THE CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR

VOLUME ONE

 

 

 

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS PUBLISHED BY POCKET BOOKS NEW YORK

A Washington Square Press Publication of POCKET BOOKS, a Simon & Schuster division of GULF & WESTERN CORPORATION 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, N.Y. 10020

Copyright © 1961 by Bruce Catton

Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Doubleday & Company, Inc., 245 Park Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017

ISBN: 0-671-46989-4

First Pocket Books printing April, 1967

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, WSP and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Once again—to Cherry

Foreword

The CENTENNIAL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR by Bruce Catton is a project begun in 1955 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., in conjunction with. The New York Times. As originally planned, this is a three-volume work constituting a modern history, based on the fullest as well as the most recent research. The three volumes, which are entitled THE COMING FURY, TERRIBLE SWIFT SWORD, and NEVER CALL RETREAT, may be read and understood separately.

In the foreword of Volume One of the original publication of the work, Mr. Catton wrote of Mr. E. B. Long: "As Director of Research for this project he has made a more substantial contribution than it is possible to acknowledge properly." Mr. Catton also noted the "able assistance given by that indefatigable and charming person, Mrs. Barbara Long."

Contents

Foreword vii

List of Maps and Graphs xi

Chapter One: SPRINGTIME OF DECISION

Chapter Two: DOWN A STEEP PLACE

Chapter Three: THE LONG FAREWELL

Chapter Four: TWO PRESIDENTS

1. The Man and the Hour 205

Chapter Five: INTO THE UNKNOWN

Chapter Six: THE WAY OF REVOLUTION

Chapter Seven: TO THE FIERY ALTAR

Notes 479

Bibliography 523

Acknowledgments 569

Index , 575

List of Maps and Graphs

The United States, 1860 xii-xiii

Charleston, South Carolina, and Fort Sumter, 1861 87

The Washington Area, 1861 160

The Struggle for Missouri, 1861 232

Western Virginia, 1861 329

First Bull Run or Manassas, July 21, 1861 402

Graphs: Population, 1860

Industry, 1860 475

The United States

and Confederate States of America, 1861 570-71

 

CHAPTER ONE

 

Springtime of Decision

 

1. The City by the Sea

Mr. Yancey could usually be found at the Charleston Hotel, where the anti-Douglas forces were gathering, and a Northerner who went around to have a look at him reported that he was unexpectedly quiet and mild-mannered: as bland and as smooth as Fernando Wood, the silky Democratic boss from New York City, but radiating a general air of sincerity that Wood never had. No one, seeing Yancey in a room full of politicians, would pick him out as the one most likely to pull the cotton states into a revolution. He was compact and muscular, "with a square-built head and face, and an eye full of expression," a famous orator who scorned the usual tricks of oratory and spoke in an easy conversational style; he was said to have in his system a full three-hour speech against the Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, to be unloaded at the proper time, and the Northern observer reflected uneasily that although Douglas probably had most of the votes at this convention, the opposition might be a little ahead in brains.¹

William Lowndes Yancey was worth anybody's study. The Democratic party was convening in Charleston, South Carolina, in late April of 1860, to nominate a candidate for the presidency, and the future of the country perhaps depended on the way the convention acted. The delegates might look for a safe middle ground, and (finding what they sought) work out some sort of compromise that would avert a split in party and nation; or they might listen to the extremists, scorn the middle ground, and commit all of America to a dramatic leap into the dark. Yancey, who was called the Prince of Fire-Eaters, was ready for such a leap. This convention would indulge in no compromise if he could help it.

There was no secret about what Yancey wanted. More than a decade earlier he had denounced "the foul spell of party which binds and divides and distracts the South," and had proclaimed the hope that someone would eventually break it—a task to which he was now devoting himself. He had asked his fellow Southerners whether "we have any hope of righting ourselves and doing justice to ourselves in the Union"; answering his question in the negative, he had said that he would work with those who did hope in the belief that eventually they would discover that nothing but secession would do.²

There was nobody quite like Yancey, and yet he was somehow typical: one of the men tossed up by the tormented decade of the 1850s (John Brown was another) who could help to bring catastrophe on but who could not do anything more than that. The mildness of his manner was deceptive; he had once had a great fight with his wife's uncle, and, in self-defense, had killed the man (a thing which proper Charlestonians still remembered), and while in Congress he had fought a famous although bloodless duel with a fellow Southerner. In his youth he had briefly brushed elbows with the crusading anti-slavery spirit which he now hated above all other things. Born in Georgia in 1814, he had been taken north while still a child when his widowed mother married a Presbyterian minister and moved to Troy, New York; and in this stepfather's church, in 1826, Charles Grandison Finney had preached at the beginning of the great revivalist campaign which was to spread abolitionism like a virulent infection (as Yancey would have said) all across the Middle West. Close friends of the stepfather, too, were such anti-slavery men as Theodore Weld and Lewis Tappan. None of this touched Yancey, however. He moved south, fell under the spell of John C. Calhoun, entered law, politics, and planter society (he married a rich planter's daughter), and in the mid-1840s entered Congress, where his first speech was an impassioned denial that Calhoun wanted or worked for disunion and an independent Southern Confederacy. What he disavowed for Calhoun, however, he presently accepted for himself; a great orator in a land that loved to listen to speeches, he eventually found in slave-state extremism a base to which his oratory could be solidly anchored. Over the years he had developed into the most fluent and persuasive of fire-eaters.³

Now he was busy among the delegates who were arriving for the convention. A disturbing sign, if any of Senator Douglas's men had noticed it, was the presence in the same hotel of Senator John Slidell, of Louisiana, who one day would make a famous trip to France; a hard-working, resolute man with thinning white hair over a cherry-red face, one who apparently enjoyed good health and good living; accepted here as spokesman and chief hatchet man for the administration of President James Buchanan, very busy among delegates from the deep South. It was whispered that Slidell ran the President—Buchanan, it was told, was "as wax in his fingers"—and though Buchanan had explicitly refused to seek or even to accept a renomination, he was deeply determined that the nomination should not go to Senator Douglas.⁴

Until the convention actually opened, the combinations and hazards and deeply laid schemes would be only partly visible. Yet during the last days before the convention opened—the chairman was to call the delegates to order on April 23— there hung in the air a sense that events here might not go according to routine. The mere fact that the delegates were meeting in Charleston, rather than in some other city, seemed to make a difference, and as the steamboats came up the harbor to the water front, the delegates from Northern states lined the rails to look about them with eager curiosity. For a generation, Charleston had been a symbol; now it was reality, seen for the first time, its horizons lost in the blue haze of wooded lowlands that enclosed the broad sparkling bay.

At first glance it looked familiar enough, a quiet American city of 40,000 people spread out on a fiat peninsula between two rivers to face the sea, its slim white church spires seeming all the taller because land and houses all lay so close to the water level. Yet there was a strangeness here, as if Charleston were a stage set designed to remind outlanders that along this coast which had been stained by so much history, life had found a pattern unlike that which the rest of America knew. The shops seemed unexpectedly quaint, almost foreign, there were long rows of dwellings where delicate iron filigree of gateway and railing was outlined against pastel plasterwork, and there were mansions whose long piazzas with slim white pillars looked inward toward shaded courtyards, as if the people who owned and controlled this land proposed to remain aloof. There were palmettos in the streets, unfamiliar blossoms topped the garden walls and gleamed in the half-hidden lawns, and in the park along the Battery the twisted live oaks were dripping with Spanish moss. On the wharves there were crowds of wide-eyed colored folk, kept in order by "ferocious-looking policemen, mounted on rickety nags, wearing huge spurs, swords and old-fashioned pistols." The coaches and omnibuses that clattered down to the docks moved with a negligent, leisurely haste.

Early arrivals had time to make brief explorations, and most of them, no doubt, would have (agreed with the Northerner who wrote that he was impressed by Charleston's "singular beauties." The most charming spot was the Battery, where upper-class folk rode disdainfully by in their carriages, and where one could see the town houses of wealthy planters, with columned streets going past toward the business center. Seaward there was Castle Pinckney on its low island, with Fort Sumter lying beyond at the gateway to the sea—Fort Sumter, an unfinished reality now, not yet an earth-moving abstraction, with a few workmen unhurriedly putting together bricks and stones in deep casemates; a place no one needed to give a second glance. Parts of Charleston looked almost French, for there was a strong Huguenot tradition here; other parts might have come straight from Georgian England, and like the English, the people of Charleston chose to follow certain picturesque customs from the old days. When an official proclamation was to be made, for instance, the sheriff in uniform and cocked hat would ride slowly down the street in an open carriage, with fife and drum to play him along and announce his magnificence, and he would stop at street corners to arise and read the proclamation at the top of his voice. Drums beat retreat at night and reveille in the morning to warn Negroes that they must be off the street during the hours of darkness unless their owners had provided them with tickets of leave.

This last point was of special interest to the men from the North. As Democrats, they were friendly to slavery (or at least they were willing to get along with it), but they rarely saw anything of it at first hand, and they knew very little about it, and one of the things an early arrival could do was see for himself what Negroes living in bondage were actually like.

The yoke seemed to be rather light in these parts. A newspaper correspondent from New York felt it his duty to attend services in a Negro church. Politely patronizing, he noted the strange folk who made up the congregation, the white-haired old men, the women in their turbans, the gay colors in all of the clothing, not overlooking "the flashily-dressed, coquettish-looking younger women"; and he was so moved by the singing that when the minister lined out the first words of a hymn—"Blow ye the trumpet, blow"—he confessed that he and all the other visitors joined in with enthusiasm, so that "if we didn't blow that trumpet then no trumpet was ever blown." He reported that many Northern visitors went to near-by plantations, where they poked about in the slave quarters, admired the white teeth of the girls and the tumbling and crawling of wide-eyed infants, and absorbed such impressions as twenty minutes would give them of the peculiar institution on its own ground. Their impressions were not unfavorable: "The darkies, so far as I have seen, both house servants and field hands, seem greatly attached to their masters and are apparently contented and happy." He added cautiously: "Whether that is anything in favor of the system or not is a question."⁶

Most of the delegates had already formed their opinions about the system. It was not properly a subject for debate here, because the Democratic party (whose orators liked to refer to it as the One and Indivisible Democracy) was supposed to be a unit on the question. The unity was partly a matter of tradition; in this party, and in this party alone, men of the North and men of the South could find a common rallying ground, not too greatly vexed by the rising agitation of the slavery issue. Partly, too, the unity came from external pressure, applied chiefly by the new Republican party of the North. The Republicans were hostile to slavery, and this spring they seemed very likely to nominate Senator William H. Seward, of New York, who had spoken darkly of an irrepressible conflict and whose election, if it should come to pass, might readily bring that conflict into being. The Democracy's task here was to name someone who could win the election over Black Republicans or any other divisive forces, and the man who had most of the votes was the one for whom Yancey and Slidell were digging a cunning pit—Senator Stephen A. Douglas, of Illinois.

Senator Douglas was a man about whom no one could be indifferent. He was either a remorseless scheming politician or a hero defending the eternal truth, the appraisal depending partly on the observer's point of view and partly on what Douglas himself was up to at the moment. As a scheming politician he had opened the door for the great tempest in Kansas and now he was standing in the wind's path, defying the storm and those who had made it; a man who could miscalculate disastrously but who would not under pressure run away from what he had done. Very few men either hated or admired him just a little. A passionate man himself, he evoked passion in others, in his friends and in his enemies.

In a party dominated by Southerners, he spoke for the muscular new Northwest—roughly, the area later generations would call the Middle West. A maker of odds would have considered him a likely winner. He was obviously the front runner, and while his managers had to find some way to push his majority up to the two-thirds mark, he did not seem to be opposed by anyone except a handful of favorite sons and the task should not be too hard. Douglas was not here himself, but his people had set up headquarters in Hibernian Hall, a block and a half from Institute Hall, where the convention would be held, and the place was packed and alive. There were scores of cots, so that no Douglas delegate need lack a place to sleep; there was an abundance of whisky on tap; and any visitor who lounged in and looked receptive was apt to find someone pressing a campaign biography of the Senator into his hand. The bubbling confidence of the Douglas leaders seemed to be justified.⁸

Yet there were disquieting omens. Of all the cities in America, the Democrats had chosen for this 1860 convention the one in which the climate for Senator Douglas's candidacy would be the least favorable. The city itself was not so much in active opposition as living on the edge of a different world; it simply was not a place where the great Northwest could find its proper voice. Douglas himself had declared, somewhat brashly, in the heat of debate, that this Northwest, the limitless new land above the rivers and beyond the mountains, would yet "be able to speak the law to this nation and to execute the law as spoken"; but was Charleston the place for it?

Although the Northwest did not yet know quite what it would say, if indeed it should try to speak and execute any law, the one certainty was that if it found its voice it would speak for change—for adjustment to the irresistible pressures that were pulling America through the middle of the nineteenth century. This adjustment would come as a matter of course in the Northwest, where all things were fluid, but it would look like utter destruction in Charleston. Charleston was the past incarnate, the city that had forced time to stand still, carefully preserving a cherished way of life which had a fragile and immutable pattern, and it would listen to no demand for change. And although Charleston stood apart, it did not stand alone. Whatever there was in all the South which had to resist the pressures of the outside world would form its ranks here, vigilant to beat down anything that even looked like a concession to the demand for change. It would take an extreme position because no other position was left to it. The institution of chattel slavery on which it was based was broad but extremely delicate, and to touch it at all could cause the collapse of everything that rested on it. Hence it was forbidden even to admit that it might someday be necessary to touch it. On this point Douglas was dangerously unsound: his Freeport doctrine, which held that no conceivable safeguard of Federal laws could protect slavery in a territory where the people themselves wanted no slavery, was open and unforgivable heresy.⁷

So there were men in this convention who would fight Douglas without paying any heed to the cost of the fight, and they had the advantage which any completely determined minority has in a meeting where the majority would like to have harmony. They were ready to go to extremes. They would accept harmony if they could get it on their own terms, but otherwise they were perfectly ready to accept discord. Northern delegates who were coming in by train began to meet these men before they even reached Charleston.

Murat Halstead, the perceptive editor of the Cincinnati Commercial, was one who discovered the omens, and he warned his Ohio readers that a strong wind was blowing. From Atlanta he sent an account of a conversation in a day coach. A Georgia delegate, convention-bound, had announced loudly that Senator Douglas just would not do. If nominated, Douglas would probably get the delegate's vote, but it would be cast with great reluctance; the delegate knew of but one other man in his district who would vote for this man from Illinois. Another Georgian, present as an observer—he had been beaten in his own race for delegate—disagreed: Douglas men were as thick as blackberries in his part of the state, and if Douglas got the nomination he would carry Georgia by 20,000—"there will be such a war whoop as never was heard in the land." When someone protested that Douglas's famous doctrine of popular sovereignty was no better than rank abolitionism, this supporter said that he himself "went the whole of it," and he was backed by a delegate from Kentucky. But the delegate from Georgia said that the nominee must be someone who could unite the party, not a man who was obnoxious to a whole section: not, to be specific, Stephen A. Douglas, who had recently stood side by side with the Black Republicans themselves.

The Democracy unquestionably needed unity, but the unity might be hard to get. Halstead's train paused one evening at a station stop in Georgia to let the passengers get out for dinner, and at table two Mississippians broke out a bottle of whisky, passed it around, and offered a toast "to the health of the nominee." Did this, asked a man from Indiana (no doubt bristling a little), include Senator Douglas? Mississippi replied that it did not: Douglas was simply not in the running, and because he could not possibly be the nominee an offer to toast the nominee's health could not apply to him. Indiana thought this unfair, and said that if Douglas won the nomination he ought to have the support of a united party: delegates could not in honor go to the convention and then bolt the nominee if they did not like him. As an afterthought, the Northerner asked why Indiana did not have as much right to criticize Mississippi's Senator Jefferson Davis as Mississippi had to criticize Senator Douglas. One of the Mississippians retorted that the reason was simple: "Davis was a patriot

and Douglas was a traitor, d…..d little better than Seward—that was the difference." Indiana protested that Douglas and the Northern Democrats had been fighting the South's battles, but this helped not at all. The South, said a Mississippian, could fight her own battles and protect her own rights, and if she could not do this in the Union, she would do it outside of the Union. Halstead wrote that other delegates at the table shook their heads and muttered that the party was in for stormy times.⁸

So ran the talk on the trains. Reaching Charleston, many of the Douglas men tended to be quieter; the Little Giant had lis enemies here, and there was no sense in stirring them up with loose talk. As convention time drew nearer, it seemed that the Douglas people were making headway. Three nights before the convention would open, the correspondent of the Richmond Dispatch was writing that "Douglas is hourly becoming less objectionable," and was explaining that personal antagonisms were subsiding and that the success of the party was the main object. The friends of Douglas, he said, were quietly meeting Southern delegates as they arrived and were trying to convince them that nothing but the nomination of Douglas would counter-balance the anticipated nomination of Seward at Chicago. As a clincher, there was the statement: Douglas was the only Democrat who could possibly win the fall election.⁹

It was a good argument, with men who thought victory in November important. There were 303 electoral votes, and a man who could get 152 of them would be the next President. If the party held its unity, the Democratic nominee should get 120 votes in the South and along the border; as of April 23 it seemed highly probable that Douglas could pick up the thirty-two additional votes in the North or in the Northwest no matter what the Republicans might do. No other Democrat could conceivably do as well. It was an open-and-shut case.

But the argument was worse than useless with men who wanted something else a great deal more than they wanted a Democratic victory in the fall, and although such men were in a small minority, they were working in Charleston with vast energy and singleness of purpose. These men, the all-out fire-eating secessionists, believed that they could get what they wanted if the party lost the election. Beyond the wrangling over platform and candidate they could see a completely new nation, an independent South embodying the most soaring dreams of the cotton empire, zealously preserving the peculiar institution and the complex values that rested on it. A beating in November might bring this to pass. Most Southerners were not yet ready to embrace secession, much as the business had been talked about in the past ten years, but the profound shock of a Black Republican victory would almost certainly make them ready. Such men as Yancey, who wanted to see this shock applied, refused even to tall about concessions or party unity.

Yet until the convention actually opened, none of this would come to a head and it was possible to accept this meeting in Charleston as just another political convention. Or the surface that was what it looked like. Hotel lobbies had the aspect that hotel lobbies always have during political conventions. There were bands, striking up appropriate tunes at odd moments, and there were impromptu orators to address anyone who would listen. Most of the 4000 visitors, it was reported, hardly went to bed at all, which was not surprising, since the bedrooms were so crowded and the nights were so noisy, and there was a good deal of drunken rowdyism— most of it, as a Northerner admitted, contributed by "roughs from New York," whose delegation, led by smooth Fernando Wood, seemed prepared to be all things to all men, with special reference to the men who could offer the best deal. Everywhere there were the perennial political types, moving with dignity about the lobbies, lounging against veranda pillars and railings, being vocal and visible. There were men who seemed to have spent so much time in the public eye that merely being looked at had put its mark on them; there were cold-eyed operators who looked like professional gamblers, and there were stout, perspiring men in glossy black, wearing fine linen and stovepipe hats, carrying gold-headed canes, eternally busy with portentous whispered conversations with other men who looked exactly like them.¹⁰

Among those who could be seen in the lobbies were certain Northerners of whom the South would see much more, in the years just ahead. There was John Logan, of Illinois, with his thick, black hair and his piercing black eyes, his back against a veranda pillar, meditatively chewing tobacco; and there was another man from Illinois, John A. McClernand, with his bristly beard and his hawk-beaked face, watching the crowd and toying absently with his watch chain. Not least of the group was Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts, bald-headed and cock-eyed, "with the little brown mustache under his sharp crooked nose"—Ben Butler, who could never forget the demands made by his soaring ambition, or the concessions that might have to be made to it, an unpredictable man who was known now as a firm friend of the South. Two years earlier Jefferson Davis had made a Fourth of July speech in the North, expressing love for the Union and deriding the chance that secessionists could do any lasting harm; Butler had liked the speech, and he was here as a fervent supporter of the Senator from Mississippi.

. . . Editor Halstead believed more and more strongly that the current was beginning to run the wrong way, as far as Senator Douglas's hopes were concerned. The Douglas men were confident, insisting that "the universal world is for the Little Giant," but there seemed to be no iron in them: Halstead felt that these Northwesterners were "not so stiff in their backs nor so strong in the faith" as the hard-core Southerners who wanted Douglas beaten. An Alabama delegate, doubtless strongly infected by Yancey-ism, explained the case to him. There was going to be a showdown; once and for all the South would find out whether Northern Democrats would stand squarely with the South on true Constitutional principles. Both platform and candidate would have to be explicit; "there must be no Douglas dodges—no double constructions —no janus-faced lying resolutions—no double-tongued and doubly damned trifling with the people." Of all Northern Democrats, said the Alabaman, Douglas was the most obnoxious to Southerners. His nomination would be an insult which the South would repay by defeating him in the election, no matter what it might cost.

The truth of the matter was that the American political system, which can survive almost any storm because of its admirable flexibility, was in 1860 breaking down because it had been allowed to become rigid. Senator Douglas's offense was that he had relied on the flexibility after it had ceased to exist. Finding America facing a sectional issue too hot to handle, he had proposed a subtle adjustment. Accept the obvious (he had said, in effect), admit that the people can always nullify an unpopular law by refusing to permit it to be enforced, and then give the territories, in respect to slavery, any law you choose; in the end the people will have things as they want them, in the meantime you will have the legislation you want, and, all in all, much argument and bitter feeling will be avoided. ... It was the politician's recourse, one of the things that make democracy work; avert a crisis long enough and it often becomes manageable. The trouble now was that men increasingly wanted to meet the crisis, to have a final showdown no matter what it might cost.¹¹

The situation had grown intolerable. What the delegates did at Charleston would be done in a hot twilight where nothing could be seen clearly and in which action of any sort might seem better than a continuation of the unendurable present. They acted under the shadow of things done earlier, at other places—in Congress, in Kansas, at Harper's Ferry— and they were ceasing to be free agents. A storm was rising, and there were leaders who proposed to meet it with stiff backs.

 

2. "The Impending Crisis"

If the Democratic convention was meeting in an irrational atmosphere, the reason is clear. During the last few years events themselves had been irrational; politics in America could no longer be wholly sane. Here and there, like flickers of angry light before a thunderstorm, there had been bursts of violence, and although political debate continued, the nearness of violence—the reality of it, the mounting threat that it would monstrously grow and drown out all voices— made the debaters shout more loudly and appeal more directly to emotions that made reasonable debate impossible. Men put special meaning on words and phrases, so that what sounded good to one sounded evil to another, and certain slogans took on their own significance and became portentous, streaming in the heated air like banners against the sunset; and even the voices that called for moderation became immoderate. American politicians in 1860 could do almost anything on earth except sit down and take a reasoned and dispassionate view of their situation.

Four months before the Charleston convention opened, the House of Representatives at Washington had tried to elect a speaker—a routine task, done every two years since the birth of the Republic, done ordinarily without jarring the foundations of the nation. Its furious inability to do this until it had exhausted itself by long weeks of argument, all legislative activities at a standstill, members coming armed to the sessions of an assembly intended for reasonable debate, was a clear sign that the democratic process had all but collapsed. It was both a symptom of trouble and a cause of more trouble. The fact that the row over the speakership seemed at last to center on the question of whether certain members had or had not read and admired a comparatively little-known book was the crowning touch of irrationality.

The first session of the Thirty-sixth Congress met in Washington on December 5, 1859, three days after John Brown had been hanged at Charlestown, Virginia—a fact not without influence on the proceedings of the House. The new Congress contained, on the House side, 109 Republicans and 101 Democrats, 13 of the Democrats being "anti-Lecompton" men, Northerners who had followed Senator Douglas in revolt against the Buchanan administration. There were also twenty-six members of the dying American party, the Know-Nothings, and, vestigial survival of a vanished era, one lone Whig. No party had a majority.¹ Even under the best of conditions there was bound to be a good deal of jockeying and in-fighting before a speaker could be named.

Conditions in the fall of 1859 were not of the best and they rapidly got a good deal worse. The first ballot showed the Democrats lining up behind Thomas S. Bocock of Virginia, with the Republicans backing John Sherman, of Ohio. Galusha Grow, of Pennsylvania, received forty-three votes and then withdrew, more than a score of ballots were listed as "scattering," and no one was elected. But before a second ballot could be cast, Representative J. B. Clark, of Missouri, came down into the well of the House with a resolution for members to consider . . . "resolved, that the doctrine and sentiments of a certain book, called 'The Impending Crisis of the South—How to Meet It,' purporting to have been written by one Hinton Helper, are insurrectionary and hostile to the domestic peace and tranquility of the country, and that no member of this House who has endorsed or recommended it or the Compend from it is fit to be Speaker of this House."²

That did it. The book was everything Mr. Clark said it was: in fact, it was a poor book written by a man notably lacking in balance. But from the time the Missouri Congressman dropped his resolution into the hopper, the House of Representatives became completely impotent. It could not elect a speaker, it could not get itself organized, it could not even vote the pay which its members needed so badly, until it had worn itself out in hot discussion of a book which, taken by itself, was hardly even of minor importance. The row to which it gave birth settled nothing whatever. It simply registered (in terms that would be ratified in blood, a short time thereafter) the appalling height the American political fever had reached. The irrational had become wholly logical.

Hinton Rowan Helper was one more of those baffling people whose sole function, historically, seems to be to make other men angry. He was a rarity, not to say a freak: a born-and-bred Southerner who had become a violent lone-wolf abolitionist, and who either advocated or at least appeared to be advocating a Southern uprising against the planter aristocracy. He believed that many things were wrong with the South, he had assembled a great many figures (some of them badly jumbled) to prove his point, and he argued that all of these defects were the result of the slave system. Of the slaveholders themselves, he suggested—"as a befitting confession of their crimes and misdemeanors, and as a reasonable expiation for the countless evils which they have inflicted on society"—that they do penance for a season in sackcloth, after the Biblical manner, and then go and hang themselves. Curiously enough, it was no sympathy for the Negro that led Helper into this frame of mind: few Americans have ever put down in print a more passionate hymn to race hatred, and if Helper hated slavery, one reason obviously was that he began by hating the slave. Before disappearing from the scene, Helper was to indulge in much cloudy rhetoric in which the extermination of the black race would appear as a positive good, and in which Negroes would be likened to "hyenas, jackals, wolves, skunks, rats, snakes, scorpions, spiders," and "other noxious creatures."³

Clearly enough, Helper was an incendiary with lighted matches, the inflammatory nature of his work lying in the fact that, as a Southerner, he fought slavery because it was bad for white Southerners rather than for the slaves themselves. But his The Impending Crisis, published in 1857, had not been widely read, and in the South—the only place where it could be expected to do any harm—it had hardly been read at all. Not until spring of 1859 did the book begin to emerge as a national irritant. Then, taking thought for the coming election, certain Republican leaders concluded that this book could be made the basis for a fine campaign document. Francis P. Blair, head man of the famous Blair family, an old-line Democrat who had drifted into the new party's ranks, would prepare a pamphlet—a digest, or "compend," of the original—and money would be raised so that 100,000 copies of the pamphlet might be placed where they would do the most good.

Concerning which the best that can be said is that it looked like a good idea at the time. Helper had spoken what sounded like good Republican doctrine. He had complained, as a Southerner, that "we have no foreign trade, no princely merchants, nor respectable artists," and that "we contribute nothing to the literature, polite arts and inventions of the age"—the cause of all of which, of course, was slavery. He had found the Southerner dependent on the Northern manufacturer from birth to death; as a child, the Southerner was "swaddled in Northern muslin," and at the far end of life, he was "borne to the grave in a Northern carriage, entombed with a Northern spade and memorized with a Northern slab." All of this, he asserted, had brought Southerners "under reproach in the eyes of all civilized and enlightened nations," and there was only one remedy for it: "The first and most sacred duty of every Southerner who has the honor and the interest of his country at heart is to declare himself an unqualified and uncompromising abolitionist."⁴

This was saying bluntly what most Republicans believed, and since it was written by a man who came from North Carolina, every good Republican was bound to feel that it was a gift from the gods—as perhaps it would have been if American politics could still be played by the old rules, under which it was always advisable to shoot irritating darts into the opposition's hide. Sales of The Impending Crisis went up as the Republicans talked about their plan, Mr. Helper found it advisable to move out of the South and take up residence quietly in New York, and spokesmen for the cotton South discovered that there was on earth one book more detestable than Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When Clark, the Congressman, urged the House to resolve that anyone who had endorsed the Helper book was unfit to be speaker, he was not taking a wild shot in the dark. Sixty-eight Republican members of the House had so endorsed it, and they included just about every Republican who could conceivably be a candidate for the speakership; included, as a matter of fact, John Sherman himself, who found himself called on to explain the inexplicable.

Sherman did his best. Gaining the floor, he recited the deal with Mr. Blair, and said that Blair had told him, after an exchange of letters with Helper, that "the obnoxious matter in the original publication" would be eliminated; it was because of this assurance, said Sherman, that eminent Republicans had given their endorsement to the scheme. As for his own part: "I do not recollect signing the paper referred to, but I presume, from my name appearing in the printed list, that I did sign it. I therefore make no excuse of any kind. I never read Mr. Helper's book, or the compendium founded upon it. I have never seen a copy of either. ... I never addressed to any Member such language as I have heard today. I never desire such language to be addressed to me if I can avoid it."⁵

Since the House had not formally organized, and was presided over by a confused and ineffective clerk, there was no rule to keep members from discussing an extraneous resolution at a time when they were supposed to be balloting on the speakership. The kind of language which John Sherman deplored grew worse and worse. Congressman Clark had asked: "Do gentlemen expect that they can distribute incendiary books, give incendiary advice, advise rebellion, advise non-intercourse in all relations of life, spread such works broadcast over the country, and not be taken to task for it?"⁶ As one Southerner after another rose to speak on this point, Sherman learned that no man in politics ever gets very far by explaining that he lent his name without knowing precisely what the borrower intended to do with it.

Representative Shelton F. Leake, of Virginia, demanded whether he was asked to consent to the election of an official "who, while I am here in the discharge of my public duties, is stimulating my Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my wife and helpless children." Sherman, who confessed afterward that he had never dreamed the Helper book would kick up such an uproar, replied that he would repeat once more—having said it, on the floor of the House, five times before—that "I am opposed to any interference by the people of the free States with the relations of master and slave in the slave states"; but another Virginian retorted hotly: "They do not mean to interfere with slavery in the states, and yet when a band of assassins violate the sacred soil of my native state, we hear not one word of denunciation from you." He was followed by Lucius Q. C. Lamar, of Mississippi, who cried that when the spirit of the Constitution was no longer observed on the floor of the House, "I war upon your government: I am against it." Republican William Kellogg, of Illinois, got the floor to assert that slavery was "a moral, social and political wrong" which he would resist to the end; the shorthand reporter noted that this was greeted by a mixture of applause and hisses, and there was a great deal of shouting and threatening which did not get taken down. At one point Kellogg was recorded as demanding: "Does the gentleman call me a spaniel coward?" and the clerk who was trying to preside over all of this, being called on to order the sergeant-at-arms to restore quiet, confessed that he did not know if that functionary were in the House or if he himself had the authority to give him orders in any case.⁷

It went on, for week after week, all business at a standstill; nothing mattered, apparently, except the single issue of slavery, and the men who spoke so hotly on this issue were not so much trying to persuade one another as to give vent to their own pent-up emotions. In the end—on January 30, 1860—John Sherman concluded that he had had enough. He withdrew his candidacy, and after a series of involved deals the House, on February 1, managed to elect a speaker— William Pennington, of New Jersey, a Republican, recently a Whig, chosen by a majority of one vote. At various places in the North, ardent Republicans celebrated, firing cannon and making jubilant speeches, as if some sort of victory had been won; and if the House had in fact discharged the unendurable emotional tension that possessed it, so that it could now get down to business and give the nation orderly government, a celebration would have been in order.⁸ But nothing had been settled. One stalemate had been ended, but the greater stalemate remained: the undigestible lump of slavery remained, and this one effort to cope with it had been a noisy and spectacular failure. Only the extremists had gained anything.

The political system clearly was being strained beyond its limit. The attempt to name a speaker had hinged, for week after week, on the question of one undistinguished book; and this question, in turn, had been discussed in the lurid, distorting light that came down from Harper's Ferry. John

Brown had underlined Helper's confused message; his abortive uprising, quenched in blood and leading him to a scaffold, gave the whole business its cutting edge. The violence that smoldered just below the surface on the floor of the House had been terribly real at Harper's Ferry, and it was not for a moment out of any man's mind. Congressman McClernand, of Illinois, a devout Douglas Democrat, wrote to a friend that "our country for the first time is in serious danger of Civil Commotions," adding that unless conservative patriotism somehow triumphed in the coming presidential election "the result must be disastrous." The situation now was made to order for the extremists. Southerners who loved the Union and wanted it preserved were being driven into the camp of the fire-eaters. Their uneasy fears about the dire things that might happen if the slave system were tampered with seemed to have been confirmed, and they were drifting to the point where they would permit no one to touch the system in any way. The Democratic party was their party, and nothing mattered now but to retain a firm control over it. If the party was wrecked thereby, that could not be helped.

On the day after the speaker election, Senator Jefferson Davis, of Mississippi, arose in the Senate to present a series of resolutions on the slavery question. These began by reasserting the state-sovereignty doctrines of John C. Calhoun, declared that it was the Senate's duty "to resist all attempts to discriminate either in relation to person or property" in the territories, and then flatly stated that there was no power anywhere to limit slavery in the territories. Congress could not do it; its solemn duty was to protect slavery there. Residents of a territory could not do it; they could outlaw slavery only when their territory was admitted to the Union as a state. Meanwhile, all acts of Northern individuals or states which interfered with the return of fugitive slaves were asserted to be "hostile in character, subversive of the Constitution and revolutionary in their effect." A little later, Davis modified the resolutions slightly, but the meaning remained unchanged.⁹ In effect, he had presented a straight slave code as a principle for Senatorial adoption.

That the Senate would actually adopt any such code was highly improbable, as Davis knew. The real target was the approaching convention of the Democratic party. If the policy set forth in these resolutions could be made to stick as official party doctrine—and the Senate Democratic caucus, in March, endorsed it—Douglas would be in an impossible position, for he could never defend this code in the Northwest and he obviously would never try to do so. Davis was not one of the fire-eaters, and men like Yancey considered him unsound, and when in mid-May he was still arguing for his resolutions, Davis spoke optimistically about the prospects of the Federal Union: "I have great confidence in the strength of the Union. Every now and then I hear that it is about to tumble to pieces, that somebody is going to introduce a new plank into the platform and if he does the Union must tumble down. . . . I come to the conclusion that the Union is strong and safe —strong in its power, as well as in the affections of the people." And yet, fighting to assure Southern control over the party, he had given Yancey and the other extremists a solid platform.¹⁰

Douglas was in the middle, and he quickly recognized the fact. Declaring that it was "the path of duty and wisdom to stand by the doctrine of non-intervention," he asked bitterly why these resolutions should be offered in the Senate. "There is no necessity for legislation; no grievances to be remedied; no evil to be avoided; no action is necessary; and yet the peace of the country, the integrity of the Democratic party, is to be threatened by abstract resolutions, when there is confessedly no necessity for action."¹¹

Douglas was under dual pressures, from the sectionalists of North and South alike. The gist of the Davis resolutions was simply an assertion that the slavery issue was untouchable; in the frenzy built up by the John Brown raid, the South was likely to agree with deep determination. But the untouchable had to be touched, for there were determined men in the North who felt quite as deeply about it as any Southerner. The John Brown episode had stirred profound passions in the North as well as in the South. The institution of slavery had one maddening quality: it ennobled its opponents. John Brown was a brutal murderer if there ever was one, and yet to many thousands he had become a martyr, made a martyr by the character of the thing he attacked. Unbalanced to the verge of outright madness, he had touched a profound moral issue, an issue that ran so deep that he took on a strange and moving dignity when he stood upon the scaffold. If what he had done made adoption of a slave code seem essential in the South, it also made acceptance of such a code unthinkable in the North.

Before the month of February ended, Douglas came under Northern fire. It came from a Republican, rather than from a Northern Democrat, but it illustrated perfectly the size of the obstacle he would meet if he campaigned in the Northwest on anything like the Davis resolutions; and it was delivered by his old opponent in the 1858 Senatorial campaign, Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, who went on to New York on February 27 to make a speech before a substantial audience at the Cooper Institute.

Lincoln was not quite a national figure at this time. His long debate with Douglas in 1858 for the Illinois Senatorial seat had drawn attention, and he had maneuvered Douglas into frank statement of that Freeport doctrine which slavery leaders found so vicious, but he was still comparatively a minor figure in the Republican party. He was being brought to New York by Republicans who opposed Seward and thought that this effective speaker might offset Seward's predominant strength in the party, and he came with some nervousness, fearing that he might be a little too Western, too countrified, for a New York audience; but he got a cordial reception, and he immediately aimed his guns at Douglas and at the whole pro-slavery position. He made it clear that although Douglas might seem hostile to slavery in the South, there were Northerners who considered him altogether too friendly to it; for slavery was "an evil not to be extended, but to be tolerated and protected only because of and so far as its actual presence among us makes that toleration and protection a necessity."

This was the inadmissible point. Lincoln spoke for men who were willing to agree that the institution was not to be touched—not now; but they insisted that it must be recognized as a wrong which must be contained in such a way that it could someday die a natural death. Looking beyond his immediate audience to the men of the South, Lincoln put his finger on the problem to which American politics could not find the solution: "The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task."¹²

Two days after Lincoln spoke, Senator Seward arose in the Senate to contribute his own bit. He was untidy, carelessly slouchy, hoarse of voice, a man described by Editor Halstead as "a jay bird with a sparrow hawk's bill"; and the South hated him for having spoken of an irrepressible conflict. He was disowning the irrepressible conflict now, speaking hopefully of the Union as something that would endure despite temporary storms, but his voice brought no healing. If the Union were to be assailed, he said, the assault could come only from the Democratic party, for the threat of disunion was made, if not in that party's name, at least in its behalf, and he spoke of the existing turmoil as of something that arose because "a great policy fastened upon the country through its doubts and fears, confirmed by its habits, and strengthened by personal interests and ambitions, is to be relaxed and changed."¹³ Saying this, Seward came mortally close to touching the untouchable; at the very least he was going opposite to the spirit of the Davis resolutions, and he offered no help at all to Lincoln's despairing complaint: "We must somehow convince them that we do let them alone."

These men were moderates—Lincoln and Davis, Seward and Douglas. Each man had a love for the Union, an awareness of the mysterious force that operates as a sort of continental destiny. But in this winter when the lines were growing taut, each man was reaching a position from which he could not retreat and on which he would not compromise.

Davis believed that the North must willingly adapt itself to the fact of slavery. Slavery existed and it had to be accepted; it should not be agitated as a moral issue by people remote from it. When Northerners interfered with slavery, they interfered with the well-being and hopes of the whole Southern community, and the very attempt to contain and limit slavery, looking as it did toward its eventual demise, was interference despite all disclaimers. People in the North must make the necessary adjustments to something which, after all, was a purely Southern concern.

Lincoln and Seward had come to an opposite position. They saw slavery as an evil affecting the entire country, and although they were willing to accept its present existence as a hard fact, they refused to admit that it must be extended into the indefinite future. They could stomach even the fugitive slave laws if—and only if—they could be sure that someday no such laws would be necessary. Like Davis, they were being driven into sectionalism, and were leaders in a purely sectional party, because slavery itself was sectional.

Douglas was the most flexible of the group. He was perfectly willing to tolerate slavery as long as his toleration did not require him to do intolerable things. Slavery could be voted up or down in the territories, as far as he was concerned, so long as it was at least disposed of by the people directly concerned; he wanted it to cease to be a constant irritant, and he hoped that the country could get on with its other business. Standing in the middle, he stood also in storm center, and sometimes it seemed as if everybody was fighting him.

Thus the moderates, as immoderate winds gathered: the forces that drove them being the same as those that blew in on the delegates at Charleston. With the moderates the will to work out some sort of solution survived; with lesser men the will to hate and to hurt grew strong. Symptomatic of this was the action, in this same session of a divided Congress, a short echo ahead of the Charleston convention, of Congressman Owen Lovejoy, of Illinois, who stood up on April 5 to address his fellow legislators.

Lovejoy had been through the mill. He had seen his older brother, Elijah, preacher of abolition, killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, more than twenty years earlier, and kneeling by his body had vowed "never to forsake the cause"; he had been a minister and an anti-slavery agitator, and in 1856 had been elected to Congress, a die-hard Free-Soil Republican who bore scars from his long fight against slavery. He spoke now as too many others were speaking—out of complete conviction that his own cause was reasonable and right and that men who opposed him were willfully wrong in the head; spoke not so much to convince as to castigate, to discharge anger that could no longer be contained. Breathing upon the tempest, he made it blow all the harder.

Slavery, he declared, was the sum of all villainies, worse than robbery, worse than piracy, worse than polygamy: "It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy, it has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself." If heaven were run on slaveholding principles, Jehovah would be a Juggernaut "rolling the huge wheels of his omnipotence, axle-deep, amid the crushed and mangled and bleeding bodies of human beings." As he spoke, waving his arms, his fists clenched, Lovejoy stalked over to the Democratic side of the House to speak into the faces of his opponents, and Virginia's Roger Pryor came out to meet him, shouting that it was bad enough to have to listen to such talk "but he shall not, sir, come upon this side of the House, shaking his fist in our faces." A Republican from Wisconsin, John Potter, cried that Democrats were just as offensive when they made speeches, and got into such a wrangle with Pryor that he was challenged to fight a duel. (He accepted, specifying that they must fight with bowie knives; Pryor's second replied that these were outside the code, and in the end there was no duel.) Thirty or forty Congressmen gathered about the speaker, some to heckle Lovejoy, others to demand that people stay on their own side of the House; all to no effect whatever. Congressman William Barksdale, of Mississippi, grated out: "Order that black-hearted scoundrel and nigger-stealing thief to take his seat and this side of the House will do it"—and, after contributing some spirited columns to the Congressional Globe, Lovejoy came to a close and the uproar died down.¹⁴

A Congress in this mood was not likely to do anything very constructive in the way of passing legislation; yet the House did manage, early in March, to pass a homestead bill that would grant Western land, free, to any adult American who cared to settle and make a farm—a thing greatly desired by the free-state North, solidly opposed by the South. Strangely, the thing was not debated at length, although it offered a more fundamental threat to the future of slavery than anything the most ranting abolitionist could say in or out of Congress. With little talk it was sent on to the Senate, where at last it was amended out of all likeness to the original. Eventually, considering that he would thereby strike a blow at Douglas, President Buchanan vetoed it.¹⁵

Yet although the whole Congressional session had been filled with talk of secession and war—and, by its mad unbalance, had given the nation a certain push in that direction—most men did not seem to think that war would ever occur. There came before the House, in this session, a naval appropriation bill, and on motion of John Sherman the estimate for repairs and re-equipment was sliced by a million dollars. Lovejoy, of all people, agreed with him, asserting: "I am tired of appropriating money for the army and navy when, absolutely, they are of no use whatever . . . I want to strike a blow at this whole naval expenditure and let the navy go out of existence."¹⁶

So the appropriation was reduced, and the navy's ability to put its warships in order was limited; one result being that U.S.S. Merrimack, in the Norfolk Navy Yard for engine overhaul, lay unrepaired at her dock ... to emerge, two years after Lovejoy's speech, as the terrifying ironclad C.S.S. Virginia.

 

3. Star after Star

It had been unseasonably hot and dry in Charleston through most of April, but a cool rain drifted in just before the Democratic convention was called to order, at noon on April 23, and Institute Hall was fairly comfortable when the delegates crowded in to find their places. The big auditorium had a level floor, with long rows of plain wooden chairs bolted together; above there was a gallery in which, by agreement, a third of the seats had been reserved for the ladies of Charleston. Making his way to the press section, where reporters were ready with piles of paper, pencils sharpened at both ends, and a messenger to rush copy off to the telegraph office, Editor Halstead took a leisurely look about him and noted disapprovingly that there was "a good deal of gaudy and uncouth ornamentation" about the hall, with inexpert frescoing over the stage. It quickly developed, also, that the acoustics were very bad, largely because loaded wagons and drays were constantly rattling along over the cobblestoned street just outside, creating a powerful racket. The invocation, delivered by "a fine, fat old clergyman" from the deep South, was totally inaudible, at least to earthly listeners, and the authorities hastily arranged to have loads of sawdust dumped in the roadway to deaden the noise.¹

On this first day there was not, actually, a great deal for anyone to listen to. There was a spirited wrangle over appointment of a committee on credentials and organization, with a certain amount of oratory to which the delegates paid a minimum of attention, but the real struggle was not quite

ready to boil over from committee and caucus rooms to the floor of the convention. Floor manager for the Douglas forces was broad-shouldered, harsh-voiced W. A. Richardson, of Quincy, Illinois, dominating his following and his section of the hall by the force of his strong personality. He had joined in the row over organization, making a brief speech on the matter, but for the moment his real responsibilities would be met off the floor. With him as lieutenant was an Illinoisan with the pleasing nickname of "For God's Sake Linder"—a title acquired a few years earlier when Douglas, in the heat of some state political fight, had wired him "For God's Sake Linder come down here I need help." Bustling, sweating, with rumpled linen, Linder was very busy, looking somehow like the sort of man to whom one would say "For God's sake."² At the end of the day, when the convention adjourned for the night, nothing in particular had taken place.

Things happened off the stage, however, that evening, that would be of lasting importance, and the next morning Halstead detected a feeling that "the convention is destined to explode in a grand row." This row did not immediately develop; indeed, as the second day's session began, the Douglas floor managers won a victory that might be decisive. By majority vote, the convention agreed that unless a state convention, instructing its delegation, had provided otherwise, delegates need not be bound by the unit rule. It was believed that this would free as many as forty pro-Douglas delegates from the control of certain delegations where a majority was anti-Douglas; Manager Richardson had gained something here, for Douglas now would almost certainly get a majority of the votes when the balloting started, and that in itself would give powerful impetus to his attempt to get the necessary two thirds. If this convention went by the ordinary rules of politics, Senator Douglas was well on his way.³

Behind the stage, however, it was becoming clear that this convention was not going to go by the ordinary rules of politics. It would go by its own rules, and these might well take it where no American political convention had ever gone before. Late at night after the opening session had adjourned, the delegates representing the cotton states caucused, and they agreed to follow the lead of the Alabama delegation in respect to the adoption of a party platform: and the Alabama delegation, on this specific issue, rested in the firm hand of William L. Yancey and would go where he took it.

Alabama's Democratic convention had met in January, and there Yancey had put through a resolution that said much the same thing, in briefer scope, as the resolutions Jefferson Davis brought up in the Senate a little later: in effect, it was an iron-tight restatement of the demand for a slave code in regard to the territories. This, the state convention ordered, was to be submitted to the Charleston convention, and Alabama's delegates were instructed to withdraw if the Charleston convention should refuse to adopt it. Now, taking counsel together, the delegations from Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Mississippi had agreed to go where Alabama went; and Alabama obviously was going all the way out of the convention unless the convention adopted the platform Alabama wanted.

Here was a decisive victory for the extremists: a victory, actually, if it could have been recognized as such, for the men who were already contemplating the final step of secession from the Federal Union. They were the people who had thought their way through this question of breaking the Democratic party in halves, and they knew, even though others might not, what the final consequences of this pledge to leave the convention could be. Long before the convention, Yancey had been very explicit about it. "All my aims and objects," he had written, "are to cast before the people of the South as great a mass of wrongs committed on them, injuries and insults that have been done, as I possibly can. One thing will catch our eye here and determine our hearts; another thing elsewhere; all, united, may yet produce spirit enough to lead us forward, to call forth a Lexington, to fight a Bunker's Hill, to drive the foe from the city of our rights." To Yancey it seemed that "the Union has already been dissolved": what remained at Washington was indeed a government, but "not the Union which the Constitution made," and he wanted to war upon it.’

Another who saw things this way was Robert Barnwell Rhett, the publisher of the Charleston Mercury. In the preceding October his paper had printed a program for South Carolina and by extension for the cotton states generally. In substance, this demanded a straight slave code in the party platform and acceptance of it by the party candidate, and urged that if the convention refused to grant this, the Southern delegates should withdraw and put forward their own candidate. If, all of this being done, the candidate should fail of election, the next legislature should recall the state's members from Congress and invite the co-operation of other Southern states on matters affecting the common safety.⁵ Rhett was unmistakably calling for secession if either the convention or the campaign turned out to be unsatisfactory; the pledges made by cotton-state delegates in their midnight conference almost certainly meant that either the convention or the campaign, if not both together, would be unsatisfactory to a marked degree.

For what the cotton states were demanding was the one thing the Democracy of the Northwest could never concede. A few months earlier, speaking from the Senate floor, Douglas had said flatly: "I tell you, gentlemen of the South, in all candor, I do not believe a Democratic candidate can ever carry any one Democratic state of the North on the platform that it is the duty of the Federal government to force the people of a territory to have slavery if they do not want it."⁶ Here Douglas was drawing the line. The whole effort of his managers just now was devoted to an effort to get the convention to side-step the big issue—to use the soft pedal, to adopt some sort of platform which would somehow satisfy the South without alienating the North. Ordinarily, this is the sort of thing a political convention does without taking a second thought, but at Charleston it was exactly what could not be done. The caucus of the cotton-state delegates was a clear warning that the bitter differences of opinion which lay underneath all of these words would have to be handled out in the open.

. . . clear warning, as well, that Douglas's prospects were not as good as they looked. President Buchanan's friends were making gleeful note of this, and on April 26 one of them wrote to the President that Douglas "is utterly lost," adding that the South would as soon vote for Seward as for Douglas .. . "the hostility to him in the South is even more intense than I expected." Another delegate reported to the President that "the feeling of the South to Douglas is of implacable hostility and his nomination would produce an alienation."

Formulation of the all-important platform was entrusted to a committee, which wrestled with its responsibility off stage while the convention installed its permanent chairman, dignified Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts. Cushing reminded the delegates that they had convened "in the exercise of the highest functions of a free people, to participate, to aid in the selection of the future rulers of the Republic." They were present, of course, as representatives of the Democratic party, which had its own special mission—"to reconcile popular freedom with constituted order, to maintain the sacred reserved rights of the sovereign states, to stand, in a word, the perpetual sentinels on the outposts of the Constitution." Great applause interrupted Mr. Cushing when he mentioned the rights of the sovereign states; applause joined in even by the Douglas delegates, who considered Cushing no friend of their candidate and who had not wanted him as chairman. He went on to denounce the new Republican party, without naming it, as the creature of men who promoted "a traitorous sectional conspiracy of one-half the states of the Union against the other half," and he called on his listeners to accept for the Democratic party the noble duty of striking down and conquering "those who, impelled by the stupid and half-insane spirit of faction and fanaticism, would hurry our land on to revolution and to civil war." Having heard him through, the convention went on to other matters. It entertained and then rejected a motion to reconsider its vote on the unit rule; it handled various contested-delegation arguments, giving the Douglas people further victories to talk about by seating certain pro-Douglas factions; it referred to the platform committee innumerable resolutions which were brought forward . . . and, like men waiting for an imminent explosion, it teetered on the edges of its chairs until the platform committee should deliver itself of the material on which the convention would either divide or unite, once and for all.⁷

On April 27, the fifth day of the convention's labors, the committee brought in its reports. Significantly, there were three of these—a majority anti-Douglas report, a minority pro-Douglas report, and (infinitely fitting, in view of the unfathomed future) a one-man report submitted by Benjamin Butler, of Massachusetts.

The reports perfectly illustrate the way in which, at an hour of high crisis, men can wrangle over words. No medieval theologians could spin out doctrinal points with more emphasis on the necessity for finding the precise, salvation-encompassing phrase or clause than men of action who are about to disagree can devote to the selection of the exact sentences upon which their disagreement is to be based. This extreme concern over comparatively minor points of verbiage is an infallible sign that there is going to be a row. If men are going to go together, they will ride on almost any words, but if they are going to break apart, the words seem to be of very great significance.

All three of the reports went back to what any contemplative party man in 1860 must have considered the Democracy's golden age, the year 1856, when the convention met at Cincinnati and without difficulty put together a platform that satisfied everybody. All three reports proposed that this Charleston convention begin by readopting, as its own, the Cincinnati platform of 1856. That platform contained a broad, rather undemanding statement of the party's position on slavery. After asserting that Congress could not legally interfere with slavery in the several states (a point acceptable to practically everyone except the most unrestrained of abolitionists) and denouncing those who disagreed as trouble-makers, it went on to endorse the compromise of 1850 and to uphold, "as embodying the only sound and safe solution of the slavery question," the doctrine of popular sovereignty as set forth in the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It held that the Democracy, as the party of the Union, must defend the rights of the states, thereby strengthening the Union itself, and it called for adherence to principles "which are broad enough and strong enough to embrace and uphold the Union as it was, the Union as it is, and the Union as it shall be, in the full expansion of the energies and capacity of this great and progressive people."

To persuade the delegates to say all of this over again was no problem. The trouble came in the effort to determine what, if anything, should be added to it.

Ben Butler, coming forth as a minority of one and speaking for moderation and the avoidance of controversy, proposed that the convention adopt the Cincinnati platform and stop there. If what had been said in 1856 meant different things to men of 1860, let each individual Democrat be his own interpreter.

The report of the pro-Douglas group asserted that "Democratic principles are unchangeable in their nature when applied to the same subject matters," and demanded that the Cincinnati platform be adopted with an all-important rider which, in effect, would say that the vexatious problems centering about slavery in the territories were really judicial in their character and hence should be left to the Supreme Court for determination. It added, almost as an afterthought, that there ought to be a railroad to California, that Cuba should be annexed, and that Northern attempts to nullify the fugitive slave laws were deplorable.

The majority report differed from this, materially, in just one paragraph—half a dozen lines of type hard and uncompromising enough to split the party. In place of the Northwesterners' pious hope that the slavery-in-the-territories matter could be left to the Supreme Court (which was simply the formulation of an agreement not to fight about it within the party), the majority report contained a statement that could be read just one way:

"Resolved, that the Democracy of the United States hold these cardinal principles on the subject of slavery in the Territories; First, that Congress has no power to abolish slavery in the Territories. Second, that the Territorial Legislature has no power to abolish slavery in any Territory, nor to prohibit the introduction of slaves therein, nor any power to exclude slavery therefrom, nor any right to destroy or impair the right of property in slaves by any legislation whatever."⁸

Here was the Yancey program, spelled out, the policy on which Douglas had warned that no Democrat could hope to carry a single Northern state; the declaration of principles whose adoption seven cotton-state delegations had solemnly declared vital to their continued presence in the convention.

... It looks simpler now than it did then. As practical politicians, many of the Douglas men were willing to see a certain amount of defection by Southern delegates—it would make it that much easier to get a two-thirds majority and nominate Douglas. There were Southern delegates who knew perfectly well that a split party would give the advantage to the Republicans, but who believed that the candidate of Yankee sectionalism could never get a majority in the electoral college and that the election would as a result be thrown into Congress, where the Democracy had enough votes to protect itself. And there were many men on both sides who did not see their way clearly but who bent before pressure, or simply followed the crowd for lack of any real guiding star. It may have been very hard, on April 27, 1860, to see that a bitter-end fight on the slavery issue in this convention would be one ounce more than party or nation could carry without breaking.

Platform reports were presented sometime after eleven in the morning. A soaking rain came up, and the ladies of Charleston, present in the galleries by the hundred, had brought no umbrellas, nor were carriages waiting for them outside. There was nothing for it but to go dinnerless during the noon recess, huddling dispirited in the galleries to protect new dresses and bonnets. The atmosphere in the hall grew damp and chilly; yet after the recess there was revival, for Mr. Yancey arose to speak to the convention and he took the galleries with him.

Yancey addressed himself directly to the Douglas Democrats of the North and Northwest, speaking bluntly, making a positive advantage out of the fact that the cotton-state Democrats were in a minority. Reviewing the tale of the Democracy's defeats in Northern states on the slavery issue, he asserted that these came because Northern Democrats tried to adjust themselves to anti-slavery sentiments. That could not be done, and there was but one ground for the Democracy to take—that slavery was right. Neither he himself nor the Alabama delegation for which he spoke wanted a break-up of the Union, but someone had to make it clear to the Democrats of the North that the Union would be dissolved unless constitutional principles triumphed at the polls. (Constitutional principles, as no one needed to explain, were clearly set forth in the majority paragraph dealing with slavery in the territories.)

Like it or not, no delegate could misunderstand Yancey's meaning. He was a pleasant, smiling man, who spoke easily, with ingratiating good humor; and he talked today with a quiet dignity, as if he saw in the near future dark perils which no man who did not stand with him could detect. He dropped his fatal, quietly eloquent sentences into the hushed convention hall with deadly precision.

"Ours is the property invaded," he said. "Ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake—the honor of children, the honor of families, the lives, perhaps, of all—all of which rests upon what your course may ultimately make a great heaving volcano of passion and crime, if you are enabled to consummate your designs. Bear with us then, if we stand sternly here upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong."⁹

Perhaps the split had already come, and all that could be done now was 'to formalize it; perhaps the talk about dormant volcanoes and the destruction of families must sound, to the majority—must perhaps really be, to an extent —nothing more than the familiar business of a politician prophesying doom unless his party or his piece of the party can prevail. Yancey was displaying the baleful ghost of John Brown, arguing that slave uprisings and the massacre of innocent families were apt to follow any concession to the moderates in this convention; and among those who considered this rather far-fetched was George A. Pugh, of Ohio, a Douglas Democrat who promptly rose to make reply. With heavy irony, Pugh remarked that an honest Southerner had at last spoken and that the truth about the South's demands was finally on the record. Like Yancey, Pugh reviewed the party's troubles in the Northern states—the real root of the difficulty, he said, was that the Northern Democrats had worn themselves out defending Southern interests—and he declared that the Northern Democrats like himself were now being ordered to hide their faces and eat dirt.

"Gentlemen of the South," said Pugh, "you mistake us— you mistake us—we will not do it."

Whereupon there was vast uproar. All over the floor, delegates were on their feet, waving their arms, yelling furiously for recognition—"screaming like panthers," Editor Halstead wrote, "and gesticulating like monkeys." Caleb Cushing, supposedly presiding over this scene, was helpless, one problem being that in the encompassing racket he could not make out a single word anyone was saying. In desperation, at last, he singled out a delegate from Missouri, who had leaped upon a table and was bellowing something incomprehensible, shaking his head passionately, waving his long red hair. This man, Cushing discerned, was moving adjournment: he recognized him, put the question, and after several minutes of general shouting and surging about on the floor, Cushing announced that the convention had adjourned until morning, and brought down his gavel with hard finality. Out into the cold rain went the delegates, each man earnestly questioning the man nearest him as if no one were quite sure what had been done this day.¹⁰

Morning of Saturday, April 28, brought no improvement. The weather remained cold and wet, and no man had yet found a fresh light. By a one-vote margin, the convention voted to recommit the various resolutions to the platform committee, and in the afternoon slightly modified reports were brought back. There was a deal of parliamentary sparring, as the Douglas men tried to force adoption of their platform (feeling that they had the votes, if the question could be brought before the house) while their opponents tried to stave off a vote, making endless speeches, bringing in motions to adjourn, motions to lay the whole business on the table, motions involving personal privilege; and at last, not long before midnight, the convention adjourned with nothing accomplished. Next day was Sunday; only technically a day of rest, for although the convention would not reconvene until Monday, the politicking in hotel lobbies, ill-ventilated bedrooms, and party committee rooms went on without a break. It was the day when everybody promised everything. The Buchanan administration was exerting all the power of patronage to keep anti-Douglas delegates in line, and the Douglas men had offered (by one estimate) approximately ten times as many offices as they would be able to give if Douglas should become President. The crowd became thinner, as men who had come just to see the show went back home, and the pressure on hotel lobbies and on barrooms was diminished. One result of this, not foreseen by the Douglas people, was that the convention galleries would increasingly be crowded by Charlestonians, who would stiffen wavering Southern delegates by cheering every anti-Douglas development. In the headquarters of the Ohio and Kentucky delegations it was noted that the supply of whisky was exhausted. Some of the party faithful, gloomily considering that the party had already taken all the steps necessary for a complete wreck, went about muttering that the next President would be named at Chicago—would, in other words, be a Republican.¹¹

Monday morning came, April 30, the day of the big showdown, the delegates entering the hall "with a curious mixture of despair of accomplishing anything and hope that something will turn up." The weather was pleasant, after a weekend of blustery rain and wind, and the crowd was charged with nervous expectancy. Despite the general exodus of out-of-town visitors the galleries were more densely packed than ever. With a minimum of delay the convention permanently shelved the Ben Butler report; then, grappling with the crucial problem, it voted by 165 to 138 to adopt the minority resolution in place of the majority report. The Douglas platform, in other words, was formally accepted and the Northwest had won its great victory. It remained to be seen what the victory would be worth.

It quickly became evident that it might not be worth very much. Having substituted the minority report for that of the majority, the convention settled down to vote on the separate planks. First of all, the 1856 Cincinnati platform was reaffirmed. Then stocky Richardson, the Douglas floor manager, moved for harmony by offering to forget all about the controversial plank referring the ins and outs of popular sovereignty to the Supreme Court. This appeased no one; and as the crowd in the galleries sat tensely silent, the cotton-state delegations, one after another, announced their withdrawal. It was done quietly. A writer for the Richmond Dispatch recalled that "there was no swagger, no bluster. There were no threats, no denunciations. The language employed by the representatives of these seven independent sovereignties was as dignified as it was feeling, and as courteous as it was either. As one followed another in quick succession, one could see the entire crowd quiver as under a heavy blow. Every man seemed to look anxiously at his neighbor as if inquiring what is going to happen next. Down many a manly cheek did I see flow tears of heartfelt sorrow."¹²

Sorrow there may have been; among the Douglas contingent there was unquestionably dismay. They would have welcomed a small eruption, as a thing that would clear the air, rally Democratic sentiment in the North, and make it easier to get a two-thirds majority in the fight for nomination; but it began to be clear that they had got a very large eruption indeed, which could easily make the nomination either unattainable or worthless, and a haunting sense that the split in the party could be prelude to a split in the Union itself began to torment the men from the Northwest. Delegate R. T. Merrick, of Illinois, arose to inquire, plaintively: "I find, sir, star after star madly shooting from the great Democratic galaxy. Why is it, and what is to come of it? Does it presage that, hereafter, star after star will shoot from the galaxy of the Republic, and the American Union become a fragment, and a parcel of sectional republics?"

Consoling answer there was none. Delegate Charles Russell, of Virginia, announced that if a break-up was indeed at hand, Virginia would go with the rest of the South. Virginia had seen John Brown and his violence, the appeal for a servile uprising, gunfire and death in a peaceful market town; Virginia today stood amid her sister states "in garments red with the blood of her children slain in the first outbreak of the 'irrepressible conflict.' " Gaining eloquence as he continued, Delegate Russell looked mournfully to the uncertain future: "Not when her children fell at midnight beneath the weapon of the assassin was her heart penetrated with so profound a grief as that which will wring it when she is obliged to choose between a separate destiny with the South and her common destiny with the entire Republic." Amid all of this, Editor Halstead looked at Yancey and found him "smiling as a bridegroom." Things were going as Yancey wanted them to go.

The day ended so. The Douglas people had their platform, plus a split convention and the prospect that there would presently be two national Democratic parties.

That night there was a Fourth of July air in Charleston. The moon came out, to silver the live oaks and their Spanish moss and to gleam from the fronts of the fine old houses, and the Southern delegates who had left the convention met in St. Andrews' Hall. A band was playing, and in the street people were cheering for Yancey. Yancey appeared, declaring that the delegates who had seceded would now form the "constitutional Democratic convention," with the others making do as well as they could as a rump convention. The South, he cried, must stand as a unit; perhaps, even now, "the pen of the historian was nibbed to write the story of a new revolution."¹³

 

4. "The Party Is Split Forever"

What was left of the Democratic convention did its best to pick up the pieces. It had lost fifty delegates, along with all chance for unity and most of its prospects for victory in the presidential election, and three days were enough to show that it could not do much with what remained. Officially, it had adopted a platform and could now proceed to the nomination of a candidate, and the Douglas leaders approached this task with some hope; since the most violent of the Senator's enemies had seceded, surely it would be simple for him to rally two thirds of those who remained? This, it developed, would not be enough. Caleb Cushing, presiding, ruled that whoever was nominated must get two thirds, not of the delegates in the hall, but of the total originally accredited to the convention, and this ruling stuck. The Southern delegates who yet remained would walk out if the convention overruled the chairman on this point, and they got a good deal of support from anti-Douglas elements in a number of Northern delegations, including that of New York. To nominate, then, the convention must give some candidate more than 200 votes, and it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be possible.

The session of May 1 began hopefully enough, with Cushing half invisible behind a huge bouquet of red roses and with a good clergyman offering a pious prayer for harmony. There were speeches. Twenty-six of Georgia's delegates had left the premises, and one Georgian who remained, Delegate Solomon Cohen, of Savannah, addressed the convention with impassioned pathos: "I will stay here until the last feather be placed upon the back of the camel—I will stay until crushed and broken in spirit, humiliated by feeling and knowing that I have no longer a voice in the counsels of the Democracy of the Union—feeling that the Southern states are as a mere cipher in your estimation—that all her rights are trampled underfoot; and I say here that I shall then be found shoulder to shoulder with him who is foremost in this contest." This, although vague, was considered somehow ominous. A South Carolina delegate, B. F. Perry—oddly enough, an early benefactor and teacher of Yancey—arose to identify himself as "an old-fashioned Union Democrat," announcing: "I love the South, and it is because I love her, and would guard her against evils which no one can foresee or foretell, that I am a Union man and a follower of Washington's faith and creed ... I came here not to sow the seeds of dissension in our Democratic ranks but to do all that I could to harmonize the discordant materials of our party."¹

The discordant materials were beyond ready fusion. After the unsuccessful attempt to upset Cushing's ruling about what a two-thirds majority really meant, the convention got down to the business of placing names in nomination. Nominating speeches were brief, and late in the afternoon, when it was time for the first roll call, the convention had six names before it—Douglas, of Illinois; James Guthrie, of Kentucky; Daniel S. Dickinson, of New York; R. M. T. Hunter, of Virginia; Joe Lane, of Oregon; and Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee. When Douglas's name was presented, the Northwestern men raised a brief cheer, but it seemed to lack body, and the gallery maintained a cold silence.

The first ballot told the story. There were 253 votes in the hall, and to win, someone would need to get 202 of them, which obviously was out of the question. Douglas got 145½ on the first ballot, and even his most hopeful followers realized that he would never rise much above this level. The Northwest was sullen and silent, and when Richardson stood up to announce the vote of Illinois, he looked and acted like a man attending a funeral—which, in a way, was the case. Eleven more ballots were taken before the day's session ended, and Douglas could pick up only 5 additional votes, for a top strength of 150½. As the delegates left the hall, Halstead felt that wounds had been inflicted that could not be healed. "I hear it stated here a hundred times a day, by the most orthodox Democrats and rampant Southerners, 'William H. Seward will be the next President of the United States,'" he wrote. "And I have heard this remark several times from South Carolinians: 'I'll be damned if I don't believe Seward will make a good president.' The fact is, there is a large class to whom the idea of Douglas is absolutely more offensive than Seward."

If the Southerners were growing more set in their anger against Douglas, the wrath of the Northwesterners was rising, also. It was a wrath against the party and against the Southerners who had exercised a veto power in the party, and Halstead heard Northern delegates mutter that they would "go home and join the black Republicans." He added: "I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men here. . . . Their exasperation and bitterness toward the South that has insisted upon such a gross repudiation of the only ground upon which they could stand in the North, can hardly be described. . . . They say they do not care a d..n where the South goes, or what becomes of her."²

To make things even more vexing, this was no longer the only convention in town. On May 1, while the convention was dolefully haggling over rules, placing names in nomination and balloting so fruitlessly, the die-hard Southerners who had seceded from it held an organization meeting in Military Hall and denominated themselves the real Democratic convention; the majority group which they had deserted was, as Yancey contemptuously insisted, the "rump convention." The new convention appointed a platform committee and selected as its chairman a Buchanan administration stalwart, Senator James Bayard, of Delaware, and on Tuesday morning, May 2, when the original convention resumed its attempt to make a nomination, the opposition drew itself together in the Charleston Theater and got down to business. The ladies of Charleston had concluded that this was the real attraction, and they filled the galleries, leaving those at Institute Hall half empty; and on the stage, calling the convention to order, was courtly Senator Bayard—romantic in his name and ancestry, brightly dressed, wearing long brown curls parted in the middle. Behind him was a stage backdrop which, without political significance, depicted the Palace of the Borgias.

The platform committee reported promptly, recommending readoption of the by now shopworn Cincinnati platform of 1856, with a postscript which defined that platform's meaning in unmistakable terms. The postscript explained that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could impair any citizen's rights to his property in a territory, and stipulated that it was the Federal government's duty to protect such rights with all its power. Only when a territory became a state could slavery therein be outlawed. This platform was unanimously adopted and the delegates then sat back to see what the "rump convention" was going to do—the idea being that the new convention would either nominate its own candidate or, in case Douglas should be beaten by someone acceptable to the cotton states, endorse the nomination made at Institute Hall.⁸

At Institute Hall nobody was getting anywhere. A brass band that came down with the Massachusetts delegation got into the gallery and played several national airs, after which Delegate Flournoy, of Arkansas, proposed three cheers for the Union, which were given; but when the balloting was resumed, it went just about as it had gone the day before. On the twenty-third ballot, Douglas got a total of 152½, a majority of the original convention strength of 303, if that made any difference—but he could rise no higher, and after fifty-seven ballots, in which Ben Butler voted at least fifty times for Jefferson Davis, the day's session was ended with Douglas one vote weaker than he had been at his ineffective peak. And on the morning of Wednesday, May 3, throwing in their hands, the delegates agreed to vote no more but to adjourn and to reconvene in Baltimore in June. Caleb Cushing spoke a brief swan song, assuring everyone that he had tried hard "in the midst of circumstances always arduous and in some respects of peculiar embarrassment" to behave as an impartial chairman should. Then, announcing that the convention would meet again on June 18, he brought down his gavel and the delegates scurried back to their hotels to pack up and look for the quickest way out of town.

This left the opposition convention with nothing in particular to do; left it, actually, slightly at a loss. Whatever Yancey and Rhett may have hoped, the dominant idea with most of the delegates who had walked out on the original convention had been the expectation that Douglas would eventually withdraw (whether voluntarily, for the good of the party, or in frank recognition of defeat) and that an acceptable compromise candidate would then be named. It had been supposed, also, that the act of withdrawal and the organization of a separate convention would help to bring all of this to pass; then the cotton-state delegates would return to the convention and a reunited party could get on with the presidential campaign, with a candidate who would interpret whatever the platform happened to say in a manner acceptable to everybody.

Now none of this had happened, and those who had withdrawn were as nonplussed as the Douglas men themselves, who had thought that Douglas could be nominated promptly once the die-hards had left the hall. Nobody, apparently (unless it was Yancey himself), had calculated accurately. The secessionist convention could do no more now than agree to meet again, in Richmond on June 11, and then adjourn. The galleries were emptied; Charleston no longer had a convention.⁴

The delegates were not the only ones who failed to see what the split in the party would finally mean. Editorializing on the matter, the Republican New York Times, mused that a great step forward had been taken; political power now would pass to the North, which henceforth would be united just as the South had been united. Enthusiastically, the Times editorial writer continued: "The Democratic party is the last of the great national organizations to yield to the 'irrepressible conflict' which slavery and freedom have been waging for control of the Federal government. . . . The Northern section of the party has asserted its power, and with new and unlooked-for firmness has maintained its position. If it stands still in its present attitude, the sectional contest is over."⁵

In Richmond, the Dispatch professed the hope that "the apparent split is more superficial than radical," and that the Democratic party was not yet sectionalized. The real fight, the Dispatch felt, had been over a man, not over a platform: "After all, the public have not much faith in any platforms, except such as Gov. Wise constructed for John Brown and those other distinguished members of the Republican party who called a Convention and nominated a ticket in Virginia last fall."⁸

Actually, this man whose platform the Dispatch editorialist commended so warmly had seen the trouble coming long before he ever saw John Brown. Henry A. Wise, governor of Virginia from 1856 through 1860, had indeed seen to it that the John Brown uprising was stamped out (this with the help of Robert E. Lee and a handful of United States Marines) and that Brown and co-workers were properly hanged. But back in 1858 he had anticipated what was going to happen in Charleston in 1860, and he had not liked it very much. Tall, lean, lantern-jawed, and outspoken, Governor Wise was a strong pro-slavery man who still believed that the South should fight for its rights within the Union, and in 1858 he had taken a pessimistic look into the future. Writing then to a friend, he had warned that the South contained "an organized, active and dangerous faction" which hoped to disrupt the Union and wanted to create a United South rather than a united Nation. This faction, Wise wrote, wanted in 1860 the nomination of an extremist "for no other purpose than to have it defeated by a line of sections. They desire defeat for no other end than to make a pretext for the clamor of dissolution."⁷

The clamor of dissolution was going on now and it would become stronger, but the extremists were not really in control. Thoughtful Southerners of stature, like Jefferson Davis, did not want the party split made permanent. This could mean only a rise in Republican power and destruction of the South's traditional control of the Democratic party—along, perhaps, with blood and battle smoke and hundreds of thousands of deaths—and the clamor of dissolution was not attractive. There would be a breathing spell now, and much might happen. Conceivably, the Douglas people could win new Southern delegates who would approach Baltimore with less stiffness in the back; conceivably, on the other hand, Douglas himself might be driven off stage so that the party could reunite behind someone less troublesome. Neither possibility was in the least likely, but almost anything was possible; there would be much electioneering and maneuvering in the Congressional districts back home, especially in the South, and there would also be a great to-do in Congress. Possibly something could be done here that would destroy this Northwesterner and permit all good Democrats to get together? Whatever the odds, the thing would be tried.

The handiest instrument that was available was embodied in the Davis resolutions regarding a Southern-rights code, which had been introduced in the Senate in February, had been endorsed by the Democratic caucus there, and now awaited final disposition. These would be brought up now and driven through to formal endorsement by the Senate, and May 7—four days after the collapse at Charleston—was the day appointed for it.

The Senate galleries were full, and the people who filled them had something to look at. Into the Senate chamber came Senator Douglas—"a queer little man, canine head and duck legs"—who went stumping down to his chair amid moderate applause. He had been through the mill lately, this Senator, and he was not well. (He would die, within little more than a year, a passionate spirit exhausting an inadequate body.) He got to his seat, twisted himself down in it, and put his feet on his desk, his mouth closed in a thin, bitter line. Fidgety, he clasped his hands, lolled in his chair, rubbed his nose, and waited to see what was going to happen.

Next came the man whose long shadow had affected so much that happened at Charleston—Senator Seward, of New York. Seward was in a good mood. As things then stood, he was very likely to be the Republican nominee and the next President, and he knew it. He was also, underneath everything else, a ham actor, and he played up to the limelight that was on him today. He stalked about the Republican side of the Senate chamber, his coat tails adrift behind him, found his seat, took a prodigious pinch of snuff, flourished a yellow silk handkerchief across his beaklike nose, and talked with a studied lack of self-consciousness to Republican die-hards like Ohio's Senator Salmon P. Chase, who had all of the dignity and the ostentatious integrity which Seward seemed to lack. Seward cracked a joke, flourished the great handkerchief again, and all in all acted the part of a presidential candidate who is aware that things are going his way.

A third man, now: Jefferson Davis, tall and slim and haggard, coming into the chamber to the sound of muted rustlings in the galleries, going to his desk and depositing documents there with thin, bloodless hands, sitting down as if ineffably weary.⁸ The Vice-President called the Senate to order and recognized the Senator from Mississippi. Senator Davis rose to speak.

Davis had something to say. The revolution that hardly anyone really wanted was coming closer and he did not like the sound of it; as a reasonable man, he would urge his opponents to be reasonable enough to see things as he saw them. Through his words there came, not only the Southerners' unappeasable opposition to Douglas, but the defiant challenge of a whole section which, if it did not consciously want disunion, would endure continued union only on its own terms.

There had been agitation (Davis told the Senate) for a generation and more, aimed at Southern institutions. This agitation had recently reached the point of revolution and civil war. "It was only last fall that an open act of treason was committed by men who were sustained by arms and money raised by extensive combinations among the non-slaveholding states to carry treasonable war against the state of Virginia." It was time to go back to the spirit of the founding fathers, who had made a compact with one another, and to ask soberly what should be done to save the country. The people of the North were threatened by nobody. Their institutions were not under attack and their rights were not invaded, and by now they had a majority in the representative districts and in the electoral college. Yet they were aggressive, hostile to the institutions of the South. What should be done?

"The power of resistance," said Senator Davis, "consists, in no small degree, in meeting the enemy at the outer gate. I can speak for myself—having no right to speak for others —and do say that if I belonged to a party organized on the basis of making war on any section or interest in the United States, if I know myself, I would instantly quit it. We of the South have made no war upon the North. We have asked no discrimination in our favor. We claim but to have the Constitution fairly and equally administered."⁹

Firmly entrenched at the outer gate, Senator Davis would await the assault, which at the moment was verbal. He was fighting over words. If it could be said plainly, flatly, and irrevocably that the United States government must under no circumstances interfere with slavery, all might be well, but the drift of the times, unhappily, was against it. The desperate intransigence of Southern leaders in this spring of 1860 carried an anxiety that their cause might be doomed no matter what anyone said. The intricate, fragile, and cherished society based on slavery could not endure very much longer, simply because the day in which it might live was coming to a close and nobody could stave off the sunset. Senator Davis would try, stalking into the shadows with infinite integrity and fixity of vision, and the immediate target of his wrath would go down too, entering the shadows a little ahead of him—a man who might, if fate had not touched him so hard, have found a way past the barriers.

Douglas listened while Davis spoke, and in due time he made reply, but for the moment the passion had gone out of him. He knew that the intended effect of the Davis resolutions was to state a policy for the Democracy which he could not accept. He was under fire from two directions, and there was very little that he could say. He had remarked, at Freeport, under prodding by Abraham Lincoln, that the Federal government could not possibly make slavery live in a place where the people did not want slavery, and he had done no more than state an obvious fact: the people can always nullify an unpopular law if they feel like it, and there is no power on earth that can stop them. But it was precisely this fact which the slave-state leaders could not accept, and as the man who had compelled them to gaze upon the abhorrent fact, Douglas was their enemy. In addition, he was involved in an old-fashioned political feud in which no one would give quarter or ask it. He had broken with the Buchanan administration on the question of the admission of Kansas as a state, and the administration would destroy him if it could. It could, and destroying him it would destroy much more; but his destruction was all important because if it could not be accomplished, Southern control of the party and the Federal government must come to an end.

In the winter of 1858 President Buchanan had urged Congress to admit Kansas as a state, the admission being based on a proposed constitution framed in a convention at the Kansas town of Lecompton. The Lecompton convention had been rigged, and the constitution itself was rigged; when the territorial voters were asked to pass on it, they had not been given a choice between slavery and no slavery. They could vote, if they chose, for the Lecompton constitution, which flatly stated the right of slave owners to continue to hold their slaves but forbade the importation of any more slaves, or they could vote for the same constitution with a proviso that the slave trade would be continued; could vote, in short, for limited slavery or for unlimited slavery, but could not vote for no slavery. Free-state people in Kansas had boycotted the plebiscite, considering the whole business an arrant fraud; but Buchanan, under vast pressure from Southern leaders and hoping as well that the troublesome Kansas problem could at last be solved if the Lecompton constitution were adopted, had put on the heat. Douglas had fought him, the Lecompton constitution had died like the fading leaves of autumn, a subsequent vote had shown that free-state residents of Kansas far outnumbered the slave-state people, and Kansas was still a territory and a living vexatious problem. It was here that Douglas had sinned. He was out of line not only on a matter of doctrine but also on a crucial question of workaday politics, and he was going to be punished for it.

Douglas had been extremely clear in his attitude on what ought to be done with the Lecompton constitution. In the Senate he had expressed himself unmistakably: "If Kansas wants a slave-state constitution she has a right to it; if she wants a free-state constitution she has a right to it. It is none of my business which way the slavery clause is decided. I care not whether it is voted down or voted up. ... I care not how that vote may stand. ... I stand on the great principle of popular sovereignty, which declares the right of all people to be left perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way. I will follow that principle wherever its logical consequences may take me, and I will endeavor to defend it against assault from all quarters."¹⁰

The right of the people to form and regulate their institutions will always be accepted by anyone who believes that the people will form and regulate things in his own particular way; but an American in that hour who declared that he did not care what the people did so long as they were allowed to do it was committing heresy against the zealots on both sides. Douglas now was detested equally, as a man devoid of principle, by the abolitionists and by the slave-state leaders.

The Davis resolutions passed the Senate on May 24. They were ineffective, except that their passage indicated that the coming Democratic meeting in Baltimore would almost certainly go the way of the one at Charleston. Nothing could be compromised, after all; in this spring of 1860 the country's most terrible problem was simply the fact that the will to compromise had gone out of so many people. Preparing for their meeting in Chicago, the Republicans gazed about joyously, with wild surmise; and little Alexander Stephens, of Georgia, considered the future and concluded that the nation was heading straight into unmeasured trouble.

Stephens was a wisp of a man, half an invalid, weighing no more than 100 pounds, shrill but movingly eloquent, a man who had been given one of the most haunting nicknames ever worn by an American politician: "The Little Pale Star from Georgia." A former Whig, he had served in Congress and had known Lincoln there; the two had been drawn to one another, possibly because each man in his innermost brooding took a deeply tragic view of human existence. Stephens had supported Virginia's R. M. T. Hunter for the nomination at Charleston, but when the split came he swung to Douglas. The strictest of strict constructionists on the states' rights issue, he nevertheless believed that Southerners could fight for their just dues in the Union better than out of it. As the Democratic split grew wider, Stephens remarked that the men who were working for secession were driven by envy, hate, jealousy, spite—"these made war in heaven, which made devils of angels, and the same passions will make devils of men. The secession movement was instigated by nothing but bad passions. Patriotism, in my opinion, had no more to do with it than love of God had with the other revolt."¹¹

Not long after the deadlock at Charleston a friend asked Stephens: "What do you think of matters now?"

"Think of them?" repeated Stephens. "Why, that men will be cutting one another's throats in a little while. In less than twelve months we shall be in a war, and that the bloodiest in history."

The friend suggested that things might be patched up at Baltimore, but Stephens insisted there was no chance of it: "The party is split forever. The only hope was at Charleston."

"But why," asked the friend, "must we have civil war, even if the Republican candidate be elected?"

"Because," said Stephens, "there are not virtue and patriotism and sense enough left in the country to avoid it. Mark me, when I repeat that in less than twelve months we shall be in the midst of a bloody war. What is to become of us then God only knows. The Union will certainly be disrupted; and what will make it so disastrous is the way in which it will be done."¹²

 

5. The Crowd at the Wigwam

 

The Democrats had met and they would fruitlessly meet again, their division beyond healing; and meanwhile the Republicans were going to Chicago. They were going noisily, impatiently, like men who see the promised land not far ahead, and Editor Halstead observed that on the trains there was a good deal more drinking of whisky than there had been on any of the trains going to Charleston.¹ The great Northwest was about to have its day, and it was not going to be quiet or restrained about it.

Halfway between Charleston and Chicago, in point of time, there was an unexpected development which arrested the attention briefly. On May 9 a number of aging politicians and distinguished-citizen types, who liked the look of things little better than Alexander Stephens did, met in Baltimore and, calling themselves the Constitutional Union Convention, nominated John Bell, of Tennessee, as their candidate for President. Mr. Bell could not conceivably be elected. He stood for moderation and the middle road in a country that just now was not listening to moderates, and the professional political operators were not with him. But he would win a certain number of votes just the same; he might even divide the Northern vote to such an extent that the election finally would be thrown into the House of Representatives. In the horse-trading that would result from this, anything at all might happen.

John Bell was an old-time leader of the Tennessee Whigs. In his sixties, a former Congressman, former Secretary of War, and present member of the Senate, he was a slaveholder who deplored strife, detested the Lecompton constitution, and believed that reasonable men could yet find a way out of their difficulties. A few years earlier he had supported the Know-Nothings, and he was popular all along the border; the new Constitutional Union party was made up of remnants of the moribund Whig party and of the short-lived Know-Nothing party. Without especially meaning to, he stood now as an obstacle in the path of Senator Seward.

The Constitutional Union Convention had been a scratch affair, with representatives from twenty-four states. It had met in a former church, which was decorated with flags, an American eagle, and a large portrait of George Washington, and it tried valiantly to provide a voice for the people who had not yet given up hope. Presiding officer was Senator John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky. Crittenden was ancient, a veteran of the War of 1812, an old supporter of Henry Clay; he had held many state and national offices and he would spend his final years in a fight to keep the Union from dissolving. The convention applauded him, as indeed it applauded all other speakers; no one said anything very controversial, and every mention of the flag, the Constitution, the Union, and the founding fathers drew long cheers. It was almost as if the delegates were making noise in order to drown out the tramp of marching feet, off stage.

This convention denounced most political-party platforms as frauds, and adopted one of its own which was commendably brief and unassailable: it declared simply for the Constitution, the Union, and enforcement of the laws. Then, having nominated Mr. Bell, and having named the distinguished orator, Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, for Vice-President, it adjourned. It had not so much as mentioned slavery in the territories or the fugitive slave laws, and even John Brown had been referred to only twice, in passing. This was mostly a convention of old men, past their time but trying stoutly to work things out so that young men would not have to die in the years just ahead, and it represented a good deal of strength in the border states, where slavery existed on a softer basis than in the cotton South, and where men could occasionally argue about it without wanting to destroy one another. Actually, this convention was all but openly seeking an election that would be settled in Congress (where compromise might yet prevail), and Northern politicians noted that it would inevitably get many votes from members of the dying Know-Nothing party, who expressed their own deep fear of the advance of the nineteenth century by opposing the foreign-born and the Catholic rather than by running a temperature over slavery. This group could win no election itself, but it might keep other people from winning. Its existence would affect what was going to happen in Chicago.²

So would Chicago itself. Despite the enthusiasm it had displayed, Charleston had been somewhat dignified and aloof, and Chicago never dreamed of being either of those things.

The mere fact that the convention was being held here was evidence that western America had blown off the lid. As a city, Chicago was hardly a quarter-century old. Ten years ago it had been a raw frontier town of fewer than 30,000 inhabitants; it had more than 100,000 now, and although it remained raw, it was expansive, vibrant, explosively aware that to be the central city of the Northwest was somehow to be at the very hub of America. Just as the atmosphere of Charleston had had its influence on what the Democrats did there, so Chicago's own atmosphere would shape what the Republicans would do. The party was new and the city was new, and each was growing too fast, and was too enthusiastic about its own growth to worry very much about restraint or dignified behavior.

The delegates would meet in a specially built auditorium— a sprawling two-story affair of lumber known as the Wigwam, measuring 180 feet along one side and 100 feet along the other. It had not been in existence when April began, but it was there now, built in six weeks at surprisingly moderate cost, with the area for the delegates laid out like an enormous stage, a series of spaces for spectators rising upward all about it, a gallery running around three sides. Nobody really knew how many people could be jammed into the place; estimates ranged from 6000 to more than double that number. Pillars were decorated with tinder-dry evergreen boughs, red, white, and blue streamers ran everywhere, and the hall was brilliantly lighted by flaring gas jets; all in all, the Wigwam must have been one of the most dangerous fire traps ever built in America. For the first time, the press gallery was provided with on-the-spot telegraph instruments. Never before had so many reporters tried to cover a convention: the press gallery, big as it was, did not have nearly enough room. More than 900 reporters applied for seats in a space designed to hold sixty.⁸

It was believed that the convention had brought in 25,000 visitors. Chicago contained forty-two hotels, and all of them seemed to be jammed; one observer with a taste for odd statistics learned, or at least estimated, that fully 130 people, unable to rent better resting places, were sleeping on tables in the various hotel billiard rooms. On the Monday and Tuesday just before the opening day of May 16, there were incessant parades along Michigan Avenue, as special trains deposited state delegations and cheering crowds of the curious and the hangers-on. Battalions of Wide-Awakes, the party's new marching clubs, flourishing torches and banners, tramped to and from the lake-front depot while brass bands played and enthusiastic Chicagoans set off rockets from the tops of buildings. Just as at Charleston, the henchmen who came along with the New York delegation struck the host city as rather uncouth; one dazed witness wrote that "they can drink more whiskey, swear as loud and long, sing as bad songs and get up and howl as ferociously as any crowd of Democrats you ever heard."⁴ Before the convention ended, it would develop that Chicago could produce enthusiasts quite as noisy.

One thing was clear to everybody: Senator Seward was the man to beat. He was the country's best-known Republican, the man with more delegates than anyone else had, and his campaign manager, wily Thurlow Weed, of Albany, knew all of the devious ways of politics and wanted, more than he had ever wanted anything in the world, to see Seward become President. Weed was installed in a suite at the Richmond House, holding day-long receptions for delegates who dropped in, or were brought in, to be cultivated, his aides busy everywhere. They were a mixture, these Weed-Seward headquarters men; among them were sluggers like Tom Hyer, the professional pugilist, solid men of commerce, such as Moses H. Grinnell, men of letters, like George W. Curtis—all of them, whatever they were doing, wearing an air of bright confidence. (One wag went so far as to pin a Seward badge, gaudy with the candidate's name and likeness, on the back of Horace Greeley, the distinguished New York editor who wanted Seward beaten as poignantly as Weed wanted him nominated.) Their confidence was reasonable. The convention would cast 465 votes, and a simple majority, 233, would bring the nomination. Seward would certainly get close to 175 on the first ballot, and it seemed likely that the momentum of enthusiasm (aided by loud noises from the galleries) could send him on to victory.⁶

The trouble with being the man to beat is that everybody else tries to beat you. This was especially true at Chicago, where all men knew that with reasonable luck this convention would name the next President; the awareness of approaching victory pressed men here just as forebodings of defeat had pressed men at Charleston. The man who attached himself to the winner could expect to be rewarded. The party faithful wanted to listen to The Word, but as necessitous human beings they were also intensely concerned with the eventual division of the loaves and fishes. There was an especial point to this because the party itself was so new; it had never distributed national patronage before, and it was developing an immense appetite for it. Furthermore, this appetite was concentrated in the Northern section of the country, which meant that the chosen candidate's capacity to win votes could have an equally narrow focus. Only five of the fifteen slave states— Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri— were represented here. The Democrats had painstakingly examined each candidate's record to see whether his orthodoxy could meet every test; the Republicans were examining records to find the man who could most surely carry the North and thus win a majority in the electoral college. Nobody was going to take anything for granted.

Senator Seward's position was weaker than either he or Weed realized, and there were in Chicago men who had diagnosed its weaknesses and were working, literally without sleep, to exploit them. The most effective of these were buzzing in and out of a set of rooms at the Tremont Hotel, where a fat down-state lawyer, Judge David Davis, had set up headquarters for Abraham Lincoln.

Davis had known Lincoln ever since the old circuit-riding days, and when Long John Wentworth, the Republican mayor of Chicago, advised Lincoln that "you ought to have a feller to run you like Seward has Weed," Lincoln had chosen Davis. Never noted as a trial lawyer, and almost wholly lacking in the ability to make a good stump speech, Davis was a thorough man, a hard worker, careful about details, a good organizer and behind-the-scenes executive, and he was about to demonstrate that his political instincts were alert and sensitive. He had gathered together an able group of co-workers. Among them were such men as Leonard Swett, of Blooming-ton, State Auditor Jesse Dubois, Judge Stephen Logan, who used to be Lincoln's law partner, Norman Judd, the railroad lawyer and political leader who had arranged the Lincoln-Douglas debates, hard-fisted Ward Lamon, of Springfield, and the two canny editors of the Chicago Tribune, Charles Ray and Joseph Medill. Their first job now was to survey the field and see what this race was really like.⁶

Aside from Seward, the principal candidates were Governor Salmon P. Chase, of Ohio, Judge Edward Bates, of St. Louis, Simon Cameron, of Pennsylvania, and of course Lincoln himself. Chase was a famous anti-slavery leader: a little too much so, perhaps, for a new party that was going to have to draw some support from the Northern Democrats. Chase had lofty hopes, and yet he was not quite making a campaign of it; he was merely standing off stage, full of dignity and rectitude, willing to receive whatever might be given to him, but not equipped with the guides and beaters needed by a man who hoped to penetrate a jungle like this one at the Wigwam. Bates had the important backing of the famous Blair family and he came from a border state, which was in his favor. If the convention should try to placate the South (which was somewhat unlikely), Bates would be a very likely choice. He had, however, presided over the national convention of the Know-Nothings in 1856 and he would be a loser in any state where the German or other foreign-born vote was essential. Cameron was a typical political boss who could hardly hope to carry anything except his own state of Pennsylvania.

Then there was Lincoln, and Davis and his aides were hard at work reminding people of him. Mayor Wentworth had warned Lincoln to "look out for prominence." The convention would eventually realize, Wentworth said, that a really prominent candidate could not be chosen; then the man who had avoided prominence would have his chance.⁷ Now the Lincoln managers were trying as hard as they could to keep their man out of the limelight and at the same time set men thinking about him; he was a dark horse and for the moment he must stay dark, but he must never become so dark as to be lost to view. The job called for expert handling.

Expert handling it was getting. The immediate problem was to line up as many second-choice votes as possible, to cultivate friendships everywhere, and to get accurate, hour-by-hour knowledge of the shifting political currents among the delegates. Nothing could be done, of course, with a delegation like that of New York, where Weed had everything under control, but if there was the slightest doubt as to where a state's votes would finally land, Davis had one or more aides attached, full time, to that state's delegation.

This involved some intensely practical considerations. If an important politician led his delegation to a candidate and so made that candidate a winner, he would expect to be rewarded for it, in the essential currency of politics—jobs, patronage, a say in the inner councils. Before this convention week began, Dr. Charles Ray, senior editor of the Chicago Tribune, had written a "profoundly private" letter to Lincoln pointing out that "you need a few trusty friends here to say words for you that may be necessary to be said," and urging that the principal managers at Chicago be properly empowered. "A pledge or two," Ray reminded him, "may be necessary when the pinch comes." Lincoln, who had been around politics long enough to know what can happen to a candidate who puts himself unrestrictedly in the hands of his managers, refused to take this bait, writing in return: "Make no contracts that will bind me." Davis and his co-workers would have to do the best they could with promises of their own. They felt their prospects were good, and on May 15 Davis telegraphed Lincoln that "nothing will beat us but old fogy politicians the heart of the delegates are with us."⁸

Down-to-earth problems were not overlooked. The men of the 1860s lived in what are now assumed to be innocent years, but they knew as much as anyone needs to know about the creation and manipulation of mass enthusiasm, and with the primitive means at their disposal they got excellent results. It became evident, for instance, that in the immense pro-Seward entourage that had come on from New York there were hundreds of men who had been brought to Chicago simply because they could yell very loudly. Properly spotted about the Wigwam under orders to stand up and cheer whenever Seward's name was mentioned, these might make uncertain delegates believe that enthusiasm for Seward was sweeping the convention, and the Seward band wagon might thus begin to roll irresistibly. Lincoln needed his own shouters, and the headquarters group at the Tremont Hotel saw to it that he got them.

As Congressman Isaac Arnold remembered afterward: "There was then living in Chicago a man whose voice could drown the roar of Lake Michigan in its wildest fury; nay, it was said that his shout could be heard, on a calm day, across that lake." And there was another man, who lived down on the Illinois River, whose remarkable voice had equal range and carrying qualities; he unfortunately was a Democrat, but he seems to have been malleable and he was asked to take the first train to Chicago. These two, then, the man from Chicago and the down-state Democrat, were told to bring together a group of huskies and take station on opposite sides of the Wigwam. When a key member of the Illinois delegation should take out his handkerchief, each man was to yell as hard as he could, his huskies yelling with him, and the yelling was to continue until the handkerchief vanished. As a matter of pride, Illinois would not let its favorite son be out-shouted.⁹

The convention would generate its own intensity. Vast as the Wigwam was, it could hold but a fraction of the crowd that wanted to get in. Long before the main gates were thrown open, at noon on Wednesday, May 16, the galleries were filled to capacity—3000 persons. The rule here was that only gentlemen accompanied by ladies could be admitted, and ladies were greatly in demand; schoolgirls, it was said, were paid twenty-five cents apiece to help male spectators get by the gatemen, and Halstead reported that certain women of the town plied a brisk if honest business along the same line. One hopeful man found an Indian woman who, at a sidewalk stand, was selling moccasins or some such artifacts to the visitors, and tried to escort her in—failing, when an official lacking in gallantry ruled that she was no lady. . . . When the three 20-foot doors giving access to the convention floor were opened, a dense crush of men came powering into the hall—delegates, alternates, and newspapermen mixed with spectators.¹⁰

In the various delegations were men whose names were now or soon would be nationally famous. Thaddeus Stevens went limping to his place with the Pennsylvanians, and Gideon Welles, his wig a poor match for his voluminous whiskers, led the delegation from Connecticut. John A. Andrew, who would be war governor of his state, led the Massachusetts delegation, and the Wisconsin group was headed by the tense, black-bearded German, Carl Schurz; the immense Davis lounged at ease under the Illinois standard, and William Evarts, a lawyer and orator of national reputation, took his seat as chairman of the New York contingent, expecting to see the nomination go to Seward without delay once the balloting began.

There would be no balloting, however, for two days, and this opening session was an anti-climax. The convention got itself organized, named committees, listened to an anti-slavery speech by the David Wilmot whose famous proviso had touched off so much trouble in Congress after the Mexican War, installed George Ashmun, of Massachusetts, as its president, listened to more oratory, and then adjourned early, one reason for adjournment being the fact that the Chicago Board of Trade, with four steamboats at the water front, was offering all hands a short excursion on Lake Michigan. Some delegates and visitors accepted this invitation. Others returned to the Wigwam to watch an exhibition drill by a corps of Zouaves; and the rest strolled about, visited bars, gathered in hotel rooms for argument, for song, for cards, or for private drinking, and in general disposed of the evening in the way traditional at political conventions.¹¹ The air of pent-up excitement increased, and on Thursday—the day when the convention would hear the report of its platform committee —it began to break loose.

The Seward contingent met that morning in front of Richmond House and paraded straight to the Wigwam, all of the men wearing huge badges, a uniformed band in front blaring away at a popular air—"Oh Isn't He a Darling?" Inside the hall, the immense crowd greeted the report of the platform committee wtih wild shouts, interrupting at almost every paragraph to cheer the statement of the party's creed.

The platform had been drawn up so as to please all Republicans, and it met this desire precisely. It began by asserting that conditions in America made the Republican party a necessity, and it went on to endorse the Declaration of Independence, with especial reference to the part about all men being created equal. It demanded preservation of the Constitution, the rights of the several states and the Federal Union, drawing attention to the fact that all of the recent talk about disunion had been uttered by Democrats, whose incendiary language was briskly denounced as "an avowal of contemplated treason." The Buchanan administration and the Lecompton constitution were condemned, and "the new dogma" that the Constitution automatically carried slavery into the territories was held unsound, "revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country." The normal condition of people in the territories was held to be one of freedom, the authority of Congress to make slavery legal in a territory was denied, and the admission of Kansas as a free state was demanded.

Then, after assailing extravagance in government, the platform advocated a protective tariff, called for a homestead act, denounced the Know-Nothing demand for restriction on the citizenship rights of naturalized immigrants, called for Federal aid for internal improvements, and commended the projected railroad to the Pacific Coast. It concluded by inviting the co-operation of all citizens who agreed with the importance of these "distinctive principles and views."

There was something here for everyone except Southerners —for anti-slavery people, for the foreign-born, for the Eastern manufacturers, for the developing Northwest—and the platform was adopted with a great burst of cheers. Delegates and spectators sprang to their feet, waved their hats, and yelled, the ladies in the gallery fluttered their handkerchiefs and clapped their hands, and Halstead reported that "such a spectacle as was presented for some minutes has never before been witnessed at a convention." He felt, too, that all of this jubilation carried a powerful element of enthusiasm for Seward, and as the crowds poured out into the streets, he wrote that "there is something almost irresistible here in the prestige of his fame."¹²

Seward that Thursday evening was within reaching distance of the nomination, and if balloting could have begun then, he would probably have attained his goal. When the uproar that followed adoption of the platform died down slightly, some Seward delegate arose to move that the convention proceed to the nomination of a candidate, and if this had been done, Seward almost certainly would have got what he wanted. Unfortunately, the convention secretary was compelled to announce that the tally sheets were not quite ready. They would arrive in a few minutes; would the delegates wait?

At that moment the delegates were prepared to do anything but wait. The mood to shout, to parade about, to slap backs, and to rejoice in the prospect of victory was too strong, and the convention adjourned for the evening. The nomination would be made Friday, and the Seward managers were unworried. There would be a great deal of caucusing and pleading during the evening, but the New Yorkers' lines looked firm. At Richmond House headquarters an immense

quantity of champagne was opened and consumed, brass bands tramped all over town with Seward banners in the breeze, serenading state delegations that might still be uncommitted . . . and at the Tremont Hotel the determined men from Illinois settled down for a night of very hard work.¹³

 

Railsplitter

 

When the convention opened, David Davis weighed very nearly 300 pounds. He had hardly had half a dozen hours of sleep in three days, he was mussed and rumpled, and beyond question he had worked off some of that surplus flesh. On this Thursday evening he telegraphed Lincoln that he was "nearly dead from fatigue," and when the convention ended he would be all but completely exhausted;¹ he believed, however, that the convention was going to go the way he wanted it to go if proper steps were taken, and he and the rest of the Lincoln high command went to work the moment the Thursday afternoon session adjourned to see what they could do.

They would work from the fact that the Seward front was not really as solid as it looked, even though most of the political experts in Chicago were about ready, this evening, to concede Seward's nomination. To win the election the Republicans must carry at least three of the four states which were listed as doubtful—New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Despite the wild jubilation that followed adoption of the platform, the party could lose those states if it followed the wrong candidate. Illinois illustrated the problem perfectly. As was the case in most other Northern states, the Republican party in Illinois contained a number of diverse factions. There were the outright abolitionists, and the Free-Soilers who had a more conservative bent; there were former Know-Nothings who distrusted foreigners, and German-born voters who were repelled by Know-Nothingism; there were former Democrats and there were old-line Whigs to whom all former Democrats were suspect; and of all the candidates, only Lincoln had managed to avoid arousing the enmity of one or more of these groups. If the delegates from such states as Indiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania could be shown that Lincoln could please all factions in their states and that Seward could not, Seward could be stopped.

A point of immense importance here was the fact that both Pennsylvania and Indiana, through a quirk in state laws, would hold their state elections in October, a month ahead of the national election. Other things being equal, their voters would line up in these state elections just about as they would in the national election. If the national ticket could not produce internal harmony, the Republicans in Indiana and Pennsylvania would lose in the October balloting and hence would lose in November as well—and, in addition, would provide the party with a deadly psychological handicap all across the North. It was essential, therefore, for the Wigwam to produce a candidate who could win in Indiana and Pennsylvania, and the principal Republican politicians in those two states did not believe Seward could do it. The job facing the group at the Tremont suite was to demonstrate that Lincoln could.

Seward was paying the price which, as Wentworth had said, was apt to be exacted of the man who was too prominent. In his famous remark about the irrepressible conflict, he had, as a matter of fact, said nothing that Lincoln himself had not said when he asserted that a house divided against itself could not stand, but somehow it had made more people angry. He had coupled it with vague, damaging talk about a "higher law" than the Constitution; also—and in some ways this was the biggest handicap of all—he was totally unacceptable to the suspicious Know-Nothings, because he had, as governor of New York, years ago, urged the support of Catholic parochial schools with public funds. Both Indiana and Pennsylvania contained many voters strongly tinged with the Know-Nothing prejudice. Like the Free-Soil moderates who felt that Seward's statements on slavery had been a bit extreme, they might not follow the Republicans if Seward carried the banner. There was, indeed, grave danger that dismaying numbers of them would vote for John Bell, running on the Constitutional Union ticket; if that happened, states which the Republicans ought to carry might wind up in the Democratic column.

The pivotal state of Indiana was already pretty well in line for Lincoln. Key man here was Caleb Smith, a former Whig who had been friendly with Lincoln when Lincoln was in Congress, prominent enough in Indiana Republican ranks to believe that he ought to be named to the cabinet if a Republican won the election. Davis had talked to him carefully and persuasively—indeed, the whole Indiana delegation had been most carefully cultivated—and Smith and the delegation had been won over. It would be asserted afterward that, in flat disregard of Lincoln's order that no binding pledges be made in his name, Davis had promised Smith the cabinet appointment. This may be an overstatement, but in any case Smith had agreed to second Lincoln's nomination from the floor, and the Indiana delegation was prepared to vote for Lincoln on the first ballot.² The job now was to win Pennsylvania, plus such other delegations as might feel that Seward was an unsafe candidate.

So on that Thursday evening there was a meeting at Davis's suite, and if the hoary tradition of a smoke-filled room was not born there, it at least took on a good deal of growth. The Lincoln men had been working hard in Pennsylvania and in New Jersey—another delegation that was uneasy about Seward—and delegates from Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey were convening now to take stock of the situation. On Judd's suggestion, a subcommittee composed of three men from each state was formed, with the hope that it could agree on a candidate, and this group met for five hours and more.

Somewhere around ten o'clock that night the door to Davis's suite opened and the pink, cherubic face of Horace Greeley, fringed with silky hair and whiskers, peered blandly in. As a determined foe of Seward, Greeley realized that the fate of the stop-Seward movement depended on what was being done right here, and as a good reporter he wanted to know what was going on. Had they, he inquired, agreed upon a candidate? Told that they had not agreed, he withdrew. Shortly afterward he sent to his New York Tribune a story that began: "My conclusion, from all that I can gather tonight, is that the opposition to Gov. Seward cannot concentrate on any candidate and that he will be nominated." Editor Halstead, who was also keeping in touch, sent a similar dispatch to his Cincinnati Commercial. He explained later that at midnight on Thursday every man in Chicago believed that Seward was in, and the champagne party at Seward headquarters took on the aspects of a victory celebration.³

But the caucus in the Tremont Hotel was not over. After Greeley left, someone suggested that it was time to see just how many votes each candidate could count on. Davis was very well informed on this point and he produced his own tabulation, which showed that Lincoln had far more votes than any other candidate except Seward. The men from New Jersey and Pennsylvania thereupon agreed that they would call their own delegations into caucus and recommend support of Lincoln on the second ballot. Later that evening the New Jersey crowd swung into line. Pennsylvania would act the following morning, just before the convention was called to order.

What was working for Lincoln here was the old matter of availability. The delegates from these important states were against Seward because they did not think they could carry their states with him, and of the other candidates only Lincoln seemed to lack Seward's handicaps. Judge Bates, satisfactory on so many points, was fatally handicapped now by his former activity in the Know-Nothing party: desperately needing the votes of the foreign-born, the Republicans could hardly hope to get them with Bates. Chase was branded as an extremist; a good many Douglas Democrats would vote Republican this fall if they were appealed to properly, but they could not in any circumstances be won by Chase, whose abolitionist tendencies were pronounced and unmistakable. That left Lincoln. He had avoided the pitfall that awaits the man who is too prominent.⁴

The thing was not yet done, however. Next morning—Friday, May 18, with the opening of the session very near— Davis and Swett had a caller: Judge Joseph Casey, of Harrisburg, who was empowered to speak for the ambitious Pennsylvania boss, Simon Cameron. Cameron, said Casey, wanted to make a deal. He would swing the Pennsylvania vote to Lincoln, provided he could be sure that he would become Secretary of the Treasury in the new cabinet, and provided also that he could have complete disposal of all Federal patronage in his state.