American Experiment (108 page)

The Republicans established themselves as a truly national party during the convention’s second day, when they voted through a platform with much wider appeal than the antislavery manifesto of four years earlier. Drafted by a group including Greeley and Schurz, the platform called for free homesteads, a tariff that would encourage industrial development, internal improvements, a Pacific railroad, Kansas’ immediate entry into the Union, and other antislavery planks. It was a moderate, even conservative platform—so much so that the white-haired veteran Free-Soiler Joshua Giddings felt compelled to add a reaffirmation of the truths of the Declaration of Independence. When he was voted down and began to leave the hall in chagrin, a New York delegate rose to urge “gentlemen to think well before, upon the free prairies of the West, in the summer of 1860, they dare to wince and quail before the assertions of the men of Philadelphia in 1776.” Shamed, the delegates now carried the motion unanimously, amid an explosion of cheers, and old Giddings resumed his seat.

Next day Seward led on the first ballot, as expected, but Lincoln was a strong second, as not expected. There followed a scramble for delegate votes, as Weed, Davis, and the other managers expended their political resources—patronage jobs, policy promises, future recognitions, even cabinet posts—in a wide-open distribution of loaves and fishes, using the hard currency of specific promises and the soft currency of hopes and expectations. “Make no contracts that will bind me,” Lincoln had said to his managers, but Judge Davis allegedly told his colleagues, “Lincoln ain’t here and don’t know what we have to meet!” All managers played this game, but Lincoln’s had the added advantage of handing out hundreds of counterfeit tickets in order to pack the Wigwam’s gallery and out-hurrah the Seward rooters.

In the end, though, it was a set of more serious political factors—above all, Lincoln’s “availability”—that brought him a surge of strength in the second ballot, and victory, as Cameron’s Pennsylvania shifted to him, early in the third. More delegates jumped onto the bandwagon, and the
nomination was made unanimous. A quiet fell upon the Wigwam as the delegates contemplated what they had done, then the cannon boomed from the roof and Illinoisans in the streets outside were swept up in a happy pandemonium.

Lincoln was waiting nervously in his Springfield law office when a telegram arrived:
“TO LINCOLN YOU ARE NOMINATED.”
He studied it for long moments. “Well,” he said, “we’ve got it.”

What did Lincoln have? A worthless nomination, some said; he would probably lose, but if he won he would lose too, for the slave states would secede. Lincoln scoffed at this latter prospect. He and most of the other Republican leaders could not believe that the Southerners really meant secession and war. “He considered the movement South as a sort of political game of bluff, gotten up by politicians, and meant solely to frighten the North,” a friend wrote after talking with him. “ ‘They won’t give up the offices,’ I remember he said, and added, ‘Were it believed that vacant places could be had at the North Pole, the road there would be lined with dead Virginians.’ ” Seward and Schurz and others also were optimistic.

The Republican leaders were less dogmatic about winning. A four-party race was unprecedented and unpredictable. Some calculated that Lincoln would monopolize the antislavery vote and hence overcome the divided opposition. Others believed that Douglas and Bell would monopolize the moderate, pro-Union vote, especially if they could agree on fusion or coalition arrangements in some of the key states. In any event, Republican leaders agreed that their course was clear. Lincoln must “make no speeches,” as William Cullen Bryant said, “write no letters as a candidate.” Nothing must sully the image of Lincoln and his party as following a moderate, centrist path between the ultras of secessionism and the ultras of abolitionism.

Lincoln complied, publicly. Privately, he was busy meeting with party chieftains, bantering with reporters, sending out campaign suggestions, querying local politicos as to how the situation looked in their end of the “vineyard.” And he allowed his image to be sharpened as “honest Abe,” a son of the frontier, log cabin born, farm boy, rail splitter. The Republicans lived up to their Whig forefathers in organizing campaign processions carrying replicas of rails he had split, and presenting the “Wide Awakes,” who provided song and spectacle. But Lincoln stayed in Springfield.

Douglas would not be so constricted. Leading half a party, facing probable defeat, he decided on intensive tours North and South. In city after city he called for Union, denounced the ultras, pictured the Democratic party as the only remaining vehicle of North-South harmony. His audiences seemed as spellbound as ever by the Little Giant, but he won few
conversions from the Republican party in the North or Breckinridge’s splinter party in the South. Douglas, who had spent so many years keeping his fences mended with the Southerners, was amazed by the hostility shown him in the slave states. He gave as good as he got, denouncing secessionist talk as traitorous. Early in October he was shocked to hear that Pennsylvania and Indiana had gone Republican in elections for state officials.

“Mr. Lincoln is the next President,” Douglas told his secretary. “We must try to save the Union. I will go South.” He was headed South anyway, but he intensified his efforts. Now he spoke for the Union rather than himself. The South must not secede. Aroused, desperate, as he saw his life’s political work being swept away, he followed a killing pace—literally killing, for in eight months he would be dead of accumulated fatigue, untended illnesses, campaign overwork, and the heavy drinking and smoking that went with it.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln won 1,866,000 votes; Douglas, 1,375,000; Breckinridge, 843,000; Bell, 590,000. Lincoln carried eighteen free states for 180 electoral votes, Breckinridge, eleven slave states for 72, Bell three border states for 39, and Douglas only Missouri, and three New Jersey votes, for 12. Studying the vote, newspaper editors could find some predictable patterns. Lincoln had won no electoral votes in the South, Breckinridge none in the North, though both had drawn huge popular votes in rural areas. The Democratic party now lay in fragments. Despite strong economic, ethnic, and religious views among the voters, the outcome was almost completely sectional. Geography was destiny.

But there was little time for analysis. On receiving news of Lincoln’s election, South Carolina’s legislature unanimously called for a state convention to be held in Columbia in late December. This convention declared without dissent that “the union now subsisting between South Carolina and the other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved.”

On January 9 Mississippi seceded, the next day Florida, the next day Alabama, followed by Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. The Union was dissolved.

The Union was dissolved. The grand experiment seemed finished. Americans had created a union to achieve order, security, liberty, and equality. Now union was gone, and with it order and security. Liberty had been largely achieved, but not for blacks, Indians, or controversial ministers and editors. Equality had been partially achieved, but not for slaves, women, illiterates, masses of laborers in fields and factories. “The last
hope of freedom in the old world is now centered in the success of the American Republic,” Douglas had said during the campaign. Now the Old World looked on in mingled pity and glee.

What had happened? What could have happened, in a nation that had been put together like a Swiss clock, with power and energy so nicely distributed and positioned and balanced, precisely so that the nation could absorb pressures from without and within? The first answers, in the heat of the conflict, offered conspiratorial or even diabolical explanations: the catastrophe was due to southern planters, northern abolitionists, agitators in general. In later years, the explanation would often reflect the political ideology or intellectual environment of the time. Secession and civil war were due to class rule North and South, cultural conflict, lack of communication and understanding, modernization surges and lags, ideological differences over slavery and the “unfreedoms” and inequalities that it caused.

Much of this inquiry was inconclusive, however, because it searched for single causes in what was a web of influences or a channel of causation. It failed to differentiate between the givens of history—the geographical, racial, and economic forces that were inextricable and inseparable from the past—and the somewhat more tractable decision-making situations, where leaders might have decided differently, for example, in permitting the slave trade or agreeing to a three-fifths rule, and the more “open” crossroads situations where men had considerable choice in arranging their political institutions and in making decisions within them.

The immediate cause of the Civil War lay in the derangement of the nation’s two political systems—the constitutional system of the 1780s and the party system of the 1830s—and in their interaction with each other. Both these systems rested on an intricate set of balances: the constitutional, on a balance between federal and state power and among the three branches of the federal government; the party, on a competitive balance between party organizations at the national and state levels. The genius of this double system lay in its ability to morselize sectional and economic and other conflicts before they became flammable, and then through incremental adjustment and accommodations to keep the great mobiles of ideological, regional, and other political energies in balance until the next adjustment had to be made. This system worked well for decades, as the great compromises of 1820 and 1850 attested. The system was flexible too; when a measure of executive leadership was needed—to make great decisions about the West, as with Jefferson, or to adjust and overcome a tariff rebellion, as with Jackson—enough presidential authority could be exerted within the system to meet the need. But the essence of the system lay in balances, adjustment, compromise.

Then, in the 1850s, this system crumbled. The centrifugal forces besetting it were so powerful that perhaps no polity could have overcome them; yet European and other political systems had encountered enormously divisive forces and survived. What happened in the United States was a fateful combination: a powerful ideology of states’ rights, defense of slavery, and “southern way of life” arose in the South, with South Carolina as the cutting edge; this was met by a counter-ideology in the urbanizing, industrializing, modernizing states, with Illinois as the cutting edge in the West. While many issues were involved in this ideological confrontation—the tariff, federal support for internal improvements, nativism, religious differences, western development, temperance—less and less these issues modified the growing issue of slavery, and more and more they helped deepen that division.

As these ideological differences grew, the double system began to falter, and the more it faltered, the more the ideological conflict intensified. The two-party system assumed that within each party moderate and “extremist” forces would grapple for control, but that the two parties would tend toward the center—and hence toward gradual adjustment and morselization—because of the need to win the support of centrist voters. The system in short depended on electoral competition in a diverse and balanced electorate. The 1850 election, however, began to throw the system askew. Because of weaknesses in the Whig party, which had never established itself at the grass roots to the degree the Democracy had, especially in the South, the Democrats won overwhelming control of Congress and Southerners won predominance within the party as a result of their unified control of caucuses, appointments of committee chairmen and memberships, parliamentary rules and processes. This was the background of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the passage of which showed the power of southern ultras and unsettled the system further.

If the “party constitution”—the competitive, two-party mechanism—had worked, the Democrats would have paid the political price in 1856: defeat at the hands of a moderate party that would have appealed to the voters for a mandate against southern extremism. But in 1856 the Whigs, plagued by their own sectional problems, and with their organizational heart beating feebly, were near the point of collapse, and the Republicans and Know-Nothings were minority parties. The Democrats won an undeserved victory, over splintered opposition, and this again played into the hands of the ultras. At the same time, the ultras virtually controlled the presidency, through the two-thirds rule in the convention and the choice of men, in Pierce and Buchanan, who were not expected to be strong. Presidents. Even the presidential veto could be negated when
congressional leaders, invoking party discipline (their own), could override the White House. There was never a strong Administration party that could build a solid link with moderate elements in the North and the border states.

Under the rising ideological-sectional pressures, this system exploded and revealed in naked outline what had been for some years the actual power configuration—a four-party or multi-party system, with its inherent weaknesses. In the four-party showdown of 1860, the Republicans won with a minority of the popular vote. In that election Stephen Douglas was the real hero, as he decided to fight for the Union even at the expense of his own candidacy, bypassed the southern ultras, and made a final effort to reach the great grass-roots Democracy, North and South, that had kept the nation together.

Much would be said later about a “blundering generation” of leaders, but these men were operating within the system they knew, as best they could, only to find that the constitutional and party system could not cope with the power of ideology. Nor could they fully understand an ideological battle in which extremists did not act rationally and prudently, in which every politician was vulnerable to the man on his “far right or left.” Much would also be made later of economic and ethnic and religious forces that these leaders could not overcome, but these were precisely the forces that, as experienced transactional leaders, they had in the past overcome through gradual adjustment and accommodation.