The team that had secured Buchanan’s nomination four years earlier was dispatched to Charleston with the mission of undermining Douglas. They had no other candidate in mind, though Jefferson Davis remained an unattainable favorite. Slidell and Bright were not delegates, but they set up headquarters in a mansion rented by the New York financier S.L.M. Barlow. They were joined by Senator James A. Bayard, who controlled the Delaware delegation. Caleb Cushing, who had been Pierce’s attorney general, was the key New Englander of the group. He had given the Douglas campaign his private indication that he leaned to Douglas’s nomination, but it was a ruse for treachery.
At a Faneuil Hall rally on December 8, 1859, organized to rail against John Brown and the “Black Republican Party,” Cushing declared, “The Southern States cannot meekly lie down and be trodden upon by the Northern.” He wrote a friend he favored a negotiated secession of the Southern states, “and I exhort them to do so.” He spent Christmas in Washington, dining with Buchanan and Jefferson Davis. On New Year’s Day, Cushing wrote Franklin Pierce, “We seem to be drifting into destruction before our eyes—in utter helplessness—the administration is unpopular and the President is embarrassed with insoluble questions. Congress is paralyzed by party spirit and everybody seems to despair of any help from men, waiting vaguely for providential intervention.” In January 1860, Cushing released a public letter defending slavery and calling criticism “a mere untruth.” He “warmly supported the candidacy of Mr. Jefferson Davis,” according to Richard Taylor, the son of President Zachary Taylor, who was an influential member of the Louisiana delegation to the convention. Privately, Cushing fantasized taking the second spot on a ticket headed by Davis.
Charleston had been designated as the site for the convention four years earlier. The Northerners on the convention committee chose it in a gesture to party unity. Thomas Dyer, the former mayor of Chicago, traveled to Charleston to secure a hall for Douglas’s headquarters, and reported to him on February 29, “Charleston is the last place on Gods Earth where a national convention should have been held.” The city of fifty thousand was the Southern crucible of lavish wealth, aristocratic pretension, and nullification. The atmosphere was dominated by the daily press run of the Charleston Mercury, filled with screeds from the pen of Robert Barnwell Rhett, the former senator, Calhoun’s old associate, who had railed for secession for more than a decade and lately called for the formation of Southern Leagues to replace the national Democratic Party. On April 19, as delegates began to arrive, he wrote an editorial in the Mercury to greet them, calling for the dissolution of the party and secession. “The Democratic party, as a party, based upon principles, is dead,” he declared. “. . . On every living issue deemed vital to the South, the Northern members, as a body, are against the South, and agree, substantially, with the Consolidationists and Black Republicans. And this result, the South herself has produced by her weakness and timidity. She has now no other alternative, but to raise up the lifeless body of the Democratic party, by restoring to it living principles, and putting it into power, or to dissolve the Union. To stand in her present position in the Union, is to be in the broad road to inevitable ruin, helpless and hopeless.”
Douglas urged as many Northern supporters as possible, even if they were not delegates, to flood the town to overwhelm the local hostility. They stepped off their trains and steamers into a charming, quaint, and thoroughly antagonistic environment, scented with azaleas and politically poisoned. Coming from the cool early spring climate of the North, they wore their woolen suits as the thermometer hit one hundred and the humidity wilted them. There were too few hotels; rooms went for astronomical prices. Douglas packed at least three hundred beds into the second floor of the Hibernian Hall, his headquarters, where delegates crammed into numbered cots alongside boxes of Sheahan’s Life of Douglas. Important Southern delegates, however, were given quarters in the best houses on the Battery, catching the sea breeze from the harbor, where they could glimpse in the distance, on a man-made island, Fort Sumter still under construction. One of Douglas’s influential delegates, J.W. Gray, publisher of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, curious about slavery, visited a slave auction and found “the strange spectacle of human beings sold like horses was one of the most revolting sights he had ever seen.”
Murat Halstead, on the scene for the Cincinnati Commercial, acutely observed the conventions of 1860. “The Douglas men came down here from their headquarters in Washington, where whisky flows like a river,” he wrote, “—they were full of enthusiasm—rampant and riotous—‘hot as monkeys’—and proclaim that the universal world is for the Little Giant. They have a desperate fight before them, and are brim full of the sound and fury of boastfulness. . . . The principal hotels swarm like hives.”
“Imagine a crowded barroom,” wrote the reporter from the New York Herald. “The weather is hot; the people are thirsty. . . . There are drinkers from the frozen North, drinkers from the crafty East, drinkers from the luxuriant West, drinkers from the fiery South—drinkers from everywhere. . . . They talk and talk—jabber and jabber—bet and bet, and drink and drink!”
A cloud of dread and confusion descended on the opening of the convention. Newspaper headlines flashed the latest revelations from Washington of the investigation of corruption in the Buchanan administration. Immediately after the Democrats had put the Republicans through the prolonged agony of electing a Speaker of the House, the Republicans installed Congressman John Covode of Pennsylvania, sworn enemy of Buchanan, as chairman of the probe. The president believed the evil hand of his personal Judas, John Forney, was behind the whole conspiracy against him. Buchanan denounced the Covode Committee as a “Star chamber” and demanded his impeachment rather than the investigation. “I defy all investigation,” he cried. The Covode Committee of the House also provided a drumbeat of stories counter to those emanating from the Mason Committee of the Senate, which was seeking to unearth Republican complicity with John Brown. Covode held hearings uncovering widespread corruption in the War Department in granting naval contracts, building contracts, fraudulent land contracts, and bartered appointments. It exposed the embezzlement of $160,000 by the postmaster of New York, who absconded to Europe just a step ahead of arrest. It revealed payoffs at the Philadelphia Custom House and Navy Yard. It disclosed the exploitation of government printing contracts and jobs in the effort to destroy Douglas and sway congressmen on the Lecompton and English bills. Forney testified about printing bribes for “subserviency to the administration in its Kansas policy,” according to the committee report. Secretary of War John Floyd and Attorney General Jeremiah Black were tainted as paymasters of bribery. In the coup de grâce, Robert J. Walker’s letter that proved that Buchanan had lied to him about Lecompton, that he approved Walker’s policy which he then subverted, was timed for release on the convention’s eve.
“The reception of the New York papers, containing the testimony before the Covode Committee and the Buchanan-Walker letter, fell like a bomb-shell and a half into the Democratic camp,” reported the New York Times. Douglas’s forces rejoiced. The revelations were greeted as vindication of his Lecompton position and giving him a boost going into the convention. “The testimony of Walker and his production of Mr. Buchanan’s letter at this particular moment were designed as a coup d’etat in favor of Douglas,” reported the New York Herald. “It was all arranged a fortnight ago, and delegates here knew all about it before the Herald arrived. A thousand copies of the Herald containing the evidence were ordered beforehand and were circulated this morning among the delegates.”
Yet at the same time the disclosure of the Walker letter angered Southern delegates, reminding them why they hated Douglas. Seven Southern delegations agreed in a meeting that if the Alabama Platform was not endorsed they would walk out. “The sudden weakness of Douglas is found in the fact that seven Southern States have declared their intention of bolting,” reported the New York Herald. “This determination is partly the result of the fierceness with which Robert
J. Walker’s testimony before the Covode committee is thrust in every delegate’s face, as an evidence that the Southern Lecompton policy was wrong, and Douglas was right in fighting them.” The New York Times reported about the Southern bolters, “If unsuccessful, they will in high dudgeon and martial array vamoose ye ranche.” Slidell used Jefferson Davis’s withdrawal of his lifeless candidacy to give the bolters an additional jolt. “Slidell,” reported the Times, “brought and has exhibited a letter from Jeff. Davis to the Mississippi Delegation, withdrawing his name from the list of candidates, and advising them to withdraw from the Convention in case Douglas is nominated.” “The opposition to Mr. Douglas is of the most bitter type,” reported the New York Tribune.
More than three thousand delegates, hangers-on, journalists, and spectators crowded into the confines of the South Carolina Institute on Meeting Street, around the corner from Calhoun’s tomb at the St. Philips Episcopal Church Cemetery. The seats were nailed to the floor, the air stale, and the heat constantly rising. A bizarre fresco was painted as a backdrop to the stage. “Three highly colored but very improperly dressed females are there engaged,” wrote Halstead. “One seems to be contemplating matters and things in general. Another is mixing colors with the apparent intention of painting something. The other is pointing with what seems to be a common bowie-knife, to a globe. The point of the dagger is plunged into the Black Sea. It may be held to be according to the proprieties, that the continent which is outlined most conspicuously on this globe is marked ‘Africa.’ ”
On April 23, the opening day of the convention, the Douglas forces felt invigorated by exercising discipline over the credentials committee, excluding upstart delegations from Illinois and New York. By the second day, however, the storm loomed. “There is an impression prevalent this morning that the Convention is destined to explode in a grand row,” wrote Halstead. “The best informed and most dispassionate men are unable to see how such a termination of this party congress can be avoided. The Southern delegates last night, in caucus assembled, resolved to stand by the Jeff. Davis resolutions. There is tumult and war in prospect.”
The senatorial claque of Slidell and company worked the committee on organization so that the fifteen Southern state representatives joined by their allies from California and Oregon outvoted the sixteen Douglas members to elect Caleb Cushing as permanent chairman of the convention. “But we did not know,” wrote J.W. Gray of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “that we had unwittingly elected the veriest toady and tool of the Fire-Eaters.” Yet the Douglas forces ended the day with what seemed like a decisive win on the rules. The change allowed imposition of the unit rule on those states whose state conventions prescribed it, which all along had been part of the Douglas strategy and compelled the entire delegations from New York, Indiana, and elsewhere to vote as a unit for his nomination. The rules change also lifted the unit rule from any state whose convention had not required it, thus allowing pro-Douglas delegates who were a minority in Southern delegations to vote for him. Douglas won on the rules by a vote of 198 to 101, which his managers took as a harbinger of ultimate victory.
The coming conflict centered in the platform committee. Douglas proposed adoption of the 1856 Cincinnati Platform, which was intentionally riddled with ambiguities to accommodate that convention. Since that platform preexisted the Dred Scott decision it permitted evasion of any statement on the ruling that might remove ambiguity and lift the veil of popular sovereignty. For all Douglas’s careful planning and the solidarity of his delegates, Southerners had gained control of the platform committee assisted by Cushing’s rulings from the chair.
“ ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.’ No witches’ cauldron, agitated by whatever number of Satan’s imps, ever boiled with such fury,” stated the New York Herald. “The platform will be the touchstone that will either enliven the hopes or turn to dross all the glitter of Mr. Douglas’ pretensions.”
On April 27, the committee’s majority report favored a congressional slave code (“the Jeff. Davis resolutions”), denied that any territorial legislature could exclude or prohibit slavery, and asserted that it “is the duty of the Federal Government to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property on the high seas, in the Territories, or wherever else its Constitutional authority extends.” The Douglas position consisted of the Cincinnati Platform with a sop to Dred Scott, that the questions of “rights of property in States or Territories” were “judicial” and should be decided by the Supreme Court.
Jefferson Davis had withdrawn as a candidate, but the platform fight was a shadow battle between Davis and Douglas. Davis represented the majority position; Douglas, the minority. “Child’s play has ended,” reported the New York Times, “and all must work with eyes upon the end. . . . Of one thing you may be certain—unless the Convention agrees to the desire of the South in this regard, the Convention will be dissolved, and two candidates be nominated; and in that case no nomination would suit the South so well as Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, and Fernando Wood, of New York”—the pro-Southern mayor who was head of the anti-Douglas faction of the state’s delegation.
The Charleston convention was transformed into a warped version of Kansas with the Douglas camp in the ironic role of the free staters, and the platform, which was the majority report of the committee but supported by a minority of the convention, an equivalent of the Lecompton Constitution. The majority platform could also be seen as an instrument of nullification, Calhoun’s revenge, raised in the only national convention ever held in his city, intended to nullify Douglas’s nomination. Douglas could not plausibly run as a candidate in the North having abandoned his principle of popular sovereignty or accepted a platform that prescribed a national slave code. “Here, then,” wrote Halstead, “is the ‘irrepressible conflict’—a conflict between enduring forces.”
Both resolutions, both platforms, were sent to the whole convention where Douglas’s numbers prevailed. His team faced its dilemma with shifting tactics rooted in wishful thinking. “It was asserted, early in the sitting of the Convention, that it would be impossible for the South to submit to Mr. Douglas as the nominee upon a platform on which it would be possible for him to stand,” wrote Halstead. “The Douglas men at first laughed this to scorn. Presently they saw such indications of earnestness, that they paused and considered the matter, and became much more tolerant, and seemed willing to acquiesce in any sort of a platform, provided the South would allow the nomination of Douglas. . . . It became apparent the moment the platform was taken into consideration that there were differences it would be impossible for honest men to accommodate. The Douglas men begged for a chance for ambiguity. They craved and clamored for a false pretense. They begged to be allowed to cheat, and for the privilege of being cheated. They were particularly anxious for success. They were not so particular about principle.”
Faced with splitting the convention, the Douglas camp had some months earlier gamed how a Southern walkout could work to its advantage. The St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat paper explained the stratagem in January. “This course will throw out of the Convention that class of votes which would be cast against him. . . . It will reduce that much the number of delegates, and of course, the number required to make up a two-thirds majority; while it leaves his strength intact.” John Forsyth, Douglas’s main backer in Alabama, wrote him in February about William Lowndes Yancey, the Alabama Ultra leader, “my fear is that Yancey . . . will not . . . stand up to the instructions and leave the convention.” If a few Southern states walked out it would enable Douglas to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for nomination more easily and allow him to occupy the political center for the general election campaign. “Their game then was, to have three or four States, at most, go out,” wrote Halstead. “They wanted a little eruption, but not a great one.”
Henry B. Payne, Douglas’s trusted man from Ohio, was given the task to defend Douglas’s platform position before the convention, calling on Southerners to “put no wei
ghts upon the North,” and refusing compromise on popular sovereignty. “We never will recede from that doctrine, Sir; never, never, never, so help us God.”
The Southerners summoned their advocate to the rostrum, William Lowndes Yancey, “the prince of the Fire-Eaters,” as Halstead dubbed him, the silver-tongued speaker of the Ultras also known as the “Orator of Secession.” The plantation owner, former newspaper editor, and congressman from Alabama was the author of the Alabama Platform, demanding the full extension of slavery into the territories without any interference by half measure compromises like Douglas’s popular sovereignty, which he first proposed at the 1848 Democratic convention. When it was overwhelmingly dismissed he walked out accompanied by only one other Alabamian. The fire-eater strategy was never to pass the platform for its own sake, but to break the party apart, catalyze a walkout of Southern delegates, destroy Douglas’s candidacy, elect a “Black Republican” as president, provoke secession, and create a Southern Confederacy.
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