But this accusation must have been wrong. No less a personage than
52. McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 16; McPherson, Negro's Civil War, 8.
53. Charleston Mercury, Oct. 15, 1860, and Richmond Enquirer, May 21, 1860, quoted in Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, 346. William L. Barney, The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860 (Princeton, 1974), 153–63, contains a perceptive analysis of the impact of the drought on southern political behavior.
54. Crenshaw, Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860, 97 and 97n.
R. S. Holt, a wealthy Mississippi planter and brother of the U.S. postmaster general, reported that "we have constantly a foretaste of what Northern brother-hood means, in almost daily conflagrations & in discovery of poison, knives & pistols distributed among our slaves by emissaries sent out for that purpose. . . . There cannot be found in all the planting States a territory ten miles square in which the foot prints of one or more of these miscreants have not been discovered." Fortunately, Holt added, "Miracles & Providence" had prevented the accomplishment of their "hellish" designs. But Congressman Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina was not willing to trust to Providence. "I see poison in the wells in Texas—and fire for the houses in Alabama," he wrote. "How can we stand it? . . . It is enough to risk disunion on."55
In vain, then, did a southern conservative point out that most of these atrocity stories "turned out, on examination, to be totally false, and all of them grossly exaggerated."56 On the eve of the election a Mississip-pian observed that "the minds of the people are aroused to a pitch of excitement probably unparalleled in the history of our country." A writer in a Texas Methodist weekly was sure that "the designs of the abolitionists are . . . poison [and] fire" to "deluge [the South] in blood and flame . . . and force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck negroes for wives." However irrational these fears, the response was real—vigilante lynch law that made the John Brown scare of the previous winter look like a Sunday School picnic. "It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass," wrote a Texan, "for the guilty one endangers the peace of society."57
This mass hysteria caused even southern unionists to warn Yankees that a Republican victory meant disunion. "The Election of Lincoln is Sufficient Cause for Secession," a Bell supporter in Alabama entitled his speech. The moderate Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia insisted that "this Government and Black Republicanism cannot live together. . . . At no period of the world's history have four thousand millions of property debated whether it ought to submit to the rule of an enemy." Not to be outdone in southern patriotism, the leading Douglas newspaper
55. R. S. Holt to Joseph Holt, Nov. 9, 1860, Lawrence Keitt to James H. Hammond, Sept. 10, Oct. 23, 1860, in ibid., 105–6, 108.
56. William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York, 1972), 149.
57. Natchez Free Trader, Nov. 2, 1860, and Texas Christian Advocate quoted in Crenshaw, Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860, 111, 95–96; Texan quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 103–4.
in Georgia thundered: "Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies . . . the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."58
The fever spread to the border states. A unionist editor in Louisville professed to have received hundreds of letters "all informing us of a settled and widely-extended purpose to break up the Union" if Lincoln was elected. "We admit that the conspirators are mad, but such madness 'rules the hour.' " John J. Crittenden, Kentucky's elder statesman of unionism, heir of Henry Clay's mantle of nationalism, gave a speech just before the election in which he denounced the "profound fanaticism" of Republicans who "think it their duty to destroy . . . the white man, in order that the black might be free. . . . [The South] has come to the conclusion that in case Lincoln should be elected . . . she could not submit to the consequences, and therefore, to avoid her fate, will secede from the Union."59
Republicans refused to take these warnings to heart. They had heard them before, a dozen times or more. In 1856 Democrats had used such threats to frighten northerners into voting Democratic. Republicans believed that the same thing was happening in 1860. It was "the old game of scaring and bullying the North into submission to Southern demands," said the Republican mayor of Chicago. In a speech at St. Paul, Seward ridiculed this new southern effort "to terrify or alarm" the North. "Who's afraid? (Laughter and cries of 'no one.') Nobody's afraid; nobody can be bought." Nor did Lincoln expect "any formidable effort to break up the Union. The people of the South have too much sense," he thought, "to attempt the ruin of the government."60
Hindsight was to reveal that southerners meant what they said. Two sagacious historians have maintained that Republican failure to take these warnings seriously was a "cardinal error."61 Yet it is hard to see what Republicans could have done to allay southern anxieties short of dissolving
58. John V. Mering, "The Constitutional Union Campaign of 1860: An Example of the Paranoid Style," Mid-America, 60 (1978), 101; Dwight L. Dumond, The Secession Movement 1860–1861 (New York, 1931), 106, 104.
59. Louisville Daily Journal, Aug. 13, 1860, in Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession, 159; Mering, "The Constitutional Union Campaign of 1860," 99.
60. New York Herald, Aug. 1, Oct. 18, 1860; CWL, IV, 95.
61. Nevins, Emergence, II, 305; Potter, Impending Crisis, 433.
their party and proclaiming slavery a positive good. As a committee of the Virginia legislature put it, "the very existence of such a party is an offense to the whole South." A New Orleans editor regarded every northern vote cast for Lincoln as "a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage" to southern honor. It was not so much what Republicans might do as what they stood for that angered southerners. "No other 'overt act' can so imperatively demand resistance on our part," said a North Carolina congressman, "as the simple election of their candidate."62
Lincoln rejected pleas from conservatives that he issue a statement to mollify the South. "What is it I could say which would quiet alarm?" he asked in October. "Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness." Lincoln would have been willing to repeat these statements "if there were no danger of encouraging bold bad men . . . who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentations—men who would like to frighten me, or, at least, to fix upon me the character of timidity and cowardice. They would seize upon almost any letter I could write, as being an 'awful coming down.'"63
Douglas did speak out. On his first foray into the South he told crowds in North Carolina that he would "hang every man higher than Haman who would attempt . . . to break up the Union by resistance to its laws." Campaigning in Iowa when he learned that Republicans had swept the October state elections in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana,64 Douglas said to his private secretary: "Mr. Lincoln is the next President. We must try to save the Union. I will go South." Go he did, to Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, at some risk to his deteriorating health and even to his life. Douglas courageously repeated his warnings against secession. The whole North would rise up to prevent it, he said pointedly. "I hold that the election of any man on earth by the American
62. New Orleans Crescent, Nov. 9, 1860, quoted in Craven, Growth of Southern Nationalism, 358; Virginia legislative committee quoted in Villard, John Brown, 567; CG, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., 455.
63. Lincoln to George T. M. Davis, Oct. 17, 1860, Lincoln to George D. Prentice, Oct. 19, 1860, in CWL, IV, 132–33, 135.
64. Several states held state elections on a different date from the presidential election, which then as now took place on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
people, according to the C
onstitution, is no justification for breaking up this government." Southerners listened to him, but they did not hear.65
The only shred of hope for Democrats was a "fusion" of the three opposition parties in key northern states to deny Lincoln their electoral votes and throw the election into the House. But the legacy of warfare between Douglas and Buchanan thwarted cooperation, while the Know-Nothing ancestry of the Constitutional Unionists bred distrust among foreign-born Democrats. After many meetings in smoke-filled rooms, fusion arrangements among all three parties emerged in New York and Rhode Island. Three of New Jersey's seven electors ran on fusion tickets; in Pennsylvania the Breckinridge and Douglas electors managed to fuse, but a rebellious group of Douglas Democrats refused to support the ticket. All of this effort was in vain. Lincoln won majorities over the combined opposition in New York, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island; the three fusion electors in New Jersey gave Douglas his only northern electoral votes. He also carried Missouri, while Bell won Virginia, Kentucky, and his native Tennessee. Breckinridge carried the rest of the South, winning 45 percent of the section's popular votes to Bell's 39 percent.66 Though Lincoln won only 40 percent of the national popular vote (54 percent in the North), his 180 electoral votes gave him a comfortable cushion over the necessary minimum of 152. Even if the opposition had combined against him in every free state he would have lost only New Jersey, California, and Oregon, and still would have won the presidency with 169 electoral votes.
To southerners the election's most ominous feature was the magnitude of Republican victory north of the 41st parallel. Lincoln won more than 60 percent of the vote in that region, losing scarcely two dozen counties. Three-quarters of the Republican congressmen and senators in the next Congress would represent this "Yankee" and antislavery portion of the free states. These facts were "full of portentous significance," declared the New Orleans Crescent. "The idle canvass prattle about Northern conservatism may now be dismissed," agreed the Richmond Examiner. "A party founded on the single sentiment . . . of hatred of African slavery, is now the controlling power." No one could any longer "be deluded . . . that the Black Republican party is a moderate" party,
65. Johannsen, Douglas, 788–803.
66. In South Carolina, presidential electors were still chosen by the legislature. Breckinridge would have carried the state overwhelmingly in a popular vote.
pronounced the New Orleans Delta. "It is, in fact, essentially a revolutionary party."67
Whether or not the party was revolutionary, antislavery men concurred that a revolution had taken place. "We live in revolutionary times," wrote an Illinois free soiler, "& I say God bless the revolution." Charles Francis Adams, whose grandfather and father had been defeated for reelection to the presidency by slaveowners, wrote in his diary the day after Lincoln's victory: "The great revolution has actually taken place. . . . The country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the Slaveholders."68
67. New Orleans Daily Crescent, Nov. 13, 1860, and Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner, Nov. 9, 1860, in Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession, 237, 223; New Orleans Daily Delta, Nov. 3, 1860, quoted in Peyton McCrary, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction: The Louisiana Experiment (Princeton, 1978), 52.
68. Horace White to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 30, 1860, in William E. Baringer, A House Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect (Springfield, III., 1945), 236; Adams quoted in Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970), 223.
8
The Counterrevolution of 1861
I
The second Continental Congress had deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776. To produce the United States Constitution and put the new government into operation required nearly two years. In contrast, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln's election.
The South moved so swiftly because, in seeming paradox, secession proceeded on a state-by-state basis rather than by collective action. Remembering the lesson of 1850, when the Nashville Convention had turned into a forum of caution and delay, fire-eaters determined this time to eschew a convention of states until the secession of several of them had become a fait accompli. And because the ground had long since been plowed and planted, the harvest of disunion came quickly after the thunderstorm of Lincoln's election.
Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. "There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees," wrote the correspondent of the London Times from Charleston. The enmity of Greek for Turk was child's play "compared to the animosity evinced by the 'gentry' of South Carolina for the 'rabble of the North.' . . . 'The State of South Carolina was,' I am told, 'founded by gentlemen. . . . Nothing on earth shall ever induce us to submit to any union with the brutal, bigoted blackguards of the New England States!' "1 In this mood the South Carolina legislature called a convention to consider secession. Amid extraordinary scenes of marching bands, fireworks displays, militia calling themselves Minute Men, and huge rallies of citizens waving palmetto flags and shouting slogans of southern rights, the convention by a vote of 169–0 enacted on December 20 an "ordinance" dissolving "the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States."2
As fire-eaters had hoped, this bold step triggered a chain reaction by conventions in other lower-South states. After the Christmas holidays—celebrated this year with a certain ambivalence toward the teachings of the Prince of Peace—Mississippi adopted a similar ordinance on January 9, 1861, followed by Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 19, Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 1. Although none of these conventions exhibited the unity of South Carolina's, their average vote in favor of secession was 80 percent. This figure was probably a fair reflection of white opinion in those six states. Except in Texas, the conventions did not submit their ordinances to the voters for ratification. This led to charges that a disunion conspiracy acted against the will of the people. But in fact the main reason for non-submission was a desire to avoid delay. The voters had just elected delegates who had made their positions clear in public statements; another election seemed superfluous. The Constitution of 1787 had been ratified by state conventions, not by popular vote; withdrawal of that ratification by similar conventions satisfied a wish for legality and symmetry. In Texas the voters endorsed secession by a margin of three to one; there is little reason to believe that the result would have been different in any of the other six states.3
Divisions in the lower South occurred mainly over tactics and timing, not goals. A majority favored the domino tactics of individual state secession followed by a convention of independent states to form a new confederacy. But a significant minority, especially in Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, desired some sort of cooperative action preceding
1. Frank Moore, ed., The Rebellion Record, I (New York, 1861), "Documents," 315.
2. Steven A. Channing, Crisis of Fear: Secession in South Carolina (New York, 1970), 282–85.
3. For good summaries of the historiography of the question of popular support for secession, see Ralph A. Wooster, "The Secession of the Lower South: An Examination of Changing Interpretations, CWH, 7 (1961), 117–27, and William J. Donnelly, "Conspiracy or Popular Movement: The Historiography of Southern Support for Secession," North Carolina Historical Review, 42 (1965), 70–84.
secession to ensure unity among at least the cotton-South states. These "cooperationists," however, did not fully agree among themselves. At the radical end of their spectrum were cooperative secessionists, who professed as much ardor for southern independence as immediate secessionists but argued that a united South could present a stronger front than could a few independent states. But they were undercut by the swiftness of events, which produced a league of a half-dozen seceded states within six weeks of South Carolina's secession. As
a Georgia co-operationist admitted ruefully in mid-January, four states "have already seceded. . . . In order to act with them, we must secede with them."4
At the center of the cooperationist spectrum stood a group that might be labeled "ultimatumists." They urged a convention of southern states to draw up a list of demands for presentation to the incoming Lincoln administration—including enforcement of the fugitive slave law, repeal of personal liberty laws, guarantees against interference with slavery in the District of Columbia or with the interstate slave trade, and protection of slavery in the territories, at least those south of 36° 30′. If Republicans refused this ultimatum, then a united South would go out. Since Republicans seemed unlikely to promise all of these concessions and most southerners would not trust them even if they did, the ultimatumists commanded little support in secession conventions.
The third and most conservative group of cooperationists were conditional unionists, who asked fellow southerners to give Lincoln a chance to prove his moderate intentions. Only if Republicans committed some "overt act" against southern rights should the South resort to the drastic step of secession. But while the ranks of conditional unionists contained influential men like Alexander Stephens, they too were swept along by the pace of events. "The prudent and conservative men South," wrote Senator Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana, who counted himself one of them, were not "able to stem the wild torrent of passion which is carrying everything before it. . . . It is a revolution . . . of the most intense character . . . and it can no more be checked by human effort, for the time, than a prairie fire by a gardener's watering pot."5
Other southerners used similar metaphors to describe the phenomenon. "It is a complete landsturm. . . . People are wild. . . . You might
4. Rome Weekly Courier, Jan. 17, 1861, quoted in Michael P. Johnson, Toward a Patriarchal Republic: The Secession of Georgia (Baton Rouge, 1977), 111.
Battle Cry of Freedom Page 32