by H. W. Brands
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HORACE GREELEY DIDN’T PUSH the South away, but neither did he dispute secession’s legitimacy. “We hold, with Jefferson, to the inalienable right of communities to alter or abolish forms of government that have become oppressive or injurious,” the New York editor declared. “And if the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless; and we do not see how one party can have a right to what another party has a right to prevent. We must ever resist the asserted right of any state to remain in the Union and nullify or defy the laws thereof; to withdraw from the Union is quite another matter. And whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”
Yet Greeley didn’t want the South to act in haste. “We must insist that the step be taken, if it ever shall be, with the deliberation and gravity befitting so momentous an issue.” Time should be allowed for tempers to cool and calmness return. Both sides of the question should be thoroughly aired. The people, in their democratic authority, should be consulted. “Let the act of secession be the echo of an unmistakable popular fiat,” Greeley said. “A judgment thus rendered, a demand for separation so backed, would either be acquiesced in without the effusion of blood, or those who rushed upon carnage to defy and defeat it, would place themselves clearly in the wrong.”
To date, Greeley said, the demands for secession didn’t meet these criteria of deliberation. “They bear the unmistakable impress of haste—of passion—of distrust of the popular judgment. They seem clearly intended to precipitate the South into rebellion before the baselessness of the clamors which have misled and excited her can be ascertained by the great body of her people.” Greeley hoped a prudent pause would ease the jitters and set things right. “We trust that they will be confronted with calmness, with dignity, and with unwavering trust in the inherent strength of the Union and the loyalty of the American people.”
Greeley’s editorial was much quoted—too much for his later comfort. It was taken, not surprisingly, as a permission for Southern states to leave the Union. “If the Cotton States shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go in peace”—these words seemed quite clear. Greeley later claimed his purpose was to put the onus on the South; by opening the door, he would allay their claustrophobia. Perhaps that was his intent, but it was lost on most of those who read his excerpted words.
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WHAT DISTINGUISHED the responses of Phillips, Garrison and Greeley to Southern secession was the irresponsibility of the authors, in the sense that they had no legal or political responsibility for the government’s response to secession. Phillips and the others obviously hoped their words would shape government policy, but their hands had no grip on the levers of power.
William Seward was different. He was a senator, and he was being talked of as the next secretary of state. Seward’s words had heft outsiders like Phillips and the others could only envy. Seward put the present moment in historical context. Self-government on republican lines was the invention of America, he said, and it was the destiny of America. Every state in the Union had a republican form of government, and each state depended on the others. “No republican state on this continent or any other can stand alone,” Seward said. “That is an impossibility. And the reason is a simple one. So much liberty, so much personal independence, such scope to emulation and ambition as a free republic gives, where universal suffrage exists, are too much for any one state, standing alone, to maintain.” Seward drew an analogy. “Republican states are like the sheaves in the harvest field. Put them up singly and every gust blows them down; stack them together and they defy all the winds of heaven.” Seward cited Texas, which had tried independence and suffered in the experiment. The Texans couldn’t wait to join the Union, once the Union allowed them in.
At a moment when radicals on both sides were rejecting compromise, Seward embraced it. He admired the Constitution but didn’t revere it. The Union’s charter had worked well but could stand tinkering. “Is it strange,” he asked, “that this complex system of our government should be found, after a lapse of seventy years, to work a little rough, a little unequal, and that it should require that the engineer should look at the machinery to see where the gudgeon is worn out, and to see that the main wheel is kept in motion?” A minor adjustment and the machine would be running as well as ever.
Seward observed that the South wasn’t the first part of the country to consider secession. New England had done so amid the War of 1812. But New Englanders had pulled back before taking any fatal steps. Seward supposed the South would pull back too. Yes, South Carolina had voted for secession, but exposure to the cold world outside the Union would cause a change of mind. Seward professed nothing but goodwill for South Carolina. “There is not a state on earth, outside the American Union, which I like half so well as I do the state of South Carolina, neither England, nor Ireland, nor Scotland, nor France, nor Turkey—although from Turkey they sent me Arab horses, and from South Carolina they send me nothing but curses.” Seward’s audience of New Yorkers chuckled. “And I have the presumption and vanity to believe that if there were nobody to overhear the state of South Carolina when she is talking, she would confess that she liked us tolerably well. I am very sure that if anybody were to make a descent on New York tomorrow—whether Louis Napoleon, or the Prince of Wales, or his mother”—more chuckles—“or the emperor of Russia, or the emperor of Austria, all the hills of South Carolina would pour forth their populations for the rescue of New York.” Much applause. Seward added, “If any of those powers were to make a descent on South Carolina, I know who would go to her rescue.” A voice from the crowd: “We’d all go!” Seward nodded, “We’d all go—everybody.” Audience: “That’s so,” and much applause.
“Therefore they do not humbug me with their secession,” he continued. “And I do not think they will humbug you. And I do not believe that if they do not humbug you and me, they will much longer succeed in humbugging themselves.” Laughter. “Now, fellow citizens, this is the ultimate truth of all this business. These states are always to be together—always shall. Talk of striking down a star from that constellation—it is a thing which cannot be done.” Loud applause.
What should be done? “I do not know any better rule than the rule which every good father of a family observes,” Seward said. Children were sometimes rambunctious, but the father kept a steady course. And so should the national government with respect to the secessionists. “That is, be patient, kind, paternal, forbearing, and wait until they come to reflect for themselves.”
Seward, speaking in late December, said he noticed improvement already in the outlook for the Union. “I believe that secession was stronger on the night of the 6th of November last, when a president and vice-president who were unacceptable to the slave states were elected, than it is now. That is now some fifty days since, and I believe that every day’s sun which set since that time has set on mollified passions and prejudices, and that if you will only give it time, sixty days’ more suns will give you a much brighter and more cheerful atmosphere.” Great applause and cheering.
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STEPHEN DOUGLAS HAD a unique perspective on the events of that winter. In a decade he had ascended from obscurity to the apex of the most powerful party in America. More than anyone else he had set the agenda of American politics. The debates of the era were debates Douglas had started and in which he took a central part. Yet now his career lay in ruins. His party was riven, his country was fracturing, and the man whose career he had resurrected was pushing past him into the White House.
“No man
in America regrets the election of Mr. Lincoln more than I do,” Douglas told a group from New Orleans who had solicited his views in the aftermath of the balloting. “None made more strenuous exertions to defeat him; none differ with him more radically and irreconcilably upon all the great issues involved in the contest. No man living is more prepared to resist, by all the legitimate means sanctioned by the Constitution and laws of our country, the aggressive party which he and his party are understood to represent.”
Yet Douglas had no doubt where his ultimate responsibility lay, and hence his true loyalty. “I am bound, as a good citizen and law-abiding man, to declare my conscientious conviction that the mere election of any man to the presidency by the American people, in accordance with the Constitution and laws, does not of itself furnish any just cause or reasonable ground for dissolving our federal Union.”
Douglas observed that even the proponents of secession found no fault with the election itself, alleging no corruption or miscounting. Nor did any of them claim that Lincoln had done anything yet to endanger slavery. Rather, they apprehended that he would do something. “Is this apprehension well founded?” asked Douglas. He thought not. “The president can do nothing except what the law authorizes. His duty is to see the laws faithfully executed. If he fails to perform this duty he will soon find himself a prisoner before the high court of impeachment.” Douglas remarked that the Democratic party, though defeated and broken, still lived. It included many Northern conservatives on the slave question, who would hold Lincoln to account.
Present laws protected the South, Douglas said. They had been enacted with the participation of the South. Congressional arithmetic ensured that they would not be overturned without the complicity of the South. This unarguable fact made talk of secession not merely pernicious but rashly counterproductive. Douglas underlined this point: “No bill can pass either house of Congress impairing or disturbing the rights or institutions of the Southern people in any manner whatever, unless a portion of the Southern Senators and Representatives absent themselves so as to give an Abolition majority in consequence of their absence.”
The appropriate response to Lincoln’s election was not secession but patience, Douglas said—patience and confidence in the American system. “Four years will soon pass away, when the ballot-box will furnish a peaceful, legal and constitutional remedy for all the evils and grievances with which the country may be afflicted.”
Douglas suspected that for some Southerners the complaints against Lincoln were red herrings. These men—“who look upon disunion and a Southern confederacy as a thing desirable in itself, and are only waiting for an opportunity to accomplish that which had been previously resolved upon”—were as deceitful as they were wrong. They would drive the South to revolution under false pretenses. They deserved nothing but scorn.
Honest Southerners—the majority, Douglas hoped—would see things differently. “To those who regard the Union under the Constitution, as our fathers made it, the most precious legacy ever bequeathed to a free people by a patriotic ancestry, and are determined to maintain it as long as their rights and liberties, equality and honor are protected by it, the election of Mr. Lincoln, in my humble opinion, presents no just cause, no reasonable excuse for disunion.”
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THE PERSON EVERYONE wanted to hear from remained silent. Lincoln had watched the reaction to his victory, which included distress in financial markets as well as the political turmoil, and concluded he could do little constructive about it. Editors sought a statement; reporters darkened his Springfield doorstep. He disappointed them, going no further than a few scribbled lines he let a news correspondent carry back to his boss. “I find Mr. Lincoln is not insensible to any uneasiness in the minds of candid men, nor to any commercial, or financial, depression, or disturbance, in the country if there be such,” Lincoln wrote. “Still he does not, so far as at present advised, deem it necessary, or proper for him to make, or authorize, any public declaration. He thinks candid men need only to examine his views already before the public.”
This wasn’t much, and it failed the obvious test. What Lincoln had said before the election he had said as a candidate. Candidates are tempted to tailor their remarks to what they think voters want to hear. Lincoln was a candidate no longer, but the president-elect. His words would now carry weight beyond anything he had said before. Even for him simply to repeat those words as president-elect would reinforce them in a way an admonition to read the earlier speeches couldn’t.
Lincoln soon realized that if he wouldn’t speak, he at least had to explain his silence. He did so with the same caution that had marked the campaign. A former senator from Connecticut implored Lincoln to “disarm the mischief makers” by means of a public statement. Lincoln commenced his response with the disclaimer “This is intended as a strictly private letter to you.” He continued, “It is with the most profound appreciation of your motive, and highest respect for your judgment too, that I feel constrained, for the present, at least, to make no declaration for the public.” Why not? “First, I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print, and open for the inspection of all. To press a repetition of this upon those who have listened, is useless; to press it upon those who have refused to listen, and still refuse, would be wanting in self-respect, and would have an appearance of sycophancy and timidity, which would excite the contempt of good men, and encourage bad ones to clamor the more loudly. I am not insensible to any commercial or financial depression that may exist; but nothing is to be gained by fawning around the ‘respectable scoundrels’ who got it up. Let them go to work and repair the mischief of their own making; and then perhaps they will be less greedy to do the like again.”
A Missouri editor, a Democrat, taxed Lincoln for his silence; Lincoln responded with greater acerbity. “I could say nothing which I have not already said, and which is in print and accessible to the public. Please pardon me for suggesting that if the papers, like yours, which heretofore have persistently garbled, and misrepresented what I have said, will now fully and fairly place it before their readers, there can be no further misunderstanding. I beg you to believe me sincere when I declare I do not say this in a spirit of complaint or resentment; but that I urge it as the true cure for any real uneasiness in the country that my course may be other than conservative. The Republican newspapers now, and for some time past, are and have been republishing copious extracts from my many published speeches, which would at once reach the whole public if your class of papers would also publish them. I am not at liberty to shift my ground—that is out of the question. If I thought a repetition would do any good I would make it. But my judgment is it would do positive harm. The secessionists per se, believing they had alarmed me, would clamor all the louder.”
The pressure nonetheless intensified. Lincoln yielded slightly. Lyman Trumbull was scheduled to speak in Springfield; he was known to have Lincoln’s ear, and Lincoln his. Trumbull’s words would be listened to carefully. Lincoln drafted a passage for Trumbull to insert in his speech. “I have labored in, and for, the Republican organization with entire confidence that whenever it shall be in power, each and all of the states will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property, and preserving peace and order within their respective limits, as they have ever been under any administration,” Trumbull should say. “Those who have voted for Mr. Lincoln, have expected, and still expect this; and they would not have voted for him had they expected otherwise. I regard it as extremely fortunate for the peace of the whole country that this point, upon which the Republicans have been so long and so persistently misrepresented, is now to be brought to a practical test and placed beyond the possibility of doubt. Disunionists per se are now in hot haste to get out of the Union, precisely because they perceive they cannot much longer maintain apprehension among the Southern people that their hom
es and firesides and lives are to be endangered by the action of the Federal Government. With such ‘Now, or never’ is the maxim.”
Trumbull delivered the message, and the response reinforced Lincoln’s distrust of words. “The Boston Courier, and its class, hold me responsible for the speech, and endeavor to inflame the North with the belief that it foreshadows an abandonment of Republican ground by the incoming administration,” he wrote to an Illinois editor, “while the Washington Constitution and its class hold the same speech up to the South as an open declaration of war against them. This is just as I expected, and just what would happen with any declaration I could make. These political fiends are not half sick enough yet. Party malice and not public good possesses them entirely.” Quoting Jesus against the Pharisees, he said, “They seek a sign, and no sign shall be given them.” Yet he softened slightly at the end: “At least such is my present feeling and purpose.”
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EVENTS COMPELLED further revelations. Amid the developing crisis, Congress named committees to seek a formula that might hold the Union together. Lincoln advised his allies in Washington how they should conduct themselves. “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” he wrote to Lyman Trumbull for the benefit of Republicans in the Senate. “If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again. The dangerous ground—that into which some of our friends have a hankering to run—is Popular Sovereignty. Have none of it. Stand firm. The tug has to come, and better now, than any time hereafter.” To Illinois Republican Elihu Washburne, in the House, which was considering both popular sovereignty and an extension of the old Missouri Compromise line, he urged similar resistance. “Let either be done, and immediately filibustering and extending slavery recommences,” Lincoln said. “On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”