America Aflame (28 page)

The fears themselves were all the more unsettling because they contradicted the basis of pro-slavery propaganda, that the institution was a positive good. Slavery rested on a tower of illogic that rendered the South increasingly defensive, for what is defended more fiercely than the indefensible: an institution of bondage in a land founded for freedom; evangelicals claimed slaves had souls, yet masters typically considered them property; slaveholders argued that the African possessed a limited intellect, yet slaves worked a variety of skilled occupations, and a few managed plantations; pro-slavery advocates maintained that the institution civilized the African, yet they emphasized the indelible primitive nature of his culture; and they asserted that the institution's basic benevolence created happy workers, yet feared their homicidal retribution.

Such introspection did not characterize southern public discourse in the 1850s. Protecting the institution of slavery remained foremost on the agenda of southern leaders as the Congress gathered three days after John Brown's execution. For the next two months, Republicans and Democrats hurled insults across the aisle until the Republicans, holding a scant majority of eight members, managed to elect the new Speaker of the House. South Carolina senator James H. Hammond commented wryly, “The only persons who do not have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.” Reporters noted that even those in the gallery carried weapons.
15

Republicans stood little chance of passing their favorite bills with a slim majority in the House, a Democratic majority in the Senate, and a Democratic administration. Measures such as a western homestead bill to attract eastern workers and farmers to the territories, federal assistance to a transcontinental railroad, and a higher tariff to protect industries and their workers all went down to defeat, either by the Senate or with President Buchanan's veto. Southern Democrats fought these proposals fiercely: 160-acre homesteads precluded plantation agriculture; a Republican-sponsored transcontinental railroad would invariably bypass the South; and the tariff threatened the South's booming cotton economy—all good reasons for opposition. But without a countervailing program other than the slave code, Democratic opposition appeared obstructionist, a collective vote against progress, against the workingman, against the settling of the West; in short, against everything Americans had dreamed of, fought for, and uprooted their lives to achieve over the past generation.

Southerners had dreams, too. They resented the implication that the North was synonymous with America. They resented any intimation that they were retrograde and opposed to progress, technology, and innovation. They rejected any suggestion of inferiority—moral, political, or economic. The fight over the extension of slavery into the territories touched on all three. The Republicans had made that extension a moral issue—Lincoln had stated as much during his debates with Douglas. The loss of access to the territories would seal the South's position as a perpetual political minority. If the Republicans, an avowedly sectional party, attained power, the consequences for the South and slavery could be dire.

Walt Whitman, ever the nationalist, groped for a way of uniting North and South on some common ground, of bypassing the self-serving politicians and poseurs. He envisioned a “healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman,” who will “come down from the West across the Alleghenies, and walk into the Presidency.” If the West embodied America's future, it also represented its salvation.
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Abraham Lincoln had considered the blacksmith's trade and had piloted various craft on the western waters, though he would claim neither as a vocation. He dared not think of himself as presidential timber either, joking in October 1858, “Just think of such a sucker as me as President.” If Lincoln did not think much of the idea, other men did. Some viewed his relatively brief career in Washington as an attribute: an outsider unsullied by corruption and unseemly behavior; a fine orator conversant with the basic moral and religious principles that informed the beliefs of many Americans; and a man who, in the age of the common man, seemed genuinely common.
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Lincoln had distinguished himself in his losing battle against Stephen A. Douglas and in speeches throughout the Midwest during the latter part of 1859. Easterners began to notice, and a group of them supporting Ohio senator Salmon P. Chase for the Republican presidential nomination and seeking to upset the bandwagon for the front-runner, New York's William H. Seward, arranged an invitation through Horace Greeley for Lincoln to deliver a speech at Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in Brooklyn early in 1860. It was a difficult time for Republicans, as many Americans associated the party with Brown's Raid and the Union-threatening agitation of the slavery question. Lincoln's trip east represented not only an effort to overshadow Seward's popularity in his home state but also an attempt to bring a fresh face and voice to eastern Republicans.
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The trip east was a big deal for Lincoln. He bought a new suit; he visited Mathew Brady's photographic studio to take a serious portrait; and he labored over his Plymouth speech more than he had over any other address—a labor he performed twice over as the venue for his presentation changed from Beecher's church to the decidedly more political forum of the Cooper Union in Manhattan. Greeley wanted a broader platform for his new western star.

Lincoln did not disappoint his eastern promoters. More than fifteen hundred people braved a driving snowstorm to listen to this strange-looking and -sounding westerner. Maybe the surprise of hearing eloquence emanating from such an ungainly form with a voice to match accounted for the enthusiasm, but there was no gainsaying that the western star had become an eastern phenomenon. The reviews gushed unstinting praise. Greeley's
Tribune
exclaimed, “He's the greatest man since St. Paul.” Major Republican organs around the country picked up the speech and published it as a pamphlet, and venues throughout the Northeast clamored for Lincoln to speak.
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Lincoln did not expound any new ideas in his Cooper Union speech. But he had a knack throughout his political career of articulating what his audience was thinking with such eloquence that it appeared as a proclamation from the gods. He elevated not only his sentiments but also his listeners, imparting an importance to their mutual journey to a greater end. In February 1860, the nation wondered about the insurgent Republican Party, a sectional organization hostile to the South and, therefore, a threat to the integrity of the Union. John Brown's ascension to martyrdom, supported by select Republicans, damaged the party's profile in the North. Several southern leaders stated flatly that a Republican victory in the upcoming presidential election would end the Union. The front-runner for the Republican nomination, William H. Seward, concerned northerners with his confrontational rhetoric—the appeal to a “higher law,” and the “irrepressible conflict” that he foresaw.

Two months earlier, just a few weeks after John Brown's execution, a Unionist rally drew a crowd of ten thousand to lower Manhattan in bitter weather. Five thousand of these citizens squeezed into the Academy of Music to hear patriotic speeches. Banners festooned the hall bearing famous Unionist quotes headed by George Washington's declaration, “Indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.” A thirty-two-gun salute punctuated the orations. New York brooked no patience with those who agitated the slavery question. Should the Republicans pull back to a position of conciliation and compromise?
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Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union speech offered a resounding “no” and revived Republican morale by emphasizing the party's basic reason for existence: its political and moral opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories. Neither bullied by southern threats of disunion nor discouraged by the weakening of northern resolve, Lincoln refocused the attention on the party's primary objective, a position he believed appealed to a broad cross-section of northerners and threatened no malice to the South or to slavery where it currently existed. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” Lincoln counseled his audience. The Republican Party would not attack slavery where it existed but would “stand by our duty fearlessly and effectively” to prevent its extension. He concluded with a stirring call to carry forward the party's first principles with pride and purpose: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” It was a classic Lincoln speech, steeped in morality and moderation, strong but not aggressive.
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The new voice from the West warmed to the reception. Lincoln allowed himself to entertain thoughts of the presidency. “The taste
is
in my mouth a little,” he admitted. By the time the Republicans convened in Chicago in May 1860 to nominate their presidential candidate, Lincoln was not a long shot for the prize. He was almost everyone's second choice—acceptable as an alternative to the Seward men, to the supporters of Senator Salmon P. Chase, and to those who favored conservative former Whig Edward Bates of Missouri. He was, in effect, the least objectionable man at the convention. If any of the other candidates faltered, Lincoln would be the logical beneficiary.
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Lincoln also benefited from the location of the convention in his home state of Illinois. His reputation as the most moderate of the candidates, save for the colorless Bates, impressed delegates convinced that only a moderate nominee had a chance to carry the states of the lower North. The Republicans could win the presidency without the South, but they needed Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana if they wanted to achieve that victory. Lincoln, more than Seward, could appeal to conservative former Whigs in these states.

Lincoln's campaign managers deftly portrayed the Illinois lawyer as a Republican Andrew Jackson, a man born in a log cabin who enjoyed splitting rails and plowing dirt, though in truth he abhorred any serious labor connected with rural life. The image harked back to the successful “Log Cabin and Hard Cider” Whig campaign of 1840, an association the Republicans hoped to cultivate among former Whigs. Lincoln was now the “Rail Splitter,” as Andrew Jackson was “Old Hickory,” a rough-hewn westerner, a striking evocation of the incorruptible and indomitable common man. What better individual to lead the nation out of sin and toward redemption than someone fresh out of the West, America's dream region.

The platform that Lincoln would run on—and party faithful paid much more attention to the specifics of these documents than we do today—expressed this promise. Although the Republicans did not abandon their strong opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories, they did not duplicate the defiant tone of the 1856 party platform that contained a specific denunciation of the Slave Power. The platform was a western document offering homesteads on the frontier, federal aid to improve rivers and harbors, and a slight increase in the tariff to stimulate the region's industrial base and appeal also to the older manufacturing districts of the East. The platform avoided offending immigrants, despite the party's vigorous Know Nothing contingent, calling for “full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
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The revival-like unity of the Republicans reflected a growing confidence in the party's prospects, especially given the disarray of the Democratic Party after its nominating convention in Charleston, South Carolina, a few weeks earlier. A worse venue for a party that desperately needed to come together could not have been imagined. The idea was that if the Democrats could come out of this southern nationalist stronghold as a unified party, the most difficult part of the campaign would be behind them. But from the outset, Charleston proved an unfortunate choice. The city lacked the hotel space to accommodate the crush of delegates, and the oppressive April heat rendered the packed hall a cauldron of quick tempers and short wits. Southern delegates competed with each other as to who could elicit the most raucous cheers from the packed partisan galleries. If those delegates had followed through on their threats, the Democratic Party would have declared war on the United States by the midpoint of the convention. Incendiary rhetoric left the Democratic Party in ashes.

Southern delegates were much more intent on making a point than on nominating a presidential candidate. The posturing that southerners had exhibited in the current congressional session carried over into the convention's deliberations. When the platform committee called for a federal slave code in the territories, northern Democrats, in the majority, defeated the proposal, prompting a walkout by delegates from Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, thus depriving the likely nominee, Stephen A. Douglas, of the required two-thirds majority. The convention voted to reconvene in Baltimore in June.

The political landscape had darkened for the Democrats by June. The Republicans were already fanning out over the North to spread their gospel of progress, prosperity, and national union. Rival delegations from the Lower South states arrived in Baltimore, one side pledged to Douglas and the other to obstruction. When the convention voted for the Douglas delegations, the spurned delegates walked out, this time joined by colleagues from the Upper South. The remaining delegates nominated Douglas for president and Herschel V. Johnson, of Georgia—one of the few southerners remaining in the hall—for vice president. Southern delegates convened to nominate sitting vice president John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky as their presidential candidate and Senator Joseph Lane of Oregon as vice president. The breakup of the last national party was complete.