectitude and singleness of purpose, he is our choice.” An old political friend who had moved to Pennsylvania and had his ear close to the ground of national party politics told Lincoln, “Seriously, Lincoln, Judge Douglas being so widely known, you are getting a national reputation. … Your discussion with Judge Douglas had demonstrated your ability and your devotion to freedom; you have no embarrassing record; you have sprung from the humble walks of life, sharing in its toils and trials.”62 Invitations to stump for other Republican candidates now arrived from Wisconsin and Kansas, as well as from points around Illinois, and in the fall of 1859 he was invited by prominent New York Republicans to speak in New York City so that they might take his measure.

  Lincoln was not at all averse to being measured. As early as February 1860 he admitted to his friends, “I am not in a position where it would hurt much for me to be nominated on the national ticket,” and on February 16 he was pleased to find that the Chicago Tribune had openly endorsed him for the Republican presidential nomination, claiming that only Lincoln could carry the western states for the Republicans. The crucial test for Lincoln was the New York invitation, for this would clearly be his debut before the Republicans’ East Coast party moguls. On February 27 about 1,500 New York Republicans turned out to hear Lincoln speak in the Great Hall of the Cooper Institute.

  His address started poorly. Tall, gaunt, his wrists dangling out of his sleeves, Lincoln spoke in a shrill Kentucky drawl that made sophisticated New Yorkers wonder whether a terrible mistake had been made about this man. After a few moments, though, Lincoln warmed to his task, and in a short while the silent crowd turned increasingly more enthusiastic. He addressed himself first to Stephen A. Douglas, underscoring once again that the intention of the framers of the Constitution was to see slavery contained and gradually extinguished rather than given the tacit approval of the popular sovereignty doctrine. “Those fathers marked it,” Lincoln insisted, “as an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us make that toleration and protection a necessity.” Lincoln then turned to the Southern disunionists and warned them that the Republicans were not going to be frightened out of their principles simply
because the South held the pistol of political disruption of the Union to their heads. Republican opposition to slavery was a matter of moral judgment, not just political expediency. “All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong,” Lincoln explained, “Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy.”63

  Yet Lincoln tempered his utterances with a large dash of caution. He insisted that he only wanted to contain slavery where it was, not to abolish it outright. “Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation.” And he distanced himself from John Brown by referring to the Harpers Ferry raid as “peculiar” and “absurd.” In short, Lincoln said everything he needed to say to make clear his moral opposition to the extension of slavery, while at the same time professing no personal animosity toward the South. Gone was the provocative rhetoric of the “House Divided” and the talk of conspiracy between Buchanan, Pierce, Douglas, and Taney—Lincoln as much as conceded that the house could remain divided so long as one of the divisions could not expand, and in so doing he positioned himself as a firm but not radical anti-slavery man, the perfect Republican. The Cooper Institute audience roared its approval, and so did the major Republican newspapers.64

  The greatest impact of the Cooper Institute speech would be felt in Illinois. On May 9, 1860, the Illinois Republican state convention at Decatur riotously pledged its national convention delegates to Lincoln for the presidential nomination, and at the height of a tremendous outburst of enthusiasm, Lincoln’s cousin, John Hanks, paraded into the convention, bearing two weather-beaten fence rails bedecked with a banner reading: “Abraham Lincoln. The Rail Candidate for President in 1860. Two Rails from a Lot of 3,000 Made in 1830 by Thos. Hanks and Abe Lincoln.” Though Lincoln had struggled all his adult life to put his crude origins out of sight and deeply resented anyone’s attempt to address him informally as “Abe,” the state convention saw at once the value of identifying him as a man “fresh from the people,” especially the people of the pioneering West, and so he became not Mr. Lincoln the railroad lawyer or the Honorable Abraham Lincoln, Esq., of Springfield, but Abe Lincoln the Rail Splitter.

  When the Republican national convention convened one week later in Chicago, most of the delegates arrived at the convention hall assuming that either Seward or some other party stalwart would be handed the presidential nomination. But Seward’s reputation as a radical, unelectable in the West and anathema to anti-slavery Democrats, crippled him. The first ballot had Seward only sixty delegates shy of the nomination, but from that point on, the Illinois contingent (which already had been agitating and bargaining for their favorite son for weeks) now began wheeling and dealing in earnest while Lincoln remained in Springfield so as to be able to turn a blind eye to the politicking the Illinois Republicans were waging in his behalf. On the third ballot Lincoln landslided into the nomination, and the convention exploded into a pandemonium of jubilation. For a running mate, the Republicans cast a careful eye toward disheartened Northern Democrats and drafted a former Democrat from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin. “We are full of enthusiasm over Old Abe,” exulted Indiana Republican Schuyler Colfax. “We feel that the battle is half won already.”65

  Southern Democrats were not nearly so jubilant. The Charleston newspapers began denouncing Lincoln as soon as he was nominated for the presidency in 1860, calling him a “horrid-looking wretch… sooty and scoundrelly in aspect; a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman,” and the Richmond papers were not much more charitable: Lincoln was an “illiterate partisan” of the abolitionists, “possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery.” The American minister in England, George Dallas, had to fumble mentally to peg Lincoln, since he knew only that “Lincoln is as absolutely self-made as our democracy could desire. He began life as a day-labourer, and took to making fence-rails.”66

  With the Democratic Party shivered into three splinters, there was little practical hope of defeating Lincoln and the Republicans, and after a glum and lackluster campaign by most of the candidates, Lincoln successfully captured the presidential election on November 6, 1860. Ironically, he had polled almost a million votes less than the combined popular votes of his three opponents, Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell—which meant that the Southern Democrats, by refusing to unite behind Douglas, had actually helped to bring about the very thing they had screamed against, the election of a Republican president. Even with less than a majority of popular votes, Lincoln still commanded the 180 electoral votes of the North. Those electoral votes would have given him the election even if the South had united both its popular and electoral votes entirely behind Douglas.67

  At last the game of balances was tipping irrevocably over the edge of the table. One day after the election, interest rates on the New York money markets began to soar nervously toward 12 percent, and the New York lawyer George Templeton Strong groaned that “apprehension… has destroyed confidence in securities and property of every kind.” That same day, Judge Andrew McGrath closed the U.S. court in Charleston, South Carolina. The outgoing governor of South Carolina, William Henry Gist, who had held the state legislature in special session to watch the outcome of the election, now urged the calling of “a convention of the people of the State… to consider and determine for themselves the mode and measure of redress.” Gist was not reluctant about suggesting that “the only alternative left… is the secession of South Carolina from the Union.” On November 12, the legislature complied, passing a bill calling for the assembling of a state convention that would withdraw South Carolina from the Union.68

  THE SUMTER CRISIS

  It will be difficult for us to appreciate the degree of desperation produced in the South by Lincoln’s election unless we remember what the presidency meant on the local level in the 1860s. The creation of a professional civil service was still another thirty years in the future, and in the meantime, every federal appointive office—some 900 of them all told, from the cabinet down to the lowliest postmaster—was filled at presidential discretion and usually according to party or philosophical loyalties. Until 1860 fully half of these appointees were Southerners; in the case of the Supreme Court, nineteen out of thirty-four sitting justices appointed between Washington and Lincoln were slaveholders.69 Much as Lincoln might protest that he was no John Brown, his identity as a Republican was enough to convince most Southerners that he would appoint only Republicans to postmasterships (where they could ensure the free flow of abolitionist literature into every Southern hamlet), only Republicans as federal marshals (who would then turn a deliberately blind eye to fugitive slaves en route to Canada), only Republicans to army commands (and thus turn the federal army into an anti-slavery militia, and federal forts and arsenals in the South into abolitionist havens), and thus make the Republicans, and the anti-slavery attitude, attractive to the nonslaveholding whites of the South without whose cooperation the survival of slavery would be impossible. These Republican intruders would “circulate insurrectionary documents and disseminate insurrectionary sentiments among [the] hitherto contented servile population.” That was entirely aside from the possibility that Lincoln himself harbored hostile designs on the South. Georgia governor Joseph Brown prophesied, with remarkable foresight, that

  if Mr. Lincoln places among us his Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc., by the end of his administration, with the control of public patronage, he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of the States of the South, in 1864. If this ticket only secured five or ten thousand votes in each of the Southern States, it would be as large as the abolition party was in the North a few years ago since. … This would soon give it control of our elections. We
would then be powerless, and the abolitionists would press forward, with a steady step, to the accomplishment of their object. They would refuse to admit any other slave States to the Union. They would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and at the Forts, Arsenals and Dock Yards, within the Southern States, which belong to the United States. They would then abolish the internal slave trade between the States, and prohibit a slave owner from carrying his slaves into Alabama or South Carolina, and there selling them. … Finally, when we were sufficiently humiliated, and sufficiently in their power, they would abolish slavery in the States. It will not be many years before enough of free States may be formed out of the present territories of the United States, and admitted into the Union, to give them sufficient strength to change the Constitution, and remove all Constitutional barriers which now deny to Congress this power.70

  Lincoln, as the president-elect, tried to offer as much in the way of reassurance as he could to the South without violating his own principles or the platform of the Republican Party. Late in November Lincoln wrote that, as president, he would regard himself as bound to obey the Constitution and the laws, including the fugitive slave laws and the security of slavery in the slave states. “I have labored in, and for, the Republican organization with entire confidence that whenever it shall be in power, each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively… as they have ever been under any administration,” Lincoln wrote calmly from Springfield two weeks after the election. “I regard it as extremely fortunate for the peace of the whole country, that this point… is now to be brought to a practical test, and placed beyond the possibility of Doubt.” To his old Whig comrade in politics, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, Lincoln wrote on December 22 to reiterate that he had no intention of meddling with slavery in the States, where the Constitution gave him no authority to meddle with it. “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would, directly, or indirectly interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves?” Lincoln asked soothingly. “If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears.”71