by Bruce Catton
Yancey addressed himself directly to the Douglas Democrats of the North and Northwest, speaking bluntly, making a positive advantage out of the fact that the cotton-state Democrats were in a minority. Reviewing the tale of the Democracy's defeats in Northern states on the slavery issue, he asserted that these came because Northern Democrats tried to adjust themselves to anti-slavery sentiments. That could not be done, and there was but one ground for the Democracy to take—that slavery was right. Neither he himself nor the Alabama delegation for which he spoke wanted a break-up of the Union, but someone had to make it clear to the Democrats of the North that the Union would be dissolved unless constitutional principles triumphed at the polls. (Constitutional principles, as no one needed to explain, were clearly set forth in the majority paragraph dealing with slavery in the territories.)
Like it or not, no delegate could misunderstand Yancey's meaning. He was a pleasant, smiling man, who spoke easily, with ingratiating good humor; and he talked today with a quiet dignity, as if he saw in the near future dark perils which no man who did not stand with him could detect. He dropped his fatal, quietly eloquent sentences into the hushed convention hall with deadly precision.
"Ours is the property invaded," he said. "Ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake—the honor of children, the honor of families, the lives, perhaps, of all—all of which rests upon what your course may ultimately make a great heaving volcano of passion and crime, if you are enabled to consummate your designs. Bear with us then, if we stand sternly here upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong."9
Perhaps the split had already come, and all that could be done now was 'to formalize it; perhaps the talk about dormant volcanoes and the destruction of families must sound, to the majority—must perhaps really be, to an extent —nothing more than the familiar business of a politician prophesying doom unless his party or his piece of the party can prevail. Yancey was displaying the baleful ghost of John Brown, arguing that slave uprisings and the massacre of innocent families were apt to follow any concession to the moderates in this convention; and among those who considered this rather far-fetched was George A. Pugh, of Ohio, a Douglas Democrat who promptly rose to make reply. With heavy irony, Pugh remarked that an honest Southerner had at last spoken and that the truth about the South's demands was finally on the record. Like Yancey, Pugh reviewed the party's troubles in the Northern states—the real root of the difficulty, he said, was that the Northern Democrats had worn themselves out defending Southern interests—and he declared that the Northern Democrats like himself were now being ordered to hide their faces and eat dirt.
"Gentlemen of the South," said Pugh, "you mistake us— you mistake us—we will not do it."
Whereupon there was vast uproar. All over the floor, delegates were on their feet, waving their arms, yelling furiously for recognition—"screaming like panthers," Editor Halstead wrote, "and gesticulating like monkeys." Caleb Cushing, supposedly presiding over this scene, was helpless, one problem being that in the encompassing racket he could not make out a single word anyone was saying. In desperation, at last, he singled out a delegate from Missouri, who had leaped upon a table and was bellowing something incomprehensible, shaking his head passionately, waving his long red hair. This man, Cushing discerned, was moving adjournment: he recognized him, put the question, and after several minutes of general shouting and surging about on the floor, Cushing announced that the convention had adjourned until morning, and brought down his gavel with hard finality. Out into the cold rain went the delegates, each man earnestly questioning the man nearest him as if no one were quite sure what had been done this day.10
Morning of Saturday, April 28, brought no improvement. The weather remained cold and wet, and no man had yet found a fresh light. By a one-vote margin, the convention voted to recommit the various resolutions to the platform committee, and in the afternoon slightly modified reports were brought back. There was a deal of parliamentary sparring, as the Douglas men tried to force adoption of their platform (feeling that they had the votes, if the question could be brought before the house) while their opponents tried to stave off a vote, making endless speeches, bringing in motions to adjourn, motions to lay the whole business on the table, motions involving personal privilege; and at last, not long before midnight, the convention adjourned with nothing accomplished. Next day was Sunday; only technically a day of rest, for although the convention would not reconvene until Monday, the politicking in hotel lobbies, ill-ventilated bedrooms, and party committee rooms went on without a break. It was the day when everybody promised everything. The Buchanan administration was exerting all the power of patronage to keep anti-Douglas delegates in line, and the Douglas men had offered (by one estimate) approximately ten times as many offices as they would be able to give if Douglas should become President. The crowd became thinner, as men who had come just to see the show went back home, and the pressure on hotel lobbies and on barrooms was diminished. One result of this, not foreseen by the Douglas people, was that the convention galleries would increasingly be crowded by Charlestonians, who would stiffen wavering Southern delegates by cheering every anti-Douglas development. In the headquarters of the Ohio and Kentucky delegations it was noted that the supply of whisky was exhausted. Some of the party faithful, gloomily considering that the party had already taken all the steps necessary for a complete wreck, went about muttering that the next President would be named at Chicago—would, in other words, be a Republican.11
Monday morning came, April 30, the day of the big showdown, the delegates entering the hall "with a curious mixture of despair of accomplishing anything and hope that something will turn up." The weather was pleasant, after a weekend of blustery rain and wind, and the crowd was charged with nervous expectancy. Despite the general exodus of out-of-town visitors the galleries were more densely packed than ever. With a minimum of delay the convention permanently shelved the Ben Butler report; then, grappling with the crucial problem, it voted by 165 to 138 to adopt the minority resolution in place of the majority report. The Douglas platform, in other words, was formally accepted and the Northwest had won its great victory. It remained to be seen what the victory would be worth.
It quickly became evident that it might not be worth very much. Having substituted the minority report for that of the majority, the convention settled down to vote on the separate planks. First of all, the 1856 Cincinnati platform was reaffirmed. Then stocky Richardson, the Douglas floor manager, moved for harmony by offering to forget all about the controversial plank referring the ins and outs of popular sovereignty to the Supreme Court. This appeased no one; and as the crowd in the galleries sat tensely silent, the cotton-state delegations, one after another, announced their withdrawal. It was done quietly. A writer for the Richmond Dispatch recalled that "there was no swagger, no bluster. There were no threats, no denunciations. The language employed by the representatives of these seven independent sovereignties was as dignified as it was feeling, and as courteous as it was either. As one followed another in quick succession, one could see the entire crowd quiver as under a heavy blow. Every man seemed to look anxiously at his neighbor as if inquiring what is going to happen next. Down many a manly cheek did I see flow tears of heartfelt sorrow."12
Sorrow there may have been; among the Douglas contingent there was unquestionably dismay. They would have welcomed a small eruption, as a thing that would clear the air, rally Democratic sentiment in the North, and make it easier to get a two-thirds majority in the fight for nomination; but it began to be clear that they had got a very large eruption indeed, which could easily make the nomination either unattainable or worthless, and a haunting sense that the split in the party could be prelude to a split in the Union itself began to torment the men from the Northwest. Delegate R. T. Merrick, of Illinois, arose to inquire, plaintively:
"I find, sir, star after star madly shooting from the great Democratic galaxy. Why is it, and what is to come of it? Does it presage that, hereafter, star after star will shoot from the galaxy of the Republic, and the American Union become a fragment, and a parcel of sectional republics?"
Consoling answer there was none. Delegate Charles Russell, of Virginia, announced that if a break-up was indeed at hand, Virginia would go with the rest of the South. Virginia had seen John Brown and his violence, the appeal for a servile uprising, gunfire and death in a peaceful market town; Virginia today stood amid her sister states "in garments red with the blood of her children slain in the first outbreak of the 'irrepressible conflict.' " Gaining eloquence as he continued, Delegate Russell looked mournfully to the uncertain future: "Not when her children fell at midnight beneath the weapon of the assassin was her heart penetrated with so profound a grief as that which will wring it when she is obliged to choose between a separate destiny with the South and her common destiny with the entire Republic." Amid all of this, Editor Halstead looked at Yancey and found him "smiling as a bridegroom." Things were going as Yancey wanted them to go.
The day ended so. The Douglas people had their platform, plus a split convention and the prospect that there would presently be two national Democratic parties.
That night there was a Fourth of July air in Charleston. The moon came out, to silver the live oaks and their Spanish moss and to gleam from the fronts of the fine old houses, and the Southern delegates who had left the convention met in St. Andrews' Hall. A band was playing, and in the street people were cheering for Yancey. Yancey appeared, declaring that the delegates who had seceded would now form the "constitutional Democratic convention," with the others making do as well as they could as a rump convention. The South, he cried, must stand as a unit; perhaps, even now, "the pen of the historian was nibbed to write the story of a new revolution."13
4. "The Party Is Split Forever"
WHAT WAS left of the Democratic convention did its best to pick up the pieces. It had lost fifty delegates, along with all chance for unity and most of its prospects for victory in the presidential election, and three days were enough to show that it could not do much with what remained. Officially, it had adopted a platform and could now proceed to the nomination of a candidate, and the Douglas leaders approached this task with some hope; since the most violent of the Senator's enemies had seceded, surely it would be simple for him to rally two thirds of those who remained? This, it developed, would not be enough. Caleb Cushing, presiding, ruled that whoever was nominated must get two thirds, not of the delegates in the hall, but of the total originally accredited to the convention, and this ruling stuck. The Southern delegates who yet remained would walk out if the convention overruled the chairman on this point, and they got a good deal of support from anti-Douglas elements in a number of Northern delegations, including that of New York. To nominate, then, the convention must give some candidate more than 200 votes, and it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be possible.
The session of May 1 began hopefully enough, with Cushing half invisible behind a huge bouquet of red roses and with a good clergyman offering a pious prayer for harmony. There were speeches. Twenty-six of Georgia's delegates had left the premises, and one Georgian who remained, Delegate Solomon Cohen, of Savannah, addressed the convention with impassioned pathos: "I will stay here until the last feather be placed upon the back of the camel—I will stay until crushed and broken in spirit, humiliated by feeling and knowing that I have no longer a voice in the counsels of the Democracy of the Union—feeling that the Southern states are as a mere cipher in your estimation—that all her rights are trampled underfoot; and I say here that I shall then be found shoulder to shoulder with him who is foremost in this contest." This, although vague, was considered somehow ominous. A South Carolina delegate, B. F. Perry—oddly enough, an early benefactor and teacher of Yancey—arose to identify himself as "an old-fashioned Union Democrat," announcing: "I love the South, and it is because I love her, and would guard her against evils which no one can foresee or foretell, that I am a Union man and a follower of Washington's faith and creed ... I came here not to sow the seeds of dissension in our Democratic ranks but to do all that I could to harmonize the discordant materials of our party."1
The discordant materials were beyond ready fusion. After the unsuccessful attempt to upset Cushing's ruling about what a two-thirds majority really meant, the convention got down to the business of placing names in nomination. Nominating speeches were brief, and late in the afternoon, when it was time for the first roll call, the convention had six names before it—Douglas, of Illinois; James Guthrie, of Kentucky; Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York; R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia; Joe Lane, of Oregon; and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. When Douglas's name was presented, the Northwestern men raised a brief cheer, but it seemed to lack body, and the gallery maintained a cold silence.
The first ballot told the story. There were 253 votes in the hall, and to win, someone would need to get 202 of them, which obviously was out of the question. Douglas got 145½ on the first ballot, and even his most hopeful followers realized that he would never rise much above this level. The Northwest was sullen and silent, and when Richardson stood up to announce the vote of Illinois, he looked and acted like a man attending a funeral—which, in a way, was the case. Eleven more ballots were taken before the day's session ended, and Douglas could pick up only 5 additional votes, for a top strength of 150½. As the delegates left the hall, Halstead felt that wounds had been inflicted that could not be healed. "I hear it stated here a hundred times a day, by the most orthodox Democrats and rampant Southerners, 'William H. Seward will be the next President of the United States,'" he wrote. "And I have heard this remark several times from South Carolinians: 'I'll be damned if I don't believe Seward will make a good president.' The fact is, there is a large class to whom the idea of Douglas is absolutely more offensive than Seward."
If the Southerners were growing more set in their anger against Douglas, the wrath of the Northwesterners was rising, also. It was a wrath against the party and against the Southerners who had exercised a veto power in the party, and Halstead heard Northern delegates mutter that they would "go home and join the black Republicans." He added: "I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men here. . . . Their exasperation and bitterness toward the South that has insisted upon such a gross repudiation of the only ground upon which they could stand in the North, can hardly be described. . . . They say they do not care a d..n where the South goes, or what becomes of her."2
To make things even more vexing, this was no longer the only convention in town. On May 1, while the convention was dolefully haggling over rules, placing names in nomination and balloting so fruitlessly, the die-hard Southerners who had seceded from it held an organization meeting in Military Hall and denominated themselves the real Democratic convention; the majority group which they had deserted was, as Yancey contemptuously insisted, the "rump convention." The new convention appointed a platform committee and selected as its chairman a Buchanan administration stalwart, Senator James Bayard, of Delaware, and on Tuesday morning, May 2, when the original convention resumed its attempt to make a nomination, the opposition drew itself together in the Charleston Theater and got down to business. The ladies of Charleston had concluded that this was the real attraction, and they filled the galleries, leaving those at Institute Hall half empty; and on the stage, calling the convention to order, was courtly Senator Bayard—romantic in his name and ancestry, brightly dressed, wearing long brown curls parted in the middle. Behind him was a stage backdrop which, without political significance, depicted the Palace of the Borgias.
The platform committee reported promptly, recommending readoption of the by now shopworn Cincinnati platform of 1856, with a postscript which defined that platform's meaning in unmistakable terms. The postscript explained that neither Congress nor a terr
itorial legislature could impair any citizen's rights to his property in a territory, and stipulated that it was the Federal government's duty to protect such rights with all its power. Only when a territory became a state could slavery therein be outlawed. This platform was unanimously adopted and the delegates then sat back to see what the "rump convention" was going to do—the idea being that the new convention would either nominate its own candidate or, in case Douglas should be beaten by someone acceptable to the cotton states, endorse the nomination made at Institute Hall.8
At Institute Hall nobody was getting anywhere. A brass band that came down with the Massachusetts delegation got into the gallery and played several national airs, after which Delegate Flournoy, of Arkansas, proposed three cheers for the Union, which were given; but when the balloting was resumed, it went just about as it had gone the day before. On the twenty-third ballot, Douglas got a total of 152½, a majority of the original convention strength of 303, if that made any difference—but he could rise no higher, and after fifty-seven ballots, in which Ben Butler voted at least fifty times for Jefferson Davis, the day's session was ended with Douglas one vote weaker than he had been at his ineffective peak. And on the morning of Wednesday, May 3, throwing in their hands, the delegates agreed to vote no more but to adjourn and to reconvene in Baltimore in June. Caleb Cushing spoke a brief swan song, assuring everyone that he had tried hard "in the midst of circumstances always arduous and in some respects of peculiar embarrassment" to behave as an impartial chairman should. Then, announcing that the convention would meet again on June 18, he brought down his gavel and the delegates scurried back to their hotels to pack up and look for the quickest way out of town.