Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (47 page)

III

The excitement and optimism at Chicago carried over into the Republican campaign. This young party exuded the ebullience of youth. First-time voters flocked to the Republican standard. Thousands of them enrolled in "Wide-Awake" clubs and marched in huge parades carrying torches mounted on the ubiquitous fence rails that became a symbol of this campaign. Political songbooks rolled off the presses, and party faithful sang their theme song, "Ain't you glad you joined the Republicans?"

One advantage the Republicans enjoyed over their opponents was party unity. The disappointed Sewardites followed their leader's example and stumped with enthusiasm for Lincoln. Only a handful of abolitionists on the left and a rather larger number of Whig-Americans on the right showed signs of alienation. The latter represented the main obstacle to Republican hopes of sweeping the North. Like the mythical phoenix, the Whig party kept rising from its own ashes. In 1860 it did so in the guise of the Constitutional Union party, which had held its convention a week before the Republicans. These conservatives decided that the best way to avoid the calamity of disunion was to take no stand at all on the issues that divided North and South. Instead of a platform, therefore, they adopted a pious resolution pledging "to recognize no political principle other than
the Constitution . . . the Union . . . and the Enforcement of the Laws."
The convention nominated wealthy slaveholder John Bell of Tennessee for president and venerable Cotton Whig Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. Few delegates were under sixty years of age; this "Old Gentlemen's Party" became a butt of gentle ridicule by Republicans, who described the Bell-Everett ticket as

37
. The platform is printed in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed.,
History of American Presidential Elections
, 4 vols. (New York, 1971), II, 1124–27.

"worthy to be printed on gilt-edged satin paper, laid away in a box of musk, and kept there." At the same time, southern Democrats accused Constitutional Unionists of "insulting the intelligence of the American people" by trying to organize a "party which shall ignore the slavery question. That issue must be met and settled."
³⁸

Constitutional Unionists did not expect to win the election. The best they could hope for was to carry several upper-South states and weaken Lincoln sufficiently in the lower North to deny him an electoral majority. This would throw the election of a president into the House, where each state had one vote but no party controlled a majority of states. Democrats might then combine with Whig-American-Unionists to elect Breckinridge, a Kentuckian who could perhaps be weaned away from his extremist southern-rights backers. Or the Constitutional Unionists might have enough leverage to elect Bell. Or if the House failed to name a president by March 4, 1861, the vice president elected by the Democratic Senate would become acting president. That worthy individual would be either Breckinridge's running mate Joseph Lane of Oregon, a proslavery native of North Carolina, or the Constitutional Unionists' own Edward Everett.
³⁹

But this spoiling strategy backfired. In several southern states the Constitutional Unionists felt compelled to prove themselves just as faithful to southern rights as the Democrats by embracing a federal slave code for the territories. This provoked many conservative ex-Whigs in the North to vote for Lincoln as the lesser of evils. "I will vote the Republican ticket next Tuesday," wrote a New Yorker who had initially intended to vote for Bell. "The only alternative is everlasting submission to the South. . . . I want to be able to remember that I voted right at this grave crisis. The North must assert its rights, now, and take the consequences."
⁴⁰
The Bell-Everett ticket won less than 3 percent of the northern vote and took no states out of the Lincoln column.

38
.
Springfield Republican
, quoted in Dale Baum,
The Civil War Party System: TheCase of Massachusetts, 1848–1876
(Chapel Hill, 1984), 50; [Lexington]
KentuckyStatesman
, May 8, 1860, in Dwight Lowell Dumond, ed.,
Southern Editorials on Secession
(New York, 1931), 76.

39
. Crenshaw,
Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860
, 59–73; Thomas B. Alexander, "The Civil War as Institutional Fulfillment,"
JSH
, 47 (1981), 11–13, 16, 20.

40
.
The Diary of George Templeton Strong: The Civil War 1860–1865
, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York, 1952), 56–57. For an analysis of the attempt by southern Constitutional Unionists to compete with Breckinridge Democrats in "Southernness," see John V. Mering, "The Slave-State Constitutional Unionists and the Politics of Consensus,"
JSH
, 43 (1977), 395–410.

The election of 1860 was unique in the history of American politics. The campaign resolved itself into two separate contests: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North; Breckinridge vs. Bell in the South. Republicans did not even have a ticket in ten southern states, where their speakers would have been greeted with a coat of tar and feathers—or worse—if they had dared to appear. In the remaining five slave states—all in the upper South—Lincoln received 4 percent of the popular votes, mostly from antislavery Germans in St. Louis and vicinity. Breckinridge fared a little better in the North, where he won 5 percent of the popular votes, enough to deny California and Oregon to Douglas. Lincoln carried these states by a plurality and all other free states except New Jersey by a majority of the popular vote.

This was accomplished only by hard work. Though repudiated by the South and by the Buchanan administration, Douglas remained a formidable opponent. At the outset of the campaign he appeared to have a chance of winning eight northern and one or two border states with some 140 of the 303 electoral votes. To prevent this, Republicans mounted a campaign unprecedented in energy and oratory. Lincoln himself observed the customary silence of presidential candidates, but all other party leaders great and small took to the stump and delivered an estimated 50,000 speeches. Republicans made a special effort headed by Carl Schurz to reduce the normal Democratic majority among German-Americans. They achieved some success among German Protestants—enough, perhaps, to make a difference in the close states of Illinois and Indiana—though the lingering perceptions of Republican dalliance with nativism and temperance kept the Catholic vote overwhelmingly Democratic.
⁴¹

In a bold break with tradition, Douglas campaigned for himself. In ill health, his voice hoarse, he nevertheless ranged through the whole

41
. For conflicting interpretations of the unresolved question of the German vote in 1860, see the essays in Frederick C. Luebke, ed.,
Ethnic Voters and the Election of Lincoln
(Lincoln, Neb., 1971). The latest estimates of the German vote are contained in William E. Gienapp, "Who Voted for Lincoln?" John L. Thomas, ed.,
Abraham Lincoln and the American Political Tradition
(Amherst, 1986), 50–97, which finds that while the proportion of German Americans voting Republican in 1860 was less than half, the increase from 1856 was dramatic and may have helped provide the margin of Republican victory in Pennsylvania as well as Indiana and Illinois.

country (except the west coast) from July to November in an exhausting tour that undoubtedly did much to bring on his death a year later. It was a courageous effort, but a futile one. Douglas carried the message to both North and South that he was the only
national
candidate, the only leader who could save the country from disunion. But in reality, Douglas Democrats were scarcely more a national party than the Republicans. Most southern Democrats painted Douglas nearly as black as Lincoln, and a traitor to boot. Douglas wound up with only 12 percent of the southern popular vote.

If the Democratic charge of sectionalism against Republicans lacked credibility this time, the old standby of branding them racial egalitarians retained its potency. Republicans had increased their vulnerability on this issue by placing a constitutional amendment to enfranchise blacks on the ballot in New York state.
⁴²
If you want to vote "cheek by jowl with a large 'buck nigger,' " chanted Democratic orators and editors, if you want to support "a party that says
'a nigger is better than an Irishman,' "
if you are "ready to divide your patrimony with the negro . . . vote for the Republican candidate."
⁴³
A Democratic float in a New York parade carried life-size effigies of Horace Greeley and a "good looking nigger wench, whom he caressed with all the affection of a true Republican." A banner proclaimed that "free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe." The
New York Herald
, largest Democratic newspaper in the country, predicted that if Lincoln was elected "hundreds of thousands" of fugitive slaves would "emigrate to their friends—the Republicans—North, and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men. . . . African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races will soon be their portion under the millennium of Republican rule."
⁴⁴

This onslaught wilted a good many Republicans. Although most party newspapers in New York endorsed the equal suffrage amendment, few

42
. Negroes in New York state could vote only if they met a $250 property qualification. No such restriction applied to whites. The constitutional amendment would have removed the restriction on black voters.

43
.
Albany Argus
, Sept. 7, 1860,
Ovid Bee
, Nov. 7, 1860, quoted in Phyllis F. Field,
The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War Era
(Ithaca, 1982), 116, 118;
New York Herald
, Nov. 5, 1860; Albon Man, Jr., "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863,"
Journal of Negro History
, 36 (1951), 379.

44
.
New York Herald
, Oct. 24, Nov. 5, 6, 1860, quoted in Field,
Politics of Race
, 117, and in Man, "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots," 378–79.

speakers mentioned it, and the party made little effort in its behalf. Nearly one-third of the Republican voters joined virtually all Democrats in voting against it, sending the measure to a resounding defeat, even though Lincoln carried New York.
⁴⁵
And in the lower North generally, Republicans played down the moral issue of slavery while emphasizing other matters of regional concern. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey they talked about the tariff; from Ohio to California the Republicans portrayed themselves as a homestead party, an internal improvements party, a Pacific railroad party. This left Democrats with less opportunity to exploit the race issue. "The Republicans, in their speeches, say nothing of the nigger question," complained a Pennsylvania Democrat, "but all is made to turn on the Tariff." Of course the Republican position on these issues constituted a flank attack on the slave power. After Buchanan had vetoed the homestead act, even a Democratic paper in Iowa denounced the president as an "old sinner" and his northern associates as "pimps and hirelings" of "the Slave Propagandists."
⁴⁶

The Buchanan administration handed Republicans another issue: corruption. Americans had always viewed malfeasance and abuse of power as the gravest dangers to republican liberty. Not only was Buchanan, in Republican eyes, the pliant tool of the slave power but his administration also, in the words of historian Michael Holt, "was undoubtedly the most corrupt before the Civil War and one of the most corrupt in American history."
⁴⁷
An exposure of frauds filled a large volume compiled by a House investigating committee. The committee's report came off the presses in June 1860, just in time for an abridged edition to be distributed as a Republican campaign document.

This report topped off a series of previous investigations that disclosed a sorry record of graft and bribery in government contracts, the civil service, and Congress itself. The War and Navy departments had awarded contracts without competitive bidding to firms that made contributions to the Democratic party. Postmasters in New York and Chicago under both Pierce and Buchanan had siphoned public funds into party coffers for years. Democrats had used some of this money in congressional

45
. The vote in favor of the amendment was 37 percent. Lincoln won 54 percent of the vote in New York.