by Bruce Catton
Lincoln himself appeared at last, riding in a carriage, and the cheering crowd dragged him forth and carried him on sweating shoulder tops to one of the platforms, depositing him there and demanding lustily that he make a speech—a thing which for a full ten minutes he was unable to do because the jostling audience would not stop yelling. When comparative quiet was obtained, Lincoln’s words were few: “It has been my purpose, since I have been placed in my present position, to make no speeches … I appear upon the ground here at this time only for the purpose of affording myself the best opportunity of seeing you and enabling you to see me.… You will kindly let me be silent.” Then he managed to get away, riding from the scene on horseback. That evening there were torchlight parades, and fireworks, and the State Journal felt that it was “a magnificent display … the streets were all ablaze with light and enthusiasm.”3
The significant word, here and elsewhere, was “enthusiasm.” Party leaders had discovered that in Lincoln they had a man they could shout about, and they would offer the electorate fence rails, brass bands, torchlight hurrahs, and the incessant tramp of marching feet. In Cincinnati a campaign newspaper—named, inevitably, The Railsplitter—was produced for thirteen issues, bearing in its logotype an unrecognizable wood-cut of Lincoln with the words “An Honest Man’s the Noblest Work of God.” Like most of the rest of the campaign documents the party got out that year, this sheet rarely quoted Lincoln. It devoted most of its space to unceasing attacks on Douglas, suggesting in one issue that Douglas was a Catholic and asserting that while in Europe he had visited the Pope. Its approach to the slavery issue was as down to earth as a village watering trough, and as devoid of reasoned argument: “The Democracy are pretty much bankrupted for arguments but they have one last resource when everything else fails—everlasting ‘nigger equality.’ Of course there will be no ‘nigger equality’ where there are no ‘niggers,’ and as the Republican party proposes to save the Territories for free white men, while the Democracy leave a way open for their introduction, it is difficult to see how the slang phrase here quoted applies to any other party than themselves.”4
As a matter of course there were campaign songs. One of these, set to the tune of the “Star Spangled Banner,” began: “Lo! See the bright scroll of the Future unfold! Broad farms and fair cities shall crown our devotion.” Another one, sung to the tune of “Old Uncle Ned,” aimed derision at Douglas:
Dere was a little man, and his name was Stevy Dug,
To de White House he longed for to go:
But he hadn’t any votes through de whole of de Souf
In de place where de votes ought to grow.5
The campaign was moving, and there could be no doubt about it; the unresolved question was where it might be moving to, and for this no one had an answer. To be sure, it was moving toward victory, but the trouble was that the victory in November would start more than it would finish, and there did not seem to be in the width and breadth of America anyone, North or South, who cared to look beyond victory. The campaign would go by torchlight, with moving feet drumming out a pulse beat on cobblestones and on dusty main streets; there would be music and bright slogans and songs and cheers and intensive jubilation, America would go along with it, it would be demonstrated that the Northwest at last could name a President—but what would happen after all of this was ratified was a mystery, and if what was being done was good, it was not, unfortunately, quite good enough.
Nobody would say anything that might make trouble: that was understood. And Mr. Lincoln, who was moodily reflecting on all of the promises his managers had made on those hot nights in Chicago, would play it straight. He would stand on the record, which was as clear as any politician’s record need be; the trouble was that the record was incomplete, and now there was no way to extend it. Lincoln had been nominated by men who (having many subsidiary matters on their minds) at least knew where he stood on such problems as slavery in the territories, the homestead act, protection for infant industries, and so on; but nobody knew where anybody stood on the grim, explosive questions which the country might have to face once the election had been completed. Would the election of a Republican cause all or part of the South to secede from the Union? If one or many states seceded, what should the Federal government do about it? Was there any way by which the people of the United States could be induced to pause and take thought and see whether the issues which divided them might somehow be disposed of without the necessity for killing anybody? On such questions as these (which, in the summer of 1860, were the only questions that really mattered), a silence as of the grave settled down on the country where gay young men in varnished capes paraded under flags with what they supposed to be proper military precision; on that other part of the country where other men, not yet uniformed, were buying muskets and laying plans and stiffening themselves for an impending shock, and resolving to give not an inch to the unspeakable aggression which was being committed by men who did not think slavery an immutable benefit.
Many people, in this summer, were writing to Lincoln, trying to find out what he thought and proposed to do about the dangerous points that were at issue; and for these Lincoln’s secretariat prepared a form letter, which was signed by the right subordinates and sent out by wholesale to the Northerners who had embarrassing questions to ask. It went like this:
“Your letter to Mr. Lincoln, of—, and by which you seek to obtain his opinion on certain political points, has been received by him. He has received others of a similar character; but he also has a greater number of the exactly opposite character. The latter class beseech him to write nothing whatever upon any point of political doctrine. They say his positions were well known when he was nominated, and that he must not now embarrass the canvass by undertaking to shift or modify them. He regrets that he cannot oblige all, but you perceive that it is impossible for him to do so.”6
This letter was sent out to earnest seekers after light. John G. Nicolay, the earnest young man who was Lincoln’s secretary, noted that a caller had urged that Lincoln say something to reassure the Southerners who were sincerely alarmed by the course of the Republican campaign. To this, Lincoln remarked curtly that “there are no such men”; and he went on to explain that this was simply “the trick by which the South breaks down every honest man.” He would go to Washington, if he tried to reassure all alarmed Southerners, “as powerless as a block of buckeye wood”; honest men could look at the Republican platform and at what Lincoln had already said, and find therein everything that he could say now. Musing with his young secretary, Lincoln spoke his mind: “Let us be practical—there are many general terms afloat such as ‘conservatism’—‘enforcement of the irrepressible conflict at the point of the bayonet’—‘hostility to the South,’ and so forth—all of which mean nothing without definition. What then could I say to allay their fears, if they will not define what particular act or acts they fear from me or my friends?” The candidate felt that he owed something to the men who, feeling that he stood for something, had entrusted him with the candidacy: “If I shall begin to yield to these threats, if I begin dallying with them, the men who have elected me, if I shall be elected, would give me up before my inauguration—and the South, seeing it, would deliberately kick me out.… If I should be elected the first duty to the country would be to stand by the men who elected me.”7
Sound as the word of gospel, indisputably—bearing, however, no word of wisdom for guidance through the hard days that might come after the electoral votes had been cast and tabulated. The Wide-Awakes marched and the bands played and the candidate was very cautious; and as the summer weeks wore away, men in the South, caught up by some reverse reflex from the emotion that was moving across the North, began to see Lincoln as the sign and symbol of what they dreaded most. In South Carolina the Charleston Mercury remarked that the hated Seward had, after all, been rejected at Chicago because “he was disposed to temporize the South,” and lacked the iron to move on for subjugation. Lincoln, the Mercury b
elieved, was different; he had “the decision of character and the earnestness” needed to beat down the South’s resistance to oppression, and all things considered, he was “the beau ideal of a relentless, dogged free-soil border ruffian … a vulgar mobocrat and a Southern hater in political opinions.” In Richmond, the Enquirer began to see Lincoln as “an illiterate partisan … possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections of Negro equality”; he surpassed Seward “in the bitterness of his prejudices and in the insanity of his fanaticism,” and his election would mean “Negro equality.”8 If Lincoln considered that it was useless for him to try to talk sense to the Southern leaders who were whipping up hatred for him, there were Southern voices that would confirm him in his belief.
Seward himself, as a matter of fact, was talking as gently as any cooing dove, this summer. He had adjusted himself with difficulty to the idea that he was not going to be President, to the astounding fact that his party had actually nominated this gawky frontiersman from Illinois in place of himself; and for a time it had seemed that he might sulk in his tent, revenging himself, by inaction, on the misguided majority. But although the adjustment was hard, Seward had made it, and now he was taking the stump—in Michigan, in Iowa, in Illinois, in Wisconsin, all through the impassioned West—and as he pleaded for a solid Republican vote he minimized the dangers that might lie ahead.
Looking toward the angry men of the South, Seward was saying: “I can hear their disputes, their fretful controversies, their threats that if their own separate interests are not gratified and consulted by the Federal government they will separate from this Union—will secede from it, will dissolve it; and while I hear on their busy sidewalks these clamorous contentions I am able to say: ‘Peace, be still. These subjects of contention and dispute that so irritate and anger and provoke you are but ephemeral and temporary. These institutions which you so much desire to conserve, and for which you think you would sacrifice the welfare of the people of this continent, are almost as ephemeral as yourselves.’ ”
Seward refused to worry—at least to worry in public—and he assured an audience at St. Paul, in a speech which was reprinted in pamphlet form and distributed in every Northern state: “The man is born today who will live to see the American Union, the American people—the whole of them—coming into the harmonious understanding that this is the land of the free men—for the free men—that it is the land for the white man; and that whatever elements there are to disturb its present peace or irritate the passions of its possessors will in the end—and that end will come before long—pass away, without capacity in any way to disturb the harmony of, or endanger, this great Union.”9
These were fine words, and Seward would repeat them. Speaking in New York a little later, he had words of jaunty confidence: “For ten, aye twenty years, these threats have been renewed in the same language and in the same form, about the first day of November every four years, when it happened to come before the day of the presidential election. I do not doubt but that these Southern statesmen and politicians think they are going to dissolve the Union, but I think they are going to do no such thing.”10
Chanting these assurances, Seward doubtless spoke for most of the men who were listening to him. Yet there was an uneasy doubt under everything—as uneasy as the doubt of slavery’s own eternal rightness which disturbed the subconscious minds of men in the South—and it centered about that grim question: If the Republicans win this election, will the Southern states leave the Union? As Seward said, the threat had been made before. It had lost its force in the North, like the alarming cry of “Wolf!” too often repeated. As a nation of poker players the Americans knew what to do with a bluff when they met one; the trouble now was that no one could be entirely certain that this was a bluff, and the consequences that might come if it were called and turned out to be no bluff were staggering to think about. The result was that nobody talked about them. Seward went about the country voicing his vibrant belief that all of this was talk and nothing more, and Lincoln stayed in Springfield (dusty smoke from the torchlight parade still hanging in the air to cloud men’s vision: ominously like powder smoke and the mist of dreadful combat, if anyone had thought about it) and had the secretariat send out form letters, on the logical ground that no one could honestly believe that he meant enmity toward the South; and Stephen A. Douglas, pausing in Chicago in the midst of a furious campaign which he knew he could not win, remarked soberly; “I believe this country is in more danger now than at any other moment since I have known anything of public life.”11
The Republican campaign was enormously effective. It moved, it had hot life in it, it caught men up and pulled them along, and the Wide-Awakes went down the sultry streets with torchlight to lead them on, bands playing, men yelling, stump speakers orating from every available soap box, with the marchers flourishing fence rails and displaying log cabins and flaunting banners to proclaim the overriding honesty of the chosen man; and no one stopped to ask: Do these men to the South of us really mean what they are saying, and if they do mean it, what are we prepared to do? There was an undertone of violence in this election. Preparations were being made in the cotton belt, and in the North the men who supported Lincoln were, as if by deep instinct, forming vaguely military marching groups, dressing in gaudy uniforms and parading to military music, troopers enlisted to defend they did not quite know what. The campaign might, on surface appearance, be blowing off steam, but it was actually building up an uncontainable pressure. The country as a whole wanted no irrepressible conflict between the sections, but the claims of sectionalism had become too strong to be ignored. The South had one sectional party and the North had another, and as far as anyone could see, it would probably be a case where the devil would take the hindmost, or perhaps everyone together in a hand basket.
The campaign, in short, was unreal. Posing as the most cynical of realists, the politicians had retained cynicism but had lost realism, and now they were entangled with something they could not handle. Parades and loud noises were taking the place of reasoned discussion. The slanting plain that led down to the sea was growing steeper and steeper, and the rush was moving faster and faster. In the North, men could listen to military music and to the unbroken thud of the feet of marching men; in the South, they could listen to the extremists. Edmund Ruffin was writing to Yancey, saying that a Republican victory was obviously coming and that it would be “a clear and unmistakable indication of future & fixed domination of the Northern section & its abolition policy over the Southern states & their institutions, & the beginning of a sure & speedy progress to the extermination of Negro slavery & the consequent utter ruin of the prosperity of the South.” The only possible answer to this, he wrote, must be secession. In his diary, Ruffin wrote that his sons hoped that Lincoln would be defeated but that he did not. “I most earnestly & anxiously desire Lincoln to be elected—because I have hope that at least one State, S.C., will secede, & that others will follow—& even if otherwise, I wish the question tested & settled now. If there is a general submission now, there never will be future maintenance of our rights—& the end of Negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions & our fate.”12
Few men were as realistic or as outspoken as Edmund Ruffin. There were even times when it seemed as if the pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties were repeating the same ugly words. Yancey himself got into New York, in the middle of this campaign, and he made a lighthearted, taunting speech which was strangely like the thoughts which that Cincinnati campaign newspaper, The Railsplitter, had given to the North a few weeks earlier.
Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the prosperity of the South and to that of the North as well; and, furthermore, it was nothing any Northerner need worry about. “It is an institution, too, that doesn’t harm you, for we don’t let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don’t trouble you wit
h that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the nose of a Northerner.” Yet the North might elect Lincoln, who would “build up an abolitionist party in every Southern state,” and Yancey warned that this would not be borne: “With the election of a black Republican, all the South would be menaced. Emissaries will percolate between master and slave as water between the crevices of the rocks underground.… The keystone of the arch of the Union is already crumbling. A more weighty question was never before you. One freighted with the fate of societies and of nationalities is on your mind.”13
4: Little Giant
Perhaps Senator Douglas had been both too clever and too outspoken. He was a tough little man who knew all of the political tricks, and he was also a hard-boiled realist, and in these capacities he had devised a Kansas-Nebraska act with popular sovereignty for an antidote, and the nation was not quite ready for it. He had unintentionally compelled the North to contemplate an arrogant slave power which would inflict its peculiar institution on the harsh western plains, as if everything beyond the Missouri could be brought under the confines of a law that seemed to fit the Tombigbee and the Yazoo. To the South, at the same time, he had given foreknowledge of an unendurable truth—that slavery would die unless the outside world dropped all other concerns to prop it up, which was obviously impossible. Because he had done these things he could not become President of the United States; the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South hated him because he liked it too little. Perhaps the truth was that the issue of slavery had become, as men’s emotions then stood, both intolerable and insoluble. Douglas had tried to reduce the issue to something that could be disposed of in the ordinary give-and-take of politics, to present America’s destiny as something that did not have to lie under the control of extremists. The conflicting moralities of men profoundly in earnest would prevent it. The showdown might have shattering impact, but it would have to come.
