The Fiery Trial (25 page)

T
HE
P
RESIDENTIAL
E
LECTION OF
1860

The “old guard” of the antislavery movement exulted in Lincoln’s triumph. “At length,” wrote Salmon P. Chase, “the first of the great wishes of my life is accomplished. The Slave Power is overthrown.” Southerners, of course, reacted differently. “The Northern people,” wrote a New Orleans newspaper, “in electing Mr. Lincoln, have perpetuated a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage on the people of the slaveholding states.” Lincoln’s victory demonstrated that a united North had the power to determine the nation’s future. Throughout the 1850s, an influential group of southern political leaders had insisted that the only way to safeguard the future of slavery in such a circumstance would be to strike for independence. As the
Louisville Courier
exclaimed, “The ‘irrepressible conflict’…is now upon us.”
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II

B
Y THE TIME
Lincoln took the oath of office on March 4, 1861, he addressed a divided nation. The seven slave states stretching from South Carolina south and west to Texas had declared their independence and formed a new nation, the Confederate States of America. As the states seceded, they seized federal property: post offices, forts, arsenals, and the U.S. Mint in New Orleans, whose holdings of gold and silver financed the Confederacy in its initial months. In this unprecedented crisis, Lincoln struggled to develop a consistent policy to prevent the contagion of secession from spreading and to keep his party from splintering. Although his stance evolved as the crisis developed, he proved willing to be conciliatory on what he deemed nonessential questions, but steadfastly refused to compromise on the non-extension of slavery. And he unwaveringly insisted on the permanence of the Union and his right to assume the presidency.

North and South, the secession crisis energized the public sphere. By the tens of thousands, ordinary Americans took part in mass meetings and petition drives, penned letters to political leaders, and anxiously followed deliberations in Congress and state legislatures. As soon as the election results were announced, advice flooded into the mailboxes of Lincoln and other Republicans. Overall, grassroots Republicans seemed adamant against compromise. From Galesburg, Illinois, Alfred Babcock, a former Whig member of Congress, informed Lincoln that “all the Republicans with whom I have conversed” believed that any concession would simply “give more strength to the institution of slavery and correspondingly weaken the principles established by our fathers in the erection of this government.” No compromise, Senator James W. Grimes of Iowa, a Republican moderate, wrote in December, would satisfy the secessionists because the North’s real offense was its hostility to slavery. The only way to keep the Lower South in the Union would be to “agree to the proposition that slavery is a benign, constitutional system, and that it shall be extended in the end all over this continent.”
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Republicans of Democratic ancestry seemed to view the secession winter as a replay of the nullification crisis of the 1830s. They insisted that the South needed to be taught a lesson. “In these trying times,” wrote one former Democrat, “there is need of Jacksonism.” Many Republicans of Whig backgrounds also invoked Old Hickory’s legacy. As a result of the crisis, as the
New York Times
put it, Andrew Jackson had become “the favorite hero” of Republicans opposed to compromise. Throughout the winter, some Republicans spoke of war as the inevitable consequence of secession. “If nothing but blood will prevent [disunion],” declared an Indianapolis newspaper in December, “let it flow.” In the House Divided speech, Lincoln had predicted that the slavery controversy would not cease “until a crisis shall have been reached and passed.” The crisis had arrived. “Settle it now,” wrote the
Chicago Tribune
.
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A few Republicans, notably the mercurial Horace Greeley, believed that only by letting the seceding states depart in peace could a demeaning compromise be avoided. In December, on the eve of South Carolina’s decision to leave the Union, Greeley’s
New York Tribune
commented that if the principle of government by the consent of the government were to be taken seriously, “we do not see that it would not justify…secession.” If the states of the Lower South declared their intention to leave, “we shall feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty to say, Let them go!” (Greeley, however, insisted that secession must come only after popular referendums in each state, which he thought advocates of southern independence would lose.)
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Many abolitionists, who had never shared the mystical devotion to the Union so common among their countrymen, also welcomed peaceable secession as preferable to compromise. “If the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders,” said Frederick Douglass early in December, “let the Union perish.” William Lloyd Garrison, who had long advocated disunion in order to free the North from its connection to slavery, insisted that the time had come for “a separation from the South…. Is it not evident that we are, and must be…two nations?” In a series of widely noted speeches, Wendell Phillips argued that disunion would bring nearer the day of emancipation. The Union, he said, protected and enriched the slave states; “disunion is abolition!”
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On the other hand, northern business leaders, especially those with commercial ties to the South, bombarded Lincoln with calls for compromise. The election was followed by falling stock and commodity prices as investors panicked at the possibility of civil war. In December and January, eastern businessmen made frantic efforts to save the Union. As in the 1830s, gentlemen of property and standing led mobs that disrupted gatherings of abolitionists, whom they blamed for the crisis. They held mass meetings where speakers (most of them Democrats, but with a fair representation of Republicans) called for compromise to avert secession. They circulated petitions that gathered tens of thousands of signatures in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and dispatched delegations to Washington to lobby Republican congressmen. In January, a special train brought thirty leading New York merchants to the nation’s capital bearing a petition for compromise signed by 40,000 New York businessmen. “The perpetuity of the Union,” it declared, was more important than “this or that subject of controversy.” Hamilton Fish, a prominent conservative Republican in New York City, expressed “surprise” at “the extent of concessions” merchants were willing to make. Many called for the repeal of the North’s personal liberty laws, which sought to impede the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the extension of the old Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific—“a plan…manufactured in Wall Street,” according to William Cullen Bryant, who opposed the idea. Others spoke of accepting the validity of the
Dred Scott
decision and allowing slavery to expand throughout the West.
²⁹

Despite calls for compromise to avoid both secession and civil war, very few northerners of either party acknowledged a state’s right to secede or denied the government’s authority to employ force as a last resort to maintain the Union. During the secession winter, northern Democratic newspapers and party leaders blamed Republicans’ “agitation…of the slavery question” for the crisis and tried to assure the South that it enjoyed broad sympathy in the North. But at the same time, no less than Republicans, they warned southerners that the election of a president did not justify secession and that they would not allow the Union to be destroyed. “If your feelings and opinions are the common feelings and opinions of the North,” Senator James A. Bayard of Delaware responded to a letter from one prominent northern Democrat, “then civil war is upon us.”
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To the surprise of secessionists and many northerners, even President James Buchanan refused to recognize the legality of secession. His annual message to Congress in early December insisted that Lincoln’s election did not constitute a “just cause” for dissolving the Union. Buchanan approved an attempt to resupply federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter, in Charleston harbor. The
Star of the West
sailed from New York on January 5, 1861, but was driven away by fire from the shore three days later. Ironically, as southerners resigned from government posts, Buchanan ended his presidency presiding over a northern, Unionist administration.
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When Congress assembled early in December 1860, members brought forth compromise proposals of every description. One barred future legislation related in any way to slavery; another called for replacing the office of president with an executive council elected from different regions of the country; a third would establish a national police to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. One member of Congress presented no fewer than seventeen constitutional amendments, protecting slavery from every conceivable interference. The House and Senate appointed committees to sift through the proposals.

The most widely supported plan emanated from John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. It consisted of six unamendable constitutional amendments designed to deal with all the points at which federal authority touched slavery. Crittenden’s plan would deny Congress the power to abolish slavery in the states or on government property such as military forts; bar abolition in the District of Columbia unless Virginia and Maryland emancipated their own slaves; prevent federal interference with the interstate slave trade; and extend the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean so as to divide between freedom and slavery all current territories and any “hereafter acquired.” At the end of December, Stephen A. Douglas endorsed Crittenden’s proposals and added his own elements. Douglas’s plan required a vote by two-thirds of Congress for the acquisition of new territory; prohibited states from conferring the right to vote on free blacks (South Carolina had listed the grant of suffrage to blacks in some northern states as one of its grievances in its Ordinance of Secession); and provided federal aid to any state that wished to “remove” its free black population to Africa or South America. Douglas also revived the “sedition” bill he had introduced in the previous session, criminalizing speeches and writings hostile to slavery.
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With Lincoln in Springfield, William H. Seward assumed the self-appointed role of party leader in Washington. On January 12, 1861, Seward gave a widely anticipated Senate speech before packed galleries and the “whole diplomatic corps,” pleading for calm and offering his own list of concessions to the South, including the repeal of northern personal liberty laws; an amendment barring any future change in the Constitution to give Congress power over slavery in the states; and a promise that within two years a national convention would be called to resolve other disputed matters. Later that month, Seward and Charles Francis Adams, who represented Massachusetts in the House, proposed the immediate admission of New Mexico as a slave state as a further step toward reconciliation.
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Given his radical reputation, Seward’s stance came as a surprise to many observers. “What do you think of Seward?” Carl Schurz wrote to his wife. “The mighty is fallen. He bows before the slave power.” Seward insisted that his proposals would strengthen Unionists in the eight Upper South slave states that had not seceded, isolate the secessionists, and ensure Lincoln’s peaceful inauguration. He had always believed that inexorable historical forces made slavery’s doom inevitable. Lincoln’s election, he believed, marked a historic turning point that could not be reversed. It had forever broken the Slave Power’s hold on the federal government and no concessions would alter this fact. When “freedom was in danger,” he explained to one critic, he had spoken so single-mindedly in its defense that “men inferred that I was disloyal to the Union.” Now, freedom had triumphed and the nation was in danger, so “I speak single for the Union.” At the very least, if compromise failed, Seward wanted “to cast the responsibility on the party of slavery.” Most Republicans, he feared, did not appreciate the seriousness of the crisis.
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Unionists in the Upper South rallied to the Crittenden plan and hailed Seward’s speech as a harbinger of reconciliation. Most Republican members of Congress, however—and, the evidence suggests, most Republican voters—rejected all these proposals. Grassroots Republicans, Russell Errett, an editor of the
Pittsburgh Gazette
, reported at the end of January, were “bitter against all efforts at concession…. Those who are familiar with the public sentiment at Harrisburg, Philadelphia, N. Y. and Washington can have no idea of the fierceness of the sentiment here.” From deep in southern Illinois, one constituent reported to Lyman Trumbull that Republicans in his neighborhood unanimously opposed any compromise recognizing slavery as right in principle, or as a national institution. Any such concession, another writer from Illinois informed Trumbull, “
dissolves
the Republican party.” Crittenden’s reference to territory “hereafter acquired,” many Republicans believed, offered a thinly veiled invitation for renewed filibustering expeditions to add slave states to the Union.
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