Almost President (12 page)

Lincoln's election as the first Republican president in 1860 is often seen as the final event that triggered secession, but secession was likely inevitable from the time Douglas won the Democratic nomination for president in 1860. With the Fire-Eaters' determination to destroy the Democratic Party, several Southern delegations, including Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas, had instructions to walk out of the Democratic National Convention if Douglas's nomination could not be stopped, which it nearly was, for the event was held in Charleston, South Carolina, the center of secessionist sentiment.

Douglas had delusions that the party might unite around his popular sovereignty platform, but a platform fight broke out over whether to accede to the South's demand for a federal slave code. Egged on by the Fire-Eaters, eight Southern state delegations walked out. Convention rules required that Douglas secure support from two-thirds of all credentialed delegates to win the nomination, but with so many delegates now absent Douglas could not reach the required threshold. His supporters moved the convention be adjourned and reconvened in Baltimore six weeks later.

Things were such a mess that Douglas offered to withdraw in favor of a compromise candidate, but his supporters refused even to let the offer be made public. It was “Douglas or nobody,” one supporter said. “Unless he is nominated, our party is gone for all time to come.” Secessionists bolted the Baltimore convention, too, but this time Douglas had arranged for enough alternate delegations that he had the votes to be nominated.

Douglas's nomination paved the way for Lincoln's by the Republicans, who concluded that the election would be won or lost in the West and that Lincoln, as a fellow Westerner, could counter Douglas's extraordinary popularity in the region. Once again, Lincoln's success depended upon being matched against Douglas. Had the Democrats nominated a Southerner, the Republicans might have been free to nominate a Northerner with more radical views, such as William H. Seward or Salmon Chase.

To complicate the electoral equation, there were two other significant presidential candidates in the race. The secessionists had met at a rump convention and nominated Buchanan's vice president, John Breckenridge, under the banner of the National Democratic Party, which existed solely in the South. Meanwhile, Tennessee senator John Bell was nominated to lead the Constitutional Union Party, which primarily consisted of the few remaining members of the conservative wing of the defunct Whig Party. Breckenridge's hope was to get enough votes to throw the election into the House of Representatives where a Southern compromise candidate might arise, but such was Douglas's anger at the secessionists that he was quoted as saying he would throw the election to Lincoln before he would let it be decided in the House.

Douglas had no need to throw the election because it was soon evident that Lincoln would be the next president. Douglas's first goal was to save the Democratic Party by driving from the party those advocating disunion and denying the Breckenridge organization any claim to legitimacy. “Secession from the Democratic Party means secession from the federal Union,” Douglas said. “He may not be elected,” one supporter said of Douglas, “but he will defeat the Vandals.”

Douglas hoped that if pro-Union Southerners rallied to his cause, he could keep the Democratic Party together as a viable national institution and play an invaluable role in holding the Union together. Douglas's running mate, former Georgia governor Herschel Johnson, said the goal was to preserve at least a fragment of the Democratic Party, using a word that would soon have a different meaning in the South, “for reconstruction, at a future day.”

Breaking precedent—and criticized for doing so—Douglas decided to campaign personally for the presidency. Douglas mystified observers by traveling even to states he had no hope of winning, such as Rhode Island, though a reporter there surmised his real purpose was not to win votes but “to crush out utterly and forever [Breckenridge's] Disunion Party, if it is in his power to do so.” After his tour of New England, Douglas went south where he astonished the Northern press and angered Southerners with his bold pronouncements in opposition to secession. This, historian Allen Nevins proclaimed, was Douglas's “finest hour.”

In Norfolk, Virginia, Douglas said, “I desire no man to vote for me, unless he hopes and desires to see the Union maintained and preserved intact.” He insisted Lincoln's election alone would not justify secession, and said if the South proceeded to break up the Union, he would endorse the use of force that Jackson had threatened against the nullifiers in 1832. In Petersburg, which would soon be the site of some of the most horrendous fighting of the Civil War, Douglas said, “There is no evil, and can be none, for which disunion is a legitimate remedy. . . . The last hope of freedom in the old world is now centered in the success of the American Republic.” In Raleigh, North Carolina, he added, “The only mistake we Democrats made was in tolerating disunionist sentiments in our bosom so long.” Southern papers warned he might be hanged if he spoke such sentiments farther south, and Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy, suggested that two gallows be built, one for Lincoln and one for Douglas, so that they could take into account the difference in the two men's heights.

Republicans, meanwhile, scoffed at Southern threats to secede, believing it was another bluff. Douglas knew better, and even though the intensity of his campaigning was destroying his health, he persevered. In three-and-a-half months, he campaigned in twenty-three states, a frantic pace even by today's standards, let alone using mid-nineteenth-century modes of transportation. His voice had been reduced to a “spasmodic bark,” which he kept up by ferociously sucking on lemons all day, and he could now walk only with the aid of a crutch. Still, he pressed on, saying, “Mr. Lincoln is the next president. We must try to save the Union. I will go South.”

Defying death threats and rotted fruit and eggs occasionally hurled in his direction, Douglas went deep into Dixie, to Georgia and Alabama, reiterating that the Constitution did not allow secession and calling on all loyal Southerners to thwart the plan of radical leaders for disunion. He drew huge crowds that gave him hope his tour was not in vain. “Well, if Lincoln is elected
perhaps
we can stand it for four years,” a planter remarked after hearing Douglas's plea. Alexander Stephens, who would serve as vice president in the Confederacy, stated that Douglas was the only hope to save the Union, and an Augusta newspaper proclaimed, “He is certainly the greatest intellect of the western world.”

But it turned out to be an illusion. Sectional pride and secession fever swept the South. Douglas was disappointed by his poor showing in the South, mystified at how his standing had tumbled in just four short years, not understanding how Dred Scott, Uncle Tom, and John Brown's foiled attempt to arm a slave insurrection had so altered public opinion in all sections. Eighty-eight percent of the popular vote he received came from the North; just 12 percent came from slave states, and most of those came from border states. Missouri was the only state he carried outright. “With your defeat,” a friendly newspaper editor in Mobile told Douglas the day after the election, “the cause of the Union was lost.”

But Douglas refused to accept that maintaining the Union was a lost cause. Believing his campaign might have opened a crack in the door, Douglas immediately began to search for some compromise that might yet avert civil war. Douglas begged Southern members of Congress to return to Washington, and all but South Carolina complied. “The whole country is looking to you,” wrote a North Carolinian. But Douglas found few allies. Buchanan agreed the South had no right to secede, but argued that the federal government had no power to prevent it. President-elect Lincoln, meanwhile, had decided the time for compromise was past. “The tug has to come and better now than later,” he said.

Douglas himself was ambivalent about compromise. He denied the South had legitimate grievances, noting the 1850 fugitive slave act, for example, was enforced as well as any other law. At one point he exclaimed, “Better a million men should fall on the battle field than that this government should lose one single state!” Yet, he understood the horrors of a civil war, so after South Carolina officially seceded on December 20, 1860, Douglas worked with Senator Crittenden to draft a set of constitutional amendments that might appease the South, including a particularly odious pair from Douglas himself that prohibited even free blacks from voting and another that would fund a freed-slave colonization scheme. The efforts at compromise came to nothing, even though Congress debated the issues until just hours before Lincoln's inaugural on March 4.

During Lincoln's inauguration, Douglas positioned himself on the platform as close to Lincoln as possible to visually demonstrate his support of the new administration. Contemporary news accounts claimed Douglas even held Lincoln's hat as the new president delivered his inaugural address. While Lincoln succinctly articulated the basic source of division—“One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended”—he sought to reassure the South that Republicans had no intention of interfering with slavery in states where it existed and that the administration would faithfully enforce the fugitive slave law. Lincoln promised to seek peaceful means to break the impasse, including a possible constitutional convention that had been pushed by Douglas and Seward. He also foreswore the use of force for any reason beyond the enforcement of existing federal laws, such as the collection of tariffs and import duties, even as he dismissed the idea that any state had a lawful right to secede from the Union.

During the speech, Douglas audibly murmured his approval of the tone and specifics of the address, saying “good,” “that's so,” “good again,” and “no coercion.” When Lincoln was finished, Douglas was one of the first to warmly congratulate him and told a reporter standing nearby that Lincoln was “all right.” Later that night, Douglas danced with Mrs. Lincoln at the inaugural ball. It all led the
New York Times
to ask the next day, “What means this evident weakness of Mr. Douglas for Mr. Lincoln?”

The answer to that question was that Douglas wanted to reinforce Lincoln's inclination toward peaceful resolution of the conflict, and he hoped to have influence with his old acquaintance in order to assure the South that his assessment of Lincoln's peaceful intentions was correct. When Democratic congressmen attacked Lincoln's address as provocative, the first to defend the new president in the Senate was not a Republican, but Douglas, who proclaimed Lincoln's speech “a peace offering rather than a war message.” When asked if he was speaking for Lincoln, Douglas avowed that he wanted it understood he was not an apologist for the administration, “but on this one question, that of preserving the Union by a peaceful solution of our present difficulties . . . if I understand his true intent and meaning, I am with him.”

The South, however, had interpreted Lincoln's remarks differently and was certain the president intended to use coercion to keep the Union together. Douglas received no help from the Republicans, who preferred to remain mute on the administration's intentions, despite Douglas's provocations. “Silence is criminal when we are on the eve of events like these!” Douglas exclaimed on the floor of the Senate a week after Lincoln's inaugural.

Meanwhile, Douglas was trying to hold the Democratic Party together and to provide direction on how Democrats should behave during the growing crisis. Prominent Democrats were wary of supporting Lincoln for fear of appearing Republican sympathizers. Democrats convening in Illinois reported considerable sympathy for secession among its members. Some thought Douglas should lead an effort to fuse with conservative Republicans and John Bell supporters to form a new party, even scrapping the Democratic name. Others simply believed the North should let the South go in peace. Douglas ally and Illinois congressman John A. McClernand spoke for his friend when he said, “If we become entangled with disunionism we will be lost as a party.”

Douglas refused to consider party fusion or any action that might end the Democratic Party as he knew it. When a supporter asked Douglas what Democrats should do, Douglas replied simply, “We must fight for our country and forget all differences.” On April 12, 1861, Confederates began bombarding Fort Sumter outside Charleston, the first shots of the war, and on April 14 the beleaguered garrison there surrendered. Douglas was entreated by his wife, Adele, and others to visit Lincoln to see how he could be of assistance. For two hours, the friendly adversaries went over strategy. Douglas described the meeting to the press as “a cordial feeling of a united, friendly and patriotic purpose.” In a later statement, Douglas said he was “prepared to sustain the president in the exercise of all his constitutional functions to preserve the Union.” To a friend, Douglas said, “I've known Mr. Lincoln a longer time than you have, or than the country has; he'll come out right, and we will stand by him.”

There was now considerable public demand, especially given Lincoln's inexperience in government and as an administrator, that he rely heavily on Douglas's counsel. Douglas, however, decided it was time to leave Washington, unless Lincoln urged him to stay (which he did not), and travel to Illinois to stem secession sympathy there. Douglas believed that if he was to build the Democratic Party into a strong but loyal opposition party, the key would be party elements in the Northwest. Traveling through Harper's Ferry, Douglas's train was stopped and searched by Virginia militia, who recognized him and spoke of detaining him. Douglas warned that if they did, a large force would be sent to rescue him, and he was let pass.

Having missed a train connection in Wheeling because of the delay, Douglas stopped in the Ohio town of Bellaire, where he expressed pleasure at addressing a large crowd consisting of Americans from both sides of the Ohio River, Ohioans and Virginians, each cheering the American flag, “the emblem of peace and union, and of constitutional liberty.” Reminding those assembled that free and open commerce throughout the Ohio River Valley and into the Mississippi was essential to the lifeblood of the region, Douglas denounced this “new system of resistance by the sword and bayonet to the results of the ballot box.” The issue was no longer slavery, but the survival of the nation.