By promising a homestead act, a protective tariff, internal improvements, and even a railroad to the Pacific, Republicans were trying to appeal to westerners, to Pennsylvanians, and to antislavery men with a traditionalist bent, such as the poet James Russell Lowell. Formerly the editor of the recently established magazine The Atlantic Monthly, Lowell explained that Republicans were really “the only conservative party.” True, for him, the signal issue of the day was slavery, but Republicans intended neither to overthrow the government nor disrupt extant institutions, as it had been alleged. Comforting fellow moderates who were jittery about Republicanism, he calmed them. “The administration of Mr. Lincoln will be conservative,” he said, “because no government is ever intentionally otherwise, and because power never knowingly undermines the foundation on which it rests.”
In November Lincoln won the presidency, but it was a victory without much of a mandate. He had received slightly less than 40 percent of the popular vote. And even though he received 180 out of the 183 electoral votes from the free states—Douglas had won three of New Jersey’s seven—he couldn’t touch the South, where he wasn’t on the ballot in ten slave states. And because the Republicans won decisive congressional victories in the North, the South was fuming. The country was thus split sectionally—and tragically, as it would turn out. For Douglas had been the Union, or compromise, candidate after all: 58 percent of the popular vote had gone for Lincoln and Breckinridge combined, neither of whom represented, or so it was perceived, any compromise on slavery. (Douglas had won 29 percent of the popular vote and John Bell, of the Constitutional Union Party, 13 percent.)
Lincoln was a minority president.
Minutemen companies, clad in red shirts and dark pants, marched throughout the Southern states, volunteer soldiers placed blue cockades in their caps, and posses of white men scoured plantations to sniff out insurrections. Blacks were lynched, and suspected abolitionists were run out of town. “Passion is rash,” warned Sam Houston, the governor of Texas. Robert Toombs, once a Unionist, said that the South must “strike, strike while is yet time.”
“So we go,” said Alexander Stephens bleakly. “Our destiny seems to be fixed.”
THE SOUTHERN NOVELIST William Gilmore Simms gleefully wrote a friend, “Unionism is dead, and Conservative politicians dare not open their mouths.”
Though Lincoln’s election has been interpreted as driving the South headlong into secession, that is not the whole case. Before November, there were Southerners who considered the fire-eaters more menacing than any Republican. The Nashville Banner and Whig pointed out that while “gallant Northern Union men” had the “enemy” in their midst, “we, meanwhile, turn our attention to the sectional spirit which infests the Southern states, and which, under the lead of such restless spirits as Yancey, Keitt, Rhett, and Spratt, and their fellow disunionists threaten, equally with Republicans in the North, to prove a wedge to split the Union in twain.”
There was the economy to consider; what would happen to trade in Northern markets should secession occur? Nor were all young Southern soldiers pleased by talk of war. “Believe me there will be no such issue as these extravagant fanatics prophesy,” a young cadet at the Virginia Military Institute calmed his sister. “We consider it here as trifling talk.” Yet the cadets continued to drill, and twenty-five hundred cartridges were distributed among them. Nonetheless, the anxious youth reassured both himself and his family when he insisted, “Believe me it will amount to nothing,”
When the secession convention convened in the elegant, commercial city of Charleston on December 17, the white population was certainly not of one mind. There were schisms among the various classes and interests: the slaveholding gentry, or planters, disagreed with the nonslaveholding yeoman farmers, whose interests differed from the common laborers. Dominated by planters, the South Carolina legislature did not therefore represent everyone since its seats went to the white population in proportion to taxes paid, and the planters were certainly going to protect their capital investment—slaves. These very divisions, in fact, had been the subject of Hinton Helper’s Impending Crisis. Yet since the impending crisis was now, finally, impending—momentarily, it seemed—people formerly divided seemed to come together, at least in Charleston, where “the merchants & their clerks, the lawyers, the mechanics & all classes of business men,” as one visitor reported, “after working all day for money to support their families, drill nearly half the night in order to defend them.” South Carolina left the Union on December 20.
Southerners seemed not to consider that the federal government might try to force them back—or might declare war. Perhaps they were sanguine because the federal government had backed down in Utah, when Brigham Young and the Mormons had threatened to secede. And even without Utah, there seemed to be ample evidence that Republicans would let South Carolina go in peace, evidence that, as a matter of fact, came from the North. “The Union is unnatural, a scheme of man, not an ordinance of God,” rationalized Nathaniel Hawthorne, “and as long as it continues, no American of either section will ever feel a genuine thrill of patriotism.” Though he disagreed with Hawthorne, Horace Greeley also seemed to shrug. “If the Cotton States shall become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go,” he wrote in his widely read Tribune. “We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”
Let South Carolina go; let the whole damned South go. There were disunionists even among the abolitionists. “If the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders; it can only be stuck together and held together by a new drain on the negro’s blood,” Frederick Douglass observed, “then will every right-minded man and woman in the land say, let the Union perish, and perish forever.” Still, disunion would of necessity abandon the slaves to their Southern masters. As William Goodell, one of the founders of the Liberty Party, insisted, freeing slaves is “the religious and constitutional duty of the Union.” But Goodell’s was virtually a lone voice.
There were disunionists too among Northern Democrats. At a meeting of merchants and politicians on December 15 at Brooke’s Hall in New York City, the suave New York lawyer Charles O’Conor called the institution of slavery just and benign; if a black man was sold from one master to another, he asked, “where is the ill in that?” O’Conor maintained that the South had done right in attempting to stanch the antislavery zealotry of the North; secession was as a matter of fact the right way for the South to preserve its (states’) rights. “The only men who are dangerous to the Union,” he said, “are the honest and conscientious men of the North, who have imbibed the dreadful error that it is their duty to crush out slavery in the Southern States.” If anyone was at fault for a foundering country, that fault lay with the abolitionists. “Abolition Is Disunion,” shouted the Chicago Times. “Strangle It.”
Former president Franklin Pierce said that if more Southern states seceded from the Union, fighting would break out in the North, with Democrats lining up on the Southern side. “I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood,” Pierce told his friend Jefferson Davis, “and if through the madness of northern abolitionists that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason & Dixon’s line merely. It will be within our own borders, in our own streets.” While John O’Sullivan begged Pierce to get back into politics and work to rid the country of “this wicked & crazy Republicanism,” the Democratic mayor of New York, Fernando Wood, said that in the event of a disunion crisis, New York would declare itself a free city and continue conducting business with both sides—which is to say that New York City would have to secede too. Judah Benjamin of Louisiana hoped that the lower South would follow South Carolina’s lead; then the Middle States (and New York) would join the South, “and that New England will be left out to the Union to enjoy by herself her fanaticism and the blessings of such freedom as she prefers.”
Yet not all Southerne
rs were happy about the prospect of secession in South Carolina or elsewhere. Unionist newspapers, particularly in the upper South, wanted to give Lincoln a chance. “He is today, what he has always been,” argued Brownlow’s Knoxville Whig, “an OLD CLAY WHIG, differing in no respect—not even upon the subject of Slavery, from the Sage of Ashland.” Herschel Johnson, who had run with Stephen Douglas, was willing to blame his own party, in part, for the crisis. “Hasty action is always unwise,” he counseled. “It is superlative folly, when prompted by passion for which, our own discretion has created the existing occasion.” And he added that though he didn’t like Lincoln or the Republicans, Lincoln had been legitimately elected—and, besides, was nothing more than a Samson shorn of his locks; the man was powerless before Congress, Johnson pointed out, which was “friendly to the constitutional rights of the South.”
Benjamin F. Perry of South Carolina was more direct; he thought his fellow citizens were going straight to the devil, “exulting over the destruction of the best and wisest form of government ever sacrificed by God to man,” he wrote in his diary. “Fools & wicked fools they know what they do.” Perry had been a Stephen Douglas supporter and a friend of Yancey but no longer spoke to the latter. And Judge James Petigru of South Carolina, the president of its Historical Society and also one of the state’s few Unionists, surveyed the scene with dismay. “Whatever may be thought of the motives of the actors,” he told Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, “their folly will be as much the subject of wonder as of censure.”
“South Carolina is too small for a republic,” Petigru confided to another friend, “but too large for an insane asylum.”
Many Southerners balked at the notion that South Carolina might actually be coerced back into the Union, and if it were to be so, they threatened retaliation. The Arkansas State Gazette warned, “South Carolina has gone; let her go; and wo [sic] to the administration, or the power, that attempts to force her back into the Union against her will! The Southern States may not be united now, but an attempt to coerce South Carolina will not only unite the Southern States, but the Southern people, as one man.”
Yet South Carolina’s secession radicalized many a conservative Northerner. “If these traitors succeed in dismembering the country, they will have a front place in the Historical Gallery of Celebrated Criminals,” said George Templeton Strong. “Their suicidal frenzy tempts me to believe in Wendell Phillips and Captain John Brown.” A temperate man who had never much liked abolitionists, Strong had voted for Lincoln. And he did not regret it now. Other stiff-spined Northern Republicans said that if the North armed itself and showed itself ready to fight, all would be well—or at least better than it was. In the New-York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant could not have been clearer: “Peaceable Secession an Absurdity,” he declared as early as six days after the election.
To these Republicans, secession was treason. Treason? Robert Toombs scoffed. John Brown’s accomplices (whoever they might have been) were never punished, and citizens such as William Walker were labeled pirates; foreign nations were protected but the South left vulnerable, defenseless, desecrated. “We are worse off in the Union than if we were out of it,” he cried. “Now you can come among us; raids may be made; you may put the incendiary’s torch to our dwellings.”
“Hence we are armed,” he continued, “and hence we will stay so, until our rights are respected, and justice is done.”
Abolitionists continued to be blamed for the crisis. In Boston, angry demonstrators pelted black men and women with stones after an abolitionist meeting in a Baptist church, and demonstrators chased the gadfly abolitionist Wendell Phillips after breaking up the annual Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society meeting because, just days earlier, he had shouted, “All hail disunion.” Afterward, Phillips packed a revolver whenever he walked out of his house.
“Events,” wrote Herman Melville, “they make dreamers quail.”
Melville called his poem “The Conflict of Convictions,” which he concluded in a blast of capital letters:
YEA AND NAY—
EACH HATH HIS SAY;
BUT GOD HE KEEPS THE MIDDLE WAY.
NONE WAS BY
WHEN HE SPREAD THE SKY;
WISDOM IS VAIN, AND PROPHESY.
Many were confused, many played politics, many were indignant, everyone underestimated everyone else, few rose to the occasion, and no William Wilberforce had appeared, as Frederick Douglass had hoped, to free the slaves without bloodshed. “None can foresee the issues or how the coil of compromises is to be unraveled,” noted Bronson Alcott. Henry Adams later remarked with disdain that “the southerners were beyond all imagination demented” and that the greatest danger was the government itself; Buchanan’s lame-duck position would have been farcical if it hadn’t been so tragic.
What was Buchanan’s position? Old Buck had alienated westerners and northwesterners when he vetoed the Homestead Act, finally passed by Congress. Squelching land development in the West, he had revealed his partiality, once again, to the Southerners who feared the advent of more free states. He had also alienated many of his own supporters by allowing, if not condoning, rampant corruption in his administration, particularly in his cabinet, and by actually having offered bribes during the Kansas crisis in order to push forward the Lecompton constitution. He had alienated Republicans just for the sake of alienating them.
In his annual message to Congress that difficult December, Buchanan declared that no state had the right to secede. At the same time he also said that the federal government had no right to make war against seceding states, which is exactly what he had tried to do with the Mormons. He thus conciliated the South. He would let it secede. Newspapers such as The Brooklyn Daily Eagle took up Buchanan’s position, such as it was: yes, secession was unlawful, true, but one could do little about it. (Later it was alleged that Buchanan’s operational passivity provided the South with the time it needed to arm and to organize.)
As if that weren’t enough, to appease the South further, Buchanan brought to Congress compromise measures in the form of constitutional amendments that protected slavery in the territories and also quashed the Northern personal liberty laws that had circumvented the Fugitive Slave Act. He also proposed the acquisition of Cuba so that the South would have itself a nice new slave state.
John Sherman would remark, “The Constitution provided against every probable vacancy in the office of President, but did not provide for utter imbecility.”
By the time Congress opened its thirty-sixth session that December, the hysteria over Lincoln’s election had risen to such a pitch that the House selected a Committee of Thirty-three (each state being represented) to effect some kind of compromise with the angry South. But the days of Henry Clay had long passed. Representatives from Florida and South Carolina refused to serve on the committee. Thomas Corwin, an energetic representative from Ohio, wrung his hands. “If the States are no more harmonious in their feelings and opinions than these thirty-three representative men, then, appalling as the idea is, we must dissolve, and a long and bloody war must follow,” he cried. “I cannot comprehend the madness of the times. Southern men are theoretically crazy. Extreme Northern men are practical fools. The latter are really quite as mad as the former. Treason is in the air around us everywhere.”
John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, the seventy-three-year-old Senate veteran, rose to the disastrous occasion just before Christmas. A friend of the great compromiser Henry Clay, Crittenden could take Clay’s place, or so many hoped; he could be a savior. “The eyes of all good men in all sections are turned toward you,” a minister in Maryland wrote the senator.
Mild-mannered, chivalrous, and generally well liked, though his sunken cheeks gave him the air of a stern schoolmaster, Crittenden wanted very much to preserve the Union—to save the country in which he fervently believed and which he’d faithfully served for forty years. With that in mind—and with an eloquence he rarely summoned—Crittenden proposed a parcel of constitutional amendm
ents soon to be known as the Crittenden Compromise. The Missouri Compromise line would be extended at 36 degrees, 30 minutes latitude through the territories to the Pacific, which would protect slavery in the South and in any territories acquired south of the line. Congress would not be allowed to interfere with the interstate slave trade or to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia or to interdict slavery in slave states. The owners of escaped slaves would receive monetary compensation. Finally, Crittenden proposed that Congress never be able to abolish slavery or alter those amendments.
Visiting the United States at the time, the British novelist Anthony Trollope laughed humorlessly. “Mr. Crittenden’s compromise was moonshine.”
It was moonshine particularly to Republicans, who rightly understood that Crittenden’s proposals effectively voided their platform. “If we surrender, it is the end of us,” said Lincoln, the president-elect. Not only would Crittenden’s proposal allow slavery into the territories, he said, but “a year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they [the South] will stay in the Union.” As it happened, the compromise died in the hands of the Senate’s Committee of Thirteen, which had been appointed to deal with the crisis. The committee, which included, along with Crittenden, William Seward, Stephen Douglas, Robert Toombs, Benjamin Wade, and Jefferson Davis, turned down the proposals. All five Republicans on the committee voted against Crittenden’s so-called compromise, and the committee could agree on nothing.
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