Though Mayer was writing about Europe in the twentieth century, his words also describe the immediate secessionists of 1860. They exaggerated the Republican threat and urged pre-emptive action to forestall the dangers they conjured up. The South could not afford to wait for an "overt act" by Lincoln against southern rights, they insisted. "If I find a coiled rattlesnake in my path," asked an Alabama editor, "do I wait for his 'overt act' or do I smite him in his coil?" When conditional unionists tell us "that it will be several years before Lincoln will have control of the sword and the purse through the instrumentality of Congress," observed a Mississippian, that only "furnishes additional argument
25. Augusta Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861; New Orleans Bee, June 25, 1860, quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 23; Thornton, Politics and Power in a Slave Society, 416; Columbia Daily South Carolinian, Aug. 3, 1860, in Dumond, ed., Southern Editorials, 154.
26. Rowland, Davis, V, 50, 72, IV, 357; O.R. Navy, Ser. 2, Vol. 3, pp. 257–58.
27. The Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe, 1870–1956: An Analytic Framework (New York, 1971), 86.
for action NOW. Let us rally . . . before the enemy can make good his promise to overwhelm us. . . . Delay is dangerous. Now is the time to strike."28
II
Seldom in history has a counterrevolution so quickly provoked the very revolution it sought to pre-empt. This happened because most northerners refused to condone disunion. On that matter, if on little else, the outgoing and incoming presidents of the United States agreed.
In his final message to Congress, on December 3, 1860, James Buchanan surprised some of his southern allies with a firm denial of the right of secession. The Union was not "a mere voluntary association of States, to be dissolved at pleasure by any one of the contracting parties," said Buchanan. "We the People" had adopted the Constitution to form "a more perfect Union" than the one existing under the Articles of Confederation, which had stated that "the Union shall be perpetual." The framers of the national government "never intended to implant in its bosom the seeds of its own destruction, nor were they guilty of the absurdity of providing for its own dissolution." State sovereignty was not superior to national sovereignty, Buchanan insisted. The Constitution bestowed the highest attributes of sovereignty exclusively on the federal government: national defense; foreign policy; regulation of foreign and interstate commerce; coinage of money. "This Constitution," stated that document, "and the laws of the United States . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . any thing in the constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding." If secession was legitimate, warned the president, the Union became "a rope of sand" and "our thirty-three States may resolve themselves into as many petty, jarring, and hostile republics. . . . By such a dread catastrophe the hopes of the friends of freedom throughout the world would be destroyed. . . . Our example for more than eighty years would not only be lost, but it would be quoted as a conclusive proof that man is unfit for self-government."29
Thousands of northern editorials and speeches echoed these themes. Fears of a domino effect were especially pervasive. "A successful rebellion
28. Wetumpka Enquirer, Nov. ?, 1860, quoted in Reynolds, Editors Make War, 142; Jackson Mississippian, Nov. 14, 1860, quoted in Rainwater, Mississippi, Storm Center of Secession, 163.
29. James D. Richardson, comp., Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, 10 vols. (Washington, 1897), V, 628–37.
by a few States now," ran an editorial typical of hundreds, "will be followed by a new rebellion or secession a few years hence." This was not mere alarmism. Some Americans were already speculating about a division of the country into three or four "confederacies" with an independent Pacific coast republic thrown in for good measure. Several New York merchants and Democrats with ties to the South were talking of setting up as a free city. A prominent New York lawyer secretly informed railroad president George B. McClellan in December 1860 that "when secession is fairly inaugurated at the South, we mean to do a little of the same business here & cut loose from the fanactics of New England & of the North generally, including most of our own State." In January 1861 Mayor Fernando Wood brought this matter into the open with a message to the aldermen advocating the secession of New York City. The project went nowhere, but it did plant seeds of copper-headism that germinated a couple of years later.30
"The doctrine of secession is anarchy," declared a Cincinnati newspaper. "If any minority have the right to break up the Government at pleasure, because they have not had their way, there is an end of all government." Lincoln too considered secession the "essence of anarchy." He branded state sovereignty a "sophism." "The Union is older than any of the States," Lincoln asserted, "and, in fact, it created them as States." The Declaration of Independence transformed the "United Colonies" into the United States; without this union then, there would never have been any "free and independent States." "Having never been States, either in substance, or in name, outside the Union," asked Lincoln, "whence this magical omnipotence of 'State rights,' asserting a claim of power to lawfully destroy the Union itself?" Perpetuity was "the fundamental law of all national governments." No government "ever had provision in its organic law for its own termination. . . . No State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. . . . They can only do so against law, and by revolution."31
Neither Lincoln nor any other northerner denied the right of revolution. After all, Yankees shared the legacy of 1776. But there was no
30. Providence Daily Post, Nov. 19, 1860, in Howard C. Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (New York, 1942), 183; Samuel L. M. Barlow to McClellan, Dec. 6, 1860, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library; William C. Wright, The Secession Movement in the Middle Atlantic States (Rutherford, N.J., 1973), 176–79.
31. Cincinnati Daily Commercial, May 6, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 828; CWL, IV, 264–65, 268, 433–37.
"right of revolution at pleasure," declared a Philadelphia newspaper. Revolution was "a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause," wrote Lincoln. But "when exercised without such a cause revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power." The South had no just cause. The event that precipitated secession was the election of a president by a constitutional majority. The "central idea" of the Union cause, said Lincoln, "is the necessity of proving that popular government is not an absurdity. We must settle this question now, whether in a free government the minority have the right to break up the government whenever they choose."32
But how was it to be settled? This problem was compounded by the lame-duck syndrome in the American constitutional system. During the four-month interval between Lincoln's election and inauguration, Buchanan had the executive power but felt little responsibility for the crisis, while Lincoln had responsibility but little power. The Congress elected in 1860 would not meet in regular session for thirteen months, while the Congress that did meet in December 1860 experienced an erosion of authority as members from the lower South resigned when their states seceded. Buchanan's forceful denial of the legality of disunion ended with a lame confession of impotence to do anything about it. Although the Constitution gave no state the right to withdraw, said the president, it also gave the national government no power "to coerce a State into submission which is attempting to withdraw."33
Republicans ridiculed this reasoning. Buchanan had demonstrated that "no state has the right to secede unless it wishes to," jibed Seward, and that "it is the President's duty to enforce the laws, unless somebody opposes him."34 But Republicans seemed unable to come up with any better alternative. Several options presented themselves: coercion, compromise, or allowing "the erring sisters to depart in peace." Although various Republican leaders sanctioned each of these approaches at one time or another, none of the options commanded a majority before April 1861. Instead, a rather vague fourth alternative emerged—described as "masterly inactivity" or a "Fabian policy"—a positi
on of watchful waiting, of making no major concessions but at the same time
32. Philadelphia Ledger, Dec. 28, 1860, quoted in Kenneth M. Stampp, And the WarCame: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–61 (Baton Rouge, 1950), 34; CWL, IV, 434n.; Dennett, Lincoln/Hay, 19.
33. Richardson, Messages and Papers, V, 634–36.
34. Stampp, And the War Came, 56.
avoiding needless provocation, in the hope that the disunion fever would run its course and the presumed legions of southern unionists would bring the South back to its senses.
When Congress convened in December several Republicans, especially from the Old Northwest, "swore by everything in the Heavens above and the Earth beneath that they would convert the rebel States into a wilderness." "Without a little blood-letting," wrote Michigan's radical, coarse-grained Senator Zachariah Chandler, "this Union will not . . . be worth a rush." The danger of losing access to the lower Mississippi valley may have accounted for the bellicosity of many mid-westerners. The people of the Northwest, said the Chicago Tribune, would never negotiate for free navigation of the river. "It is their right, and they will assert it to the extremity of blotting Louisiana out of the map."35
And how would customs duties be collected at southern ports? Whose customhouses were they—American or Confederate? In the nullification crisis of 1832, Andrew Jackson had vowed to use force to collect duties in South Carolina and to hang the nullification leaders. "Oh, for one hour of Jackson!" exclaimed many Yankee Republicans who developed a sudden retrospective affection for this Tennessee Democrat. If letters received by Republican congressmen were any indication, their constituents stood ready to "coerce" the rebels. "We elected Lincoln," wrote an Illinoisian, "and are just as willing, if necessity requires, to fight for him. . . . Little Boone [County] can be relied on for 500 Wide Awakes, well armed and equipped." Lincoln "must enforce the laws of the U. States against all rebellion," added an Ohioan, "no matter what the consequences."36
Lincoln seemed to agree. In December 1860 he told his private secretary that the very existence of government "implies the legal power, right, and duty . . . of a President to execute the laws and maintain the existing government." Lincoln quietly passed word to General-in-Chief
35. Henry Adams, "The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61," in Adams, The Great Secession Winter of 1860–61 and Other Essays, ed. George Hochfield (New York, 1958), 4; Chandler to Austin Blair, Feb. 11, 1861, in Nevins, Emergence, II, 411–12; Chicago Tribune, Feb. 25, 1861, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 558.
36. Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Dec. 17, 1860; A. W. Metcalf to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 12, 1860, in William E. Baringer, A House Dividing: Lincoln as President Elect (Springfield, Ill., 1945), 237; J. W. Whiting to Trumbull, Nov. 19, 1860, E. D. Mansfield to Salmon P. Chase, Nov. 26, 1860, in Stampp, And the War Came, 27.
Winfield Scott to make ready to collect the customs and defend federal forts in seceded states, or to retake them if they had been given up before his inauguration. In Springfield the Illinois State Journal, quasi-official spokesman for Lincoln during this period, warned that "disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards. . . . The laws of the United States must be executed—the President has no discretionary power on the subject—his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution."37
Republicans preferred to distinguish between "coercion"—which had a harsh ring—and enforcement of the laws. "It is not making war upon a State to execute the laws," insisted the Boston Advertiser. But to southerners this was a distinction without a difference. To "execute the laws" in a foreign country—the Confederacy—would mean war. "Why, sir," asked Louis Wigfall of Texas, "if the President of the United States were to send a fleet to Liverpool, and attempt there . . . to collect the revenue . . . would anybody say that the British Government was responsible for the bloodshed that might follow?"38
In any event the whole question was hypothetical until March 4, for Buchanan intended no "coercion." And even if he had, the resources were pitifully inadequate. Most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered over two thousand miles of frontier, while most of the navy's ships were patrolling distant waters or laid up for repair. The strongest armed forces during the winter of 1860–61 were the militias of seceding states. Moreover, upper-South unionists who had managed to keep fire-eaters in their states at bay made an impression on Republicans with warnings that anything which smacked of coercion would tip the balance toward secession. For a time, therefore, Republican opinion drifted uncertainly while other groups sought to fashion a compromise.
Buchanan's message to Congress set the agenda for these efforts. He first blamed the North in general and Republicans in particular for "the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question" which had now "produced its natural effects" by provoking disunion. Because of Republicans, said the president, "many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before morning."
37. John G. Nicolay and John Hay, Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), III, 248; Lincoln to Francis P. Blair, Dec. 21, 1860, Lincoln to Elihu B. Washburne, Dec. 22, 1860, in CWL, IV, 157, 159; Illinois State Journal, Nov. 14, Dec. 20, 1860, in Nevins, Emergence, II, 356–57.
38. Both quotations from Stampp, And the War Came, 39, 44.
Buchanan stopped short of asking the Republican party to dissolve; instead he asked northerners to stop criticizing slavery, repeal their "unconstitutional and obnoxious" personal liberty laws, obey the fugitive slave law, and join with the South to adopt a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in all territories. Unless Yankees proved willing to do these things, said Buchanan, the South would after all "be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government." As an additional sign of northern good will, Buchanan also advised support for his long-standing effort to acquire Cuba, which would further placate southern fears by adding a large new slave state to the Union.39
Republican responses to these suggestions may be readily imagined. The printable comments included: "Pharasaical old hypocrite . . . bristling with the spirit of a rabid slaveocracy . . . wretched drivel . . . truckling subserviency to the Cotton Lords . . . gross perversion of facts . . . brazen lies." After the voters had just rejected the Breckinridge platform by a margin of 4,000,000 to 670,000 in the presidential election, Buchanan "proposes an unconditional surrender . . . of six-sevenths of the people to one-seventh . . . by making the Breckinridge platform a part of the Constitution!"40
Although few of the compromise proposals introduced in Congress went so far as Buchanan's, they all shared the same feature: Republicans would have to make all the concessions. Republicans refused to succumb to what they considered blackmail. Indeed, the possibility that a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Unionists might patch together a "shameful surrender" and call it compromise caused some Republicans to prefer the alternative of letting the cotton states "go in peace." Having long regarded the Union as a "covenant with death," Garrisonian abolitionists were glad that slaveholders had broken the covenant. Even non-Garrisonians agreed, in Frederick Douglass's words, that "if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders [and] a new drain on the negro's blood, then . . . let the Union perish." Several radical Republicans initially took a similar position. If South Carolina wanted to leave, said the Chicago Tribune in October 1860, "let her go, and like a limb lopped from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls." Horace Greeley's New York Tribune prominently advocated the go-in-peace approach. "If the Cotton States shall
39. Richardson, Messages and Papers, V, 626–27, 630, 638, 642.
40. Various Republican editorials quoted in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials, 154, 127, 137, 152, 146, 138, 147.
become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go," wrote Greeley in a famous editorial three days after Lincoln's election. "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section
is pinned to the residue by bayonets."41
A genuine desire to avoid war accounted in part for this attitude. But other motives were probably more important, for all of these Republicans subsequently endorsed war to preserve the Union. Greeley's go-in-peace editorials represented a dual gambit, one part aimed at the North and the other at the South. Like most Republicans, Greeley believed at first that southern states did not really intend to secede; "they simply mean to bully the Free States into concessions." Even after South Carolina went out, Greeley wrote to Lincoln that "I fear nothing . . . but another disgraceful backdown of the free States. . . . Another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured, will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads."42 To advise the North to let the disunionists go, therefore, became a way of deflecting compromise. Toward the South, Greeley expected his gambit to operate like the strategy of parents who tell an obstreperous adolescent son, after his repeated threats to run away from home, "There's the door—go!" By avoiding talk of coercion it might also allow passions to cool and give unionists breathing room to mobilize their presumed silent majority below the Potomac.43
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