by Bruce Catton
So there were men in this convention who would fight Douglas without paying any heed to the cost of the fight, and they had the advantage which any completely determined minority has in a meeting where the majority would like to have harmony. They were ready to go to extremes. They would accept harmony if they could get it on their own terms, but otherwise they were perfectly ready to accept discord. Northern delegates who were coming in by train began to meet these men before they even reached Charleston.
Murat Halstead, the perceptive editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, was one who discovered the omens, and he warned his Ohio readers that a strong wind was blowing. From Atlanta he sent an account of a conversation in a day coach. A Georgia delegate, convention-bound, had announced loudly that Senator Douglas just would not do. If nominated, Douglas would probably get the delegate’s vote, but it would be cast with great reluctance; the delegate knew of but one other man in his district who would vote for this man from Illinois. Another Georgian, present as an observer—he had been beaten in his own race for delegate—disagreed: Douglas men were as thick as blackberries in his part of the state, and if Douglas got the nomination he would carry Georgia by 20,000—“there will be such a war whoop as never was heard in the land.” When someone protested that Douglas’s famous doctrine of popular sovereignty was no better than rank abolitionism, this supporter said that he himself “went the whole of it,” and he was backed by a delegate from Kentucky. But the delegate from Georgia said that the nominee must be someone who could unite the party, not a man who was obnoxious to a whole section: not, to be specific, Stephen A. Douglas, who had recently stood side by side with the Black Republicans themselves.
The Democracy unquestionably needed unity, but the unity might be hard to get. Halstead’s train paused one evening at a station stop in Georgia to let the passengers get out for dinner, and at table two Mississippians broke out a bottle of whisky, passed it around, and offered a toast “to the health of the nominee.” Did this, asked a man from Indiana (no doubt bristling a little), include Senator Douglas? Mississippi replied that it did not: Douglas was simply not in the running, and because he could not possibly be the nominee an offer to toast the nominee’s health could not apply to him. Indiana thought this unfair, and said that if Douglas won the nomination he ought to have the support of a united party: delegates could not in honor go to the convention and then bolt the nominee if they did not like him. As an afterthought, the Northerner asked why Indiana did not have as much right to criticize Mississippi’s Senator Jefferson Davis as Mississippi had to criticize Senator Douglas. One of the Mississippians retorted that the reason was simple: “Davis was a patriot and Douglas was a traitor, d—d little better than Seward—that was the difference.” Indiana protested that Douglas and the Northern Democrats had been fighting the South’s battles, but this helped not at all. The South, said a Mississippian, could fight her own battles and protect her own rights, and if she could not do this in the Union, she would do it outside of the Union. Halstead wrote that other delegates at the table shook their heads and muttered that the party was in for stormy times.8
So ran the talk on the trains. Reaching Charleston, many of the Douglas men tended to be quieter; the Little Giant had his enemies here, and there was no sense in stirring them up with loose talk. As convention time drew nearer, it seemed that the Douglas people were making headway. Three nights before the convention would open, the correspondent of the Richmond Dispatch was writing that “Douglas is hourly becoming less objectionable,” and was explaining that personal antagonisms were subsiding and that the success of the party was the main object. The friends of Douglas, he said, were quietly meeting Southern delegates as they arrived and were trying to convince them that nothing but the nomination of Douglas would counter-balance the anticipated nomination of Seward at Chicago. As a clincher, there was the statement: Douglas was the only Democrat who could possibly win the fall election.9
It was a good argument, with men who thought victory in November important. There were 303 electoral votes, and a man who could get 152 of them would be the next President. If the party held its unity, the Democratic nominee should get 120 votes in the South and along the border; as of April 23 it seemed highly probable that Douglas could pick up the thirty-two additional votes in the North or in the Northwest no matter what the Republicans might do. No other Democrat could conceivably do as well. It was an open-and-shut case.
But the argument was worse than useless with men who wanted something else a great deal more than they wanted a Democratic victory in the fall, and although such men were in a small minority, they were working in Charleston with vast energy and singleness of purpose. These men, the all-out fire-eating secessionists, believed that they could get what they wanted if the party lost the election. Beyond the wrangling over platform and candidate they could see a completely new nation, an independent South embodying the most soaring dreams of the cotton empire, zealously preserving the peculiar institution and the complex values that rested on it. A beating in November might bring this to pass. Most Southerners were not yet ready to embrace secession, much as the business had been talked about in the past ten years, but the profound shock of a Black Republican victory would almost certainly make them ready. Such men as Yancey, who wanted to see this shock applied, refused even to talk about concessions or party unity.
Yet until the convention actually opened, none of this would come to a head and it was possible to accept this meeting in Charleston as just another political convention. On the surface that was what it looked like. Hotel lobbies had the aspect that hotel lobbies always have during political conventions. There were bands, striking up appropriate tunes at odd moments, and there were impromptu orators to address anyone who would listen. Most of the 4000 visitors, it was reported, hardly went to bed at all, which was not surprising, since the bedrooms were so crowded and the nights were so noisy, and there was a good deal of drunken rowdyism—most of it, as a Northerner admitted, contributed by “roughs from New York,” whose delegation, led by smooth Fernando Wood, seemed prepared to be all things to all men, with special reference to the men who could offer the best deal. Everywhere there were the perennial political types, moving with dignity about the lobbies, lounging against veranda pillars and railings, being vocal and visible. There were men who seemed to have spent so much time in the public eye that merely being looked at had put its mark on them; there were cold-eyed operators who looked like professional gamblers, and there were stout, perspiring men in glossy black, wearing fine linen and stovepipe hats, carrying gold-headed canes, eternally busy with portentous whispered conversations with other men who looked exactly like them.10
Among those who could be seen in the lobbies were certain Northerners of whom the South would see much more, in the years just ahead. There was John Logan, of Illinois, with his thick, black hair and his piercing black eyes, his back against a veranda pillar, meditatively chewing tobacco; and there was another man from Illinois, John A. McClernand, with his bristly beard and his hawk-beaked face, watching the crowd and toying absently with his watch chain. Not least of the group was Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts, bald-headed and cock-eyed, “with the little brown mustache under his sharp crooked nose”—Ben Butler, who could never forget the demands made by his soaring ambition, or the concessions that might have to be made to it, an unpredictable man who was known now as a firm friend of the South. Two years earlier Jefferson Davis had made a Fourth of July speech in the North, expressing love for the Union and deriding the chance that secessionists could do any lasting harm; Butler had liked the speech, and he was here as a fervent supporter of the Senator from Mississippi.
… Editor Halstead believed more and more strongly that the current was beginning to run the wrong way, as far as Senator Douglas’s hopes were concerned. The Douglas men were confident, insisting that “the universal world is for the Little Giant,” but there seemed to be no iron in them: Halstead felt that these Northwesterners were �
��not so stiff in their backs nor so strong in the faith” as the hard-core Southerners who wanted Douglas beaten. An Alabama delegate, doubtless strongly infected by Yancey-ism, explained the case to him. There was going to be a showdown; once and for all the South would find out whether Northern Democrats would stand squarely with the South on true Constitutional principles. Both platform and candidate would have to be explicit; “there must be no Douglas dodges—no double constructions—no janus-faced lying resolutions—no double-tongued and doubly damned trifling with the people.” Of all Northern Democrats, said the Alabaman, Douglas was the most obnoxious to Southerners. His nomination would be an insult which the South would repay by defeating him in the election, no matter what it might cost.
The truth of the matter was that the American political system, which can survive almost any storm because of its admirable flexibility, was in 1860 breaking down because it had been allowed to become rigid. Senator Douglas’s offense was that he had relied on the flexibility after it had ceased to exist. Finding America facing a sectional issue too hot to handle, he had proposed a subtle adjustment. Accept the obvious (he had said, in effect), admit that the people can always nullify an unpopular law by refusing to permit it to be enforced, and then give the territories, in respect to slavery, any law you choose; in the end the people will have things as they want them, in the meantime you will have the legislation you want, and, all in all, much argument and bitter feeling will be avoided.… It was the politician’s recourse, one of the things that make democracy work; avert a crisis long enough and it often becomes manageable. The trouble now was that men increasingly wanted to meet the crisis, to have a final showdown no matter what it might cost.11
The situation had grown intolerable. What the delegates did at Charleston would be done in a hot twilight where nothing could be seen clearly and in which action of any sort might seem better than a continuation of the unendurable present. They acted under the shadow of things done earlier, at other places—in Congress, in Kansas, at Harper’s Ferry—and they were ceasing to be free agents. A storm was rising, and there were leaders who proposed to meet it with stiff backs.
2: “The Impending Crisis”
If the Democratic convention was meeting in an irrational atmosphere, the reason is clear. During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices—made the debaters shout more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians in 1860 could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation.
Four months before the Charleston convention opened, the House of Representatives at Washington had tried to elect a speaker —a routine task, done every two years since the birth of the Republic, done ordinarily without jarring the foundations of the nation. Its furious inability to do this until it had exhausted itself by long weeks of argument, all legislative activities at a standstill, members coming armed to the sessions of an assembly intended for reasonable debate, was a clear sign that the democratic process had all but collapsed. It was both a symptom of trouble and a cause of more trouble. The fact that the row over the speakership seemed at last to center on the question of whether certain members had or had not read and admired a comparatively little-known book was the crowning touch of irrationality.
The first session of the Thirty-sixth Congress met in Washington on December 5, 1859, three days after John Brown had been hanged at Charlestown, Virginia—a fact not without influence on the proceedings of the House. The new Congress contained, on the House side, 109 Republicans and 101 Democrats, 13 of the Democrats being “anti-Lecompton” men, Northerners who had followed Senator Douglas in revolt against the Buchanan administration. There were also twenty-six members of the dying American party, the Know-Nothings, and, vestigial survival of a vanished era, one lone Whig. No party had a majority.1 Even under the best of conditions there was bound to be a good deal of jockeying and in-fighting before a speaker could be named.
Conditions in the fall of 1859 were not of the best and they rapidly got a good deal worse. The first ballot showed the Democrats lining up behind Thomas S. Bocock of Virginia, with the Republicans backing John Sherman, of Ohio. Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, received forty-three votes and then withdrew, more than a score of ballots were listed as “scattering,” and no one was elected. But before a second ballot could be cast, Representative J. B. Clark, of Missouri, came down into the well of the House with a resolution for members to consider … “resolved, that the doctrine and sentiments of a certain book, called ‘The Impending Crisis of the South—How to Meet It,’ purporting to have been written by one Hinton Helper, are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of the country, and that no member of this House who has endorsed or recommended it or the Compend from it is fit to be Speaker of this House.”2
That did it. The book was everything Mr. Clark said it was: in fact, it was a poor book written by a man notably lacking in balance. But from the time the Missouri Congressman dropped his resolution into the hopper, the House of Representatives became completely impotent. It could not elect a speaker, it could not get itself organized, it could not even vote the pay which its members needed so badly, until it had worn itself out in hot discussion of a book which, taken by itself, was hardly even of minor importance. The row to which it gave birth settled nothing whatever. It simply registered (in terms that would be ratified in blood, a short time thereafter) the appalling height the American political fever had reached. The irrational had become wholly logical.
Hinton Rowan Helper was one more of those baffling people whose sole function, historically, seems to be to make other men angry. He was a rarity, not to say a freak: a born-and-bred Southerner who had become a violent lone-wolf abolitionist, and who either advocated or at least appeared to be advocating a Southern uprising against the planter aristocracy. He believed that many things were wrong with the South, he had assembled a great many figures (some of them badly jumbled) to prove his point, and he argued that all of these defects were the result of the slave system. Of the slaveholders themselves, he suggested—“as a befitting confession of their crimes and misdemeanors, and as a reasonable expiation for the countless evils which they have inflicted on society”—that they do penance for a season in sackcloth, after the Biblical manner, and then go and hang themselves. Curiously enough, it was no sympathy for the Negro that led Helper into this frame of mind: few Americans have ever put down in print a more passionate hymn to race hatred, and if Helper hated slavery, one reason obviously was that he began by hating the slave. Before disappearing from the scene, Helper was to indulge in much cloudy rhetoric in which the extermination of the black race would appear as a positive good, and in which Negroes would be likened to “hyenas, jackals, wolves, skunks, rats, snakes, scorpions, spiders,” and “other noxious creatures.”3
Clearly enough, Helper was an incendiary with lighted matches, the inflammatory nature of his work lying in the fact that, as a Southerner, he fought slavery because it was bad for white Southerners rather than for the slaves themselves. But his The Impending Crisis, published in 1857, had not been widely read, and in the South—the only place where it could be expected to do any harm-it had hardly been read at all. Not until spring of 1859 did the book begin to emerge as a national irritant. Then, taking thought for the coming election, certain Republican leaders concluded that this book could be
made the basis for a fine campaign document. Francis P. Blair, head man of the famous Blair family, an old-line Democrat who had drifted into the new party’s ranks, would prepare a pamphlet—a digest, or “compend,” of the original—and money would be raised so that 100,000 copies of the pamphlet might be placed where they would do the most good.
Concerning which the best that can be said is that it looked like a good idea at the time. Helper had spoken what sounded like good Republican doctrine. He had complained, as a Southerner, that “we have no foreign trade, no princely merchants, nor respectable artists,” and that “we contribute nothing to the literature, polite arts and inventions of the age”—the cause of all of which, of course, was slavery. He had found the Southerner dependent on the Northern manufacturer from birth to death; as a child, the Southerner was “swaddled in Northern muslin,” and at the far end of life, he was “borne to the grave in a Northern carriage, entombed with a Northern spade and memorized with a Northern slab.” All of this, he asserted, had brought Southerners “under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations,” and there was only one remedy for it: “The first and most sacred duty of every Southerner who has the honor and the interest of his country at heart is to declare himself an unqualified and uncompromising abolitionist.”4