Coming Fury, Volume 1 (6 page)

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.
⁴

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 that 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 Gushing, 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.”
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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 some time 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.