Coming Fury, Volume 1 (17 page)

Looking toward the angry men of the South, Seward was saying: “I can hear their disputes, their fretful controversies, their threats that if their own separate interests are not gratified and consulted by the Federal government they will separate from this Union—will secede from it, will dissolve it; and while I hear on their busy sidewalks these clamorous contentions I am able to say: ‘Peace, be still. These subjects of contention and dispute that so irritate and anger and provoke you are but ephemeral and temporary. These institutions which you so much desire to conserve, and for which you think you would sacrifice the welfare of the people of this continent, are almost as ephemeral as yourselves.’ ”

Seward refused to worry—at least to worry in public—and he assured an audience at St. Paul, in a speech which was reprinted in pamphlet form and distributed in every Northern state: “The man is born today who will live to see the American Union, the American people—the whole of them—coming into the harmonious understanding that this is the land of the free men—for the free men—that it is the land for the white man; and that whatever elements there are to disturb its present peace or irritate the passions of its possessors will in the end—and that end will come before long—pass away, without capacity in any way to disturb the harmony of, or endanger, this great Union.”
⁹

These were fine words, and Seward would repeat them. Speaking in New York a little later, he had words of jaunty confidence: “For ten, aye twenty years, these threats have been renewed in the same language and in the same form, about the first day of November every four years, when it happened to come before the day of the presidential election. I do not doubt but that these Southern statesmen and politicians think they are going to dissolve the Union, but I think they are going to do no such thing.”
¹⁰

Chanting these assurances, Seward doubtless spoke for most of
the men who were listening to him. Yet there was an uneasy doubt under everything—as uneasy as the doubt of slavery’s own eternal rightness which disturbed the subconscious minds of men in the South—and it centered about that grim question: If the Republicans win this election, will the Southern states leave the Union? As Seward said, the threat had been made before. It had lost its force in the North, like the alarming cry of “Wolf!” too often repeated. As a nation of poker players the Americans knew what to do with a bluff when they met one; the trouble now was that no one could be entirely certain that this was a bluff, and the consequences that might come if it were called and turned out to be no bluff were staggering to think about. The result was that nobody talked about them. Seward went about the country voicing his vibrant belief that all of this was talk and nothing more, and Lincoln stayed in Springfield (dusty smoke from the torchlight parade still hanging in the air to cloud men’s vision: ominously like powder smoke and the mist of dreadful combat, if anyone had thought about it) and had the secretariat send out form letters, on the logical ground that no one could honestly believe that he meant enmity toward the South; and Stephen A. Douglas, pausing in Chicago in the midst of a furious campaign which he knew he could not win, remarked soberly; “I believe this country is in more danger now than at any other moment since I have known anything of public life.”
¹¹

The Republican campaign was enormously effective. It moved, it had hot life in it, it caught men up and pulled them along, and the Wide-Awakes went down the sultry streets with torchlight to lead them on, bands playing, men yelling, stump speakers orating from every available soap box, with the marchers flourishing fence rails and displaying log cabins and flaunting banners to proclaim the overriding honesty of the chosen man; and no one stopped to ask: Do these men to the South of us really mean what they are saying, and if they do mean it, what are we prepared to do? There was an undertone of violence in this election. Preparations were being made in the cotton belt, and in the North the men who supported Lincoln were, as if by deep instinct, forming vaguely military marching groups, dressing in gaudy uniforms and parading to military music, troopers enlisted to defend they did not quite know
what. The campaign might, on surface appearance, be blowing off steam, but it was actually building up an uncontainable pressure. The country as a whole wanted no irrepressible conflict between the sections, but the claims of sectionalism had become too strong to be ignored. The South had one sectional party and the North had another, and as far as anyone could see, it would probably be a case where the devil would take the hindmost, or perhaps everyone together in a hand basket.

The campaign, in short, was unreal. Posing as the most cynical of realists, the politicians had retained cynicism but had lost realism, and now they were entangled with something they could not handle. Parades and loud noises were taking the place of reasoned discussion. The slanting plain that led down to the sea was growing steeper and steeper, and the rush was moving faster and faster. In the North, men could listen to military music and to the unbroken thud of the feet of marching men; in the South, they could listen to the extremists. Edmund Ruffin was writing to Yancey, saying that a Republican victory was obviously coming and that it would be “a clear and unmistakable indication of future & fixed domination of the Northern section & its abolition policy over the Southern states & their institutions, & the beginning of a sure & speedy progress to the extermination of Negro slavery & the consequent utter ruin of the prosperity of the South.” The only possible answer to this, he wrote, must be secession. In his diary, Ruffin wrote that his sons hoped that Lincoln would be defeated but that he did not. “I most earnestly & anxiously desire Lincoln to be elected—because I have hope that at least one State, S.C., will secede, & that others will follow—& even if otherwise, I wish the question tested & settled now. If there is a general submission now, there never will be future maintenance of our rights—& the end of Negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions & our fate.”
¹²

Few men were as realistic or as outspoken as Edmund Ruffin. There were even times when it seemed as if the pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties were repeating the same ugly words. Yancey himself got into New York, in the middle of this campaign, and he made a lighthearted, taunting speech which was strangely like the thoughts
which that Cincinnati campaign newspaper,
The Railsplitter
, had given to the North a few weeks earlier.

Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the prosperity of the South and to that of the North as well; and, furthermore, it was nothing any Northerner need worry about. “It is an institution, too, that doesn’t harm you, for we don’t let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don’t trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the nose of a Northerner.” Yet the North might elect Lincoln, who would “build up an abolitionist party in every Southern state,” and Yancey warned that this would not be borne: “With the election of a black Republican, all the South would be menaced. Emissaries will percolate between master and slave as water between the crevices of the rocks underground.… The keystone of the arch of the Union is already crumbling. A more weighty question was never before you. One freighted with the fate of societies and of nationalities is on your mind.”
¹³

Perhaps Senator Douglas had been both too clever and too outspoken. He was a tough little man who knew all of the political tricks, and he was also a hard-boiled realist, and in these capacities he had devised a Kansas-Nebraska act with popular sovereignty for an antidote, and the nation was not quite ready for it. He had unintentionally compelled the North to contemplate an arrogant slave power which would inflict its peculiar institution on the harsh western plains, as if everything beyond the Missouri could be brought under the confines of a law that seemed to fit the Tombigbee and the Yazoo. To the South, at the same time, he had given foreknowledge of an unendurable truth—that slavery would die unless the outside world dropped all other concerns to prop it up, which was obviously impossible. Because he had done these things he could not become President of the United States; the North derided him for liking slavery too much, and the deep South
hated him because he liked it too little. Perhaps the truth was that the issue of slavery had become, as men’s emotions then stood, both intolerable and insoluble. Douglas had tried to reduce the issue to something that could be disposed of in the ordinary give-and-take of politics, to present America’s destiny as something that did not have to lie under the control of extremists. The conflicting moralities of men profoundly in earnest would prevent it. The showdown might have shattering impact, but it would have to come.

It was worst in the South. There Douglas was a symbol. Lincoln might be the black-visaged enemy who threatened to upset everything the South lived by—namely, the notion that a chosen people might live by the unremitting toil of an inferior race fated to hew wood and draw water—but Douglas had come to look like the apostate, the turncoat, the former friend who appeared on the other side when the pinch came. Douglas was the more menacing because he bore no ill-will. In his position, in this summer of 1860, the slavery system could read its own sentence of ultimate death. To get away from him, the men who had Southern sentiment in their control had determined that the choice would be between the Black Republicans and disunion.
¹

As the hot weeks passed, following the great conventions, the choice began to be clearer. A political maneuver designed to force concessions was running into the knowledge that the forced concessions would not be made; and the alternative was to break away altogether, to try against impossible odds to erect a self-contained nation that would base itself on an outworn foundation. In sheer self-defense the people who had chosen this gambit were asking whether what they were going to do would mean war and destruction. Since no other candidate was readily available, they would ask it most directly of Senator Douglas himself.

For Douglas, of all the candidates, was the one who was trying to make a real campaign. The swing around the circle was new at that time. A man nominated for the presidency usually stayed at home, letting what he was speak for him, reflecting quietly that a politician’s first duty was to get elected, and although his supporters might go to almost any log-cabin-and-hard-cider excess, the candidate himself was supposed to act as if he did not really know what they were doing. Douglas would not follow this pattern.
He was intense, dynamic, a man who was burning himself out, a crafty politician lifting himself in this final year of his life above the craft of politics; he would campaign across all the South, openly bidding for votes, arguing his case in person from any stump that was available. He came to Norfolk, Virginia, late in August, to speak from the steps of the City Hall, and he was blunt without qualification.

“I desire no man to vote for me,” he said, “unless he hopes and desires the Union maintained and preserved intact by the faithful execution of every act, every line and every letter of the written Constitution which our fathers bequeathed to us.” Sectional parties, whether they were born in the North or in the South, were “the great evil and curse of this country,” and it was time for men who loved the unbroken country to see whether they could not find some common principle on which they could stand and defeat both Northern and Southern agitators. Someone in the audience called out to ask whether, if Lincoln should be elected, secession would not be justified. Douglas met this without flinching.

“To this I emphatically answer ‘No,’ ” he said. “The election of a man to the presidency by the American people, in conformity with the Constitution of the United States, would not justify any attempt at dissolving this glorious confederacy.”

There was another question. Suppose the cotton states, on the election of Lincoln, should secede from the Union without waiting for some overt act against their constitutional rights: where would Senator Douglas then stand in respect to the act of Southern secession? His reply was uncompromising: “It is the duty of the President of the United States, and of all others in authority under him, to enforce the laws of the United States passed by Congress and as the courts expound them: and I, as in duty bound by my oath of fidelity to the Constitution, would do all in my power to aid the government of the United States in maintaining the supremacy of the laws against all resistance to them, come from whatever quarter it might.”
²

A man asking Southerners to vote for him in the summer of 1860 had to have courage to say that. Saying it, Douglas raised a storm; and when protest was made, he demanded that the same questions be asked of John C. Breckinridge. (One oddity of the
campaign was the fact that in the North Douglas was running against Lincoln, and in the South he was running against Breckinridge; and the Lincoln managers, although they aimed most of their shots at Douglas, were sometimes worried much more about the vote John Bell might get.)

Not long after he had spoken in Norfolk, Douglas was at Raleigh, North Carolina, and there he was even more explicit about what the Constitution meant to him and the way in which he would enforce it. Speaking for the men of the Northwest, he declared that since they had so great a stake in the Union, the men who felt as he felt were determined to maintain it, and that they knew but one way to do this—to enforce the Constitution rigidly, line by line and clause by clause, precisely as it had come down from the founding fathers, without stopping to ask whether Southern fire-eaters or Northern abolitionists liked it or not.

So far, so good; in the political jargon of that day, to speak for strict enforcement of the Constitution was simply to say that the Constitutional guarantee of slavery must be respected. But Douglas went on to insist that the Constitution also provided for the integrity of the Federal Union, and he wanted all men to know that he considered this guarantee as good as the other. “I am in favor,” he said, “of executing in good faith every clause and provision of the Constitution and of protecting every right under it—and then hanging every man who takes up arms against it.” While the audience was digesting this assertion, Douglas went on to drive the point home. He would use force and the extreme rigor of law against disunionists: