by Bruce Catton
Presumably these men knew how the people in their states were thinking, and it is clear that even in the heart of the cotton belt a majority was not yet ready to secede and would not consider Lincoln’s election adequate reason for secession. But the majority by now was at the mercy of events. It had been brought—by fear, by suspicion, and by anger—to a point just one step short of the final act; the smallest accident, the most casual misstep by some politician in Washington, might compel it to take that last step. Nor would it be necessary for the majority in all of the Southern states to be won over. The sense of regional solidarity had immense power, and where one state led, other states might well follow.
One state would lead. On October 12 Governor Gist, as a matter of routine, called the legislature of South Carolina into special session to name the state’s presidential electors. This was necessary, since of all of the states only South Carolina did not call the people to the polls in presidential elections; the legislature decided where the state’s electoral vote would go. But when he summoned the legislature, Governor Gist announced that it might well be called on, in addition, to take some action “for the safety and protection of the State,” and when it met to perform its quadrennial duty, on November 5, he recommended that it remain in session until the nation had cast and counted its ballots. If the nation elected Lincoln, the legislature would be advised to summon a state convention, and it was correctly taken for granted that such a convention would have no reason for existence except to pass an ordinance of secession.
The drift was not universally visible, even in the South. The confused campaign would go on to its fateful confused climax, and one of the most momentous votes in American history would be cast by a nation that had no way to know what it was doing when it voted. No candidate had declared for secession; both Douglas and Bell had called for national unity, and Breckinridge had proudly challenged anyone to show that he had ever said or even thought anything hostile to the Union; and by surface appearances the attempt to make a Republican victory the signal for a general exodus of the cotton states had failed to win substantial popular support. Even Yancey, in his mocking address in New York, had talked like a man who was prepared to fight for slavery within the Union. Yet the campaign had completely failed to do what a political campaign is supposed to do—bring the nation to full awareness and earnest discussion of its most crucial issues and lead to a verdict that would put those issues on the way toward settlement. There had been nothing even resembling an attempt by reasonable men to analyze a baffling problem and see what could be done about it. Only Douglas had tried to make a debate of it, and by election night he knew that his struggle had failed. The election would be a shock which could benefit no one but the extremists on both sides.
Election day was November 6. Douglas was in Mobile, Alabama, and he got the returns in the office of his friend John Forsyth, proprietor of the Mobile Register. By the middle of the evening it was clear that Lincoln had won. Forsyth drew up an editorial prepared for the next day’s issue, urging Alabama to call a state convention to consider what ought to be done, and he and Douglas argued about the matter. Forsyth felt that Union men in the state could beat the drift toward secession only by accepting the plan for such a convention and then winning control of it; Douglas urged that if the Union men could not keep such a convention from being called, they had no chance to control it when it was held. Forsyth was insistent, however, and the copy went to the printer’s to be published, and Douglas trudged off to his hotel. To his secretary, Douglas seemed “more hopeless than I had ever seen him before.”11
5: Verdict of the People
Abraham Lincoln spent November 6 in the governor’s office in the state capitol building at Springfield, leaving the place in mid-afternoon long enough to walk to a polling booth and cast his own ballot, then coming back to chat casually with friends—waiting, with no one knows how much of suspense, hope, and anxiety, to see what the people had decided. As the afternoon passed, the tension rose. By evening the office was jammed; a larger crowd filled the chamber of the House of Representatives and a still greater crowd stood in the street outside. The first returns came in at seven o’clock—a dispatch showing that the Republican vote in near-by Decatur was larger than it had been in 1856. A few more local returns came in during the next hour, whetting the appetite but proving nothing much, and at last the waiting became unendurable. Lincoln and a few others walked over to the telegraph office to get the returns as they came off the wire.
Now the pace became faster. Illinois had gone Republican—although Lincoln, rather disturbingly, had failed to carry his own county; there were still plenty of Douglas men in central Illinois—and then it became known that Indiana had been won. By ten o’clock it was clear that the Northwest was going Republican; then, a surer omen of final victory, came word that Pennsylvania was in line, with Allegheny county carried by 10,000 and a clear majority in Philadelphia. Now if New York would follow Pennsylvania, Lincoln could consider himself elected.
Near the telegraph office was an ice-cream parlor, taken over for the evening by a group of Republican women, and to the telegraph office came a delegation to ask if Mr. Lincoln and his friends would not step over and have a little refreshment. By now there was no need to keep hanging over the telegraph instrument—the crowds in the street had begun to yell and sing and fire guns in the air, and Secretary Nicolay noted that the mob in the House of Representatives chamber was “shouting, yelling, singing, dancing and indulging in all sorts of demonstrations of happiness.” Lincoln went to the ice-cream parlor, where a long table was spread with coffee, sandwiches, cake, oysters, and the like, and as he came in, a chorus of feminine voices greeted him for the first time with the proudest salutation an American can hear: “How do you do, Mr. President?” Lincoln sat down, and the crowd began to sing:
Ain’t you glad you joined the Republicans—
Joined the Republicans—
Joined the Republicans—
Ain’t you glad you joined the Republicans
Down in Illinois?
Then, while this homespun jollification was going on, word came in that New York State had gone Republican and that victory was certain, and there were cheers and back-slappings and a general milling-about and happy confusion. Lincoln, who seemed to be the least elated man in the room, excused himself at last and went home to give the news to his wife and to try to get some sleep.1 The rest of Springfield kept on celebrating (except for the silent people who had gathered at Democratic headquarters), and the cheering and banging went on until dawn. Nicolay wrote that he himself managed to get to bed at four in the morning, but that there was so much noise outside even at that hour that he could not sleep.
Springfield celebrated from provincial pride, from joy that the Northwest had at last sent one of its sons to the White House, perhaps too from a feeling that a period of great strain had ended and that something which had perplexed and disturbed men for a long time had finally been put on the road to settlement. But the strange thing about this election was that the Republican victory was celebrated in the deep South as well—the deep South, where no single man had voted for Abraham Lincoln, where his name and party label did not even appear on the ballot. Charleston was as jubilant and as excited as Springfield, and there were as many flags and black-powder salutes along the Battery as in front of the Illinois state house. Here too there was a feeling of release from tension. Whatever the future might conceal, one pressure at least had been discharged. This Republican triumph, by its very completeness, was so intolerable that men would behave in a new way. There would be a new nation, it would be born in South Carolina, and it would begin to take shape at once.
So the day after the election was an informal holiday in Charleston. Business was neglected, and men crowded around the bulletin boards to cheer at each new confirmation of Lincoln’s election. A palmetto flag was hoisted in front of the office of the Mercury, which editorialized gaily: “The tea has been thrown overboa
rd, the revolution of 1860 has been initiated.” A Boston steamer in the harbor (one of its owners was the Caleb Cushing who had presided with such dignity when the Democrats tried in vain to have a harmonious convention) saluted the flag of South Carolina with fifteen guns, and the foreman of a grand jury in the Federal court at Charleston informed the judge that the jury had no presentments to make—as a creature of United States authority it considered its function at an end in Charleston. The judge agreed, remarking: “So far as I am concerned the Temple of Justice raised under the Constitution of the United States is now closed. If it shall never again be opened I thank God that its doors have been closed before its altar has been desecrated with sacrifices to tyranny.” That night there were fireworks and illuminations, and within a few days the state’s two United States Senators, James Chesnut, Jr., and James H. Hammond, sent in their resignations. Simultaneously the legislature called a convention of the people to meet on December 17 to consider the state’s relations with the Northern states and with the government of the United States; a tall liberty pole was raised, cannon saluted the palmetto flag, and bands played the “Marseillaise.”
Elsewhere in the deep South there was parading and cheering, although the tone was not quite so deep and sure as in Charleston. Men began to wear blue cockades, emblem of resistant liberty ever since the old Nullification days, in their hats, and in many places semi-military marching groups called “Minute Men,” “Sons of the South,” and so on recruited members. In Alabama, where a convention similar to South Carolina’s had been called, candidates for convention seats began to campaign, with oratory and with patriotic appeals. The Mississippi legislature was called into special session, and in Georgia—after some debate—the legislature agreed that delegates to a state convention should be elected shortly after the beginning of the new year. The process which South Carolina’s governor had initiated just before the election was beginning to work.2
Yet there may have been less of a swing and a sweep to this than appears on the surface. To most men the situation still was not entirely clear. The election returns themselves, if anyone bothered to analyze them, did not show even the deepest South speaking with a united voice. Breckinridge, the supposed candidate of the secessionists, had indeed carried eleven states, but he had lost such powerful slave states as Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri, and the vote for the stoutly Unionist Bell-Everett ticket all through the South had been significantly large. Douglas had carried no slave state except Missouri, but in the popular vote his total was second only to Lincoln’s, and if a good part of his vote came from Northern states, the Breckinridge vote was not exclusively Southern, either; approximately a quarter of all the votes cast for Breckinridge were cast in the North. So far there was no mandate for secession or any other kind of immediate action.
But there was still deep confusion and bewilderment, and in such times men of intense singleness of purpose can often drive through to their chosen goal and compel their fellows to trail along after them. The Southern men who, in November of 1860, proposed secession and the creation of a new nation had the advantage of knowing precisely what they wanted and of standing for immediate, emotion-releasing action. Those who counseled delay and full exploration of the possibilities of compromise were using the kind of talk that should have been (but was not) voiced in the presidential campaign; now it came too late, it had no force in it, and state and regional patriotism were generating a pressure that made it sound empty.
Alexander Stephens unintentionally proved the point. He had been a Douglas man, and he had seen profound trouble coming as far back as the previous spring, and now he tried to persuade the Georgia legislature that it was not yet time for direct action. He was not very persuasive. “My object,” he told the legislators, “is not to stir up strife but to allay it; not to appeal to your passions, but to your reason.” The election of Lincoln he liked no better than the next man, but it was not by itself sufficient reason for fracturing the Constitution: “Do not let us break it because, forsooth, he may. If he does, then is the time to strike.” But although Stephens hoped the Union might be preserved, he would go where Georgia went, bowing to the will of the people: “Their cause is my cause, and their destiny is my destiny.”3
No broken dike, crumbling before a powerful flood, was ever repaired with that kind of talk. The men at Milledgeville, Georgia’s capital, applauded, for they loved frail little Stephens, but to all intents and purposes they did not hear him. Singularly enough, his voice struck a spark only in the Northern state capital of Springfield, where Lincoln read a newspaper account of what Stephens had said and wrote to ask if Stephens could forward a revised copy. This Stephens could not do, since he had nothing except the reporter’s notes, which he thought were substantially accurate; and he wrote sadly to Lincoln: “The country is certainly in great peril, and no man ever had heavier or greater responsibilities than you have in the present momentous crisis.”
There had always been a shadowy bond of liking and understanding between Stephens and Lincoln, and now Lincoln spoke his troubled mind in a letter marked “for your eye only.” He saw both the peril and the responsibility, but he did not quite understand what was troubling the South so violently or what he himself ought to do about it. Neither directly nor indirectly would he, as President, interfere with slavery in the Southern states, and the South during the next four years would be in no more danger in that respect than it was in the days of George Washington.
“I suppose, though, this does not meet the case,” Lincoln went on. “You think slavery is right, and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.”
It was difference enough. Stephens replied that neither Lincoln’s election nor fears of the new administration’s immediate actions really caused the trouble; the problem was that Lincoln’s election and eventual inauguration would “put the institutions of nearly half the states under the ban of public opinion and national condemnation. This, upon general principles, is quite enough of itself to arouse a spirit not only of general indignation but of revolt on the part of the proscribed.” Stephens hoped that Lincoln could find something to say that would calm men’s minds; finally, he would remind this faraway friend from Illinois that “conciliation and harmony, in my judgment, can never be established by force. Nor can the Union under the Constitution be maintained by force.”4
This thought was bothering Lincoln profoundly, in the days when he tried to adjust himself to the knowledge that he was going to be the next President of the United States. Nicolay noted that on November 15 Lincoln was considering how the government should try to maintain the Union. To “two gentlemen” who were with him, Lincoln spoke his mind: “My own impression is, at present (leaving myself room to modify the opinion, if upon a further investigation I should see fit to do so) that this government possesses both the authority and the power to maintain its own integrity. That however is not the ugly point of the matter. The ugly part is the necessity of keeping the government together by force, as ours should be a government of fraternity.”5
For a few weeks the question of what the Federal government ought to do if one or more states announced that they had left the Union would be an academic matter, evoking opinions very different from the ones that would be wrenched out of men when the physical break actually came. The New York Tribune’s Horace Greeley, who had done about as much as any one man to give the slave-holding Southerners the idea that a Republican victory would be fatal to their cause, was writing now that the Union should not be maintained by force: “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 in peace.… Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.”6
&
nbsp; One of the tragic facts about the year 1860 was that the Northern men who worked so hard to elect an anti-slavery ticket understood hardly at all, beforehand, what their victory would mean; but they recognized its probable effect very clearly, once the election had taken place. No single cotton-state convention had met, no legislature had voted for disunion, no concrete, tangible evidence of approaching secession which might not have been discerned earlier had come to the surface at this time; but the election was hardly a week behind them when such men as Lincoln and Greeley (and, with them, many other thoughtful Northerners) were facing the fact that these slave-state men were very likely to go out of the Union at once without waiting for any overt act. What had been dismissed earlier as “gasconade” and the meaningless vaporings of contentious hotheads was accepted now for what it so obviously was—the plain statement of a clear intent. And although in years to come many Northerners would feel that there had been a devious conspiracy to create a new cotton-state empire on the merest pretext, it is probable that Lincoln in his musings had said it as well as need be: men of the North and South simply had different notions about slavery.
