Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (48 page)

46
. ——— Helfenstein to Stephen A. Douglas, July 31, 1860, in Reinhard H. Luthin,
The First Lincoln Campaign
(Cambridge, Mass., 1944), 208;
Dubuque Herald
, quoted in
ibid
., 179.

47
. Michael F. Holt,
The Political Crisis of the 1850s
(New York, 1978), 214.

contests in 1858. They had also bribed judges to naturalize immigrants prematurely so they could vote in the crucial states of Pennsylvania and Indiana in 1856, and had "colonized" Irish railroad construction workers in Indiana to help swing that state to Buchanan. The New York postmaster fled the country in 1860 when auditors found his accounts $155,000 short. The House committee also dug up evidence that the administration had bribed congressmen to vote for admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution. Government printing contracts, long a lucrative source of patronage, became a greater scandal than ever under Buchanan. Kickbacks from payments exceeding by several times the printing cost found their way into the party treasury.

Secretary of War John Floyd presented the biggest target to graft hunters. He had sold government property for much less than its real value to a consortium headed by cronies. He had also signed padded bills presented to the War Department by a contractor in financial difficulties who then used these signed bills as collateral for bank loans and for negotiable bonds from an Interior Department Indian trust fund. Although partially revealed before the election, Floyd's full complicity in this matter did not come out until December 1860, when Buchanan allowed him to resign without punishment. A Virginian, Floyd pronounced himself a secessionist and returned home, where he was feted by like-minded compatriots who praised one of his final acts in office—an order (subsequently countermanded) to transfer 125 cannon from Pittsburgh to arsenals in Mississippi and Texas.
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Republicans made big capital out of these scandals. To be sure, Buchanan was not running for re-election, and most northern Democrats had already repudiated his administration. But some Douglas Democrats had also been caught with their hands in the till, and the whole party was tarnished by the image of corruption. The "plunder of the public treasury," declared the Republican platform, "shows that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded." Republican campaigners combined this crusade to "throw the rascals out" with denunciations of the slave power. The revelations of malfeasance, said Charles Francis Adams, had shown how "the slaveholding interest has

48
. Michael F. Holt, "James Buchanan, 1857–1861," in C. Vann Woodward, ed.,
Responses of the Presidents to Charges of Misconduct
(New York, 1974), 86–96; David E. Meerse, "Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860,"
CWH
, 12 (1966), 116–31; Nichols,
Disruption of American Democracy
, 284–87, 328–31; Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 196–200, 372–75.

been driven to the expedient of attempting to bribe the people of the Free States with their own money in order to maintain itself in control of the government." Horace Greeley spoke of "not one merely but two Irrepressible Conflicts—the first between . . . Free Labor . . . and aggressive, all-grasping Slavery propagandism . . . [the second] between honest administration on one side, and wholesale executive corruption, legislative bribery, and speculative jobbery on the other; and we recognize in Honest Abe Lincoln the right man to lead us in both."
⁴⁹
The future would reveal that a good many Republican politicians were none too honest themselves. But in 1860 the party carried an unsullied banner of reform and freedom against the tired old corrupt proslavery Democrats.

To some members of their constituency, however, the Republican message seemed sour. When party orators discussed slavery, especially in the lower North, they often took pains to describe Republicanism as the true "White Man's Party." Exclusion of slavery from the territories, they insisted, meant exclusion of black competition with white settlers. This caused several abolitionists to denounce the Republicans as no better than Douglas Democrats. William Lloyd Garrison believed that "the Republican party means to do nothing, can do nothing, for the abolition of slavery in the slave states." Wendell Phillips even went so far as to call Lincoln "the Slave Hound of Illinois" because he refused to advocate repeal of the fugitive slave law.
⁵⁰

But some Republicans came almost up to the abolitionist standard. In the upper North the old evangelical fervor against bondage infused their rhetoric. After the Republican convention Seward rediscovered the irrepressible conflict. Even in Missouri he boldly proclaimed that freedom "is bound to go through. As it has already gone through eighteen of the states of the Union, so it is bound to go through all of the other fifteen . . . for the simple reason that it is going through all the world."
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Gubernatorial candidates John Andrew of Massachusetts and Austin Blair of Michigan, Senators Charles Sumner, Salmon P. Chase, and Benjamin Wade, Congressmen George W. Julian and Thaddeus Stevens,

49
. Meerse, "Buchanan, Corruption and the Election of 1860,"
loc. cit
., 125, 124.

50
. These and similar quotations can be found in James M. McPherson,
The Strugglefor Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction
(Princeton, 1964), 11–18, and in McPherson,
The Negro's Civil War
(New York, 1965), 3–10.

51
. Emerson D. Fite,
The Presidential Campaign of
1860 (New York, 1911), 192.

nearly the whole Republican party of Vermont, and a host of other party leaders were abolitionists in all but name. Many of them
did
favor repeal of the fugitive slave law, along with the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia and the prohibition of the interstate slave trade.

Believing that these men embodied the progressive spirit and future thrust of the Republican party, many abolitionists supported it in 1860. "Lincoln's election will indicate growth in the right direction," wrote one, while Frederick Douglass acknowledged that a Republican victory "must and will be hailed as an anti-slavery triumph."
⁵²
Southerners thought so too. Democrats below the Potomac considered Lincoln "a relentless, dogged, free-soil border ruffian . . . a vulgar mobocrat and a Southern hater . . . an illiterate partisan . . . possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery and his openly avowed predilections of negro equality." As the election neared, the increasing likelihood that a solid North would make Lincoln president brewed a volatile mixture of hysteria, despondency, and elation in the South. Whites feared the coming of new John Browns encouraged by triumphant Black Republicans; unionists despaired of the future; secessionists relished the prospect of southern independence. Even the weather during that summer of 1860 became part of the political climate: a severe drought and prolonged heat wave withered southern crops and drove nerves beyond the point of endurance.
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Stories of slave uprisings that followed the visits of mysterious Yankee strangers, reports of arson and rapes and poisonings by slaves crowded the southern press. Somehow these horrors never seemed to happen in one's own neighborhood. Many of them, in fact, were reported from faraway Texas. And curiously, only those newspapers backing Breckin-ridge for president seemed to carry such stories. Bell and Douglas newspapers even had the effrontery to accuse Breckinridge Democrats of getting up "false-hoods and sensation tales" to "arouse the passions of the people and drive them into the Southern Disunion movement."
⁵⁴

But this accusation must have been wrong. No less a personage than

52
. McPherson,
Struggle for Equality
, 16; McPherson,
Negro's Civil War
, 8.

53
.
Charleston Mercury
, Oct. 15, 1860, and
Richmond Enquirer
, May 21, 1860, quoted in Craven,
Growth of Southern Nationalism
, 346. William L. Barney,
The Secessionist Impulse: Alabama and Mississippi in 1860
(Princeton, 1974), 153–63, contains a perceptive analysis of the impact of the drought on southern political behavior.

54
. Crenshaw,
Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860
, 97 and 97n.

R. S. Holt, a wealthy Mississippi planter and brother of the U.S. postmaster general, reported that "we have constantly a foretaste of what Northern brother-hood means, in almost daily conflagrations & in discovery of poison, knives & pistols distributed among our slaves by emissaries sent out for that purpose. . . . There cannot be found in all the planting States a territory ten miles square in which the foot prints of one or more of these miscreants have not been discovered." Fortunately, Holt added, "Miracles & Providence" had prevented the accomplishment of their "hellish" designs. But Congressman Lawrence M. Keitt of South Carolina was not willing to trust to Providence. "I see poison in the wells in Texas—and fire for the houses in Alabama," he wrote. "How can we stand it? . . .
It is enough to risk disunion on
."
⁵⁵

In vain, then, did a southern conservative point out that most of these atrocity stories "turned out, on examination, to be totally false, and
all of them
grossly exaggerated."
⁵⁶
On the eve of the election a Mississip-pian observed that "the minds of the people are aroused to a pitch of excitement probably unparalleled in the history of our country." A writer in a Texas Methodist weekly was sure that "the designs of the abolitionists are . . . poison [and] fire" to "deluge [the South] in blood and flame . . . and force their fair daughters into the embrace of buck negroes for wives." However irrational these fears, the response was real—vigilante lynch law that made the John Brown scare of the previous winter look like a Sunday School picnic. "It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass," wrote a Texan, "for the guilty one endangers the peace of society."
⁵⁷

This mass hysteria caused even southern unionists to warn Yankees that a Republican victory meant disunion. "The Election of Lincoln is Sufficient Cause for Secession," a Bell supporter in Alabama entitled his speech. The moderate Benjamin H. Hill of Georgia insisted that "this Government and Black Republicanism cannot live together. . . . At no period of the world's history have four thousand millions of property debated whether it ought to submit to the rule of an enemy." Not to be outdone in southern patriotism, the leading Douglas newspaper

55
. R. S. Holt to Joseph Holt, Nov. 9, 1860, Lawrence Keitt to James H. Hammond, Sept. 10, Oct. 23, 1860, in
ibid
., 105–6, 108.

56
. William L. Barney,
The Road to Secession
: A
New Perspective on the Old South
(New York, 1972), 149.

57
.
Natchez Free Trader
, Nov. 2, 1860, and
Texas Christian Advocate
quoted in Crenshaw,
Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860
, 111, 95–96; Texan quoted in Reynolds,
Editors Make War
, 103–4.

in Georgia thundered: "Let the consequences be what they may—whether the Potomac is crimsoned in human gore, and Pennsylvania Avenue is paved ten fathoms deep with mangled bodies . . . the South will never submit to such humiliation and degradation as the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln."
⁵⁸

The fever spread to the border states. A unionist editor in Louisville professed to have received hundreds of letters "all informing us of a settled and widely-extended purpose to break up the Union" if Lincoln was elected. "We admit that the conspirators are mad, but such madness 'rules the hour.' " John J. Crittenden, Kentucky's elder statesman of unionism, heir of Henry Clay's mantle of nationalism, gave a speech just before the election in which he denounced the "profound fanaticism" of Republicans who "think it their duty to destroy . . . the white man, in order that the black might be free. . . . [The South] has come to the conclusion that in case Lincoln should be elected . . . she could not submit to the consequences, and therefore, to avoid her fate, will secede from the Union."
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