by Bruce Catton
It was worst in the South. There Douglas was a symbol. Lincoln might be the black-visaged enemy who threatened to upset everything the South lived by—namely, the notion that a chosen people might live by the unremitting toil of an inferior race fated to hew wood and draw water—but Douglas had come to look like the apostate, the turncoat, the former friend who appeared on the other side when the pinch came. Douglas was the more menacing because he bore no ill-will. In his position, in this summer of 1860, the slavery system could read its own sentence of ultimate death. To get away from him, the men who had Southern sentiment in their control had determined that the choice would be between the Black Republicans and disunion.1
As the hot weeks passed, following the great conventions, the choice began to be clearer. A political maneuver designed to force concessions was running into the knowledge that the forced concessions would not be made; and the alternative was to break away altogether, to try against impossible odds to erect a self-contained nation that would base itself on an outworn foundation. In sheer self-defense the people who had chosen this gambit were asking whether what they were going to do would mean war and destruction. Since no other candidate was readily available, they would ask it most directly of Senator Douglas himself.
For Douglas, of all the candidates, was the one who was trying to make a real campaign. The swing around the circle was new at that time. A man nominated for the presidency usually stayed at home, letting what he was speak for him, reflecting quietly that a politician’s first duty was to get elected, and although his supporters might go to almost any log-cabin-and-hard-cider excess, the candidate himself was supposed to act as if he did not really know what they were doing. Douglas would not follow this pattern. He was intense, dynamic, a man who was burning himself out, a crafty politician lifting himself in this final year of his life above the craft of politics; he would campaign across all the South, openly bidding for votes, arguing his case in person from any stump that was available. He came to Norfolk, Virginia, late in August, to speak from the steps of the City Hall, and he was blunt without qualification.
“I desire no man to vote for me,” he said, “unless he hopes and desires the Union maintained and preserved intact by the faithful execution of every act, every line and every letter of the written Constitution which our fathers bequeathed to us.” Sectional parties, whether they were born in the North or in the South, were “the great evil and curse of this country,” and it was time for men who loved the unbroken country to see whether they could not find some common principle on which they could stand and defeat both Northern and Southern agitators. Someone in the audience called out to ask whether, if Lincoln should be elected, secession would not be justified. Douglas met this without flinching.
“To this I emphatically answer ‘No,’ ” he said. “The election of a man to the presidency by the American people, in conformity with the Constitution of the United States, would not justify any attempt at dissolving this glorious confederacy.”
There was another question. Suppose the cotton states, on the election of Lincoln, should secede from the Union without waiting for some overt act against their constitutional rights: where would Senator Douglas then stand in respect to the act of Southern secession? His reply was uncompromising: “It is the duty of the President of the United States, and of all others in authority under him, to enforce the laws of the United States passed by Congress and as the courts expound them: and I, as in duty bound by my oath of fidelity to the Constitution, would do all in my power to aid the government of the United States in maintaining the supremacy of the laws against all resistance to them, come from whatever quarter it might.”2
A man asking Southerners to vote for him in the summer of 1860 had to have courage to say that. Saying it, Douglas raised a storm; and when protest was made, he demanded that the same questions be asked of John C. Breckinridge. (One oddity of the campaign was the fact that in the North Douglas was running against Lincoln, and in the South he was running against Breckinridge; and the Lincoln managers, although they aimed most of their shots at Douglas, were sometimes worried much more about the vote John Bell might get.)
Not long after he had spoken in Norfolk, Douglas was at Raleigh, North Carolina, and there he was even more explicit about what the Constitution meant to him and the way in which he would enforce it. Speaking for the men of the Northwest, he declared that since they had so great a stake in the Union, the men who felt as he felt were determined to maintain it, and that they knew but one way to do this—to enforce the Constitution rigidly, line by line and clause by clause, precisely as it had come down from the founding fathers, without stopping to ask whether Southern fire-eaters or Northern abolitionists liked it or not.
So far, so good; in the political jargon of that day, to speak for strict enforcement of the Constitution was simply to say that the Constitutional guarantee of slavery must be respected. But Douglas went on to insist that the Constitution also provided for the integrity of the Federal Union, and he wanted all men to know that he considered this guarantee as good as the other. “I am in favor,” he said, “of executing in good faith every clause and provision of the Constitution and of protecting every right under it—and then hanging every man who takes up arms against it.” While the audience was digesting this assertion, Douglas went on to drive the point home. He would use force and the extreme rigor of law against disunionists:
“Yes, my friends, I would hang every man higher than Haman who would attempt by force to resist the execution of any provision of the Constitution which our fathers made and bequeathed to us.”3
Nobody else was talking that way. Secession was being threatened openly, but most politicians were either deploring the hard feelings which brought such talk to the surface, or were refusing to take the talk seriously, or were ignoring it altogether. John Bell stood for the Union and the Constitution, without any elaboration of the steps which such a belief might entail. Typical of his support was the plea put forward by the Cincinnati Daily Times, which plaintively asked “Why Should We Quarrel?” and lamented that brothers were ceasing to be brothers. “Why seek to meddle with that which concerns us not?” inquired the Times. “Why not return to the happy days when we were homogeneous, and undivided in sentiment from Maine to Georgia?” The Republicans were not offering much more. Lincoln was letting his record speak for itself, refusing to elaborate on it lest designing men twist his words out of shape, and Seward was blandly insisting that this talk of secession was no more than empty talk. A party organ like the Pittsburgh Gazette held that the talk was deplorable, but it refused to be alarmed: “As to the threats of Revolution so freely indulged in, we do not care whether they are sham or in earnest. We believe them to be mere bravado—empty gasconading, intended merely to alarm, but that is no matter. They are equally disgraceful whether made for political effect or otherwise; and the people of the North will be false to their rights if they fail to rebuke them.” The implication, of course, was that the people of the North ought to administer such rebuke by voting the straight Republican ticket.4
Breckinridge was being most careful of all. He touched on the subject once, in a speech at a big political barbecue in Lexington, Kentucky, where he said that he would “proudly challenge the bitterest enemy I may have on earth to point out an act, to disclose an utterance, to reveal a thought of mine hostile to the Constitution and the Union of the States.” He went on to assert that Lincoln, who represented “the most obnoxious principles at issue in this canvass,” was advancing unconstitutional ideas, “and if the Republican party should undertake to carry them out they will destroy the Union.” He then hastened back to safer ground with a ringing peroration: “Conscious that my foot is planted on the rock of the Constitution, surrounded and sustained by friends I love and cherish, holding principles that have been in every form endorsed by my native commonwealth, with a spirit erect and unbroken I defy all calumny and calmly await the triumph of the truth.”5
Breckinri
dge might defy calumny with all of his vigor, but he was still going to get the votes of all Southerners who actively hoped for a break-up of the Union. He would get, as well, most of the votes of the numerous Southerners who, not actively desiring disunion, would still prefer it to life under a Black Republican President. Like Lincoln, he would let the fermenting times themselves work for him. Only Douglas, with his talk of building a gallows higher than Haman’s, would speak out.
So the campaign moved on toward its climax. A brief flurry of panic touched Republican headquarters in Springfield as the first election tests drew near. It was all-important for the Republicans to carry Pennsylvania and Indiana for their state tickets at the state elections in October. What with factional fights, and the chance that the still powerful Know-Nothing element would go against the Republicans, it looked for a time as if these state elections might be lost, and Judge Davis made a hurried trip to Harrisburg to consult with Simon Cameron, the lanky party boss to whom so much had been promised so rashly at Chicago. Davis found Cameron “a genial, pleasant and kind-hearted man,” the geniality all the warmer because Cameron examined certain notes expounding Lincoln’s position on the tariff and found them “abundantly satisfactory.” Republican victory in Pennsylvania, said Cameron, was certain. Davis got further reassurance farther east, returned to Indiana and found party leaders uneasy, saw to it that campaign funds were raised, and believed that the danger had been averted. Until the votes were counted, however, Judge Davis would worry, and a week before the election he wrote to his wife that if Pennsylvania and Indiana went against the Republicans, “I shall consider the idea that the people are capable of self-government a heresy.”
Either his worries were groundless or his desperate fence-mending was effective. Pennsylvania went Republican in October by more than 30,000, and the Republican ticket won in Indiana by nearly 10,000. Judge Davis was trying a case in Clinton, Illinois, when the good news reached him, and his judicial decorum collapsed under the strain: Lincoln’s friend Ward Lamon wrote that the judge kicked over the clerk’s desk, “turned a double somersault and adjourned court until after the presidential election.” To intimates, Davis confided that he believed Douglas “is sorry he didn’t die when he was little.” Lamon probably exaggerated slightly, but Davis’s excitement was understandable: the victories in the state elections unquestionably meant that Lincoln was going to win in November.6
Nowhere was this more clearly visible than in the South. Ruffin drafted a letter to Yancey remarking that there was but one remedy for the impending calamity—“secession of some (if all are not then ready) of the Southern states from the Union with the Northern, which has been changed from the former bond of fraternal love, & of mutual defence & support, to a yoke & manacles on the South.” The Charleston Mercury, Rhett’s organ, published a doleful editorial on “The Terrors of Submission,” asserting that the inauguration of Lincoln and Hamlin would reduce the value of all Southern slaves by $100 each, and going on to declare: “If the South once submits to the rule of abolitionists by the General Government, there is, probably, an end of all peaceful separation of the Union. We can only escape the ruin they meditate for the South by war.” The Mercury added that “the ruin of the South, by the emancipation of her slaves, is not like the ruin of any other people. It is not a mere loss of liberty … but it is the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having.”7
Not all were as outspoken. The New Orleans Daily True Delta noted sadly that “the South is now rapidly drifting into the fatal embrace of her most implacable enemies,” and felt that “the insanity or malignancy” of the South’s most prominent leaders had led Dixie off into a constricting box: the South was now estranged, not just from the North (which did not really matter), but from the Northwest, and the result was likely to be deadly. But there was no help for it. On October 16 the Mississippi Free Trader printed a letter from Jefferson Davis, sounding the tocsin with dignified reserve: “Confronted by a common foe, the South should, by the instinct of self-preservation, be united.… The recent declarations of the candidate and leaders of the Black Republican party … must suffice to convince many who have formerly doubted the purpose to attack the institution of slavery in the states. The undying opposition to slavery in the United States means war upon it where it is, not where it is not” [that is, the Republicans did not simply oppose slavery in the territories: they opposed slavery in the slave states, and they would not stop until they had obliterated it], “and the time is at hand when the great battle is to be fought between the defenders of the constitutional government and the votaries of mob rule, fanaticism and anarchy.”8
Davis saw how things were drifting. It was dawning on him that it did not really matter who got the votes in the South—Breckinridge, Douglas, or Bell; the Republican party was going to win the election, and if these votaries of mob rule were to be stopped, something would have to be done very quickly. Davis suggested that all three candidates who were opposing Lincoln should withdraw; let the opposition center on one man, and the menacing Republican might yet be beaten. But who would withdraw? It came down, apparently, to Douglas, and he would not withdraw; after all, he was the only one of the three who had the remotest chance of winning a straight two-man contest … and the Wide-Awakes marched down the dusty streets with smoking flares and with incessant music and cheers, the tide was moving and no one could stop it, and Douglas himself, the one man who might have kept the Republicans from victory, was in the fight to the finish, holding up, for any who had eyes to see, the monstrous vision of a high gallows for traitors.… It was too late.
The governor of South Carolina at that time was William H. Gist, a dedicated man and, like so many of that kind, somewhat strait-laced; one-time president of the Methodist State Sunday School convention, a lawyer and a planter, one who believed there should be restrictions on the manufacture and sale of strong drink; a stout South Carolina patriot and a man with an eye to see things and a heart to act on what the eye saw. Even before the Indiana and Pennsylvania elections, he could see that Abraham Lincoln was going to win the election, and on October 5 he wrote letters to the governors of the cotton states urging “that there may be concert of action, which is so essential to success.” South Carolina, said Governor Gist, would call a state convention as soon as Lincoln’s election was official. If any other state would secede, South Carolina would follow; if no other state would take the lead, South Carolina would go it alone—provided that there was some reason to think that other states would fall in line. And so: “If you decide to call a convention upon the election of a majority of electors favorable to Lincoln, I desire to know the day you propose for the meeting, that we may call our convention to meet the same day, if possible.”9
The Republicans had had a gaudy float going down the streets of Springfield with a big banner announcing that the ball was in motion. Now a Southern ball was in motion, rolling slowly, even wobbling unsteadily on its axis, but nevertheless moving; started on its way by this letter of Governor Gist’s, which was delivered to the various governors by a South Carolina militia officer with the completely suitable name of States’ Rights Gist. States’ Rights Gist would become a Confederate general and would die in action at Franklin, Tennessee; when he set out on this fateful mission he had just four years to live.
The governors were by no means unrestrained in their enthusiasm when they wrote their replies. As political veterans they could not get very far ahead of local sentiment, and local sentiment had not yet hardened. Governor John W. Ellis, of North Carolina, wrote that the people of his state simply had not made up their minds what to do in case Lincoln should be elected: “Some favor submission, some resistance, and others would await the course of events that might follow.” They probably would not think a Republican victory, in itself, proper cause for leaving the Union, although they would never support “the monstrous doctrine of coercion.” From Louisiana came similar words. Governor Thomas O. Moore would need
more than “the deplorable event” of a Republican victory to make him advise secession, and he believed most people in Louisiana felt the same way. He did think that Louisiana should meet with other slave states to “endeavor to effect a complete harmony of action,” but he feared this harmony would be hard to get. To be sure, if the Federal government tried coercion, the case would be different; meanwhile, Louisiana was totally unprepared “for any warlike measures,” and her arsenals were empty.
Mississippi was a different case. Governor John J. Pettus felt that his people would do anything in their power to keep the state “from passing under the Black Republican yoke,” but Mississippi could not go it alone. He would call a special session of the legislature as soon as it was known that Lincoln had won the election, and he believed Mississippi would ask a council of the slave states; if such a council advised secession, Mississippi would probably go along. In Georgia, Governor Joseph E. Brown believed that a convention of the people, meeting sometime between election day and March 4, would determine the state’s course of action. In his opinion the people would “wait for an overt act” rather than vote to go out of the Union, regardless of what other states might do, simply because Lincoln was elected. Still, “events not yet foreseen” might lead to more immediate action. Governor Andrew B. Moore, of Alabama, favored consultation among cotton-state executives. He did not think Alabama would secede alone, but “if two or more states will cooperate with her she will secede with them; or if South Carolina or any other Southern State should go out alone and the Federal Government should attempt to use force against her, Alabama will immediately rally to her rescue.” Governor M. S. Perry, of Florida, felt that Florida could not take the lead in secession, “but will most assuredly cooperate with or follow the lead of any single Cotton State which may secede.” A state convention would be called as soon as Lincoln’s election became a fact; meanwhile, “if there is sufficient manliness at the South to strike for our rights, honor and safety, in God’s name let it be done before the inauguration of Lincoln.”10