by Bruce Catton
A profound change was taking place in the world. Because of such unconsidered factors as the invention of the steam engine, the development of semi-automatic machinery, the growth of worldwide systems of cheap transportation and finance, and the opening of limitless markets that had never existed before, the existence of the industrial nation became possible. It was possible, that is, for a busy nation to sustain itself by selling, to a market beyond its own borders, goods made from raw materials which it did not produce. To a certain extent what was happening in America now—what was putting the 1860 election outside of political rationality-was simply a reflection of this fact.
By singular circumstance, the great cotton-spinning industry of England, paralleled somewhat by a similar industry in France and by an American counterpart to the east of the Connecticut River, was the first great industry to develop in this way. The British textile manufacturers were showing what could happen when centralized production relying on distant sources of supply had a world market to exploit, and this was something altogether new under the sun.3 The nations of the earth would no longer be entirely self-sustaining; in a backhanded and wholly misunderstood way, men all about the world would become members of one another, not because they wanted to, but because the world itself was changing. The black field hand in the Yazoo Delta and the rich planter who owned him, the mill hand in Manchester and the ultimate consumer in Berlin, Capetown and Baghdad were tied together now, made subtly interdependent in a way no one was ready to understand.
This had two immediate effects as far as American slavery was concerned; effects which went in precisely opposite directions.
Human slavery, obsolescent for generations, was now being made wholly obsolete, especially if it existed in a nation which itself was beginning to be industrialized. America had a more prodigious industrial potential just then than any other nation. It contained an almost limitless supply of industry’s raw materials, from cotton and lumber to coal and iron ore; it also offered the world’s richest market; and of all countries it was the one that was most certain to see the greatest development of the Industrial Revolution. This development was visibly taking place. Less and less were men producing in their own homes the things they needed for working and living. Homemade manufactures, as the census people called them—farm implements, textiles, bits of furniture and household equipment, home-cured meats, the innumerable products of plantation work shop and frontier farm—declined all through the decade of the 1850s, dropping from more than $27,000,000 in 1850 to slightly over $24,000,000 in 1860. This happened despite a huge growth in population and a sharp expansion in Southern plantations and the development of new frontiers in the West.4 A nation which was just beginning to exploit its own immense agricultural potential was at the same time expanding its factory system.
The day of the semi-independent handcraftsman was swiftly coming to a close. Iron and textile industries grew ever larger, an imperfect but constantly improving national railroad network was coming into being, manufactured goods were being finished for export as well as for domestic consumption, and the intricate mass-production processes of modern manufacturing were well in hand. (To make even as uncomplicated an instrument as a muzzle-loading Springfield rifle, more than 100 different automatic power tools were being used.)5 The new industrial state was coming into being at an accelerating rate, and in such a state chattel slavery could not live.
Most of this development was taking place in the Northern states. The South remained pastoral, producing raw materials for the outside world and relying on the outside world for an increasing portion of its finished goods. Yet the South was directly, inescapably involved in the wave of industrialization, as much responsible for it as the manufacturers of Manchester or the shipping magnates of New York and Liverpool. The vast cotton fields of the Gulf states were the base for the great world textile industry. The mills of England and France were built on them. The entire Southern area whose ways were being made more and more out of date by the economic revolution that was taking place was itself an integral factor in the growth and progress of that revolution.
This put the South in an extremely difficult position. It was contributing to the very process that was certain to transform its own society. Not without a prodigious wrench, unendurably expensive in dollars, almost unthinkable in its effect on social organization and on cherished habits of thought, could the South do away with the slave system on which its production of raw materials was based. Each upward surge in the industrial advance made slavery more and more central to the Southern economy—and, at the same time, increased the odds against slavery’s continued existence. The Southern planters who so jubilantly proclaimed that cotton was king would have had to admit, if pressed, that the king was a very hard master. The domain of King Cotton had to sink further and further into a colonial status.6 It was committed to industrial progress for other lands but not for itself. It was a complex society dependent on modern processes in manufacture, in transportation, and in finance, and yet these had to be controlled elsewhere because colonialism had no place for them. What the rest of the nation wanted very much—protection for industry and for industry’s markets, expansion of the free-farm system, internal improvements fostered by the central government, all of the things that would speed up the incomprehensible developments that were under way—these the South wanted not at all. But its opposition to these things had to take the form of opposition to any attack on slavery itself. Confronting the most complex problems, Southerners were compelled to discuss them in terms of their effect on the one peculiar institution.
Yet in its instinctive and violent defense of this institution the South was not so much defending an old culture, as it supposed itself to be doing, as fighting against the odds for a share in a new one. As cotton prices went on up and new western lands came into production, new men could enter the magical planter class and, entering it, could make money. The very symbol of a man’s chance to get on in life became the possibility that he could acquire new land and more slaves. When men like Yancey insisted that anything that menaced slavery menaced all the South, they were talking to the hard new men who were on the make as well as to the old aristocrats lounging at their ease on the storied verandas of Charleston.
The argument over slavery thus pointed in several directions at once, and the abolitionist who declared that slavery was morally wrong was not contributing much because he was ignoring all of the complexities that made the case so difficult. Yet the business might conceivably have been settled, by argument and negotiation among men of good will, if slavery had not included one element that could not be discussed rationally.
For the tragedy of the Negro, and of the America to which he had been compelled to come as a valuable but undesirable immigrant, was that his detention in servitude involved emotions deeper than the pit and blacker than midnight, convulsive stirrings in the nerve system that went beyond anything with which men of that day could cope intellectually. Beyond everything else, slavery was a race problem. It was the race problem, demanding attention at a time when Americans of the blood prided themselves on their inborn superiority to people who showed even minor differences in accent, in pigmentation, or in cultural background. No one was ready to face up to this problem.
As long as slavery existed, the problem did not have to be faced. Slavery did not solve the race problem, but it plowed around it. As a slave the Negro might be a strain on the conscience, but he was not really a bother, and those who thought he should not be a slave could spend their time happily denouncing his masters rather than reflecting on the limitless implications of the concept of the universal brotherhood of man. Enslaved, the Negro was under control and so was the race problem. But if he should be freed, en masse, all across America, he would have to be dealt with as a human being, and a nation whose declaration of independence began by asserting that all men were created equal would have to make up its mind whether those words were to be taken seriously.
This
was what almost nobody was prepared to do. Even many of the Northerners who were most anxious to free the Negro were ready to agree that he ought to be deported as soon as he lost his chains. Lincoln himself felt this way, and with others who felt as he did he had urged that some sort of resettlement scheme be devised. Let the Negro be planted in Central America, in Africa, or perhaps in the dim lands on the far side of the misty mountains of the moon—anywhere at all, so long as it was not in America. Even slavery’s enemies had some small part in keeping slavery alive.
The Southerner was perfectly clear on this point, and he would close ranks in defense of slavery instinctively, even though he might privately be of two minds about the institution’s morality or cash value. His determination to keep his a white man’s country did not necessarily imply personal feeling against the man who had to remain a slave. The master actually liked the slave better than did the man who owned no slaves. Frederick Law Olmsted, the Northerner whose journey through the slave states confirmed him in his abolitionist views, noted with amazement that “when the Negro is definitely a slave, it would seem that the alleged antipathy of the white race to associate with him is lost.”7 With the enormous gulf between owner and owned fixed by law and enforced by all the power of the state, there could be a sort of toleration, even a fondness, which did the slave little good but which at least served to gloss over the innate ugliness of the system itself.
That ugliness, so clearly visible to Northerners who did not have to rub elbows with the institution, was also visible in the South. Orations and sermons and pamphlets might extol slavery as a positive good, but there was an underlying uneasiness about it. An outsider like Olmsted might deplore the debasing effect of slavery on both races, but in his bitterest denunciations he said little more than was said by such a woman as Mary Boykin Chesnut, mistress of one of the greatest of South Carolina’s slave empires, who saw slavery from the most favorable of all vantage points and was heartsick over what she saw. Beneath the easy intimacy that seemed to make the master-slave relationship so harmonious, even so rewarding, she saw darkness and horrors. The intimacy was on the surface. Under it was a great estrangement, a total lack of communication, a latent hostility which would, and at times did, break through the varnished surface, with violence and murder.8 Slavery rested finally on the ability to use unmeasured force, and every slave and master knew it. What had happened in San Domingo might conceivably happen on the Yazoo Delta or in the South Carolina rice fields, and John Brown had been so frightening precisely because no one could be entirely certain that his monstrous dream was impossible of attainment. Beneath the easy solidity of Southern life there was a haunting realization that the ice was very thin.
So the leaders of the South—no blinder than the leaders of the North, but driven by a sharper compulsion—had made the most disastrous miscalculation in American political history. The fearfully explosive issues of the day would not be brought nearer a solution by this campaign; they would only be intensified. The one candidate who, as a friend of the South, might possibly have been elected had been rejected out of hand; the national political party which traditionally served Southern interests had been wrecked. There would be no great debate. Instead of hunting for a solution, the politicians had worked for a crisis. This they would presently get, and when they got it they would find it a catastrophe.
America just then was in a state of highly unstable equilibrium. Everything seemed to be turning into something different. A simple pastoral society was developing great cities, a network of mines and factories, powerful combinations of production and trade and finance. Smallness was giving way to bigness, loosely held political controls were growing stronger and more centralized, revolutionary readjustments in almost every aspect of national life were beginning to take place. The Industrial Revolution was under way and it could not be stopped; responsible men could do no more than appraise what was happening and work out some means to minimize the shock. But the responsible men had refused to do anything of the kind. No adjustments would be made. The collision would be head-on, and the shock would be cataclysmic. The campaign of 1860 was little more than an open invitation to revolution.
3: By Torchlight
It was like no campaign ever waged before—except possibly the log-cabin-and-hard-cider monstrosity of 1840. There was a great confusion of voices, but what men said did not seem to matter very much. North and South, the people were going to vote by their emotions, and the nervous unease that lay across all sections of the country drove men to sudden displays of wild enthusiasm, as if in the flare of torches and the excitement of moving parades some reassurance about the future might be found. The country moved blindly on toward an election that would bring none of its problems to a solution. Its political machinery was being loaded with more than it could carry, and after the votes were cast and counted, something was bound to break.
The Democrats were prisoners of their own division, and the initiative lay with the Republicans, who would exercise it with a peculiar mixture of canny forethought and energetic irresponsibility. The anticipation of victory would be controlling. The tide was going their way, and they would run no risk of reversing it; as far as they could, they would make the voter feel that he must move with it.
The sense of movement was quite literal, and it seemed to be contagious, drawing people with it, driving an insistent new pulse beat through the blood stream. Mid-summer twilight, in city after city all through the Middle West, saw the strangest of parades—smoky torches flaring in the thickening dark, thousands of men tramping out a disturbing rhythm as they moved down the streets to the sound of military bands, with their own impassioned shouting stirring the senses of the crowds that lined the sidewalks to watch. America was beginning to march, and the marching was more readily started than stopped; this campaign, whose outcome would leave the nation so aroused and desperate that it would create great armies and start them off for unimaginable goals, was ominously-hinting at what was to come.
The marching was done by the Wide-Awakes, faintly military organizations of young Republican enthusiasts whose formation was simply a revival of an old device for generating political enthusiasm. The business first came to view in the winter of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln went to New England to speak after his performance at New York’s Cooper Institute. In Hartford he was met by a formation of a few dozen of the faithful, togged out in oil-cloth capes and bearing torches, and they marched behind a band to escort him from his hotel to the place where he was to speak. The performance seemed effective, and after the Wigwam convention had made its nominations and the party leaders began to get the campaign under way, the idea was picked up and expanded.1
Before long there were many Wide-Awake clubs, parading at party rallies, parading sometimes simply for the sake of parading, putting thousands of men in line, conveying an increasing feeling that this new party carried immense popular support. A Chicago newspaper remarked that a stranger, seeing the Wide-Awakes for the first time, “is strongly impressed with the peculiar spectacle they present,” and it commended the precision of the rudimentary drill which the marchers had practiced. Lincoln was the Railsplitter—a fact of no apparent significance, but somehow a fine talking point—and so the marchers took to carrying long rails, each with a swinging lamp at the top, or an American flag bearing the names of the Republican nominees. “The uniform of the privates,” said the Chicago paper, “is a black enamelled circular cape, quite full and of good length, and a glazed military fatigue cap with a brass or silver eagle in front. Some companies are uniformed with blue, red, drab and gray silver caps and capes and relieve the monotony of the darker uniforms. The captains and non-commissioned officers are distinguished by an Inverness overcoat, with black cape and undress military caps … The measured tread, steady front and unbroken lines speak of strict attention to drill, and the effective manner in which the various bodies are managed by their officers shows conclusively that men of military experience control their movements.”2
This came to its brightest flowering on August 8, in a great ceremony at Springfield, Illinois, where there was to be a grand “ratification meeting” to endorse, underline, and celebrate the nomination of Lincoln. Into Springfield came the Wide-Awakes from, apparently, all parts of Illinois. The young men in oil-cloth capes got off trains by the scores and hundreds, came trundling in from near-by towns by wagons, or made the hike on foot, camping by the roadside at night, presenting the appearance (as the stoutly Republican Illinois State Journal remarked) of “a veritable political earthquake.” Springfield was all bannered and beflagged, and the State Journal reporter, confessing that “we have no adequate words to describe what our eyes beheld,” asserted that the country had never seen a larger or more magnificent political demonstration. With much effort and confusion, parade marshals importantly vocal, company commanders barking orders, teamsters cursing their mounted floats into line, the parade began to move by mid-morning. At the head of the procession a wagon carried an immense ball, with the placard: “The Republican ball is in motion.” (Another banner proclaimed, in handy doggerel: “The people mourn insulted laws, And curse Steve Douglas as the cause.”) It was followed by a score or more of Wide-Awake companies, each with its own band, all the bands playing at once to produce a marvelous discord and an unceasing thump of bass drums; and there were floats, delegations of true believers from neighboring towns and counties, each delegation riding in wagons. The men who had devised the floats had let themselves go; one float, harking back to the wild campaign of old Tippecanoe’s day, mounted a log cabin with a stout pioneer splitting rails in front of it; another, a huge dray hauled by twenty-three yoke of oxen, had a whole gang of railsplitters at work; on still another wagon a small steam engine worked a power loom which was visibly producing yards and yards of jeans cloth, which a tailor immediately fabricated into a pair of pants for the fortunate nominee, while a banner overhead proclaimed the party’s devotion to “Protection to Home Industry.” There were speakers’ stands all over town, and at times a dozen orators were in action simultaneously.