American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Lincoln complied, publicly. Privately, he was busy meeting with party chieftains, bantering with reporters, sending out campaign suggestions, querying local politicos as to how the situation looked in their end of the “vineyard.” And he allowed his image to be sharpened as “honest Abe,” a son of the frontier, log cabin born, farm boy, rail splitter. The Republicans lived up to their Whig forefathers in organizing campaign processions carrying replicas of rails he had split, and presenting the “Wide Awakes,” who provided song and spectacle. But Lincoln stayed in Springfield.

  Douglas would not be so constricted. Leading half a party, facing probable defeat, he decided on intensive tours North and South. In city after city he called for Union, denounced the ultras, pictured the Democratic party as the only remaining vehicle of North-South harmony. His audiences seemed as spellbound as ever by the Little Giant, but he won few conversions from the Republican party in the North or Breckinridge’s splinter party in the South. Douglas, who had spent so many years keeping his fences mended with the Southerners, was amazed by the hostility shown him in the slave states. He gave as good as he got, denouncing secessionist talk as traitorous. Early in October he was shocked to hear that Pennsylvania and Indiana had gone Republican in elections for state officials.

  “Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” Douglas told his secretary. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” He was headed South anyway, but he intensified his efforts. Now he spoke for the Union rather than himself. The South must not secede. Aroused, desperate, as he saw his life’s political work being swept away, he followed a killing pace—literally killing, for in eight months he would be dead of accumulated fatigue, untended illnesses, campaign overwork, and the heavy drinking and smoking that went with it.

  On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won 1,866,000 votes; Douglas, 1,375,000; Breckinridge, 843,000; Bell, 590,000. Lincoln carried eighteen free states for 180 electoral votes, Breckinridge, eleven slave states for 72, Bell three border states for 39, and Douglas only Missouri, and three New Jersey votes, for 12. Studying the vote, newspaper editors could find some predictable patterns. Lincoln had won no electoral votes in the South, Breckinridge none in the North, though both had drawn huge popular votes in rural areas. The Democratic party now lay in fragments. Despite strong economic, ethnic, and religious views among the voters, the outcome was almost completely sectional. Geography was destiny.

  But there was little time for analysis. On receiving news of Lincoln’s election, South Carolina’s legislature unanimously called for a state convention to be held in Columbia in late December. This convention declared without dissent that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

  On January 9 Mississippi seceded, the next day Florida, the next day Alabama, followed by Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The Union was dissolved.

  The Union was dissolved. The grand experiment seemed finished. Americans had created a union to achieve order, security, liberty, and equality. Now union was gone, and with it order and security. Liberty had been largely achieved, but not for blacks, Indians, or controversial ministers and editors. Equality had been partially achieved, but not for slaves, women, illiterates, masses of laborers in fields and factories. “The last hope of freedom in the old world is now centered in the success of the American Republic,” Douglas had said during the campaign. Now the Old World looked on in mingled pity and glee.

  What had happened? What could have happened, in a nation that had been put together like a Swiss clock, with power and energy so nicely distributed and positioned and balanced, precisely so that the nation could absorb pressures from without and within? The first answers, in the heat of the conflict, offered conspiratorial or even diabolical explanations: the catastrophe was due to southern planters, northern abolitionists, agitators in general. In later years, the explanation would often reflect the political ideology or intellectual environment of the time. Secession and civil war were due to class rule North and South, cultural conflict, lack of communication and understanding, modernization surges and lags, ideological differences over slavery and the “unfreedoms” and inequalities that it caused.

  Much of this inquiry was inconclusive, however, because it searched for single causes in what was a web of influences or a channel of causation. It failed to differentiate between the givens of history—the geographical, racial, and economic forces that were inextricable and inseparable from the past—and the somewhat more tractable decision-making situations, where leaders might have decided differently, for example, in permitting the slave trade or agreeing to a three-fifths rule, and the more “open” crossroads situations where men had considerable choice in arranging their political institutions and in making decisions within them.

  The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise.

  Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West. While many issues were involved in this ideological confrontation—the tariff, federal support for internal improvements, nativism, religious differences, western development, temperance—less and less these issues modified the growing issue of slavery, and more and more they helped deepen that division.

  As these ideological differences grew, the double system began to falter, and the more it faltered, the more the ideological conflict intensified. The two-party system assumed that within each party moderate and “extremist” forces would grapple for control, but that the two parties would tend toward the center—and hence toward gradual adjustment and morselization—because of the need to win the support of centrist voters. The system in short depended on electoral competition in a diverse and balanced electorate. The 1850 election, however, began to throw the system askew. Because of weaknesses in the Whig party, which had never established itself at the grass roots to the degree the Democracy had, especially in the South, the Democrats won overwhelming control of Congress and Southerners won predominance within the party as a result of their unified control of caucuses, appointments of committee chairmen and memberships, parliamentary rules and processes. This was the background of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the passage of which showed the power of southern ultras and unsettled the system further.

  If the “party constitution”—the competitive, two-party mechanism—had worked, the Democrats would have paid the political price in 1856: defeat at the hands of a moderate party that would
have appealed to the voters for a mandate against southern extremism. But in 1856 the Whigs, plagued by their own sectional problems, and with their organizational heart beating feebly, were near the point of collapse, and the Republicans and Know-Nothings were minority parties. The Democrats won an undeserved victory, over splintered opposition, and this again played into the hands of the ultras. At the same time, the ultras virtually controlled the presidency, through the two-thirds rule in the convention and the choice of men, in Pierce and Buchanan, who were not expected to be strong. Presidents. Even the presidential veto could be negated when congressional leaders, invoking party discipline (their own), could override the White House. There was never a strong Administration party that could build a solid link with moderate elements in the North and the border states.

  Under the rising ideological-sectional pressures, this system exploded and revealed in naked outline what had been for some years the actual power configuration—a four-party or multi-party system, with its inherent weaknesses. In the four-party showdown of 1860, the Republicans won with a minority of the popular vote. In that election Stephen Douglas was the real hero, as he decided to fight for the Union even at the expense of his own candidacy, bypassed the southern ultras, and made a final effort to reach the great grass-roots Democracy, North and South, that had kept the nation together.

  Much would be said later about a “blundering generation” of leaders, but these men were operating within the system they knew, as best they could, only to find that the constitutional and party system could not cope with the power of ideology. Nor could they fully understand an ideological battle in which extremists did not act rationally and prudently, in which every politician was vulnerable to the man on his “far right or left.” Much would also be made later of economic and ethnic and religious forces that these leaders could not overcome, but these were precisely the forces that, as experienced transactional leaders, they had in the past overcome through gradual adjustment and accommodation.

  At least the system did allow for a certain vital flexibility and potential—the coming to power of a strong President who could build his own presidential party and govern. As the southern states broke away from the Union, as the inauguration of a new President neared, eyes North and South turned toward the tall man in Illinois, and to another man in Mississippi, Jefferson Davis.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Blood-Red Wine

  TWO WESTERNERS LEFT THEIR homes on February 11, 1861: Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln. They had much in common. Both had been born in Kentucky. Both had prospered in the trans-Appalachian region as that region had prospered. Both had become famous throughout the nation; indeed, both had recently been elected Presidents, and they were now setting forth toward their posts. Davis and Lincoln had something else in common: Neither would live to come home again.

  The day before, Jefferson Davis, as spare and erect as ever but with his light hair now turning gray, was helping his wife prune rose bushes on Brierfield, their plantation near Vicksburg, when a messenger rode in with a telegram. Her husband’s face turned so desolate as he read the message that Varina Davis feared news of a death in the family. Davis was silent for long moments, then told her that he had just been chosen provisional President of the newly formed Confederate States of America. As an old soldier he had expected at most a military command, but as a good soldier he immediately packed to leave. Early next morning the plantation bell summoned the slaves of Brierfield to hear their master bid them farewell. Then Davis and his black manservant walked to a nearby Mississippi landing, rowed out into the river, and flagged a steamer for the ride north to Vicksburg.

  Davis was beginning his long trip to Montgomery at a critical moment for the seven seceding states. Spurred as always by South Carolina’s leaders, they had organized a new government with remarkable speed and efficiency. Their new charter, the Confederate Constitution, provided for the “sovereign and independent” nature of the individual states and protected slavery, though slave importation was barred to appease French and British opinion. Davis had been chosen provisional President over such fire eaters as William Yancey and Robert Rhett, with Alexander Stephens, an old Whig turned Democrat, as Vice-President. All this was in response to wild enthusiasm in the lower South, as orators called for secession, old soldiers formed military companies, women sewed flags, preachers fulminated from the pulpit about the mortal peril to the South, and newspapers mirrored the intense feelings at the grass roots. But states of the upper South, so critical to secessionists’ hopes, were holding back.

  Heading east, Davis could hardly ignore the geography of secession as he was forced to make a detour north into Tennessee—which still remained in the Union—southeast to Atlanta, and then doubled back southwest to Montgomery. Nor could he ignore the lower South’s shortage of east-west railroad links, ominous for a region heading toward war. Even this run had no sleeping cars, so the President-elect rested, fully dressed, on a camp bed set up in a regular coach. He was immensely buoyed, though, by the “approbation” of the people crowding into stations where he paused, by the booming guns and bonfires that marked his way. At each of his twenty-five stops Davis repeated that “no reconstruction” of the Union was now possible and urged his listeners to prepare for war.

  Yet he could not forget the “cooperationists” who opposed separate secessions by the states, favored collective action by all the South, and in many cases were willing to negotiate with the Republicans in search of some kind of last-minute compromise, even while they insisted on southern rights and their determination to repel any Union assault. Rolling through Tennessee, he could not forget that two days before he left Brier-field the people of that state had voted decisively against calling a convention to consider secession; and that a few days before, Virginians had dashed secessionist hopes with their own foot-dragging. Without the prestigious Old Dominion little could be done; certainly a Gulf Coast Confederacy would not be enough.

  In Montgomery a delegation from the Confederate constitutional convention waited to greet Davis. Yancey grandly introduced him to the station crowd: “The man and the hour have met.” Davis had only one day to prepare his inaugural address; then, as the strains of “Dixie”—played by a southern band for the first time—died away, he called the new nation the true embodiment of “the American idea that governments rest on the consent of the governed” and asserted that the southern people would preserve their political liberty at all costs. He hoped for good will between the Confederacy and the “Northeastern States of the American Union,” but warned that if “lust of domination should cloud the judgment or inflame the ambition of those States,” then the South would “maintain, by the final arbitrament of the sword, the position which we have assumed among the nations of the earth.”

  “Upon my weary heart,” the new President recorded, “was showered smiles, plaudits, and flowers.” But ahead he saw “troubles and thorns innumerable.”

  Lincoln had left Springfield amid a cold drizzle and an atmosphere of gloom. Umbrellas raised against the rain, a small crowd gathered around the rear platform of the single coach that, with engine and baggage car, comprised the President-elect’s special train. The day before, Lincoln had grasped Herndon’s hand and said, “If I live I’m coming back some time, and then we’ll go right on practicing law as if nothing had ever happened.” But he added, “I am sick of office-holding already.” Now, standing on the rear platform, he looked down, his face wreathed in sadness, then looked up and spoke a few words of farewell. The wheels of the stubby little locomotive began to turn.

  Lincoln’s train meandered back and forth along the whole route to Washington, so that people and politicians could see him, and he them. As though strengthening himself for the ordeal ahead, he drew sustenance from encounters with Indiana farmers, Cincinnati immigrants, even traveling slaveholders; from Pittsburgh miners and ironworkers; from Albany Know-Nothings, New York merchants and pro-secessionists. Using a dozen different railroads, h
e rolled slowly across the country, zigzagging through the prairies and the Mohawk Valley, and down the flank of the Hudson. Sometimes he escaped the deluge of advice, admonitions, and job soliciting by withdrawing to his private quarters. His occasional melancholy was not shared by Mary Todd Lincoln, already aglow at the prospect of being the First Lady, or by their two young sons, whose pranks bedeviled train crew and passengers alike.

  News from Washington told of drift, indecision, and paralysis, of a confusion of voices, proposals, manifestos, diatribes. With his Cabinet rid of Southerners, Buchanan could act more freely, but he hoped that Congress could solve the crisis, or that a new constitutional convention could be called, in the spirit of ’87. Congress was too divided to do more than discuss attractive but Utopian compromises.

  The eyes of Washington were on the man who was still tacking back and forth as he headed east. But Lincoln had no solution either, and at first he seemed to play down the seriousness of the crisis. Conscious that the Inaugural Address would be his first major statement, he kept a draft of it in his pocket. To the crowds along the way he spoke from the train platform, groping for words, experimenting with various phrases. He told an Indianapolis gathering, “It is your business to rise up and preserve the Union and liberty, for yourselves, and not for me.” In Cincinnati he promised to treat neighboring Kentucky’s slaveholders just as “Washington, Jefferson, and Madison” had treated them. He argued to a Pittsburgh crowd that no crisis existed except an artificial one created by designing politicians. In Freedom, Pennsylvania, he invited a towering coal heaver up to the platform, and they stood back to back for the audience to judge who was taller.

  In Philadelphia the President-elect raised a flag at Independence Hall and said: “I have often inquired of myself, which great principle or idea it was that kept this nation together. It was…something in that Declaration giving liberty, not alone to the people of this country, but hope to the world for all future time.…It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”