Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  All sorts of people availed themselves of the opportunity to call on the president-elect. Some men wore mud-caked brogans and hickory shirts, others elegant broadcloth and linen garments. Most women were attired in their Sunday best. Not all visitors behaved well. Churls with their hats on and pants tucked into their boots and reeking of the barnyard would puff away on malodorous cigars while staring at Lincoln as if he were an object in a museum. Occasionally, a few rural folk would elbow their way through the crowd, announce their names, shake Lincoln’s hand, and promptly retreat.

  Those receptions were fittingly democratic. Lincoln showed no signs of self-importance, remaining ever the kind, good-natured, affable neighbor that he had been since his arrival in Springfield twenty-three years earlier. All visitors, even the most irksome and annoying, received a cordial greeting. He made no distinction between rich and poor, though he did show an unusually strong affection for friends from his early days in Illinois. He genially set every guest at ease, joking, answering questions, and reminiscing. Should strangers seem awkward and abashed, he strove to make them feel comfortable. He would sometimes take a break to confer with Nicolay at a corner table strewn with books and newspapers. After an interview in late December, one Eastern merchant described the president-elect as “perfectly cool,” “very discreet of remark,” and “thoroughly ‘posted’” about “the entire history of our Government—with all persons of note that from time to time have been connected with it—with all that surrounds him now!”18

  Another caller asked the president-elect to explain how Southerners could, with a straight face, argue that they were as entitled to carry slaves into the western territories as Northerners were to carry any form of property there. “Do you not see,” replied Lincoln, “that the South is right from her point of view? We northerners, if we go into the territories, are able to live without slaves, but the southerners are not. The southerner is not a perfect human being without his negro.… There is an old proverb: ‘Clothes make the man;’ but it is also true that ‘Negroes make the man.’ ”19

  Many callers sought jobs. “These office-seekers are a curse to this country,” he told a Canadian visitor early in the Civil War. “No sooner was my election certain, than I became the prey of hundreds of hungry, persistent applicants for office, whose highest ambition it is to feed at the government crib.”20 In Springfield, would-be civil servants met with frustration, for he gently but firmly refused to make any commitments. By January, job hunters had learned that they would incur his displeasure if they pestered him. He told a young friend, who informally asked for a land office post, “that he would forget such requests of his friends, unless the person himself or some friend would present their claims at the proper time & place.”21

  Secession of the Lower South

  That winter the nation trembled at the prospect of secession and the possibility of war. Between December and February, seven states of the Deep South, fearing that Lincoln’s victory would lead to emancipation and social chaos, withdrew from the Union amid cries of “nigger equality,” “abolitionism,” “Black Republicanism,” “spaniel submissionists,” “buck niggers and our daughters,” “equality in the territories,” and “equal rights.”22 According to an Arkansasan, many Southerners “have been taught that Lincoln intends to use every means to instigate revolt among the slaves; that the Republicans are organized into military companies, and intend to march against the South under the leadership of Giddings, Seward & Co., to cut the throat of every white man, distribute the white females among the negroes, and to carry off each man for himself an ebony beauty to ornament and grace his home in the North; that northern white men are more impressed by the charms of a dark, rich hue, than by their pale faced beauties at home.”23

  Fear of slave revolts had long pervaded the South, especially in the areas where blacks were most numerous, and that fear intensified dramatically after John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859. A perceived upsurge of slave insubordination frightened slaveholders and led them to favor secession. In September 1860, Congressman Lawrence Keitt of South Carolina, which had proportionally the largest black population in the country (57%), told a friend: “See—poison in the wells in Texas and fire for the Houses in Alabama—Our negroes are being enlisted in politics—With poison and fire how can we stand it? If Northern men get access to our negro[e]s to advise poison and the torch we must prevent it at every hazard.”24 A newspaper in Keitt’s state warned: “The midnight glare of the incendiary’s torch will illuminate the country from one end to the other; while pillage, violence, murder, poisons and rape will fill the air with the demoniac revelry of all the passions of an ignorant, semi-barbarous race, urged to madness by the licentious teachings of our Northern brethren. A war of races—a war of extermination—must arise, like that which took place in St. Domingo.” Northerners “cannot, or will not, understand this state of things,” complained the editor.25 When asked, “Do you desire the millions of negro population of the South, to be set free among us, to stalk abroad in the land, following the dictates of their own natural instincts, committing depredations, rapine, and murder upon the whites?” residents of the Cotton States replied “NO!”26

  To prevent such mayhem, slavery and white supremacy must be maintained by seceding from the Union. On November 16, 1860, the Augusta, Georgia, Constitutionalist said that the South regarded the American flag as “the emblem of a gigantic power, soon to pass into the hands of that sworn enemy, and knows that African slavery, though panoplied by the Federal Government, is doomed to a war of extermination. All the powers of a Government which has so long sheltered it will be turned to its destruction. The only hope for its preservation, therefore, is out of the Union.”27 When the Deep South formed the Confederate States of America in February 1861, the vice president of that new entity, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, asserted that its “foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers had written the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution “upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.”28 Stephens and many others maintained that white liberty required black slavery. At his state’s secession convention Congressman Keitt declared, “I am willing in this issue to rest disunion upon the question of slavery. It is the great central point from which we are now seceding.”29 In Texas, the secession convention issued a Declaration of Causes condemning the Republicans as a party “based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.”30

  Southerners thought it unmanly to bow to the Republicans’ refusal to allow them to take their slaves into the western territories. In midsummer 1860, John Bell had predicted that “the whole South, in 30 days after the election of ‘Lincoln,’ would feel his election to be an insult to them.”31 They must have equal rights! They would not tolerate second-class citizenship! Too long had they endured criticism of their section and its peculiar institution! “To deny us the right and privilege [of taking slaves into the territories] would be to deny us equality in the Union and would be a wrong and a degradation to which a high spirited people should not submit,” declared a group of Mississippians in 1859.32 (Slaves comprised 55% of the Magnolia State’s population.) In 1850, the state’s junior senator, Jefferson Davis, told his legislative colleagues that Southerners would become “an inferior class, a degraded class in the Union” if they were forbidden to take their slaves into the territories.33 In urging secession, a Georgia editor in 1860 exhorted
his neighbors: “Let us act like men. Let us be equals.”34 “We were not born to be mastered, nor to submit to inferior position,” cried a Virginia newspaper.35

  Secessionists would rather destroy the government than submit to it if it forbade them equal rights in the territories. That prohibition they termed, in the words of fire-eating William L. Yancey, “discrimination as degrading as it is injurious to the slaveholding states.”36 James H. Hammond of South Carolina favored secession rather than “submitting to gross insult.”37 A Texas editor exclaimed, “The North has gone overwhelmingly for NEGRO EQUALITY and SOUTHERN VASSALAGE! Southern men, will you SUBMIT to the DEGRADATION?”38

  The Deep South sent commissioners to proselytize in the Upper South and the Border States. An Alabama secession commissioner, trying to persuade Kentucky to leave the Union, called Lincoln’s election “the last and crowning act of insult and outrage upon the people of the South.” He dramatically predicted that if the Republicans carried out their announced policies “and the South submits, degradation and ruin must overwhelm alike all classes of citizens in the Southern States. The slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life.… What Southern man, be he slave-holder or non-slave-holder, can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality, and the white man stripped by the heaven-daring hand of fanaticism of that title to superiority over the black race which God himself has bestowed? … Can Southern men submit to such degradation and ruin?”39

  A congressman from Alabama, where 45 percent of the residents were bondsmen, told a friend that he would “rather die a freeman than live a slave to Black Republicanism” and would either “be an equal, or a corpse.”40 Robert Barnwell of South Carolina predicted that white Southerners “must become a degraded people” if slavery were not “upheld as a political institution essential to the preservation of our civilization.”41 A fellow South Carolinian, William Porcher Miles, declared that accepting restrictions on slavery expansion would put the “seal of inferiority” on Southerners and brand them “as those who from perverse moral obliquity are not entitled to the enjoyment of full participation in the common goods and property of the Republic.”42 Echoing him was Texas Senator Louis T. Wigfall, who told his Northern colleagues: “You denounce us, degrade us, deride us, tell us … that we are degraded, that we are not your equals.”43 An Alabamian observed that accepting restrictions on slavery expansion was tantamount to admitting “that a free citizen of Massachusetts was a better man and entitled to more privileges than a free citizen of Alabama.” He asked the voters of his state: “Will you submit to be bridled and saddled and rode under whip and spur,” or instead demand to be treated in accordance with “the great doctrine of Equality: Opposition to ascendancy in any form, either of classes, by way of monopolies, or of sections, by means of robbery.”44 Alexander H. Stephens issued a public letter alleging that any exclusion of slavery from the territories “would be in direct violation of the rights of the Southern people to an equal participation” in those lands “and in open derogation of the equality between the states of the South and the North which should never [be] surrendered by the South.”45

  The South took offense at several other criticisms. In 1850, an Alabama newspaper protested against “the unwillingness of Northern men to sit around the same altars with Southern men—the denunciations of us by the press and the people of the North—the false slanders circulated in their periodicals and reviews—the rending of churches for a theoretical sentiment, and then appropriating to their use what they sanctimoniously call the price of blood.” These slights “have alienated the two sections of a common country, and would alone, at some future day, terminate in a dissolution of the union.”46 The South’s hurt feelings were illustrated by a New Orleans editor, who proclaimed that his region “has been moved to resistance chiefly … by the popular dogma in the free States that slavery is a crime in the sight of GOD.… The South in the eyes of the North, is degraded and unworthy, because of the institution of servitude.”47 A fellow Louisianan, Senator Judah P. Benjamin, denounced “the incessant attack of the Republicans, not simply on the interests, but on the feelings and sensibilities of a high-spirited people by the most insulting language, and the most offensive epithets.”48 Mississippi Governor John Jones Pettus declared that Republicans “attempted to degrade us in the estimation of other nations by denouncing us as barbarians, pirates, and robbers, unfit associates for Christian or civilized men.”49

  The South also feared losing power. Strong though the desire to attain power may have been, the dread of having it taken away was stronger still, especially if that loss imperiled slavery. Charles Francis Adams believed that the “question is one of power. And nothing short of a surrender of everything gained by the election will avail.” The secessionists “want to continue to rule.” Their “true grievance and the only one is the loss of power.”50 Another diarist, Sidney George Fisher of Philadelphia, concurred: “The southern people are arrogant and self-willed. They have been accustomed generally to govern the country, always to have large influence in the government. They cannot bear to lose power, and to submit to the control of the North.”51 The New York Tribune argued that the great complaints of the South included the “loss of sixty years’ monopoly of the Government, its military and civil offices” and “the loss of prestige and power by the old political parties, and their humiliated leaders.”52

  As members of a traditional society, Southerners resented the modernizing Northerners, whose watchwords were “improvement” and “progress.” Below the Mason-Dixon line, new economic, social, intellectual, and cultural trends enjoyed little favor; innovation and reform, highly prized in the North, were suspect in the South. The Southern revolt against the Union represents, among other things, a chapter in the long history of traditionalist resistance to modernization. “We are an agricultural people,” a leading secessionist, Senator Louis T. Wigfall, explained to an English visitor; “we are a primitive but a civilized people. We have no cities—we don’t want them. We have no literature—we don’t need any yet. We have no press—we are glad of it.”53

  Secessionists scoffed at Stephen A. Douglas and others who argued that Lincoln could do little harm because his party did not control Congress. They replied that Republicans would sooner or later dominate the House of Representatives and eventually the senate and the Supreme Court; in the meantime, the new administration could undermine slavery with its power of appointment. Congressman Henry W. Hilliard of Alabama explained that it “is not any apprehension of aggressive action on the part of the incoming administration which rouses the southern people to resistance, but it is the demonstration which Mr Lincoln’s election by such overwhelming majorities affords, of the supremacy of a sentiment hostile to slavery in the non-slaveholding states of the Union.”54 A reapportionment of the House based on the 1860 census would give the North almost two-thirds of the seats in that chamber. Even a Unionist journal like the New Orleans Picayune alleged that the Republicans “will be the most moderate of national men in their professions, without abating a jot of the ultimate purpose of forcing the extinction of slavery.… It is for these future, progressing, insidious, fatal results, more than from an ‘overt act’ of direct oppression, that the triumph of Black Republicanism … is to be profoundly deprecated by every Southern man of every shade of party opinion.”55

  Some slaveholders feared that Lincoln would appoint local nonslaveholders to office and thus create a Republican Party in the South threatening Democratic hegemony. “The prospective development of a Republican party among the non-slaveholding whites of the South.… is the great grievance,” said the New York Tribune. Poorer farmers and artisans might combine to displace the planter elite
.56 But divisions among whites in the Deep South were minor compared with their overwhelming agreement on the need to protect slavery and white supremacy at all costs.

  Skepticism about Secession Threats

  On election night, when the first ominous rumblings of secession reached Springfield—in the form of a report that South Carolina Senators James Chesnut and James H. Hammond had resigned their seats—it alarmed most of Lincoln’s friends but not him. “There are plenty left,” he remarked, alluding to the other sixty-four senators. “A little while ago I saw a couple of shooting stars fall down, hissing and sputtering. Plenty left for many a bright night.”57 Soon thereafter, Elihu B. Washburne found Lincoln “in fine spirits and excellent health, and quite undisturbed by the blustering of the disunionists and traitors.”58 An Ohio journalist recalled that the president-elect “considered the movement [in the] South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North. He believed that when the leaders saw their efforts in that direction [i.e., of secession] were unavailing, the tumult would subside.” Lincoln predicted that they “won’t give up the offices. Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.”59 In September he had stated that there were “no real disunionists in the country.”60 He told his law partner that “he could not in his heart believe that the South designed the overthrow of the Government.”61 On election eve, Lincoln explained to a Washingtonian “that in his part of the country, when a man came among them they were in the habit of giving him a fair trial.” That “was all he desired from the South,” which “had always professed to be law-abiding and constitution-loving; placing their reliance on the constitution and the laws.” As president, he would make sure that “these should be sustained to the fullest extent.”62 The following month, when a visitor asked whether Lincoln thought the Southern states would secede, he expressed doubt: “I do not think they will. A number from different sections of the South pass through here daily, and all that call appear pleasant and seem to go away apparently satisfied, and if they only give me an opportunity I will convince them that I do not wish to interfere with them in any way, but protect them in everything that they are entitled to.” With eyes flashing, he added a caveat: “If they do [secede], the question will be [posed], and it must be settled come what may.”63 To a Tennesseean he declared that “to execute the laws is all that I shall attempt to do. This, however, I will do, no matter how much force may be required.”64