Sectional tension had waxed and waned from the inception of the Union as Northern and Southern societies and economies matured in their own distinct ways.1 Southern complaints about Northern insensitivity to their section’s particular needs on occasion rose above the normal clamor of American politics with threats of disunion, especially when Southerners perceived a threat to their “peculiar institution” of slavery. But it was the issue of the expansion of slavery into the territories that led to the destruction of the Whig Party, strained the unity in the Democratic Party until it fractured, and gave birth to the Republican Party in the mid-1850s. From the time of the war with Mexico in 1846, slavery, which Democrats and Whigs had sought to keep out of national debate, now agitated almost all aspects of national public discourse and policy-making and changed the way both Southerners and Northerners approached politics and each other. The Republican Party, which grew out of elements of various moribund or disintegrating political organizations in reaction to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, appealed to Northerners who wanted to keep slavery out of the new territories and resented the slaveholder’s constant intrusion into Northerners’ civil liberties, especially the forced compliance with an invigorated and expansive federal fugitive slave act in 1850.
The desire to keep the territories free of slavery was at the heart of this new political association. The party’s antislavery agenda united individuals of various political stripes who were committed to a nation that promised white men the opportunity to advance by their own hard work and the open land to become independent farmers unhindered by the competition of an oligarchy based on the exploitation of slave labor and the concentration of social and political power in an elite. That success in achieving the goal of containing slavery would lead to the ultimate extinction of that institution was not a secret, as slaveholders well understood.2
The Republican Party also gave white Southerners a political focus for their fear and hatred. As far as Southerners were concerned, the rise of a party that appealed primarily to Northern voters was a threat to slavery, the foundation upon which their way of life, their domestic stability, and their understanding of racial purity rested. Republican protestations that they had no plans or constitutional right to tamper with slavery in states where it already existed could not, and did not, change this perception. And acts such as John Brown’s attempt to foment a slave rebellion with his raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, only served to confirm Southern fears about a supposedly fanatical abolitionism driving Northern passions aimed at the destruction of their way of life.
From the presidential campaign of 1860 and through the secession winter of 1860–1861, Northerners experienced what activist Mary Livermore later called, “a time of extreme and unconcealed anxiety.”3 They could not help but pay attention to the extraordinary events beyond their own electoral districts and states, and they did not wait for community leaders or politicians to direct their attention to the crisis.4 The people’s foremost sources of information were their newspapers. The secession crisis came at a time when American publishers were turning out a record number of newspapers for a growing market with high literacy rates. Residents of the larger cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco could choose from among several dailies and other journals, while those in smaller towns usually had access to at least one local paper published on a weekly schedule.5
The need to remain connected to worlds left behind contributed to the spread of newspapers across the continent through newly settled regions. Boosters believed that the newspaper was essential for encouraging the growth of their new communities, an attitude that furthered the spread of antebellum print culture.6 In 1849, for example, Minnesota territory had its first newspaper. By the late 1850s, St. Paul, Minnesota, was home to over 10,000 residents and seven newspapers, and in 1861 the new state counted 125 newspapers.7 In Indiana, during the decade before secession, the number of newspapers grew from about 100 to almost 500.8 On the eve of the secession crisis, Wisconsin supported over 100 weekly newspapers.9 Thus, during the crisis of 1860–1861, newspapers across the North provided detailed information about the various phases of the crisis, all with their own partisan slant. Wilhelm Francksen, a German immigrant who served in the Union army, would later try to explain this phenomenon to his family. “Nearly everyone reads a newspaper here, but only the papers from their own party,” he wrote home to Germany, “which all the facts are colored or changed according to the party line and that contain nothing but lies and poison aimed at the other parties.”10
Readers of these journals gathered at public spaces and in private homes to exchange news, debate, and speculate about what would happen next. During the 1860 campaign, residents of the village of Courtland, New York, congregated at a local dry goods store to discuss events and listen to people read aloud the New York papers and no doubt continued to do so into the future.11 In the Great Barrington, Massachusetts, area, farmers read newspapers aloud and discussed the pressing issues of the day when they met regularly at a distillery where their animals consumed the by-products of whiskey making.12 Conversations at upper-class social gatherings in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities could not avoid the subject of disunion.13
In April 1861, as the crisis came to a head, the people of Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, met daily in a square on their main street looking seaward for a signal from a steamship out of Hyannis to keep them up to date.14 No doubt they took the opportunity to discuss their fears and express their opinions to those standing with them as they shuffled about waiting for news. Elsewhere, expecting trouble any moment, people checked for incoming telegraph messages that might be posted in public places. Great Barrington, Massachusetts, residents who normally relied on weekly newspapers studied posts on bulletin boards placed by telegraph operators, editors, and people with access to out-of-town papers.15 Chicagoan Mary Livermore tried to do her daughterly duty caring for an ill parent in Boston, but also “vibrated between my father’s sick room and the bulletin board” as she sought out news about the unfolding situation in South Carolina.16
Those people who generally tended to their own business found it difficult to ignore what was going on around them. Attending Sunday services, for example, could mean sitting through sermons in which preachers addressed the state of the Union. At Thanksgiving, Cleveland, Ohio, churchgoers listened to their preachers present sermons about the preservation of the Union.17 Ministers across the North not only declaimed upon the crisis from their Sunday pulpits, but also wrote about it in their sectarian journals.18
Knowing what was going on in South Carolina and elsewhere in the Deep South did not mean agreeing on how the nation should handle the disgruntled region. Philadelphia preacher Henry A. Boardman spoke for many when he argued in a Thanksgiving Day sermon that national unity was “too sacred a trust to be sacrificed except upon the most imperative grounds” and urged Americans to explore “every practicable means for preserving it” rather than allowing its disintegration.19 Other clergy believed that they should offer concessions before matters worsened to prove the North’s benevolent intentions toward the South. Prior to South Carolina’s secession, the editor of the Philadelphia Presbyterian was specific in his suggestion for easing the fears of slaveholders, arguing that personal liberty laws, which protected runaway slaves, should be repealed; such laws, he judged, were just another form of extraconstitutional nullification.20
In early December, Philadelphian Sidney George Fisher went even further by suggesting that the country could head off all but South Carolina’s secession if its lawmakers passed an act allowing a state to leave the Union.21 More frantically, Northern businessmen appealed for conciliation, lest secession disrupt the national economy and bring on a new market collapse. Recalling the Panic of 1857, they sought unity above all else. In December, for example, a group of businessmen in New York City gathered at the office of a commission merchant to reaffirm the right of slavery and called upon citizens to support political compromise favorable to Southern interests.22
Other Northerners, however, believed that preemptive concessions were unnecessary either because Southerners would not take radical action against the Constitution they professed to respect or because such actions would fail to appease slaveholders who wanted nothing less than a national guarantee of protection for slavery. Republicans, confident in their ability to govern the entire nation, failed to grasp the danger in secessionist threats.23 Vermonter Marshall Harvey Twitchell years later recalled that he did not believe that Abraham Lincoln’s coming to power would lead to “anything serious.”24 Loud fire-eaters might attract some attention, but, as one New York City editorialist proclaimed in November, “The secession strength in the South is overrated.”25 Still other Northerners were not so certain of the slaveholders’ lack of will. Reassuring words about the future did not calm these pessimistic souls. Minnesotan William G. Le Duc heard William Seward tell a crowd, “there was no danger of any serious trouble with the South.” Le Duc, who had spent some time in the South, concluded, “such erroneous opinion expressed by one so prominent in public life could only lessen the chance of averting war.”26
Even Northerners who accepted that the slaveholders would take states out of the Union were convinced that any concessions would be futile. They considered it would now be best to stand firm and not abandon principle for a period of illusory harmony. Abolitionists were naturally disposed to oppose compromise.27 After all, as black abolitionist Thomas Hamilton concluded shortly after South Carolina left the Union on December 20, the slave states in spirit had left the Union years earlier, bullying Northern states to bend to their will on any number of issues. “The Republican party may, by bowing down to the required depth, stave off for a month, or a year, or two years, the formal withdrawal of these cotton States,” Hamilton argued, “but the event is as certain as the sunshine and the rain, and depends on laws as inevitable as the laws of nature.”28 Republican politicians in Washington and in state capitals across the land came to accept this view.
As if to confirm suspicions about the insatiable demands of Southerners, on December 17, Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky shaped a compromise from the various and numerous proposals before Congress that would allow for the expansion of slavery, at least below the old Missouri Compromise line, along with other provisions guaranteeing slavery’s safety where it already existed. Politicians also expanded it to include not only the disfranchisement of the small number of Northern blacks who could vote but also the removal of free African Americans residing in Northern and Southern states to Africa. Northern blacks and their friends were outraged by the notion that politicians would sacrifice on the altar of national unity the minimal rights and expectations for a free nation that blacks enjoyed, but, in the end, the compromise plan failed to capture the support of Congress.29
Black abolitionist Thomas Hamilton admitted, “secession must soon triumph” because, among other things, Southerners now “regard as a hopeless task the effort to convince the North that slavery is a blessed and divine institution.”30 That, indeed, was the rub. The compromise propositions considered before and after South Carolina seceded on December 20 required the victorious Republican Party to abandon its core belief concerning stopping the expansion of slavery. Such a compromise was at odds with the very platform that had won Republican candidates their elections across the North. The best that the party could offer secessionists were reassurances about leaving slavery alone where it presently existed, which was not much as far as slaveholders were concerned. As Wisconsin Republicans resolved at a convention in December before the secession of South Carolina occurred, “we can make no compromise which will appease the South without yielding the whole ground which brought the Republican party into existence.”31
Compromise threatened not only the new party’s existence, but also the nation’s democratic ways. Abraham Lincoln had carried the day in all the free states but for New Jersey, where he had won four of the state’s seven electoral votes. Giving in to the secessionists would undermine the election’s outcome and corrupt the democratic process. Furthermore, Union-loving Northerners believed that secession was, as Lincoln said in his March 4, 1861, inaugural address, “the essence of anarchy”; its rejection of majority rule could only leave a nation with “anarchy, or despotism in some form.”32 Thus, unchecked secession would be a challenge not only to the nation’s domestic tranquility and prosperity, but also to its liberty and to its role as the world’s beacon of republican government.33
Some men continued to look for compromises, but radical Republican James Ashley, a Congressman from Ohio, accepted that secession provided his party with an opportunity. He believed the newly elected president’s war powers gave Lincoln the means to free slaves in the traitorous states. If war came, for Ashley it would be one that would bring to an end that hated institution.34 Beyond the parlors of radicals, abolitionists, and African Americans, however, Northerners voiced little concern about the South’s slaves as victims or even as people deserving respect. It was, after all, the threatened expansion of slavery and the arrogance of slaveholders that had driven Northerners into the Republican Party, and the desire to preserve the old constitution that kept many of them in line behind Lincoln. Although slaves did not matter for much among most Northerners, whatever their party affiliation, they certainly mattered to Southerners. On December 24, 1860, the South Carolina secessionists, desirous of explaining their actions, issued “A Declaration of Causes” that made it plain that Northern actions against slavery had forced the state out of the Union.35 Indeed, Maine soldier Oliver Otis Howard made little headway when he tried to explain to a Southern lady that Republicans were not abolitionists but only wished to stop the extension of slavery into the territories. According to Howard, she corrected him by explaining, “it is all the same thing!” “Why stop the extension of slavery?” Howard recalled her arguing, “It shows that they are against us. It is all very plain.” She promised bloodshed.36
Many residents of the Deep South states shared the concern that the Republicans were “against” them and their interests and that only secession might save them. They soon followed South Carolina’s example, beginning on January 9, 1861, when Mississippians voted to secede. Five other Deep South states left in turn. The lull in the disintegration of the Union in the aftermath of Texas’s secession on February 1, 1861, gave Northerners a few months to continue to debate the best approach to handling such an extraordinary situation.
Northerners may have fumed about the traitorous audacity of those first Confederate states, but, even so, they remained divided on the proper course of action for dealing with secessionists. Some people believed it was not prudent or even desirable to embark on an immediate campaign to reverse secession. In January 1861, leading men in Keokuk, Iowa, met several times to discuss the proper course of action after secessionists began to act, but they could not agree on a strategy.37 Northern Democrats especially were trapped in a bind of disavowing disunion, but not knowing how to arrest it without seemingly giving in to fire-eaters and selling out the North. They worried that they might be blamed for the crisis if war followed disunion, which intensified their calls for compromise and their condemnation of Republicans as the real causes of all the troubles.38 While Democrats urged caution and compromise at any price, Republican jurist Samuel Freeman Miller argued that it would be an embarrassment to give in to the demands of traitors at a time when the nation should be willing to enforce its laws and protect its government.39 Elsewhere, a Columbus, Ohio, editorialist shared Miller’s views when he pronounced that “beyond certain limits forbearance ceases to be a virtue. . . . The time is now upon us to test whether we have a government or not.”40
Some Northerners, however, were not so keen on forcing the slave states to remain in the Union. They concluded that it would be best to let the slave states go their own way, an action that would in the end free the nation from the intractable problems related to slavery and profit the remaining states. Future president Rutherford B. Hayes, for example, confided in his diary that a new and free northern nation would thrive without the seceded states.41 A New Yorker even wished that all of the other slave states would follow their brethren into the Confederacy, for if they did not, the nation would still endure the unhappiness of disunion without the benefit of ridding itself of slavery.42
There remained individuals across the North who continued to call for a cautious response in hopes that the crisis would resolve itself with some sort of national reconstruction. Some Northerners, as Oliver Otis Howard recalled, assumed that time eventually would restore calm, “that these first symptoms of rebellion were merely dark days of passion—the sheer embodiments of windy fury which time under the sun rays of good sense would dissipate.”43 In January, William Henry Seward, a leading Republican, continued to tell visitors, according to the wife of one of them, “There is no danger of civil war. It will all be over in six weeks.”44
Many Northerners probably took comfort in knowing that after Texas’s secession in February 1861, important slave states such as Virginia had resisted the impulse for disunion.45 But as New Yorker Jane Stuart Woolsey learned, such comfort might be short-lived. In early February 1861, a Virginian warned her not to be optimistic about the secession crisis burning itself out. The guest informed her that Virginians’ understanding of the meaning of Union was different from that of New Yorkers’. The quiet from that state only meant delay, and Virginia would eventually take its place in the new Confederacy.46
Doing nothing, however, was not a good option for many Northerners. In the southern regions of the Old Northwest, Democrats continued to advocate compromise. On December 22, immediately after South Carolina’s secession, for example, the people of Patoka, a community with a significant number of German Catholics located in Democratic Dubois County in the southern tier of Indiana, urged acceptance of the Crittenden Compromise, specifically called for the repeal of personal liberty laws, and reaffirmed their belief in white superiority.47 The Democrats at the January 1861 meetings in Keokuk pleaded that no concession was too great if it saved the Union.48 Nothing good would come of coercion, compromisers believed, and most Democrats, while they did not sympathize with Southern desires to break up the republic, argued that talk was the only weapon at the disposal of their government for ending the crisis. The rash fire-eaters who had caused the trouble would soon have to yield to the majority of Southerners who still loved the old flag.49
Within this debate, there were some Democrats who went so far as to admit that states could indeed leave the Union if their people wished to do so.50 Indeed, the more radical among these Democrats in Midwestern states, especially in the lower counties that had been settled by migrants from Southern states, even contemplated their own secession.51 Many of these lower-county Midwesterners believed that Republicans had drawn them into a needless crisis because of what they wrongly assumed were the party’s abolitionist views.52 In January 1861, Ohioan Hugh Anderson assured a grandson residing in Alabama that his sympathies were with the South, and that he understood the “Lincolnites” to be the unreasonable fanatics. Hugh’s son Parker made it clear that if war came, he would not support the “ red mouthed abolitionist disunionists nigger elevators, nigger lovers of men who make laws making my children only equal to be raised up educated at the same school and associated with, a race perhaps two removes from a babboon [sic].” But he also assured his family’s Alabama relative not to worry, because even if war came Lincoln would have a difficult time raising an army in Ohio. He averred that thousands of anti-Lincoln men would resist, and the new president’s supporters were “generally quaker abolitionists [who are] not the material for an army” anyway.53
Racism and constitutional ideals prevented some Northerners from supporting an aggressive response to secession. So, too, did economic interest. Northerners had hardly recovered from an earlier financial crisis, the Panic of 1857, and now they faced a period of political discord and economic uncertainty that threatened the tranquility and trust essential for cross-sectional trade. In December, after South Carolina’s secession, the Philadelphia Press reminded its readers of the Northern states’ lucrative trade connections with the South that “is of as great value annually to the free States as that of the Union is to all Europe, Asia, and South America.” That business, alone, the editorialist argued, is sufficient “a motive to conciliation.”54 Businessmen and workingmen alike argued for compromise; they understood that breaking their economic ties with the South would undermine their livelihoods even as they had begun to expect an end to the troubles ushered in by the financial difficulties that had begun with the Panic of 1857. Limited credit, property devaluation, declining prices, factory closings, bankruptcies, and extensive unemployment had undone the prosperity of mid-decade.55 Now secession promised to do the same.
In Dubuque, Iowa, the Republican victory and the secession of South Carolina halted an economic recovery.56 In New Jersey, Newark and other cities with Southern business connections also paid an economic price for sectional instability.57 During the antebellum era, Wisconsin banks had found favorable investments in the bonds of several Southern states; the secession crisis devalued those investments, which undermined confidence in those institutions.58 At least one Northern businessman received defiant letters from his Southern clients informing him that they would be paying their debts with Confederate money or violence.59 As Lincoln’s inauguration approached, Wall Street experienced “Feverish anxiety.”60 And Midwestern businessmen and newspaper editors worried openly that secession might close the Mississippi River to traffic or disrupt transportation on that vital waterway.61
Shortly after South Carolina’s secession vote, on December 26, 1860, the U.S. Army contingent in Charleston harbor moved from its vulnerable position at Fort Moultrie to the more defensible Fort Sumter. The federal government attempted to supply and to reinforce those soldiers when it sent the merchant vessel Star of the West southward, only to have the ship turned back from the harbor on January 9 when Southerners opened fire from shore batteries. This hostile act outraged many Northerners who would come to see this volley as the opening salvo of the war. Citizens cried treason, demanded action of their representatives, and mustered into volunteer military companies, offering their services to their governors to defend the flag. South Carolina had started a fight that they could not ignore unless they wished to accept dishonor for themselves and their nation. The lame-duck President James Buchanan, however, avoided taking action and a period of quiet ensued, even as some politicians unsuccessfully continued to explore avenues of compromise.62
Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4 gave Northerners an opportunity to celebrate American democracy despite the crisis.63 It also reminded Americans throughout the land that the Republican Party, an organization committed to the nonexpansion of slavery, would be guiding national policy for the next four years. While divisions remained among Northerners on how to handle secession, many people continued to urge the Republican Party not to abandon its principles. The party, eager to prove that it had the will and the power to honor the campaign pledges that embodied its ideals, obliged them throughout the months of crisis. If the party bent to Southern demands and compromised away its principles, the politicians reasoned, it would prove itself to be illegitimate and weak to supporters and enemies alike.64 The more strident antisecessionists declared that the time for compromise had passed. Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, echoing Thomas Hamilton’s earlier words, argued that “The contest must now be decided, and decided forever, which of the two, Freedom or Slavery, shall give law to this Republic.” There was nothing else to do but “Let the conflict come.”65
Northern loyalists agreed that it was important to protect federal property in the South, lest federal authority appear to be impotent in the face of challenges. Once again, attention focused on Charleston harbor and Fort Sumter. With the firing on that fort on April 12 and the surrender of its garrison on the following day, the Confederacy took matters out of the hands of Northerners. On April 15, President Lincoln declared that people in seceded states were engaging in an insurrection “too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” He also called out the militia of the loyal states to the number of 75,000 men to do what the courts could not. “I appeal to all loyal citizens,” the president continued, “to favor, facilitate and aid this effort to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government.”66 Not long thereafter, on May 3, the president called for volunteers to enlist for three years or until no longer needed.
Lincoln’s call to arms and his stated intention of regaining control of federal property that had fallen into rebel hands were deciding factors in convincing Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas to leave the Union. It also united loyal citizens in their desire to resist the destruction of their country in what many expected to be a quick fight that would resolve the issue by the end of the summer, a prediction that a few wary citizens failed to accept with the same unqualified enthusiasm. Friends told Theodore Upson, an Indiana farm boy, “that it would all be over soon; that those fellows down South are big bluffers and would rather talk than fight.” Upson, however, questioned their optimism. He had Southern family relations, knew their pugnacious spirit, and concluded, “I am not so sure about that.”67