CHAPTER NINE
The Crisis of the Union, 1860–65
Lurching Toward War
Despite a remarkable, and often unimaginable, growth spurt in the first half of the nineteenth century, and despite advances in communication and transportation—all given as solutions to war and conflict—the nation nevertheless lumbered almost inexorably toward a final definitive split. No amount of prosperity, and no level of communication could address, ameliorate, or cover up the problem of slavery and the Republicans’ response to it. No impassioned appeals, no impeccable logic, and no patriotic invocations of union could overcome the fact that, by 1860, more than half of all Americans thought slavery morally wrong, and a large plurality thought it so destructive that it had to be ended at any cost. Nor could sound reasoning or invocations of divine scripture dissuade the South from the conviction that the election of any Republican meant an instant attack on the institution of slavery.
What made war irrepressible and impending in the minds of many was that the political structure developed with the Second American Party system relied on the continuation of two key factors that were neither desirable nor possible to sustain. One was a small federal government content to leave the states to their own devices. On some matters, this was laudable, not to mention constitutional. On others, however, it permitted the South to maintain and perpetuate slavery. Any shift in power between the federal government and the states, therefore, specifically threatened the Southern slaveholders more than any other group, for it was their constitutional right to property that stood in conflict with the constitutional right of due process for all Americans, not to mention the Declaration’s promise that all men are created equal. The other factor, closely tied to the first, was that the South, tossed amid the tempest and lacking electoral power, found itself lashed to the presidential mast requiring a Northern man of Southern principles. That mast snapped in November 1860, and with it, the nation was drawn into a maelstrom.
Time Line
1860:
Lincoln elected president; South Carolina secedes
1861:
Lower South secedes and founds the Confederacy; Lincoln and Davis inaugurated; Fort Sumter surrenders to the Confederacy; Upper South secedes from the Union; Battle of Bull Run
1862:
Battles of Shiloh and Antietam; preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
1863:
Emancipation Proclamation; battles of Vicksburg and Gettysburg
1864:
Fall of Atlanta and Sherman’s March to the Sea; Lincoln reelected
1865:
Lee surrenders to Grant at Appomattox; Lincoln assassinated; Johnson assumes presidency
America’s Pivotal Election: 1860
The electoral college, and not a majority of voters, elected the president. For the South, based on the experience of 1848 and the near election of John Frémont in 1856, it was a good thing. Since 1840 the numbers had been running against slavery. The choice of electors for the electoral college was made by a general election, in which each state received electors equal to the number of its congressional and senatorial delegations combined. Generally speaking, states gave their electoral total to whichever candidate won the general election in its state, even if only by a plurality (a concept called winner-take-all). As has been seen several times, this form of election meant that a candidate could win the popular vote nationally and still lose the electoral college, or, because of third parties, win a narrow plurality in the popular vote, yet carry a large majority in the electoral college.
By 1860 two critical changes had occurred in this process. First, the two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans, held national conventions to nominate their candidates. Because of the absence of primaries (which are common today), the conventions truly did select the candidate, often brokering a winner from among several competing groups. After state legislatures ceased choosing the individual electors, the impetus of this system virtually guaranteed that presidential contests would be two-party affairs, since a vote for a third-party candidate as a protest was a wasted vote and, from the perspective of the protester, ensured that the least desirable of the candidates won. When several parties competed, as in 1856, the race still broke down into separate two-candidate races—Buchanan versus Frémont in the North, and Buchanan versus Fillmore in the South.
Second, Van Buren’s party structure downplayed, and even ignored, ideology and instead attempted to enforce party discipline through the spoils system. That worked as long as the party leaders selected the candidates, conducted most of the campaigning, and did everything except mark the ballot for the voters. After thirty years, however, party discipline had crumbled almost entirely because of ideology, specifically the parties’ different views of slavery. The Republicans, with their antislavery positions, took advantage of that and reveled in their sectional appeal. But the Democrats, given the smaller voting population in the South, still needed Northern votes to win. They could not afford to alienate either proslavery or free-soil advocates. In short, any proslavery nominee the Democrats put forward would not receive many (if any) Northern votes, but any Democratic free-soil candidate would be shunned in the South.
With this dynamic in mind, the Democrats met in April 1860 in Charleston, South Carolina. It was hot outside the meeting rooms, and hotter inside, given the friction of the pro-and antislavery delegates stuffed into the inadequately sized halls. Charleston, which would soon be ground zero for the insurrection, was no place for conciliators. And, sensibly, the delegates agreed to adjourn and meet six weeks later in Baltimore.
Stephen Douglas should have controlled the convention. He had a majority of the votes, but the party’s rules required a two-thirds majority to nominate. Southern delegates arrived in Baltimore with the intention of demanding that Congress pass a national slave code legitimizing slavery and overtly making Northerners partners in crime. Ominously, just before the convention opened, delegates from seven states announced that they would walk out if Douglas received the nomination. Northern Democrats needing a wake-up call to the intentions of the South had only to listen to the speech of William L. Yancey of Alabama, who berated Northerners for accepting the view that slavery was evil.1 On the surface, disagreements appeared to center on the territories and the protection of slavery there. Southerners wanted a clear statement that the federal government would protect property rights in slaves, whereas the Douglas wing wanted a loose interpretation allowing the courts and Congress authority over the territories. A vote on the majority report declaring a federal obligation to protect slavery failed, whereupon some Southern delegates, true to their word, walked out. After Douglas’s forces attempted to have new pro-Douglas delegations formed that would give him the nomination, other Southern delegations, from Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, also departed. Remaining delegates finally handed Douglas the nomination, leaving him with a hollow victory in the knowledge that the South would hold its own convention and find a candidate, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, to run against him, further diluting his vote.
Where did sensible, moderate Southerners go? Many of them gravitated to the comatose Whigs, who suddenly stirred. Seeing an opportunity to revive nationally as a middle way, the Whigs reorganized under the banner of the Union Party. But when it came to actually nominating a person, the choices were bleak, and the candidates universally old: Winfield Scott, seventy-four; Sam Houston, sixty-seven; and John J. Crittenden, seventy-four. The Constitutional Union Party finally nominated sixty-four-year-old John Bell, a Tennessee slaveholder who had voted against the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
The Republicans, beaming with optimism, met in Chicago at a hall called the Wigwam. They needed only to hold what Frémont had won in 1856, and gain Pennsylvania and one other Northern state from among Illinois, Indiana, and New Jersey. William H. Seward, former governor of New York and one of that state’s U.S. senators, was their front-runner. Already famous in antislavery circles for his fiery “higher law”
and “irrepressible conflict” speeches, Seward surprised the delegates with a Senate address calling for moderation and peaceful coexistence. Seward’s unexpected move toward the middle opened the door for Abraham Lincoln to stake out the more radical position.
Yet the Republicans retreated from their inflammatory language of 1856. There was no reference to the “twin relics of barbarism,” slavery and polygamy, which had characterized Frémont’s campaign in 1856. The delegates denounced the Harper’s Ferry raid, but the most frequently used word at the Republican convention, “solemn,” contrasted sharply with the Charleston convention’s repeated use of “crisis.”2 Despite his recent moderation, Seward still had the “irrepressible conflict” baggage tied around him, and doubts lingered as to whether he could carry any of the key states that Fremont had lost four years earlier. Lincoln, on the other hand, was from Illinois, although he went to the convention the darkest of dark horses. His name was not even listed in a booklet providing brief biographies of the major candidates for the nomination. He gained the party’s nod largely because of some brilliant backstage maneuvering by his managers and the growing realization by the delegates that he, not Seward, was likely to carry the battleground states.
When Abraham Lincoln emerged with the Republican nomination, he entered an unusual four-way race against Douglas (Northern Democrat), Bell (Constitutional Union) and Breckinridge (Southern Democrat). Of the four, only Lincoln stood squarely against slavery, and only Lincoln favored the tariff (which may have swung the election in Pennsylvania) and the Homestead Act (which certainly helped carry parts of the Midwest).3 As in 1856, the race broke down into sectional contests, pitting Lincoln against Douglas in the North, and Bell against Breckinridge in the South. Lincoln’s task was the most difficult of the four, in that he had to win ouright, lacking the necessary support in the House of Representatives.
The unusual alignments meant that “the United States was holding two elections simultaneously on November 6, 1860,” one between Lincoln and Douglas, and a second between Breckinridge and Bell. On election day, Douglas learned from the telegraph that he had been crushed in New York and Pennsylvania. More sobering was the editorial in the Atlanta Confederacy predicting Lincoln’s inauguration would result in the Potomac’s being “crimsoned in human gore,” sweeping “the last vestige of liberty” from the American continent.4 When the votes were counted, Lincoln had carried all the Northern states except New Jersey (where he split the electoral vote with Douglas) as well as Oregon and California, for a total of 160 electoral votes. Douglas, despite winning nearly 30 percent of the popular vote, took only Missouri and part of New Jersey; this was a stunning disappointment, even though he had known the Southern vote would abandon him. Breckinridge carried the Deep South and Maryland. Only Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky went to Bell, whose 39 electoral votes exceeded those of Douglas. The popular vote could be interpreted many ways. Lincoln received more than 1.86 million votes (almost 40 percent), followed by Douglas with 1.38 million. Lincoln did not receive a single recorded vote in ten slave states, but won every free state except New Jersey.
If one adds Lincoln’s and Douglas’s popular vote totals together, applying the South’s faulty logic that Douglas was a free-soiler, almost 69 percent voted against slavery. And even if one generously (and inaccurately) lumps together the votes for Bell and Breckinridge, the best case that the South could make was that it had the support of no more than 31 percent of the voters. The handwriting was on the wall: slavery in America was on the road to extinction. The key was that Lincoln did not need the South. When this realization dawned on Southerners, it was a shocking comeuppance, for since the founding of the nation, a Southern slaveholder had held the office of president for forty-nine out of seventy-two years, or better than two thirds of the time. Twenty-four of the thirty-six Speakers of the House and twenty-five of the thirty-six presidents pro tem of the Senate had been Southerners. Twenty of thirty-five Supreme Court justices had come from slave states, giving them a majority on the court at all times.5
After the election, Lincoln found his greatest ally in preserving the Union in his defeated foe, Stephen Douglas. The Illinois senator threw the full force of his statesmanship behind the cause of the Union. His, and Lincoln’s, efforts were for naught, since the South marched headlong toward secession. Southern states recognized that it would only be a matter of months until a “black Republican” would have control over patronage, customs officials in Southern states, and federal contracts. A black Republican attorney general would supervise federal marshals in Mississippi and Louisiana, while Republican postmasters would have authority over the mails that streamed into Alabama and Georgia—“black Republicans” with purposes “hostile to slavery,” the South Carolina secession convention noted.
The Last Uneasy Months of Union
Democrat president James Buchanan presided over a nation rapidly unraveling, leading him to welcome emergency measures that would avoid a war. Lincoln agreed to a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit interference with slavery in states where it existed. Congress now attempted to do in a month what it had been unable to do in more than forty years: find a compromise to the problem of slavery.
In mid-December, Kentuckian John J. Crittenden, a respected Senate leader, submitted an omnibus set of proposals, which were supported by the Committee of Thirteen—politicians who could have averted war had they so chosen, including Jefferson Davis, Seward, Douglas, and from the House a rising star, Charles Francis Adams.
Crittenden’s resolutions proposed four compromise measures. First, they would restore the Missouri Compromise line; second, prohibit the abolition of slaveholding on federal property in the South; third, establish compensation for owners of runaways; and last, repeal “personal liberty” laws in the North. More important, the compromise would insert the word “slavery” in the Constitution, and then repackage the guarantees with a constitutional guarantee that would make the provisions inviolate to future change.
By that time, the North held the decision for war in its hands. Given that the South was bent on violating the Constitution no matter what, Northerners glumly realized that only one of three options remained: war, compromise, or allowing the Deep South to leave. Since no compromise would satisfy the South, Northerners soberly assessed the benefits of allowing the slaveholding states to depart. The money markets already had plunged because of the turmoil, adding to the national anxiety. Northerners desperately wanted to avoid disunion, and had the Crittenden proposals been put to a national plebiscite, it is probable they would have passed, according to Horace Greeley, although the secessionists would have ignored them as well.6
But in Congress the measures died. Republicans never cast a single vote for the provisions and, more important, the South could not accede to any of the conditions. Now, truly, the issue was on the table: would slavery survive without the support of the people? Would a majority of Southerners long support the slaveholding elites if federal law opened up its mails and harbors? Answers came shortly, when a new government formed in the South.
The Confederate States of America
No sooner had the telegraphs stopped clattering with the 1860 electoral counts than Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Yancey, T. R. Cobb, and other Southern fire eaters led a movement to call the state governments of the Deep South into session. South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi met first, the legislators in Columbia, South Carolina, ablaze with secessionist rhetoric. American flags were ripped down, replaced by new South Carolina “secesh” flags of a red star on a white background. The Palmetto State’s incendiary voices hardly surpassed those in Alabama, where the secession proposal had early widespread support.
Virginian Edmund Ruffin, one of the hottest fire eaters, had outlined a League of United Southerners in 1858, and the commercial conventions in 1858 advanced the notion still further. On November 10, 1860, the South Carolina legislature announced a convention to occur a month later. If necessary, Sout
h Carolina was ready to act unilaterally. Florida, Alabama, and Georgia announced similar conventions. Every step of the way, South Carolina took the lead, issuing an “Address to the People of South Carolina” that called the Constitution of the United States a failed “experiment.” Rhett proposed a conference in Montgomery with other Southern states to form a government separate from the United States, and South Carolina officially seceded on December 20, 1860.
Stephen Douglas lambasted the movement as “an enormous conspiracy…formed by the leaders of the secession movement twelve months ago.” Fire eaters, he said, manipulated the election in order to “have caused a man to be elected by a sectional vote,” thereby proving that the Union was as divided as they claimed.7 However, evidence paints a more complex picture. In many of the Southern states, the vote on secession was quite close. In Mississippi, for example, the secessionists defeated the “cooperationists” by fewer than 5,000 votes.8 January’s secession conventions in other states produced even smaller prosecession margins. Secession carried in Georgia by 3,500 ballots and in Louisiana by 1,200. Nowhere in the South did the vote on secession approximate the numbers who had gone to the polls for the presidential election. Only 70 percent of the November total turned out in Alabama, 75 percent in Louisiana, and only 60 percent in Mississippi—making the prosecession vote even less of a mandate. Nevertheless, Douglas’s conspiracy interpretation did not account for the fact that the secession forces won the elections, no matter how narrowly and no matter how light the vote, underscoring the old adage that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing, or in the case of an election, stay home. More important, the winner-take-all system led to a unanimous agreement by the states of the lower South to send delegates to a February convention in Montgomery. As an Alabamian put it, “We are no longer one people. A paper parchment is all that holds us together, and the sooner that bond is severed the better it will be for both parties.”9
A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror Page 50