Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (36 page)

Lincoln lost the election, but it did him no harm. In fact, it increased his national visibility tremendously. With the Democrats further fracturing along North-South lines, the Republicans were beginning to feel confident about their chances in the presidential campaign of 1860. And Abraham Lincoln had the look of a candidate who might be able to win the White House for them.

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LINCOLN’S
“House Divided” speech at Springfield, Illinois (June 17, 1858):

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.

Why did John Brown attack a federal arsenal?

Debates, antislavery novels, abolitionist conventions, Congress, and the Supreme Court had all failed. Some said action was needed. And the man shouting loudest for action was John Brown (1800–59). Viewed through history as a lunatic, psychotic, fanatic, visionary, and martyr, Brown came from a New England abolitionist family, several of whom were quite insane. A failure in most of his undertakings, he had gone to Kansas with some of his twenty-two children to fight for the antislavery cause, and gained notoriety for an attack that left five pro-slavery settlers hacked to pieces.

After the massacre at Pottawatomie, Brown went into hiding, but he had cultivated wealthy New England friends who believed in his violent rhetoric. A group known as the Secret Six formed to fund Brown’s audacious plan to march south, arm the slaves who would flock to his crusade, and establish a black republic in the Appalachians to wage war against the slaveholding South. Brown may have been crazy, but he was not without a sense of humor. When President Buchanan put a price of $250 on his head, Brown responded with a bounty of $20.50 on Buchanan’s.

Among the people Brown confided in was Frederick Douglass; Brown saw Douglass as the man slaves would flock to, a “hive for the bees.” But the country’s most famous abolitionist attempted to dissuade Brown, not because he disagreed with violence but because he thought Brown’s chosen target was suicidal. Few volunteers answered Brown’s call to arms, although Harriet Tubman signed on with Brown’s little band. She fell sick, however, and was unable to join the raid.

On October 16, 1859, Brown, with three of his sons and fifteen followers, white and black, attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the Potomac River not far from Washington, D.C. Taking several hostages, including one descendant of George Washington, Brown’s brigade occupied the arsenal. But no slaves came forward to join them. The local militia was able to bottle Brown up inside the building until federal marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart arrived and captured Brown and the eight men who had survived the assault.

Within six weeks Brown was indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged by the state of Virginia, with the full approval of President Buchanan. But during the period of his captivity and trial, this wild-eyed fanatic underwent a transformation of sorts, becoming a forceful and eloquent spokesman for the cause of abolition.

While disavowing violence and condemning Brown, many in the North came to the conclusion that he was a martyr in a just cause. Even peaceable abolitionists who eschewed violence, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, overlooked Brown’s homicidal tendencies and glorified him. Thoreau likened Brown to Christ; Emerson wrote that Brown’s hanging would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

The view in the South, of course, was far different. Fear of slave insurrection still ran deep, and the memory of Nat Turner (see Chapter 3) remained fresh. To southern minds, John Brown represented Yankee interference in their way of life taken to its extreme. Even conciliatory voices in the South turned furious in the face of the seeming beatification of Brown. When northerners began to glorify Brown while disavowing his tactics, it was one more blow forcing the wedge deeper and deeper between North and South.

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JOHN BROWN
at his execution:

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

Why did the southern states secede from the United States?

Within days of Lincoln’s election in 1860, the South Carolina legislature voted to secede from the Union. In his final message to Congress, lame-duck president Buchanan stressed that states had no right to secede, but having always favored the southern cause, Buchanan did nothing to stop such an action. In South Carolina, local militia began to seize the federal forts in Charleston’s harbor. Buchanan attempted weakly to reinforce Fort Sumter, the last Charleston fort in federal hands, but the supply ship turned back. (On leaving the White House, Buchanan is supposed to have told Lincoln, “My dear sir, if you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning to Wheatland [his Pennsylvania home], you are a happy man indeed.”

Before Lincoln was inaugurated, five more states seceded, and in February 1861, these seven states, all from what is called the “lower South” (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas), formed the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis (1808–89), U.S. senator from Mississippi, was elected president. By the time the war began, the first seven states of the Confederacy would be joined by four more: Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

On March 4, 1861, after secretly slipping into Washington to foil an assassination plot that had been uncovered, Lincoln was inaugurated. In one of history’s great ironies, the oath of office was administered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the Dred Scott decision, which had greatly contributed to Lincoln’s election.

For years, secession had been held out as a blustering threat that both sides believed would never be used. Why did it finally happen? There were many factors: the widespread southern feeling that the South was being overpowered by northern political, industrial, banking, and manufacturing strength; the fear that the southern way of life was threatened by northern control of Congress; race-baiting hysteria that southern editorialists and politicians fanned with talk of black control of the South and widespread intermarriage and rape of southern white womanhood. Typical of the rhetoric at the time were these comments: “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter? In ten years or less our children will be the slaves of negroes.” A South Carolina Baptist preacher said, “If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.” And, “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission.”

All these disparate emotions and political views coalesced in the slavery issue. In the southern view, secession was the last resort to block emancipation. Faced with a legislative confrontation in which its political power was diminishing, the South resorted to the one power it possessed to control its destiny: leaving the Union.

What cannot be overlooked in any discussion of political, social, and economic reasons for the South’s breaking away are human nature and historical inevitability. History has repeatedly shown that a more powerful force—in this case the North—will attempt to overwhelm a weaker one for its own interests. For those white southerners who held no slaves—and they were a majority—there was the common denominator of fear. Fear that Lincoln, the Republicans, and the abolitionist Yankees who owned the banks and the factories that set the prices for their crops would make them the slaves of free blacks. Human nature dictates that people who are pushed to the wall either break or push back. To ask why cooler heads did not prevail and settle these questions amicably overlooks the character of the South—proud, independent, individualistic, loyal to the land, and even chivalrous. For such people, a stubborn refusal to submit was the answer. As the new president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, put it, “Will you be slaves or be independent? Will you consent to be robbed of your property?” To Davis, submission meant the loss of liberty, property, and honor itself.

Given the social, economic, historical, social, and psychological reasons behind secession, there is another issue that is often overlooked: the two sides were not made up of two monolithic points of view—pro-slavery, anti-Union secessionists in the South, and abolitionist, pro-Union forces in the North. That they were is a myth and a vast oversimplification. After the first seven states seceded, there were still eight slave states left, and attempts were being made in Washington to craft some compromise to keep the Union intact. Did all southerners want to leave the Union? Hardly. While the lower South states where slavery was more deeply entrenched were solidly secessionist, according to James McPherson’s
Battle Cry of Freedom,
the voters in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri had elected a majority of pro-Unionists to state conventions that would decide the question. In North Carolina and Tennessee, the voters had rejected secession conventions entirely. Conventions in Missouri and Arkansas rejected secession. Even in Texas, Governor Sam Houston, the greatest hero of Texas independence, opposed secession. The Texas secession deposed him as governor. (It may be stating the obvious, but blacks and women did not figure into these votes.) That is one reason it is more appropriate to call the two sides Union and Confederacy, instead of North and South.

Why didn’t the North allow the South to go its own way? Some people, including such prominent abolitionist voices as New York newspaperman Horace Greeley, argued that the North should do just that, although he may have believed that the southern states would not actually go through with it. Hardcore abolitionists were glad that the slaveholders had broken the “covenant with death,” as some of them, like Garrison, called the Constitution. But if the seceding states were permitted to go, it would mean the end of the United States of America as it was created in the Declaration and the Constitution. The result would be anarchy. The practical result would be economic dislocation and international weakness that could only result in the collapse of the nation’s institutions.

There were certainly deep philosophical and patriotic reasons that many people had for wanting to preserve the Union. But to most northerners, the issue was more practical: simple economics. In his prizewinning book
The Metaphysical Club,
Louis Menand sums up the prewar attitudes of a great many Americans in the North: “We think of the Civil War as a war to save the Union and to abolish slavery, but before the fighting began most people regarded these as incompatible ideals. Northerners who wanted to preserve the union did not wish to see slavery extended into the territories; some of them hoped it would wither away in the states where it persisted. But many Northern businessmen believed that losing the South would mean economic catastrophe, and many of their employees believed that freeing the slaves would mean lower wages. They feared secession far more than they disliked slavery, and they were unwilling to risk the former by trying to pressure the South into giving up the latter.”

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From
LINCOLN’S
first inaugural address
(March 4, 1861):

In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous question of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to “preserve, protect, and defend it.”

I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

The 1860 Census

History doesn’t show whether London’s touts laid odds on the war’s outcome. On paper, as they say in sports, this contest looked like a mismatch. About the only thing the South seemed to have going for it was a home-field advantage. Looking at numbers alone, the South’s decision and fortunes seemed doomed from the outset. But as the history of warfare has consistently proven, Davids often defeat Goliaths—or, at the least, make them pay dearly for their victories. The South needed no better example than the patriots who had defeated England in the Revolution.

UNION

• Twenty-three states, including California, Oregon, and the four slaveholding “border states” of Missouri, Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland, and seven territories. (West Virginia would join the Union in 1863.)