4: The Crisis
<< 3: The Politicians and the New Day || 5: Secession >>
The Southern moderates in 1859 form one of those political
groups, numerous enough in history, who at a crisis arrest our
imagination because of the irony of their situation.
Unsuspecting, these men went their way, during the last summer of
the old regime, busy with the ordinary affairs of state, absorbed
in their opposition to the Southern radicals, never dreaming of
the doom that was secretly moving toward them through the plans
of John Brown. In the soft brilliancy of the Southern summer
when the roses were in bloom, many grave gentlemen walked slowly
up and down together under the oaks of their plantation avenues,
in the grateful dusk, talking eagerly of how the scales trembled
in Southern politics between Toombs and Yancey, and questioning
whether the extremists could ride down the moderate South and
reopen the slave trade. In all their wondering whether Douglas
would ever come back to them or would prove the blind Samson
pulling down their temple about their ears, there was never a
word about the approaching shadow which was so much more real
than the shades of the falling night, and yet so entirely shut
away from their observation.
In this summer, Stephens withdrew as he thought from public life.
With an intensely sensitive nature, he had at times flashes of
strange feeling which an unsophisticated society would regard as
prophetic inspirations. When he left Washington "on the
beautiful morning of the 5th of March, 1859, he stood at the
stern of the boat for some minutes gazing back at the capital."
He had announced his intention of not standing again as a
Representative, and one of his fellow-passengers asked jokingly
whether he was thinking of his return as a Senator. Stephen's
reply was full of emotion, "No, I never expect to see Washington
again unless I am brought here as a prisoner of war." During the
summer he endeavored to cast off his intuition of approaching
disaster. At his plantation, "Liberty Hall," he endeavored to be
content with the innumerable objects associated with his youth;
he tried to feel again the grace of the days that were gone, the
mysterious loveliness of the Southern landscape with its immense
fields, its forests, its great empty spaces filled with glowing
sunshine. He tried to possess his troubled soul with the severe
intellectual ardor of the law. But his gift of second sight
would not rest. He could not overcome his intuition that, for all
the peace and dreaminess of the outward world, destiny was upon
him. Looking out from his spiritual seclusion, he beheld what
seemed to him complete political confusion, both local and
national. His despairing mood found expression a little later in
the words: "Indeed if we were now to have a Southern convention
to determine upon the true policy of the South either in the
Union or out of it, I should expect to see just as much
profitless discussion, disagreement, crimination, and
recrimination amongst the members of it from different states and
from the same state, as we witness in the present House of
Representatives between Democrats, Republicans, and Americans."
Among the sources of confusion Stephens saw, close at home, was
the Southern battle over the reopening of the slave trade. The
reality of that issue had been made plain in May, 1859, when the
Southern commercial congress at Vicksburg entertained at the same
time two resolutions: one, that the convention should urge all
Southern States to amend their constitutions by a clause
prohibiting the increase of African slavery; the other, that the
convention urge all the Legislatures of Southern States to
present memorials to Congress asking the repeal of the law
against African slave trade. Of these opposed resolutions, the
latter was adopted on the last day of the convention*, though the
moderates fought hard against it.
*It is significant that the composition of these Southern
commercial congresses and the Congress of the whole Southern
people was strikingly different in personnel. Very few members
of the commercial congresses reappear in the Confederate
Congress.
The split between Southern moderates and Southern radicals was
further indicated by their differing attitudes toward the
adventurers from the United States in Central America. The
Vicksburg Convention adopted resolutions which were thinly veiled
endorsements of southward expansion. In the early autumn another
Nicaraguan expedition was nipped in the bud by the vigilance of
American naval forces. Cobb, prime factor in the group of
Southern moderates as well as Secretary of the Treasury, wrote to
Buchanan expressing his satisfaction at the event, mentioning the
work of his own department in bringing it about, and also
alluding to his arrangments to prevent slave trading off the
Florida coast.
But the spirit of doubt was strong even among the moderates.
Douglas was the target. Stephens gives a glimpse of it in a
letter written during his last session in Congress. "Cobb called
on me Saturday night," he writes. "He is exceedingly bitter
against Douglas. I joked him a good deal, and told him he had
better not fight, or he would certainly be whipped; that is, in
driving Douglas out of the Democratic party. He said that if
Douglas ever was restored to the confidence of the Democracy of
Georgia, it would be over his dead body politically. This shows
his excitement, that is all. I laughed at him, and told him he
would run his feelings and his policy into the ground." The
anger of Cobb, who was himself a confessed candidate for the
Democratic nomination, was imperiling the Democratic national
machine which Toombs was still struggling so resolutely to hold
together. Indeed, as late as the autumn of 1859 the machine
still held together.
Then came the man of destiny, the bolt from the blue, the end of
the Chapter. A marvelous fanatic—a sort of reincarnation of the
grimmest of the Covenanters—by one daring act shattered the
machine and made impossible any further coalition on the
principle of "nothing doing." This man of destiny was John
Brown, whose attack on Harper's Ferry took place October 16th,
and whose execution by the authorities of Virginia on the charges
of murder and treason occurred on the 2nd of December.
The incident filled the South with consternation. The prompt
condemnation of it by many Republican leaders did not offset, in
the minds of Southerners, the fury of praise accorded by others.
The South had a ghastly tradition derived chiefly from what is
known as Nat Turner's Rebellion in Virginia, a tradition of the
massacre of white women and children by negroes. As Brown had
set opt to rouse a slave rebellion, every Southerner familiar
with his own traditions shuddered, identifying in imagination
John Brown and Nat Turner. Horror became rage when the
Southerners heard of enthusiastic applause in Boston and of
Emerson's description of Brown as "that new saint" who was to
"make the gallows glorious like the cross." In the excitement
produced by remarks such as this, justice was not done to
Lincoln's censure. In his speech at Cooper Institute in New
York, in February, 1860, Lincoln had said: "John Brown's
effort...in its philosophy corresponds with the many attempts
related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors.
An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people, until he
fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He
ventures the attempt which ends in little else than in his own
execution." A few months afterwards, the Republican national
convention condemned the act of Brown as "among the gravest of
crimes."
An immediate effect of the John Brown episode was a passionate
outburst from all the radical press of the South in defense of
slavery. The followers of Yancey made the most of their
opportunity. The men who voted at Vicksburg to reopen the slave
trade could find no words to measure their hatred of every one
who, at this moment of crisis, would not declare slavery a
blessing. Many of the men who opposed the slave traders also felt
that, in the face of possible slave insurrection, the peril of
their families was the one paramount consideration.
Nevertheless, it is easy for the special pleader to give a wrong
impression of the sentiment of the time. A grim desire for
self-preservation took possession of the South, as well as a
deadly fear of any person or any thing that tended directly or
indirectly to incite the blacks to insurrection. Northerners of
abolitionist sympathies were warned to leave the country, and in
some cases they were tarred and feathered.
Great anger was aroused by the detection of book-agents who were
distributing a furious polemic against slavery, "The Impending
Crisis of the South: How to Meet It", by Hinton Rowan Helper, a
Southerner of inferior social position belonging to the class
known as poor whites. The book teemed with such sentences as
this, addressing slaveholders: "Do you aspire to become victims
of white non-slave-holding vengeance by day and of barbarous
massacres by the negroes at night?" It is scarcely strange,
therefore, that in 1859 no Southerner would hear a good word of
anyone caught distributing the book. And yet, in the midst of all
this vehement exaltation of slavery, the fight to prevent a
reopening of the slave trade went bravely on. Stephens, writing
to a friend who was correspondent for the "Southern Confederacy",
in Atlanta, warned him in April, 1860, "neither to advocate
disunion or the opening of the slave trade. The people here at
present I believe are as much opposed to it as they are at the
North; and I believe the Northern people could be induced to open
it sooner than the Southern people."
The winter of 1859-1860 witnessed a famous congressional battle
over the speakership. The new Congress which met in December
contained 109 Republicans, 101 Democrats, and 27 Know-Nothings.
The Republican candidate for speaker was John Sherman of Ohio.
As the first ballot showed that he could not command a majority,
a Democrat from Missouri introduced this resolution "Whereas
certain members of this House, now in nomination for speaker, did
endorse the book hereinafter mentioned, resolved, That the
doctrines and sentiments of a certain book, called 'The Impending
Crisis of the South: How to Meet It', are insurrectionary and
hostile to the peace and tranquillity of the country, and that no
member of this House, who has indorsed or recommended it, is fit
to be speaker of the House."
During two months there were strange scenes in the House, while
the clerk acted as temporary speaker and furious diatribes were
thundered back and forth across the aisle that separated
Republicans from Democrats, with a passage of fisticuffs or even
a drawn pistol to add variety to the scene. The end of it all
was a deal. Pennington, of the "People's Party" of New Jersey,
who had supported Sherman but had not endorsed Helper, was given
the Republican support; a Know-Nothing was made sergeant-at-arms;
and Know-Nothing votes added to the Republican votes made
Pennington speaker. In many Northern cities the news of his
election was greeted with the great salute of a hundred guns, but
at Richmond the papers came out in mourning type.
Two great figures now advanced to the center of the Congressional
stage—Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi, a lean eagle of
a man with piercing blue eyes, and Judah P. Benjamin, Senator
from Louisiana, whose perpetual smile cloaked an intellect that
was nimble, keen, and ruthless. Both men were destined to play
leading roles in the lofty drama of revolution; each was to
experience a tragic ending of his political hope, one in exile,
the other in a solitary proscription amid the ruins of the
society for which he had sacrified his all. These men, though
often spoken of as mere mouthpieces of Yancey, were in reality
quite different from him both in temper and in point of view.
Davis, who was destined eventually to become the target of
Yancey's bitterest enmity, had refused ten years before to join
in the secession movement which ignored Calhoun's doctrine that
the South had become a social unit. Though a believer in slavery
under the conditions of the moment, Davis had none of the passion
of the slave baron for slavery at all costs. Furthermore, as
events were destined to show in a startlingly dramatic way, he
was careless of South Carolina's passion for state rights. He
was a practical politician, but not at all the old type of the
party of political evasion, the type of Toombs. No other man of
the moment was on the whole so well able to combine the elements
of Southern politics against those more negative elements of
which Toombs was the symbol. The history of the Confederacy
shows that the combination which Davis now effected was not as
thorough as he supposed it was. But at the moment he appeared to
succeed and seemed to give common purpose to the vast majority of
the Southern people. With his ally Benjamin, he struck at the
Toombs policy of a National Democratic party.
On the day following the election of Pennington, Davis introduced
in the Senate a series of resolutions which were to serve as the
Southern ultimatum, and which demanded of Congress the protection
of slavery against territorial legislatures. This was but
carrying to its logical conclusion that Dred Scott decision which
Douglas and his followers proposed to accept. If Congress could
not restrict slavery in the territories, how could its creature,
a territorial legislature do so? And yet the Douglas men
attempted to take away the power from Congress and to retain it
for the territorial legislatures. Senator Pugh of Ohio had
already locked horns with Davis on this point, and had attempted
to show that a territorial Legislature was independent of
Congress. "Then I would ask the Senator further," retorted the
logical Davis, "why it is he makes an appropriation to pay
members of the territorial legislature; how it is that he invests
the Governor with veto power over their acts; and how it is that
he appoints judges to decide upon the validity of their acts."
In the Democratic convention which met at Charleston in April,
1860, the waning power of political evasion made its last real
stand against the rising power of political positivism. To
accept Douglas and the idea that somehow territorial legislatures
were free to do what Congress could not do, or to reject Douglas
and endorse Davis's ultimatum—that in substance was the issue.
"In this convention where there should be confidence and
harmony," said the "Charleston Mercury", "it is plain that men
feel as if they were going into a battle." In the committee on
resolutions where the States were equally represented, the
majority were anti-Douglas; they submitted a report affirming
Davis's position that territorial legislatures had no right to
prohibit slavery and that the Federal Government should protect
slavery against them. The minority refused to go further than an
approval of the Dred Scott case and a pledge to abide by all
future decisions of the Supreme Court. After both reports had
been submitted, there followed the central event of the
convention—the now famous speech by Yancey which repudiated
political evasion from top to bottom, frankly defended slavery,
and demanded either complete guarantees for its continued
existence or, as an alternative, Southern independence. Pugh
instantly replied and summed up Yancey's speech as a demand upon
Northern Democrats to say that slavery was right, and that it was
their duty not only to let slavery alone but to aid in extending
it. "Gentlemen of the South," he exclaimed, "you mistake us—you
mistake us—we will not do it."
In the full convention, where the representation of the States
was not equal, the Douglas men, after hot debate, forced the
adoption of the minority report. Thereupon the Alabama
delegation protested and formally withdrew from the convention,
and other delegations followed. There was wild excitement in
Charleston, where that evening in the streets Yancey addressed
crowds that cheered for a Southern republic. The remaining
history of the Democratic nominations is a matter of detail. The
Charleston convention adjourned without making nominations. Each
of its fragments reorganized as a separate convention, and
ultimately two Democratic tickets were put into the field, with
Breckinridge of Kentucky as the candidate on the Yancey ticket
and Douglas on the other.
While the Democrats were thus making history through their
fateful break-up into separate parties, a considerable number of
the so-called best people of the country determined that they had
nowhere politically to lay their heads. A few of the old Whigs
were still unable to consort either with Republicans or with
Democrats, old or new. The Know-Nothings, likewise, though their
number had been steadily melting away, had not entirely
disappeared. To unite these political remnants in any definite
political whole seemed beyond human ingenuity. A common
sentiment, however, they did have—a real love of the Union and a
real unhappiness, because its existence appeared to be
threatened. The outcome was that they organized the
Constitutional Union Party, nominating for President John Bell of
Tennessee, and for Vice President Edward Everett of
Massachusetts. Their platform was little more than a profession
of love of the Union and a condemnation of sectional selfishness.
This Bell and Everett ticket has a deeper significance than has
generally been admitted. It reveals the fact that the sentiment
of Union, in distinction from the belief in the Union, had become
a real force in American life. There could be no clearer
testimony to the strength of this feeling than this spectacle of
a great congregation of moderate people, unable to agree upon
anything except this sentiment, stepping between the sectional
parties like a resolute wayfarer going forward into darkness
along a perilous strand between two raging seas. That this
feeling of Union was the same thing as the eager determination of
the Republicans, in 1860, to control the Government is one of
those historical fallacies that have had their day. The
Republican party became, in time and under stress of war, the
refuge of this sentiment and proved sufficiently far-sighted to
merge its identity temporarily in the composite Union party of
1864. But in 1860 it was still a sectional party. Among its
leaders Lincoln was perhaps the only Unionist in the same sense
as Bell and Everett.
Perhaps the truest Unionists of the North, outside the
Constitutional Union Party, in 1860, were those Democrats in the
following of Douglas who, after fighting to the last ditch
against both the sectional parties, were to accept, in 1861, the
alternative of war rather than dissolution. The course of
Douglas himself, as we shall see hereafter, showed that in his
mind there was a fixed limit of concession beyond which he could
not go. When circumstances forced him to that limit, the
sentiment of Union took control of him, swept aside his political
jugglery, abolished his time-serving, and drove him into
cooperation with his bitterest foes that the Union might be
saved. Nor was the pure sentiment of Union confined to the North
and West. Though undoubtedly the sentiment of locality was more
powerful through the South, yet when the test came in the
election of 1860, the leading candidate of the upper South, in
Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was John Bell, the
Constitutional Unionist. In every Southern State this sentiment
was able to command a considerable part of the vote.*
*A possible exception was South Carolina. As the presidential
electors were appointed by the legislature, there is no certain
record of minority sentiment.
Widely different in temper were those stern and resolute men
whose organization, in perfect fighting trim, faced eagerly the
divided Democrats. The Republicans had no division among
themselves upon doctrine. Such division as existed was due to
the ordinary rivalry of political leaders. In the opinion of all
his enemies and of most Americans, Seward was the Republican man
of the hour. During much of 1859 he had discreetly withdrawn from
the country and had left to his partisans the conduct of his
campaign, which seems to have been going well when he returned in
the midst of the turmoil following the death of John Brown.
Nevertheless he was disturbed over his prospects, for he found
that in many minds, both North and South, he was looked upon as
the ultimate cause of all the turmoil. His famous speech on the
"irrepressible conflict" was everywhere quoted as an exultant
prophecy of these terrible latter days.
It was long the custom to deny to Seward any good motive in a
speech which he now delivered, just as it was to deny Webster any
good motive for his famous 7th of March speech. But such
criticism is now less frequent than it used to be. Both men were
seeking the Presidency; both, we may fairly believe, were shocked
by the turmoil of political currents; each tried oiling the
waters, and in the attempt each ruined his candidacy. Seward's
speech in condemnation of John Brown in February, 1860, was an
appeal to the conservative North against the radical North, and
to many of his followers it seemed a change of front. It
certainly gained him no new friends and it lost him some old
ones, so that his star as a presidential candidate began its
decline.
The first ballot in the Republican convention surprised the
country. Of the votes, 233 were necessary for a choice. Seward
had only 173 1/2. Next to him, with 102 votes, stood none of the
leading candidates, but the comparatively obscure Lincoln. A gap
of more than 50 votes separated Lincoln from Cameron, Chase, and
Bates. On the second ballot Seward gained 11 votes, while
Lincoln gained 79. The enemies of Seward, finding it impossible
to combine on any of the conspicuous candidates, were moving
toward Lincoln, the man with fewest enemies. The third ballot
gave Lincoln the nomination.
We have seen that one of the basal questions of the time was
which new political group should absorb the Whig remainder. The
Constitutional Union party aimed to accomplish this. The
Republicans sought to out-maneuver them. They made their
platform as temperate as they could and yet consistent with the
maintenance of their opposition to Douglas and popular
sovereignty; and they went no further in their anti-slavery
demands than that the territories should be preserved for free
labor.
Another basal question had been considered in the Republican
platform. Where would Northern capital stand in the
reorganization of parties? Was capital, like men, to become
frankly sectional or would it remain impersonal, careless how
nations rose or fell, so long as dividends continued? To some
extent capital had given an answer. When, in the excitement
following the John Brown incident, a Southern newspaper published
a white list of New York merchants whose political views should
commend them to Southerners, and a black list of those who were
objectionable, many New Yorkers sought a place in the white list.
Northern capital had done its part in financing the revived slave
trade. August Belmont, the New York representative of the
Rothschilds, was one of the close allies of Davis, Yancey, and
Benjamin in their war upon Douglas. In a word, a great portion
of Northern capital had its heart where its investments were—in
the South. But there was other capital which obeyed the same law,
and which had investments in the North; and with this capital the
Republicans had been trafficking. They had succeeded in winning
over the powerful manufacturing interests of Pennsylvania, the
pivotal State that had elected Buchanan in 1856.
The steps by which the new party of enthusiasm made its deal with
the body of capital which was not at one with Belmont and the
Democrats are not essential to the present narrative. Two facts
suffice. In 1857 a great collapse in American business—"the
panic of fifty-seven"—led the commercial world to turn to the
party in power for some scheme of redress. But their very
principles, among which was non-intervention in business, made
the Democrats feeble doctors for such a need, and they evaded the
situation. The Republicans, with their insistence on positivism
in government, had therefore an opportunity to make a new
application of the doctrine of governmental aid to business. In
the spring of 1860, the Republican House of Representatives
passed the Morrill tariff bill, consideration of which was
postponed by the Democratic Senate. But it served its purpose:
it was a Republican manifesto. The Republicans felt that this
bill, together with their party platform, gave the necessary
guarantee to the Pennsylvania manufacturers, and they therefore
entered the campaign confident they would carry Pennsylvania nor
was their confidence misplaced.
The campaign was characterized by three things: by an ominous
quiet coupled with great intensity of feeling; by the
organization of huge party societies in military
form—"Wide-awakes" for Lincoln, numbering 400,000, and "Minute
Men" for Breckenridge, with a membership chiefly Southern; and by
the perfect frankness, in all parts of the South, of threats of
secession in case the Republicans won.
In none of the States which eventually seceded were any votes
cast for Lincoln, with the exception of a small number in
Virginia. In almost all the other Southern States and in the
slave-holding border States, all the other candidates made
respectable showings. In Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, Bell
led. But everywhere else in the other slave-holding States
Breckinridge led, excepting in Missouri where Douglas won by a
few hundred. Every free State except New Jersey went for
Lincoln. And yet he did not have a majority of the popular vote,
which stood: Lincoln, 1,866,459; Douglas, 1,376,957;
Breckinridge, 849,781; Bell, 588,8791. The majority against
Lincoln was nearly a million. The distribution of the votes was
such that Lincoln had in the Electoral College, 180 electors;
Breckinridge, 72; Bell, 39; Douglas, 12. In neither House of
Congress did the Republicans have a majority.
1The figures of the popular vote are variously given by different
compilers. These are taken from Stanwood, A History of the
Presidency.
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