by Larry Tagg
Election Day was November 6. Early the next morning, telegraph keys clicked out the news of Lincoln’s victory. On November 8 this letter was posted from Pensacola, Florida:
To Abraham Lincoln
Yesterday you were hanged in effigy in our town.
a Citizen
Chapter 8
Lincoln’s Election
“Let this low fellow rule?”
Polling places had been swamped by a record turnout: more than 81% of eligible voters cast ballots. Abraham Lincoln won the electoral college going away, with a total of 180 (with 152 needed to win) to Breckinridge’s 72, Bell’s 39, and Douglas’ meager dozen. The numbers, however, were misleading. Lincoln’s popular support was far short of the mandate needed to lead the nation out of the looming crisis. He was no “people’s president.” Nationwide, Lincoln polled only 39.8% of the popular vote—not only less than any other elected President in American history, but so low that only three losers of two-party contests have ever done worse: Herbert Hoover in 1932, Barry Goldwater in 1964, and George McGovern in 1972. All of Lincoln’s electoral votes had come from the eighteen free states, and only 54% had voted for him even there. Not a single person voted for him in any of the ten Deep South states. In four Upper South states, his vote tally was a paltry 2%.
The 1860 election was an aberration. The electoral machine wrought by the Founding Fathers had been manipulated by the party system to produce an elected leader who embodied the Framers’ worst nightmare: an unknown, sectional candidate whom half the country saw as illegitimate; an interloper, a usurper.
* * *
Southern fears at the prospect of a Lincoln presidency leaped from the pages of every newspaper. The alarm that rang loudest went to the Southerners’ fear that their wealth would disappear. “The underground railroad will become an overground railroad,” cried Barnwell Rhett from the pages of the Charleston Mercury. There would be a massive flight of slaves from the border states northward, he and others predicted, and a corresponding sell-off of slaves southward, with the result that the value of every slave would drop. After all, the ultimate purpose of Lincoln’s party was to redefine property to exclude slaves, and slave property was the foundation of wealth in the South. One slave was worth a hundred, in some places a thousand, acres of land. The aggregate value of slaves in 1860 was more than the value of all the nation’s factories, railroads, and livestock put together, or roughly one-half of the country’s gross domestic product. Translated to a modern day sum, the figure would be a crushing five to six trillion dollars. Southern leaders were fairly foaming at the mouth with indignation. The stakes were indeed tremendous.
Property rights had always been at the top of the list of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. To have an idea of just how much was at stake, imagine a modern-day president whose election would cause one-half of the country’s homeowners to risk losing the entire value of their homes. Southerners feared the foundations of their freedom would be gnawed away by conspirators. “Secret conspiracy, and its attendant horrors, will hover over every portion of the South,” warned Rhett in the Mercury. “Slave property is the foundation of all property in the South. When security in this is shaken, all other property partakes of its instability. Banks, stocks, bonds, must be influenced. Timid men will sell out and leave the South. Confusion, distrust and pressure must reign.”
The Washington Constitution predicted that Lincoln would appoint spoilsmen in the South—postmasters, customs house officers, federal marshals, and other positions of authority in every city and town, port and arsenal—who would be constantly, quietly at work for abolition, sowing discontent among the slaves. Everywhere in the Cotton States the most ruinous predictions were printed and shouted, read and heard:
Lincoln would forever close the Western territories to slave labor. Slave populations, bottled up in the South, would mushroom and overwhelm their masters.
Lincoln would fill vacancy after vacancy on the Supreme Court with abolitionists, and it and the other federal courts would become venues for anti-slavery activism. The Dred Scott decision would be reversed.
Lincoln would wink at slave escapes and defiance of the Fugitive Slave Law. Once out of his shackles, no slave would ever be returned.
“John Brown raids” would multiply and slave revolts would succeed unchecked by a smiling Abraham Lincoln, who as Commander-in-Chief would refuse to use the army to fight them.
With the help of abolitionist postmasters in the South, anti-slavery propaganda would clog the mails, poisoning the minds of pliable citizens.
Congress would plunder the South by passing a high protective tariff wholly in the interests of the North.
The dream of the slave kingdom, the “Golden Circle,” would die forever.
A half million Wide Awakes—with their military drill, precision, and obedience to Lincoln, their leader—would execute his abolitionist projects.
And finally, Lincoln would free more than four million Southern slaves, give them federal jobs, and urge them to copulate with and marry white women. “If you are tame enough to submit,” preached one South Carolina Baptist, “abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” The heated reply, from one Alabamian: “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the Negro!! … Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism.”
Seventy years before, James Madison had argued in The Federalist papers that the nation was so large and its interests so diverse that no one interest could ever gain control of the government. That argument had now failed. Southerners, in the fall of 1860, girded themselves to resist a future thrust on them by a Constitution that they felt had broken down; one that, when tested, did not sufficiently protect minority rights; one under which a Republican administration, using its Northern majority as a hammer and government jobs as a wedge, could turn the Constitution topsy-turvy, centralize power in Washington, and destroy the principle of state sovereignty. Their civilization shattered, their property worthless, the Southern states would be reduced to mere provinces of a consolidated despotism. “I shudder to contemplate it!” cried an Alabamian. “What social monstrosities, what desolated fields, what civil broils, what robberies, rapes, and murders of the poorer whites by the emancipated blacks would then disfigure the whole fair face of this prosperous, smiling, and happy Southern land.” Atlanta’s Southern Confederacy predicted apocalypse:
The South will never permit Abraham Lincoln to be inaugurated President of the United States, this is a settled and a sealed fact. It is the determination of all parties in the South. Let the consequences be what they may, whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies, or whether the last vestige of liberty is swept from the face of the American continent, the South, the loyal South, the constitutional South, will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln.
This editor, and others, spoke for the chivalry of the South. A highbred Carolinian correspondent wrote to a friend: “Did you think the people of the South, the Lords Proprietors of the Land, would let this low fellow rule for them? No. His vulgar facetiousness may suit the race of clock makers and wooden nutmeg venders—even Wall Street brokers may accept him, since they do not protest—but never will he receive the homage of southern gentlemen… .” Southerners, she said, would never submit to rule by a president who “exhibits himself at railway depots, bandies jokes with the populace, kisses bold women from promiscuous crowds.”
While streets were thronged across the South with people talking of secession, Lincoln worked quietly in Springfield. There he received a basket of letters a day—the super-heated political atmosphere produced the most vile, venomous letters ever addressed to a president-elect, many from the Southern elite. They were “senseless fulminations, … disgraceful threats and indecent drawings,” according to Henry Villard, th
e New York Herald correspondent. Lincoln’s torture and execution were the most popular motifs—by stabbing, gunshot, and hanging. From South Carolina, addressed to Mrs. Lincoln, was a crude painting of him tarred and feathered with chains on his feet and a rope around his neck. Another letter contained a drawing of the Devil stabbing Lincoln with a three-pronged pitchfork, heaving him into the fires of Hell. Lincoln’s friend Henry Clay Whitney wrote that during a visit to Lincoln after the election,
… he showed me his recent contributions by mail, of the [Southern] chivalry: there were editorials, in pompous language, referring to him as the Illinois ape, a baboon, a satyr, a negro, a mulatto, a buffoon, a monster, an abortion, an idiot, etc. There were threats of hanging him, burning him, decapitating him, flogging him, etc. The most foul, disgusting and obscene language was used in the press which were the organs of the Southern elite par excellence, of the nation, as they thought. Nor had the limner’s art been neglected: in addition to several rude sketches of assassination, by various modes, a copy of Harper’s Weekly was among the collection, with a full length portrait of the President-elect; but some cheerful pro-slavery wag had added a gallows, a noose and a black-cap.
* * *
Reactions were not limited to the elite. Soon after the election the following letter arrived from Louisiana, deeply expressive within a limited range:
Old Abe Lincoln
God damn your god damned old Hellfired god damned soul to hell god damn you and goddam your god damned family’s god damned hellfired god damned soul to hell and god damnation god damn them and god damn your god damn friends to hell god damn their god damned souls to damnation god damn them and god damn their god damn families to eternal god damnation god damn souls to hell god damn them and God Almighty God damn Old Hamlin to to [sic] hell God damn his God damned soul all over everywhere double damn his God damned soul to hell
Now you God damned old Abolition son of a bitch God damn you I want you to send me God damn you about one dozen good offices Good God Almighty God damn your God damned soul and three or four pretty Gals God damn you
And by doing God damn you you
Will Oblige, Pete Muggins
Chapter 9
Lincoln in the Secession Winter
“He will totter into a dishonoured grave.”
At noon on November 7, the day Lincoln’s election was announced, the Charleston Mercury unfurled South Carolina’s palmetto flag over its office to wild cheering from the crowd below. Diarist Mary Chesnut noted gaily in her diary that Federal Judge Andrew Magrath had resigned, and that pictures of the judge “were suspended … across various streets in Charleston. The happy moment seized by the painter to depict him was while Magrath was in the act of dramatically tearing off his robes of office in rage and disgust at Lincoln’s election.” The next day, the Mercury announced, “The tea has been thrown overboard—the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.” Robert Barnwell Rhett knew that the revolutionary hammer must come down now, while the iron was hot, while the excitement favored the party of action. Movements for secession had swept these streets before in 1833 and 1850, and both times had come to nothing.
This time, though, fortune was with the secessionists. The South Carolina state legislature, heavy with wealthy slaveowners, was already convened—it was the only state whose legislators, not its voters, still chose the presidential electors. It was the last vestige of the Revolutionary aristocracy, and it was eager to forge a new chapter in history. Governor Gist, a wealthy planter and an ardent secessionist himself, had instructed the legislators, when they met on November 5 for the presidential vote, to remain in session in case Lincoln were elected, so that they might immediately consider their response. On Saturday, November 10, three days after Lincoln’s election was announced, the reconvened South Carolina legislature called for a secession convention in mid-December. That same day, the United States senators from South Carolina resigned from Congress.
On Monday, November 12, the New York financial market plunged.
On Tuesday, November 13, the South Carolina legislature voted to raise a volunteer army of ten thousand men.
On Sunday, November 18, Georgia voted a million dollars for arms and troops, and scheduled a convention for mid-January to discuss secession.
It was not quite two weeks after Lincoln’s election.
* * *
Lincoln himself was deplorably out of touch with the rage and dread that gave rise to the frenzy rippling from Charleston. The events that tumbled so quickly one after the other, from the curses at Lincoln’s election in November to the cannon-roar at Fort Sumter the next April, occurred largely because the new President-elect was so slow in fathoming the temper of the times, because he so underestimated the intensity of feeling and so totally misperceived the extent of the crisis in the Deep South. Lincoln himself was unaware that he suffered from this blindness. He spoke with a Kentucky twang, after all. Because of his Kentucky birth, he thought of himself as a Southerner, a delusion that thrived only because he lived and worked among Northerners. He thought he understood Southerners, but he didn’t. He had spent the 1850s in story-telling contests on the Illinois circuit, rather than broadening his views in the crucible of debate in Washington. Alone among the presidential candidates in 1860, Lincoln had stayed home in Springfield, Illinois, during the entire summer and fall campaign. From his two-story house on the Midwestern prairie, surrounded by well-wishers, friends, and gawkers, he had been completely insulated from the Southern people. He was a man who read little. Personal contacts were crucial to his understanding, and the last time he had spent any time among the people of the Cotton States was thirty years before, when in 1831, as a twenty-four-year-old, he had ridden on a flatboat to New Orleans. The last time he had spent any time in a slave-holding region had been during his stint in Washington, D.C., as a congressman a dozen years before. He had had no reason to spend time outside Illinois—his ambition, until very recently, was to be elected Senator from his state.
Lincoln had never taken the danger to the Union seriously. He had seen talk of war subside after the Compromise of 1850, after “Bleeding Kansas” in 1856, and after the John Brown raid in 1859. In 1856 Lincoln had said, “All this talk about the dissolution of the Union is humbug—nothing but folly.” At the close of the Douglas debates in 1858, he had assured his audience that “this controversy will soon be settled, and it will be done peaceably too. There will be no war, no violence.”
In the 1860 campaign, his success depended on Northern voters sharing his skepticism about the possibility of a war with the South. On August 15, he had written optimistically to a friend that he had received assurances that “in no probable event will there be any very formidable effort to break up the Union. The people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government.” On November 12—the same day on which South Carolina legislators called for a secession convention—the Chicago Tribune told readers that Mr. Lincoln “does not … believe that any of the States will … go off and organize a Confederacy.” His calm in the face of the developing crisis was so complete that observers thought that he was either unaware of the situation or paralyzed by indecision.
On November 20, the Republicans of Illinois celebrated their Grand Jubilee in Springfield, but already the fizz had gone off the champagne—the crowds were smaller than before election time. Lincoln, according to newspaperman Donn Piatt, who spoke to him there, was confident the Southern fire-eaters could be brought around by dangling government jobs in front of them:
[His] low estimate of humanity blinded him to the South. He could not understand that men would get up in their wrath and fight for an idea. He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North. He believed that when the leaders saw their efforts in that direction were unavailing, the tumult would subside. “They won’t give up the offices,” I remember he said, and added, “Were it believ
ed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.”
When Piatt repeated his warning that “the Southern people were in dead earnest, meant war,” Lincoln laughed. A few days later, Lincoln showed the same cheer in a conversation with a Philadelphia reporter, saying, “I think, from all I can learn, that things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future.”
What made Lincoln’s complacency so dangerous to the nation was that, just now, when the South was in ferment, when his ways were still unknown, and when so much depended on the wisdom of his policies, the masses both North and South were desperately in need of soothing statements from him, their future leader, to defuse the crisis. He could have spoken—but he did not. Because his countrymen were listening so hard for Lincoln’s voice, his silence thundered in their ears. Reporter Henry Villard was puzzled by Lincoln’s attitude in the days after the election. “Stubborn facts of the most fearful portent,” he wrote, were developing at an alarming rate. “He could not shut his eyes to their growing gravity. He could not block his mind to their serious logic. Every newspaper he opened was filled with clear indications of an impending national catastrophe. Every mail brought him written, and every hour verbal, entreaties to abandon his paralyzed silence, repress untimely feelings of delicacy, and pour the oil of conciliatory conservative assurances upon the turbulent waves of Southern excitement.”