America Aflame (31 page)

Abraham Lincoln captured the 1860 presidential election by winning the North. He carried the four northern border states—Illinois, Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—that John C. Frémont lost in 1856. He won these states by positioning himself in the conservative wing of the Republican Party, pledging to keep the territories free for white men and disavowing any hostility toward the states in which slavery existed. As one of his Pennsylvania supporters explained, Lincoln ran as “a consistent Whig.” The people “think he is conservative, and will, if elected, carry out the principles & policies of Henry Clay.” There was no deception in this position: Lincoln admired Clay greatly, and his staunch Unionism trumped his own moral misgivings about slavery. But, as a westerner, and as a Republican, his opposition to slavery in the territories was steadfast. He had stated on numerous occasions that the West was reserved “for homes of free white people.” It was “God-given for that purpose.” The sentiment resonated not only in Pennsylvania but also and especially in the West.
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John C. Breckinridge carried most of the southern states, as expected. However, John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas combined for 55 percent of the popular vote in the South, confirming northern beliefs on the weakness of disunion sentiment there. Yet Douglas, who could lay claim to being the only national candidate, won the electoral vote of just one state, Missouri, an ominous indicator of polarization.

Lincoln would be a minority president—he garnered just under 40 percent of the popular vote. Even had the three other candidates combined against him, Lincoln still would have received a majority of the electoral votes, a sure sign of the North's new dominance in national politics. The outcome was clear to southerners: a party had ascended to national power with scarcely a southern vote.

In a dingy slave cabin in western Virginia, a young boy awoke to find his mother praying for the election of Abraham Lincoln. It was one of the earliest memories of the boy, Booker T. Washington. At his home in Rochester, Frederick Douglass rejoiced that Lincoln's election would break the “exacting, haughty and imperious slave oligarchy.”
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Hundreds of miles away in southern Georgia, a young girl stooped in her parents' garden gathering loose rose leaves to scatter among her clothes, a fall ritual repeated all over the South as the long hot summer blended into the brilliant southern autumn. Further away still, the boatman in Illinois gathered his belongings for the longest journey he would ever make.

CHAPTER 8

THE TUG COMES

WALT WHITMAN SAT ATOP
his omnibus on Broadway despite the frigid February weather. The conveyance, pulled by a team of horses, normally lurched along at a top speed of three miles per hour, a bit slower than a fast walker. Even at that modest pace, the ride over the city's uneven cobblestones left a bone-jarring impression on passengers. Today, though, Walt was going nowhere. People, carts, wagons, carriages, and hacks competed on the city's busiest thoroughfare in a contest that counted few winners. Thirty thousand people clogged Broadway between Vesey and Barclay streets, five thousand of whom congregated near the entrance to the Astor House, New York's most elegant hotel, rising to a then-impressive height of six stories in Greek Revival splendor.

The focus of this throng pulled up to the hotel in a modest hack, stepped out, dressed in black from head to toe, and walked slowly but purposefully up the steps of the hotel entrance. He paused for a moment, looked at the crowd, turned sharply on his heel and disappeared into the lobby. Walt Whitman had known New York for many years and had reveled in its eccentricities and dynamism, but he had never witnessed such an odd scene. The spectators had stood in sullen silence, except for a few enthusiasts who braved reproof by applauding the stranger as he entered the hotel. Some had come out of curiosity to see this odd-looking man from the West whom they knew primarily from withering caricature and whose election had precipitated a national crisis. It was Whitman's first encounter with the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln. The date was February 19, 1861, and the nation was disintegrating. Already, the seven departing states of the Lower South had established a separate government in Montgomery, Alabama, calling itself the Confederate States of America. The man many New Yorkers regarded as the immediate cause of this catastrophe had just checked into the Astor House.

Lincoln had received only 35 percent of the city's vote. New York's Democratic mayor, Fernando Wood, did not even deign to greet the president-elect and, in fact, was plotting to take the city out of the Union to form an independent city-state called Tri-Insula. New York's economy depended heavily on the cotton trade, now disrupted because of this man's election. The city's large Catholic population had additional reasons to distrust an incoming administration that included within its ranks individuals hostile to their religion. Whitman reported that many in the crowd carried weapons and stood ready to use them “as soon as break and riot came.” Lincoln seemed unperturbed by the surly reception. He locked eyes with the crowd for a long moment, demonstrating a fearlessness that dissolved much of the tension. Here was a different kind of leader, Whitman acknowledged.
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At the time, leadership of any kind would have been a welcome novelty. President James Buchanan, abandoned by his southern Democratic colleagues, wandered the White House bereft of friends and ideas. Although he considered secession illegal, his public comments seemed to justify it. He placed the blame for the current crisis squarely on a partisan northern electorate and its “incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question … for the last quarter of a century.” Buchanan claimed, though without more evidence than what his erstwhile southern colleagues fed him, that the election had a “malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom.” What the South required was security, he argued. He favored calling a constitutional convention to frame an amendment to guarantee protection for slavery in the territories, a proposal soundly rejected by a majority of voters in the recent presidential election. The president also prayed a lot. Alexander Stephens, watching Buchanan's dithering in the months after the November election, concluded that the crisis was “past praying, I fear. Mr. Buchanan has ruined the country. His appeal to heaven was made too late.” While the president sought divine intervention, leaders in the Lower South forged a new nation.
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At least Buchanan understood the core of the sectional problem. It was not the tariff, states' rights, railroads, federal patronage, the territories, or religious differences. It was all of these things connected to one thing: slavery. It had always been thus. With the election of Abraham Lincoln and a Republican administration, the destiny of the South in the American Union now resided in hostile hands. In December 1860, the editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger
marked off “the last hours of the United States of America,” an inglorious end to a noble experiment, precipitated by “the election to the Presidency of a candidate pledged to the ultimate extinction of a domestic institution which is the foundation stone of southern society.”
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William D. Holcombe, a Mississippi physician and writer, disabused those who attributed the national breakup to causes other than slavery. “He has not analyzed this subject aright nor probed it to the bottom, who supposes that the real quarrel between the North and the South is about the Territories, or the decision of the Supreme Court, or even the constitution itself.… Opposition to slavery, to its existence, its extension and its perpetuation, is the sole cohesive element of the triumphant faction.… The only alternative left us is this:
a separate nationality or the Africanization of the South
.”
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A South Carolina convention voted for secession on December 20, 1860, precipitating a procession of Lower South states out of the Union. The delegates defended their decision as necessary to protect both the institution of slavery and themselves. The state's “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify Secession” affirmed that northern states “have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.” The delegates warned that once Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861, “a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.”
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To persuade other southern states to follow the path of secession, the early seceding states of the Lower South dispatched “commissioners” to plead the case for disunion in other slaveholding states. Their arguments centered on slavery. When Mississippi's commissioner, William L. Harris, appeared before the Georgia legislature in late December 1860, he noted that a Republican administration promised “freedom to the slave, but eternal degradation for you and for us.” He elaborated: “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro, as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.” The choice for the South was clear: “This
new union
with Lincoln Black Republicans and free negroes,
without slavery
; or, slavery under our old constitutional bond of union,
without
Lincoln Black Republicans, or free negroes either, to molest us.”
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The commissioners pressed to get their message across forcefully and quickly. Compromise plans were afoot that would potentially abort the secession movement. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, a former Whig and disciple of the Great Compromiser, Henry Clay, and a man trusted by northerners, submitted a plan to the U.S. Senate on January 3, 1861, requesting a national plebiscite on several constitutional amendments. The most important of these advocated reviving and extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Coast, prohibiting slavery above the line, and not only allowing but guaranteeing federal protection for slavery below the line. Although the Senate could not agree on the constitutionality of a referendum, the plan caught the imagination of an American public hopeful of resolving the sectional crisis. Petitions supporting the Crittenden compromise poured into Congress. William H. Seward presented a petition from New York City with thirty-eight thousand signatures. Simon Cameron, a Republican from Pennsylvania, reported receiving “daily, by every mail, a large number of letters … all sustaining the proposition of the Senator from Kentucky.” Horace Greeley believed that the plan would win a majority of votes in the North.
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Nothing happened. Although some Republicans favored Crittenden's proposals, the president-elect did not. The principles of his party and his interpretation of the Constitution informed Lincoln's opposition. Crittenden's plan canceled the Republican Party's central tenet: the exclusion of slavery from the territories. The plan also defied the wishes of voters who had cast their ballots for a party pledged to keep the territories white. Several weeks before Crittenden submitted his plan to the Senate, Lincoln wrote to Republican senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois in unequivocal terms: “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and ere long, must be done again.” The Crittenden compromise failed in the House in January 1861, and in the Senate in March.
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Former president John Tyler tried one last effort to resolve the crisis. The elderly Tyler, in comfortable retirement at his Virginia estate, felt called to duty by the country that he had served two decades earlier. It was a selfless act that would exhaust and eventually kill him. But given the Republicans' intransigence, Buchanan's indecisiveness, and accelerating secession, it was worth a last chance. Tyler's Peace Conference, composed of delegates from the Border South and most of the northern states, met in Washington, D.C., in February. They crafted a seven-point proposal differing little from the Crittenden plan. It suffered the same fate. Republicans could not abide any proposition that eviscerated the major reason for the party's existence, its unalterable opposition to slavery in the territories. Even had the Republicans supported these plans, it was doubtful that the seven seceded states would have rejoined the Union on the dubious promise of more slave states in the territories. The real fears of the secessionists were that the Republicans would use every means within their power to undermine the institution where it existed, thereby unleashing an economic and social catastrophe.

The secessionists were as skeptical as the president-elect about the viability of compromise. They and their states moved quickly to leave the Union and establish their new nation. On January 21, Senator David Levy Yulee of Florida stood and delivered an emotional farewell to his colleagues, followed by senators from Alabama and Mississippi. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was the last to speak. He had been ill, suffering from painful neuralgia, and the drama of the moment did little to ease his discomfort. As he spoke his farewell, thinking back to his years in government work, his gallant service to his country in the Mexican War, as a cabinet member, and now as a United States senator, his voice cracked. For a man of steadfast loyalty to his country and his state, this was a heart-rending time. At the end of this difficult speech, he spoke to his northern colleagues. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well.” With that, the gallery erupted into cheers, applause, and cries of anguish. Senator Yulee stood up again, and the five other senators followed him out of the chamber, single file. An observer reported, “There was everywhere a feeling of suspense as if, visibly, the pillars of the temple were being withdrawn and the great Government structure was tottering.”
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Alexander Stephens saw the unfolding tragedy after Lincoln's election and spoke out to his fellow Georgians at the state capital in Milledgeville in November 1860. Like his friend Lincoln, Stephens held the utmost faith in the Constitution as a safeguard of southern interests. He argued that constitutional checks would render Lincoln “powerless to do any great mischief.” Stephens employed biblical imagery to emphasize the perils of disunion to his audience. He warned that the dissolution of the Union would endanger “this Eden of the world,” that “instead of becoming gods, we shall become demons, and at no distant day commence cutting one another's throats.” He begged his state, and the South, to “wait for the act of aggression.” Do not allow history to condemn the South for striking the first blow in response to a constitutional election, he urged. Stephens's speech received widespread coverage, appearing in the
London Times
almost in its entirety.
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Stephens's words evoked little enthusiasm at home. The secessionists were on the ascendant in the Lower South. Younger, vigorous, well organized, and armed with an activist plan, they easily outshone cautious conservatives. Waiting is rarely a flashy alternative, especially if others equate delay with submission or, worse, destruction. The failure of compromise proposals further eroded southerners' confidence in the efficacy of inaction.

Hence Alexander Stephens's pessimism. He had watched helplessly as Georgia seceded, giving a perfunctory speech at the convention urging delegates to wait, saying that the “point of resistance should be the point of aggression,” but this was a weak argument compared to the clear-cut predictions of doom offered up by secessionists. Georgians rewarded his years of service by selecting him to represent the state in the new government now forming in Montgomery. Torn between his love of the Union and responsibility to his state, he consented only on the condition that the convention support his resolution that any government created in Montgomery must be based on the United States Constitution.
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Stephens journeyed to Montgomery in February more out of duty than out of conviction. He distrusted the hotspurs who had taken the seven Lower South states out of the Union, and, as he confided to a friend, he believed that war was “almost certain.” It was not the so-called fire-eaters who controlled the formation of the new Confederate States of America, however. Some of the older political leaders stepped to the fore. They realized that their appeals had to reach three audiences: the reluctant and skeptical populations of the Border South, the citizens of the northern states, and the European powers. To win over these constituencies would require skill and tact. Radicalism would suit the revolutionary spirit but doom the revolution.
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