"The Almost Chosen People"
Civil War America, 1850 -1870
The Civil War, in which are included the causes and consequences, const.i.tutes the central event in American history. It is also America"s most characteristic event which brings out all that the United States is, and is not. It made America a nation, which it was not so before. For America, as we have seen, was not prescriptive, its people forged together by a forgotten process in the darkness of prehistory, emerging from it already a nation by the time it could record its own doings. It was, rather, an artificial state or series of states, bound together by negotiated agreements and compacts, charters and covenants. It was made by bits of parchment, bred by lawyers. The early Americans, insofar as they had a nationality, were English (or more properly British) with an English national ident.i.ty and culture. Their contract to become Americans-the Declaration of Independence-did not in itself make them a nation. On the contrary; the very word "nation" was cut from it-the Southerners did not like the word. Significantly it was John Marshall, the supreme federalist, the legal ideologist of federalism, who first a.s.serted in 1821 that America was a nation. It is true that Washington had used the word in his Farewell Address, but elliptically, and it was no doubt inserted by Hamilton, the other ideologue of federalism. Washington referred to "the Community of Interest in one Nation," which seems to beg the question whether America was a nation or not. And even Marshall"s definition is qualified: "America has chosen to be," he laid down, "in many respects and for many purposes, a nation." This leads one to ask: in what respects, and for what purposes, was America not a nation? The word is not to be found in the Const.i.tution. In the 1820s in the debates over the "National Road," Senator William Smith of South Carolina objected to "this insidious word:" he said it was "a term unknown to the origins and theory of our government." As one const.i.tutional historian has put it: "In the architecture of nationhood, the United States has achieved something quite remarkable ... Americans erected their const.i.tutional roof before they put up their national walls ... and the Const.i.tution became a subst.i.tute for a deeper kind of national ident.i.ty."
Yes; but whose const.i.tution: that as seen by the North, or the one which the South treasured-or the one, in the 1850s, interpreted by the southern-dominated Taney Supreme Court? The North, increasingly driven by emanc.i.p.ationists, thought of the Const.i.tution as a doc.u.ment which, when applied in its spirit, would eventually insure that all people in America, whatever their color, black or white, whatever their status, slave or free, would be equal before the law. The Southerners, by which I mean those who dominated the South politically and controlled is culture and self-expression, had a quite different agenda. They believed the Const.i.tution could be used to extend not so much the fact of slavery-though it could do that too-but its principle. Moreover, they possessed, in the Democratic Party, and in the Taney Court, instruments whereby their view of the Const.i.tution could be made to prevail. They were frustrated in this endeavor by their impetuosity and by their divisions-that is the story of the 1850s.
For the South, the decade began well. True, the California gold rush had been, from their point of view, a stroke of ill-fortune, since the slavery-hating miners who rushed there frustrated the South"s plan of making California a slave state. But in some other respects the Compromise of 1850 worked in their favor. For one thing it made it possible for them to keep the Democratic Party united, and since 1828 that party had been the perfect instrument for winning elections. All it had to do, to elect a president of its choosing, was to hold the South together and secure a reasonable slice of the North; then, with their own man in the White House, appointing new Supreme Court judges, they could keep the South"s interpretation of the Const.i.tution secure too. For the election of 1852 the Democrats were able to unite round a campaign platform which promised "to abide by and adhere to a faithful execution of the acts known as the Compromise Measures," and for their candidate they picked a man peculiarly adapted to follow that s me, "a Northerner with Southern inclinations."
Franklin Pierce (1804-69) was born in Hillboro, New Hampshire, had been to Bowdoin and practiced as a lawyer in Concord. So by rights he should have been an abolit.i.tionist and an Emersonian, a political Transcendentalist, and a thorough New Englander. But in reality he was a Jacksonian Democrat, another "Young Hickory" and an ardent nationalist, all-out for further expansion into the crumbling Hispanic South, and thus to that extent a firm ally of the slavery-extenders. He had been a New Hampshire congressman and senator and had served a.s.siduously in the Mexican War, of which (unusually in the North) he was an enthusiastic supporter, reaching the rank of brigadier-general. At the 1852 Democratic convention he emerged, after many votes, as the perfect Dark Horse compromise candidate, being nominated on the forty-ninth ballot. He is usually described as "colorless." When he was nominated, an old farmer-friend from New Hampshire commented: "Frank goes well enough for Concord, but he"ll go monstrous thin, spread out over the United States." Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had been a close friend of Pierce at Bowdoin, called on Pierce after he was nominated, sat by him on the sofa, and said: "Frank, what a pity ... But, after all, this world was not meant to be happy in-only to succeed in." This story is apocryphal, but Hawthorne said something similar to Pierce in a letter in which he undertook to write Pierce"s campaign biography. Horace Mann, who knew both, said of the proposed biography, "If he makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote." Hawthorne agreed: "Though the story is true, it took a romancer to do it."
Hawthorne had to conceal two things: Pierce"s drinking-it was said he drank even more than Daniel Webster, and he was certainly often drunk-and the fact that he hated Pierce"s wife Jane. So did a lot of other people. The Pierces had two sons. Their four-year-old died in 1844; their surviving son was killed a month after the election in an appalling railroad accident, and Jane felt, and said, that the presidency had been bought at the cost of their son"s life. Hawthorne burned doc.u.ments about Pierce which were highly derogatory, commenting: "I wish he had a better wife, or none at all. It is too bad that the nation should be compelled to see such a death"s head in the preeminent place among American women; and I think a presidential candidate ought to be scrutinised as well in regard to his wife"s social qualifications, as to his own political ones." Jane was the daughter of the Bowdoin president and sister-in-law of its most distinguished professor: but women of academic families are not always congenial." The fact is, Hawthorne hated most women, particularly if they had intellectual pretensions, which Jane certainly did: he said of women writers, "I wish they were forbidden to write on pain of having their faces scarified with an oyster-sh.e.l.l!"" At any rate, The Life of Franklin Pierce duly appeared, the tale of "A beautiful boy, with blue eyes, light curling hair, and a serene expression of face," who grew up to be a distinguished military man and a conciliatory politician, anxious to preserve the Union by rea.s.suring the South and appealing to "the majority of Northerners" who were "not actively against slavery" to beware of what Hawthorne called "the mistiness of a philanthropic system."
Pierce won handsomely. The Whigs selected the Mexican War commander, General Winfield Scott, who like most generals was lost in the complex politics of ethnic America. He not only bellowed out his antislavery views, which the Whigs had allowed for, but turned out to be a strident nativist only happy with Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock, so he alienated the Germans and the Irish. In the end he carried only Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Ma.s.sachusetts, giving Pierce a landslide in the electoral college, though his plurality over all the other candidates (there were four vote-splitters) was only 50,000. In theory Pierce"s Cabinet bridged North and South, since his Secretary of State, William Learned Marcy (1786-1857), was a member of the old Albany Regency, the New York politico who had egged on Jackson to enjoy "the spoils of victory" in 1829. But Marcy did not care a d.a.m.n about slavery and, as Polk"s Secretary of War, had been a rabid architect of the war against Mexico. Again, Pierce"s Attorney-General, Caleb Cushing (1800-79), though a Harvard-Ma.s.sachusetts Brahmin, was primarily, like Marcy, a "Manifest Destiny" man, and thus a Southern ally. On the other side, Pierce made Jefferson Davis (1808-89) secretary of war, and Davis was not merely a genuine Southerner but the future President of the Confederation. In practice, then, the Pierce administration was committed to policies which might have been designed to help the South.
The first expression of this policy was the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. This was Davis" idea, significantly. America was then discussing alternative possibilities for transcontinental railways and Davis was determined, for strategic as well as economic reasons, that the South should control one route. This required pa.s.sage through a large strip of territory in what was then still northwest Mexico. Davis persuaded Pierce to send the South Carolina railroad promoter, Senator James Gadsden (1788-1858), to Mexico to promote the purchase of the strip. This was a dodgy business, as Gadsden had a financial interest in securing the purchase, which was made with US federal money-$10 million for 45,000 square miles-and the Senate agreed to ratify the deal only by a narrow margin, partly because this extra territory automatically became slave soil. Indeed Davis" original idea, that Gadsden should buy not only the strip but the provinces of Tamaulipas, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, and the whole of Baja (lower) California, was also on the cards but not proceeded with as the Senate knew these vast territories would have been turned into several new slave states, and would never have ratified the deal, the Senate now having a Northern majority, or rather an anti-slave one.
There were other possibilities for the South, however. They wanted Cuba, to turn it into an ideal slave state. "The acquisition of Cuba," wrote Davis, "is essential to our prosperity and security." He regretted that, in joining the Union, the Southern states had forfeited their right to make treaties and acquire new territories on their own, otherwise Cuba would already be in the Union, and slave soil. James Buchanan (1791-1866), who as Polk"s secretary of state had been a leading mover in acquiring Texas, was now minister in London and intrigued and negotiated furiously in 1854 to have Cuba purchased and annexed. But nothing came of it-this was one of many occasions when Northerners in Congress frustrated the South"s dream of an all American, all-slave Caribbean." There were various filibustering expeditions to seize by force what might be more difficult to acquire by diplomacy. Prominent in them was William Walker (1824-60), a Tennessee doctor and populist fanatic, who wanted to annex chunks of Latin America to the US, not to make them slave states but to give their peoples a taste of democracy. The "gray-eyed man of destiny" entered Lower California in 1853 and proclaimed a republic, but Pierce was not hard-faced enough to allow that. Then Walker took his private army to Nicaragua and actually had himself recognized by the US in 1856. But that aroused the fury of another predator, Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), whose local transport system was being disrupted by Walker"s doings, and as Vanderbilt had more money, he was able to force Walker to "surrender" to the US Navy. Finally Walker turned to Honduras, but there the British navy took a hand and turned him over, as a nuisance, to a Honduran firing-squad.
Now that the Gadsden Purchase made a Southern railway route to California geographically possible, others were looking for northern routes, and this too had an important bearing on the land strategy of the South. Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, who had helped Clay to draft the 1850 Compromise, was now chairman of the Senate Committee on Territories, and in that capacity he brought forward a Bill to create a new territory called Nebraska in the lands west of the Missouri and Iowa, the object being to get rails across it with an eastern terminus in the rapidly growing beef-and-wheat capital of Chicago. To appease the Southerners, he proposed to include in the Bill a popular sovereignty clause, allowing the Nebraskans themselves to decide if they wanted slavery or not. The South was not satisfied with this and Douglas sought to rea.s.sure them still further by not only providing for another territory and future state, Kansas, but repealing the old 1820 Missouri Compromise insofar as it banned slavery north of lat.i.tude 36.30. This outraged the North, brought up to regard the 1820 Compromise as a "sacred pledge," almost part of the Const.i.tution. It outraged some Southerners too, such as Sam Houston of Texas, who saw that these new territories would mean the expulsion of the Indians, who had been told they could occupy these lands "as long as gra.s.s shall grow and water run." But Douglas, who wanted to balance himself carefully between North and South and so become president, pushed on; and President Pierce backed him; and so the Kansas-Nebraska Act pa.s.sed by 113 to 100 in the House and 37 to 14 in the Senate, in May 1854.
Backing this contentious Bill proved, for Pierce, a mistake and ruled out any chance of his being reelected. It also led to what might be called the first bloodshed of the Civil War. Nebraska was so far north that no one seriously believed it could be turned into a series of free states. Kansas was a different matter, and both sides tried to build up militant colonies there, and take advantage of the new law which stated its people were "perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic inst.i.tutions in their own way, subject only to the Const.i.tution." The first foray was conducted by the New England Emigrant Aid Society, which in 1855-6 sent in 1,250 anti-slavery enthusiasts. The Southerners organized just across the border in Missouri. In October 1854 the territory"s first governor, Andrew H. Reeder, arrived and quickly organized a census, as prelude to an election in March 1855. But when the election came, the Missourians crossed the border in thousands and swamped the polls. The governor said the polls were a fraud but did nothing to invalidate the results, probably because he was afraid of being lynched. Territorial governors were provided by Washington with virtually no resources or money, as readers of Chapter 25 of Mark Twain"s Roughing It-which describes the system from bitter experience-will know. At all events the slavers swept the polls, expelled from the legislature the few antislavers who were elected, adopted a drastic slave-code, and made it a capital offense to help a slave escape or aid a fugitive. They even made orally questioning the legality of slavery a felony.
The anti-slavers, and genuine settlers who wanted to remain neutral, responded by holding a const.i.tutional convention-elected unlawfully-drafted a const.i.tution in Topeka which banned both slaves and freed blacks from Kansas, applied for admission to the US as a state, and elected another governor and legislature. Then the fighting began, a miniature civil war of Kansas" own. The Bible-thumping clergymen from the North proved expert gun-runners, especially of what were known as "Beecher"s Bibles," rifles supplied by the bloodthirsty congregation of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. The South moved in guns too. In May 1856 a mob of slavers sacked Lawrence, a free-soil town, blew up the Free State Hotel with five cannon, burned the governor"s house and tossed the presses of the local newspaper into the river. This in turn provoked a fanatical free-soiler called John Brown, a glaring-eyes fellow later described by one who was with him in Kansas as "a man impressed with the idea that G.o.d has raised him up on purpose to break the jaws of the wicked." Two days after the "Sack of Lawrence," Brown, his four sons, and some others rushed into Pottawatomie Creek, a pro-slavery settlement, and slaughtered five men in cold blood. By the end of the year over 200 people had been murdered in "Bleeding Kansas."
The Lawrence outrage in turn provoked a breakdown of law in the Congress. The next day, May 22, Senator Charles Sumner (1811-74) of Ma.s.sachusetts, a dignified, idealistic, humorless, and golden-tongued man who also had a talent for vicious abuse-the kind which causes wars-delivered a philippic in the Senate. One of the weaknesses of Congressional procedure was that, unlike the British parliament, where a speaker must go on until he finishes, senators were allowed an overnight respite then allowed to start again next morning, provoking their antagonized hearers beyond endurance. In his two-day speech, full of excitable s.e.xual images, Sumner said what was going on in Kansas was "the rape of a virgin territory [sprung] from a depraved longing for a new slave state, the hideous offspring of such a crime." He made a particular target of Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, whom he accused of having "chosen a mistress who ... though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight-I mean the harlot, slavery." One cannot help feeling that, in the run-up to the Civil War, s.e.x played a major, if unspoken, part. All Northerners knew, or believed, that male slave-owners slept with their pretty female slaves, and often bought them with this in mind. Abraham Lincoln, aged twenty-two and on his second visit to New Orleans, saw a young and beautiful teenage black girl, "guaranteed a virgin," being sold, the leering auctioneer declaring: "The gentleman who buys her will get good value for his money." The girl was virtually naked, and the horrific scene made a deep impression on the young man. Southerners denied they fornicated with their female slaves, but they also (contradicting themselves) accused their Northern tormenters of s.e.xual envy, which may have been true in some cases.
In any event Sumner"s metaphors were provocative. Butler"s nephew, Congressman Preston S. Brooks, fumed over the insults for two days, then attacked Sumner with his cane while he was writing at his desk in the Senate. Sumner was so badly injured, or traumatized, that he was ill at home for two years, his empty Senate desk symbolizing the stop-at-nothing violence of the Southern slavers. Equally significant was that Brooks, having been censured by the House, resigned and was triumphantly reelected, his admirers presenting him with hundreds of canes to mark his "brave gesture," though it was in fact a cowardly a.s.sault on an unarmed, older man. Here was a case of unbridled and inflammatory Northern words provoking reckless Southern aggression-a paradigm of the whole conflict.
Brooks" attack, and the support it received from the "gentlemanly South," reflected the aggressive politics of the slave states. The Dred Scott verdict by the Taney Court had given the South hope that the const.i.tutional history of the country could be rewritten in a way that would make slavery safe for ever. All previous arrangements had left the South insecure-insecurity was at the very root of its violence. What the Southern militants, especially in South Carolina, wanted was a "black code," enacted by Congress and imposed on the territories. They were not so foolish as to hope they could reinstate slavery in New York and New England but they wanted abolitionism to be made illegal in some way. And they wanted not merely to open new territory in the South and West and outside the present borders of the US to slavery but also to reopen and relegalize the slave trade.
This forward plan received an important boost with the election of 1856. The Kansas-Nebraska Act destroyed the last remains of the crumbling Whig Party. In its place, phoenix-like, came the new Republicans, deliberately designed to evoke the memory of Jefferson, now presented as ,in anti-slaver, his attacks on slavery being eminently quotable, his ownership of slaves forgotten. At its nominating convention, the Republican Party pa.s.sed over its chief anti-slaver, William H. Seward (1801-72), as too extreme, and picked John Charles Fremont (1813-90), a South Carolina adventurer who had eloped with the daughter of old Senator Benton and then had innumerable near-death escapes in California, including a capital conviction for mutiny quashed by President Polk. The Republican slogan was "Free Soil, Free Speech and Fremont." The Democratic Party, rejecting Pierce as a sure loser, and Douglas as too all-things-to-all-men, picked James Buchanan, who concentrated on taking all the slave states and as much of the rest as he could. Old Fillmore, with Jackson"s son-in-law Donelson as his running mate, popped up from the past as a splitter. That did for Fremont. So Buchanan, with a fairly united Democratic Party behind him, carried all the South plus New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, and California, making 174 college voters, against Fremont"s 114. Buchanan was elected on a minority (45.3 percent) of the vote but his plurality over Fremont was wide, 1,838,169 to 1,341,264.
The new President was at heart a weak man, and a vacillating one, but he was not out of touch with the combination of imperialist and Southern opinion which, well led, would have ruled out any prospect of coercion of the South by the North. Whatever he said in public, Buchanan sympathized with the idea of adding new states to the South, even if slavers. In his message to Congress, January 7, 1858, Buchanan criticized Walker"s filibustering in Nicaragua not because it was wrong in itself but because it was impolitic and "impeded the destiny of our race to spread itself over the continent of North America, and this at no distant day, should events be permitted to take their natural course." He followed this up by asking Congress to buy Cuba, despite the fact that the Spanish were demanding at least $150 million for it (the Republicans blocked the plan). America had absorbed what was once Spanish-speaking territory of millions of square miles in California and Texas: why not the whole of Mexico and Central America? That was all part of the "North American Continent," to which the US was "providentially ent.i.tled" by its Manifest Destiny.
Moreover, the price of slaves was rising all the time, despite the efforts of the Virginia slave-farms to produce more, and this in turn strengthened demands for a resumption of the slave-trade. Slave-smuggling was growing, and it was well known, and trumpeted in the South, that merchants in New York and Baltimore bought slaves cheap on the West African coast, and then landed them on islands off Georgia and other Southern states. So why not repeal the 1807 Act and legalize the traffic? That was the demand of the governor of South Carolina in 1856, and the Vicksburg Commercial Convention of 1859 approved a motion resolving that "all laws, state or federal, prohibiting the African slave trade, ought to be repealed." The first step, it was argued, was to have blacks captured from slave-ships stopped and searched by the US Navy-the current practice was to send them, free, to Liberia, which most of them did not like-sent to the South and "apprenticed" to planters with good records. Representative William L. Yancey of Alabama asked: "If it is right to buy slaves in Virginia and carry them to New Orleans, why is it not right to buy them in Cuba, Brazil or Africa, and carry them there?" If blacks would rather be slaves in the South than free men in Liberia, might it not be that other African blacks would prefer to come to the South, as slaves, rather than remain in the "Dark Continent," where their lives were so short and cheap?
Southerners argued that to take a black from Africa and set him up in comfort on a plantation was the equivalent, allowing for racial differences, of allowing a penniless European peasant free entry and allowing him, in a few years, to buy his own farm. The Dred Scott Case, by declaring the Missouri Compromise unconst.i.tutional, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act together opened up enormous new opportunities for setting up slave-plantations and ranches, and therefore increased the demand for slaves. Southerners argued that by resuming the slave trade the cost of slaves in America would be sharply reduced, thereby boasting the economy of the whole country. The aggressive message of the South was: slavery must be extended because it makes economic sense for America. But beneath this aggressive tone was the deep insecurity of Southerners who had no real moral answer to the North"s case and knew in their hearts that the days of slavery were numbered.
That sense of insecurity was justified, because in the late 1850s it became obvious that dreams of a vast expansion of slavery to the west and into the Caribbean and other Hispanic areas were fantasies, and the reality was a built-in and continuing decline of Southern political power. Calhoun, in almost his dying words in 1850, had warned the South that if they did not act soon, and a.s.sert his theory of states" rights, if necessary by force, they were doomed to a slow death: they would never be stronger than they were, and could only get weaker. That was demonstrated to be good advice; in May 1858 the free state of Minnesota entered the Union, followed by another free state, Oregon, in February 1859, while Kansas, being a slave territory, was denied admission. So the Congressional balance, as Calhoun had foreseen, was destroyed for ever. The South was now outvoted in the Senate 36 to 30 and in the House the gap was enormous, 147 to 90.
Southerners" sense of insecurity was deepened by the fact that, while they boasted publicly that "Cotton is King" and "The Greatest Staple in the World," they were painfully aware of the weaknesses of their cotton-slave economy. Most plantations were in debt or operated close to the margins of profitability. During the 1850s, world cotton prices tended to fall. More and more countries were producing raw cotton-a trend which would knock large nails in the South"s coffin when the war began. In the light of economic hindsight, it can be seen that the plantation system, as practiced, was fundamentally unsound, and some planters grasped this at the time. Plantations absorbed good land and ruined it, then their owners moved on. There was an internal conflict in the South, as the newer estates in the Deep South were more scientific and efficient (and bigger), and thus tended to take black slave labor away from the tidewater and border areas, and push up the price of slaves. This, at a time of falling cotton prices, put further pressure on profit margins. As the price of slaves rose, slavery as an inst.i.tution became more vital to the South: to the Deep South because they used slaves more and more efficiently, to the Old and border South because breeding high-quality, high-priced slaves was now far more important than raising tobacco or cotton. Professor Thomas R. Dew of William and Mary College, in his book The Pro-Slavery Argument of 1852, a.s.serted: "Virginia is a negro-raising state for other states: she produces enough for her own supply and 6,000 [annually] for sale."
Actually, Virginia was living on its slave-capital: blacks formed 50 percent of the Virginia population in 1782, but only 37 percent in 1860s-it was selling its blacks to the Deep South. Virginia and other Old South or border states concentrated on breeding a specially hardy type of negro, long-living, prolific, disease-free, muscular, and energetic. In the 1850s, about 25,000 of these blacks were being sold, annually, to the Deep South." The 1860 census showed there were 8,099,000 whites in the South and 3,953,580 slaves. But only 384,000 whites owned the slaves: 10,781 owned fifty and more; 1,733, a hundred and more. So over 6 million Southern whites had no direct interest in slavery. But that did not mean they did not wish to retain the inst.i.tution-on the contrary: poor whites feared blacks even more than the rich ones did. By 1860 there were already 262,000 free blacks in the Southern states, competing with poor whites for scarce jobs, and a further 3,018 were manumitted that year. Poor whites were keener than anyone on penal legislation against slaves: they insured no state recognized slave marriage in law, and five states made it unlawful to teach slaves to read and write. In any event, small white farmers in the South were very much at the mercy of the big plantation owners and had to go along with them." Those who produced cotton, rice, sugar, tobacco, and slaves on a large scale were all-powerful. As one historian has put it, "There was never in America a more perfect oligarchy of businessmen."
Slavery was not the only issue between North and South. Indeed it is possible that an attempt at secession might have been made even if the slavery issue had been resolved. The North favored high tariffs, the South low ones; the North, in consequence, backed indirect taxation, the South direct taxation. It is significant that once the war began, the North, shorn of the South, immediately introduced high tariffs with the Morrill Act of 1861, and pushed through direct federal income tax too. There were huge differences of interest over railroad strategy. Increasingly, the railroad interests of the Northeast and the Northwest came into alignment in the 1850s, and this in turn led to an alliance between Eastern manufacturers seeking high tariffs and Western farmers demanding low-cost or free lands-both linked by lines of rail. This was the basis of the power of the new Republican Party, and the South saw it as a plot-indeed, it was what finished them. Many Southerners believed deeply in their hearts that the moral indignation of the North was spurious, masking meaner economic motives. As Jefferson Davis put it, "You free-soil agitators are not interested in slavery ... not at all ... It is so that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circ.u.mscribed bounds. It is so that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandis.e.m.e.nt ... you desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states. And why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the North-East states, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry."
Davis was reflecting a bitter conviction held by all "thinking" men in the South: that the North, while accusing the South of exploiting the blacks, exploited the whole of the South systematically and without mercy. Their feeling was exactly the same as the resentment felt by the Third World towards the First World today. There was something inherent in a plantation economy which put it in a dependent position, with the capitalist world its master. There was, of course, no control by the state of national production and prices, of cotton or anything else. If world markets were high, profits rose, but there was then a tendency to reinvest them in increased production. If prices fell, the planters had to borrow. In either case, the South lacked liquid capital. So the planters fell into the hands of bankers, ending up dependent on New York or even the City of London." The South lacked its own financial system, like the Third World today. When cotton made big profits, it spent them, as the Arab rulers today dissipate colossal oil revenues. And it was in a real sense milked, like the primary producers today ii Africa and Latin America, at the same time acc.u.mulating ma.s.sive debts it had no hope of repaying. In effect, the South had all the disadvantages of a one-crop economy. It had only 8 percent of US manufactures. It should have put up the money to open factories, and so pro vide employment for poor whites and diversify its economy at the same time. But there was no spare capital in the South itself, and the North had no intention of building factories there and competing against itself with low-wage, low-price products. So the South saw itself as the slave of a Union dominated by Northern capital. As the Charleston Mercury put it: "As long as we are tributaries, dependent on foreign labor and skill for food, clothing and countless necessities of life, we are in thralldom."
The Civil War was not only the most characteristic event in American history, it was also the most characteristic religious event because both sides were filled with moral righteousness for their own cause and moral detestation of the att.i.tudes of their opponents. And the leaders on both sides were righteous men. Let us look more closely at these two paladins, Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Lincoln was a case of American exceptionalism because, in his humble, untaught way, he was a kind of moral genius, such as is seldom seen in life and hardly ever at the summit of politics. By comparison, Davis was a mere mortal. But, according to his lights, he was a just man, unusually so, and we can be confident that, had he and Lincoln been joined in moral discussion, with the topic of slavery alone banned, they would have found much common ground.
Both men were also characteristic human products of mid-i9thcentury America, though their backgrounds were different in important respects. Lincoln insisted he came from nowhere. He told his campaign biographer, John Locke Scripps of the Chicago Tribune, that his early life could be "condensed into a single sentence from Gray"s Elegy, "The short and simple annals of the poor." " He said both his parents were born in Virginia and he believed one of his grandfathers was "a Southern gentleman." He also believed his mother was illegitimate, probably rightly. He was born in a log cabin in the Kentucky backwoods and grew up on frontier farms as his family moved westwards. His father was barely literate; his mother taught him to read, but she died when he was nine. Thereafter he was self-taught. His father remarried, then took to hiring out his tall lanky (six feet four and 170 pounds) son, for 25 cents a day. He said of his son: "He looked as he had been rough-hewn with an axe and needed smoothing down with a jackplane." Lincoln acquired, in the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, and on the Ohio and the Mississippi, an immense range of skills: rafting, boating, carpentry, butchering, forestry, store- keeping, brewing, distilling, plowing. He did not smoke, chew tobacco, or drink. He acquired an English grammar, and taught it to himself. He read Gibbon, Robinson Crusoe, Aesop, The Pilgrim"s Progress, and Parson Weems" lives of Washington and Franklin. He learned the Statutes o f Illinois by heart. He rafted down to New Orleans and worked his way back on a steamer. He visited the South several times and knew it, unlike most Northerners." He listened often to Southerners defend the "Peculiar Inst.i.tution" and knew their arguments backwards; what he had personally witnessed made him reject them, utterly, though he never made the mistake of thinking them insincere or superficial. He loved Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, in that order. He was a born storyteller, a real genius when it came to telling a tale, short or long. He knew when to pause, when to hurry, when to stop. He was the greatest coiner of one-liners in American history, until Ronald Reagan emerged to cap him. He was awkward-he always put his whole foot flat down when walking, and lifted it up the same way-but could suddenly appear as if transfigured, full of elegance. With one hand he could lift a barrel of whiskey from floor to counter. He was hypochondriac, as he admitted. He wrote an essay on suicide. He said: "I may seem to enjoy life rapturously when I am in company. But when I am alone I am so often so overcome by mental depression that I never dare carry a penknife."
Lincoln was a self-taught lawyer but his instincts were not for the cause. He said "persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can ... As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough. A worse man can scarcely be found than one who [creates litigation]." As a circuit lawyer, Lincoln fancied himself a Whig and stood for the state legislature. His first elective post, however, was as captain of volunteers in the Black Hawk War (1832), in which he came across five scalped corpses in the early morning: "They lay heads towards us on the ground. Every man had a round red spot on the top of his head about as big as a dollar where the redskins had taken his scalp. It was frightful. But it was grotesque. And the red sunlight seemed to paint everything over." But he held no grudge; indeed he saved an Indian from being butchered. He was the first man to refer to Indians as "Native Americans," though in the then current usage the term referred to Americans of old Anglo-Saxon stock. He said to those who protested about German immigrants, and claimed the t.i.tle for themselves: "Who are the [real] Native Americans? Do they not wear the breechclout and carry the tomahawk? We pushed them from their homes and now turn on others not fortunate enough to come over so early as we or our forefathers."
He did not win his first political election. And he had bad luck. He bought a store and set up as postmaster too. His partner, Berry, fled with the cash and Lincoln had to shoulder a $1,100 burden of debt. Like Washington, he went into land-surveying to help pay it off. Then he was elected to the state a.s.sembly, serving eight years from the age of twenty-five to thirty-two. It met in Vandalia, its eighty-three members being divided into two chambers. Lincoln was paid $3 for each sitting, plus pen, ink, and paper. His first manifesto read: "I go for all sharing the privileges of government who a.s.sist in sharing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females)." He belonged to a group of Whig legislators who were all six feet or over, known as the Long Nine. He got the state capital shifted to Springfield and there set up a law practice, making his name by winning a case for an oppressed widow. A colleague said: "Lincoln was the most uncouth-looking man I ever saw. He seemed to have but little to say, seemed to feel timid, with a tinge of sadness visible in his countenance. But when he did talk all this disappeared for the time, and he demonstrated he was both strong and acute. He surprised us more and more at every visit."
Lincoln"s first love, Ann Rutledge, died of typhoid fever. That Lincoln was devastated is obvious enough; that his love for her persisted and prevented him from loving any other woman is more debatable. At all events, it is clear he never loved the woman he married, Mary Todd. She came from a grand family in Kentucky, famous since Revolutionary days for generals and governors. She was driven from it by a horrible stepmother, but never abandoned her quest for a man she could marry in order to make him president. Oddly enough, she turned down Stephen Douglas, then a youngish fellow-member of the Illinois a.s.sembly, in favour of Lincoln, whom she picked out as White House timber. She said to friends: "Mr Lincoln is to be president of the United States some day. If I had not thought so, I would not have married him, for you can see he is not pretty." Lincoln consented, but missed the wedding owing to an illness which was clearly psychosomatic. This led to a sabre duel with Sheilds, the state auditor, which was called off when Lincoln scared his opponent by cutting a twig high up a tree. And this in turn led to reconciliation with Mary, and marriage, he being thirty-three, she twenty-four. His law partner, William H. Herndon, said: "He knew he did not love her, but he had promised to marry her."
It was an uncomfortable marriage of opposites, particularly since she had no sense of humor, his strongest suit. He liked to say: "Come in, my wife will be down as soon as she gets her trotting-harness on." He was a messy man, disorderly in appearance, she was a duster and polisher and tidier. She wrangled acrimoniously with her uppity white servants and sighed noisily for her "delightful n.i.g.g.e.rs." "One thing is certain," she said, "if Mr Lincoln should happen to die, his spirit will never find me living outside the boundaries of a slave state." She hated his partner, his family, and his so-called office. Herndon said: "He had no system, no order; he did not keep a clerk; he had neither library, nor index, nor cash-book. When he made notes, he would throw them into a drawer, put them in his vest-pocket, or into his hat ... But in the inner man, symmetry and method prevailed. He did not need an orderly office, did not need pen and ink, because his workshop was in his head."
The Lincolns had four sons. Generations of Lincoln-admirers have played down the role of Mary in his life and career, easily finding spicy material ill.u.s.trative of her shortcomings. But the likelihood is that he would never have become president without her. It took him four years, aged thirty-three to thirty-seven, to get into Congress, and but for her endless pushing he might have become discouraged. For his part, he did his best to behave to her gallantly. There is a touching photograph of her, taken in 1861, arrayed in her inaugural finery, wearing pearls. They were a set which Lincoln had just bought for her, paying $530, at Tiffany"s store on 550 Broadway: a seed-pearl necklace and matching bracelets for each arm. They are now in the Library of Congress."
Lincoln won a seat for Congress in 1847, by a big majority. The Whig Party gave him $200 for his expenses. He handed back $199.25, having bought only one barrel of cider. He rode to Washington on his own horse, and staved with friends. But he served only one term-his of the Capitol, within sight of its windows, was "a sort of negro stable where gangs of negroes were sold, and sometimes kept in store for a time pending transport to the Southern market, just like horses." Lincoln was broad-minded, tolerant, and inclined to let things alone if possible, but he found this insult to the eye of freedom, literally within sight of Congress, "mighty offensive." The first law he drafted was a Bill to Abolish Slavery in the District of Columbia, to be enacted by local referendum (as we have seen it became part of the 1850 Compromise). At the end of his term, he returned contentedly to the law.
But the slavery issue would not let him rest, or stay out of politics. It was even more persistent than Mary Lincoln"s pushing. Some notes have survived of his musings:
If A can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B, why may not B s.n.a.t.c.h the same argument, even prove equally, that he may enslave A? You say A is white and B is black-is it color then, the lighter having the right to enslave the darker? Take care-by this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly? You mean the whites are intellectually the superior of the blacks, and therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again-by this rule you are to be the slave of the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.
As Herndon said, "All his great qualities were swayed by the despotism of his logic." There are many memorable descriptions of him lost in thought, turning things over in his mind.
Lincoln did a lot of this musing at home, a place in which he kept a low profile. Mary Lincoln said: "He is of no account when he is at home. He never does anything except to warm himself and read. He never went to market in his life. I have to look after all that. He just does nothing. He is the most useless, good-for-nothing man on earth." He replied, in his own way: "For G.o.d, one "d" is enough, but the Todds need two." He was often driven from his own house by Mary"s anger. There are no fewer than six eyewitness descriptions of her furies, one relating to how she drove him out with a broomstick. He was never allowed to ask people to a meal, even or rather especially his parents. He wrote: "Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention ... Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own." Mary felt his righteousness as well as his awkwardness: "He was mild in his manner," she said, "but a terrible firm man when he set his foot down. I could always tell when, in deciding anything, he had reached his ultimatum. At first he was very cheerful, then he lapsed into thoughtfulness, bringing his lips together in a firm compression. When these symptoms developed, I fashioned myself accordingly, and so did all others have to do, sooner or later."
That Lincoln, as his wife implied, had a huge will when intellectually roused to a moral cause is clear. This sprang from a compulsive sense of duty rather than ambition as such. The evidence suggests that he was obliged to reenter politics not because he was an anti-slavery campaigner but because, in the second half of the 1850s, the slavery issue came to dominate American politics to the exclusion of almost everything else. Each time the issue was raised, and Lincoln was obliged to ponder it, the more convinced he became that the United States was uniquely threatened by the evil, and its political consequences. In those circ.u.mstances, an American who felt he had powers-and Lincoln was conscious of great powers-had an inescapable duty to use them in the Union"s defense. Lincoln did not see slavery in religious terms, as the "organic sin" of the Union, as the Protestant campaigners of the North put it. Those close to him agreed he had no religious beliefs in the conventional sense. His wife said: "Mr Lincoln had no faith and no hope in the usual acceptation of those words. He never joined a church. But still, I believe, he was a religious man by nature ... it was a kind of poetry in his nature." Herndon said Lincoln insisted no personal G.o.d existed and when he used the word G.o.d he meant providence: he believed in predestination and inevitability."
Lincoln came closer to belief in G.o.d, as we shall see, but in the 1850s he was opposed to slavery primarily on humanitarian grounds, as an affront to man"s natural dignity; and this could be caused by religious sectarians as well as by slave-owners. In his boyish and youthful reading, he had conceived great hopes of the United States, which he now feared for. He wrote: "Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read of "all men are created equal except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control it will be "all men are created equal except negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigration to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, without the base alloy of hypocrisy."" The state of America caused him anguish. He said to Herndon: "How hard it is to die and leave one"s country no better than if one had never lived for it! The world is dead to hope, deaf to its own death-struggle. One made known by a universal cry, what is to be done? Is anything to be done? Who can do anything? And how is it to be done? Do you never think of these things?"
But from this general sense of downward moral plunging, which had to be arrested, the slavery issue, and still more the South"s determination to extend and fortify it, loomed ever larger. In an important letter to Joshua F. Speed, the storekeeper with whom he shared some of his most intimate thoughts, Lincoln dismissed the claim that slavery was the South"s affair and Northerners "had no interest" in the matter. There were, he said, many parts of the North, in Ohio for instance, "where you cannot avoid seeing such sights as slaves in chains, being carried to miserable destinations, and the heart is wrung. It is not fair for you to a.s.sume that I have no interest in a thing which has and continually exercises, the power of making me miserable." Lincoln was as much concerned for the slave-owner as for the slave-the inst.i.tution morally destroyed the man supposed to benefit from it. It was thus more important, as Lincoln saw it, to end slave-owning than to end slavery itself. He said a Kentuckian had once told him: "You might have any amount of land, money in your pocket, or bank stock, and while traveling around n.o.body would be any the wiser. But if you have a darky trudging at your heels, everybody would see him and know you owned a slave. It is the most glittering property in the world. If a young man goes courting, the only inquiry is how many negroes he, or she, owns. Slave-ownership betokens not only the possession of wealth but indicates the gentleman of leisure, who is above labor and scorns it." This image of the strutting slave-owner, corrupted and destroyed by the wretch at his heels, haunted Lincoln. He wept for the South in its self-inflicted moral degradation.
It was because slavery made him miserable, and because he thought it was destroying the nation, not least the South, that Lincoln reentered politics and helped to create the new Republican Party, primarily to prevent slavery"s extension. Looking back with the hindsight of history, we tend to a.s.sume that slavery was a lost cause from the start and the destruction of the old South inevitable. But to a man of Lincoln"s generation, the South appeared to have won all the political battles, and all the legal ones. So long as the Democratic Party remained united, the South"s negative grip on the United States seemed unbreakable, and its power to make positive moves was huge. The creation of the Republican party, from free-soilers, Whigs, and many local elements, was the answer to the Democratic stranglehold on the nation, which had been the central fact of American political life since 1828. Lincoln failed to get into the Senate in 1855 and (as we have seen) Buchanan won the presidency in 1856. But it was by then apparent that the Republican Party was a potential governing instrument, and Lincoln"s part in creating it was obvious and recognized.
At Bloomington on May 29, 1856, when the new Illinois Republican Party was inaugurated, Lincoln was called to make the adjournment speech and he responded with what all agreed was the best speech of his life. It was so mesmerizing that many reporters forgot to take it down. Even Herndon, who always took notes, gave up after fifteen minutes and "threw pen and paper away and lived only in the inspiration of the hour." Lincoln argued that the logic of the South"s case, which was that slavery was good for the negroes, would be to extend it to white men too. Because of the relentless pressure of the South"s arguments, Northerners like Douglas, Lincoln warned, were now yielding their case of "the individual rights of man"-"such is the progress of our national democracy." Lincoln said it was therefore urgent that there should be a union of all men, of whatever politics, who opposed the expansion of slavery, and said he was "ready to fuse with anyone who would unite with him to oppose slave power." If the united opposition of the North caused the South "to raise the bugbear of disunion," the South should be told bluntly, "the union must be preserved in the purity o f its principles as well as in the integrity o f its territorial parts." And he updated the reply of Daniel Webster to the South Carolina nullifiers, as the slogan of the new Republican Party: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." One eyewitness said: "At this moment, he looked to me the handsomest man I had ever seen in my life." Herndon recalled: "His speech was full of fire and energy and force. It was logic. It was pathos. It was enthusiasm. It was justice, equity, truth and right set alight by the divine fires of a soul maddened by the wrong. It was hard, heavy, knotty, gnarly, backed with wrath."
It was now only a matter of time before Lincoln became the champion of the new Republicans. The Senatorial election of 1858 in Illinois, when he was pitted against Douglas, the "Little Giant," provided the opportunity. On June 16 Lincoln, having been nominated as Republican candidate, laid down the strategy at the state convention in Springfield. Together with the Bloomington speech, it represents the essence of Lincoln"s whole approach to the complex of political issues which revolved round slavery. He said that all attempts to end both the South"s agitation for the right to extend slavery and the North"s to abolish it had failed, and that the country was inevitably moving into crisis:
A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the House to fall. But I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South [Emphasis Lincoln"s.]
The burden of the speech was a masterly summary of the legal and const.i.tutional threats represented by the Dred Scott decisions and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and Lincoln challenged Douglas-his main opponent in the state-to say clearly where he stood on both these issues. Lincoln said of his speech: "If I had to draw a pen across my record, and erase my whole life from sight, and if I had one poor gift or choice left as to what I should save from the wreck, I should choose that speech and leave it to the world unerased."
Lincoln was right to put his finger on Douglas, for he represented the spirit of compromise where it was no longer possible-where further attempts to evade the dread issue would play into the hands of the South and sell the pa.s.s. Lincoln objected strongly to Horace Greeley"s plan to get Douglas into the Republican Party. He saw Douglas as an unprincipled man motivated solely by ambition. Eventually both North and South came round to Lincoln"s view. But in 1858 Douglas was a much weightier politician than Lincoln, albeit a younger man. Only five feet high, but muscular and stocky, he was the son of a doctor but had done many things-laborer in his teens, a teacher at twenty, a lawyer at twenty-one, a state legislator and Secretary of State of Illinois, a judge of its supreme court, then a congressman, a senator before he was forty, a European traveler who had been received by the Tsar of Russia and the Queen of England, a rich man who had married two Southern heiresses. He traveled in princely fashion, by special train or coach, with a truck and field gun behind, which fired a salute when he arrived in any place he was due to speak. He drove to his engagements in a carriage with six horses and with thirty-two outriders. So Douglas was a grand man who looked down his nose at the uncouth Lincoln. But Lincoln was cunning when he wished to be. Annoyed by the conservative Springfield Journal, he persuaded it to publish an apology for Southern slavery and so ruined its reputation among right-thinking Illinois readers-it went out of business. Determined to get maximum publicity for his House Divided strategy, he provoked and teased and inveigled Douglas into giving him a series of public debates, from which Lincoln had everything to gain and very little to lose.
The Lincoln-Douglas debates were a series of seven encounters, August-October 1858, conducted throughout the state, with the Senate seat the prize. They were preceded and followed by bands and processions and attracted crowds of 10,000 or more, entire families traveling up to 30 miles to attend them. Both men were good debaters and they made a striking contrast of style, Douglas, meticulously dressed, exuding vigor, Lincoln shambling and awkward in word and gesture, then suddenly, without warning and for brief seconds, becoming G.o.dlike in his majestic pa.s.sion. Douglas won the seat. But the debates eventually finished him, while they transformed Lincoln into a national figure. They were, also, an important process in educating the North in the real issues at stake, and this was of far greater historical importance than the Clay-Webster-Calhoun encounters of 1850.
The strength of Douglas was his warning that the path Lincoln was treading could lead to sectional discord on a scale the country had never known, and possibly civil war. His weakness was that he was never really prepared to say where he stood on slavery and was thus exposed, in debate, as trying to be all things to all men. He said: "I do not care whether the vote goes on for or against slavery. That is only a question of dollars and cents. The Almighty himself has drawn across this continent a line on one side of which the earth must be for ever tilled by slave labor, whereas on the other side of that line labor is free." Northerners might accept this-indeed had always accepted it-as a convenient or inescapable fact-but they did not want it spelled out. To do so sounded amoral or even immoral. And most Americans, then as now, wanted to sound moral. Then again, Douglas said: "When the struggle is between the white man and the negro, I am for the white man. When it is between the negro and the crocodile, I am for the negro." That too played into Lincoln"s hands: it was a remark which would do for a saloon but not for a public platform. Lincoln rightly saw that the debate, the entire controversy, had to be conducted on the highest moral plane because it was only there that the case for freedom and Union became una.s.sailable. He pointed out again and again that even the South was, in its heart, aware that slavery was wrong. The United States had made it a capital offense half a century ago to import slaves from Africa, and that fact, over the years, had wormed its way into Southern att.i.tudes, however much they might try to defend slavery. Hence, even in the South, the slave-dealer was treated with abhorrence. Slave-owners would not let their children play with his-though they would cheerfully see them playing with slave-children. And the South knew that not only slave-dealing was wrong but slavery itself-why else did they manumit: "Why have so many slaves been set free, except by the promptings of conscience?" As for the Dred Scott decision, it was an aberration, which would shortly be set right, at the next presidential election: "You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time."
Lincoln"s object was not merely to put his name and his case before the American people, as well as Illinois voters. It was also to expose the essential pantomime-horse approach of a man who tried to straddle North and South. He succeeded in both. He put to Douglas the key question: "Can the people of a United States territory, in any lawful way, against the wish of a citizen of the United States, exclude slavery from its limits prior to the formation of a state const.i.tution?" If Douglas said yes, to win Illinois voters, he lost the South. If he said no, to win the South, he lost Illinois. Douglas" answer was: "It matters not what way the Supreme Court may hereafter decide as to the abstract question whether slavery may or may not go into a territory under the Const.i.tution; the people have the lawful means to introduce it or exclude it as they please, for the reason that slavery cannot exist a day or an hour unless it is supported by the local police regulations." This answer won Douglas Illinois but it lost him the South and hence, two years later, the presidency. Lincoln, normally a generous and forgiving man, had no time for Douglas and did not regret destroying his future career. He thought less of Douglas than he did of the Southern leaders. He said: "He is a man with tens of thousands of blind followers. It is my business to make some of those blind followers see."
The debates gave Lincoln precisely the impetus he needed. He quoted Clay many times and in a way he inherited Clay"s mantle. The rhyme went: "Westward the star of empire takes its way-the girls link onto Lincoln, their mothers were for Clay." He was told: "You are like Byron, who woke to find himself famous." By 1859 he knew he ought to be president, wanted to be president, and would be president. The campaign autobiography he wrote December 20, 1859 is brief (800 words), plain, and self-dismissive, yet it exudes a certain confidence in himself and his purpose. He sums up his bid for the presidency in two laconic sentences: "I was losing interest in politics, when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known." William Henry Seward (1801-72) and Salmon Portland Chase (1808-73) were both initially considered stronger contenders for the Republican nomination than Lincoln. Seward, first governor then Senator for New York, was the leader of the abolitionists, who said he was "guided by a higher law than the Const.i.tution." Chase was senator, then governor of Ohio, a free-soiler and Democrat who drafted the first Republican Party set of beliefs. Both had strong claims but Lincoln had a big success in New York. At the Republican State convention in Decatur, Lincoln"s cousin John Hanks did a remarkable if unconscious public relations job by holding a demonstration centered around two fence-rails which, he said, were among the 3,000 Lincoln had split thirty years before. He told stories of Lincoln"s youth and his pioneering father-entirely fanciful in the latter"s case-and made rail-splitting into a national symbol, from which Lincoln hugely benefited. Lincoln was in Springfield when a telegram arrived saying he had been nominated for president at the Republican National Convention in Chicago. He said: "I reckon there is a little short woman down in our house that would like to hear the news." He took his acceptance speech to the local school superintendent, who corrected a split infinitive.
The Democratic papers dismissed Lincoln as "a third-rate lawyer," "a nullity," "a man in the habit of making coa.r.s.e and clumsy jokes," one who "could not speak good grammar," a "gorilla." And we have to remember that most of Lincoln"s sayings and speeches, and even his letters, have been cleaned up a good deal before coming down to us. The feeling that he was too rough to be president was not confined to the South, or even to Democrats. But William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878), the anti-slavery poet and philosopher, who had helped to found the Republican Party, called him "A poor flatboatman-such are the true leaders of the nation." Lincoln had the Douglas Debates made into a little pamphlet, which he gave to people who asked his views. It served his purpose well. In dealing with the South"s threat that his election would lead them to secede, he had already taken the bull by the horns in his speech at the Cooper Inst.i.tution in New York City, February 27, 1860: "You will not abide by the election of a Republican President! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed the Union will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver!-or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!" "
Using the political arithmetic of the previous thirty years, Lincoln should have been defeated. All the South had to do was to retain its links with the North, concentrate on keeping Jackson"s old Democratic coalition together, and pick another Buchanan, or similar. But that was increasingly difficult to do, as the anti-slavers of the North raised the political temperature and the South replied with paranoia. Militant abolitionism dated from the early 1830s, when it became obvious that repatriating blacks to West Africa had failed-only 1,420 blacks had been settled in Liberia by 1831 and the number going there was declining