by Bruce Catton
Not all of the Southerners left the hall, and those who remained were plainly uneasy. Delegate T. B. Flournoy, of Arkansas, protested that he was a thick-and-thin slavery man who would “apply the torch to the magazine and blow it to atoms” before he would submit to wrong; yet he did not think a wrong was being done here, and he firmly believed that “in the doctrine of non-intervention and popular sovereignty are enough to protect the interest of the South.” And S. H. Moffat, of Virginia, cried passionately: “In the name of common sense, have we not enough of higher law, revolutionary, abolitionist scoundrels in the North to fight without fighting our friends?”
The delegates applauded fervently, but nothing was changed. The factions of the Democracy were going to fight their friends, the atmosphere having become so filled with distorting heat waves that friends and enemies had begun to look terribly alike. Late in the evening, unable to proceed further without rest, the convention adjourned until morning. There were the usual mass meetings that night, but the spirit had gone out of them. All men could see that they had crossed a divide, and Editor Halstead, doggedly covering his fourth convention in three months, reported that “the private cursing was not loud but deep.”7
Having lost its anti-Douglas cotton-state delegations, the convention discovered on the following morning that it was also losing its chairman. Caleb Cushing announced that inasmuch as delegations from a majority of the states had withdrawn, either wholly or in part, he felt that it was his duty to resign. His speech was greeted with cheers—the Douglas crowd cheering because they were happy to see Cushing leave (they had considered him anti-Douglas, from the start), and the galleries cheering to show that they approved his course. David Tod, of Ohio, took Cushing’s place, and tried to call the roll of states so that nominations could be made. But there was continuing uproar, with more speeches to be made, or at least to be attempted. One of these came from Ben Butler, who announced that he himself was quitting this convention, partly because there had been a partial withdrawal of a majority of the states and partly because “I will not sit in a convention where the African slave trade, which is piracy by the laws of my country, is approvingly advocated.” Butler stalked out, followed by part of the Massachusetts delegation. Then Pierre Soulé, of Louisiana, obtained the floor.
Soulé was a member of the new pro-Douglas delegation from Louisiana, seated by the convention’s action in adopting the majority report of the committee on credentials. He was dark, intense, unmistakably French in manner and in accent, and he arose to denounce “the conspiracy which has been brooding for months past” to defeat Senator Douglas; a conspiracy, he said (with obvious reference to the activities of the Buchanan administration leaders), which had been devised by “political fossils so much incrusted in office that there is hardly any power that can extract them.” He was bitter about the men who were so determined to defeat Douglas, and he spoke of them with scorn: “Instead of bringing a candidate to oppose him; instead of creating before the people issues upon which the choice of the nation could be enlightened; instead of principles discussed, what have we seen? An unrelenting war against the individual presumed to be the favorite of the nation—a war waged by an army of unprincipled and unscrupulous politicians, leagued with a power which could not be exerted on their side without disgracing itself and disgracing the nation.”8
Heartened, presumably, by the thought that there were still Douglas supporters in the South, the convention at last got down to the business of making a nomination. Since the die-hard anti-Douglas men had all departed, this was easy. On the first ballot, Douglas got 173 of 190½ votes cast, and on a second ballot he received 181½ out of 194½; and then the convention unanimously adopted a motion stating that inasmuch as Douglas had received two thirds of all the votes, he should be declared the nominee. Mild cheering and more speeches followed; and in the evening, after naming Senator Benjamin Fitzpatrick, of Alabama, as its choice for Vice-President, the convention sat back to listen to Richardson, of Illinois.
Senator Douglas, said Richardson, would accept the nomination. But he had been prepared, “for the harmony of the party, for the success of the party, for the preservation of the government always and at all times,” to withdraw his name. Then Richardson read the letter which he had had in his pocket during the recent in-fighting.
Douglas’s letter to Richardson said what his letter to Richmond had said, in somewhat sharper language. Douglas began by reiterating his doctrine of non-intervention and went on: “While I can never sacrifice the principle, even to attain the Presidency, I will cheerfully and joyfully sacrifice myself to maintain the principle. If, therefore, you and my other friends, who have stood by me with such heroic firmness at Charleston and Baltimore, shall be of the opinion that the principle can be preserved and the unity and ascendancy of the Democratic party maintained and the country saved from the perils of Northern abolitionism and Southern disunion by withdrawing my name and uniting upon some other non-intervention and Union loving Democrat, I beseech you to pursue that course.”
Richardson put the letter back in his pocket and added his own final word of defiance to his foes in the deep South:
“I have borne this letter with me for three days, but those gentlemen who have seceded from this convention placed it out of my power to use it. And the responsibility, therefore, is on them.… We in the North have one sectional party to fight, and intend to whip them. You have an equally sectional party to fight in the South, and we expect you to whip them.”9
Then the convention adjourned, its labor accomplished for good or for ill. (One last chore remained. Senator Fitzpatrick, named for the vice-presidency, felt himself unable to accept, and the Democratic National Committee a few days later named Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia, in his place.)
But the show was not over. Like Charleston, Baltimore on this final day had two conventions. While the original convention was nominating Douglas, the anti-Douglas men convened in the hall of the Maryland Institute. They considered themselves the real Democratic convention, and they were in high good spirits. The Baltimore Sun remarked that there were no arguments and no fights: “All restraint of feeling had disappeared,” and it was easy to recognize “the perfect restoration of that geniality of intercourse which is alone the earnest diagonal of a harmonious result.” Caleb Cushing, greeted with applause, was installed as chairman, and when he called the roll of the states, it became apparent that this was largely a Southern convention.
Sixteen delegates were present from Massachusetts, two from New York, one from Vermont, and one from Iowa; the border states were all represented, and there were delegations from California and from Oregon. No other Northern states were represented, but the cotton states were out in force—except for South Carolina: clinging rigidly to principle, the South Carolina delegation was still in Richmond, watching from afar, prepared to endorse what was done here if all went as it should. The reporter from the Sun remarked that he had never before seen the Southern leaders looking so happy. Yancey sat at his ease and “glowed with satisfaction,” and even Georgia’s redoubtable Senator Robert Toombs, usually so grim of visage, showed a face “for once lit up with good cheer.” The general atmosphere, the Sun man believed, was “a feeling of sectional pride and loyalty to the Southern leaders that is superior to convictions of either principle or expediency.”
It did not take this harmonious convention long to do what it had convened to do. A platform was speedily put together and adopted, bluntly asserting the sharp pro-slavery principles that had been fought for so hard at Charleston, commending the projected acquisition of Cuba and endorsing the plan for a railroad from some point on the Mississippi River to some point on the Pacific Coast. Then John C. Breckinridge was placed in nomination; he won a two-thirds majority on the first ballot, and was given the nomination unanimously, and Joseph Lane, of Oregon, was named for the vice-presidency. (These nominations were warmly approved by the Richmond convention.) And then, before final adjournment, the conven
tion listened to Yancey.
Yancey was jubilant. What he had worked for over the years was now coming to pass, and it was his time to crow. “The storm clouds of faction have drifted away,” he said, “and the sunlight of principle, under the Constitution, and of the Union under the Constitution, shines brightly upon the national Democracy.” The party, the Constitution, and the Union itself were safe: and yet he himself was no worshiper at the shrine of the Union. “I am no Union shrieker. I meet great questions fairly, on their own merits. I do not try to drown the judgment of the people shrieking for the Union. I am neither for the Union nor against the Union—neither for disunion nor against disunion. I urge or oppose measures upon the ground of their constitutionality and wisdom or the reverse.”10
Yancey went on at length, reaching at last the point of anticlimax; spectators in the gallery began to leave, Chairman Cushing fidgeted visibly in his chair, and this speech was the last one. The convention adjourned … and the country had two Democratic parties and two Democratic candidates. Editor Halstead reflected that the real trouble lay in the convention system, which was no better than “a system of swindling.” The Douglas men, he felt, had come to Baltimore blinded by their own enthusiasm: “They did not know the power and desperation of the South, and were foolish enough to believe the opposition to them in that quarter would quietly subside. They were, however, met in a spirit more intolerant than their own.”11
2: The Great Commitment
If the leaders could speak for the people, the South had committed itself. It would not permit Stephen A. Douglas to become President, even though the price of beating him might be the election of a Black Republican. Such an election, since it would be manifestly intolerable, would be proper ground for dissolution of the Federal Union; but the dissolution would come, not to avoid an immediate threat to the stability of Southern society, but as an alternative preferable to the tacit admission that the institution which Southern society lived by might some day have to undergo change. At Charleston and at Baltimore the South had taken its stand. It would remain the South, separate and unalterable. He who could not subscribe to that fact would be an enemy.
The motives that compel men to act are sometimes as confusing as the things that grow out of the completed actions. When the Southern delegates walked proudly out of the Democratic conventions they drew armies after them, and put the touch of fire on quaintly named places which no one then knew anything about—Chickamauga Creek, Stone’s River, the tidewater barrens at Cold Harbor, and the drowsy market town of Gettysburg, to name but a few. But why they did this and why it had to come out as it did are questions that no one then could have answered and that remain riddles to this day.1 In part, what was done and what came of it depended on what other men would do in response—it took two sides, after all, to bring about a Sumter bombardment, a battle of Antietam, or a rough-neck march from Atlanta to the sea. But a certain part of it came out of a refusal to admit that the nineteenth century was not going to end as it had begun. For a great number of reasons the American South was fated to try to stay just as it was in a time when everything men lived by was changing from top to bottom. This was the commitment that had been made and that would be paid for. Why?
Men’s motives (to repeat) are mixed and obscure, and none of the many separate decisions which brought war to America in 1861 is wholly explicable. It is quite possible that the choice which was made at these conventions in 1860 came at least in part out of a general, unreasoned resentment against immigration and the immigrant.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans both North and South could see that something cherished and familiar was being lost. Looking back only a few years, it was easy to see a society where (if the glaze of years could be trusted) everyone thought, spoke, and acted more or less alike, living harmoniously by a common tradition. That society, in retrospect, seemed to have been singularly uncomplicated and unworried—a loose amalgam of small cities, quiet towns, and peaceful farms, slow in movement, lacking railroads and telegraph lines and owning no factories of consequence, simple and self-sustaining, owing the outside world no more than casual acknowledgment—a society stirred by perfectionist impulses, perhaps, but nevertheless living to itself alone.
But this fragment of the golden age was growing dimmer as years passed. Revolutionary change was taking place everywhere, or was visibly ready to take place, and people who liked things as they had been found the change abhorrent.2 Furthermore, it seemed possible that newcomers were at least partly responsible for the change. People whose background touched neither Jamestown nor Plymouth Rock were arriving by the thousands—Germans, Irish, French, Italians, men of new tongues and new creeds and new folk ways, cut adrift from Europe by famine, by revolution, or by simple restless hope, crossing the ocean to make this new land their own. It was easy to feel that they were corrupting the old America. So there was a sudden flare-up of bitter nativist feeling. A whole political party dedicated to curbing the immigrant arose, elected Congressmen and governors, even aspired (without success) to take control of the Federal government; the American, or Know-Nothing, party, which stained generations of American life with the indelible hue of its own intolerant yearning for a simpler age. As a political movement it did not live long. A country where every citizen was the descendant of immigrants could not for very long ascribe to the immigrant all of the disturbing problems that were coming as the inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. So Know-Nothingism died, even though its lingering existence was one reason why Mr. Seward was not blessed with the Republican nomination at Chicago; but the mere fact that it had risen so quickly and spread so widely testified to a changing nation’s profound unease in the presence of change.
To fear change meant to fear the alien—the man who looked and talked and acted differently, and who therefore was probably dangerous. And of all the groups whose migration to America had caused strain, the largest of all, and the one whose presence seemed to be the most disturbing, was one racially homogenous bloc which, to men of that day, seemed to be entirely beyond assimilation. Its members had been coming in for the better part of two centuries. When they arrived they did not fan out across the land, dispersing and mingling and losing clear-cut identity among people already stamped with Americanism, as most immigrants did. These, instead, settled in large groups, congregating in some states until they actually constituted a majority of the population, going to other states hardly at all, clinging with pathetic tenacity to their own customs and folk ways. Of all the immigrant groups these were the most distinctive—in language, in appearance, in culture—and although they were among the most peaceful, easygoing, and uncomplaining people the world has ever seen, their mere presence frightened native Americans almost beyond endurance. Because this was so, the navy patrolled the seas to see that no more of these people took ship for America, and in the states where they settled there were strict laws, rigidly enforced, for their control.
These people, of course, were the Negroes, who had come from Africa—mostly from the enormous, ill-omened bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, from the steaming concentration camps which had been set up for them on those pestilential shores as depots of embarkation. That they had emigrated from their native lands through no desire of their own made no difference; they had come from beyond the seas and now they were here, and a bewildered country that was inclined to give all immigrants some of the blame for its unresolved problems had become so exasperated by the mere presence of these Africans that in 1860 it could discuss its present difficulties and its future way out of them only in terms of this one specific group.
The long voyage across the sea to America lies embedded in the subconscious memory of every American. It was a hard trip even under the best of conditions, and many people died trying to achieve it, but it was made more tolerable by the unvoiced promise that lay at the end. After it was made, its hardships and dangers faded slowly out of sight because those who came were volunteers led on by hope, an
d there was something in the New World to justify that hope after the trip had ended. But for the Negro it had been different. The trip itself was worse—fearfully, unspeakably worse—and what came after it was very little better than the trip itself. The institution of slavery had become comparatively benign, to be sure, but it was still slavery: a vast system of forced labor that sustained the economy of half a continent, offering to those who labored no prospect whatever for a better life. To the Negro, hope was denied. There was only survival, bought at the price of surrendering human dignity. The Negro had to remain what he was and as he was, his mere presence a mocking denial of the nation’s basic belief in freedom and the advancement of the human spirit. He was the one man in America who could not be allowed a share in America’s meaning.
Since he was not allowed to talk, the Negro did not complain much about this, but the business was disturbing to other people because it was obvious that slavery was morally wrong and everyone knew that things morally wrong could not endure; nor could they bring enduring good fortune to anyone. It was supposed, half a century or more before this darkening year of 1860, that in the fullness of time slavery would wither away in the natural course of things as an evil outgrown. But the business did not work out that way. The America which had seemed as pastoral as Eden was becoming a very different sort of place, and the conditions under which slavery existed grew extremely complex; and presently the very forces that made slavery more and more of an anachronism worked powerfully to keep it alive. Modern industrialism, taking shape beyond the seas but touching America as well, exerted a pressure beneath which the Southern states of America were all but helpless. These states could produce enormous quantities of cotton. Using slave labor they could produce it very cheaply, and in steadily increasing volume; and because they could do this they had to do it, for their land had become the base for an industrial process that was entirely outside of their control. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America had reached a point at which it could discard slavery only at an incalculable cost.
