Stephens’s pessimism was justified. In those days, several northern states held statewide elections weeks before the presidential balloting, and the Republicans swept those races, portending their success in November. Douglas, sensing the inevitable, abruptly broke off his campaign and hurried to the South to plead with leaders and voters that the Union, above all, must be preserved; that the legacy of the Founders transcended the election of one man. It was an extraordinary display of selfless patriotism and personal courage at a time when posturing passed for statesmanship. That it was a fool’s errand, he could not know. Douglas knew only the Union.
Douglas fought a growing perception in the South that two nations already existed, a perspective shared by increasing numbers of northerners as well. The religious schism of the 1840s fueled these views initially. Southerners understood the implications of their increasingly minority status within the government and the nation. “Northern” and “American” now seemed interchangeable terms. Technology, fashion, finance, immigration, and the most widely read newspapers and magazines all congregated at the North and extended their influence throughout the nation. The fact that northern advances rested in part on the labor of four million slaves galled many southerners. They believed that without the South, the North would be a much lesser region.
Objectively, northerners and southerners shared many things. They both believed in the American dream that hard work brought financial well-being and independence. Both regions harbored aspiring urban middle classes that looked to investments in their families and their communities as down payments on a rosy future. Northerners and southerners chased after railroads, canals, harbor improvements, and real estate. But for all the urban hubbub, the hiss of steam engines, and the click-click of the telegraph, America was still a nation of family farms and small shops, regardless of section. Americans prayed in similar ways; theirs was a personal God, and they reached for heaven with the same fervor with which they sought out the main chance of financial success. Northerners and southerners interpreted the world around them through their evangelical theology, that God had a purpose for them and their country, and that events fit into a larger divine plan.
North and South shared a revolutionary heritage, what Abraham Lincoln would call the “mystic chords of memory.” They struggled to interpret that legacy, live up to it, and preserve it. Historical societies formed in profusion during the 1840s and 1850s in both sections. Northerners and southerners both prized the West, not only as the newest land but also as the American dreamscape, a place of renewal and redemption.33
Such similarities might have overcome political differences, were it not for slavery. The institution transformed common bonds into bitter differences. The technologies that drew a vast continent together—the steam railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph—also transmitted news and information. Partisan political journals, magazines, sectarian publications, popular literature, and published speeches flooded homes, offices, and churches. An ink war erupted long before Fort Sumter. Citizens north and south exaggerated their mutual animosity. A claim from a southern journalist in 1860 that “nine-tenths” of northerners were abolitionists was preposterous, but the leading dailies and magazines in the South offered no contradiction. With every escalating event of the 1850s, “Slave Power” and “abolitionist” seemed as appropriate as “slave state” and “free state” as sectional descriptors.
The similar economic aspirations of North and South also foundered on the institution of slavery. If southerners could not carry their slaves westward or count on evenhanded economic development policies from the federal government, then their dependence was sealed and slavery doomed. By the late 1850s, southern political leaders looked to Mexico and the Caribbean, and the reopening of the African slave trade, to counter the immigrant population boom fueling northern political and economic power and leaving the South further behind.
Northerners and southerners may have prayed to the same God and espoused similar evangelical Protestant principles, but slavery inspired vastly different professions of faith. From the southern perspective, the Bible sanctioned slavery while northerners disregarded the holy book and the tradition of keeping religion out of politics. To one southern minister, the divide was simple. Northerners were “atheists, infidels, communists, free-lovers, rationalists, Bible haters, anti-christian levelers, and anarchists.” Southerners, on the other hand, were “God-fearing and Christ-loving, conscientious people … that … have a zeal for God, and seek his glory and the good of man.”34
Northern ministers preached that slavery violated the Golden Rule and threatened both individual souls and America’s unique compact with God. Israel’s downfall confirmed the truth that “righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is a reproach.” Expiating the sin of slavery was a Bible-based imperative for America. As for mixing religion and politics, slavery touched the core of personal and national morality. How could Christians remain silent?35
Southern writers and politicians believed that the anti-slavery spirit in the North derived not only from a very loose interpretation of the Bible but also from an excess of democracy. What a writer in De Bow’s Review called the “no property masses” were ascendant in the North and would eventually unleash their hostility against property in the South. The writer drastically miscast the Republican Party as the repository of property-hating men, but the identity of Republicans and disorder in the southern mind obscured the reality. The affinity of propertyless men for the Republican Party was the “surest means of striking down the largest body of property holders in the country … as is the fact with the slave-owners of the South.” The class struggle had spread from revolutionary Europe to northern cities, prompting cynical northern politicians to use the territories as a safety valve while retaining the migrants’ allegiance in the West.36
The North represented to southerners the unfortunate conclusion of the democratic revolution in American politics during the first half of the nineteenth century, a revolution in which the South participated. From the 1820s onward, the newer states of the Lower South installed white male suffrage without property qualifications. In the older parts of the South, new constitutions afforded greater representation for western portions of those states and broadened the suffrage basis. Anxiety among the large property holders, who were also, of course, the large slaveholders, accompanied this process. Associating anti-slavery with propertyless masses in the North, the slaveholders projected their own fears onto northern society.
The restraint that characterized a society based on slavery was absent in the free North. Slavery, not freedom, best ensured republican government, an argument advanced by the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in July 1860: “The defense of slavery is the defense not of the South alone … but a defense of republican institutions. The welfare of the Union and all the hopes of humanity that repose upon its maintenance, are inseparably bound up with slavery. With slavery and with the liberty to extend itself wherever it may, the Republic stands, without this liberty, it falls.” Another southern editor, contemplating the likely election of Abraham Lincoln, put the matter bluntly: “Slavery cannot share a government with democracy.”37
The democratic principle that most rankled the South was majority rule. John C. Calhoun spent the better part of his political career devising schemes to ensure the protection of minority, i.e., southern, rights. In 1859, Louisiana’s governor declared that “the Republican [Party] appears to foster the idea that … the majority of the voices in the whole United States … ought to rule.” Few northerners would find that exceptional, but the idea frightened southerners. The result of majority rule had dire consequences for the South, matching even the worst excesses of European mass uprisings. South Carolina’s Lawrence Keitt worried that “the concentration of absolute power in the hands of the North will develop the wildest democracy ever seen on this earth—unless it should have been matched in Paris in 1789.”38
Southern concerns about the northern perv
ersion of republican principles were well taken. The nation of the Founders no longer existed. The ethnic and religious diversity, the spread of universal white male suffrage, and the geographic expanse of the nation differed markedly from the conditions extant at the founding. These changes strained the orderly and balanced system of government established by the Constitution. “The worst of all possible forms of government,” the Rev. James Henley Thornwell of South Carolina argued, was “democratic absolutism.” On another occasion he wrote, “I am afraid that the tendency of things in this country is to corrupt a representative into a democratic government; and to make the State the mere creature of popular caprice.”39
Southern references to the founding had to confront the inconvenient language of the Declaration of Independence, the self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Southerners asserted that Thomas Jefferson could only have been referring to white men or to Anglo-Saxon men, but his words stood as a shining rebuke to a society grounded on slavery. In 1855, Henry A. Washington, a law professor at William and Mary, delivered an address that summarized changing southern attitudes about that document. It proved so popular that the Southern Literary Messenger reprinted the speech in its April 1860 edition. After a “scientific” discussion on racial differences, Washington acknowledged that the concept of human equality “stands in the very front of the Declaration of Independence. It is there announced as a self-evident truth that all men are by nature equal.” According to Washington, however, Jefferson’s notion was both scientifically and morally incorrect and resulted “in many of the most mischievous errors of our times.” It was incontrovertible that “the white races are superior to the brown, and the brown to the black.”40
Most northerners would have agreed with southerners on the issue of white racial superiority. The cases of the Native American and the African “proved” white preeminence. However, others, including Lincoln, argued that the appropriate qualification to Jefferson’s statement was that all men are created equal “to attain their respective capacities.” Slavery was an institution that defied both God’s law of creation and the nation’s founding documents by inhibiting the African’s proper evolution.
Southerners understood that the world and their country were changing, and they were being marginalized. From a purely statistical perspective, readily available in De Bow’s Review, any literate southerner could trace the declining port revenues of New Orleans and Charleston, the burgeoning economies of Cincinnati, Chicago, and New York, and the pace of urbanization in the West. All foretold not only change but a deepening minority status. While De Bow continued to boost southern industrial and urban development, others imagined a graceful, agricultural South set off from the aggressive, materialistic, industrial North. Such a stark distinction was fanciful, but by 1860 it was easier to imagine difference.41
Slavery stood at the center of these perceived economic distinctions between North and South. Writers at the South told of the inexorable conflict between capital and labor in the North, a battle absent in the slaveholding South, where no white man could ever be subordinate or exploited, and where the slave is contented and cared for. “The dread conflict between capital and labour … only finds a peaceful solution in slavery.” As opposed to the tawdry, competitive, and chaotic society of the North, the South promoted the ascendancy of the “agricultural interest,” which created “a highly refined state of society,” true to its religion, the family, and the worker. These attributes “rest mainly upon the institution of slavery.”42
Turning away from the dynamic example of the North also implied a rejection of northern reform closely connected to the abolition movement. The softening of property proscriptions against married women, the expansion of employment and educational options for women, and the trend toward universal public education received cool receptions in the South. A writer in De Bow’s Review boasted that in the South, “the true position of woman in society [is] recognized and guarded—not the right to be unsexed, to brawl in political assemblies.… Beautiful by the heart—beautiful at the domestic board—beautiful in her ministering of charity … who would substitute for her—so soft, so lovely, so cherished and adored in the innermost heart of man—that modern Amazonian creation … of a ‘Woman’s Rights Convention.’”43
By 1860, some southerners were willing to believe that the differences between North and South were apparent from the beginning of European settlement. A correspondent in the Southern Literary Messenger wondered: “What attraction could exist between Puritan and Cavalier, between Rev. Cotton Mather and Capt. John Smith?” It was as if two separate races had somehow found themselves occupying the same contiguous geographic area and agreed to coalesce for convenience rather than on common cultural or racial grounds. Another writer summarized this argument in June 1860, just as the presidential campaign began. “A contest of races exists at present between the people of this government,” the writer explained, “the native dissimilarities which … combined, form what is called the American people.” The southern people, the writer asserted, derived from “that branch of the human race which … controls all the enlightened nations of the earth.” Northerners, on the other hand, were “more immediately descended of the English Puritans … the common people of England.”44
Thus was planted the fanciful notion that North and South represented the descendants of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers, respectively, and that each section’s distinctive racial traits derived from this ethnic difference. Georgian Thomas Cobb concluded about northerners in 1860, “They are different people from us … and there is no love between us.” The slavery controversy, brewing for more than three decades, boiled over to a realization that North and South not only had different interests but were, in fact, different peoples.45
Most northerners did not feel compelled to justify their “civilization,” if indeed they stopped to distinguish northern life from American life generally. Some believed that southerners, as slaveholders, were more prone to violence, more of a threat to democratic institutions, and more hostile to progress in general than northerners. The Fugitive Slave Law, the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott decision, and the Lecompton fraud convinced many northerners that slave society bred despotism. Much as southerners believed that slavery provided the foundation for a superior civilization, northerners saw the institution as a detriment to the spiritual and economic progress of the nation. In a society dedicated to progress, the future would always be more compelling.
The central flaw in southern society, many northerners were coming to believe, was slavery. In rhetoric reminiscent of Horace Greeley’s lamentations about how the Indians’ forlorn land reflected their lack of enterprise, William H. Seward noted that slavery undermined “intelligence, vigor, and energy” in southern blacks and whites. It produced “an exhausted soil, old and decaying towns, wretchedly-neglected roads … [and] an absence of enterprise and improvement,” rendering the institution “incompatible with all … the elements of the security, welfare, and greatness of nations.” Hinton Rowan Helper, a North Carolinian, corroborated these charges in The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), a book on the debilitating impact of slavery on the South in general and on southern whites in particular. It became a popular Republican Party campaign document.46
When Stephen A. Douglas abandoned his campaign and headed south, he understood the stakes. Threats of disunion had escalated during the campaign. Many in the North, including most Republicans, dismissed these warnings. Southerners had threatened secession periodically since the Nullification Crisis of the early 1830s, and these tantrums had always dissipated. Horace Greeley quipped that “the South could no more unite upon a scheme of secession than a company of lunatics could conspire to break out of bedlam,” and Lincoln confided to a friend that southern talk of disunion was “a sort of political game of bluff … meant solely to frighten the North.” But a generation of invective and th
e events of the 1850s had taken their toll on Americans. The prospect of a sectional party assuming power in Washington alarmed most southerners. While a majority of southerners did not want to leave the Union, they were not unconditional Unionists; they wanted guarantees that if the Republicans won the election, this sectional, anti-slavery party would not undermine their civilization.47
Abraham Lincoln captured the 1860 presidential election by winning the North. He carried the four northern border states—Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—that John C. Frémont lost in 1856. He won these states by positioning himself in the conservative wing of the Republican Party, pledging to keep the territories free for white men and disavowing any hostility toward the states in which slavery existed. As one of his Pennsylvania supporters explained, Lincoln ran as “a consistent Whig.” The people “think he is conservative, and will, if elected, carry out the principles & policies of Henry Clay.” There was no deception in this position: Lincoln admired Clay greatly, and his staunch Unionism trumped his own moral misgivings about slavery. But, as a westerner, and as a Republican, his opposition to slavery in the territories was steadfast. He had stated on numerous occasions that the West was reserved “for homes of free white people.” It was “God-given for that purpose.” The sentiment resonated not only in Pennsylvania but also and especially in the West.48
John C. Breckinridge carried most of the southern states, as expected. However, John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas combined for 55 percent of the popular vote in the South, confirming northern beliefs on the weakness of disunion sentiment there. Yet Douglas, who could lay claim to being the only national candidate, won the electoral vote of just one state, Missouri, an ominous indicator of polarization.
America Aflame Page 25
