America Aflame (29 page)

Alexander Stephens, who stood with Douglas to the last, despaired, not only for his party but for his country: “There is a tendency everywhere, not only at the North, but at the South, to strife, dissension, disorder, and anarchy.” The chaos that his friend Abraham Lincoln had warned against two decades earlier now seemed imminent. The southern bolters achieved their objectives: they denied Douglas the nomination of a unified party, and they crafted a platform brimming with a “full measure of Southern rights.” Yet, by fracturing the Democratic Party, the southern delegates rendered it more likely that a party hostile to those rights would assume power. Perhaps that was their intention.
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A month before the Democratic Party reconvened to die, a group of former Whigs, mainly from northern and southern border states, gathered in Baltimore as the Constitutional Union Party and selected John Bell of Tennessee as its presidential candidate, with Edward Everett of Massachusetts as his running mate. The party platform was simple: for the Constitution and for the Union.

With four presidential candidates in the field, the 1860 presidential campaign unfolded in three distinct campaigns: Douglas against Lincoln in the North; Breckinridge versus Bell in the South; and Douglas contesting Bell in the border states, with Lincoln and Breckinridge hoping for some support there as well.

The Republicans left Chicago with the campaign initiative that they never relinquished. They used their congressional investigations into the corruption of the Buchanan administration—the first such hearings in the nation's history—and the southern Democratic obstruction of their programs to aid workers and farmers with land in the West, and the homespun nature of their presidential candidate to broaden the party's appeal in the key border states of the North.

Republican rallies exuded an evangelical fervor that blended religious and military pageantry much in the manner of the Free Soil Party, though on a grander scale. They performed before a more receptive audience, as anti-slavery and, especially anti-southern sentiment had grown in the North since 1848. The “Wide-Awakes,” the party's shock troops of younger voters, four hundred thousand strong by one estimate, paraded in black oilcloth capes and red shirts after the fashion of the Paris revolutionaries of 1848. Even into the Democratic stronghold of New York City they marched, holding their torches high through the narrow streets of lower Manhattan preceded by booming military bands, and cheered on by thousands of partisan onlookers who sang out the “Freedom Battle Hymn,” entreating citizens to march “On for freedom, God, our country, and the right.” The rally culminated at Broadway and Tenth Street at midnight in a shower of Roman candles. Wherever the Wide-Awakes went during that campaign season, their parades and the accompanying din of music and fireworks lent an impression of an inexorable tide changing the political landscape of America for all time. Here was not merely a political rally; here was a movement.
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Wide-Awakes marching through lower Manhattan, October 3, 1860. Though not a paramilitary organization, the Wide-Awakes wore uniforms and marched in precision order through northern streets supporting the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln, lending a martial atmosphere to Republican rallies during the 1860 election campaign. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

The Republicans flaunted their youthful exuberance and their righteousness. Morality was a major theme at these events, conveniently bundling the issues of slavery, Roman Catholicism, prohibition, and political corruption. Wide-Awakes were fond of chanting the doggerel “Little Doug [liked] lots of drink in his jug,” while portraying Lincoln as a paragon of virtue—abstemious in alcohol, tobacco, and swearing—that was at least two-thirds accurate. Lincoln, moreover, was “religiously honest.” “Honest Abe” would restore probity and purity to the White House. Not a politician but a statesman, a man who had only a brief stay in Washington before returning to toil humbly for his people.
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Despite the Republican Party platform's silence on religion and Lincoln's rejection of nativism, former Know Nothings grasped the evangelical fervor of the campaign to pursue their attacks on the Catholic Church. One Republican newspaper, blending anti-slavery and nativist rhetoric, alleged that “Roman Catholics, whose consciences are enslaved … regard the King of Rome—the Pope—as the depository of all authority.” Another editor forged the same connection, charging that Irish Catholics “were sots and bums who crawled out of their ‘rotten nests of filth' on elections to cast ignorant ballots for the candidates of the slaveocracy.” Republicans distilled the Democrats to an unholy trinity of “the Pope, a whisky barrel, and a nigger driver.” Little wonder that Catholics responded to this barrage by voting in unprecedented numbers for Democratic candidates. The nativist calculation that linking Catholics and slaveholders would attract rather than repel voters in key northern states proved correct, however. The Republicans' support of nativist policies in northern cities proved more compelling to some voters than the slavery issue.
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Stephen A. Douglas had no army drilling for him, though several northern cities managed spirited rallies for the Little Giant. Reviled by a substantial wing of his own party, Douglas took to the hustings, an unprecedented move for a major presidential candidate of that era. He crisscrossed the North and a good portion of the South, including a speaking tour in Georgia at the invitation of Alexander Stephens. He promoted popular sovereignty, exalted the Union, and warned against extremism.

In the South, the surrogates for Breckinridge and Bell carried on mannerly campaigns, with the former stressing the importance of protecting southern rights though not threatening disunion, and the latter hewing closely to the name of the party. Breckinridge's strong professions for the Union undercut Douglas's strategy to command the center position between anti-slavery and disunion. While there was plenty of disunion talk in the South, none of it came from Breckinridge.

The southern press and politicians devoted considerable space to these candidacies and, in the Upper South, to Douglas as well. They also reserved a good many column inches for a candidate whose name and party would not even appear on the ballots in ten southern states. A relative unknown in the South at the outset of the campaign—one Alabama newspaper referred to him as Gabriel Lincoln—he came to be known by many southerners as a subhuman creature whose political party existed primarily to destroy the South. The Republican candidate, according to one description, was a “horrid-looking wretch … sooty and scoundrelly in aspect; a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman.”
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As “sooty” implied, southern journalists and politicians employed race to denigrate the Republicans. One editor claimed falsely that Lincoln's running mate, Hannibal Hamlin, “had negro blood in his veins and … one of his children had kinky hair.” It was clear that the party stood for “one dogma—the equality of races, white and black.” The amount of ink and rhetoric marshaled to excoriate Lincoln and the Republicans far exceeded their scant prospects for electoral success in the South. Rather, it seemed as if southern nationalists wished to educate the voters less about the election than about its aftermath should the Republicans win.
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Lincoln's frequent professions that Republicans bore no ill will toward the South or its institutions struck many in the South as disingenuous. After all, who would appoint the postmasters, the judges, and the customs agents, and who would control the military in a Republican administration? Southerners predicted a Republican administration's policies could wipe out “four hundred and thirty millions of dollars” of capital investment in slaves. “They know that they can plunder and pillage the South, as long as they are in the same Union with us, by … every other possible mode of injustice and peculation. They know that in the Union they can steal southern property in slaves.” While Lincoln and Douglas sparred as to who best would promote the progress and prosperity of the nation, southerners viewed the election as a referendum on themselves—whether other parts of the Union valued their comity sufficiently to reject the Republican Party and accede to southern demands for protection.
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Lincoln did not say much during the campaign. “My published speeches contain nearly all I could willingly say.” He did change his appearance, a source of constant comment by both his supporters and detractors. Several colleagues told him that he “would be much improved in appearance” if he cultivated “whiskers.” When eleven-year-old Grace Bedell suggested during a campaign appearance that “you would look a great deal better” if he grew a beard, “for your face is so thin,” he finally gave in and allowed hair to sprout and soften his sunken cheekbones.
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Alexander Stephens watched the campaign unfold from his Georgia residence and felt a rising sadness. The slanders against Lincoln pained him especially. Stephens believed that a Lincoln administration would run the government “just as safely for the South and honest and faithfully
in every particular
” as Buchanan had. “I know the man well,” he emphasized. “He is not a bad man.” Stephens feared the growing influence of disunionists in the South more than he feared the Republicans. If the future of slavery depended on conservative policies and leaders, then southern extremists played into the enemies' hands. Stephens stumped loyally for Douglas. He respected Breckinridge but worried about some of his supporters, noting that “those who begin revolutions seldom end them.” By the fall, the extremists seemed ascendant. Stephens confided to a correspondent of the
New York Herald
, “I hold revolution and civil war to be inevitable. The demagogues have raised a whirlwind they cannot control.”
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Stephens's pessimism was justified. In those days, several northern states held statewide elections weeks before the presidential balloting, and the Republicans swept those races, portending their success in November. Douglas, sensing the inevitable, abruptly broke off his campaign and hurried to the South to plead with leaders and voters that the Union, above all, must be preserved; that the legacy of the Founders transcended the election of one man. It was an extraordinary display of selfless patriotism and personal courage at a time when posturing passed for statesmanship. That it was a fool's errand, he could not know. Douglas knew only the Union.

Douglas fought a growing perception in the South that two nations already existed, a perspective shared by increasing numbers of northerners as well. The religious schism of the 1840s fueled these views initially. Southerners understood the implications of their increasingly minority status within the government and the nation. “Northern” and “American” now seemed interchangeable terms. Technology, fashion, finance, immigration, and the most widely read newspapers and magazines all congregated at the North and extended their influence throughout the nation. The fact that northern advances rested in part on the labor of four million slaves galled many southerners. They believed that without the South, the North would be a much lesser region.

Objectively, northerners and southerners shared many things. They both believed in the American dream that hard work brought financial well-being and independence. Both regions harbored aspiring urban middle classes that looked to investments in their families and their communities as down payments on a rosy future. Northerners and southerners chased after railroads, canals, harbor improvements, and real estate. But for all the urban hubbub, the hiss of steam engines, and the click-click of the telegraph, America was still a nation of family farms and small shops, regardless of section. Americans prayed in similar ways; theirs was a personal God, and they reached for heaven with the same fervor with which they sought out the main chance of financial success. Northerners and southerners interpreted the world around them through their evangelical theology, that God had a purpose for them and their country, and that events fit into a larger divine plan.

North and South shared a revolutionary heritage, what Abraham Lincoln would call the “mystic chords of memory.” They struggled to interpret that legacy, live up to it, and preserve it. Historical societies formed in profusion during the 1840s and 1850s in both sections. Northerners and southerners both prized the West, not only as the newest land but also as the American dreamscape, a place of renewal and redemption.
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Such similarities might have overcome political differences, were it not for slavery. The institution transformed common bonds into bitter differences. The technologies that drew a vast continent together—the steam railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph—also transmitted news and information. Partisan political journals, magazines, sectarian publications, popular literature, and published speeches flooded homes, offices, and churches. An ink war erupted long before Fort Sumter. Citizens north and south exaggerated their mutual animosity. A claim from a southern journalist in 1860 that “nine-tenths” of northerners were abolitionists was preposterous, but the leading dailies and magazines in the South offered no contradiction. With every escalating event of the 1850s, “Slave Power” and “abolitionist” seemed as appropriate as “slave state” and “free state” as sectional descriptors.