by H. W. Brands
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IN EARLY AUGUST victory looked closer than ever. “I hesitate to say it, but it really appears now as if the success of the Republican ticket is inevitable,” Lincoln wrote to a Republican friend. “We have no reason to doubt any of the states which voted for Fremont. Add to these Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and the thing is done.”
His Republican neighbors in Springfield shared his anticipation and held a rally that included a stop at his front door. He felt compelled to come out but not to speak. “I appear among you upon this occasion with no intention of making a speech,” he declared. “It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my present position, to make no speeches.” He would let people look at him, but that was all. After a few minutes he bowed out. “You will kindly let me be silent,” he said.
Sometimes silence required more justification. He developed a stock answer: “My published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say,” he told one questioner, among many. In this case he added, “Justice and fairness to all, is the utmost I have said, or will say.”
Yet he couldn’t ignore the possible consequences of his election. Southern fire-eaters insisted that their states would secede if Lincoln won. He said he didn’t believe them. “The people of the South have too much of good sense, and good temper, to attempt the ruin of the government,” he replied to a New York Republican who had raised the issue. “At least, so I hope and believe.” Lincoln’s answer was labeled “Private,” but he didn’t ask the recipient to burn it. Without challenging the separatists directly, he wanted to let out that he had confidence in the ordinary people of the South.
The question of the South’s reaction grew more pressing as November approached. One writer after another urged him to reassure the South he had no designs against slavery there. He steadfastly refused. With the election just weeks away, he was more determined than ever to keep silent on matters of substance. “I appreciate your motive when you suggest the propriety of my writing for the public something disclaiming all intention to interfere with slaves or slavery in the States,” he responded to a questioner from Tennessee. “But in my judgment, it would do no good. I have already done this many, many, times; and it is in print, and open to all who will read. Those who will not read, or heed, what I have already publicly said, would not read, or heed, a repetition of it.” Wrapping his caution in the words of the Gospel, he said, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead.”
To another correspondent, also seeking a statement of reassurance to the South, Lincoln asked, “What is it I could say which would quiet alarm? Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness and cowardice, which perhaps should be avoided. Why do not uneasy men read what I have already said? And what our platform says? If they will not read, or heed, these, would they read, or heed, a repetition of them? Of course the declaration that there is no intention to interfere with slaves or slavery in the states, with all that is fairly implied in such declaration, is true; and I should have no objection to make, and repeat the declaration a thousand times, if there were no danger of encouraging bold bad men to believe they are dealing with one who can be scared into anything.” Such bad men must receive no encouragement, and they would get none from Abraham Lincoln.
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LINCOLN’S STRATEGY of silence paid off on election day. His ticket swept the Northern states, giving him a decisive majority of the electors. The Republicans, the antislavery party, had captured the White House in only their second try. They celebrated again, this time with the assurance of victory achieved.
Lincoln himself was of two minds about the result. He was pleased to have won, to have achieved his highest ambition. But he had been given nothing like the mandate a president-elect hopes for. He had lost every Southern state, and in the country at large, half again as many people had voted against him as for him. He would be the sixteenth president of the republic fashioned by America’s founders, but if the angry voices already rising in the South were to be credited, he might be the last.
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ROBERT BARNWELL RHETT WASN’T angry at the outcome of the election; he was delighted. Rhett was the most torrid of South Carolina fire-eaters, having been hoping and working for secession for more than a decade. The Charleston Mercury, the paper he owned, had amplified every argument in favor of secession and dismissed every argument against. For many months Rhett and the paper had portrayed the “Black Republicans” as an imminent threat to slavery and the Southern way of life, and insisted that the election of a Republican president must finally force South Carolina to do what it should have done years before. As Lincoln’s victory became inevitable, Rhett’s paper grew breathless that Southern freedom was at hand. “The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery,” the Mercury proclaimed on November 3. “No man of common sense, who has observed the progress of events, and who is not prepared to surrender the institution, with the safety and independence of the South, can doubt that the time for action has come—now or never. The Southern States are now in the crisis of their fate; and, if we read aright the signs of the times, nothing is needed for our deliverance but that the ball of revolution be set in motion.”
Some in the South were arguing that secession should await agreement among the slave states on when and how the break might best occur. Rhett blasted such caution as the counsel of timidity. Secession would never come if every state waited on the slowest. Cooperation would follow individual secession; it need not precede it. “The example of a forward movement only is requisite to unite Southern states in a common cause.” And South Carolina was the state to provide the example. “Other states are torn and divided, to a greater or less extent, by old party issues. South Carolina alone is not. Any practical move”—by South Carolina—“would enable the people of other states to rise above their past divisions, and lock shields on the broad ground of Southern security.”
Delay would strengthen the enemies of the South. “In the position in which the South will be placed by the election of an Abolitionist white man as President of the United States, and an Abolitionist colored man as Vice President of the United States”—the attacks on the Republican ticket had included assertions of black ancestry for Hannibal Hamlin—“we should not hesitate,” Rhett and the Mercury declared. “The evils of submission are too terrible for us to risk them.”
South Carolina took Rhett’s advice. Upon the confirmation of the electoral vote, state leaders summoned a convention, which swiftly approved an ordinance of secession. A declaration of the causes—a manifesto of secession—accompanied the ordinance. The declaration noted that a previous convention, in 1852, had proclaimed South Carolina’s sovereign right to secede from the Union, a right that followed from the nature of the Constitution as a compact among independent states. But the earlier convention had forborne to act on that right. South Carolina was acting now because its grievances against the Union had grown intolerable. First was the failure of the federal government to enforce the constitutional obligation of other states to return fugitive slaves. Nearly all the Northern states by law or practice materially obstructed the return of fugitives. “Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding states, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.” Beyond this, the Northern states actively discriminated against the property rights of the South and conspired to attack its institutions. “Those states have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the states and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishme
nt among them of societies whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign”—carry off—“the property of the citizens of other states. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.”
The agitation against the South had been growing for a quarter century, during which South Carolina had patiently hoped for better, the declaration continued. The recent election revealed that such hope was misplaced. “Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that article establishing the executive department the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the states north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common government, because he has declared that that ‘Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,’ and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.”
The victory of the antislavery party placed South Carolina’s interests in grave peril. “On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the government,” the declaration said. “The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the states will be lost. The slaveholding states will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the federal government will have become their enemy.” South Carolina had chosen to preempt this fate. “The Union heretofore existing between this state and the other states of North America is dissolved.”
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WENDELL PHILLIPS WAS twice happy. The abolitionist orator had applauded Lincoln’s election, and now he cheered South Carolina’s secession—not for South Carolina’s sake, but for the Union’s. He hoped the other slave states would join South Carolina in leaving. For Phillips, Southern secession would allow the free states to rid themselves of the moral burden they had been carrying for decades. “After drifting a dreary night of thirty years before the hurricane, our ship of state is going to pieces on the lee shore of slavery,” Phillips said. And none too soon. He likened the present moment to 1776. Just as the American colonies had broken free from Britain, so the North was about to break free from the South. Anyone who placed Union over honor now should be ostracized as the Loyalists had been ostracized then. “Suppose at that moment John Adams had cried out, ‘Now let the people everywhere forget independence, and remember only ‘God save the king’!” Phillips’s audience hooted appreciatively.
Phillips granted the Southern right to secede, on moral and practical grounds. “A Union is made up of willing states, not of conquered provinces,” he said. Perhaps the Constitution forbade secession; perhaps the North had a legal right to keep the South in the Union. This didn’t matter. “There are some rights, quite perfect, yet wholly incapable of being enforced. A husband or a wife who can only keep the other partner within the bond by locking the doors and standing armed before them, had better submit to peaceable separation.” Phillips’s listeners nodded.
Some would mourn the breakup of the Union as the failure of a noble experiment. Not Phillips. “Real unions are not made; they grow. This was made, like an artificial waterfall or a Connecticut nutmeg. It was not an oak which today a tempest shatters. It was a wall hastily built, in hard times, of round boulders; the cement has crumbled, and the smooth stones, obeying the law of gravity, tumble here and there. Why should we seek to stop them, merely to show that we have a right and can?” Better to start work on the successor to this doomed thing. “Let us build, like the pyramids, a fabric which every natural law guarantees; or, better still, plant a Union whose life survives the ages.”
Abolitionists who endorsed secession had to answer a troubling question: Would it not entrench Southern slavery the more? Phillips said no. On the contrary, it would guarantee the end of Southern slavery. He quoted Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, an opponent of secession. “If I were an abolitionist,” Johnson had recently said, “and wanted to accomplish the abolition of slavery in the Southern states, the first step I would take would be to break the bonds of this Union. I believe the continuance of slavery depends on the preservation of this Union, and a compliance with all the guarantees of the Constitution.” Phillips agreed. Outside the Union, he said, slavery would confront the growing hostility of the world without the protection of the Constitution and of the North. Outside the Union, no Fugitive Slave Act would compel the return of escaped slaves. John Brown had had to take the slaves he rescued from Missouri all the way to Canada; once the South left the Union, the next John Brown’s destination would be Illinois or Ohio.
The civilized nations were paying close attention, Phillips said. What they wanted to see was where Americans stood on the issue of the hour. “Let the world distinctly understand why they go—to save slavery,” he said of the secessionists, “and why we rejoice in their departure—because we know their declaration of independence is the jubilee of the slave.” Yes, the Union of 1787 would have failed. But it had been doomed from the start. “All lies bear bitter fruit. Today is the inevitable fruit of our fathers’ faithless compromise in 1787.” Other countries must see that Americans had finally come to their senses. “For the sake of the future, in freedom’s name, let thinking Europe understand clearly why we sever.”
Phillips asked himself, rhetorically, why he placed so little value on the Union. “Because I consider it a failure,” he answered. “Certainly, so far as slavery is concerned, it is a failure.” The number of slaves had quintupled under the aegis of the Union; this hardly recommended the Union as a promoter of freedom. American values and morality had suffered commensurately since the founding of the Union. “At its outset, nine men out of ten were proud to be called abolitionists; now, nine out of ten would deem it not only an insult but a pecuniary injury to be charged with being so.” Freedom of speech had been sacrificed to slavery, lest slaveholders take offense. “Before the Union existed, Washington and Jefferson uttered the boldest antislavery opinions; today they would be lynched in their own homes, and their sentiments have been mobbed this very year in every great city of the North.”
Having failed, the Union must give way. The slaveholders doomed themselves by secession, Phillips said, but they gave liberty a second chance in America. “All hail, then, Disunion!”
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WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON THOUGHT the South had gone mad. “The election of the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to the presidency of the United States has operated upon the whole slaveholding South in a manner indicative of the torments of the damned,” Garrison wrote in The Liberator. “The brutal dastards and bloody-minded tyrants who have so long ruled the country with impunity are now furiously foaming at the mouth, gnawing their tongues for pain, indulging in the most horrid blasphemies, uttering the wildest threats, and avowing the most treasonable designs. Their passions, ‘set on fire of hell,’ are leading them into every kind of excess, and they are inspired by a demoniacal phrenzy.” Garrison quoted from the Book of Revelation to mark the South as the modern Babylon; he turned to the ancient Greeks—and John Brown—to declare, “Whom the gods intend to destroy, they first make mad.” This was the condition of Southern leaders, he said. “They are insane from their fears, their guilty forebodings, the lust of power and rule, their hatred of free institutions, their consciousness of merited judgments; so that they may be properly classed with the inmates of a lunatic asylum.”
Abraham Lincoln’s pledges not to touch slavery in the states were lost on the Southern firebrands, said Garrison. “In vain does the Republican party present but one point of antagonism to slavery—to wit, no more territorial expansion—and exhibit the utmost cautiousness not to give offence in any other direction, and make itself hoar
se in uttering professions of loyalty to the Constitution and the Union. Still they protest that its designs are infernal, and for them there is ‘sleep no more’! Are not these the signs of a demented people?”
How should the rest of the country deal with these lunatics? “The question in its simplest form is, What is the value to the free states of their federal connection with the slave states?” asked Garrison. His answer was: very little. Slavery was an embarrassment to the United States in world affairs. Slavery, like all forms of bound labor, was a drag on a modern economy. Slavery discredited hard work and manual labor. Slavery debauched democracy. The conclusion was inescapable. “The free states not only derive no advantage from their Union with the slave states but positive injury.”
The North should welcome separation from the South, Garrison said. If the South didn’t separate from the North, the North should separate from the South. At the very least, the North should not resist separation. “When any of the slave states are bent upon secession, it should not be opposed by others but permitted peaceably and cheerfully, as a happier revolution than that which delivered us from British domination. Every slaveholding state which secedes from the Union cuts off a decayed branch from its”—the Union’s—“growth and accelerates its advance to power, respect, virtue and prosperity.”