Dean Richmond of the Albany Regency attempted to create a fusion ticket of Douglas and Breckinridge, but his negotiations fell into a round of mutual accusations and contempt. “There can be no middle ground,” read the statement of the pro-Breckinridge party in response to his overture. “Squatter Sovereignty is but another form of Free-Soil Republicanism, and necessarily continues the excitement, strife and bloodshed caused by fanatical emigrant-aid societies with their contributions of Sharp’s rifles.” The New York Times wrote of the Albany Regency’s “ruin,” its “blunders,” the “craziness” of its fusion schemes, its unprincipled alliances with Fernando Wood on the one hand and the Know Nothings on the other, “craven and incompetent,” its fate “a sealed fact.”
The Constitutional Unionist campaign, the most conservative of the campaigns and the one operating most on magical thinking, circulated letters pledging its signers never to speak about slavery as a public issue. John Bell gave an interview to the New York Herald at his Tennessee home on August 8, his major contribution to the debate. “Mr. Bell,” the paper reported approvingly, “has a third interest in about four hundred slaves, the balance belongs to his second wife. They are employed in Mr. Bell’s iron works. . . . The system by which this large body of slaves is governed is admirable and humane.” Bell stated he preferred Douglas over Breckinridge, and so long as his followers “adhered to principle” would be in favor of fusion efforts “to defeat Lincoln,” but “he had no apprehensions that Lincoln would be elected.” He believed his own “cause is progressing gloriously,” and that either he or his running mate Edward Everett “will be President—by the people of the House, or through the action of the Senate.”
Douglas had a brief delusional episode that lasted about two weeks after the Baltimore convention. He could not restrain himself from sketching out to Charles Lanphier, editor of the Illinois State Register, just how he would win. He would carry the South, except for South Carolina and Mississippi, which would go for Breckinridge, and the border states, which would go for Bell. Then he would carry the New England states, except for Massachusetts and Vermont. He would carry most of the rest of the North. But if the election were deadlocked and happened to go into the House of Representatives he was certain that Breckinridge had “no show” and he would win there. But by the time Douglas reached Boston in early July, however, his wishful projections had evaporated and he confided to Senator Henry Wilson “his conviction that Lincoln would be elected.”
On August 31, in Baltimore, Douglas introduced the charge of conspiracy into the center of the campaign, raising the accusation he had laid out three months earlier in his Senate floor speech. “There is a mature plan throughout the Southern states to break up the Union,” he said. “I believe the election of a Black Republican is to be the signal for that attempt and that the leaders of the scheme desire the election of Lincoln so as to have an excuse for disunion.” Politically and personally he was closer than Lincoln to the trauma tearing the country apart. Douglas was the target of the Southern Ultras, their immediate enemy and obstacle, within their own party; Lincoln was the “excuse.” He experienced the crack-up of the Democratic Party and the nation as one and the same thing. Until the Democratic convention, he could no more envision the party coming apart than he could imagine severing his limbs. He thought he knew the South, the real South—he had married two Southern women, owned a Mississippi plantation—and to him it was not a place that would ever separate from the Union. Haunted by the recent death of his infant daughter and wracked with illness, gasping for breath, his voice described as a “spasmodic bark,” he began to speak about his own death—his political death—and relate it to the death of the country. “I am not seeking the Presidency,” he said. “I am too ambitious a man to desire to have my death-warrant signed now. . . . My object is to preserve this Union by pointing out what, in my opinion, is the only way in which it can be saved.”
Douglas conflated his fate with that of the party and the country, a trinity. Before an audience in Richmond, the day before his Baltimore appearance, he described the Democratic Party as “the only historical party now remaining in the country, the only party that has its northern and southern support firmly enough established to preserve this Union.” But Douglas was pleading for a party that had ceased to exist at Charleston and Baltimore. The moment it was finally within the grasp of his leadership was the signal for its dissolution. He had proposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act to win the regard of the South for the purpose of becoming president only to set in motion the events that turned him into an object of obloquy. He was left standing on the ruins of what had been until his nomination the only national party, as much a sectional candidate as the others. Jefferson Davis, back in Mississippi, told a crowd that gallows should be constructed for both Douglas and Lincoln with the difference being their height.
“The sky is dark,” Herschel Johnson, Douglas’s running mate, wrote Alexander Stephens in mid-July. Following grim results from early elections in Vermont and Maine, Douglas met privately with Johnson on September 11 at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York to review strategy. “I told him,” said Johnson, “he underestimated the power of Mr. Buchanan’s army of office holders, in the Northern States; that although they could not carry a single one for Breckinridge, they would bring him enough votes to give them all to Lincoln, that he (Douglas) would not carry a single Southern State and that I regarded Lincoln’s election as certain. I shall never forget the expression of deep sadness, at this announcement. He was silent and thoughtful, for a moment, but rallying said, ‘If you be correct in your views, then God help our poor country.’ ”
In late September, trying to hold back the tide in the Northwest states, Douglas barnstormed by train through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, speaking until his voice gave out. At Toledo, before a midnight rally at the station, he ran inside another train that had just come into the depot. He had heard that William Seward was a passenger. Seward, in fact, had gotten over his gloom and was touring the country giving speeches for Lincoln. He was accompanied by Charles Francis Adams, Jr. Chugging from a whiskey bottle in his hand, careening down the aisle, Douglas shouted to Seward, “Come, Governor, they want to see you; come out and speak to the boys!” “How are you, Judge?” Seward replied. “No; I can’t go out. I’m sleepy.” “Well! if you don’t want to you shan’t.” Douglas left, drinking. “So,” recalled Adams, “on this occasion, Douglas, a Presidential candidate, had, more than half drunk, rushed into that car at midnight, whiskey-bottle in hand, to drag Seward . . . out of his sleeping-berth, to show him in a railroad station to his (Douglas’s) political heelers!” When Douglas reached Cincinnati, he was too debilitated to address the thousands that had assembled to hear him.
“I’m no alarmist,” Douglas said in Chicago at a grand reception on October 5. “I believe that this country is in more danger now than any other moment since I have known anything of public life.” On October 8, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he received a telegraph from John Forney that Pennsylvania had voted Republican in the early presidential ballot; then he learned that Indiana and Ohio had gone Republican, too. Curtin and Lane, who had staked their elections on Lincoln’s nomination, were victorious. “Mr. Lincoln is the next president,” Douglas said to his traveling secretary. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” He told Congressman Edward McPherson of Pennsylvania, “By God, sir, the election shall never go into the House; before it shall go into the House, I will throw it to Lincoln.” The New York Times reported, “The words thus used were accompanied by a violent gesture, and perhaps an additional oath.”
The day after the catastrophic early elections, on October 9, Richmond dangled $200,000 before state candidates on the Breckinridge ticket and worked out an awkward distribution of New York presidential electors favoring Douglas, fusion achieved through payment of a sufficient sum of cash. The deal was cut without Douglas’s permission. That, more or less, was the end of the campaign funds.
Dougla
s went south. He spoke at the levee at St. Louis and boarded a steamer down the Mississippi to Memphis, addressing crowds before heading to Nashville, where Yancey arrived on the same day. “If I have antagonized Mr. Douglas,” he told a rally, “it is because he has tied the brand of discord to the tail of the party fox to be turned loose on our Southern fields.” On his way to Chattanooga, Douglas’s train narrowly avoided a wreck. He was convinced there was a deliberate effort to assassinate him. He was trailed by vituperative editorials. He arrived at Atlanta on October 30, where he was greeted by Alexander Stephens, the only prominent Southern leader other than his running mate willing to campaign with him. They knew he could not win Georgia, but hoped he might throw the state to Bell. But where would that lead? Bell existed only to throw the election into the House. Douglas headed to Alabama. The state was split North and South, between support for him and for Yancey, between the increasingly open division over Union and secession.
On the evening of November 1 Douglas was escorted from the Montgomery train station by a torchlight parade to his hotel, but when he approached the entrance he and his wife were pelted with a barrage of rotten eggs and tomatoes. The next day he appeared at the State Capitol before a large crowd, most of whom were Bell and Breckinridge voters. It was the significant speech of his campaign.
“The Republic is now involved in darkness, and surrounded with those elements of discord which inspire the patriot’s hearts with dread,” he began. He recapitulated his case for “principle of non-intervention on the subject of slavery,” which he claimed the basis of “peace between the North and the South.” He depicted himself as a brave defender of Southern rights on the Fugitive Slave Act, being denounced as “a traitor, a Benedict Arnold, a Judas Iscariot,” and standing against “the Northern people in a wild frenzy of fanaticism” whipped up by “Seward, Sumner, Chase, Giddings and the Abolition leaders.” He described how “the Abolitionists howled” against his Kansas-Nebraska Act. At every turn he said he was also opposed by Jefferson Davis. “Why was there any secession from Charleston and Baltimore? The men who seceded tell the people that they were not willing to endorse Douglas and his squatter sovereignty notions. I believe that is their excuse. The record shows that excuse is not true.” He veered into a tangent on how climate determined the presence of slavery. “For instance, suppose we should acquire the Island of Cuba, and I trust we will very soon, and after we acquired it, it should be colonized by Sumner, Seward, Chase, Giddings, Lincoln and men of that class, nobody but Abolitionists going there, do you think they would free the negroes in Cuba? How long would it be before they would each have a plantation?”
He returned to his theme. “Do you think there is a solitary fire-eater in all America who believes that his party can procure an act of Congress protecting slavery, and enforcing its existence, where the people do not want it? I do not think there is one of them who would risk his character by pretending that he did. Then why do they make the demand? . . . What is the inference? The only inference I can draw is, that these men desire a pretext for breaking up this Union.”
Finally, he exposed the plot against him and the country, his recognition of the political reality of defeat staring him in the face, and made his plea against secession. “I believe there is a conspiracy on foot to break up this Union,” he said. “It is the duty of every good citizen to frustrate the scheme. If Lincoln is elected, he owes it to the Breckinridge men, and then they tell us, after having tried to secure that result by dividing the party, that if he is elected they are going to dissolve the Union. At Norfolk, Virginia, they wanted to know whether, if Lincoln was elected, I would help them dissolve the Union. I told them never on earth.”
Douglas defended his stance against secession by laying out a scenario of political tactics. “There is no living man who would do more to defeat Lincoln than myself. There is no man more anxious to defeat him than myself. And I would have no trouble in beating him to death, but for the support given him by the Breckinridge men.” Douglas was daydreaming about what might have been if he had not been who he was, the Southerners were not the Southerners, and slavery was not an issue. But then he contemplated the inevitability of Lincoln. “If Lincoln is elected,” he said, “he must be inaugurated.” He described how he would lead the effort in the Congress to thwart Lincoln from realizing the Republican platform. “And after he is inaugurated,” Douglas explained, “if he attempts to violate any man’s rights, or the Constitution of the country, we will punish him according to the Constitution, to the extent of the law. Notwithstanding the combination between the Breckinridge men and the Black Republicans at the North, we have already succeeded in ensuring the election of enough Douglas Democrats, united with the South, to outvote the Black Republicans. We shall hold both Houses of Congress against him during his term, if he should be elected.” With that vision of Lincoln elected but denied, he pled again to his Southern audience, “I hold that the election of any man on earth by the American people, according to the Constitution, is no justification for breaking up this government.”
Among those listening to Douglas was William Lowndes Yancey. He had just spoken in favor of secession in New Orleans, where he called it “the right to save ourselves from despotism and destruction—the right to withdraw ourselves from a government which endeavors to crush us.” That night, in Montgomery, Yancey was escorted by city officials and leaders of the Breckinridge Club in a carriage drawn by four white horses through the cheering people in the streets to the “constant firing of cannon and the strains of music,” onto the stage of the newly constructed Artesian Basin Theatre, where he was warmly greeted by the justices of the Alabama Supreme Court and the mayor. Then he was introduced, “Three cheers for the greatest orator of the world!”
Another face in the crowd at both Douglas’s and Yancey’s events was a young actor who was a member of a traveling troupe that had come to Montgomery, where he would play the lead role in Richard III. “Booth, Booth, Booth!” read the advertisements, exploiting the most famous family name of the theater. “He was convinced that Douglas was simply a professional politician and a rank opportunist,” recalled a stagehand about the reaction of John Wilkes Booth. But Booth had struck up a friendship with Yancey’s son, Ben, and walked from his favorite bar with him to hear his father’s speech. “Yancey’s oratory swept the young actor off his feet and he left the meeting in a delirium of enthusiasm.” Afterward, “at every opportunity,” he “sought conversation with Ben’s father.”
The evening of his Montgomery speech, Douglas and Adele boarded a steamboat to take them to Selma for his speech the next day. As he spoke hundreds rushed onto the boat, the floor broke, they tumbled to the deck below, and were badly bruised. Adele stayed behind to recuperate while Douglas hobbled away on crutches to the final stop of his campaign in Mobile.
On November 6, Douglas awaited the election results in the office of the editor of the Mobile Register, John Forsyth. The outcome was quickly apparent. Without allowing a moment to lapse, Forsyth showed Douglas an editorial he had already written to be published in the next day’s paper calling for a state convention to determine whether Alabama should secede. Douglas opposed printing it, but Forsyth insisted that holding a convention was the only way to try to halt secession. According to Douglas’s private secretary, “he returned to his hotel more hopeless than I had ever before seen him.” Back in Washington, a month later, Douglas would receive a letter from Forsyth, suddenly transformed from Unionist to secessionist, declaring himself in favor of a civil war rather than “be stripped of 25 hundred millions of slave property and to have turned loose among us 4,000,000 of freed blacks,” and concluding, “With your defeat the cause of the Union was lost.”
On his way back to Washington, Douglas passed through New Orleans, where he was welcomed with a silk banner with his likeness, reading, “Our Choice in 1864.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WIDE-AWAKE
Lincoln did not campaign. His policy was d
iscretion. He did not leave Springfield, instead receiving a stream of visitors in a room at the State Capitol. He was “bored—bored badly,” Herndon reported to Trumbull on June 19. “Good gracious, I would not have his place and be bored as he is—I could not endure it.”
Abraham Lincoln, August 13, 1860
The Republican campaign circulated authorized biographies, pamphlets of his speeches, the book of his debates with Douglas, and engravings of Mathew Brady’s photograph. The Republicans in the Congress flooded the mail with franked copies of the Covode Committee report on the Buchanan administration’s corruption. Surrogate speakers roamed the country on Lincoln’s behalf. Chase spoke. Seward went on a whistle-stop tour. Orville Browning spoke to the Old Whigs, Owen Lovejoy to the abolitionists, Carl Schurz to the Germans, and Cassius Clay galvanized the Wide-Awakes.
The Wide-Awake Clubs were spontaneously organized in Hartford by five young store clerks to escort the militant Clay to a rally. By the time the campaign was in full swing they had attracted hundreds of thousands of young men, wearing uniforms of glazed black oilcloth capes and hats, carrying lanterns on poles, and marching at rallies and parades. The Wide-Awakes created a widespread network of Republican activism, partisan newspapers, and crossed class lines, drawing in mechanics and farmers. In almost every town and city the Wide-Awakes drilled in public squares. Unlike the hard cider campaigns of the past, the Wide-Awake clubs stressed the values of temperance and self-discipline, and they organized to turn out the vote and guard the polls. Democrats countered with the “Chloroformers” intended to put the Wide-Awakes to sleep. They also created the Little Giants and Little Dougs clubs; the Bell campaign mounted the Bell Ringers and Clapperites, while the Southern Democrats joined the Breckinridge Clubs. But these groups were a shadow of the Wide-Awakes, which swept the North. Every Lincoln rally was led by phalanxes of marching Wide-Awakes in their capes and bearing their torches. They were a new phenomenon in politics, a fad, and yet more than that. The sudden growth of this quasi-military, coordinated mass movement was a political Great Awakening, a reflexive response to a rapidly polarizing country. A note from an officer of the Beardstown, Illinois, Wide-Awakes to the secretary of the Springfield Wide-Awakes about a forthcoming “grand rally,” caught the spirit for “an assembling of the masses at Springfield on the 8th [of August], as shall strike terror to the hearts of all opponents of our worthy standard bearer, ‘Honest Old Abe,’ and rekindle, within the bosom of his friends, fires of devotion, that shall, in the coming November, sweep from the political arena those twin sisters of iniquity, ‘Squatter Sovereignty and Disunion.’ ” In Galena, Illinois, a former army captain and ostensible Douglas supporter, Ulysses Grant, turned down the invitation to train the “Douglas Guards” and instead drilled the Wide-Awakes. Lincoln didn’t need to say a word to arouse them.
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