Southern paranoia swelled in 1857, when Hinton Rowan Helper’s book The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It appeared, arguing that slavery stunted and distorted the South’s economic as well as moral development; that the southern aristocracy repressed and exploited both slaves and poor whites; and that slavery was an inefficient and wasteful economic system that caused the South to fall ever further behind the North. Southern states censored the book when they learned about it. North Carolina’s law was the severest—anyone caught distributing the book would be publicly whipped and imprisoned for a year the first time and hanged the next. Of course, sales soared with the southern condemnation as bold and curious natives sought to peek into its forbidden text.29
Slavocrats insisted that popular sovereignty and states’ rights permitted the holding and selling of slaves anywhere. In January 1859 Buchanan endorsed this view when he declared that the Dred Scott decision resolved “the question of slavery in the territories” by confirming “the right . . . of every citizen . . . to take his property of any kind, including slavery, into the common territories” and “have it protected . . . under the Federal Constitution.” Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi followed this up with a resolution holding that it was the federal government’s duty to protect the property rights of slaveholders in the territories. In May the southern states held a convention at Vicksburg, Mississippi, during which the delegates voted forty to nineteen for a resolution that called for repealing the 1808 law that outlawed the importation of slaves. If one accepted slavery’s legality and morality, it was hard to dispute Georgia senator William Goulden’s argument that there was no difference “between buying a man in Virginia, who was a slave there, and buying one in Africa, who was a slave there.”30
Southerners became increasingly obsessed, indeed paranoid, over destroying any real or imagined threats to slavery. Then Harpers Ferry realized their worst nightmares of a slave revolt whereby they were murdered in their beds by their vengeful chattel.
John Brown had a messiah complex.31 He believed that God endowed him to crusade against the abomination of slavery and destined him to die as a martyr in this glorious cause. He acquired this vision at a young age and devoted his life to fulfilling it. Along the way he failed at such occupations as farming, sheep raising, cattle driving, and land speculating and sired half a dozen children with his long-suffering wife. His morality stretched thin when it came to money—he was jailed for a fraudulent land deal and was sued twenty-one times. He was among the idealists called to win Kansas as a free state. However, unlike virtually all other Free Soilers, he backed his beliefs with violence. After the border ruffians sacked Lawrence, he led seven men, including two of his sons, to murder five slavocrats along Pottawatomie Creek in May 1856.
This mass murder was the dress rehearsal for a far more ambitious plan in Brown’s tormented mind. He intended to provoke a slave rebellion by capturing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry and distributing the weapons to blacks. For this operation he gathered nineteen “soldiers,” including three of his sons and five blacks, who joined him in the attack. Brown and his men did not act alone. Backing the plot with money and fervor were wealthy abolitionists known as the “Secret Six”: Thomas Higginson, Theodore Parker, Samuel Howe, George Stearns, Franklin Sanborn, and Gerrit Smith. Brown, his men, and the Secret Six were an anomaly within the abolitionist movement; virtually all abolitionists advocated nonviolence.
Brown and his men took over the Harpers Ferry arsenal on the evening of October 16, 1858. Although they cut the telegraph wires, word soon spread of the takeover. The next morning militia surrounded the arsenal and a contingent of marines arrived that afternoon. Ironically, the two ranking federal army officers who captured the raiders—Col. Robert E. Lee and Lt. J. E. B. Stuart—would themselves soon commit treason against the United States. Sporadic gunfire echoed through the town and surrounding hills as each side sniped at the other. Lee ordered Stuart and twelve men to storm the arsenal. One marine and two of Brown’s followers died in the fighting before Brown and his six surviving men surrendered. These deaths were atop the four citizens and eight raiders previously killed. Five of Brown’s followers posted outside the arsenal managed to escape. The subsequent trial culminated with death sentences for Brown and his men; four were carried out on December 16, 1859, and the other two, after failed appeals, on March 16, 1860. On December 2, 1859, John Brown strode to the scaffold as fearlessly as he fought against slavery.
Harpers Ferry had an enormous impact on the 1860 election and thus America’s fate.32 Although the vast majority of northerners, including most abolitionists, abhorred and denounced the raid, a few, like William Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and John Greenleaf Whittier, publicly responded by denouncing slavery and admiring Brown’s courage. William Seward inspired abolitionists and enraged slavocrats by declaring that “I know and you know that a revolution has begun. I know, and all the world knows that revolutions never go backward.”33 The violence and fanaticism of Brown and his followers appalled Abraham Lincoln, who wrote, “We have a means provided for the expression of our belief in regard to slavery—it is through the ballot box—the peaceful method provided by the Constitution.”34
Once a zealous, outspoken minority, Democratic Party fire-eaters who exalted slavery and secession swelled their ranks after Harpers Ferry. The Richmond (VA) Enquirer summed up the raid’s impact: “The Harpers Ferry invasion has advanced the cause of disunion more than any other event that has happened since the formation of the national government.”35 John Brown would be the grim reaper ominously standing before countless southern men as they cast their ballots in 1860.
6
The Election
If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitution against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist on its extension.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Our new government . . . rests on the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.
ALEXANDER STEPHENS
America was undergoing revolutionary economic and demographic changes in 1860.1 Over the preceding decade, the nation’s population had soared by more than a third, from 23.2 million to 31.5 million. Of those 8.2 million new people, 5.5 million were native born and 2.7 million were immigrants. Although every state had more people, the North carried most of that growth. This led to the latest shift in the House of Representative’s regional power imbalance, with slave states accounting for only 83 of 233 members, or 36 percent. Yet slavery was hardly the dying institution that many hoped or feared it to be. In 1860 the census counted 3,953,760 slaves worth $3.059 billion, up from 1,191,354 slaves worth $291 million in 1810.2
The economic changes were even more stunning. Related industrial, transportation, and communications revolutions were rapidly transforming mid-nineteenth-century America. Factories mass produced more goods at cheaper prices. Railroads and steamboats transported these goods at cheaper rates. The telegraph tried the nation together literally if not figuratively with nearly instantaneous communications. These greater efficiencies and economies of scale dropped commodity and consumer prices by 45 percent and 50 percent, respectively, from 1815 to 1860. Meanwhile wages and wealth rose with the greater demand for labor and the cheaper prices. The result was a virtuous economic cycle whereby increasingly cheaper goods led to greater demand that led to greater production that led to cheaper prices. Thus did these revolutions feed each other.3
Nonetheless, every region of the nation remained rural, with only one in four Americans living in a town with twenty-five hundred or more people. Six of ten Americans, or 59 percent, were farmers while less than one in five, or 18 percent, were manufacturers. Farms produced 75 perc
ent of the nation’s exports, with cotton the most important crop.4
The North benefited far more from the industrial revolution than the South. Of the national economy in 1860, the North accounted for 73 percent and the South 26 percent. A comparison between industries reveals startling disparities:
In 1860, the North had produced $167,295 worth of flour and meal as compared with the South’s $55,849,000. The North had 19,770 miles of railway track; the south, 10,513. . . . The North . . . had 109,000 manufacturing establishments to the South’s 31,300. The capital investment in Northern manufactures was $842,000,000 to the South’s $167,855,000. The number of workers in Northern manufactures was 1,131,600 to the South’s 189,000. The values of the manufactured products turned out in the North was $1,594,486,000 compared to the South’s $291,375,000. . . . The capital stock of the North’s banks was put at $292,594,000; of the South’s banks, at $129,287,000. The total bank deposits in the North stood at $1,877,678,000; in the South, at $66,124,000. In the North money in circulation totaled $119,826,000; in the South, $87,276.000.5
Indeed, the South harbored only 5 percent of the nation’s industrial capacity and three in ten of its white people. These would be enormous if not insurmountable disadvantages in the coming Civil War.
Yet if each region’s wealth were divvied up equally among its people, each southerner would be richer than each northerner. In 1860 the average slaveholder was ten times wealthier than the average northern farmer, by $33,906 to $3,858, and owned five and a half times more land, valued at $46.74 an acre compared to $13.47 an acre. The regional gap was actually widening, as cotton and slave prices doubled during the 1850s. Cotton exports soared from $681,176 to $1,739,893 from 1850 to 1860, while the assessed value of four million slaves rose from $1.5 billion to $3 billion. Those regional disparities are grossly misleading without an understanding of how wealth was actually distributed in the North and South.6
The American Dream of upward economic, social, and educational mobility was largely confined to the North. Most northerners enjoyed solid middle-class incomes and lifestyles with relatively well-paying jobs, well-furnished homes, good schooling, and ease in embarking on new careers if need be. Most southerners were trapped and exploited by the elite at the top of either a feudal or slave socioeconomic pyramid, depending on whether they were white or black.
Northerners who journeyed beyond the Mason-Dixon Line were appalled by what they found. Senator William Seward of New York made three fact-finding trips across swaths of the South, in 1835, 1846, and 1857, and each time despaired at the “exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly neglected roads, and, in every respect, an absence of enterprise and improvement. . . . Such has been the effect of slavery.” Frederick Law Olmstead observed that “for every rich man’s house . . . I passed a dozen shabby and half furnished cottages and at least a hundred cabins—mere hovels, such as none but a poor farmer would house his cattle in at the north.” Cassius Clay of Kentucky, Henry Clay’s cousin, suffered the same despair when he traveled north and contrasted that region’s “industry, ingenuity, numbers, and wealth” with his own state’s stagnation and mass poverty amid rich planters. In favoring slavery’s eventual demise, Republicans like George Weston argued that “to destroy slavery is not to destroy the South, but to change its social organization for the better.”7
Abraham Lincoln was doing quite well himself. Then fifty-one years old, he and his family lived a comfortable upper-middle-class life in a $5,000 home and owned $12,000 in other property. The Lincolns had three living sons, Robert, Willie, and Thomas or Tad, respectively aged sixteen, nine, and seven. Two servants helped Mary care for the house, cooking, and boys.8
Lincoln worked incessantly behind the scenes to promote the Republican Party. The party was split between moderates who were willing to compromise on the issues and radicals who were not. Lincoln was a moderate who continually sought to convince others that pragmatism was better for the party and nation than idealism. For instance, he wrote Salmon Chase, then Ohio’s Radical Republican governor, advising him that introducing “a proposition for repeal of the Fugitive Slave law, into the next Republican National Convention, will explode the convention and the party. Having turned your attention to the point, I wish to do no more.”9
Although Lincoln denied his interest in one day running for president, his movements after he lost his 1858 Senate campaign called this into question. In 1859 he journeyed four thousand miles and gave twenty-three speeches in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Kansas. Then, in midwinter 1860, he traveled from Springfield all the way to New York City to give a speech at the Cooper Union Institute. What he said on February 27, 1860, ranks among his greatest orations.10 William Cullen Bryant, the poet and newspaper editor, introduced him.
Lincoln was well aware that his audience extended far beyond the several hundred people sitting before him, that his words would resonate across the nation. He explored the breadth and depth of the founders’ intentions and the nation’s worsening divisions over slavery. The result for every American was a stark moral choice: “If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitution against it are themselves wrong, and should be silenced and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality—its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist on its extension.” Lincoln urged his audience to share his conclusion that slavery was indeed a terrible evil and that it must be not be allowed to spread. Yet to preserve the Union it was equally essential that, for now, slavery must be tolerated where it currently existed.11
No election in American history was more consequential than that of 1860.12 The first party to name candidates for the presidency and vice presidency was brand new. The Constitutional Union Party was composed mostly of older Whigs and Know Nothings who sought a middle ground between Democrats and Republicans. Shortly after their convention opened at Baltimore on May 9, the delegates nominated senators John Bell of Tennessee and Edward Everett of Massachusetts as their presidential and vice presidential candidates.
The Republican Party was the next to name its contenders. Abraham Lincoln, the eventual winner, had enormous handicaps compared to his rivals. His only experience at the national political level was a single two-year term in the House of Representatives. He had lost both of his attempts to be elected to the U.S. Senate. His campaign committee, brilliantly headed by David Davis, tried to obscure his inexperience by promoting Lincoln as “the rail-splitter,” a self-made man who rose from poverty to prosperity through hard work, good humor, and keen intelligence. They mass-marketed Lincoln with an official biography, slogans, songs, and rallies.13
The Republicans held their convention at the Wigwam, a recently completed meeting hall in Chicago, from May 16 to 18. This venue was perfect for Illinois Republicans to promote the nomination of their native son. Like the other candidates, Lincoln stayed home to await the verdict. He sent one key message to David Davis, his campaign manager in Chicago: “Make no contracts that will bind me.”14 Davis did not obey that order. He promised a cabinet post to Simon Cameron, the party’s most prominent Pennsylvanian, if he deferred running for the nomination and instead delivered his state to Lincoln.
Although he faced such political giants as William Seward, Salmon Chase, Simon Cameron, and Edward Bates, Lincoln was no dark horse candidate. For those who followed politics, he was either renowned or reviled for the positions he had articulated during his debates with Stephen Douglas two years earlier. His speaking tour in the northeast in 1859 and his Cooper Union speech in February 1860 further promoted his image and views. He was a small town “man of the people” and westerner unsullied by the political tar baby of Washington or big-city machines. Illinois and Indiana were swing states that the midwesterner Lincoln would likely carry. If elected he would be the first president born west of the Appalachian Mountains and thus would symbolize how much the nation’s center of population and political and economic gravity had shifted over the previous century.
Lincoln’s cousin, John Hanks, contrived an effective bit of political theater. He carried into the Wigwam two fence rails that he claimed Lincoln had split thirty years earlier. Hanks and other supporters then proclaimed Lincoln the “Rail-Splitter Candidate” for president.
On the first ballot of 466 votes cast, Lincoln won a solid second place with 102 votes, behind Seward’s 173½ but with twice as many as the next three candidates, Cameron with 50½, Chase with 49, and Bates with 48. The rest of the votes were spread among a host of minor figures. It was then that Davis cut that deal with Cameron. On the second ballot Pennsylvania’s delegation along with many other delegates cast their votes for Lincoln, who with 181 votes was just behind Seward with 184½, while the other candidates all lost votes. On the third ballot, Lincoln surged ahead of Seward with 231½ votes, just a few shy of a majority. Then, with a nod from Chase, Ohio’s leader rose and announced that the state was shifting its votes to Lincoln; others followed, giving Lincoln 364. In a show of party unity, Seward’s supporters threw their votes to Lincoln, who won unanimously. Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was chosen as Lincoln’s running mate.
That afternoon a delegation of party leaders took the train down to Springfield and officially offered Lincoln the nomination. Lincoln gratefully accepted. Governor John Wood lent Lincoln a room in the state capitol for his campaign headquarters. Although Lincoln was tempted to launch a speaking campaign across the states, etiquette insisted that he should not seem to want the White House too eagerly. Prominent Republicans across the country championed Lincoln in their speeches whether they were running for reelection or not. Spearheading Lincoln’s campaign at the grassroots level were Wide Awake clubs that rather ominously dressed in black and paraded with split rails and flaming torches through the streets.
As the Republicans unified around Lincoln, the Democrats tore apart between two bitterly opposed factions. Of all the possible sites for the Democratic convention in 1860, none could have been worse than Charleston, the epicenter of slavocracy, nullification, and secession. A rancorous deadlock ensued after the convention opened on April 23. Although a minority in numbers, the fire-eaters dominated the proceedings, shouted down their rivals, and did all they could to castigate front-runner Stephen Douglas for opposing the Lecompton constitution and Dred Scott decision. The result after fifty-nine votes over nine grueling days was Douglas stuck far from the required support of two-thirds of delegates. Slavocrats rallied around Vice President John Breckinridge of Kentucky, who advocated spreading slavery anywhere and suppressing freedom of speech and freedom of the press for anyone who opposed slavery. One by one the southern delegations walked out. Those left finally agreed to call it quits and reconvene at Baltimore after the Republican convention.
The Age of Lincoln and the Art of American Power, 1848-1876 Page 11