by James Oakes
FOR MONTHS, EVEN BEFORE the 1860 elections, Republicans across the North were giddily predicting the destruction of slavery in the South. With Abraham Lincoln as president and with wider Republican margins in Congress, the long reign of the Slave Power would be over. Although prohibited by the Constitution from interfering directly with slavery in the states where it already existed, the federal government would nevertheless do all it could to put slavery out of existence by interfering with it indirectly. At the very least, slavery would be banned from all the western territories, and no new slave states would be admitted to the Union. With the addition of each new free state, the already weakened power of the slaveholding oligarchy would diminish still further. Congress would abolish slavery in Washington, D.C., and repeal the despised Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. New appointments to the Supreme Court would transform America’s highest judicial tribunal, shifting it from a proslavery to an antislavery bias. Most Republicans endorsed these policies in one form or another. A number of Republicans also proposed that the federal government purchase and then emancipate all the slaves in the Border States. The most radical Republicans went even further. They would restore “free speech” to the South, which could only mean that postmasters would no longer interrupt the flow of abolitionist propaganda into the slave states. Others would regulate the domestic slave trade by taxing every slave sold across state lines and outlawing the coastwise trade entirely.
Even shorn of its more radical elements, the basic Republican goal remained the same: Pressed down into the Gulf States, denied access to fresh western soils, and deprived of the life-giving support of federal power, slavery even in the cotton South would eventually become unprofitable, maybe even dangerous. Slavery’s intrinsic weaknesses would become steadily more apparent. The blight of economic backwardness would spread across the South, its arrogant aristocracy would become ever more disdainful of democracy, and the slaves would become increasingly restless and insurrectionary. A homegrown antislavery movement would spring up within the slave states. It might take awhile, although most Republicans expected that abolition, accelerating over time, would be accomplished within a generation. But however long it took, and by whatever particular means, the destruction of slavery was inscribed in the Republican electoral victory in November of 1860.3
Lincoln had repeatedly vowed to put slavery on “the course of ultimate extinction.” But what did this mean? He once said, in an offhand remark, that if slavery were to be abolished in the “most peaceful” and “most gradual” way, it might take a hundred years, but in the very next breath he signaled his doubt that abolition would or even should take that long.4 He was skeptical that slavery would be abolished peacefully, for example, having already spoken ominously of an impending crisis, a violent struggle that would end in the complete victory of either slavery or freedom. Nor did he expect it to take a century. When in November of 1861 Lincoln drafted two proposals for the abolition of slavery in Delaware—a model, Lincoln hoped, for all four of the Border States that remained loyal—he indicated that the process would be completed in as little as five years, no more than thirty, although his preference was for ten. But voluntary gradual abolition by the states was only one of the ways Lincoln expected to attack slavery. By 1860 he was committed to banning slavery from the territories, abolishing it in Washington, and admitting no new slave states into the Union. He said that if he were in Congress he would vote to overrule the Dred Scott decision. He hated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and warned that if the slave states seceded from the Union the North would stop enforcing it altogether. Lincoln had embraced the Republican Party scenario for slavery’s demise—self-destruction by means of containment, restriction of slavery to the states where it already existed and, paradoxically, forcing it to die a natural death. Ultimate extinction.
When Lincoln spoke of these things he was relatively circumspect. Many of his fellow Republicans were more overt, and some would have pushed the policy further, but it was the same basic policy. Shortly before the November elections a Republican newspaper in Chicago spelled out in dramatic detail what would happen to the slave states should the Republicans triumph at the polls. “We will surround them with a cordon of Free States, as with a wall of fire.—We will hem them in, on all sides, by free and happy communities. . . . Deprived of the aid of the general government and thrown upon itself for support, slavery must gradually die out.” Southerners would get antislavery literature in the mail. Missouri and Delaware would soon become free states, and slavery, “confined to its present limits . . . will become unprofitable, and a pecuniary as well as a moral curse. Then emancipation societies will spring up in all the slave States, and the blessed work will go on, until the last slave is free.” The child is now born, the editors proclaimed, “who will live to see the emancipation of the last slave upon the American Continent.” All of this would happen within the limits prescribed by the Constitution. After the Republicans take power, the slave states will be allowed to “keep their barbarous system. . . . We will let them alone.” But this was true only in the narrow sense that Congress would not directly abolish slavery in the states where it already existed. There was nothing to stop the federal government from surrounding the slave states with a cordon of freedom and slowly squeezing slavery to death.5
Many Republicans were persuaded that slavery was so politically untenable, socially unstable, and economically irrational that it was kept artificially alive only by steady infusions of federal support funneled to the slaveholders thanks to the viselike grip the Slave Power maintained over every branch of the federal government. Slavery was “seated in the President’s chair, ruling in the Council chamber, judging on the bench of the Supreme Court, moving to and fro armed among Senators and representatives.” Without the support of the Slave Power the slaves would have been restored to their natural condition of freedom long before. Republicans believed that with their electoral victory in November of 1860, the Slave Power would at last be overthrown. “The power of the slave interest is broken,” Henry Ward Beecher announced just before Election Day, “the crisis is over.” A few days after the Republican victory, Salmon Chase, who would soon begin serving as Lincoln’s Treasury secretary, wrote that one of the “great objects” of his life, “the overthrow of the Slave Power, is now happily accomplished.” So long as the Republicans implemented the policies to which the party was committed, Chase believed, slavery was doomed. Republicans may not have secured majority control of Congress, but they had overthrown the Slave Power, tilted the government toward freedom, and thereby sealed slavery’s fate. William Seward, soon to become secretary of state, was never one to shy away from bold predictions, and he did not do so now: Lincoln’s election, he flatly declared “is the downfall of slavery.”6
It was certainly the downfall of circumspection, for Lincoln’s election loosened a number of Republican tongues. Where they had once been vague about slavery’s future, they were suddenly bold and specific. In January of 1861, for example, Horace Greeley, the Republican editor of the influential New York Tribune, published the details of a plan to have the federal government purchase—at four hundred dollars apiece—and then emancipate every slave in the states surrounding the cotton South: Delaware and Maryland, plus the westernmost slave states running southward from Missouri and Arkansas through Louisiana and Texas. The emancipated slaves would then be “colonized” somewhere outside the United States. “Rent by internal discords and jealousies,” Greeley explained, “the seceding States will, one by one, abolish Slavery and return” to the Union. Before the year was out, Lincoln would be drafting statutes that nearly duplicated Greeley’s plan, though without colonization.7
Northern Democrats warned that the Greeley proposal would “turn nearly a million negroes loose upon our borders to immigrate into Ohio to mix with the white population, and compete with the white laborers for a living.” But there were no comparable objections among Republicans. On the contrary, they were soon floating the same proposal in
Washington. On February 11, only a few weeks after Greeley published his plan, Congressman James B. McKean of New York introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives urging the appointment of a “select committee” of five members to determine if “it be practicable for the General Government to procure the emancipation of the slaves in some, or all, of the ‘border states.’ ”8
These proposals rested on the premise that slaves were “property” only under state law, and that the moment the federal government took possession of the slaves, they were emancipated because the Constitution did not recognize the slaves as property. Paraphrasing Lincoln at Cooper Union, Republican editors at the Hartford Evening Press insisted that “if slaves were referred” to anywhere in the Constitution, “they were spoken of as ‘persons’ and not as ‘property.’ ” They explained, “Mr. Madison, in the convention, ‘thought it wrong to admit into the constitution the idea that there could be property in men,’ and in that spirit was the instrument made. Slavery was left as they found it, sustained only by local, state legislation.” A radical paper in Chicago made the same familiar point: the “framers were careful to avoid the introduction of a single word that should intimate the recognition of the right of property in man.” The more conservative Cincinnati Daily Commercial denounced the Dred Scott decision on the same grounds. In “proclaiming that slaves are property under the Constitution,” the Supreme Court issued a “monstrous decision.”9
The Republican consensus that there was no right of property in slaves dampened the prospect of a meaningful sectional compromise. In his much-awaited annual message to Congress in December of 1860, President James Buchanan proposed a series of constitutional amendments, the first of which, echoing the Dred Scott decision, would grant “express recognition of the right of property in slaves” in the states where slavery already exists as well as in “all the common Territories” of the United States. This was slavery national—wherever the Constitution was sovereign, slavery was protected. Even Democratic papers conceded that no Republican could endorse Buchanan’s proposed amendment. In fact the Republicans were outraged. “The Constitution does not chattelise human beings,” the Iowa State Register declared, “and no system of terrorism that the South can inaugurate will drive the free States into an admission that it does.” Republican editors across the North uniformly pronounced the Buchanan proposal dead on arrival. The basic difference between Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, a pro-southern editor in Philadelphia explained, is that “[o]ne protects slave property as it protects all other property. The other makes war upon slave property, as it does not upon any other property.”10
If any one issue sent the slave states fleeing from the Union, this was it: the Republican Party had elected a president who did not believe there was a constitutional right of property in slaves. Secessionists went to great lengths refuting the Republican position. “Slaves are recognized both as property and as a basis of political power by the Federal compact,” an Alabama secessionist wrote, “and special provisions are made by that instrument for their protection as property.” The Republicans have already rendered meaningless “the fundamental principle of all good governments—the duty to protect the property of the citizen.” No matter how artfully Lincoln tries to cover over his intentions, Congressman J. L. M. Curry of Alabama warned, the policy of his administration “is not to recognize the right of the Southern citizen to property in the labor of African slaves.”11
Defenders of slavery insisted that the Constitution, far from stigmatizing slavery, singled it out for special protection. It counted three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of representation, boosting the power of the slave states in the House of Representatives and the Electoral College. The fugitive slave clause guaranteed that slaves escaping into free states would be returned to their masters. Congress was prohibited by the Constitution from outlawing the international slave trade for twenty-one years after ratification. State governments alone could determine what did or did not count as “property,” and nowhere did the Constitution exempt any particular “species of property” from the fundamental rights of property. Congress has no power to “decide what shall or shall not be property,” Curry explained. “The Constitution of the United States discriminates specially in favor of slave property; provides for its security, and for its representation in this body. It recognized property in slaves; and the Supreme Court has affirmed our right to emigrate to, and occupy with slaves, the common territory.” There were few southerners in 1860 who doubted that the Constitution established a right of property in slaves.12
When the republic was formed, Jefferson Davis explained a few weeks after the war began, “the right of property in slaves was protected by law” in twelve out of the thirteen original states. “This property,” he went on, was also “recognized in the Constitution,” whereas Congress was given no power at all “to legislate” in any way that might prejudice “that species of property.” A New Orleans editor put it succinctly: “The Constitution of the country recognizes slaves as property; the laws of Congress recognize slaves as property; the decisions of the Supreme Court recognize slaves as property.” Such convictions were commonplace among secessionists. “It is not safe,” one Georgia editor warned, “to trust eight hundred millions of dollars worth of negroes, in the hands of a power which says that we do not own the property, that the title under the Constitution is bad.” It was not only hot-blooded secessionists who believed this. The northern states “should pass laws giving full protection to slave property in the Territories,” a moderate newspaper in Gallatin, Tennessee, proposed, “and should recognize slave property as on the same footing as any other species of property.” Only then could the disaster of disunion be averted. South Carolina leaders understood this, which is why, in their widely publicized “Declaration” of the causes for its secession, they proclaimed that “[t]he right of property in slaves was recognized” in the Constitution.13
If Republican constitutional principles were outrageous, the party’s policy proposals were still more threatening. Secessionists warned that once in power the Republicans would implement plans designed to force the slave states to abolish slavery on their own. Historians often treat such rhetoric as though it was a species of hysteria, replete with fantasies of improbable Republican depredations, when in fact all the secessionists did was take Republicans at their word. Secessionist editorials often read like the mirror images of Republican editorials. The Kentucky Statesman warned readers that with control of Congress, Republicans would repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and, in impudent defiance of the Supreme Court, prohibit slavery in all the western territories. And that was only the beginning. Republicans would block the admission of new slave states, abolish slavery in Washington, and exclude it from all federal property—forts, dockyards, and arsenals—within the South. Eventually Republicans would ban the interstate slave trade. If their party “shall succeed in attaining control of the government,” the Statesman warned, “its history leaves no doubt that it will undertake to carry out these purposes.”14 And with that, the slave states would have no choice but to secede from the Union.
Secessionists waved aside all Republican promises not to “interfere” directly in the states where slavery already existed. “Where they cannot attack it in the States they will attack it at every other point they can reach,” a Louisiana secessionist paper argued. “They will set fire to all the surrounding buildings in the hope that some spark may catch, and everything be destroyed in a general conflagration. They will undermine the pillars of the institution, and then wait quietly for the whole edifice to tumble.” Lincoln’s election would bring with it “no direct act of violence against negro property,” the Richmond Enquirer pointed out. Instead the Republicans would go after slavery indirectly. “[U]nder the fostering hand of federal power,” abolitionism would insidiously plant itself in the Border States, “converting them into free States, then into ‘cities of refuge’ for runaway negroes from the gulf
States.” The Republicans could accomplish all of this while technically adhering to their promises not to interfere directly with slavery in the southern states. “No act of violence may ever be committed, no servile war waged, and yet the ruin and degradation of Virginia will be as fully and as fatally accomplished as though bloodshed and rapine ravished the land.” As Alabama’s Congressman Curry correctly noted, Republican policies were designed to “force the abolition of slavery” by the southern states themselves. “Do you not call this interference?” North Carolina Congressman Zebulon B. Vance asked. “You are interfering.” And in so doing, he added, Republicans violate one of the oldest and plainest principles of justice and reason—that you cannot do indirectly what you are forbidden to do directly.”15
Northern Democrats, like southern secessionists, roundly assailed Republican plans to squeeze slavery to death indirectly. Six weeks before the election, the Daily Illinois State Register denounced Lincoln for proposing “to legislate so that slavery must soon be extinguished.” He would load the judiciary with antislavery judges, the editors warned. Others cautioned the slave states to remain within the Union, where they would be “protected from foreign invasion and domestic insurrection” and where their property rights were secure. If Republicans force the South to secede, the slaves would be “cajoled and coaxed into the North, where no owner could hope to recover them,” a New York paper predicted, and if a war should come, northern “miscreants” would follow the Union forces into the South, where the slaves “would be kidnapped, excited and roused into rebellion.”16