by James Oakes
In the South avid secessionists and cautious cooperationists all read Republican plans the same way. The Charleston Mercury, the leading editorial voice of the South Carolina secession movement, predicted that once Republicans were “enthroned at Washington, in the Executive and Legislative departments of Government,” the process of abolition would commence. First slavery would be systematically weakened in the Border States, so that Kentucky, Virginia, and Missouri would soon “enter on the policy of making themselves Free States.” Surrounded by hostile free states, the Mercury warned, the “timid” in the cotton states would begin selling off their own slaves, but there would be no purchasers. The value of slave property would sink to nothing. Similar sentiments were echoed in New Orleans, where, a month before the election, the Daily True Delta conceded that Lincoln would not directly “overthrow” slavery or “conspire” against southern rights. But “so far as the south can be dwarfed, cramped and shut in from healthy intercourse with the world . . . , the abolition president will use the whole power of the country against it.” Lincoln’s election, then, would be “the death knell of the political and social prosperity of the south.” No southerner will be represented in his cabinet; none would be appointed to diplomatic posts. Not another slave state would enter the Union, and indeed the nation would acquire no more territory at all unless it, too, was free of slavery. The New Orleans editors were skeptical about secession, whereas Charleston’s were enthusiastic, but both recognized the identical threat to slavery coming from the Republican Party. For all its secessionist zeal, the Charleston Mercury was in some ways quite clearheaded. On the eve of the election it put the matter bluntly: “The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery.” If the Republicans win, the only way to protect slavery would be to leave the Union. Which is precisely what the cotton states did.17
The secession movement began in South Carolina, within weeks after Lincoln’s election, and by Christmas of 1860 the Palmetto State had declared its independence from the Union. The remaining states of the Deep South hardly needed South Carolina’s coaxing. Beginning in early January and continuing into February, all the cotton states—Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas—seceded from the Union. By February of 1861 they had come together to form a new government, the Confederate States of America, under an explicitly proslavery constitution, with an interim president, Jefferson Davis, a wealthy cotton planter from Mississippi. As they made their departures from the Union, each of the seceded states made it unmistakably clear that their action was prompted by the urgent need to protect the right of property in slaves from the impending assault of the Republicans who were about to take control of the federal government.18
The conflict over slavery had become irreconcilable. Secessionists argued that it was both naive and dangerous for any slaveholder to think that slavery could remain secure under the rule of Republicans, who denied that there was such a thing as a right of property in slaves. Disunion was the only way to protect slavery from the assaults that Republicans themselves were promising to deliver. What secessionists did not expect was the way disunion itself would fundamentally alter the terms of the debate over slavery’s fate. With remarkable speed, secession drove Republicans from their emphasis on gradual abolition by means of federal containment to their second scenario, immediate emancipation as a military necessity.
SEWARD’S ALTERNATIVES
Curiously, Abraham Lincoln is the least useful Republican by which to gauge the shift in Republican discussions of slavery during the secession crisis. The last major speech he ever gave explaining his position on slavery was at Cooper Union in Manhattan, in February of 1860, as part of his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. After his New York appearance he toured New England giving different versions of the same speech. Then, in keeping with the electoral practices of his day, Lincoln went home to Springfield and stopped talking in public. Throughout the race for the nomination, through the fall presidential campaign, and then through the entire secession winter until his inauguration, Lincoln did not give a single major speech. He let leak private indications of where he stood on the legality of secession and the danger of compromising with secessionists on the territorial expansion of slavery, and he made a number of brief public statements to that effect while en route from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Otherwise Lincoln remained largely silent during some of the most turbulent months in American political history.19
Even in private correspondence Lincoln was reluctant to speak. Congressman John Gilmer of North Carolina addressed a series of questions to Lincoln in mid-December, questions that reflected the fears of many southern leaders that once in power the Republicans would move against slavery indirectly. Lincoln was “greatly disinclined” to answer the questions, but because he was considering Gilmer as a potential southern member of his cabinet, he felt compelled to respond. The result was an almost comical series of nonresponses. Gilmer asked, for example, “whether as President you will favor the abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia.” To which Lincoln replied that he had “no thought of recommending the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia” to Congress—which hardly answered the question he was asked. Lincoln gave the same type of response when Gilmer asked him whether he “would approve any law of Congress” regulating the domestic slave trade: Lincoln had “no thought” of recommending such a law to Congress. But what if Congress passed such a law, without the president’s recommendation? Lincoln did not say. What if Congress passed a law “prohibiting the employment of Slaves in the Arsenals and Dock Yards” of the southern states? Well, Lincoln answered, that was “a thing I never thought of in my life, to my recollection, till I saw your letter.” Would Lincoln use his influence to pressure northern states to repeal the laws they passed aimed at frustrating enforcement of the fugitive slave clause—the so-called personal liberty laws? “I really know very little of them,” Lincoln answered, but if “any of them are in conflict with the fugitive slave clause, or any other part of the constitution, I certainly should be glad of their repeal.” Needless to say, there were not many Republicans in 1860 who believed northern personal liberty laws were “in conflict” with the Constitution. Some questions Lincoln simply ignored. Would he, Gilmer asked, “enforce the fugitive slave law . . . favor its repeal . . . [or] suggest amendments impairing its efficiency?” Lincoln could hardly answer that one, as he was soon to propose such “amendments” in his inaugural address, so he passed over the question in silence. Likewise, to Gilmer’s inquiry as to whether Lincoln would oppose the admission of any new slave states; Lincoln said nothing at all. When, however, Gilmer mentioned policies to which Republicans were pledged by virtue of their party’s platform, Lincoln’s answers were straightforward. “On the territorial question, I am inflexible,” he wrote. It is hard to imagine that Gilmer would be satisfied by such evasive responses. Yet Lincoln was so concerned that they not leak out that he marked the letter “strictly confidential.”20 When pressed to speak out publicly during the secession crisis, Lincoln repeatedly said that he was a Republican, that his position was reflected in the Republican Party platform, and that he would take no stance that went against his party.
Given Lincoln’s near-total silence, all eyes turned instead to another leading Republican politician of the day: Senator William Seward of New York. Long viewed as an ideological spokesman for his party, one of those who worked hardest to formulate and popularize its positions on slavery, Seward had been a favorite to win the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Yet despite his loss to Lincoln, Seward was still recognized as one of the party’s most important leaders. Lincoln’s recent nomination of Seward to be his secretary of state did nothing to diminish Seward’s stature. Many assumed that his was the public voice of the incoming administration. As a result, while Lincoln remained publicly silent, everyone waited expectantly for the major statement Seward was set to make in the Senate on January 12, 1861. It was a critica
l moment. Alabama and Florida had seceded the day before; Mississippi, two days before that. It was clear that Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas would soon secede as well. What would Seward have to say about this? Would he, like most of his fellow Republicans, stand his ground and refuse to compromise with the secessionists? Or would Seward offer the South concessions that would save the Union?
Even more than most Republicans, Seward was convinced that the mere election of Lincoln signaled the overthrow of the Slave Power and with it the inevitable destruction of slavery. Ten years earlier he had announced that emancipation was “inevitable.” Now that the hour of slavery’s demise was at hand, the only thing Republicans had to do was hold the Union together until Lincoln’s inauguration. There would be no need for any “overt act” against slavery because slavery was doomed anyway. Leading Republican radicals, including Senator Charles Sumner and Salmon Chase, assumed the same conciliatory posture.21 But conciliation was not the same thing as compromise. It could mean almost the reverse. Republicans in general, and Seward in particular, believed that slavery’s fate was already sealed by their electoral victory. Convinced that slavery could be abolished peacefully, the conciliators urged fellow Republicans to speak as softly as possible—perhaps saying nothing at all. Why add fuel to the secessionist fire? As Chase wrote in late November of 1860, “[A]ll needless irritation should be carefully avoided.” There was no need for war because the Slave Power had been dislodged and federal policy was about to shift in a dramatically antislavery direction. Charles Francis Adams, who along with Seward was a leading Republican supporter of conciliation, freely admitted that his moderate stance toward the South did not mean he was willing to compromise basic Republican principles. If anything, Adams and Seward were willing to conciliate because they were not willing to compromise.22
So fervently did Seward believe that war was unnecessary to destroy slavery that he made heroic but misleading efforts to cultivate unionists in the Upper South in a desperate attempt to limit the scope of secession to the Deep South. Inevitably his behavior raised suspicions among the “stiff-backs” in the Republican Party. Was Seward willing to offer the South a proposal that would allow slavery to expand into the territories? That was the line in the sand Republicans had drawn—no more expansion of slavery—yet only by abandoning that line was there any hope of avoiding war, if there was indeed any chance at all. Given Seward’s desperate desire to avoid a war and his own driving ambition to take charge of the situation, some people thought he might cross the line and support an agreement that would allow slavery into some of the western territories. In fact he never did. Not once—in Senate debates, in public speeches, or in private correspondence—did Seward so much as hint that he would support a settlement that would extend the Missouri Compromise line and allow slavery into the territories south of it. As Seward explained to his wife, he was trying “to gain time for the new administration to organize and for the frenzy of passion to subside. I am doing this,” he added, “without making any compromise whatever, by forbearance, conciliation, magnanimity.”23
Whatever he was telling Upper South unionists in private, in public Seward conceded nothing. The tone of his January 12 speech to the Senate was conciliatory, his prose was obscure, but his substance was unyielding. There was nothing to distinguish it from the speeches that had marked him as a radical ten years earlier. He would not concede that slaves were “property” under the Constitution, he would modify the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, and he would suppress the southern rebellion by force. Secession was illegal and the Union indissoluble.24 In short, Seward held fast to the standard Republican positions. But he also said more than that.
If it comes to war—if the North has to invade the South to enforce the law—the result, said Seward, would be slave rebellion. For although this was ostensibly a dispute over the disposition of the territories, it was at bottom a more fundamental conflict over “the relation of African slaves to the domestic population of the country.” It was a struggle over slavery, and the slaves knew it, Seward warned. “Freedom is to them, as to all mankind, the chief object of desire.” With a “flagrant civil war” raging all about them, can anyone expect that the slaves “will remain stupid and idle spectators?” Of course not, Seward argued. All of human history teaches us what the slaves will do in the midst of civil war. An “uprising” and “ferocious African slave population,” numbering in the millions, would overwhelm the South, and the entire slave system would come crashing down.25
There were only two ways to abolish slavery, Seward explained. The “American” way achieves abolition gradually by means of federal containment: close off access to the African slave trade, restrict slavery to the states where it already exists, and let it die a natural death. As slavery weakens, the slave states themselves will eventually realize that they must abolish slavery on their own. This was the peaceful resolution he and the Republicans hoped to pursue. But there was a second, “European” path by which “direct abolition” would be “effected, if need be, by compulsion.” Seward was likely referring to the cases in which European nations had imposed abolition on their Caribbean colonies. In the United States the Constitution did not allow the federal government to emancipate slaves in the states—except in wartime when, Republicans believed, federal authorities could legally free slaves in an effort to suppress a rebellion. So long as the slave states remained within the Union, the United States would follow the “American” path. But if the South secedes, “if dissolution prevail,” Seward asked, “what guarantee shall there be against the full development here of the fearful and uncompromising hostility to slavery which elsewhere pervades the world?”26 Secession meant war, Seward warned, and war promised swift, violent military emancipation.
Such were the alternatives Seward and the Republicans were offering to the slave states: abandon any claim to a constitutional right of property in slaves and submit to a peaceful containment policy that would put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction, or leave the Union and face the prospect of immediate, violent military emancipation. Once a slave state left the Union, gradual abolition was no longer an option, except in the Border States that remained loyal. Secession will “hasten the downfall of American slavery at least one hundred years,” the Indianapolis Daily Journal explained.27 Far from resolving the sectional crisis, an Iowa Republican declared in January of 1861, secession ensured that the “irrepressible conflict” would “gather fierceness and energy, and will continue until the last chain forged for the enslavement of men on this continent, will fall from the limbs of the bondman.” The secessionists, the editor argued, are working “for the extinction of slavery” just as surely as they are “for the dismemberment of the Government.” Secession will not protect slavery, Republicans warned. “Disunion, rather, is abolition,” Salmon Chase explained, “and abolition through civil and servile war, which God forbid!”
Northern threats of military emancipation rose in tandem with secessionism in the Lower South. The very idea of secession is “utterly preposterous,” one pro-Lincoln paper in Boston declared shortly after Lincoln’s victory was announced. “The only results to the rebellious States would be a bloody strife confined entirely to their own territory, [and] the immediate and violent abolition of slavery.” In December, days before South Carolina seceded, the Indianapolis Daily Journal found some cause for “satisfaction” among those who hated slavery: “The dissolution of the American Union seals the doom of American slavery.” Secession will fail, a Republican editor in Springfield, Illinois, declared. “Universal Liberty is to be the eventual law of this land. Slave-holding traitors are only hastening the day when that law shall take effect.” If the Union is destroyed, the Bloomington, Illinois, Weekly Pantagraph warned, “one may foresee that American slavery is destined to die a bloody death, and to come sooner and more suddenly to a tragical termination. It will not be in the power of man to avert it.”28 With secession Republicans promised a military emancipation that would abolish sla
very more quickly—and with more bloodshed—than peaceful containment.
These were the loud editorial echoes of the constitutional principles developed by antislavery activists over several decades. As John Quincy Adams had long before warned, the constitutional protection of slavery would be nullified if the slave states rebelled, for then the federal government would be empowered to emancipate slaves as a means of suppressing a rebellion. In the very act of seceding, Republicans declared, the slave states forfeited any “rights” slavery had under the Constitution. Lincoln himself had hinted at this in September of 1859. Addressing southerners who were already threatening secession, he declared that if they “divided the Union” because Republicans refused to treat slavery the way secessionists demanded, northerners would “cease to be under obligations to do anything for you.” In that case, Lincoln asked ominously, “how much better off do you think you will be?”29
By early 1861 Republicans everywhere were issuing similar threats, only more overtly. “Suppose the southern states go out of the Union to escape northern aversion to slavery.” That would only “free” the North “from all the constitutional restraints that now limit its action.” Until now the North has always been “willing to allow to slavery all the protection that the Constitution even by implication requires,” the Iowa State Register argued. But “when the severance comes” the northern states “will see to it, that the curse of human bondage shall not pass beyond its present limits.” An Indiana paper was even more emphatic that the North was constitutionally freed from slavery thanks to secession. “No more protection then,” it declared, “no more fugitive slave laws, no more right of transit, no more suppressing of slave insurrections by Federal troops.” By January of 1861, this was standard Republican rhetoric.30