The year 1859 was a year of desperate measures on the part of individuals North and South. These individuals did not have the official approval of the communities they represented, but they expressed in action the most advanced ideas that were taking form in the two opposing camps. A few bold men in the South attempted to revive the slave trade from Africa, bringing back upon the high seas the horrors of the Middle Passage that had been outlawed for fifty years. One bold man in the North declared a private war on the slaveholders and took up arms against them in an insurrectionary attempt to seize the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry in order to arm the slaves.
Sporadic attempts to run slaves from Africa to the United States had been made for years, but the severity of the law and the vigilance of the navy had discouraged the trade from becoming general. Slave prices were on the rise in the South during the fifties; prime field hands had risen to the all-time high of $1500 to $2000 a head. Slaves were scarce and more slaves were needed. The very system was one that rapidly exhausted the soil and the men who worked it, consequently a fresh supply of both was continually needed. The demand for new soil gave rise to the territorial expansion program of the South; the demand for slaves gave rise to attempts to smuggle them into the country and to a movement to make the trade legitimate by repealing slave trade laws. At the Southern Convention held at Vicksburg in May 1859, a vote of 40 to 19 was cast in favor of a resolution recommending the repeal of all laws restricting the African slave trade. Slave ships were actually fitted out and put into service. The profits in the forbidden trade were enormous, since Negroes could be purchased on the African coast for $50 a head and sold in America for $500, even under the surreptitious conditions of sale made necessary by their illegal entry. Unscrupulous promoters—Northern as well as Southern—were willing to risk their capital for such tremendous possibilities of increase; ship’s officers and sailors were ready to make a voyage that paid them many times more than any regular trading venture could. Death was the penalty for engaging in the slave trade12—the old piracy laws had been extended to cover it—but ships were bought, and men willing to sail them could be hired.
Douglas, who was emphatically opposed to reviving the odious trade and who was in a position to be kept informed of its progress, once said that 15,000 Negroes had been brought into the country in 1859—a figure greater than that of any year during the period when the traffic had still been legal. Douglas also said that if the Democrats made the re-opening of the slave trade a principle in their party platform he would decline their nomination for the Presidency in the 1860 campaign.
The revival of the African slave trade was kept relatively quiet—so quiet in fact that its importance is sometimes overlooked in historical discussions of the events leading to the Civil War. Nevertheless, it was a move on the part of the South almost as desperate as the single-handed gesture made by John Brown at Harper’s Ferry.
BLOOD AND IRON AT HARPER’S FERRY
John Brown’s attempt was not so foolhardly as many have liked to believe. Fugitive slaves from the South had for years been taking refuge in Canada; they were a picked lot of men who had had the courage to break away from their masters and make the long difficult journey north. Brown was in touch with some of them and he had planned for them to come to Virginia to assist him as soon as he had captured the arsenal. He expected, too, that the slaves in the South would rise in one great insurrectionary movement to overthrow their masters. Slave revolts had been numerous in the South—more numerous than written history records, for they were put down with an iron hand and all news of them was suppressed whenever possible in order to prevent a local insurrection from spreading by example. The South was in deadly fear of an uprising of the slaves. It was something that haunted the mind of every slaveholder, and every plantation possessed its own private arsenal to be used in case the long-dreaded revolt ever broke out.
John Brown entered Harper’s Ferry during the night of October 16, 1859. With a band of only eighteen men he seized the town and stopped the trains and telegraphs. He succeeded in holding the place for one day; then a force of United States marines under command of Colonel Robert E. Lee put down the miniature rebellion, killing ten of Brown’s followers and capturing the fierce old leader.
News of the insurrection brought terror to Northern and Southern people alike. The long breeding conflict had broken out into open warfare, and the spot picked for the initial battle was near enough to both Northern and Southern centers of population to make them feel that the battle had begun on their own doorsteps. This was no distant rumbling of the drum in far-off Kansas. It was a thunderbolt let loose in the heart of the East. Harper’s Ferry was only fifty-three miles from Washington and only one hundred and sixty miles from Richmond. It was a small place, but it was a railroad junction with which thousands of people were familiar, for they had seen its wild gorges as their trains had passed through, bound for the South, the North or the West.
The interrogation of Brown and the testimony brought out during his trial caused a tremendous sensation. Although John Brown resolutely refused to reveal anything that might implicate the abolitionists who had backed him, some of these men took fright and revealed their own identity by fleeing to Canada and Europe in order to get beyond reach of the American law.
Brown himself was brought to trial immediately, being taken into the courtroom while he was still on a cot recovering from his wounds. His bearing during the trial was so fearless, so completely that of a man who felt that what he had done was right and who was perfectly willing to stand the consequences, that he won admiration even from those who were bent on sending him to his death. On December 2, 1859, he was led to the gallows, and there, surrounded by troops of soldiers, he was hanged. Among the uniformed men in a volunteer regiment from Richmond was a man who was to take an active part in another historic death. He was a young actor, intensely pro-Southern in his sympathies. His name was John Wilkes Booth.
John Brown hardened public opinion in both the North and the South. The South naturally poured out its wrath on his head; the North, although divided in opinion, nevertheless began to realize that the raid carried out by the stern old rebel was part of a cause that most Northerners considered a worthy one. He had fought for freedom, and his words at the trial had made it clear that he had fought without thought of personal danger or self-interest of any kind. The example that he had set was not forgotten. His deed had made a great impression on the Northern people, and his name became their rallying cry when they finally marched to carry on the battle he had begun.
His action, however, was a source of embarrassment to the still young Republican party. The Democrats attempted to make political capital out of his deed by placing the responsibility for it on the Republicans. Some of the milder abolitionists had flocked to the Republican party, since it was the only major party that came near to representing their beliefs. The Republicans tried to shake off their unwanted friends; they used every means at their disposal to disavow any connection with abolitionism or John Brown. Their leader in Illinois went out of his way in the most important speech that he had yet made, to emphasize his belief that Brown was an irresponsible fanatic, a madman driven to murder by his madness.
During the autumn of 1859, Lincoln received an invitation to lecture at Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn. When Lincoln arrived in New York, he found that the place where the meeting was to be held had been changed. He was to speak at Cooper Union instead, where a large and important audience could be expected to attend. He spent the next two days feverishly polishing his words to make them worthy of the occasion, and then, on the evening of February 27, he made the great speech that was to publicize his name in the East and go a long way toward making him President.
In this address, which was mainly an answer to Douglas’s charge that the men who had written the Constitution of the United States had forbidden the Federal Government to exercise any control over slavery in the territories, Lincoln took the o
pportunity to reply to the Democratic accusation of Republican complicity in the John Brown raid.
You charge that we stir up insurrections among your slaves. We deny it; and what is your proof? Harper’s Ferry! John Brown!! John Brown was no Republican; and you have failed to implicate a single Republican in his Harper’s Ferry enterprise.…
Some of you admit that no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harper’s Ferry affair, but still insist that our doctrines and declarations necessarily lead to such results. We do not believe it.…
John Brown’s effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection. It was an attempt by white men to get up a revolt among slaves, in which the slaves refused to participate.… That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts, related in history, at the assassination of kings and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution. Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon, and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry, were, in their philosophy, precisely the same.
Yet, although Lincoln denounced John Brown, he condemned without equivocation the dangerous policy adopted by the South in its fiercely conducted campaign for the defense of slavery; he referred openly to the often-repeated assertion of Southerners that they would secede from the Union if the “sectional” Republican party elected a President; and, in a bold and uncompromising conclusion he appealed to the Republicans to stand firm in the face of increasing Southern aggression.
Even though much provoked, let us do nothing through passion and ill temper. Even though the Southern people will not so much as listen to us, let us calmly consider their demands, and yield to them if, in our deliberate view of our duty, we possibly can. Judging by all they say and do, and by the subject and nature of their controversy with us, let us determine, if we can, what will satisfy them.
Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.
The question recurs: What will satisfy them? Simply this: we must not only let them alone, but we must somehow convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task.… What will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’s new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our free-State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.…
Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the national Territories, and to overrun us here in these free states? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored—contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong: vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man; such as a policy of “don’t care” on a question about which all true men do care; such as Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance; such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said and undo what Washington did.
Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the government, nor of dungeons to ourselves. Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it.
“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us to the end dare to do our duty as we understand it”—strange words for a man whose whole policy hitherto had been that of “groping for some middle ground”! Circumstances were transforming men and policies; the whole course of history now takes on a greatly accelerated pace as the nation, drawn up into two irreconcilably hostile camps, moves toward the final event that was to plunge it into civil war.
This event was the election of 1860, an election that had long been anticipated with dread as the signal that was to summon the slaveholders to armed revolt if they saw the votes of the people go against them. The issues involved in this election were not simply party matters—the growing cleavage between North and South had become so great that the election cut across party lines; the South was not able to dominate even its own party, the Democratic party that had hitherto been its willing tool.
The split in the Democratic party started by Douglas flared wide open at the very beginning of the campaign, and the division immediately took on a sectional nature. The sectionalism the Democrats had been charging against the Republicans now came home to roost in their own convention. At Charleston, South Carolina, where the Democratic National Convention first convened on April 23, 1860, the delegates separated over sectional differences. The Southern wing split with the Northern Democrats who were standing for Douglas, and withdrew from the convention to meet later at Richmond and then at Baltimore, where they finally nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky on June 28. On June 18, Douglas was nominated by the Northern Democrats. The chance of electing a Democratic President was made still slimmer by the entry of a third party into the field, the Constitutional Unionists, descendants of the Know-Nothings and the Whigs, who nominated John Bell of Tennessee as their candidate.
Under such circumstances it became obvious that the man nominated by the Republicans would stand an excellent chance of being elected. The Republicans, in the election of 1856, had won 1,341,000 votes in the North alone, against the 1,838,000 votes obtained by the Democrats from the whole country. Without the Southern Democrats, Douglas could hardly hope to be elected; without the Northern Democrats, the South could not muster enough votes to elect Breckinridge.
THE REPUBLICANS SEEK A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE
All this, however, is much clearer to us looking back at it than it was to the sorely puzzled Republican politicians then. The Republican National Convention was to be held at Chicago on May 16—late enough in the year for the party leaders to be able to take the Democrats’ difficulties into account, but not late enough for them to know exactly what would happen, since the final choices of the two wings of the Democratic party had not been made by the time that the Republican Convention was held.
In the spring of 1860 it would doubtless have been easy to get takers for a hundred-to-one bet against the chances of the relatively obscure Lincoln receiving the nomination for the Presidency. A political friend, Jesse W. Fell of Bloomington, Illinois, had urged Lincoln to prepare a brief autobiographical sketch (on December 20, 1859) which indicated that his hat was in the ring, but very few people knew it. Late in 1859, a book entitled Presidential Possibilities had appeared; it listed and described twenty-one potential candidates—Lincoln’s name was not among them. The men who stood out in the public mind as really likely possibilities were William H. Seward, who was the most eminent leader of the Republican party; Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, who had been U. S. Senator and Governor of Ohio and who was a noted anti-slavery advocate; Edward Bates of Miss
ouri, distinguished lawyer and also a prominent anti-slavery man; Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, a machine-politician who could swing the numerous electoral votes of his keystone state. Beyond these were a host of other possible candidates, none of whom was outstanding, but nearly all of whom seemed to have a better chance for gaining the nomination than Lincoln did. Among them were John C. Frémont, who had been the Republican nominee for 1856; Benjamin F. Wade of Ohio; John McLean of the United States Supreme Court; and Senator William L. Dayton of New Jersey, who had nosed Lincoln off the ticket for the Vice-Presidential candidacy in 1856.
Yet for one reason or another all these men were passed over. There was something wrong with each of them in the eyes of the astute Republican campaign managers. Seward’s very eminence stood in his way; he had made enemies—among them was Horace Greeley, editor of the influential New York Tribune; Seward’s declarations against slavery were more radical than Lincoln’s and they had been better publicized than anything that Lincoln had ever spoken on the subject; Seward was a man who had tasted power and he would be sure to want to have his own way as President. Chase suffered from all the drawbacks that Seward did, and he was less well known. Bates was a favorite son, established only in Missouri, which was a small state with many pro-slavery voters. Cameron would never pass muster before the critical eyes of Puritan New England.
Lincoln was a dark horse; he had made some name for himself but not too much of a name; he had stood firmly for the principles of the Republican party but he had had no dealings with abolitionists. The times were perilous—someone who would take orders was needed in the White House so the Republican leaders could tell him what to do. After much bickering, Lincoln was agreed upon as a compromise choice whose nomination should offend no one in the party. He was not looked upon as an absolute nonentity. He was merely considered “safe,” with all the meaning that that term implies in American politics.
The Life and Writings of Abraham Lincoln Page 11