After two blisteringly hot days, Springfield celebrated July 4, 1860, “very quietly,” the daily Illinois State Journal, formerly the Sangamo Journal, reported. “There was no general celebration by the people.” With a headache and sore throat, Lincoln abstained from the politician’s usual Independence Day activities. He thought he might have a low-grade version of the “hard and tedious spell of scarlet fever” that his son William had been suffering. His eldest son, Bob, was about to enter Harvard. “He promises very well, considering we never controlled him much.” His long-standing intimate friend James Matheny, one of the few guests at his wedding in 1842, gave the Fourth of July oration at the fairgrounds. Lincoln stayed home. In the afternoon, the Springfield Guards paraded to the admiration of the crowd milling around on the city streets. “They then marched out to the woods, where they spent the rest of the day,” probably in the shade. The “interminable popping of fire crackers during the whole day, and the shooting of rockets and other pyrotechnics at night, completed the day’s performances.” The editors of the Journal hoped that “our citizens will not permit another anniversary of our glorious Independence Day, to come and go without celebrating it in a more general and worthy manner.” The concerns on the next July 4 were to be dramatically different. Union army volunteers would be marching through Springfield streets.
Sharing the widespread confidence that he would be elected president in the fall, the newly nominated Republican candidate could not have been unhappy, sitting in the shade of his porch or indoors, as he skimmed the Journal. It had reprinted in immediate sequence the Declaration of Independence and the Republican Party platform. And on the next page there was a Fourth of July editorial containing long excepts from two well-known speeches Lincoln had given in 1858. Both celebrated the Declaration as the country’s founding document. Its affirmation that “all men are created equal” was the “electric cord,” Lincoln proposed, that bound together all Americans, whatever their national or ethnic origin. And the argument of those who claimed otherwise was that of “the same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will enjoy the fruits of it. Turn in whatever way you will—whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.” And the serpent must be denied, though not inconsequentially and irresponsibly crushed. The Dred Scott decision, Lincoln stated, was the case in point. It needed to be denied. Slavery was a form of tyranny, of denying the right of every living human being to have freedom. That was Lincoln’s position. That was the position of the Republican Party and of all antislavery moralists.
But an antislavery moralist was not necessarily an antislavery activist. Most Republicans were not. All Americans, Republicans believed, should be free to make choices of employment, residence, and consumerism, free to possess the things of this world according to their means and abilities. That did not mean that free Negroes who lived in the United States should have civil and political rights. It did not mean that it was desirable for antislavery activists to agitate in destabilizing ways. And it certainly did not justify abolitionism. The Constitution’s stipulation that slavery was entirely a state matter needed to be respected. Civil and political rights for free blacks were at the will of the white majority, the superior race.
The 1860 Republican platform, like Lincoln’s speeches, paid homage to the Declaration of Independence. Structured as a series of seventeen declarative statements, the platform linked those statements together in an ascending series of affirmations and accusations. Its rhetorical tone and logic imitated the Declaration, suggesting that an “electric cord” connected the Declaration of 1776 and the Republican platform. The platform declared, first,
1. That the history of the nation during the last four years, has fully established the propriety and necessity of the organization and perpetuation of the Republican party; and that the causes which called it into existence are permanent in their nature, and now, more than ever before, demand its peaceful and constitutional triumph. 2. That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Federal Constitution, that we solemnly re-affirm the self-evident truths that all men are created free and equal . . . and that the Federal Constitution, the Rights of the States, and the Union of the States must and shall be preserved [my emphasis]. 3. That to the Union of the States this nation owes its unprecedented . . . [prosperity] . . . and we hold in abhorrence all schemes for disunion. . . . And . . . that no Republican member of Congress has uttered or countenanced the threats of Disunion . . . without rebuke . . . and we denounce those threats of Disunion . . . as denying the vital principles of a free government, and as an avowal of contemplated treason, which it is the imperative duty of an indignant People sternly to rebuke and forever silence. 4. That the maintenance inviolate of the Rights of the States and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively [my emphasis], is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends. . . . That the new dogma that the Constitution, of its own force, carries slavery into any or all of the territories of the United States, is a dangerous political heresy, at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself . . . is revolutionary in its tendency, and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country . . . That the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom.
No wonder most abolitionists had no trust in the Republican Party or its nominee. Though its platform affirmed in broad terms that all men are created equal, this did not include free blacks in the North or free blacks and slaves in the South. On the whole, white Americans did not believe that Negroes were equal to Caucasians. Well-known antislavery moralists such as Jefferson, Clay, and Lincoln rejected civil rights for blacks. And most Americans would not have concluded that either the Declaration or the Constitution was an umbrella under whose shelter American Negroes could find citizenship. Some Americans believed that the Declaration did not apply to slaves. Slaves were not included in “all men.” Republicans, in general, took exception to this, though they accepted that the Constitution legitimized slavery at the will of the individual states. Lincoln had only a minor argument with the latter: the Constitution didn’t require that it be forever and unalterable. He would leave slavery for future adjudication. And he had a minor qualification about the claim that “all men are created equal.” They were created equal in their right not to be slaves but not in their right to be citizens. No civil rights for free Negroes in Illinois. There were, though, two bottom lines: no extension of slavery into the territories and no secession.
ON THAT same July 4, 1860, in a cooler climate, an extraordinary twenty-nine-year-old man delivered a brilliant address to an audience of two thousand people. The place was Framingham, Massachusetts, two of whose militia companies had fought in the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Each year, starting in 1854, the Massachusetts Antislavery Society chose July 4 as the day to hold its annual rally in a grove called Harmony. There, in 1850, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the new Fugitive Slave Law, a key component of the Compromise of 1850. All good Whigs, like Lincoln, were pledged to uphold that law. The New England states, especially Massachusetts, passed personal liberty laws and resisted.
The extraordinary man who stepped to the platform in the tree-lined amphitheater had, ironically, the same surname as two famous opponents of slavery, Stephen A. Douglas and Frederick Douglass. The mulatto son of a Virginia slave owner named William Douglas and a slave mother known as Mary, at the age of fifteen H. Ford Douglas had fled to Cleveland and freedom. He seems never to have revealed how he pulled it off. Self-taught, a habitué of the Cleveland Free Library, he discovered a gift for literacy and oratory. The Cleveland black community welcomed him. Already an outspoken abolitionist by his mid-twenties, an admirer and soon a friend of Frederick Douglass, he moved to Chicago. In late summer 1858, appalled at his adopted state’s Black Code, he met briefly with the two most prominent Illinois Republicans, Senator Lyman Trumbull and senatorial aspirant Abraham Lincoln. He had a request in hand. Would they please sign his petition urging that free blacks residing in Illinois be given the right to testify before juries in cases in which they had evidence to offer regarding themselves or another person?
Trumbull and Lincoln refused. Blacks, they regularly affirmed, had the right not to be slaves, but did not have any civil rights, let alone the suffrage, in the United States. Someplace else, perhaps. H. Ford Douglas’ petition went nowhere. Now an advocate of voluntary expatriation to any country treating Negroes as equal citizens, he himself went to British Canada. It seemed impossible for a literate, intelligent man like Douglas not to take at face value statements such as Trumbull’s in support of his colleague as Lincoln initiated his campaign against Stephen Douglas: “We, the Republican party, are the white man’s party. We are for free white men, and for making white labor honorable and respectable, which it never can be when negro slave labor is brought into competition with it. We wish to settle the Territories with free white men, and we are willing that this negro race should go anywhere that it can better its condition. . . . We believe it is better for us that they should not be among us. I believe it will be better for them to go elsewhere.”
At first “elsewhere” suited H. Ford Douglas. In July 1860 he had good reason to believe that racist attitudes would always severely limit Negroes’ opportunities in the United States. Colonization, perhaps to Canada or Haiti or Central America, seemed the answer. John Quincy Adams, Douglas told his audience, had said twenty years before that “ ‘the preservation, propagation and perpetuation of slavery is the vital animating spirit of the national government,’ and this truth is not less apparent today.” If men like Lincoln and Trumbull preferred that as few free Negroes as possible live in Illinois, that they carry personal identity cards, and that they not be citizens in any meaningful sense, why should any black person be impressed by their minimalist position? Was their no-extension line in the sand not callously self-serving? After all, the free soil doctrine advocated free soil for white, not black, people. And blacks anyplace, including those in the territories, were to be residents without rights. “I care nothing about that antislavery which wants to make the territories free, while it is unwilling to extend to me, as a man . . . all the rights of a man. In the state of Illinois, where I live—my adopted state—I have been laboring to make it a place fit for a decent man to live in. In that state, we have a code of black laws that would disgrace any Barbary State. . . . Men of my complexion are not allowed to testify in a court of justice where a white man is a party. If a white man happens to owe me anything, unless I can prove it by the testimony of a white man, I cannot collect the debt. Now, two years ago, I went through the state of Illinois for the purpose of getting signers to a petition asking the legislature to repeal the ‘Testimony Law.’ . . . I went to prominent Republicans, and among others, to Abraham Lincoln and Lyman Trumbull, and neither of them dared to sign that petition, to give me the right to testify in a court of justice!”
What could one expect from Lincoln, H. Ford Douglas asked, if he became president? “I know Abraham Lincoln, and I know something about his antislavery.” It is a morally self-indulgent antislavery, an egregious example of making oneself feel good without accepting the moral obligation to act. It is, partly, a politician’s feel-good evasion of corrective public policy, let alone constructive action. It does nothing, Douglas argued, to make the lives of free or enslaved blacks the slightest bit better. Insofar as he deplores slavery as an evil, he will say and do nothing to prevent its indefinite perpetuation. Lincoln will risk, Douglas concluded, no political or personal capital, even to advocate that a black man as well educated as he be allowed to testify in a courtroom against a white man who has committed a civil crime or criminal act. That’s the kind of antislavery person Lincoln is. And who are Lincoln’s models and antecedents? Douglas asked. “I want to know,” he continued, “if any man can tell me the difference between the antislavery of Abraham Lincoln and the antislavery of the old Whig party or the antislavery of Henry Clay? Why, there is no difference between them. Abraham Lincoln is simply a Henry Clay Whig, and he believes just as Henry Clay believed in regard to this question. And Henry Clay was just as odious to the antislavery cause and antislavery men as ever was John C. Calhoun. In fact, he did as much to perpetuate Negro slavery in this country as any other man who has ever lived.” That was a harsh judgment on Clay. The “in fact” was a rhetorical exaggeration, but in 1860, in historical retrospect, true enough.
Six months later, anxiously awaiting his inauguration day, Lincoln gratefully accepted from an ex-Whig New York Republican the gift of a limited-edition bronze medal memorializing “the Great Compromiser.” Lincoln felt “extreme gratification . . . in possessing so beautiful a memento of him whom during my whole political life, I have loved and revered as a teacher and leader.” H. Ford Douglas had reason to anticipate that Lincoln would now follow in his mentor’s footsteps. He would find a way to compromise with the South. There would be no secession, or it would be, after a compromise, retracted. There would be no civil war. Slavery would remain. And the racism in Illinois and much of the country that deprived free Negroes of civil rights would be a permanent feature of American life. At the climax of his address, Douglas called the roll of his abolitionist heroes, asserting by association his commitment to stand with them as an heir to their leadership. And he did so with the sense that the black man in America had a special relationship with Massachusetts and New England soil. “What can I say, then, as a black man, other than to thank the men and the women of New England who have so nobly stood by the rights and liberties of my unfortunate race.” It was an appropriate hortatory exaggeration. By 1860, slavery had been long gone from New England. The Adamses and the Parsons of Massachusetts had long ago rejected slavery. Most New England states had legislated civil rights for blacks, though local racism limited opportunities. Still, most abolitionists recognized that the New England that had given the country John Quincy Adams had far outpaced all other sections of the country in its acceptance of Negroes as equal citizens. It was in New England and its extensions that abolitionism had been allowed to breathe and then grow strong.
Invoking the names of those who had stood on the same platform where he now stood, Douglas praised his own honor roll of American heroes. “What an army of brave men the moral and political necessities of twenty-five years ago pushed upon this platform to defend . . . this last Thermopylae of the New world! Then it was that our friend Mr. Garrison could . . . brave a Boston mob, in defence of his convictions of right, in words of consuming fire. . . . Then it was that Elijah P. Lovejoy . . . gave to the cause the printed sheet and the spoken word within the very sight of the fortress of the evil doer.” He now “sleeps in a martyr’s grave on the banks of the father of waters. . . . These were brave men,” among others. “Then, too, it was that that other good friend, Wendell Phillips, brought to the Antislavery platform the rare gifts of scholarly culture and a magnificent rhetoric. . . . Frederick Douglass, had not yet stirred the intellectual sea of two continents to the enormities of this country.” And “let us not forget one other name. . . . not born to die . . . John Brown has gone to join the glorious company of ‘the just made perfect’ in the eternal adoration of the living God, bearing in his right hand the history of an earnest effort to break four millions of fetters, and ‘proclaim liberty throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof.’ ”
The men and women who gathered on the slope, overflowing the Harmony amphitheater on July 4, 1860, could not know, beyond hopes and fears, what the next years would reveal. Neither could Lincoln and Trumbull. Neither could H. Ford Douglas, who advocated that the American Negro should claim his rights as a human being and also consider geographic alternatives, either Canada or the Caribbean world, where he would have full citizenship, among nonracist whites or in a black nation. The former was Douglas’ preference. He was soon to find that he had another alternative. In an ironic, unintended way, it was Lincoln’s election to the presidency that made this possible. The alternatives Lincoln faced and the choices he made determined H. Ford Douglas’ future. Though the war that came was one that Lincoln was stuck with, it was a war that Douglas embraced. Like Wendell Phillips, he cheered secession on as the last best hope for emancipation in his lifetime. The rivers of blood that would flow seemed to him, and to most abolitionists, an acceptable and inevitable price to be paid for Negro freedom—and to repay the generations of blood that had been shed under the lash: the rapes, murders, and torture; the callous destruction of families; the transformation of human bodies into cash entities in accounting books. In 1863, H. Ford Douglas became one of the first thirty black men commissioned as officers in the Union army.
In this regard, it was to take Lincoln five years to catch up to the abolitionists, to find the compassion and the language, as he did in his Second Inaugural Address, to express what Douglas felt on July 4, 1860. And when Lincoln, in March 1865, a month before his death, looked back at why the United States had fought a bloody civil war, he was in essence in the same place Douglas was in 1860. It was indeed slavery that had made the war unavoidable, because different views about it had made disunion inevitable. But from his election to at least mid-1862, Lincoln was to hope that an end-run around slavery was possible. The South could keep slavery for some long period of time if it returned to the union. And he was to keep trying from 1862 to 1864 to bribe the South or buy out slavery and make colonization viable. Emancipation was not the goal; reunification was. Unlike H. Ford Douglas and most abolitionists, he did not think, almost to the moment of his death, that the black race had much of a future in America. Racism was too deeply embedded in the white psyche and soul.
IN THE tightly packed best acoustical auditorium in downtown Boston, a Baptist church called Tremont Temple, once a Greek Revival theater, a now rake-thin and partly grizzled Wendell Phillips, who for almost twenty-five years had been hoping for an American political and moral revolution, denounced the newly elected president. It was November 7, 1860. Abraham Lincoln, Phillips proclaimed, was “not an abolitionist, hardly an antislavery man.” He was and would be “a pawn on the political chessboard.” He owed his election “to no merit of his own, but to lives that have roused the nation’s conscience, and deeds that have ploughed deep into its heart.” It was the spirit and blood, Phillips reminded his audience, of Elijah Lovejoy, William Lloyd Garrison, and John Brown that had, indirectly, made Lincoln’s election possible.
It was not an acknowledgment that Lincoln was ever to make. It was not politically apposite to do so, even if he had been capable, which he was not, of recognizing abolitionists as revolutionaries, as he readily granted the Founding Fathers had been. Why did they not also have, as he had implied in his speech to the House of Representatives in 1848, a “sacred right” to revolutionize? This was partly, it would seem, because they were abolitionists, partly because he valued stability more than anything else, his only red line a prohibition on extending slavery beyond where it already existed. His dedication was to the opportunity for white America to be its best unitary self, for the Whig values of individual initiative, economic nationalism, and rational public policy to determine America’s future. His was not a revolutionizing temperament. He looked for prudent, gradual, law-affirming ways to move the nation from slavery to emancipation. For him also—as it was for the rowdy crowd that filled the streets, pushing into Tremont Temple to hear the most rousing of abolitionist orators, as it was for almost everyone—the excitement of his election was inseparable from worry about what would come next. Would there be secession? Would a compromise be hammered out at the last moment? Would markets be destabilized? Would there be a war?
Five days before Wendell Phillips’ Tremont Temple speech, Lincoln had been elected chief executive with 40 percent of the popular vote, the smallest percentage ever. Though his election itself was not a surprise, there was considerable difference of opinion over what would happen next. Phillips had his preferred scenario. As an unknown young man, he had risen in Faneuil Hall, soon after Lovejoy’s assassination in 1837, to defend freedom of speech, even that of abolitionists. He had then himself become an abolitionist, an electrifying orator with a radical message questioning whether a nation under a Constitution that legitimized slavery ought to endure. Wouldn’t the North be better off without the South, Phillips asked. Were not moral integrity and equal rights more important than any practical consideration? And now that the secession of the Deep South states seemed likely, would not the cause of justice, human and divine, be better served by the creation of a separate Northern nation, uncontaminated by slavery? Or, alternatively and even better, would not a war in which the loyal Union states crushed the treasonous slave power be preferable to an indefinite continuation of slavery? A nationalist, Phillips preferred the perpetuation of the United States, though not under the present slave-favoring Constitution—and not under the Fugitive Slave Law that Congress had passed in 1850. The pro-slavery Constitution was now—as John Quincy Adams, whom Phillips had known and admired, put it when Texas was admitted to the Union by a legislative end-run around the Constitution—“a menstruous rag.”
The question of the moment in November 1860 was: what could one expect from the new president? Phillips expected little. He had reason to believe that Lincoln would, like his predecessors, do everything he could not to challenge the existence of slavery in the South. He had, though, mustered some hope that the man he had recently referred to as “the Slave-hound of Illinois” might not be quite as retrograde as that. After all, Lincoln’s party was antislavery and Lincoln himself an antislavery moralist. Still, the Republican Party movers and shakers could not be counted on for anything more than a commitment to nonextension. That was the centerpiece of their platform. They had no intention of tampering with the national status quo. Even William Seward, author of the notorious “irrepressible conflict,” was now sugarcoating his abolitionism with the language of accommodation. With his party about to take power, he was toning down his rhetoric.
From Phillips’ point of view, only the sword would do. And the hypocrisy of Seward’s claim that the Republican Party “is a party of one idea; an idea that fills and expands all generous souls; the idea of equality,—the equality of all men before human tribunals, as they are all equal before the Divine tribunal and laws,” seemed nauseatingly self-laudatory. Also, it was simply not true. Lincoln’s Republicans had never supported equal rights for free Negroes. And they would not support American citizenship for what would be a vastly increased free black population if emancipation ever came. What to do with these black aliens? Other than gradual colonization, no one had a practical plan to untie the Gordian knot. Unlike Lincoln, Seward in New York had supported equality for free blacks. “That is his rainbow of hope,” Phillips remarked. “It is a noble idea,—equality before the law. . . . Mark it.” But now “let us question Mr. Lincoln about it.”
With oratorical ventriloquism, Phillips brought a virtual Lincoln onto the Tremont Temple stage.
“Do you believe . . . that the negro is your political and social equal, or ought to be?”
“Not a bit of it.”
“Do you believe he should sit on juries?”
“Never.”
“Do you think he should vote?”
“Certainly not.”
“Should he be considered a citizen?”
“I tell you frankly, no.”
“Do you think that, when the Declaration of Independence says, ‘All men are created equal,’ it intends the political equality of blacks and whites?”
“No, sir.”
Phillips had Lincoln right. Lincoln did not, and never was to, see the light by which abolitionists had for decades been showing the way. His genius was neither for revelation nor for proactive progressivism. It was for prudent response, with the least cost for the best results, to the realities already in place. Slavery existed. He could not change that other than by physical force, by high-risk confrontation when no one and nothing had forced confrontation on him. Phillips accurately assessed the newly elected president. He would do everything he could to keep the peace. If any state should secede, he would offer it what it wanted to return to the Union except the extension of slavery beyond where it already existed. Otherwise, the Southern states could keep their slaves indefinitely.
Lincoln had campaigned and been elected with one firewall: nonextension. That had provided the sectional Republican plurality. Most abolitionists probably voted for Lincoln. Out of the total 1,866,000 votes that produced an Electoral College majority of 180 for the winner, 28 more than needed, no one knows how many abolitionist voters there were. Perhaps less than 100,000 or so. He could have been elected president without a single abolitionist vote. Phillips of course preferred Lincoln to Stephen A. Douglas or the other two candidates. The three together got almost 3,000,000 votes. Together, the two Democrats—Douglas and John C. Breckinridge—had more than enough to have defeated Lincoln if the Democrats had been united. Abolitionists of course had good reason to prefer the Republican. Like Lincoln, they opposed slavery for moral reasons. Some abolitionists believed blacks to be innately inferior to whites. Some also favored colonization. Most, though, unlike Lincoln, favored abolition immediately or at least as soon as possible. About that, they were morally and practically passionate, though opinions differed about the best form of implementation. The newly elected president was not. He wanted nothing to do with abolition and abolitionists. A practical politician, he knew his base and its limitations. But its limitations were his own, not only of politics but of mind-set. An antislavery moralist from Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois, he favored incremental change, when the country as a whole was prepared for it. In the meantime, he would do all he could to maintain things as they were.
Wendell Phillips expected little from him. With their dramatically differing agendas, it seemed unlikely that he and Lincoln would ever coalesce, at least if matters were in Lincoln’s control. Phillips hoped that secession would force total war on the president—then, whatever the president’s preference or the country’s readiness, universal emancipation. What he feared, though, was that Lincoln, representing the plurality that had elected him, would do everything he could to prevent a war, including accommodation. Most Northerners indeed did hope that the new president could keep the union together. The South should be mollified. Slavery, indeed, bad as it was, was not bad enough to allow the union to become its victim. Two centuries of prosperous commerce between Southern cotton and Northern banking, insurance, shipping, and textiles outweighed slavery’s iniquity. Surely a civil war could be avoided but, if war did come, Phillips also feared that Lincoln would do everything he could do to mollify the South before emancipation became inevitable. He would never, Phillips predicted, take the initiative to free the slaves. And who or what could force him? Like Adams, Phillips believed the South would never give up slavery without rivers of blood. “The last ten years of John Quincy Adams’ were the frankest of his life,” he told his Tremont Temple audience. “In them, he poured out before the people the treason and indignation which formerly he had only written in his diary.” Only a slave rebellion or a civil war would end slavery. But if Lincoln were to keep South Carolina in the union by peaceful persuasion, slavery would survive indefinitely.
One month later, on December 3, 1860, the Boston abolitionist community assembled once again in Tremont Temple, this time to commemorate the day, one year before, when the body of John Brown was cut down from the gallows. Phillips had approved of Brown’s mission. The newly spilled blood of slave masters seemed a small price to pay for the blood of the lash. Brown’s moldering flesh had become, in idea and in illustration, a magical sacrament for his co-revolutionaries. Here was the epitome of commitment, a man willing to kill and be killed, biblical style, in the service of God’s justice, for those who believed in this version of God. His attempt to instigate a slave rebellion had failed. What was important to abolitionists was that it had been tried. But since it was a criminal conspiracy, it had made his supporters, a group of six men who had financed the raid, subject to prosecution. One of those six, Lexington’s Franklin Sanborn, attending the commemorative Tremont Temple event, was aware that, if his complicity was discovered, the Buchanan administration would have him indicted for treason.
Wary of consequences, Phillips himself had resisted a full association with Brown’s violence. He was, though, probably at Tremont Temple on this day, as was his friend Frederick Douglass. They had confided in each other for more than twenty years. Having come close to implicating himself in the illegal raid, Douglass had reason to be nervous. But the Western world’s most famous ex-slave, the controversial writer, orator, editor, and antislavery propagandist, was eager to deliver one of his characteristically fiery calls for all black bodies to be as free as his own. The subject for discussion was to be “The Great Question of the Age, ‘How Can American Slavery Be Abolished?’ ” How indeed!
As Boston’s abolitionist community pushed into the theater-like seating arrangement of Tremont Temple, the space quickly became densely crowded, not entirely with abolitionists. The hall, like the nation, was divided between abolitionists and their opponents. Many anti-abolitionist Bostonians, some of them well-dressed members of the Cotton Whig business community, took prominent seats. Anti-abolitionist, working-class street and tavern people, identified immediately by dress and tone, crowded the aisles. There were some intemperate Harvard students. Alcohol probably helped loosen tongues. As pro-abolition speakers, including Douglass, rose to the platform, jeers, shouting, and racial obscenities erupted. It was clear that the organizers of the meeting and its featured speakers were not going to be permitted orderly discussion. The policemen assigned to keep the peace had little interest in protecting abolitionists. What had been billed as a memorial meeting turned into a raucous free-for-all.
Voice: Where’s the Union?
Sanborn: We come to discuss the subject of American slavery.
Voice: Where’s John Brown?
Voice: He’s safe.
Another voice: The devil has him.
Voice from the platform: No matter where he may be.
Sanborn: Every man is entitled to express his own opinion.
Cries: No! No! (Three cheers.)
Sanborn: Cannot every man say what he thinks at stated times and in proper places?
Cries: Yes! Yes! (Great noise.) And a few minutes later: Negro voices—We object. It is not right. It is not right.
Mayhem erupted. Speakers were shouted down. “Only Douglass, with his practiced and powerful bass voice, managed to make himself heard for more than a few moments above the din. He reached the podium and, defying the terrible threats of the crowd—Put him out! Down him! Put a rope round his neck!—shouted: This is one of the most impudent, (order! order!) barefaced, (knock him down! sit down!) outrageous attacks on free speech (stop him! you shall hear him!)—I can make myself heard—(great confusion) that I have ever witnessed in Boston or elsewhere. (Applause. Free speech.) I know your masters. (Cries—Treason! treason! Police! police! Put him out! put him out!) I have served the same master that you are serving. (Time! Time!) You are serving the slaveholders.” Stomping feet from the anti-abolition gallery imitated boots on the march. A black minister was grabbed by the hair and pulled from the stage. Policemen attempted to either trap or arrest Douglass—it was not clear which. Men in top hats pummeled and were pummeled, people pulled and shoved, collars grabbed, bodies pushed and struck. Men and women shouted racial epithets from the boxes and the pit in a scene of disorder whose major ideological and emotional antagonism was between high- and low-class ruffians and well-dressed white and black abolitionists. It was a race riot of sorts. Orderly tragedy had been reduced to a disorderly historical drama.
When the disorder spread to the nearby streets, the police, unfriendly to all abolitionists and always keen to suppress disorder, secured the Tremont Street and Common area. Douglass and his colleagues rescheduled their meeting to a safer venue. “Boston is a great city,” Douglass told his fellow abolitionists a few days later. “Nowhere more than here have the principles of human freedom been expounded. . . . And yet, even here, in Boston, the moral atmosphere is dark and heavy. The principles of human liberty, even if correctly apprehended, find but limited support in this hour of trial. The world moves slowly, and Boston is much like the world. We thought the principle of free speech was an accomplished fact. Here, if nowhere else, we thought the right of the people to assemble and express their opinion was secure. . . . But here we are to-day contending for what we thought was gained years ago. The mortifying and disgraceful fact stares us in the face, that though Faneuil Hall and Bunker Hill Monument stand, freedom of speech is struck down.”
Wendell Phillips had made the same point in his coming-out speech in Faneuil Hall in 1837. He had made that constitutional right the keynote of his defense of Elijah Lovejoy. John Quincy Adams had made free speech and petition the grounds of his opposition to the gag rule. The more things changed, the more they remained the same. Now Douglass took up the same high constitutional note. It was the most available and amenable common ground. Still, the controlling issue was not free speech; it was slavery. And once again, as in 1837, the danger to life and limb increasingly came from speech on that subject.
AT HOME in December 1860 in his recently expanded, modest two-story house at Eighth and Jackson in downtown Springfield, Lincoln had to deal with the excitement, exhaustion, and challenge of having just been elected president. Springfield Republicans were at first in a chest-thumping mood, the streets crowded with parades, the air filled with speeches, the roads and railroad station thronged with visitors from near and far, the curious, the aspirational, and the self-interested. The city and its native son had triumphed. Prosperity, material and psychological, had suddenly been or was about to be increased hugely, or so many local people expected. “To-day, and till further notice, Mr. Lincoln will see visitors at the Executive Chamber in the State House, from 10 to 12 a.m., and from 3 1–2 to 5 1–2 p.m., each day,” the Illinois State Journal had announced in mid-November. These were to be mostly fraternal and public relations sessions: jokes, anecdotes, backslapping, visitors from near and far, job seekers, autograph hunters, and the aggressively curious. Lincoln said almost nothing of anticipatory significance, despite pressure for guidance from friends and enemies around the country. His gut instinct and political savvy told him that he had everything to lose and nothing to gain by saying anything substantive about slavery and the state of the nation in addition to what he had already said.
He probably reread or remembered a private letter he had received six months before from a well-known Ohio congressman, Joshua Giddings. A veteran of more than twenty years of antislavery activism, a colleague of Adams’ in the fight against the gag rule, Giddings had for decades been vilified as a radical abolitionist. He was anathema to Democrats and made moderate Whigs uncomfortable. Eager to declare Lincoln guilty by association, Stephen Douglas had repeatedly claimed in 1858 that Lincoln was a close ideological associate of “Father Giddings, the high priest of abolitionism.” Lincoln spouted, Douglas asserted, as “radical [an] abolitionism as ever Giddings, Lovejoy or Garrison enunciated.” Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass also made Stephen Douglas’ list of infamy. “Did [Elijah’s brother Owen] Lovejoy, or Lloyd Garrison, or Wendell Phillips, or Fred. Douglass” ever take higher abolition grounds than the two-faced Lincoln, who expressed himself differently in Southern and in Northern Illinois?
No one following the 1858 Senate campaign debates believed Lincoln was an abolitionist. But the accusation lent itself to sound bites for partisan advantage, a mid-nineteenth-century version of negative campaigning. Lincoln repeatedly labored to make clear that he deplored abolitionism and opposed civil rights for free Negroes. It was a challenge, though, also to argue that free blacks had the moral and constitutional right to be residents of Illinois. After all, where would one draw the line between residency and civil rights? By conviction and for political expediency, Lincoln had to try. He also made as light of the subject as he could, with humor and evasion. Giddings had always been far to the left of Lincoln on the subject. But by June 1860, convinced that “you are to be elected,” Giddings was eager to close ranks with the man likely to be the first president who was an antislavery moralist and who had drawn the line against slavery extension. For abolitionists, this was only marginally better than tokenism, though much better than the electoral alternatives. For Giddings, a veteran of congressional antislavery battles, it was a way forward. And he did not think it presumptuous to weigh in with advice. “I am sure that any suggestions I may make will be respectfully considered.”
Anticipating that Lincoln would be pressured between his election and inauguration in March 1861 to elaborate on his views about slavery and secession, Giddings urged him to resist. He invoked the example of the president about whom Lincoln had had almost nothing to say. “I think the administration of John Quincy Adams the wisest and purest on record. . . . After he became a candidate . . . he refused . . . to express any opinion to his most intimate friends until called to act officially. . . . If any question arises as to the detail or manner of carrying out that platform it will be one of such moment that you should reflect deeply upon it before you act[,] and no man has a right to demand of you an opinion until the question shall be practically before you. I refer to this subject from the conviction that enquiries may be propounded touching the question of slavery, as the public mind is most excited in that direction.” Giddings also proposed Adams as a model of how to handle Cabinet and patronage appointments. “He used to say he never condescended to perform . . . the vexation and responsibility” of “appointing village post masters.” The latter was not advice Lincoln could take. Party loyalty and political patronage were inseparable coordinates, keys to sustaining the Republican Party’s newly formed base.
But the gist of Giddings’ advice focused on the slavery issue. “One class of antislavery men are assailing me for voting for you. I can stand their assaults. I do not wish you to relieve me in any way. I would advise you to give no other answer to any man on that subject further than your intentions to carry out the doctrines of the party as expressed in their platform. Mr. Clay defeated himself and friends in 1844 by attempting to make his opinions acceptable to all. Let me advise you to avoid his example in that respect, and to follow that of Mr Adams.”
In effect, keep your mouth shut on this matter for as long as you can. “The exercise of power always brings responsibility and is not to be courted by the prudent. I make these suggestions, not because I think they may not have occurred to you, but because from my past experience and observation, I know that the example of Mr Adams on these points will if followed enable you to enter upon your official duties (if elected) untrammeled, and free to act as your judgment and conscience may then dictate.” Say nothing to commit yourself beyond the party platform. Keep your options open. In effect, do nothing more to exacerbate the pro-slavery or antislavery factions. Coming from a lifelong abolitionist, it was extraordinary advice. It implies that Giddings, like Adams, expected that some national cataclysm was likely, probably disunion, with or without a civil war. Lincoln continued to believe that disunion would never happen. The South would not secede; that was not in its interest. Rationality and loyalty would prevail. After all, weren’t there more pro-unionists than secessionists in the South?
The view from Springfield was clear about this. The threat of secession was a national danger, but it was exaggerated. It could be accommodated, as long as the South accepted nonextension with the assurance of the perpetuation of slavery where it still existed. Its “eventual extinction” would be so far off as to be more a rhetorical salve than an actual medicinal purge. Slavery would continue to exist as long as the Southern states insisted on it. Senator Lyman Trumbull read from a script Lincoln had written. “When inaugurated,” Trumbull assured the South, referring to Lincoln in the third person, “he will be the President of the country and the whole country, and . . . will be as ready to defend and protect the State in which he has not received a solitary vote against any encroachment upon its constitutional rights, as the one in which he has received the largest majority. . . . No encroachments will be made on the reserved rights of any of the States.” His administration will have “no more right to meddle with slavery in a State, than it has to interfere with serfdom in Russia. . . . It should be a matter of rejoicing to all true Republicans, that they will now have an opportunity of demonstrating to their political adversaries and to the world, that they are not for interfering with the domestic institutions of any of the States, nor the advocates of negro equality or amalgamation, with which political demagogues have so often charged them. . . . Should any Republican inquire what has been gained by the triumph of Republicanism, I answer, much. We have gained a decision of the people in favor of a Pacific Railroad, a Homestead policy, a judicious tariff, the admission into the Union of Kansas as a free State, a reform in the financial department of the government, and more important than all, the verdict of the people, the source of power, and from whose decision there is no appeal, that the constitution is not a slavery-extending instrument.” All the South need do was accept nonextension. In exchange, it had a pledge of noninterference. Was this not fair, reasonable, and constitutionally sound? The South would, sooner than later, Lincoln expected, see the light.
In Lincoln’s view, abolitionists were a disruptive minority best stayed away from, Giddings being the exception that proved the rule. Lincoln kept his correspondence with him as private as possible. The Illinois State Journal occasionally let names such as Douglass and Garrison seep into its columns, though not regularly and always dismissively. A constant newspaper reader, Lincoln was, as visitors to his temporary office at the Statehouse noticed, often absorbed in the national press. He was well aware of who the prominent abolitionists were and of their views. A few days after Wendell Phillips’ secession-baiting speech in Boston about how little he expected from the Lincoln presidency, the Journal took notice under the headline “One Northern Sympathiser.” Lincoln undoubtedly read the Journal’s story. “Wendell Phillips, the ultra-Abolitionist, is out with a speech denunciatory of Mr. Lincoln, Gov. Seward, and the Republican party. Mr. Phillips is one of a very few Northern men who hope to emancipate the slaves by overthrowing the government. The disunionists of the South will get no other ‘aid and comfort’ at the North.” To Lincoln, abolitionists such as Phillips were as threatening to his highest priority, a Union-preserving peaceful solution to the threat of disunion, as were pro-secession fire-eaters such as Alabama’s William Yancey.
Lincoln had, for the time being, no role to play other than to watch and wait. He had reason to worry, but he also believed that he had reason to be optimistic. Southerners had been threatening secession for decades, going back at least as far as the Missouri Compromise negotiations in 1819 and the Nullification Crisis in 1832. Why should these be anything more than threats now? After all, as Trumbull, Illinois’ antidote to Stephen Douglas, told a huge crowd of Springfield supporters at a bonfire and fireworks celebration in mid-November 1860, the South Carolina fire-eaters were inflaming “the public mind by misrepresenting the objects and purposes of the Republican party, with the hope of precipitating some of the Southern States into a position from which they cannot, without dishonor, afterwards recede, well knowing, if they delay till after the new Administration is inaugurated and tested, it will furnish no cause for their complaints.” The slave-owning South had nothing to fear. Its constitutional rights would not be abused, let alone denied. If the South accepted containment, all would be well.
Lincoln did not always and continuously expect Southern compliance. At times, he only hoped for it. Mostly, though, in the winter and into the spring of 1860/1861, he nervously assumed that reason, persuasion, and loyalty to the union would sufficiently motivate the South to remain in the union, or return to it quickly, after the maximum pressure of temporary secession had been applied. At the same time and for quite some time, he allowed himself to look into the abyss: the intractability of the slavery problem. The South had a constitutional right to slavery’s perpetuation. Northern public opinion had resolved into widespread moral disapproval. Equally if not more important, free soil ideology and its economic aspirations demanded that the Western territories be reserved for white people only: certainly not for slaves; even free blacks were mostly unwelcome. But the abyss was deeper: the clash between the claim, with the Declaration as its holy text, that “all men are created equal,” even if this did not mean that free Negroes had the right to be fully enfranchised citizens, and the fact of slavery. The Declaration and second-class citizenship (or no citizenship at all) were compatible. The Declaration was, though, not compatible with slavery.
And could the nation, Lincoln had asked publicly and prominently in 1858, exist indefinitely half slave and half free? He did not think so. Three years before, he had asked the same question in a private letter to a slave-owning Lexington, Kentucky, judge and politician, a fellow Whig who had orated about “the peaceful extinction of slavery.” Lincoln had responded evasively to his own question: “The problem is too mighty for me. May God, in his mercy, superintend the solution.” In his candid moments, he acknowledged that he had no faith in “ ‘peaceful extinction’. . . . The condition of the negro slave in America . . . is now as fixed, and hopeless of change for the better, as that of the lost souls of the finally impenitent. The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.” The problem was not solvable, but it could be postponed, provided that the South accepted nonextension.
As he waited in Springfield to assume the presidency, his public face registered optimism. After all, why should nonextension be so difficult for the South to swallow? Everything else could and would stay the same indefinitely. Clearly, Southern representation in the Senate made antislavery legislation impossible. And the Constitution made any change difficult to enact, the elimination of slavery by amendment almost an impossibility. What was there to worry about? As to the dissolution of the Union, secession had been threatened so many times before, starting with Jefferson’s and Madison’s “Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions” in 1799, that it had some resemblance to the boy who cried wolf. In 1844, Adams, writing to William Seward, who might have had some anticipation of where he and the country were heading, provided another of his many statements about where he believed the conflict between freedom and slavery would lead. The lust for Texas and the expansion of slavery were pointing the way. The South “is even now lunging us into a desperate war for Slavery, the issue of which can be no other than the dissolution of the Union, and an imperial race of Caesars under the name of Democracy. This is the evil.”
Adams was being predictive; Lincoln, rational and optimistic. But the national division had its unmistakable parallel even in Lincoln’s own Springfield. His hometown had narrowly split its presidential vote in his favor by only 59 votes. The Illinois State Journal had its oppositional counterpart, the Register, and its editorials exemplified the extreme polarization. Lincoln soon read in the Journal that “dispatches . . . advise us that the movement of the Southern States for a dissolution of the Union is assuming consistency and shape. Mr. Chestnut, of South Carolina, has sent his resignation as U.S. Senator to the Legislature, and a resolution was offered accepting it.” A secession convention was scheduled in South Carolina. Other Deep South states were tending in the same direction. On the one hand, it seemed to the ultrarational and prudent Lincoln that secession was an absurdity, so against everyone’s interests as to make dissolution of the union a national calamity to be avoided at almost all costs. On the other hand, elements in the South were pushing for it, and pushing hard. Still, it seemed to him that they were a minority, that pro-unionists outnumbered pro-secessionists. And if all that was at issue was nonextension, then the South and North ought to be able to reason together. The good sense of both would recognize that, since the Republicans could not retreat from nonextension but would accommodate the South in most other ways, all talk of secession, other than momentary rhetorical posturing, should be put aside.
Lincoln followed the daily barrage of widely reprinted newspaper dispatches from every area of the country, its wildly beating pulse captured in the diversity of moods and views on every side of the issue. The Illinois State Journal recommended to its readers a calming report from Washington’s National Intelligencer. “During the last thirty years no Presidential election has occurred without the accompaniment of menaces directed against the perpetuity of the Union.” This would prove another instance of the same. An angry pro-union border state newspaper excoriated South Carolina as an inveterate troublemaker: “This fountain-head of Tories, nullifiers, rebels, hot heads, fools, and traitors, has become the standard of Southern statesmen.” That seemed increasingly the problem. “The truth is, that South Carolina never had a scintilla of wisdom, moderation or conservatism, and has now become completely deranged.” South Carolina and its allies did not see it that way at all. The state was preparing to secede. It believed it had excellent cause. The underlying claim was that the Constitution was not a suicide pact. Lincoln’s election and nonextension meant that slavery would gradually be brought to an end, sooner or later. The South had not signed on for that in 1787. The end of slavery would mean the death of the South, at least as all living Southerners and their ancestors had known it. That was the same as their own death. And after living with Negroes as slaves for so long, how could Southern whites safely live alongside Negroes if they were free? Though not all Southerners felt this way, most did. Efforts in Congress to forge a compromise failed, one after the other. And President James Buchanan’s Cabinet was falling apart.
THE SUFFERING Buchanan was more attuned than Lincoln to the South at its primal level of concern. It was a matter not of intelligence or attention, but of ideology and personality. It was also a matter of sympathy. Lincoln could not quite understand what the South feared, let alone the nature of that fear, how painfully it registered on the South’s collective nervous system and how deeply it penetrated into the bloodstream of slave owners. Buchanan could. Much was at risk: on the material level, the entire Southern economy. Without slaves to work the cotton fields, almost every aspect of the Southern economy, every thread of its rural and urban commerce, would collapse; the interwoven fabric of slavery and cotton was so pervasive that almost no aspect of Southern economic survival would be untouched. Yet that was not, as Buchanan recognized, the primary driver of Southerners’ alienation.
The last president to be born in the eighteenth century, Buchanan had had a forty-year career in government more noteworthy for the distinguished positions he held than for his accomplishments other than his negotiation, as Polk’s secretary of state, of the Oregon boundary treaty with Great Britain in 1846. It was a major accomplishment, though the credit only partly his. The treaty had been long in preparation, fully supported by Whigs and Democrats. Like Adams, Buchanan had started life as a Federalist. Unlike Adams, he turned to the Democrats and Andrew Jackson for career and fortune. A Pennsylvanian who became, as a senator, an ambassador, secretary of state, and then, in 1857, president, the capstone of his career, Buchanan demonstrated decency, modest competence, and a restrained and pacific personality. Liked though not highly regarded, he had no idea that his presidency would turn into a slow-frame nightmare for him and the country. For Lincoln and the Whigs, Buchanan’s disaster proved a blessing. It made the Republican Party and made Lincoln president, as Lincoln very well knew when he read in the Illinois State Journal Buchanan’s last annual State of the Union address.
Between 1855 and 1857, Buchanan handled badly the implementation of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, “bleeding Kansas,” popular sovereignty, and the Lecompton Constitution. The result was the opposite of the pacification of the South he had intended. He and fellow Democrat Stephen A. Douglas became bitter enemies. Their party, by the summer of 1860, had split apart. In 1856, Buchanan pledged that he would not run for a second term. By the summer of 1860, a renomination of Buchanan would have been futile anyway. Events had made it impossible, even had Buchanan wanted it. All this was a great gift to Lincoln and the Republicans. Like Lincoln, Buchanan was an antislavery moralist. He also detested abolitionism, which he believed had set back the cause of gradual emancipation by a century. He also had no difficulty living with things as they were. Like Lincoln, he opposed civil rights for free Negroes. A moderate, small-government Democrat who believed that the Constitution severely limited the federal government, he had as his highest priority keeping the country together. The South needed to be ameliorated. With the Dred Scott decision happily in place in 1857, he supported the slaveholder’s right to retain his property in slaves wherever he went in the United States and its territories. Slaves had always been and still were, by law, property.
Still, as he told Congress and the nation in his State of the Union address on December 6, 1860, things had now come to such a pass that he despaired that common sense, love of nation, and a commitment to mutual tolerance would prevail. “The different sections of the Union are now arrayed against each other, and the time has arrived, so much dreaded by the Father of his Country, when hostile geographical parties have been formed.” But secession and a civil war, greater evils than any that currently existed, could be avoided. Actually, “how easy would it be for the American people to settle the slavery question forever and to restore peace and harmony to this distracted country!” Two palliatives, actually solutions, were at hand. “The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects.” It had to stop. Beginning in 1835, Northern agitators had been directly and indirectly attacking the basis of Southern life. Abolitionists and their allies had caused the problem. “All that is necessary to accomplish the object, and all for which the slave States have ever contended, is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way. As sovereign States, they, and they alone, are responsible before God and the world for the slavery existing among them.” How sovereign were they? In Buchanan’s view, very sovereign.
And why should these attacks on the Southern way of life drive the South to secession? Free labor versus slave labor? Nonextension? Those were not, Buchanan told Lincoln and the Republicans, as much as one might emphasize them, the deep root causes, the ultimate existential considerations. “The immediate peril arises” not as much from economic considerations as from the fact that “the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question throughout the North for the last quarter of a century has at length produced its malign influence on the slaves and inspired them with vague notions of freedom. Hence a sense of security no longer exists around the family altar. This feeling of peace at home has given place to apprehensions of servile insurrections. Many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before the morning. Should this apprehension of domestic danger, whether real or imaginary, extend and intensify itself until it shall pervade the masses of the Southern people, then disunion will become inevitable. Self-preservation is the first law of nature.” From 1835 on, “pictorial handbills and inflammatory appeals” have been “circulated extensively throughout the South of a character to excite the passions of the slaves, and, in the language of General Jackson, ‘to stimulate them to insurrection and produce all the horrors of a servile war.’ ” What were those horrors? Buchanan did not have to list them: murder, rape, miscegenation; black power shedding, drinking, and polluting white blood in the fields, the workroom, and the bedroom; a power structure turned upside down and inside out in the individual body and in the family, in the day-in, day-out social, economic, and physical relationships of Southern life. It was hard for a Southerner to contemplate. It was necessary to resist, to the death.
And to prevent secession, all the North needed to do was mind its own business about slavery. In return, all the South had to do, Buchanan urged, was accept that the Republican president had been elected according to the procedures set out in the Constitution. He was a legitimate president. He deserved, and the law required, that he be given the opportunity to exercise the duties of his office until he proved to be exercising them unconstitutionally. He had pledged to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law. Nonextension was not an imminent practical concern. Probably some compromise, over time, could satisfy both constituencies. The Constitution, Buchanan argued, neither gave the federal government the power to use force to coerce a seceding state to remain in or return to the union, nor gave any state the right to withdraw. So why not keep in place what exists? All the North needed to do would be to prevent antislavery agitation. After all, that was all the South had been asking for since 1835. And all the South needed to do was accept Lincoln as the legitimate president of the entire country until there was some constitutional reason to think otherwise.
In Springfield, as the calendar moved closer to the day of inauguration, Lincoln may have appeared “calm and collected,” but he was not. The Illinois State Journal had printed the full text of Buchanan’s State of the Union message. A few days later, Lincoln read in the Journal a devastatingly predictive account of what was to come, reprinted from the Cincinnati Commercial, in the Senate’s response to Buchanan’s plea. “On motion concerning the reference of the President’s Message, [Joseph] Lane, of Oregon, made an apology for the dissolution of the Union, saying it must dissolve unless the rights of the South are further guaranteed. [John P.] Hale, of N.H., said the logic of this controversy is war or submission. The minority must submit to the majority. He made no threats, and spoke without having consulted anybody, he spoke for himself only and one little State. ‘We must look this matter straight in the face.’ [Albert G.] Brown, of Miss. desired to know if Hale presented the issue of war or submission. Hale said it must lead to that. He made no threat. Brown replied sternly: ‘We will not submit, and if it is war[,] let it come, and God show the right.’ [Alfred] Iverson, of Ga., was quiet at first, but haughty and defiant in the end. Mr. Iverson discarded all shams, saying that the election of Lincoln was no cause for secession; but the South would not be governed by the North, and intended to go out while she had strength, not to wait until she was too weak. Douglas sat scowling in his seat; Southern men looked cool. The Northern men were calm and collected.”
An exhausted, depressed Buchanan went home to Wheatland, his Pennsylvania farm near Lancaster. His two indentured servants, formally his slaves, packed his bags. True to habit and precedent, he had performed his final official duty graciously, the last of a long career, calling on Lincoln and escorting him to the inauguration ceremony on March 5, 1861. He would have agreed with the intention of the new president’s prophylactic claim to the South: “We are not enemies but friends.” He had been saying that all along. Differences over slavery did not require divorce. Lincoln agreed. Always personable and mostly good-humored, Buchanan had done all he was capable of to persuade the Democratic Party and the white nation to keep the peace. He did not believe that force of arms would solve the problem of slavery or secession. Coercion was unacceptable. But his plea that both sides desist from exacerbation and confrontation—that the South accept Lincoln, that the North resist further antislavery agitation—was rejected by both.
Listening to Lincoln’s inaugural address, or reading it soon afterward, he knew, as did Lincoln, that the new president would have to deal with the reality of secession. South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas would not retreat. A strong unionist who, once the inevitable had happened, supported the war, the ex-president was soon distressed to learn that he was being deemed a failed president who ought to have done more to prevent secession. Despite his flaws, it is an unfair criticism. Buchanan did not control events and their timing. He did attempt to supply and reinforce Fort Sumter in January 1861, the use of an unarmed merchant ship signaling to the South that he did not want to start a war. The ship was fired on and driven off anyway. And a plausible argument can be made that whatever he did or didn’t do during his presidency, the war would have come. Conditions were in place, including Lincoln’s mind-set, that made it inevitable. Southern leaders had decided that the South should and would sustain independence. Could any Republican president have controlled the forces at work that resulted in the refusal of the North to accept an independent Southern confederacy? Not likely. And slavery would still have required redress. By inference, that was the argument Lincoln was to make in his Second Inaugural Address, a month before his death. It was the war that John Quincy Adams had seen no way of avoiding.
WHILE SLAVERY controlled only one-third of the body of the nation, racism animated the national spirit. If there was anything that made slavery an intractable problem, it was this. There were, of course, other things: the Constitution, the Southern and national economies, the social and psychological realities of Southern life, the disinclination of the taxpayer to fund buyouts, and the unwillingness of Americans to have Negroes as fellow citizens, let alone neighbors. This brings the list back to racism. Abolitionists helped raise the consciousness and spread of antislavery moralism, but they had little effect on the widespread conviction that the Negro belonged to an inferior race. Slavery fed and nurtured all of Southern life; it contributed substantially to the economy of the North. And though it had varying gradations, complicated by the reality of free blacks and the mental gymnastics required by the contradiction between “all men are created equal” and slavery, it dominated the psyche and spirit of most Americans. Difficult as it would be to eliminate slavery, there was a more intractable, seemingly irresolvable problem: race.
Lincoln recognized this. Early on, he himself bought into the comfortable co-existence of antislavery moralism and racism in Illinois. That was the world he lived in. It was his mind-set also. That was where he was when he came to maturity as a young man in Illinois. That was where he was when the war started. There is no reason to believe that, at its end, he accepted blacks as equals, though he had begun, pressured by the obvious certainty that America would now be a multiracial nation, to make concessions to the new reality. And he knew, when in 1864 he began tentative efforts at reconstruction, proposing citizenship for a small number of blacks—those who had fought for the Union and the black leadership elite—that he was settling, by necessity, for second best. Colonization, if only it could be made practical, was still preferable.
In the winter of 1860/1861, as seven Southern states and then four more exited the union, the new president had a number of consequential questions to ponder: whether a state had the right to secede, to revolutionize as he had affirmed in 1848; whether he could tempt or force the seceding states back into the Union; whether his voters would stick with him if he tried either approach; whether the seceding states could be bribed to return short of allowing slavery to be legal in the Western territories, a concession that he could not afford to make; what he could do to prevent additional states from seceding; and, if the newly created Southern Confederacy insisted on its separate sovereignty, under what circumstances he should attempt to coerce it back into the Union. If the Confederacy believed it had a right to take possession of Union property such as forts, what would be an effective response? From one point of view, that would be stealing. After all, federal property belonged to all the nation’s taxpayers. And given his commitment to national sovereignty, subject to the provisions of the Constitution, how could he accept what he believed to be an illegal and unconstitutional abrogation of a contractual obligation? This was, in fact, a rebellion, and, as he had said to the House of Representatives in 1848, the majority had a right, in the interest of self-preservation and its own sovereignty, to suppress an illegal attempt by a minority to create an independent sovereignty.
There were three additional complicating factors. There was the moral dimension. The majority (or at least a legitimate plurality) of Americans disapproved of slavery. The rebels favored it. But the moral issues, other than nonextension, could be put on indefinite hold. There was also the political dimension. The Republican Party and its principles probably could not survive if the party did not affirm its legitimacy and its right to rule the nation as a whole. If it turned tail, it might never again elect a president. Then there was the constitutional dimension: Lincoln had been elected, fair and square, by the decision of the ballot box, according to the time-honored constitutional procedures. Did not a commitment to democracy require that his election be honored?
None of these considerations altered the reality of slavery or the racism that animated the spirit of the nation. But slavery was not the primary or even a major consideration in the decisions Lincoln needed to make in 1861. He had no reason to believe that the combined free black and slave populations, if and when emancipation occurred, would be accepted by white Americans as fellow citizens with equal rights, or that, if equality were mandated by law, it would not produce a century or more of vicious hostility. He himself never did and still did not believe a multiracial society desirable, let alone possible. Somehow the entire black population needed to be eliminated, the long-term problem of emancipation made to go away. Colonization was still the answer. Meanwhile, he had pressing life-and-death problems to deal with. As a practical matter, slavery was not one of them, except insofar as the seceding states had withdrawn from the union in response to his and his party’s determination that slavery should exist only where it already existed by constitutional and local sanction. If the South accepted that, there need be no conflict. To Lincoln’s mind, his best approach was amelioration, and the main strategical concern was how much carrot and how much stick would be necessary to persuade the states that had seceded to return, and to keep the border states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri—from seceding. How much soft inducement and how much iron fist?