American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Then, in late October 1859, another act of violence disrupted the seeming calm. Unsatiated by his bloodletting in Kansas, John Brown had become more than ever possessed of a single fanatical vision—the liberation of the slaves. Somehow evading the “federal hounds” sent to track him down, he had moved from place to place throughout the North, raising a little money, collecting a few arms, and gathering another following. Monomaniacal, contemptuous of the cowards who fell by the way, he possessed a strange power of mesmerizing skeptics. After Boston abolitionists lionized him and Concord literati received him, he left New England scornful of all the extremist talk and, with a band that included two of his sons, ready for action.

  His was a daring plan: to capture the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, arm the slaves that would flock in from the whole area, and prepare for revolution, or at least for liberation. The seizure of the arsenal, early in the morning in the sleepy Virginia town, came easily. Then Brown and his band settled down to await the blacks. But the people who arrived in the morning were not black but white—first a half-drunken mob from the town, then some militia units, and finally federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. After Lee demanded unconditional surrender, and while Brown finally parleyed for safe escape, the federal troops suddenly stormed the arsenal. Brown, struck down by a Marine lieutenant, was saved only because the officer had absentmindedly brought his dress sword rather than his battle weapon. Brown’s two sons were killed in the action.

  What were Brown’s true intentions? He did indeed intend to liberate the slaves; he had tried to persuade his friend, the great black leader Frederick Douglass, to come with him, but Douglass had refused, warning him that he would be “going into a perfect steel-trap” and would never emerge alive. But Brown was intent even more on martyrdom—martyrdom to prove to himself that he truly possessed the heroic qualities he esteemed in a man, and to send a bugle call across the land. In both he succeeded magnificently. So courageous was his bearing after his capture, so candid his statements, that he won the admiration of his southern captors and hero worship in the North. Lydia Maria Child, while disapproving of violence, asked the permission of Governor Wise of Virginia to visit Brown and bind his wounds, on the ground that he was not a criminal but “a martyr to righteous principles.” Wise politely turned down her request.

  When Brown was hanged, church bells tolled across the North, black bunting was displayed from windows, gun salutes fired, offices closed, memorial meetings held. Emerson proclaimed that Brown would “make the gallows glorious like the cross”; Thoreau called him an “angel of light”; Wendell Phillips avowed that the “lesson of the hour is insurrection.” Moldering in his grave in North Elba, New York, the “crazy, deluded, monomaniacal, fanatical” old man would have been pleased to know of all this. Let them hang him, he had said: “I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.” And on the way to the gallows, sitting bound on the coffin that would soon contain him, he handed out a message for his countrymen: the crimes of this guilty land would never be purged away, “but with Blood…”

  Already Southerners were seeing blood. The more northern abolitionists canonized Brown, the more the defenders of slavery responded with wrath. Correspondence that Brown carelessly—or deliberately—left behind revealed that New England eminences had encouraged and aided the “murderer,” that leading abolitionists valued Brown as an abettor of disunion, that the bells tolling for Brown were proclaiming northern approbation of slave insurrection. The fact that Seward and Lincoln both repudiated Brown’s violence, that moderates like Edward Everett and other northern notables were calling for conciliation at Union meetings, that some of Brown’s backers thought he had planned liberation, not insurrection, had little effect on the rising feeling. The “Black Republicans” seemed to control northern politics. A spasm of fervent solidarity passed through the South. “Never before, Since the Declaration of Independence,” exulted a South Carolina paper, the Watchman, “has the South been more united in sentiment and feeling.”

  It had long seemed likely that 1860 would be a year of conflict, perhaps even of showdowns between slavery and antislavery forces, between Democrats and Republicans, between moderate and militant factions within those parties. The passion sweeping the country contained an explosive combination of anger and fear. Anger, because conflict over slavery was becoming increasingly polarized as the old compromises crumbled, because thoughts of Kansas still burned in people’s minds, and now because of John Brown. Fear, because many Northerners suspected that the “slave power” was spreading its “tentacles”—and its peculiar institution—throughout the nation, and because, even more, many Southerners suspected that “Black Republicans” were threatening not only their way of life but their solidarity, by driving a wedge between slaveholders and poor whites and even, God forbid, between masters and slaves.

  Anger was the keynote of the Thirty-sixth Congress, which convened on December 5, 1859, three days after Brown was hanged. The House was so divided that it took two months to elect a Speaker. Members of Congress talked freely of secession and disunion. They shouted one another down, obstructed legislative action, carried ill-concealed weapons onto the House floor. The Senate displayed hardly more civility. Republicans, bolstered in number in the 1858 elections, took the lead in pressing a homestead bill, a protective tariff bill, and a Pacific railroad bill; the first passed both chambers and was vetoed by Buchanan; the second passed the House and failed in the Senate; the third died in the legislative labyrinth. The lawmakers were now seeking sectional acclaim at the expense of practical policy-making.

  Fears of Southerners for their own sectional unity were further aroused at this point by a bombshell in the form of a book—written by one of their own. Hinton Rowan Helper, son of a North Carolinian blacksmith, after travels throughout the North and West, had concluded that slavery was blighting the South, crippling its economic progress, and above all impoverishing and degrading the whites—especially the small farmers and skilled workers. He cared nothing for the plight of the slaves; they should be deported. He cared passionately about whites—all whites. He was long on convincing facts and figures, but also on moral concern. “Non-slaveholders of the South!” he wrote, “farmers, mechanics, and working-men…the arrant demagogues whom you have elected to offices of honor and profit, have hoodwinked you, trifled with you, and used you as mere tools for the consummation of their wicked designs….” Southern elites dreaded nothing more than a challenge to solidarity between rich and poor whites.

  The solidarity was all the more important in the early months of this election year, for the unity of the organization that threw a great protective arm over the South, the Democratic party, was approaching a harsh test—the convention of 1860. Everything seemed to go wrong for the Democrats when they met in Charleston late in April. The city, crowded and intensely hot, had been made for finer things than this horde of Democracy’s raucous, quarrelsome grass-roots activists. Nor was the political arithmetic encouraging. Now clearly the choice of northern Democrats, Douglas had the votes to control the convention but not enough for the two-thirds needed to nominate. Despite the desperate efforts of Douglas men to conciliate delegates who would not be conciliated, and despite a Douglas-backed platform that even left the issue of squatter sovereignty open, delegation after delegation of Southerners walked out of the convention.

  Even with much of their southern opposition gone, Democrats were unable to nominate their man in fifty-seven ballots. The Charleston conclave adjourned, to meet again for a new try in Baltimore six weeks later. There the tragicomedy was re-enacted, as Douglas reasserted control of the convention and the Southerners and other anti-Douglas delegates walked out a second time. Now at last the Little Giant had enough votes for nomination, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. The secessionists promptly met in a nearby-Baltimore hall, passed the proslavery platform that had been rejected in Charleston, and nominated John C. Breckinridge, Buchanan’s Vice-President and an ol
d-time Whig from Kentucky, for President.

  Amid the heat and anger of their conventions the northern and southern Democrats had tragically miscalculated each other’s conviction; the Douglas men, for example, had thought only a few southern ultras would walk out. Between the two Democratic conventions another party met, also in Baltimore, but with a harmony and purposefulness that the Democracy no longer could command. This was the Constitutional Union party, inheritor of the great Whig tradition, organized by Senator John J. Crittenden, Henry Clay’s successor both as a Kentuckian and as a Unionist. Delegates from twenty-three states agreed not to write a platform but simply to run—or stand—on the Constitution and on the Union. With Crittenden too old to campaign, the convention chose a ticket of John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Boston, both old-time Whigs.

  And the Republicans? They were still a party of much promise and little performance, of compelling ideology but cloudy strategy. They were clearly now the antislavery party that wished to doom the evil to ultimate extinction nationally and let it wither in the South. They were increasingly the party of economic growth, expanding industrial capitalism, protection for business, western development through railroads and free homesteads; and most Republicans believed that liberty and equality could be achieved best through expanding the economic opportunity of the little man.

  The Republicans, though, faced strategic dilemmas in the spring of 1860. To win the fall election they had to carry the swing states that had eluded them four years earlier, and to do that they must broaden their appeal not only geographically and economically but politically; they had to attract old Whigs, moderate nativists, antislavery Democrats, Fillmore men, all-out Unionists. But the more Republicans broadened their appeal, the more they would compete with opposition parties expert at compromise—Douglas’ northern Democrats and Bell’s Unionists. The alternatives were to move in a radical direction, in the hope that a militant program and candidate would bring out a huge, mobilized Free-Soil vote, but this course seemed risky judging from recent election returns; or to follow a strategy of political expediency, but 1860 was no time to divert this vigorous young party toward a fickle and shapeless opportunism.

  Only moral, intellectual, and political leadership of the highest order could have readily solved such strategic problems, and the Republican party could claim no such leadership. The party did possess an array of presidential hopefuls, each of whom symbolized a plausible posture for the party. Seward was the front-runner. Although the New York senator was seeking to appear more conciliatory—he now spoke not of slave and free states but of “labor states” and “capital states”—he still symbolized the militant antislavery party that had its roots in the “upper” North. Toward the other end of the party spectrum, Edward Bates of Missouri stood for the Whiggish republicanism of old, with leanings toward nativism. Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio held a combination of low-tariff and antislavery views that made him less available than his rivals. Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania came from the most pivotal state of all, but his reputation was mainly that of an opportunistic machine politician.

  And then there was Abraham Lincoln, seemingly the most unavailable contender of them all, a much defeated, regional politician who had never managed anything larger than a company of militia. On second look, he appeared more promising: he was popular in Illinois, which would be a pivotal state; he stood at the center of the Republican mainstream; he had a rural mien and background, an advantage in campaigning; he had won something of a national reputation in his debates with Douglas; and if he still was less known than Seward or Chase, his relative obscurity at least meant that he had fewer enemies in the party. Lincoln was aware of his need for wider recognition, especially in the East, and he readily accepted an invitation to speak in New York City. His address at the Cooper Union was largely a legal and historical argument that the Framers opposed slavery, but it was delivered with such logic and moral earnestness that he drew an ovation from a sophisticated audience that included Greeley and Bryant. By the time he had finished a speaking tour of New England he had won considerable national attention, at least as an orator.

  To plan strategy as a party, rather than as a collection of rival tongs each looking for its own main chance, the Republicans needed a means of making a collective and democratic decision. As Lincoln had said, to defeat the enemy “we must hold conventions; we must adopt platforms…; we must nominate candidates, and we must carry elections.”

  The convention was not only the key means of national party decision; by mid-century it had become virtually an American art form. The arrival of flag-bedecked trains carrying state delegations, the delegates’ march to the convention hall with bands playing and banners waving, the stentorian call to order in the bunting-draped hall, the points of order, the fiery debates over the platform, the deafening floor demonstrations for favorites, and then the suspense-ridden presidential balloting—suspenseful because the presidential choice was usually made in the balloting itself—were all firmly fixed in political folklore and practice. Conventions had a grimy side too—the flushed, sweating delegates who enjoyed their liquor as much as their politics, the pickpockets and prostitutes who infested the hotels and public places, the sordid deals—with both money and patronage jobs as currency—made with delegates.

  Such, in all its tawdriness and grandeur, was the Republican conclave that opened in mid-May in the famous Wigwam convention hall in Chicago. Lincoln had been lucky in the choice of this city rather than an eastern one, and Illinois Republicans made the most of it. After Seward’s delegates pulled into the station in thirteen train cars filled with merrymakers, Lincoln’s men arranged for thousands of Illinoisans to flock in from Springfield, Peoria, and dozens of other towns. Seward had brought along someone else: Thurlow Weed, one of the most dexterous politicos of the day, widely experienced and connected, an old hand at conventions and convention deals. Lincoln’s men—his old friend Judge David Davis, Republican state chieftain and railroad entrepreneur Norman Judd, Jesse Fell, Leonard Swett, and others—were mainly novices at big-time politics.

  The Republicans established themselves as a truly national party during the convention’s second day, when they voted through a platform with much wider appeal than the antislavery manifesto of four years earlier. Drafted by a group including Greeley and Schurz, the platform called for free homesteads, a tariff that would encourage industrial development, internal improvements, a Pacific railroad, Kansas’ immediate entry into the Union, and other antislavery planks. It was a moderate, even conservative platform—so much so that the white-haired veteran Free-Soiler Joshua Giddings felt compelled to add a reaffirmation of the truths of the Declaration of Independence. When he was voted down and began to leave the hall in chagrin, a New York delegate rose to urge “gentlemen to think well before, upon the free prairies of the West, in the summer of 1860, they dare to wince and quail before the assertions of the men of Philadelphia in 1776.” Shamed, the delegates now carried the motion unanimously, amid an explosion of cheers, and old Giddings resumed his seat.

  Next day Seward led on the first ballot, as expected, but Lincoln was a strong second, as not expected. There followed a scramble for delegate votes, as Weed, Davis, and the other managers expended their political resources—patronage jobs, policy promises, future recognitions, even cabinet posts—in a wide-open distribution of loaves and fishes, using the hard currency of specific promises and the soft currency of hopes and expectations. “Make no contracts that will bind me,” Lincoln had said to his managers, but Judge Davis allegedly told his colleagues, “Lincoln ain’t here and don’t know what we have to meet!” All managers played this game, but Lincoln’s had the added advantage of handing out hundreds of counterfeit tickets in order to pack the Wigwam’s gallery and out-hurrah the Seward rooters.

  In the end, though, it was a set of more serious political factors—above all, Lincoln’s “availability”—that brought him a surge of strength in the second ballot, an
d victory, as Cameron’s Pennsylvania shifted to him, early in the third. More delegates jumped onto the bandwagon, and the nomination was made unanimous. A quiet fell upon the Wigwam as the delegates contemplated what they had done, then the cannon boomed from the roof and Illinoisans in the streets outside were swept up in a happy pandemonium.

  Lincoln was waiting nervously in his Springfield law office when a telegram arrived: “TO LINCOLN YOU ARE NOMINATED.” He studied it for long moments. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got it.”

  What did Lincoln have? A worthless nomination, some said; he would probably lose, but if he won he would lose too, for the slave states would secede. Lincoln scoffed at this latter prospect. He and most of the other Republican leaders could not believe that the Southerners really meant secession and war. “He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North,” a friend wrote after talking with him. “ ‘They won’t give up the offices,’ I remember he said, and added, ‘Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.’ ” Seward and Schurz and others also were optimistic.

  The Republican leaders were less dogmatic about winning. A four-party race was unprecedented and unpredictable. Some calculated that Lincoln would monopolize the antislavery vote and hence overcome the divided opposition. Others believed that Douglas and Bell would monopolize the moderate, pro-Union vote, especially if they could agree on fusion or coalition arrangements in some of the key states. In any event, Republican leaders agreed that their course was clear. Lincoln must “make no speeches,” as William Cullen Bryant said, “write no letters as a candidate.” Nothing must sully the image of Lincoln and his party as following a moderate, centrist path between the ultras of secessionism and the ultras of abolitionism.