Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership (42 page)

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Authors: Conrad Black

BOOK: Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership
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The fact was that both sides were spoiling for a fight. The national government had been reduced to a dithering, hair-splitting, talking shop, impotently enduring endless threats bellowed at it from its constituents. The Jackson settlement was bound to turn into a shabby and unsustainable compromise when it was operated by weaklings who would never threaten to hang their vice presidents for treason and invade states of the Union as if they were foreign territory, as Jackson had done. The parties had put up steadily more ambiguous leaders to try to dissemble their way through the contradictions, and in the interest of attracting the South to him, Douglas, with the self-destructive abandon of a mindless opportunist, had seized on “popular sovereignty.” Lincoln had forced him to keep his place as senator from Illinois by renouncing the main point of “popular sovereignty”—the right of slaveholders to their property in territories whatever the Congress or local governments thought of it. He had proffered the South more than the North was prepared to give, and then tried to take it back when Lincoln cut him off at the knees.
Unless the North was prepared to allow the South to withdraw, it would now come to war, and was like a classic series of aggregated grievances between two parties that can only be resolved by a fight, and a fight of unlimited length until one protagonist had beaten the other unconscious and stood over him in complete victory, or, in the case of the South, had so exhausted the North that it could not continue. Either the Union would break or the objecting party, the North, would have to beat the South into unconditional surrender.
Nothing less would clear the air, much less resolve the issue (as General U.S. Grant would explain, 20 years later, to German Imperial Chancellor Bismarck).
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This could not be simply a successful dust-up. The South, in all its pride and courage, was chippy, swaggering, and disdainful. It could not be tamed like a disobedient child with a good birching, such as Germany, under Bismarck’s leadership, would figuratively administer to the (almost unoffending but inadequately deferential) Danes, Austrians, and French. Nothing less would save the Union, which had so sonorously and loudly proclaimed itself the light unto the world and clarion of human freedom and dignity, the ark of deliverance of the rights of man, just one long lifetime before.
This was about to be the choice, acquiescence in the dissolution of the Union, northern suppression of the insurrection, or a successful southern war of independence. They were all bad choices for those who believed in the United States, but they were the only choices. The South didn’t think the North had the will or ability to prevent the secession of the South, and many northerners thought so too. The task for the new president, if he wished to save the country—and the Republicans did, and were now almost certain to win, given the fragmentation they had engineered among their opponents—would be to persuade the North to suppress the insurrection, and then do it, in the certain knowledge that the South would fight with the desperate courage and ingenuity of ferocious, brave people, proud of what they were defending, contemptuous of their opponents, a martial society much handier with horse and gun and rural travel than the more urban, polyglot North.
CHAPTER SIX
 
Civil War and Reconstruction
 
The Agony and Triumph of the
American Union, 1860–1889
1. THE 1860 ELECTION
 
The Democrats met at Charleston, South Carolina, in April 1860. Jefferson Davis was now the principal heir to Calhoun, and the South demanded protection of slavery in the territories. It was not enough, as Calhoun himself had demanded, that the federal government have no role in these matters, or, as Douglas had proposed, that territories could vote for slavery if they chose. Now, the federal government had to sponsor and protect slavery in the territories, and slavery could only be repealed, if at all, when the territories became states. This mania cannot be entirely laid at the door of Douglas, but he opened the door for the monster of belligerent slavery to emerge. Douglas went as far as he could, advocating Calhoun’s formula of congressional non-intervention in slavery, as well as adherence to Supreme Court rulings, including
Dred Scott,
and the takeover of Cuba (an outright act of belligerency against a foreign power). The southerners, who would have leapt for joy at the Douglas platform just a few years before, stalked out of the convention, which had failed to choose a nominee, and the official Democrats returned to Baltimore in June (after the Republican convention). Douglas was finally nominated there for president and he chose the relatively anti-secessionist former Georgia governor Herschel Vespasian Johnson as vice president. The southerners, representing 11 states, also reverted to Baltimore and chose Vice President John C. Breckinridge for president and transplanted North Carolinian Joseph Lane, senator from the new state of Oregon, for vice president.
The fragments of the continuing Whigs and the American Party (Know-Nothings) had met at Baltimore in May, constituted themselves as the Constitutional Union Party, dedicated to cooling slavery out by simply preserving the Union however the Supreme Court construed the Constitution as shaping it, and nominated former Tennessee senator and Harrison’s war secretary, John Bell, for president, and Webster disciple and former secretary of state Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president. It was a wishful conjuration of an easy exit from the relentless and suffocating crisis.
Lincoln was instrumental in having Chicago chosen, for the first of scores of national conventions, as the place of the Republican convention in May. Lincoln largely packed the site, a new convention center nicknamed “the Wigwam,” with supporters, and had the advantage of having been less militant in his comments than Seward and the other principal candidate, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. It was clear that there would be two Democratic candidates running against the Republican nominee, whose victory should thus be assured. Given the disposition of electoral votes, all the Republicans had to do was win the northern states and they would win the election, albeit with a minority of votes, as Buchanan had had opposite Frémont and Fillmore in 1856, and Taylor against Cass and Van Buren in 1848. To ensure that the party did well in the border states, and try to soften the antagonism of the southern secessionists, Lincoln was the best of the candidates. He also had the appeal of the self-made man, and of being his own man. Though born in a log cabin in Kentucky and an autodidact, Lincoln had built up one of the largest legal practices in the United States.
Seward had fought his anti-slavery corner well for a long time, and had been instrumental in uprooting the Van Buren–Marcy Albany Regency in New York. But Seward owed most of his career, and relied for most of the advice he followed on Thurlow Weed. Lincoln counseled himself. Seward had given some important addresses, including one famed for the identification, in 1858, of “an irrepressible conflict,” but Lincoln had traveled tirelessly through the northern states, had met and established a rapport with most of the prominent Republicans, and by his series of brilliant, thoughtful, powerfully delivered speeches, had made himself conspicuously presidential.
Suddenly this new party, in the most dire circumstances the country had known since Valley Forge, was going to win, and what was needed was a thoughtful, strong, steady, profound leader. Chase had no campaign manager and had no idea of how to organize a campaign. Edward Bates, a prominent ex-Whig from Missouri, was the fourth candidate, but his campaign had largely been created by the publisher of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, in an act of vengeance against his former allies, Seward and Weed. These were substantial men, but they had never spoken of the immense crisis that loomed as Lincoln had, stirring audiences to their depths again and again with speeches like those in Illinois that had shaken the Democrats apart, and at Cooper Union.
The Republican Party had been organized mostly by its leaders in the principal northern states—Weed, Seward, and Greeley in New York, Chase in Ohio, Simon Cameron in Pennsylvania, and Lincoln in Illinois. Lincoln had been the soul of diplomacy and had no enemies, and had made himself friendlier with the other party barons than they were with each other; Seward and Weed had not even called upon Pennsylvania’s Cameron, a kingmaker and favorite son from a very important state. And Lincoln had been the most articulate, frequently heard, and overpoweringly but unaffectedly eloquent evocator and voice of the ambitions and grievances of the opponents of the long and now rather sleazy Democratic confidence trick that tied slavery to Union. He was very well organized, including having altered rail schedules to bring tens of thousands of supporters from all over Illinois to Chicago in convention week.
Chicago had grown in less than 30 years from a fur and military post with barely 20 families, and wolves roaming the dirt streets at night, to a city of over 100,000 and the greatest grain, meat, and lumber market in the world; it was the breastplate of the mighty expansion across the continent of the United States. One of the principal trains bringing delegates and press from New York made the trip from Buffalo to Chicago in the astounding time of 16 hours,
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frequently exceeding 60 miles an hour. The very progress of America and its explosive growth were mocked by the antiquarian primitiveness of the South.
On the first ballot, Seward led, 173½to Lincoln’s 102, 49 for Chase, and 48 for Bates; it was a Seward-Lincoln race. On the second ballot 188 for Seward to 183½for Lincoln, and on the third ballot Lincoln came in at 231½, where only 233 was needed for a majority. A landslide of shifted votes put him across. In recognition of New England, Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine was chosen as vice presidential nominee. It had been, and still stands as, one of the most brilliant campaigns for a party nomination in American history. The party platform included all the old baubles of Clay’s American System—the protective tariff for industry, liberal immigration, internal improvements, the Wilmot Proviso, an absolute prohibition of slavery in the territories, though new states were free to choose slavery—and it advocated a homestead law and a railway to the Pacific. America was to quell internal discordance and drive on to its promised greatness, inspiring and attracting the masses of oppressed Europe.
Republican victory was virtually a foregone conclusion; so was insurrection, and so, as Lincoln had warned, was war, and it would not be a slapstick war like much of what went on in previous wars with Indians, Mexicans, and even, at times, the French and the British. A terrible and total war impended, for the soul and integrity of America, to unbind it and attach it inexorably to an exalted and exceptional destiny, which it had long claimed for itself, or to cut it down to a humbled and truncated vision of itself, no longer master of the hemisphere, a heavily compromised success. The eyes of the world, which had never left America for long since Lexington and Concord, were riveted on her more fixedly than ever.
On November 6, 1860, Lincoln won 1.87 million votes (almost 40 percent), to 1.36 million (about 29 percent) for Douglas, 850,000 for Breckinridge (18 percent), and 590,000 for Bell (13 percent). Lincoln ran very strongly at nearly 40 percent in a four-way race, as was shown by his 180 electoral votes to 72 for Breckinridge, 39 for Bell, and just 12 for Douglas. Lincoln carried all 18 free states and no others. Breckinridge won in all 11 southern slave states except Virginia, which Bell won narrowly, and the border states between North and South broke: just Missouri for Douglas, Kentucky and Tennessee for Bell, and Maryland for Breckinridge. Breckinridge did not exceed 10 percent in any of the northern states, and Lincoln and Douglas (despite Douglas’s mighty efforts to appease the South) had insignificant numbers of votes there. The country’s regional divisions, away from the border between North and South, could scarcely have been more stark.
2. CIVIL WAR AT LAST
 
South Carolina’s legislature voted to set up a state convention, which voted unanimously to secede from the Union on December 20, 1860, citing the election of a regional party, and of an anti-slavery president, and what it called the North’s prolonged war on slavery. Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed between January 9 and February 1. Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee voted that they would secede if any effort were made to coerce a seceding state to remain in the Union. There were 25 to 35 percent anti-secession minorities in Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia, even after the legislatures had voted to secede, but opinion firmed up quickly across the South.

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