by Larry Tagg
Rhett and other slave state editors now decided Lincoln was more dangerous than Seward. Soon after Lincoln’s candidacy was announced, the Louisville Courier pointed out that his doctrines were the “most subtle and dangerous form of anti-slaveryism” because they were so ambiguous. Southern opinion makers now argued that Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” doctrine—the radical anti-slavery pronouncement that had cost him the nomination—had really been borrowed from Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech from the 1858 Douglas senate race. The Richmond Enquirer called Lincoln’s nomination a sign of “determined hostility” toward slavery by the Republicans, because they had chosen a man who, unlike Seward, was an “illiterate partisan … possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery,” who exceeded Seward in the “bitterness of his prejudice and the insanity of his fanaticism.” The New York Herald agreed, seeing Lincoln as the more dangerous man because he believed all of Seward’s “revolutionary and destructive theories,” but lacked Seward’s “practical and experienced statesmanship.”
Lincoln’s Southern enemies must not have been listening to the abolitionists, because the abolitionists didn’t trust him either. William Lloyd Garrison called the Republicans “a cowardly party” for being unwilling to attack slavery where it already existed. Abolitionists ran their own candidate—Gerritt Smith, on a budget of fifty dollars—complaining that Lincoln ignored “all the principles of humanity in the colored race, both slave and free.” Garrison’s friend, the abolitionist orator Wendell Phillips, tore at Lincoln. “Who is this huckster in politics?” he asked his abolitionist listeners in a speech two weeks after Lincoln’s nomination. “What is his recommendation? It is that nobody knows good or bad of him. His recommendation is, that out of the unknown things in his past life, journals may make for him what character they please.” A few weeks later, after doing a little digging into Mr. Lincoln’s past pronouncements, Phillips put a finer point on his attack, writing an article for the June issue of Garrison’s Liberator entitled: “Abraham Lincoln, The Slave-Hound of Illinois.”
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The derision of Abraham Lincoln after his nomination in 1860 was more widespread and more openly contemptuous than of any other candidate in the nation’s history. But Lincoln had the good fortune of running for president in the heyday of party politics, when people didn’t vote for the candidate, but for the party. He was only the latest and most spectacularly unqualified example of a type that had been pawns in the party game since Jackson: the weak candidate nominated by a party sure of victory. For Lincoln had arrived accompanied by incredible luck. The Railsplitter was the torchbearer for a party that in 1860 had been given advantages over its opponents such as no other party had ever been given before.
Chapter 7
The 1860 Presidential Campaign
“Yesterday you were hanged in effigy in our town.”
The Republican Party began like many other doomed splinter parties in the politically rambunctious Jacksonian period. The Antimasonic Party of 1832, the Liberty Party of 1844, the Free Soil Party of 1848 and 1852, and the American (or “Know Nothing”) Party of 1856 were all born in an era when all a party needed to run a candidate for president was a printing press and volunteers to hand out ballots. The birth of the Republican Party was no more auspicious than the earlier failures. It had been conceived in 1854 as a reaction against Douglas’ “Popular Sovereignty” doctrine, which had just been written into law as the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Republicans managed to win in only two minor states that year, Wisconsin and Michigan. “Nobody believes that the Republican movement can prove the basis of a permanent party,” observed the Albany Argus in 1855.
But in the next year dramatic events started a rush of voters toward this new party dedicated to breaking the political grip of the Slave Power:
Northerners grew increasingly outraged at the continuing violence and murder in “Bleeding Kansas.”
In May of 1856 Southern congressman Preston Brooks, a Democrat, beat abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner over the head thirty times with a gold-headed gutta percha cane on the Senate floor, leaving him bloody and unconscious beneath his desk.
In Central America that summer, Southern filibuster William Walker installed himself as president of Nicaragua, overthrew the government and legalized slavery. Despite the obvious illegality of his expedition, President Pierce, a Democrat, recognied Walker’s regime as the legitimate government of Nicaragua, with a view to statehood. Emboldened, Walker recruited men for the conquest of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Costa Rica.
Northerners expressed their reaction to the would-be Slave Kingdommakers in the presidential election of November 1856, where, on a budget of just $50,000, the Republicans captured thirty-three percent of the national vote. Anti-Democratic, anti-Southern, and anti-slavery voters in that year had joined the party in a stampede. By the end of 1856 Republicans controlled most northern governorships and legislatures and had elected a large number of northern Congressmen.
In the four years from then until Lincoln’s appearance, however, the news for the Republican Party only got better:
In March of 1857 the Southern-dominated Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. There was immediate resentment in the North, where state legislatures passed resolutions stating that the ruling was not binding. “Dred Scott” hardened Northerners’ resolve to reconstitute the court after the election of 1860.
During the Panic of 1857, after Southerners opposed efforts to stimulate the economy, many hard-hit Northern businessmen joined the Republicans. The Republican bosses cemented these new, wealthy voters into the party foundation by adding a protective tariff to their platform.
In Congress, Southerners successively defeated a Northern Pacific railroad route, a homestead act, and land grants for colleges. Republicans promptly added provisions for all these to their platform, and welcomed millions of new voters into their ranks.
A religious revival in 1857 and 1858 focused anti-liquor, anti-Catholic, and anti-slavery feeling, which was strong among rural Northern farmers. They, too, migrated to the Republican Party.
The corruption under President Buchanan provided a windfall of anti-Democratic sentiment. In the year before the 1860 election, a House investigating committee published an exposé of massive fraud among Buchanan officials, disclosing graft and bribery in government contracts, in the civil service, even payoffs for votes in Congress itself. When the House report was made public in the middle of the summer campaign of 1860, Republicans made huge political capital of the scandal and printed a hundred thousand copies as campaign literature, playing on traditional American fears of abuse of power in office as the gravest danger to liberty.
But the Republicans in the campaign of 1860 received a crowning gift— the suicide of the Democratic Party. The Democrats’ most popular candidate, Stephen Douglas of Illinois, had committed sins unpardonable to Barnwell Rhett, William L. Yancey, and other Southern fire-eaters. Douglas’ popular sovereignty doctrine, they said, was not aggressively pro-slavery enough (ironic, since Lincoln had criticized Douglas for just the opposite—being a tool of the Slave Power). Douglas’ enemies in the Buchanan administration joined Rhett, Yancey, and the out-and-out secessionists. Together, at the May 1860 Democratic Convention, the anti-Douglas delegates walked out of the hall, leaving Douglas without enough votes for the nomination. The remaining delegates rescheduled the convention for June in Baltimore in the hopes of a rapprochement. There, however, the enemies of Douglas again rose and left. This time the remaining delegates nominated Douglas, and the anti-Douglas bolters nominated their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The tradition-rich Democratic Party—the country’s only remaining national party—had thus split, leaving the infant Republican opposition, only in its second national election, guaranteed of a victory in the fall.
There was yet another party convention in May. In Baltimore, the conservat
ive Constitutional Union Party convened for the first time in the shadow of the crisis over the nation’s future, and named wealthy slaveholder John Bell of Tennessee its nominee. The party ignored the slavery issue and campaigned on the platform “the Constitution as it is, and the Union under it now and forever.” Alluding to the failed “Know Nothing” Party of the 1850s, the Republicans called Bell’s party the “Do Nothings.” The lackluster Constitutional Unionists would splinter the opposition to Lincoln still further.
As the campaign summer wore on, Southerners were forced to look the prospect of a “Black Republican” victory in the fall square in the face, and, coming in the wake of the John Brown raid the previous October, the mood grew murderous. There was dread of a bloody revolt by slaves waiting only for the signal to be given by Yankee incendiaries—“untiring fanatics,” “abolition fiends”—whom they feared had sneaked into their midst. Lurid tales came out of Texas of arson fires in a dozen towns, “kindled by the torches of abolitionists.” One newspaper announced that a patrol had found four guns, a pistol, and a dagger in the hands of slaves. Another reported that Negroes were collecting hundreds of bottles of strychnine to poison the townspeople. Though none of these stories were true, the terror swept across the South. In Georgia, thirty-six slaves were arrested and accused of planning to burn the town and annihilate the inhabitants. In an Alabama backwater, two whites and eight slaves were arrested, and one white man lynched. In Texas, a stranger—a Louisianan—was almost lynched when his appearance excited suspicion. A Mississippian wrote that within three weeks he had read of twenty-three abolitionist agents being lynched, and blamed “hellish” Northern organizations for their plots. Another Southern observer commented, “the minds of the people are aroused to a pitch of excitement probably unparalleled in the history of our country.”
As mob violence boiled, Northerners in the South were ducked in ponds, marched to train depots at bayonet point, and pushed onto northbound cars. With the South in the throes of a paranoid hysteria, no one was foolhardy enough to contemplate working for the Republicans. In that day there was no such thing as a secret ballot. Voters picked up paper ballots at the polling place in temporary sheds emblazoned with party posters, then dropped the ballots, clearly marked with the voter’s choice, into clear glass bowls. Both the ballots and the bowls had to be supplied by party volunteers. Since there were no Republican volunteers in the South, there was no way to collect Republican votes or protect Republican voters. Lincoln could look for no votes there.
That the Republicans were not allowed to contest the election in the South meant that Lincoln did not know the South and the South did not know Lincoln. The Republicans, however, could afford to be cavalier about their lack of votes in the South. They didn’t need them. The election of 1856 showed them that if they held the Northern states they had won and added the Northern states they had lost—Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania—they could gain a majority of electoral votes without getting one vote south of the Mason-Dixon line.
* * *
But the North did not know Lincoln either. With the election his to lose, he remained silent, whiling away the months of the campaign puttering in an office in the Illinois state capitol loaned by the governor. He received visitors affably, but made no speeches nor statements to the press, nor clarified his policies. What followed was what always happened in Jacksonian America when one party was sure of victory: Republicans mounted a safe campaign devoid of substance, a campaign of hoopla that would satisfy the public craving for pageantry and spectacle, a campaign that would leave Northern voters feeling bouncy but that bore little on the crisis in the South, and a campaign that would leave the public knowing almost nothing about the candidate himself.
The Republicans were united, organized, energetic, and well-funded. The campaign they mounted was a throwback to the victorious 1840 “log cabin and hard cider” campaign that had elected the little-regarded William Henry Harrison, heavy on barbecues and rallies, parades and banners, songs and mottoes. The most spectacular feature of the campaign was the “Wide Awakes,” a quasi-military Republican organization that counted hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic young men in its colorful ranks. They paraded down streets across the North in disciplined zigzag formations, roaring cadenced cheers to the boom and crash of big brass bands while holding aloft oil-burning torches. They wore distinctive glazed caps and capes that protected them from the burning oil that rained down from the torches over their heads. (A pun on their garb was the source of their name: the fabric on their glazed gear had no nap—hence, the Wide Awakes.) Particularly memorable was one grand night march down Broadway in New York City that drew into its jaunty lines ninety thousand uniformed, shouting marchers, each a source of light, making the boulevard a river of fire. Rockets and roman candles shot starshells from behind each file, and, wrote George Templeton Strong, “the procession moved along under a galaxy of fire balls—white, red, and green. I have never seen so beautiful a spectacle on any political turnout.” The cheering from the ecstatic crowds that jammed the streets was answered by the chants of the Wide Awakes and the fortissimo of the bands. The whole scene was climaxed by tens of thousands of voices singing “Ain’t You Glad You Joined the Republicans?” to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare.”
With Lincoln holed up and shut-mouthed in his office in Springfield, Northern voters who flocked to the picnics, parades, and rallies listened to Republican orators who had been recruited to fan out across the North on the party’s behalf. In their speeches, the moral crusade against slavery was muted. Voters were counted on to vote their pocketbooks. “I know the country is not Anti-Slavery,” observed Horace Greeley. “It will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening. An Anti-Slavery Man per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River and Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery.” So Republicans played instead on bread-and-butter themes, customizing the tune to local interests. The homestead issue—free land—was the subject of speeches in the Northwest, where the German and Scandinavian freesoilers saw it as necessary to their future prosperity. Support for the tariff was promised in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New England, which had been hard-hit by the recent economic panic. The Pacific Railroad was stressed in the Mississippi Valley, where businessmen were taut with concern about where the railhead would be. Internal improvements were pledged everywhere.
In the glare of the hoopla, in the din of the bands, the songs, and the blandishments to the voters in the estimated 50,000 Republican campaign speeches, Lincoln was obscured. To the voters he was little more than a caricature, a sketch—the Railsplitter. During the entire campaign from May to November he made not one public utterance, spoke only to well-wishers who dropped by his borrowed room, and wrote only privately to friends. Americans barely knew what he looked like. The first mass-produced print of Lincoln was made from a picture taken by Matthew Brady during his visit to New York for the Cooper Union speech in February 1860, and voters saw this same image—lithographed, engraved, printed, and reprinted—in every campaign pamphlet and illustrated magazine published in the East. (Looking at the likeness and shaking his head, one friend told him, “It’s a good thing women can’t vote.”)
Americans had no way to get a sense of the man—whether he was conservative or radical, whether he was a man of no backbone like Franklin Pierce or of steely resolve like Andrew Jackson, whether he would be conciliatory or hostile toward the South—indeed, whether he was even capable of administering the government of a nation in crisis or whether those around him would have to direct it for him.
* * *
The uncertainty about Lincoln’s intentions had immediate tragic consequences in the South. As the fall chill deepened and Election Day approached, the slave states were in a blaze. Muskets were being issued and military units organized in Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia. Several Southern states were arranging to buy arms in Europe. No one dared speak publicly except to condemn the perf
idy of the North. The highest public officials in the land, the Southerners in the Buchanan cabinet, openly threatened a revolutionary breakup of the Union. Buchanan’s pro-Southern mouthpiece, the Washington Constitution, actually encouraged secession by predicting dire consequences of a Lincoln victory: “Let Lincoln be President, and how many months’ purchase would the Union be worth?” The Knights of the Golden Circle, a society formed to bring about a Southern slave kingdom that would encircle the Caribbean and include Mexico, Cuba, Central America, and the northern tier of South American states, became avowedly secessionist, falling in behind the extremists Rhett and Yancey. The ranks of the secessionists included the editors of several Southern newspapers, who now freely exulted in the prophesy of a new age of prosperity for the South after Lincoln was elected and the South broke away from the Union.