by Bruce Catton
This left the opposition convention with nothing in particular to do; left it, actually, slightly at a loss. Whatever Yancey and Rhett may have hoped, the dominant idea with most of the delegates who had walked out on the original convention had been the expectation that Douglas would eventually withdraw (whether voluntarily, for the good of the party, or in frank recognition of defeat) and that an acceptable compromise candidate would then be named. It had been supposed, also, that the act of withdrawal and the organization of a separate convention would help to bring all of this to pass; then the cotton-state delegates would return to the convention and a reunited party could get on with the presidential campaign, with a candidate who would interpret whatever the platform happened to say in a manner acceptable to everybody.
Now none of this had happened, and those who had withdrawn were as nonplussed as the Douglas men themselves, who had thought that Douglas could be nominated promptly once the die-hards had left the hall. Nobody, apparently (unless it was Yancey himself), had calculated accurately. The secessionist convention could do no more now than agree to meet again, in Richmond on June 11, and then adjourn. The galleries were emptied; Charleston no longer had a convention.4
The delegates were not the only ones who failed to see what the split in the party would finally mean. Editorializing on the matter, the Republican New York Times, mused that a great step forward had been taken; political power now would pass to the North, which henceforth would be united just as the South had been united. Enthusiastically, the Times editorial writer continued: "The Democratic party is the last of the great national organizations to yield to the 'irrepressible conflict' which slavery and freedom have been waging for control of the Federal government. . . . The Northern section of the party has asserted its power, and with new and unlooked-for firmness has maintained its position. If it stands still in its present attitude, the sectional contest is over."5
In Richmond, the Dispatch professed the hope that "the apparent split is more superficial than radical," and that the Democratic party was not yet sectionalized. The real fight, the Dispatch felt, had been over a man, not over a platform: "After all, the public have not much faith in any platforms, except such as Gov. Wise constructed for John Brown and those other distinguished members of the Republican party who called a Convention and nominated a ticket in Virginia last fall."8
Actually, this man whose platform the Dispatch editorialist commended so warmly had seen the trouble coming long before he ever saw John Brown. Henry A. Wise, governor of Virginia from 1856 through 1860, had indeed seen to it that the John Brown uprising was stamped out (this with the help of Robert E. Lee and a handful of United States Marines) and that Brown and co-workers were properly hanged. But back in 1858 he had anticipated what was going to happen in Charleston in 1860, and he had not liked it very much. Tall, lean, lantern-jawed, and outspoken, Governor Wise was a strong pro-slavery man who still believed that the South should fight for its rights within the Union, and in 1858 he had taken a pessimistic look into the future. Writing then to a friend, he had warned that the South contained "an organized, active and dangerous faction" which hoped to disrupt the Union and wanted to create a United South rather than a united Nation. This faction, Wise wrote, wanted in 1860 the nomination of an extremist "for no other purpose than to have it defeated by a line of sections. They desire defeat for no other end than to make a pretext for the clamor of dissolution."7
The clamor of dissolution was going on now and it would become stronger, but the extremists were not really in control. Thoughtful Southerners of stature, like Jefferson Davis, did not want the party split made permanent. This could mean only a rise in Republican power and destruction of the South's traditional control of the Democratic party—along, perhaps, with blood and battle smoke and hundreds of thousands of deaths—and the clamor of dissolution was not attractive. There would be a breathing spell now, and much might happen. Conceivably, the Douglas people could win new Southern delegates who would approach Baltimore with less stiffness in the back; conceivably, on the other hand, Douglas himself might be driven off stage so that the party could reunite behind someone less troublesome. Neither possibility was in the least likely, but almost anything was possible; there would be much electioneering and maneuvering in the Congressional districts back home, especially in the South, and there would also be a great to-do in Congress. Possibly something could be done here that would destroy this Northwesterner and permit all good Democrats to get together? Whatever the odds, the thing would be tried.
The handiest instrument that was available was embodied in the Davis resolutions regarding a Southern-rights code, which had been introduced in the Senate in February, had been endorsed by the Democratic caucus there, and now awaited final disposition. These would be brought up now and driven through to formal endorsement by the Senate, and May 7—four days after the collapse at Charleston—was the day appointed for it.
The Senate galleries were full, and the people who filled them had something to look at. Into the Senate chamber came Senator Douglas—"a queer little man, canine head and duck legs"—who went stumping down to his chair amid moderate applause. He had been through the mill lately, this Senator, and he was not well. (He would die, within little more than a year, a passionate spirit exhausting an inadequate body.) He got to his seat, twisted himself down in it, and put his feet on his desk, his mouth closed in a thin, bitter line. Fidgety, he clasped his hands, lolled in his chair, rubbed his nose, and waited to see what was going to happen.
Next came the man whose long shadow had affected so much that happened at Charleston—Senator Seward, of New York. Seward was in a good mood. As things then stood, he was very likely to be the Republican nominee and the next President, and he knew it. He was also, underneath everything else, a ham actor, and he played up to the limelight that was on him today. He stalked about the Republican side of the Senate chamber, his coat tails adrift behind him, found his seat, took a prodigious pinch of snuff, flourished a yellow silk handkerchief across his beaklike nose, and talked with a studied lack of self-consciousness to Republican die-hards like Ohio's Senator Salmon P. Chase, who had all of the dignity and the ostentatious integrity which Seward seemed to lack. Seward cracked a joke, flourished the great handkerchief again, and all in all acted the part of a presidential candidate who is aware that things are going his way.
A third man, now: Jefferson Davis, tall and slim and haggard, coming into the chamber to the sound of muted rustlings in the galleries, going to his desk and depositing documents there with thin, bloodless hands, sitting down as if ineffably weary.8 The Vice-President called the Senate to order and recognized the Senator from Mississippi. Senator Davis rose to speak.
Davis had something to say. The revolution that hardly anyone really wanted was coming closer and he did not like the sound of it; as a reasonable man, he would urge his opponents to be reasonable enough to see things as he saw them. Through his words there came, not only the Southerners' unappeasable opposition to Douglas, but the defiant challenge of a whole section which, if it did not consciously want disunion, would endure continued union only on its own terms.
There had been agitation (Davis told the Senate) for a generation and more, aimed at Southern institutions. This agitation had recently reached the point of revolution and civil war. "It was only last fall that an open act of treason was committed by men who were sustained by arms and money raised by extensive combinations among the non-slaveholding states to carry treasonable war against the state of Virginia." It was time to go back to the spirit of the founding fathers, who had made a compact with one another, and to ask soberly what should be done to save the country. The people of the North were threatened by nobody. Their institutions were not under attack and their rights were not invaded, and by now they had a majority in the representative districts and in the electoral college. Yet they were aggressive, hostile to the institutions of the South. What should be done?
"The power of resistance,
" said Senator Davis, "consists, in no small degree, in meeting the enemy at the outer gate. I can speak for myself—having no right to speak for others —and do say that if I belonged to a party organized on the basis of making war on any section or interest in the United States, if I know myself, I would instantly quit it. We of the South have made no war upon the North. We have asked no discrimination in our favor. We claim but to have the Constitution fairly and equally administered."9
Firmly entrenched at the outer gate, Senator Davis would await the assault, which at the moment was verbal. He was fighting over words. If it could be said plainly, flatly, and irrevocably that the United States government must under no circumstances interfere with slavery, all might be well, but the drift of the times, unhappily, was against it. The desperate intransigence of Southern leaders in this spring of 1860 carried an anxiety that their cause might be doomed no matter what anyone said. The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simply because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset. Senator Davis would try, stalking into the shadows with infinite integrity and fixity of vision, and the immediate target of his wrath would go down too, entering the shadows a little ahead of him—a man who might, if fate had not touched him so hard, have found a way past the barriers.
Douglas listened while Davis spoke, and in due time he made reply, but for the moment the passion had gone out of him. He knew that the intended effect of the Davis resolutions was to state a policy for the Democracy which he could not accept. He was under fire from two directions, and there was very little that he could say. He had remarked, at Freeport, under prodding by Abraham Lincoln, that the Federal government could not possibly make slavery live in a place where the people did not want slavery, and he had done no more than state an obvious fact: the people can always nullify an unpopular law if they feel like it, and there is no power on earth that can stop them. But it was precisely this fact which the slave-state leaders could not accept, and as the man who had compelled them to gaze upon the abhorrent fact, Douglas was their enemy. In addition, he was involved in an old-fashioned political feud in which no one would give quarter or ask it. He had broken with the Buchanan administration on the question of the admission of Kansas as a state, and the administration would destroy him if it could. It could, and destroying him it would destroy much more; but his destruction was all important because if it could not be accomplished, Southern control of the party and the Federal government must come to an end.
In the winter of 1858 President Buchanan had urged Congress to admit Kansas as a state, the admission being based on a proposed constitution framed in a convention at the Kansas town of Lecompton. The Lecompton convention had been rigged, and the constitution itself was rigged; when the territorial voters were asked to pass on it, they had not been given a choice between slavery and no slavery. They could vote, if they chose, for the Lecompton constitution, which flatly stated the right of slave owners to continue to hold their slaves but forbade the importation of any more slaves, or they could vote for the same constitution with a proviso that the slave trade would be continued; could vote, in short, for limited slavery or for unlimited slavery, but could not vote for no slavery. Free-state people in Kansas had boycotted the plebiscite, considering the whole business an arrant fraud; but Buchanan, under vast pressure from Southern leaders and hoping as well that the troublesome Kansas problem could at last be solved if the Lecompton constitution were adopted, had put on the heat. Douglas had fought him, the Lecompton constitution had died like the fading leaves of autumn, a subsequent vote had shown that free-state residents of Kansas far outnumbered the slave-state people, and Kansas was still a territory and a living vexatious problem. It was here that Douglas had sinned. He was out of line not only on a matter of doctrine but also on a crucial question of workaday politics, and he was going to be punished for it.
Douglas had been extremely clear in his attitude on what ought to be done with the Lecompton constitution. In the Senate he had expressed himself unmistakably: "If Kansas wants a slave-state constitution she has a right to it; if she wants a free-state constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up. ... I care not how that vote may stand. ... I stand on the great principle of popular sovereignty, which declares the right of all people to be left perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. I will follow that principle wherever its logical consequences may take me, and I will endeavor to defend it against assault from all quarters."10
The right of the people to form and regulate their institutions will always be accepted by anyone who believes that the people will form and regulate things in his own particular way; but an American in that hour who declared that he did not care what the people did so long as they were allowed to do it was committing heresy against the zealots on both sides. Douglas now was detested equally, as a man devoid of principle, by the abolitionists and by the slave-state leaders.
The Davis resolutions passed the Senate on May 24. They were ineffective, except that their passage indicated that the coming Democratic meeting in Baltimore would almost certainly go the way of the one at Charleston. Nothing could be compromised, after all; in this spring of 1860 the country's most terrible problem was simply the fact that the will to compromise had gone out of so many people. Preparing for their meeting in Chicago, the Republicans gazed about joyously, with wild surmise; and little Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, considered the future and concluded that the nation was heading straight into unmeasured trouble.
Stephens was a wisp of a man, half an invalid, weighing no more than 100 pounds, shrill but movingly eloquent, a man who had been given one of the most haunting nicknames ever worn by an American politician: "The Little Pale Star from Georgia." A former Whig, he had served in Congress and had known Lincoln there; the two had been drawn to one another, possibly because each man in his innermost brooding took a deeply tragic view of human existence. Stephens had supported Virginia's R. M. T. Hunter for the nomination at Charleston, but when the split came he swung to Douglas. The strictest of strict constructionists on the states' rights issue, he nevertheless believed that Southerners could fight for their just dues in the Union better than out of it. As the Democratic split grew wider, Stephens remarked that the men who were working for secession were driven by envy, hate, jealousy, spite—"these made war in heaven, which made devils of angels, and the same passions will make devils of men. The secession movement was instigated by nothing but bad passions. Patriotism, in my opinion, had no more to do with it than love of God had with the other revolt."11
Not long after the deadlock at Charleston a friend asked Stephens: "What do you think of matters now?"
"Think of them?" repeated Stephens. "Why, that men will be cutting one another's throats in a little while. In less than twelve months we shall be in a war, and that the bloodiest in history."
The friend suggested that things might be patched up at Baltimore, but Stephens insisted there was no chance of it: "The party is split forever. The only hope was at Charleston."
"But why," asked the friend, "must we have civil war, even if the Republican candidate be elected?"
"Because," said Stephens, "there are not virtue and patriotism and sense enough left in the country to avoid it. Mark me, when I repeat that in less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war. What is to become of us then God only knows. The Union will certainly be disrupted; and what will make it so disastrous is the way in which it will be done."12
5. The Crowd at the Wigwam
THE DEMOCRATS had met and they would fruitlessly meet again, their division beyond healing; and meanwhile the Republicans were going to Chicago. They were going noisily, impatiently, like men who see the promised land not far ahead, and Editor Halstead observed that on the trains there was a good deal more drinking of
whisky than there had been on any of the trains going to Charleston.1 The great Northwest was about to have its day, and it was not going to be quiet or restrained about it.
Halfway between Charleston and Chicago, in point of time, there was an unexpected development which arrested the attention briefly. On May 9 a number of aging politicians and distinguished-citizen types, who liked the look of things little better than Alexander Stephens did, met in Baltimore and, calling themselves the Constitutional Union Convention, nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, as their candidate for President. Mr. Bell could not conceivably be elected. He stood for moderation and the middle road in a country that just now was not listening to moderates, and the professional political operators were not with him. But he would win a certain number of votes just the same; he might even divide the Northern vote to such an extent that the election finally would be thrown into the House of Representatives. In the horse-trading that would result from this, anything at all might happen.
John Bell was an old-time leader of the Tennessee Whigs. In his sixties, a former Congressman, former Secretary of War, and present member of the Senate, he was a slaveholder who deplored strife, detested the Lecompton constitution, and believed that reasonable men could yet find a way out of their difficulties. A few years earlier he had supported the Know-Nothings, and he was popular all along the border; the new Constitutional Union party was made up of remnants of the moribund Whig party and of the short-lived Know-Nothing party. Without especially meaning to, he stood now as an obstacle in the path of Senator Seward.