The Man Who Saved the Union (17 page)

Moore solicited Sherman’s own views on slavery. Sherman said Louisianans of the current generation were not responsible for the existence of slavery in the state, having inherited the institution from their forebears. And he distinguished between two classes of slaves: domestic servants and field hands. The former were treated well, probably better than any other slaves on earth. But the condition of the field hands was different and depended on the character of their owners. “Were I a citizen of Louisiana, and a member of the legislature,” Sherman said, “I would deem it wise to bring the legal condition of the slaves more near the status of human beings under all Christian and civilized governments. In the first place, in the sale of slaves made by the state, I would forbid the separation of families, letting the father, mother, and children be sold together to one person, instead of each to the highest bidder.” He went on to recommend the repeal of the state law forbidding the education of slaves. He
told of his experience as a bank manager in California. An army officer from Rapides Parish in Louisiana had brought a slave,
Henry Sampson, to San Francisco. Sherman hired Sampson to work for his bank. “At first he could not write or read, and I could only afford to pay him one hundred dollars a month; but he was taught to read and write by Reilley, our bank-teller, when his services became worth two hundred and fifty dollars a month, which enabled him to buy his own freedom and that of his brother and family.”

The governor and the others listened carefully. When Sherman finished, one of the other guests suddenly struck the table with his fist, rattling the china and silver. “By God, he is right!” the guest declared. But several present rejected Sherman’s counsel, and the conversation continued for an hour, with the Louisianans doing most of the talking. “I was glad to be thus relieved,” Sherman remarked later, “because at the time all men in Louisiana were dreadfully excited on questions affecting their slaves, who constituted the bulk of their wealth, and without whom they honestly believed that sugar, cotton, and rice could not possibly be cultivated.”

T
he excitement escalated during the course
of 1860. The Republicans surprised the Democrats and many of themselves by nominating Abraham Lincoln over
William Seward, who was much more accomplished and better known in the country at large. Yet it was precisely Seward’s reputation that worried some of the Republican strategists, for the New York senator was commonly associated with the radical wing of the party and tended to frighten voters less committed to the antislavery cause. Lincoln’s views were vaguer. His campaign against Stephen
Douglas had failed to win him a Senate seat, but the effort brought him to the attention of the national party. His supporters arranged an invitation from New York’s Cooper Union to deliver a lecture in February 1860. His appearance initially disconcerted some who had thought they might like him. “
When Lincoln rose to speak, I was greatly disappointed,” an audience member recounted. “He was tall, tall—oh, how tall, and so angular and awkward that I had, for an instant, a feeling of pity for so ungainly a man. His clothes were black and ill-fitting, badly wrinkled, as if they had been jammed carelessly into a small trunk. His bushy head, with the stiff black hair thrown back, was balanced on a long and lean headstalk, and when he raised his hands in an opening gesture,
I noticed that they were very large. He began in a low tone of voice, as if he were used to speaking outdoors, and was afraid of speaking too loud. He said, ‘Mr.
Cheerman
,’ instead of ‘Mr. Chairman,’ and employed many other words with an old-fashioned pronunciation. I said to myself: ‘Old fellow, you won’t do; it’s all very well for the wild West, but this will never go down in New York.’ ”

As Lincoln warmed to his subject, however, a change came over him. “He straightened up, made regular and graceful gestures,” the audience member recalled. “His face lighted as with an inward fire; the whole man was transfigured. I forgot his clothes, his personal appearance, and his individual peculiarities. Presently, forgetting myself, I was on my feet with the rest, yelling like a wild Indian, cheering this wonderful man. In the close parts of his argument, you could hear the gentle sizzling of the gas burners. When he reached a climax, the thunders of applause were terrific. It was a great speech. When I came out of the hall, my face glowing with excitement and my frame all a-quiver, a friend, with his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abe Lincoln, the rail-splitter. I said, ‘He’s the greatest man since St. Paul.’ ”

Not everyone had such a conversion that night, but Lincoln’s New York debut convinced the party leaders they could elect him. They calculated the arithmetic of the electoral college and concluded that he needn’t carry a single Southern state, so thoroughly did the North and its electors outnumber the South. Lincoln might scare Southern slaveholders, who hadn’t forgotten the prediction of his house-divided speech, but if he held the ardent antislavery vote in the North and enticed some moderates, he would be the next president.

The campaign unfolded according to plan. The Republicans nominated Lincoln on the third ballot at their Chicago convention in May
1860.
Hannibal Hamlin of Maine balanced the ticket east to west. The party platform opposed slavery in the territories but said nothing about its existence in the Southern states.

The Democrats ensured Lincoln’s victory by falling apart. Stephen Douglas claimed the greatest support in the party, but the Democrats’ requirement that a candidate receive two-thirds of the delegates prevented their convention, meeting at Baltimore, from putting Douglas over the top. Southern zealots rejected Douglas’s popular sovereignty scheme, insisting that slavery be the law in every territory regardless of the wishes of the inhabitants. The fire-eaters stormed out of Baltimore
and reconvened in Richmond, where they nominated
John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. The Baltimore rump proceeded with Douglas.

A fourth candidate in the contest was
John Bell of Tennessee, nominated on the
Constitutional Union ticket by a coalition of remnant Whigs and Union-minded Southerners. Bell’s supporters sought a middle ground between the Southern Democrats and the Northern Republicans, contending that the former were dangerous to the Union for threatening secession, the latter for giving the former a pretext for their threats.

Lincoln spent the general election campaign at home in Springfield while Republican speakers rallied Northern voters on his behalf. The party ignored the South. Douglas took the then-unusual step of mounting a traveling campaign, but his peripatetic pleas for Democratic unity fell on deaf Southern ears. Lincoln received fewer than four votes in ten in the popular balloting, yet these were sufficiently concentrated—he carried every Northern state, plus
California and Oregon—to earn him a solid majority of the electors.

“S
ince leaving St. Louis I have become pretty well initiated into the leather business and like it well,” Grant wrote an acquaintance amid the campaign. “Our business here”—in Galena—“is prosperous, and I have every reason to hope, in a few years, to be entirely above the frowns of the world, pecuniarily.” Grant followed the electioneering with interest, although he hadn’t lived in Galena long enough to vote there. He remained a Democrat and favored Douglas but recognized that the rift among the Democrats had doomed the Douglas candidacy. Yet he believed that a loss might not be all to the bad. “I think the Democratic party want a little purifying and nothing will do it so effectually as a defeat.” Still, he couldn’t get excited about such a result. “I don’t like to see a Republican beat the party.”

Grant later professed relief at not having been able to vote in 1860. “
My pledges would have compelled me to vote for Stephen A. Douglas, who had no possible chance of election,” he said. He added, “The contest was really between Mr. Breckinridge and Mr. Lincoln, between minority rule and rule by the majority. I wanted, as between these candidates, to see Mr. Lincoln elected.”

This may have been so, but like many others in America, and especially
those who lived near the border between slavery and freedom, Grant in 1860 was deeply ambivalent about Lincoln. Grant didn’t like slavery, but he had married into a family of slaveholders and consequently become a slaveholder himself. And his dislike of slavery didn’t equal his dread of the disruption to the Union that Lincoln’s election seemed to portend. Grant had voted for
Buchanan in
1856 to forestall
secession and buy time for emotions to ease, yet the emotions had only intensified. Grant would have voted for Douglas in 1860, again in hopes that the storm would pass.

The election of Lincoln unleashed the furies. South Carolina had been the center of secessionist agitation for decades, notably nullifying what South Carolinians called the “tariff of abominations” of 1828 and vowing to bolt the Union if
Andrew Jackson tried to enforce it. The Palmetto State men had ultimately backed down, but in the summer and early autumn of 1860 they again took the secessionist lead, warning of grave consequences in the event Lincoln carried the election. One South Carolina politician spoke for many in his state in declaring: “
Should a Black Republican President be elected it is the necessary sequence of reason that a majority of the people of the country have endorsed his principles and raised a banner on which is enscribed: death to the institutions of the South. In that event it is my solemn judgment we can no longer remain in the same confederacy.” The arithmetic of the campaign became clear to South Carolinians, as to the rest of the country, weeks before the election, and by the time Lincoln secured his victory, sentiment in the state had congealed around the required response. A visitor to Charleston remarked that everyone he met favored secession over submitting to the new administration. “The young men ardently desire disunion,” the visitor said. “So do old men, and wise men. The tradespeople wish it, entertaining a consciousness of its disastrous entailment upon their business. The clergy add their counsels on the same side. Reliable men are freely offering their property to maintain secession.”

When the tally of electors officially confirmed Lincoln’s victory, the South Carolinians moved at once. A special convention on December 20 unanimously approved an ordinance repealing the state’s ratification of the Constitution. “
The union now subsisting between
South Carolina and other States, under the name of the ‘United States of America,’ is hereby dissolved,” the ordinance declared.

14

“
H
OW DO YOU FEEL
ON THE SUBJECT OF SECESSION IN
S
T.
L
OUIS
?” Grant wrote a business acquaintance in that city as the South Carolinians were deciding on disunion. “The present troubles must affect business in your trade greatly.” Galena had shared in the excitement of the fall campaign, with supporters of
Douglas and Lincoln filling the streets with torchlight and partisan noise, but since the election the town had fallen nervously quiet. “With us the only difference experienced as yet is the difficulty of obtaining southern exchange.”

Grant didn’t know what to make of the talk of secession. “It is hard to realize that a State or States should commit so suicidal an act as to secede from the Union,” he remarked. “Though from all the reports I have no doubt but that at least five of them will do it. And then, with the present granny of an executive”—the lame duck
Buchanan, who denied the right of secession but disavowed any authority to prevent it—“some foolish policy will doubtless be pursued which will give the seceding States the support and sympathy of the southern states that don’t go out.”

Grant read of troubles in
Missouri, where a minority of secessionists clamored for their state to join the other Union-leavers. From the vantage of Galena it looked as though they might have their way. Grant extrapolated from Missouri to the rest of the slave South: “It does seem as if just a few men have produced all the present difficulty.”

A
braham Lincoln thought so too. Lincoln got the good news of his election amid the bad news that the South was taking it so ill. He wondered whether the former outweighed the latter. “
I declare to you this morning,”
he told a visitor, “that for personal considerations I would rather have a full term in the Senate—a place in which I would feel more consciously able to discharge the duties, and where there is more chance to make a reputation, and less danger of losing it—than four years of the presidency.”

The presidency would be his, though, and he had to make the best of it. But until it actually
was
his, until he was inaugurated in March 1861, his hands were largely tied. So was his tongue, although that was his own doing rather than the Constitution’s.
Friends of the Union implored him to assure the South he meant that region no harm. A
Kentucky editor, alarmed that the secessionists would carry away the Bluegrass State, urged Lincoln to “
take from the disunionists every excuse or pretext for treason.”

“Would it do any good?” Lincoln responded dubiously. “If I were to labor a month, I could not express my conservative views and intentions more clearly and strongly than they are expressed in our platform and in my many speeches already in print and before the public.… For the good men of the South—and I regard the majority of them as such—I have no objection to repeat seventy and seven times. But I have
bad
men also to deal with, both North and South—men who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentation.” These bad men would take anything he said and turn it against him. “I intend keeping my eye upon these gentlemen, and to not unnecessarily put any weapons in their hands.”

Yet as he pondered the matter and received further entreaties to clarify his aims, he consented to tip his hand a little. He wrote a passage for
Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois Republican and close ally, to insert in a speech. “
Each and all of the States will be left in as complete control of their own affairs respectively, and at as perfect liberty to choose, and employ, their own means of protecting property and preserving peace and order within their respective limits as they have ever been under any administration,” Lincoln said through Trumbull. “Those who have voted for Mr. Lincoln have expected, and still expect, this, and they would not have voted for him had they expected otherwise.”