Coming Fury, Volume 1 (14 page)

But the show was not over. Like Charleston, Baltimore on this final day had two conventions. While the original convention was nominating Douglas, the anti-Douglas men convened in the hall of the Maryland Institute. They considered themselves the real Democratic convention, and they were in high good spirits. The Baltimore
Sun
remarked that there were no arguments and no fights: “All restraint of feeling had disappeared,” and it was easy to recognize “the perfect restoration of that geniality of intercourse which is alone the earnest diagonal of a harmonious result.” Caleb Cushing, greeted with applause, was installed as chairman, and when he called
the roll of the states, it became apparent that this was largely a Southern convention.

Sixteen delegates were present from Massachusetts, two from New York, one from Vermont, and one from Iowa; the border states were all represented, and there were delegations from California and from Oregon. No other Northern states were represented, but the cotton states were out in force—except for South Carolina: clinging rigidly to principle, the South Carolina delegation was still in Richmond, watching from afar, prepared to endorse what was done here if all went as it should. The reporter from the
Sun
remarked that he had never before seen the Southern leaders looking so happy. Yancey sat at his ease and “glowed with satisfaction,” and even Georgia’s redoubtable Senator Robert Toombs, usually so grim of visage, showed a face “for once lit up with good cheer.” The general atmosphere, the
Sun
man believed, was “a feeling of sectional pride and loyalty to the Southern leaders that is superior to convictions of either principle or expediency.”

It did not take this harmonious convention long to do what it had convened to do. A platform was speedily put together and adopted, bluntly asserting the sharp pro-slavery principles that had been fought for so hard at Charleston, commending the projected acquisition of Cuba and endorsing the plan for a railroad from some point on the Mississippi River to some point on the Pacific Coast. Then John C. Breckinridge was placed in nomination; he won a two-thirds majority on the first ballot, and was given the nomination unanimously, and Joseph Lane, of Oregon, was named for the vice-presidency. (These nominations were warmly approved by the Richmond convention.) And then, before final adjournment, the convention listened to Yancey.

Yancey was jubilant. What he had worked for over the years was now coming to pass, and it was his time to crow. “The storm clouds of faction have drifted away,” he said, “and the sunlight of principle, under the Constitution, and of the Union under the Constitution, shines brightly upon the national Democracy.” The party, the Constitution, and the Union itself were safe: and yet he himself was no worshiper at the shrine of the Union. “I am no Union shrieker. I meet great questions fairly, on their own merits. I do not try to drown the judgment of the people shrieking for the
Union. I am neither for the Union nor against the Union—neither for disunion nor against disunion. I urge or oppose measures upon the ground of their constitutionality and wisdom or the reverse.”
¹⁰

Yancey went on at length, reaching at last the point of anticlimax; spectators in the gallery began to leave, Chairman Cushing fidgeted visibly in his chair, and this speech was the last one. The convention adjourned … and the country had two Democratic parties and two Democratic candidates. Editor Halstead reflected that the real trouble lay in the convention system, which was no better than “a system of swindling.” The Douglas men, he felt, had come to Baltimore blinded by their own enthusiasm: “They did not know the power and desperation of the South, and were foolish enough to believe the opposition to them in that quarter would quietly subside. They were, however, met in a spirit more intolerant than their own.”
¹¹

If the leaders could speak for the people, the South had committed itself. It would not permit Stephen A. Douglas to become President, even though the price of beating him might be the election of a Black Republican. Such an election, since it would be manifestly intolerable, would be proper ground for dissolution of the Federal Union; but the dissolution would come, not to avoid an immediate threat to the stability of Southern society, but as an alternative preferable to the tacit admission that the institution which Southern society lived by might some day have to undergo change. At Charleston and at Baltimore the South had taken its stand. It would remain the South, separate and unalterable. He who could not subscribe to that fact would be an enemy.

The motives that compel men to act are sometimes as confusing as the things that grow out of the completed actions. When the Southern delegates walked proudly out of the Democratic conventions they drew armies after them, and put the touch of fire on quaintly named places which no one then knew anything about—Chickamauga Creek, Stone’s River, the tidewater barrens at Cold
Harbor, and the drowsy market town of Gettysburg, to name but a few. But why they did this and why it had to come out as it did are questions that no one then could have answered and that remain riddles to this day.
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In part, what was done and what came of it depended on what other men would do in response—it took two sides, after all, to bring about a Sumter bombardment, a battle of Antietam, or a rough-neck march from Atlanta to the sea. But a certain part of it came out of a refusal to admit that the nineteenth century was not going to end as it had begun. For a great number of reasons the American South was fated to try to stay just as it was in a time when everything men lived by was changing from top to bottom. This was the commitment that had been made and that would be paid for. Why?

Men’s motives (to repeat) are mixed and obscure, and none of the many separate decisions which brought war to America in 1861 is wholly explicable. It is quite possible that the choice which was made at these conventions in 1860 came at least in part out of a general, unreasoned resentment against immigration and the immigrant.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans both North and South could see that something cherished and familiar was being lost. Looking back only a few years, it was easy to see a society where (if the glaze of years could be trusted) everyone thought, spoke, and acted more or less alike, living harmoniously by a common tradition. That society, in retrospect, seemed to have been singularly uncomplicated and unworried—a loose amalgam of small cities, quiet towns, and peaceful farms, slow in movement, lacking railroads and telegraph lines and owning no factories of consequence, simple and self-sustaining, owing the outside world no more than casual acknowledgment—a society stirred by perfectionist impulses, perhaps, but nevertheless living to itself alone.

But this fragment of the golden age was growing dimmer as years passed. Revolutionary change was taking place everywhere, or was visibly ready to take place, and people who liked things as they had been found the change abhorrent.
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Furthermore, it seemed possible that newcomers were at least partly responsible for the change. People whose background touched neither Jamestown nor Plymouth Rock were arriving by the thousands—Germans, Irish,
French, Italians, men of new tongues and new creeds and new folk ways, cut adrift from Europe by famine, by revolution, or by simple restless hope, crossing the ocean to make this new land their own. It was easy to feel that they were corrupting the old America. So there was a sudden flare-up of bitter nativist feeling. A whole political party dedicated to curbing the immigrant arose, elected Congressmen and governors, even aspired (without success) to take control of the Federal government; the American, or Know-Nothing, party, which stained generations of American life with the indelible hue of its own intolerant yearning for a simpler age. As a political movement it did not live long. A country where every citizen was the descendant of immigrants could not for very long ascribe to the immigrant all of the disturbing problems that were coming as the inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. So Know-Nothingism died, even though its lingering existence was one reason why Mr. Seward was not blessed with the Republican nomination at Chicago; but the mere fact that it had risen so quickly and spread so widely testified to a changing nation’s profound unease in the presence of change.

To fear change meant to fear the alien—the man who looked and talked and acted differently, and who therefore was probably dangerous. And of all the groups whose migration to America had caused strain, the largest of all, and the one whose presence seemed to be the most disturbing, was one racially homogenous bloc which, to men of that day, seemed to be entirely beyond assimilation. Its members had been coming in for the better part of two centuries. When they arrived they did not fan out across the land, dispersing and mingling and losing clear-cut identity among people already stamped with Americanism, as most immigrants did. These, instead, settled in large groups, congregating in some states until they actually constituted a majority of the population, going to other states hardly at all, clinging with pathetic tenacity to their own customs and folk ways. Of all the immigrant groups these were the most distinctive—in language, in appearance, in culture—and although they were among the most peaceful, easygoing, and uncomplaining people the world has ever seen, their mere presence frightened native Americans almost beyond endurance. Because this was so, the navy patrolled the seas to see that no more of these
people took ship for America, and in the states where they settled there were strict laws, rigidly enforced, for their control.

These people, of course, were the Negroes, who had come from Africa—mostly from the enormous, ill-omened bight of Benin, the Slave Coast, from the steaming concentration camps which had been set up for them on those pestilential shores as depots of embarkation. That they had emigrated from their native lands through no desire of their own made no difference; they had come from beyond the seas and now they were here, and a bewildered country that was inclined to give all immigrants some of the blame for its unresolved problems had become so exasperated by the mere presence of these Africans that in 1860 it could discuss its present difficulties and its future way out of them only in terms of this one specific group.

The long voyage across the sea to America lies embedded in the subconscious memory of every American. It was a hard trip even under the best of conditions, and many people died trying to achieve it, but it was made more tolerable by the unvoiced promise that lay at the end. After it was made, its hardships and dangers faded slowly out of sight because those who came were volunteers led on by hope, and there was something in the New World to justify that hope after the trip had ended. But for the Negro it had been different. The trip itself was worse—fearfully, unspeakably worse—and what came after it was very little better than the trip itself. The institution of slavery had become comparatively benign, to be sure, but it was still slavery: a vast system of forced labor that sustained the economy of half a continent, offering to those who labored no prospect whatever for a better life. To the Negro, hope was denied. There was only survival, bought at the price of surrendering human dignity. The Negro had to remain what he was and as he was, his mere presence a mocking denial of the nation’s basic belief in freedom and the advancement of the human spirit. He was the one man in America who could not be allowed a share in America’s meaning.

Since he was not allowed to talk, the Negro did not complain much about this, but the business was disturbing to other people because it was obvious that slavery was morally wrong and everyone knew that things morally wrong could not endure; nor could they
bring enduring good fortune to anyone. It was supposed, half a century or more before this darkening year of 1860, that in the fullness of time slavery would wither away in the natural course of things as an evil outgrown. But the business did not work out that way. The America which had seemed as pastoral as Eden was becoming a very different sort of place, and the conditions under which slavery existed grew extremely complex; and presently the very forces that made slavery more and more of an anachronism worked powerfully to keep it alive. Modern industrialism, taking shape beyond the seas but touching America as well, exerted a pressure beneath which the Southern states of America were all but helpless. These states could produce enormous quantities of cotton. Using slave labor they could produce it very cheaply, and in steadily increasing volume; and because they could do this they had to do it, for their land had become the base for an industrial process that was entirely outside of their control. By the middle of the nineteenth century, America had reached a point at which it could discard slavery only at an incalculable cost.

A profound change was taking place in the world. Because of such unconsidered factors as the invention of the steam engine, the development of semi-automatic machinery, the growth of worldwide systems of cheap transportation and finance, and the opening of limitless markets that had never existed before, the existence of the industrial nation became possible. It was possible, that is, for a busy nation to sustain itself by selling, to a market beyond its own borders, goods made from raw materials which it did not produce. To a certain extent what was happening in America now—what was putting the 1860 election outside of political rationality-was simply a reflection of this fact.

By singular circumstance, the great cotton-spinning industry of England, paralleled somewhat by a similar industry in France and by an American counterpart to the east of the Connecticut River, was the first great industry to develop in this way. The British textile manufacturers were showing what could happen when centralized production relying on distant sources of supply had a world market to exploit, and this was something altogether new under the sun.
³
The nations of the earth would no longer be entirely self-sustaining; in a backhanded and wholly misunderstood way, men
all about the world would become members of one another, not because they wanted to, but because the world itself was changing. The black field hand in the Yazoo Delta and the rich planter who owned him, the mill hand in Manchester and the ultimate consumer in Berlin, Capetown and Baghdad were tied together now, made subtly interdependent in a way no one was ready to understand.