Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  37. The platform is printed in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1124–27.

  "worthy to be printed on gilt-edged satin paper, laid away in a box of musk, and kept there." At the same time, southern Democrats accused Constitutional Unionists of "insulting the intelligence of the American people" by trying to organize a "party which shall ignore the slavery question. That issue must be met and settled."38

  Constitutional Unionists did not expect to win the election. The best they could hope for was to carry several upper-South states and weaken Lincoln sufficiently in the lower North to deny him an electoral majority. This would throw the election of a president into the House, where each state had one vote but no party controlled a majority of states. Democrats might then combine with Whig-American-Unionists to elect Breckinridge, a Kentuckian who could perhaps be weaned away from his extremist southern-rights backers. Or the Constitutional Unionists might have enough leverage to elect Bell. Or if the House failed to name a president by March 4, 1861, the vice president elected by the Democratic Senate would become acting president. That worthy individual would be either Breckinridge's running mate Joseph Lane of Oregon, a proslavery native of North Carolina, or the Constitutional Unionists' own Edward Everett.39

  But this spoiling strategy backfired. In several southern states the Constitutional Unionists felt compelled to prove themselves just as faithful to southern rights as the Democrats by embracing a federal slave code for the territories. This provoked many conservative ex-Whigs in the North to vote for Lincoln as the lesser of evils. "I will vote the Republican ticket next Tuesday," wrote a New Yorker who had initially intended to vote for Bell. "The only alternative is everlasting submission to the South. . . . I want to be able to remember that I voted right at this grave crisis. The North must assert its rights, now, and take the consequences."40 The Bell-Everett ticket won less than 3 percent of the northern vote and took no states out of the Lincoln column.

  38. Springfield Republican, quoted in Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: TheCase of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill, 1984), 50; [Lexington] KentuckyStatesman, May 8, 1860, in Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials on Secession (New York, 1931), 76.

  39. Crenshaw, Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860, 59–73; Thomas B. Alexander, "The Civil War as Institutional Fulfillment," JSH, 47 (1981), 11–13, 16, 20.

  40. The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War 1860–1865, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York, 1952), 56–57. For an analysis of the attempt by southern Constitutional Unionists to compete with Breckinridge Democrats in "Southernness," see John V. Mering, "The Slave-State Constitutional Unionists and the Politics of Consensus," JSH, 43 (1977), 395–410.

  The election of 1860 was unique in the history of American politics. The campaign resolved itself into two separate contests: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North; Breckinridge vs. Bell in the South. Republicans did not even have a ticket in ten southern states, where their speakers would have been greeted with a coat of tar and feathers—or worse—if they had dared to appear. In the remaining five slave states—all in the upper South—Lincoln received 4 percent of the popular votes, mostly from antislavery Germans in St. Louis and vicinity. Breckinridge fared a little better in the North, where he won 5 percent of the popular votes, enough to deny California and Oregon to Douglas. Lincoln carried these states by a plurality and all other free states except New Jersey by a majority of the popular vote.

  This was accomplished only by hard work. Though repudiated by the South and by the Buchanan administration, Douglas remained a formidable opponent. At the outset of the campaign he appeared to have a chance of winning eight northern and one or two border states with some 140 of the 303 electoral votes. To prevent this, Republicans mounted a campaign unprecedented in energy and oratory. Lincoln himself observed the customary silence of presidential candidates, but all other party leaders great and small took to the stump and delivered an estimated 50,000 speeches. Republicans made a special effort headed by Carl Schurz to reduce the normal Democratic majority among German-Americans. They achieved some success among German Protestants—enough, perhaps, to make a difference in the close states of Illinois and Indiana—though the lingering perceptions of Republican dalliance with nativism and temperance kept the Catholic vote overwhelmingly Democratic.41

  In a bold break with tradition, Douglas campaigned for himself. In ill health, his voice hoarse, he nevertheless ranged through the whole

  41. For conflicting interpretations of the unresolved question of the German vote in 1860, see the essays in Frederick C. Luebke, ed., Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln (Lincoln, Neb., 1971). The latest estimates of the German vote are contained in William E. Gienapp, "Who Voted for Lincoln?" John L. Thomas, ed., Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition (Amherst, 1986), 50–97, which finds that while the proportion of German Americans voting Republican in 1860 was less than half, the increase from 1856 was dramatic and may have helped provide the margin of Republican victory in Pennsylvania as well as Indiana and Illinois.

  country (except the west coast) from July to November in an exhausting tour that undoubtedly did much to bring on his death a year later. It was a courageous effort, but a futile one. Douglas carried the message to both North and South that he was the only national candidate, the only leader who could save the country from disunion. But in reality, Douglas Democrats were scarcely more a national party than the Republicans. Most southern Democrats painted Douglas nearly as black as Lincoln, and a traitor to boot. Douglas wound up with only 12 percent of the southern popular vote.

  If the Democratic charge of sectionalism against Republicans lacked credibility this time, the old standby of branding them racial egalitarians retained its potency. Republicans had increased their vulnerability on this issue by placing a constitutional amendment to enfranchise blacks on the ballot in New York state.42 If you want to vote "cheek by jowl with a large 'buck nigger,' " chanted Democratic orators and editors, if you want to support "a party that says 'a nigger is better than an Irishman,' " if you are "ready to divide your patrimony with the negro . . . vote for the Republican candidate."43 A Democratic float in a New York parade carried life-size effigies of Horace Greeley and a "good looking nigger wench, whom he caressed with all the affection of a true Republican." A banner proclaimed that "free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe." The New York Herald, largest Democratic newspaper in the country, predicted that if Lincoln was elected "hundreds of thousands" of fugitive slaves would "emigrate to their friends—the Republicans—North, and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men. . . . African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races will soon be their portion under the millennium of Republican rule."44

  This onslaught wilted a good many Republicans. Although most party newspapers in New York endorsed the equal suffrage amendment, few

  42. Negroes in New York state could vote only if they met a $250 property qualification. No such restriction applied to whites. The constitutional amendment would have removed the restriction on black voters.

  43. Albany Argus, Sept. 7, 1860, Ovid Bee, Nov. 7, 1860, quoted in Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era (Ithaca, 1982), 116, 118; New York Herald, Nov. 5, 1860; Albon Man, Jr., "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863," Journal of Negro History, 36 (1951), 379.

  44. New York Herald, Oct. 24, Nov. 5, 6, 1860, quoted in Field, Politics of Race, 117, and in Man, "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots," 378–79.

  speakers mentioned it, and the party made little effort in its behalf. Nearly one-third of the Republican voters joined virtually all Democrats in voting against it, sending the measure to a resounding defeat, even though Lincoln carried New York.45 And in the lower North generally, Republicans played down the moral issue of sla
very while emphasizing other matters of regional concern. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey they talked about the tariff; from Ohio to California the Republicans portrayed themselves as a homestead party, an internal improvements party, a Pacific railroad party. This left Democrats with less opportunity to exploit the race issue. "The Republicans, in their speeches, say nothing of the nigger question," complained a Pennsylvania Democrat, "but all is made to turn on the Tariff." Of course the Republican position on these issues constituted a flank attack on the slave power. After Buchanan had vetoed the homestead act, even a Democratic paper in Iowa denounced the president as an "old sinner" and his northern associates as "pimps and hirelings" of "the Slave Propagandists."46

  The Buchanan administration handed Republicans another issue: corruption. Americans had always viewed malfeasance and abuse of power as the gravest dangers to republican liberty. Not only was Buchanan, in Republican eyes, the pliant tool of the slave power but his administration also, in the words of historian Michael Holt, "was undoubtedly the most corrupt before the Civil War and one of the most corrupt in American history."47 An exposure of frauds filled a large volume compiled by a House investigating committee. The committee's report came off the presses in June 1860, just in time for an abridged edition to be distributed as a Republican campaign document.

  This report topped off a series of previous investigations that disclosed a sorry record of graft and bribery in government contracts, the civil service, and Congress itself. The War and Navy departments had awarded contracts without competitive bidding to firms that made contributions to the Democratic party. Postmasters in New York and Chicago under both Pierce and Buchanan had siphoned public funds into party coffers for years. Democrats had used some of this money in congressional

  45. The vote in favor of the amendment was 37 percent. Lincoln won 54 percent of the vote in New York.

  46. ——— Helfenstein to Stephen A. Douglas, July 31, 1860, in Reinhard H. Luthin, The First Lincoln Campaign (Cambridge, Mass., 1944), 208; Dubuque Herald, quoted in ibid., 179.

  47. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978), 214.

  contests in 1858. They had also bribed judges to naturalize immigrants prematurely so they could vote in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and Indiana in 1856, and had "colonized" Irish railroad construction workers in Indiana to help swing that state to Buchanan. The New York postmaster fled the country in 1860 when auditors found his accounts $155,000 short. The House committee also dug up evidence that the administration had bribed congressmen to vote for admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution. Government printing contracts, long a lucrative source of patronage, became a greater scandal than ever under Buchanan. Kickbacks from payments exceeding by several times the printing cost found their way into the party treasury.

  Secretary of War John Floyd presented the biggest target to graft hunters. He had sold government property for much less than its real value to a consortium headed by cronies. He had also signed padded bills presented to the War Department by a contractor in financial difficulties who then used these signed bills as collateral for bank loans and for negotiable bonds from an Interior Department Indian trust fund. Although partially revealed before the election, Floyd's full complicity in this matter did not come out until December 1860, when Buchanan allowed him to resign without punishment. A Virginian, Floyd pronounced himself a secessionist and returned home, where he was feted by like-minded compatriots who praised one of his final acts in office—an order (subsequently countermanded) to transfer 125 cannon from Pittsburgh to arsenals in Mississippi and Texas.48

  Republicans made big capital out of these scandals. To be sure, Buchanan was not running for re-election, and most northern Democrats had already repudiated his administration. But some Douglas Democrats had also been caught with their hands in the till, and the whole party was tarnished by the image of corruption. The "plunder of the public treasury," declared the Republican platform, "shows that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded." Republican campaigners combined this crusade to "throw the rascals out" with denunciations of the slave power. The revelations of malfeasance, said Charles Francis Adams, had shown how "the slaveholding interest has

  48. Michael F. Holt, "James Buchanan, 1857–1861," in C. Vann Woodward, ed., Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct (New York, 1974), 86–96; David E. Meerse, "Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860," CWH, 12 (1966), 116–31; Nichols, Disruption of American Democracy, 284–87, 328–31; Nevins, Emergence, II, 196–200, 372–75.

  been driven to the expedient of attempting to bribe the people of the Free States with their own money in order to maintain itself in control of the government." Horace Greeley spoke of "not one merely but two Irrepressible Conflicts—the first between . . . Free Labor . . . and aggressive, all-grasping Slavery propagandism . . . [the second] between honest administration on one side, and wholesale executive corruption, legislative bribery, and speculative jobbery on the other; and we recognize in Honest Abe Lincoln the right man to lead us in both."49 The future would reveal that a good many Republican politicians were none too honest themselves. But in 1860 the party carried an unsullied banner of reform and freedom against the tired old corrupt proslavery Democrats.

  To some members of their constituency, however, the Republican message seemed sour. When party orators discussed slavery, especially in the lower North, they often took pains to describe Republicanism as the true "White Man's Party." Exclusion of slavery from the territories, they insisted, meant exclusion of black competition with white settlers. This caused several abolitionists to denounce the Republicans as no better than Douglas Democrats. William Lloyd Garrison believed that "the Republican party means to do nothing, can do nothing, for the abolition of slavery in the slave states." Wendell Phillips even went so far as to call Lincoln "the Slave Hound of Illinois" because he refused to advocate repeal of the fugitive slave law.50

  But some Republicans came almost up to the abolitionist standard. In the upper North the old evangelical fervor against bondage infused their rhetoric. After the Republican convention Seward rediscovered the irrepressible conflict. Even in Missouri he boldly proclaimed that freedom "is bound to go through. As it has already gone through eighteen of the states of the Union, so it is bound to go through all of the other fifteen . . . for the simple reason that it is going through all the world."51

  Gubernatorial candidates John Andrew of Massachusetts and Austin Blair of Michigan, Senators Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, and Benjamin Wade, Congressmen George W. Julian and Thaddeus Stevens,

  49. Meerse, "Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860," loc. cit., 125, 124.

  50. These and similar quotations can be found in James M. McPherson, The Strugglefor Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction (Princeton, 1964), 11–18, and in McPherson, The Negro's Civil War (New York, 1965), 3–10.

  51. Emerson D. Fite, The Presidential Campaign of 1860 (New York, 1911), 192.

  nearly the whole Republican party of Vermont, and a host of other party leaders were abolitionists in all but name. Many of them did favor repeal of the fugitive slave law, along with the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the prohibition of the interstate slave trade.

  Believing that these men embodied the progressive spirit and future thrust of the Republican party, many abolitionists supported it in 1860. "Lincoln's election will indicate growth in the right direction," wrote one, while Frederick Douglass acknowledged that a Republican victory "must and will be hailed as an anti-slavery triumph."52 Southerners thought so too. Democrats below the Potomac considered Lincoln "a relentless, dogged, free-soil border ruffian . . . a vulgar mobocrat and a Southern hater . . . an illiterate partisan . . . possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections of negro equality." As the election neared, the increasing likelihood that a solid North would make Lincoln president brewed a volatile
mixture of hysteria, despondency, and elation in the South. Whites feared the coming of new John Browns encouraged by triumphant Black Republicans; unionists despaired of the future; secessionists relished the prospect of southern independence. Even the weather during that summer of 1860 became part of the political climate: a severe drought and prolonged heat wave withered southern crops and drove nerves beyond the point of endurance.53

  Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one's own neighborhood. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckin-ridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up "false-hoods and sensation tales" to "arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement."54