Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (45 page)

17
. Oates,
To Purge This Land
, 323; Villard,
John Brown
, 568.

18
.
Richmond Enquirer
and
Richmond Whig
, quoted in Henry T. Shanks,
The Secession Movement in Virginia, 1847–1861
(Richmond, 1934), 90; William A. Walsh to L. O'B. Branch, Dec. 8, 1859, in Avery O. Craven,
The Growth of Southern Nationalism
1848–1861 (Baton Rouge, 1953), 311.

19
. Villard,
John Brown
, 563; Philip S. Foner,
Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict
(Chapel Hill, 1941), 161–62.

20
. Oates,
To Purge This Land
, 310; Villard,
John Brown
, 472; Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 104.

Fearing political damage, Republican leaders hastened to disavow Brown. Seward condemned the old man's "sedition and treason" and pronounced his execution "necessary and just." Even though Brown "agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong," said Lincoln, "that cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason." Governor Samuel Kirkwood of Iowa decried Brown's "act of war" as "a greater crime" than even "the filibuster invaders of Cuba and Nicaragua were guilty of," though "in the minds of many" Brown's raid was "relieved to some extent of its guilt [because] the blow was struck for freedom, and not for slavery."
²¹

Southerners did not like this comparison of Brown with the filibusters. They also detected a sting in the tail of Lincoln's and Kirkwood's remarks ("agreed with us in thinking slavery wrong . . . blow was struck for freedom"). To southern people the line separating Lincoln's moral convictions from Brown's butchery was meaningless. "We regard every man," declared an Atlanta newspaper, "who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing" as "an enemy to the institutions of the South." As for the supportive resolutions of northern conservatives, they were so much "gas and vaporing." "Why have not the conservative men at the North frowned down the infamous black-republican party?" asked
De Bow's Review
. "They have foreborne to crush it, till now it overrides almost everything at the North." On the Senate floor Robert Toombs warned that the South would "never permit this Federal government to pass into the traitorous hands of the Black Republican party." "Defend yourselves!" Toombs thundered to the southern people. "The enemy is at your door, wait not to meet him at your hearthstone, meet him at the doorsill, and drive him from the temple of liberty, or pull down its pillars and involve him in a common ruin."
²²

John Brown's ghost stalked the South as the election year of 1860 opened. Several historians have compared the region's mood to the "Great Fear" that seized the French countryside in the summer of 1789 when peasants believed that the "King's brigands are coming" to slaughter them.
²³
Keyed up to the highest pitch of tension, many slaveholders

21
. Seward and Kirkwood quoted in Villard,
John Brown
, 564–68;
CWL
, III, 502.

22
.
Atlanta Confederacy
, quoted in Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 108n;
DeBow's Review
, 29 (July 1860), reprinted in Paul F. Paskoff and Daniel J. Wilson, eds.,
The Cause ofthe South: Selections from DeBow's Review 1846–1867
(Baton Rouge, 1982), 219–20;
CG
, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., Appendix, 93.

23
. Ollinger Crenshaw,
The Slave States in the Presidential Election of 1860
(Baltimore, 1945),
chap. 5
; Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 67–68; Oates,
To Purge This Land
, 322–23.

and yeomen alike were ready for war to defend hearth and home against those Black Republican brigands. Thousands joined military companies; state legislatures appropriated funds for the purchase of arms. Every barn or cotton gin that burned down sparked new rumors of slave insurrections and abolitionist invaders. Every Yankee in the South became
persona non grata
. Some of them received a coat of tar and feathers and a ride out of town on a rail. A few were lynched. The citizens of Boggy Swamp, South Carolina, ran two northern tutors out of the district. "Nothing definite is known of their abolitionist or insurrectionary sentiments," commented a local newspaper, "but being from the North, and, therefore, necessarily imbued with doctrines hostile to our institutions, their presence in this section has been obnoxious." The northern-born president of an Alabama college had to flee for his life. In Kentucky a mob drove thirty-nine people associated with an antislavery church and school at Berea out of the state. Thirty-two representatives in the South of New York and Boston firms arrived in Washington reporting "indignation so great against Northerners that they were compelled to return and abandon their business."
²⁴
In this climate of fear and hostility, Democrats prepared for their national convention at Charleston in April 1860.

II

Most southern Democrats went to Charleston with one overriding goal: to destroy Douglas. In this they were joined by a scattering of administration Democrats from the North. Memories of Lecompton and the Freeport doctrine thwarted all efforts to heal the breach. This "Demagogue of Illinois," explained an Alabama editor, "deserves to perish upon the gibbet of Democratic condemnation, and his loathsome carcass to be cast at the gate of the Federal City."
²⁵
Some lower-South Democrats even preferred a Republican president to Douglas in order to make the alternatives facing the South starkly clear: submission or secession. And they ensured this result by proceeding to cleave the Democratic party in two.

24
. Woodward, "John Brown's Private War," 62–66; Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 108n.

25
.
Opelika Weekly Southern Era
, April 18, 1860, quoted in Donald E. Reynolds,
Editors Make War: Southern Newspapers in the Secession Crisis
(Nashville, 1970), 35.

The Alabama Democratic convention took the first step in January 1860 by instructing its delegates to walk out of the national convention if the party refused to adopt a platform pledging a federal slave code for the territories. Other lower-South Democratic organizations followed suit. In February, Jefferson Davis presented the substance of southern demands to the Senate in resolutions affirming that neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could "impair the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common territories. . . . It is the duty of the federal government there to afford, for that as for other species of property, the needful protection."
²⁶
The Senate Democratic caucus, dominated by southerners, endorsed the resolutions and thereby threw down the gauntlet to Douglas at Charleston.

In the fevered atmosphere of 1860, Charleston was the worst possible place for the convention.
²⁷
Douglas delegates felt like aliens in a hostile land. Fire-eating orators held forth outdoors each evening. Inside the convention hall, northerners had a three-fifths majority because delegates were apportioned in the same way as electoral votes rather than by party strength. Douglas's supporters were as determined to block a slave-code plank as southerners were to adopt one. There was thus an "irrepressible conflict" in the party, wrote the brilliant young journalist from Cincinnati Murat Halstead, whose reports provide the best account of the convention. "The South will not yield a jot of its position. . . . The Northern Democracy . . . are unwilling to submit themselves to assassination or to commit suicide."
²⁸

The crisis came with the report of the platform committee, in which each state had one vote. California and Oregon joined the slave states to provide a majority of 17 to 16 for a slave-code plank similar to the Jefferson Davis resolutions. The minority report reaffirmed the 1856 platform endorsing popular sovereignty and added a pledge to obey a Supreme Court decision on the powers of a territorial legislature. This was not good enough for southerners. They accepted the axiom of the Freeport doctrine that a Court decision would not enforce itself. Slave property needed federal protection, said the committee chairman, a North

26
.
CG
, 36 Cong., 1 Sess., 658.

27
. Charleston had been selected as the site by a special Democratic committee chaired by a New Yorker who hoped that the choice of a southern city would promote party harmony!

28
. William B. Hesseltine, ed.,
Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead Reports the Caucuses of 1860
(Baton Rouge, 1960), 35, 44.

Carolinian, so that when the United States acquired Cuba, Mexico, and Central America any slaveholder could take his property there with perfect security. The foremost orator for southern rights, William Lowndes Yancey, gave a rousing speech in favor of the majority report. The galleries rang with cheers as Yancey launched into his peroration: "We are in a position to ask you to yield," he said to northern delegates. "What right of yours, gentlemen of the North, have we of the South ever invaded? . . . Ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the property that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake."
²⁹

After this eloquence the replies of northern delegates sounded futile, indeed almost funereal. "We cannot recede from [popular sovereignty] without personal dishonor," said a Douglas Democrat from Ohio, "
never, never, never
, so help us God." And they did not. After two days of bitter parliamentary wrangling, Douglas men pushed through their platform by a vote of 165 to 138 (free states 154 to 30, slave states 11 to 108). Fifty delegates from the lower South thereupon walked out. Everything that followed was anticlimax. Douglas could not muster the two-thirds majority required for nomination. Nor could the convention agree on anyone else during fifty-seven acrimonious ballots. Exhausted and heartsick, the delegates adjourned to try again six weeks later in the more hospitable clime of Baltimore. Yancey gave them a ringing farewell. Speaking in Charleston's moonlit courthouse square, he inspired a huge crowd to give three deafening cheers "for an Independent Southern Republic" with his concluding words: "Perhaps even now, the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new revolution."
³⁰

Attempts to reunite the party seemed hopeless. Delegates from the Northwest went home angry toward their southern brethren. "I never heard Abolitionists talk more uncharitably and rancorously of the people of the South than the Douglas men," wrote a reporter. "They say they do not care a d—n where the South goes. . . . 'She may go out of the Convention into hell,' for all they care." But most southern bolters aimed to seek readmission at Baltimore. Their strategy was "to rule or ruin," wrote Alexander Stephens, who had moved toward moderation during the past year and was now supporting Douglas.
³¹
If readmitted, the bolters

29
.
Speech of William L. Yancey of Alabama, Delivered in the National DemocraticConvention
(Charleston, 1860).

30
. Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 215; Robert W. Johannsen,
Stephen A. Douglas
(New York, 1973), 754; Hesseltine, ed.,
Three Against Lincoln
, 86.

31
. Hesseltine, ed.,
Three Against Lincoln
, 101; Stephens quoted in George Fort Milton,
The Eve of Conflict: Stephen
A.
Douglas and the Needless War
(Boston, 1934), 468.

intended to insist again on a slave-code platform and if defeated to walk out again, this time with the promise of most upper-South delegates to join them. If they were denied admission, the same upper-South delegates would bolt and help their cotton-state compatriots form a new party.