Lincoln was traveling through Kansas—of all places—when John Brown was executed. The next day he told a crowd at Leavenworth that he believed the hanging was justified, “even though he agreed with us that slavery is wrong. That cannot excuse violence, bloodshed, and treason.” But Lincoln denounced any attempt to link Brown’s actions to the Republican Party as a mere “electioneering dodge,” and he pointedly warned any southerners who might be considering secession after the next presidential election: “If constitutionally we elect a president and therefore you undertake to destroy the Union, it will be our duty to deal with you as old John Brown has been dealt with.” Besides Leavenworth, Lincoln also visited Elwood, Troy, Doniphan, and Atchison, Kansas, during the first week in December. While modestly denying any interest in the 1860 presidential nomination, Lincoln, like all good politicians, was keeping his options open.1
By far his most important appearance came in February 1860, when he addressed the Young Men’s Central Republican Union in New York City. Defining youth rather liberally—members included sixty-five-year-old William Cullen Bryant and forty-nine-year-old Horace Greeley, a comparative stripling by group standards—the committee was actually a front for opponents of New York senator William Seward. Lincoln was unaware of this fact when he accepted the group’s invitation in the fall of 1859 (he asked for an extension to give him more time to compose a proper speech). The original invitation called for an address at the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, the so-called Grand Central Station of the Underground Railroad. For reasons possibly having to do with the weather—New Yorkers might have balked at crossing the ice-choked East River at night in the dead of winter—the speech was moved to the more august and accessible location of the Cooper Union on Seventh Street in Manhattan. Event organizers did not bother to tell Lincoln of the change of venues, and he first learned of it through a notice in the New York Tribune after he checked into the Astor House on lower Broadway. He was not amused. Having worked for weeks on an address suitable for a church audience, Lincoln now found himself having to spend all day reworking his speech for a more partisan political crowd.2
On the morning of his speech, several members of the Young Men’s Central Republican Union called on Lincoln at his hotel. They found him wearing a new $100 black suit he had commissioned specially for the occasion from Woods & Henckle tailor shop in Springfield. Unfortunately, the suit had been badly wrinkled on the three-day train ride, and Lincoln apologized “for the awkward and uncomfortable appearance he made in his new suit.” His hosts suavely put him at ease, insisting that he accompany them on a brief sightseeing tour of Manhattan. At the corner of Broadway and Bleecker Street, a few blocks from the Cooper Union, Lincoln was ushered into the studio of the celebrated photographer Mathew Brady. His first impression was scarcely welcoming: one wall of the reception room was dominated by Brady’s recent photograph of Stephen Douglas, “looking somewhat fiery and slightly dogmatical.”3
Undaunted, Lincoln made his way upstairs, where the famous photographer was on hand to take Lincoln’s picture. Making a virtue of necessity, Brady decided to photograph his elongated subject standing up. He posed Lincoln in front of a fake Grecian pillar, his left hand resting on a pile of books. The subsequent photograph, later heavily retouched to eliminate Lincoln’s sometimes “lazy” left eye and deep wrinkles, became the first iconic image of the prairie politician. Widely reprinted (occasionally with a herd of buffalo added to the background to illustrate the candidate’s western roots), the Brady photograph introduced the public to a somewhat idealized version of the real man—tall, stately, and formal, with a firm mouth and a pair of rapier-sharp high cheekbones that many a model, male or female, would have killed to possess.4
At precisely eight o’clock that night, Lincoln strode onto the stage at the Cooper Union to “loud and prolonged applause.” A little nervous and uncomfortable before a crowd of 1,500 of New York’s most urbane and accomplished citizens, Lincoln fidgeted through a brief if fulsome introduction by William Cullen Bryant, who termed the fifty-one-year-old speaker one of the “children of the West.” At last gaining the podium, Lincoln allowed the applause to die down, then launched immediately into his speech. For the next hour and a half he laid into his familiar punching bag, Stephen Douglas, mentioning him by name five times. Douglas, said Lincoln, had claimed that the Founding Fathers had never intended to prohibit the spread of slavery into new territories—not so. Citing specific research into their backgrounds, Lincoln maintained that twenty-one of the thirty-nine signers of the Declaration of Independence had gone on record as favoring the prohibition of slavery in new territories, and another fifteen (including such nonserving luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and Gouverneur Morris) had also given every indication of supporting that stance.5
Stretching out his prairie vowels for comic effect, Lincoln denounced Douglas and “his peculiar adherents” for believing in the “gur-reat purrinciple fantastically called ‘Popular Sovereignty,’” which Lincoln defined helpfully for his audience as the belief that “if one man would enslave another, no third man should object.” He scorned southerners for painting Republicans as “reptiles” and “outlaws,” and repeated his debatable contention that “no Republican designedly aided or encouraged the Harpers Ferry affair.” He glossed over the raid as “peculiar” and “absurd,” and described Brown somewhat leniently as “an enthusiast” who had believed he had a divine commission to liberate the slaves. It was similar to the assassination of kings and emperors throughout history, Lincoln claimed, and southerners should not worry about it, since “in the present state of things in the United States, I do not think a general, or even a very extensive slave insurrection, is possible.” Instead, he warned southerners to stop threatening to leave the Union whenever they felt put upon. Northerners would leave slavery alone in the South, he said, but they would “fearlessly and effectively” fight to prevent its spread. Lincoln closed with the most remembered line of his entire ninety-minute speech: “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.” He received a rousing—some reports said standing—ovation from the crowd.6
The next morning, Lincoln set off, as planned, to visit his son Robert at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He was heartened by the overwhelmingly positive response to his speech in the local media. The New York Times, then, as now, the quasi-official voice of the nation, devoted three front-page columns to the speech. “When Mr. Lincoln had concluded his address,” the newspaper reported, “three rousing cheers were given for the orator and the sentiments to which he had given utterance.” Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune went even further in its praise. “The speech of Abraham Lincoln at the Cooper Institute last night was one of the happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this city, and was addressed to a crowded and most appreciating audience,” the Tribune recounted. “No man ever before made such an impression on his first appeal to a New York audience.” A transcript of his entire speech was printed on page six of the newspaper. Greeley’s fellow editor, William Cullen Bryant of the New York Evening Post, trumpeted Lincoln’s speech in blaring headlines: “THE REPUBLICAN PARTY VINDICATED” and “THE DEMANDS OF THE SOUTH EXPLAINED.” Lincoln, said Bryant, had “place[d] the Republican party on the very ground occupied by the framers of our constitution and fathers of our republic…it is wonderful how much a truth gains by a certain mastery of clear and impressive statement.”7
Lincoln was deluged with offers for more appearances, and he accepted nearly every one. En route to Exeter, he delivered speeches in Providence, Rhode Island, Concord, Manchester, and Dover, New Hampshire. At Providence, an overflow crowd of 1,500 people turned out to cheer him from the moment he set foot in the auditorium on the second floor of the town depot. Lincoln, said the Providence Journal, “abounds in good humor and pleasant satire, and often gives a witty thrust that cuts like a Damascus blade. But he does not aim chiefly at fun. He strives rather to show the plain, simple, cogent reasoning that his positions are impregnable, and he carries the audience with him, as he deserves to.” While repeating essentially the same speech he had given at the Cooper Union, Lincoln took pains to throw in a few new touches. Seeking to explain why he did not support the eradication of slavery in southern states, he drew a folksy parallel for the urbane easterners. “If on the street, or in the field, or on the prairie I find a rattlesnake,” he explained, “I take a stake and kill him. But suppose the snake was in bed where children were sleeping. Would I do right to strike him there? I might hurt the children, or I might not kill, but only arouse and exasperate the snake, and he might bite the children.”8
Everywhere he went, Lincoln was greeted enthusiastically. After speaking at Exeter Town Hall in front of Robert and hundreds of his fellow students, he made appearances at Hartford, New Haven, Meriden, Norwich, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. In eleven days, he gave eleven speeches in three dependably Republican states, while carefully avoiding William Seward’s stronghold in Massachusetts and politically “doubtful” New Jersey. It was a physically exhausting but emotionally exhilarating trip, sweetened by the fact that Robert (who had failed his entrance exams to Harvard the year before) was excelling academically and socially at Phillips Exeter Academy. That summer, Robert would retake the exams and gain admittance to Harvard, helped immeasurably by a letter of recommendation that Lincoln personally requested from Stephen Douglas to Harvard president James Walker.9
By the time Lincoln returned to Springfield in the early-morning hours of March 14, he had been away from home for exactly three weeks. His speech at the Cooper Union, he modestly reported to Mary, “went off passably well.” His law partner caught a new lightness in Lincoln’s step. His “dazzling success in the East,” reported William Herndon, had convinced Lincoln “that the presidential nomination was within his reach.” While downplaying his chances, Lincoln admitted to Lyman Trumbull that “the taste is in my mouth a little.” He also took studied swipes at the other leading Republican candidates, noting that Seward was “the very best candidate we could have for the North of Illinois, and the very worst for the South of it.” The same held true for Ohio’s favorite son, Salmon P. Chase. Conditions were reversed for Missouri’s Edward Bates, who Lincoln figured would be stronger in southern Illinois, while seventy-five-year-old Supreme Court justice John McLean was a good ten or fifteen years too old for the post. Still, when supporter Edward Stafford suggested that Lincoln raise a campaign war chest of $10,000, the potential candidate was aghast. “I could not raise ten thousand dollars if it would save me from the fate of John Brown,” Lincoln replied. Any chance he had for the nomination would have to depend on word of mouth, not depth of pockets.10
While Lincoln was touring the Northeast in the amber afterglow of his Cooper Union triumph, Stephen Douglas was locked in fierce combat on the floor of the Senate. Once again, popular sovereignty was the wedge issue dividing Douglas from the party’s traditional base in the South. Georgia senator Alfred Iverson, who earlier had warned that the election of a Republican president would force the South to secede, now postured violent defiance. “Let those loud-mouthed, blood and thunder, braggadocio Hotspurs assemble their abolition army and come to force us back into the Union,” he boomed, “and we should hang them up like dogs to the trees of our forests.” Other southerners, including Jefferson Davis, James S. Green, and Clement Clay, added their voices to the rising din. Douglas attempted to placate the ultras, observing that “if I were a citizen of Louisiana I would vote for retaining and maintaining slavery, because I believe the good of that people would require it.” He proposed a bill making it illegal for one state to invade another—as though that had been the motivating factor in John Brown’s raid—but succeeded only in further enflaming southern sensibilities by calling for a strong federal response to such violations. When the Richmond Enquirer charged that his bill amounted to coercion of “the sovereign states of the South,” Douglas challenged the assertion that he was “plunging deeper and deeper into the abyss of political error.” “I do not admit the fact that there is a better Democrat on earth than I am,” said Douglas, “or a sounder one on the question of state rights, and even on the slavery question.”11
He would soon get the opportunity to prove it. The Democratic caucus, controlled from the wings by President Buchanan, passed a series of resolutions intended to bear on the party platform at the rapidly approaching presidential nominating convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Sponsored by Davis, the resolutions called for a federal slave code for all territories and the prohibition of local ordinances interfering with slaveholders’ property rights. Douglas, advised again to ignore southern provocations, adopted a policy of “masterly inactivity” on the Senate floor, while furiously wheeling and dealing at his campaign headquarters in the National Hotel and hosting potential supporters at his home on Minnesota Row. Adele, as always, was by his side, graciously presiding over dinner parties and looking luminous again after her grave illness. Further evincing her loyalty, she stopped attending the White House teas hosted by the president’s niece, Harriet Lane, although the two competing hostesses kept adjoining boxes at Ford’s Theatre. One night, when a South Carolina fire-eater entered their box to pay his respects, Adele cut him off at the knees. “Sir, you have made a mistake,” she said. “Your visit is intended for next door.”12
Douglas concentrated on winning supporters outside of Washington. He maintained a voluminous correspondence with would-be backers from New York to California, and sent campaign aide A. D. Banks, a former Petersburg, Virginia, newspaper editor, on frequent forays into the South to contact putative moderates. In the Old Northwest, where he was strongest, Douglas won endorsements from state conventions in Illinois, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, and Wisconsin. He also gained adherents in New England, with delegations pledging their support from Maine, Vermont, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The powerful states of New York and Pennsylvania remained split, despite the strong-arming tactics of Douglas’s old champion George N. Sanders, who was said to be employing “the moral suasion of stewed oysters, Virginia ham and Bourbon whiskey” on delegates. Much of the South remained out of reach, although individual supporters assured Douglas that he was “stronger, a thousand times, with the southern people, than superficial currents set in motion by politicians would indicate.” A last-minute effort to move the convention from Charleston to New Orleans, where Douglas had strong personal and business roots, failed. Douglas supporters would have to make their stand in the home state of the ferocious John C. Calhoun, whose restless spirit, nine years dead, still cast a considerable shadow across the ever-darkening face of the South.13
The Democratic National Convention opened for business in Charleston on April 23. It was unseasonably hot, and thin columns of steam rose from the cobblestone street outside the South Carolina Institute Hall as the 606 delegates gathered to select their party’s next presidential candidate. A brief midmorning shower did little to lower the sweltering heat, and the doors and windows of the two-story wooden building were thrown open in a vain attempt to create a cross breeze in the jam-packed first-floor assembly room. The deafening rattle of horse-drawn carriages on Meeting Street drowned out the brief opening remarks by executive committee chairman Daniel A. Smalley and the less concise invocation by local minister Christian Hanckle, who had conveniently pasted his lengthy prayer to the inside cover of a hymnal. Delegates futilely swished palm-leaf fans, mopped their necks with balled-up handkerchiefs, and squirmed in their hard-backed wooden chairs like restless children on the last day of school. Onlookers in the overhanging balconies added to the general hubbub. No one in the room, either visitor or delegate, could hear himself think.14
By any objective measure, Charleston had been a disastrous choice for the party’s convention. Not only was it difficult to reach by rail—a wearying thirteen changes of train were required between Washington, D.C., and the Carolina coast—but local hotels were inadequate to house the expected onslaught of delegates. With that in mind, several of the state delegations chartered steamers to use as floating dormitories. Others planned to pitch tents on public property, a plan that was swiftly quashed by local authorities. Many Democrats, particularly those from northern states, simply opted not to attend the convention at all. “Charleston is the last place on Gods Earth where a national convention should have been held,” Chicago backer Thomas Dyer told Douglas. Massachusetts delegate F. O. Prince complained to Adele Douglas, “I have never been taught to believe in eternal punishment, but the journey here has led me to recognize the contrary ‘platform,’ to use the term now current, since it has appeared to me, that those who were instrumental in locating the convention here can only be adequately punished therefore by Brimstone and Caloric ad infinitum.” Curiously, Douglas himself was untroubled by the choice. “There will be no serious difficulty in the South,” he assured Albany, New York, delegate Peter Cagger before the convention. “The last few weeks has worked a perfect revolution in that section.”15
Douglas’s supporters on the ground in Charleston were considerably less sanguine. Having spent much of their time arguing with southern delegates on the interminable train ride to the coast, they found themselves outnumbered, outorganized, and outshouted by their angry counterparts, who openly suggested that any Douglas supporters would be better off attending the upcoming Republican Party convention in Chicago alongside their fellow abolitionists. Intended as a reward to the South for helping elect northerner James Buchanan president four years earlier, the selection of Charleston now seemed a monument to unintended consequences and the intrinsic unpredictability of politics. For all its flower-scented gardens and soft sea breezes wafting over the Battery from its famous harbor, Charleston was enemy territory for Douglas and his supporters. Five days before, as conventioneers began arriving, an Alabama newspaper scripted a less-than-encouraging welcome. “This Demagogue of Illinois,” thundered the Opelika Weekly Southern Era, “deserves to perish upon the gibbet of Democratic condemnation, and his loathsome carcass to be cast at the gate of the Federal City.” The Jackson Mississippian was equally defamatory, terming Douglas “the most profligate of all political reprobates; the most unbearable of all political bores; a turbulent demagogue; a miserable thimblerigger with a remarkable capacity to betray.”16
Having spent the last ten years of his political life in a thankless struggle to broker some sort of accommodation between pro-and antislavery forces, Douglas was no longer in a mood to compromise. “I do not intend to make peace with my enemies, nor to make a concession of one iota of principle,” he told Illinois ally James W. Singleton, “believing that I am right in the position I have taken, and that neither can the Union be preserved or the Democratic party maintained upon any other basis.” Singleton, who had known Douglas since the two served together as young men in the state militia, agreed. “We are not in a condition to carry another ounce of southern weight,” he replied. “We have essayed to vindicate their rights under the Constitution, we grant to them all we claim for ourselves, and we must now take our chances alike for the protection which the local laws will extend to our property in the territories; to go further and legislate for one or every species of property in the territories—would be inexplicable inconsistency, invoking the fatal acknowledgement as error all our preconceived notions of the right and capacity of the people to regulate their domestic affairs in their own way.” Efforts were still being made to reach out to moderate southerners—what few there were—but northern Democrats were determined to nominate Douglas. “Rest assured of one thing,” one committed delegate told Douglas on the eve of the convention. “There can arise no contingency in the convention when your friends will agree to vote for any other man than yourself. The time for compromise and postponement upon that point has passed.” Another supporter vowed that the Douglas men would walk out of the convention if he were denied the nomination. It would prove to be a mordantly ironic threat.17
There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Douglas was, as Cincinnati journalist Murat Halstead noted, “the pivot individual” around whom all other Democrats revolved. “Every delegate,” wrote Halstead, “was for or against him. Every motion meant to nominate or not to nominate him.” Signaling his own inveterate opposition to Douglas’s nomination, President Buchanan dispatched more than 500 loyalists, both delegates and lobbyists, to battle the Little Giant. They gathered in a rented mansion on King Street behind a local ice cream parlor to plot strategy, led by a quartet of proadministration senators: John Slidell of Louisiana, Jesse Bright of Indiana, James A. Bayard of Delaware, and William Bigler of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Douglas supporters congregated at the luxurious Mills House and the rather less comfortable Hibernian Hall, where hundreds of cots had been crammed together barracks-like on the second floor.18
In keeping with long-accepted tradition, Douglas remained in Washington, leaving his campaign in the hands of his trusted lieutenant, former Illinois congressman William A. Richardson, who had run his 1856 campaign in Cincinnati. Described by Halstead as “a fine specimen of a strong, coarse man,” Richardson would have his hands full, combating both the Buchananites and the southern ultras who were sworn to resist Douglas to the last. He could not have been reassured by a flaming editorial in the Charleston Mercury by radical editor Robert Barnwell Rhett, Jr., who crowed: “The Democratic party, as a party, based on principles, is dead. It exists now only as a powerful faction. It has not one single principle common to its members North and South.”19
The acknowledged leader of the ultras was forty-five-year-old former Alabama congressman William Lowndes Yancey, whose bland exterior masked a ferocious inner heat. As a young man, Yancey had killed a man in South Carolina during a fistfight. Convicted of manslaughter, he had served three months in jail, during which time he wrote a less-than-contrite letter to his brother describing the fight and noting with unseemly self-approval: “I have done my duty as a man, & he who grossly insulted me lies now, with a clod upon his bosom.” Later, while serving a single term in Congress, he fought a duel with fellow congressman Thomas W. Clingman of North Carolina over Clingman’s opposition to the annexation of Texas. Like a couple of proper English gentlemen, the two exchanged pistol shots at dawn on the field of honor (each missed). As a delegate to the 1848 Democratic National Convention in Baltimore, Yancey led a two-man walkout after Michigan senator Lewis Cass was nominated on a platform that did not include a plank forbidding Congress from prohibiting slavery in newly acquired territories. For the previous ten years, he had traveled tirelessly across the South, promoting the establishment of southern rights associations and advocating secession from the Union. “We shall fire the Southern heart,” Yancey told a fellow believer, “instruct the Southern mind—give courage to each other, and at the proper moment, by one organized, concerted action, we can precipitate the cotton states into a revolution.”20
Yancey arrived in Charleston with formal instructions from the Alabama Democratic Party empowering him to lead another walkout if the convention did not adopt a platform supporting a uniform federal slave code in the territories. Douglas’s men anticipated such a walkout, but regarded it as a positive, not negative, act. “Douglas could ask for nothing better,” the St. Paul Pioneer and Democrat declared. “This course will throw out of the convention that class of votes which would be cast against him. It will reduce that much the number of delegates, and of course, the number required to make up a two-thirds majority; while it leaves his strength intact.” Back in Washington, Douglas instructed his supporters to “make no compromises, ask no favors…neither receive nor give quarter.”21
While northern delegates were alternately arguing with their southern counterparts in hotel lobbies and listening to denunciatory speeches from fire-eating rabble-rousers on street corners, Yancey stayed literally above the fray, occupying a suite of rooms on the upper floor of the Charleston Hotel. His hard-eyed, wig-wearing chief lieutenant, Mississippi congressman William Barksdale, circulated through the crowd, strong-arming delegates who might be wavering in their commitment (and who were well aware of his fearsome reputation as a bowie-knife-wielding duelist). Two days before the convention opened, representatives from seven southern states—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—met in Yancey’s room and agreed to stand together in demanding a federal slave code plank. If adopted, such a plank would force Douglas to step down as a candidate, since he could never agree to its implicit renunciation of popular sovereignty. If not adopted, the ultras would walk out.
Before anyone else could be nominated, the front-runner had to be defeated, and that looked like a formidable task. The Douglas camp won a pair of preliminary skirmishes before the convention even opened. Douglas’s old schoolboy friend from Vermont, Daniel A. Smalley, in his role as chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, ruled in favor of Douglas supporters in two disputed delegations, New York and Illinois. Despite strong pressure from ultras and Buchananites, the committee refused to overturn Smalley’s decision. On the eve of the convention, Halstead reported, the “run of the current is Douglas-ward.” At the Mills House, Douglas supporters whooped it up, assuring Halstead that “all that is to be done is to ratify the voice of the people. There is nothing but a few ballots, and all is over—Douglas [is] the nominee.” As if to underscore their confidence, a number of them got roaring drunk and “made the night hideous” beneath the journalist’s hotel window.22
The convention formally got under way at noon the next day. For those who believed in portents, it was a clear sign of Douglas’s ascendancy—his forty-seventh birthday. (It was also the day traditionally recognized as William Shakespeare’s birthday, but no one was heard to remark on the coincidence.) The first order of business was to rule on the executive committee decision to exclude the anti-Douglas delegations from New York and Illinois. Virginia delegate M. W. Fisher rose to speak in behalf of the contested delegations, which were led respectively by New York City mayor Fernando Wood and Chicago postmaster Isaac Cook, a bitter personal enemy of Douglas. With the horse-drawn carriages still lumbering noisily down Meeting Street, the elderly, thin-voiced Fisher could scarcely make himself heard. He was drowned out, at any rate, by a challenge from New York congressman John Cochrane, a suave parliamentarian whose florid complexion and balding head were topped by an artful comb-over. The New York City resident was known for his high living, and Halstead wittily described him as looking “as though it would require a very strong cup of coffee to bring him into condition in the morning.” Cochrane’s defense of the Douglas delegations carried the day, and the convention’s first vote went overwhelmingly in Douglas’s favor, 256–47. An elderly Pennsylvania delegate who attempted to take the floor was rebuffed by cries of “Goddamn you, sit down!” and “What the hell do you want to talk for?”23
The convention’s second official act was less favorable to Douglas. Massachusetts delegate Caleb Cushing, who had served as Franklin Pierce’s attorney general and now was firmly allied with the Buchanan administration, was elected permanent chairman. Despite his New England roots, Cushing was notably pro-southern in his sentiments—one disgusted Ohio delegate later termed him “the veriest toady and tool of the Fire Eaters”—and he accepted the post with an impassioned speech limning the geographical glories of the continent, from the rocky hills of the East to the verdant valleys of the Mississippi basin and the golden shores of the West, concluding with a ringing denunciation of the “traitorous” and “half insane” Republicans who were conspiring “to set region against region.”24
The Democrats were doing a pretty good job of that themselves, and a momentous decision on the second day of the convention underscored the fact. Following a stem-winding speech by Richardson in behalf of a move to free uninstructed delegates from having to vote as a unit, the assembly agreed to allow the delegates to vote individually. This freed another 30 to 40 votes for Douglas, and the 197 votes in favor of the measure were within a hairbreadth of the 202 he needed to win the nomination. Confident of their power, the Douglas supporters unwisely agreed to southern demands that the convention approve a party platform before selecting the nominee. It was the ultras’ trump card, and the Douglas camp blithely allowed them to play it. That decision, made in the first flush of victory, would prove disastrous, not merely to Douglas and the Democratic Party, but ultimately to the nation as a whole.
Party platforms ordinarily were no more than vague documents laying out in general terms the positions a candidate was expected to take during the campaign. But 1860 was not an ordinary year. The decade-long wrangle over such abstract concepts as popular sovereignty and states’ rights had ossified around the South’s adamantine demand for a federal slave code, which Maine congressman James G. Blaine, himself a future presidential candidate, later characterized as an argument over “an imaginary Negro in an impossible place.” The canny Halstead summed up the matter neatly for his readers: “The South makes it a point of honor that the platform shall not be one capable of double construction…. The Northern delegates don’t care much about the honor of the matter. Their political existence depends absolutely upon their ability to construe the platform adopted here to mean ‘popular sovereignty,’ which will allow them to declare, in the North, that the officially expressed Democratic doctrine is that the people of the Territories may, while in their territorial condition, abolish or exclude slavery. They cannot, dare not, yield the opportunity for pressing this pretext.” Noting that the ultras controlled the platform committee by a bare one-vote margin, Halstead predicted that “the Convention is destined to explode in a grand row. There is tumult and war in prospect.” The explosion was postponed, for the time being, when the chairman of the Vermont delegation, John S. Robinson, conveniently dropped dead on the third day of the convention, forcing delegates to suspend business for the rest of the day out of respect.25
While the platform committee deliberated behind closed doors at nearby Masonic Hall, delegates tramped the streets in search of much-needed diversion. Some found it on the breezy Battery, where the Boston-based stylings of Gilmore’s Brass Band serenaded the crowd free of charge, courtesy of the Massachusetts delegation. As the musicians bleated away at patriotic tunes, delegates looked across the harbor to Sullivan’s Island, where Colonel William Moultrie’s homegrown militia had successfully held off the flower of the British navy in 1776, thus saving Charleston from near-certain capture. Closer to shore, on a man-made island three miles from the Battery, a cadre of army engineers worked desultorily to complete a new fort. Named after former South Carolina general Thomas Sumter, the fort when finished would boast massive brick walls, forty feet high and twelve feet thick, to protect it from any seaborne invaders. None of the 146 gun ports pointed toward shore, since no danger was expected to come from that direction. Excursion boats sailed past the unfinished fort and up the Ashley and Cooper rivers to neighboring plantations, where the southern delegates were greeted warmly and the northern delegates largely went uninvited.26
Other conventioneers found more prosaic amusements inside the city. At the Charleston Theater, a skilled magician named Professor Jacobs, ably assisted by a “goblin” called Sprightly, was said “to do wonderful things with cards, rabbits, and a goose.” Less mystically inclined delegates repaired to the various saloons along the waterfront to sample an assortment of exotic drinks served in iced bowls alongside free helpings of green peas and strawberries. Still others took advantage of the hospitality room aboard the Pennsylvania delegation’s chartered steamer, Keystone State, which was stocked with free liquor and lager beer, or visited the New York delegation’s headquarters on the Nashville, where with typical big-city urbanity the New Yorkers had obligingly stowed a contingent of “amiable females.” Professional gamblers swarmed the hotel lobbies, ever ready to deal a few hands of faro or poker, and world-class pickpockets mingled through the crowd, relieving unwary delegates of their winnings.27
The convention got back to business on the morning of the fifth day, when the platform committee, looking like the guests of honor at a mass hanging, trooped into the hall. The weather outside was equally gloomy. The heat wave had broken, and cold rain and gusty winds swept across the city. In the overhead galleries, female visitors dripped disconsolately onto the floor, the feathers in their ruined bonnets drooping along with their spirits. Excited delegates snatched at advance copies of the three committee reports. The majority report, presented by North Carolina delegate William W. Avery, upheld the southern position. Signed by all fifteen southern committee members, it firmly rejected the notion of popular sovereignty and called on the federal government “to protect, when necessary, the rights of persons and property on the high seas, in the Territories, or wherever else its constitutional authority extends.”28
The minority position, endorsed by all but one of the sixteen eastern and midwestern members of the committee, was presented by longtime Douglas loyalist Henry Payne of Cleveland. Warning the southerners that they were in danger of destroying the party—if not, indeed, the nation—over a mere abstraction, Payne urged them to allow the party’s eventual candidate “to run this race unfettered and unhampered” by the demand for a federal slave code. The minority platform repeated the position taken by the 1856 convention, which had endorsed a carefully worded statement on popular sovereignty that both northern and southern delegates could accept. The new platform, as suggested by Douglas, added a codicil pledging to abide by the Dred Scott decision and any future Supreme Court rulings on slavery in the territories. It was as far as northern Democrats were prepared to go. “We never will recede from that doctrine, sir; never, never, never,” Payne cautioned. “We cannot recede from this doctrine without personal dishonor, and so help us God, we never will abandon this principle. If the majority report is adopted, you cannot expect one northern electoral vote, or one sympathizing member of Congress from the free states.” Payne’s speech was greeted with tremendous applause from the northern delegations and absolute silence from the southern ones.29
Benjamin Butler, a delegate from Lowell, Massachusetts, whose somewhat ridiculous appearance—he was cross-eyed, heavy-lidded, fat-faced, and bald—masked a calculating, lawyerly intelligence, rose next to present a one-man minority report. Butler’s solution to the platform controversy was simple—he merely endorsed the 1856 platform as it was. To those who disapproved of the 1856 platform for being too vague and admitting too many interpretations, Butler responded that both the Bible and the Constitution were also open to interpretation. Furthermore, he said, the majority report’s call for the “rights of persons and property on the high seas” might be used to reinstitute the African slave trade, while the minority report’s pledge to tie the Democratic Party to any and all future Supreme Court decisions “was enough to make the bones of old Jackson rattle in his coffin.” When a Maryland delegate acidly remarked that his state, at least, had never encouraged open resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, Butler replied that Massachusetts had never kept its voters away from the polls with bludgeons and knives.30
On that less-than-collegial note, the convention adjourned for lunch, but the pouring rain kept all but the hungriest delegates inside. The southerners caucused informally, and William Barksdale passed along a handwritten note to Cushing that “Mr. Yancey [is] asking very much to speak.” This was the moment all Charleston had been waiting for. An extended ovation greeted Yancey’s appearance at the podium, and he began to voice what one observer called “the most uncompromising sentiments in the most musical and ingratiating tones.” For the next hour and a half—the convention obligingly suspended its one-hour time limit for his benefit—Yancey held forth on the South’s minority status within the Union and the necessity of the North to vouchsafe southern rights, particularly the right to freely take their slaves wherever they wanted. “Ours is the property invaded,” he said, “ours are the institutions which are at stake; ours is the peace that is to be destroyed; ours is the honor at stake.” While southerners on the floor and in the galleries roared their approval, Yancey urged the convention to “bear with us, then, if we stand sternly upon what is yet that dormant volcano, and say we yield no position here until we are convinced we are wrong. We are in a position to ask you to yield. What right of yours, gentlemen of the North, have we of the South ever invaded? What institution of yours have we ever assailed, directly or indirectly? What laws have we ever passed that have invaded, or induced others to invade, the sanctity of your homes or to put your lives in jeopardy?” No one, he said, had the right to interfere with slavery. “It does not belong to you to put your hands on it,” he thundered. “You are aggressors when you injure it. You are not our brothers when you injure us.” He urged the delegates to unite behind slavery as a positive good. “If we beat you, we give you good servants for life and enable you to live comfortably,” Yancey concluded expansively. All white men should join “the master race and put the Negro race to do the dirty work which God designed they should do.” Wild shouts and raucous clapping escorted him from the podium.31
It had grown dark while Yancey spoke, and the pale yellow glow of gaslights shimmered in the hall as Ohio senator George Pugh angrily made his way to the stage to speak in rebuttal. He was glad to hear a southern leader speak so plainly and boldly, Pugh noted, since that had not been the case in Cincinnati four years earlier, when southern delegates had supported a platform tacitly calling for popular sovereignty. “Must the Democratic party be dragged at the chariot wheel of three hundred thousand slave-masters,” Pugh demanded, while northern Democrats “were thrust back and told in effect they must put their hands on their mouths and their mouths in the dust? Gentlemen of the South, you mistake us—you mistake us! We will not do it!”32
It was, said one observer, “a fearless speech,” and the convention floor seethed with angry delegates. John Cochrane of New York made a motion to split the difference between the platforms by adding language affirming the property rights of all citizens in the territories and calling any efforts to annul those rights “unwise in policy and repugnant to the Constitution.” Connecticut delegate W. D. Bishop said he doubted whether anything new could be added to the debate “if the convention remained in session and debated all summer.” Noting that the minds of the southern delegates appeared to be made up, Bishop called for an immediate vote on the platform. The convention exploded. Dozens of delegates jumped up at once, climbing onto their chairs, “screaming like panthers, and gesticulating like monkeys.” Reporters climbed atop their writing tables to view the explosion, and visitors in the galleries craned their necks over the balcony to see what was happening below. Cushing pounded his gavel like a hammer, but no one could hear it. A crowd of angry southerners gathered menacingly around Bishop, and impromptu wrestling matches took place throughout the hall. Someone cried out in a strangled voice that—good God!—the Democratic Party was about to die.33
Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and the delegates voted to adjourn for the night. It was a long one. Telegrams flew back and forth between Charleston and Washington, asking for instructions from party leaders in Congress and the White House. George N. Sanders, who as master of the New York ports had risked presidential displeasure by attending the convention as a Douglas backer, wired Buchanan, appealing to his patriotism and reminding him of Douglas’s selfless withdrawal in Buchanan’s favor at the Cincinnati convention. Sanders urged the president to announce his support for Douglas, adding portentously that Buchanan “could not afford to be the last president of the United States.” Buchanan was in no mood to endorse his bitter enemy, and the fact that Sanders’s telegram was sent collect—it cost Buchanan $26.80 to read it—did nothing to improve the president’s state of mind. Meanwhile, southern leaders such as Robert Toombs of Georgia and Jefferson Davis of Mississippi were urging their state delegations to walk out if they did not receive satisfaction. Robert Hunter of Virginia, who retained hopes of being the nominee himself, advised his state not to withdraw—at least, not yet. Douglas’s people, on the other hand, continued to exude confidence. C. P. Culver reassured the senator that Yancey’s speech had merely been a way for the South to let off steam, and that in the end only Alabama and Mississippi would oppose his platform. The odds were ten-to-one that Douglas would be nominated.34
The next day dawned cold and rainy, and the delegates returned to the convention hall in equally foul spirits. Kentucky and Ohio delegates groused that they had run through their liquor supplies, and the men from the Bluegrass State suffered the added ignominy of having to pay for thirty empty hotel rooms out of their own pockets—an additional $125 per man. The Pennsylvania delegation had similar problems. Having chartered the Keystone State with the expectation that it would pay for itself by taking visitors on excursions around the harbor, the delegates were faced with a $2,000 shortfall. The ship would return north later that day, bearing with it many of Douglas’s most vocal supporters. Henceforth, the visitor’s gallery would be filled primarily with southern shouters.
Empty whiskey barrels and deserted poop decks were the least of the convention’s worries, as immediately became clear when deliberations resumed in the clammy hall. At the urging of proadministration senator William Bigler, the various platforms were sent back to the committee for further tinkering. The harried members returned with three more platforms, each largely unchanged from the originals. The convention had devolved into a Jesuitical parsing of phrases, the most significant of which was an admission by the Douglas camp that “inasmuch as differences of opinion exist in the Democratic party as to the nature and extent of the powers of a Territorial Legislature, and as to the powers and duties of Congress…over the institution of slavery within the Territories,” they were prepared to accept any future Supreme Court rulings on the subject, even ones that might limit popular sovereignty. It was a last-ditch effort to reach common ground with the South on the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. But southern delegates were not prepared to place their trust in a Supreme Court whose makeup might change dramatically when pro-southern dinosaurs like Chief Justice Taney inevitably passed away. They filibustered into the night, and the convention adjourned for the Sabbath, still hopelessly deadlocked and increasingly dispirited.35
Sunday was no day of rest for the warring delegations. The Buchananite troika of Slidell, Bayard, and Bright met with Yancey deep into the night to plot strategy. They were joined by Louisiana delegate Richard Taylor, son of the late president, who hoped to add a moderating tone to the southern position. Yancey promised to try once more to convince the members of his own delegation not to bolt prematurely from the convention, and the others waited up until dawn for him to return with an answer. He never came. Meanwhile, rampant wheeling and dealing continued on all sides. Halstead reported that one southerner had been approached three separate times by Douglas’s people and asked which foreign mission he wanted in return for his support. The Douglas camp, Halstead noted with grudging admiration, was playing “a bold game with enormous force and splendid impudence for an imperial stake,” offering ten times the number of patronage posts that actually existed in the government. Other northern delegates did not seem so avid about lining up southern support. Cleveland delegate J. W. Gray candidly told his hometown newspaper, the Plain Dealer: “Our only fear is that they will not go. They are a nuisance to the party and the country, and the sooner they get out the better.” One exasperated Louisianian was asked so many times when he was planning to walk out that he responded: “Oh, never mind. We won’t go out until we are ready. You are too damn keen for us to go.”36
Not everyone stayed indoors plotting. The rain had finally stopped, and a cool breeze blew in from the Atlantic. Halstead listened to some southern delegates sitting outside at breakfast complaining about the frost and worrying about its effect on cotton-planting efforts back home. A northern delegate whiling away the afternoon saw a sign in a shop window announcing “Slaves for sale.” Seriously or not, he inquired within about buying “a nice woman” for his household, and was shown a pretty young mulatto woman who was said to have many sterling qualities as a seamstress. Since he was a convention delegate, he could have her for the bargain price of $1,500. The delegate said he would have to think about it. Other northerners were thinking primarily about getting out of town. Trains, stagecoaches, and boats were packed with gamblers, ward heelers, and disappointed office seekers who could no longer afford the city’s exorbitant rates. Since most of them were Douglas supporters, their departure meant that the hall would be filled even more densely with proslavery locals.37
On Monday morning, the convention reopened for business. Yancey was observed to be smiling like a child on Christmas morning. He was the only one. The rest of the delegates, northern and southern, were suitably grim. After dispensing with the first item of business, Benjamin Butler’s minority report, the delegates took up what Halstead humorously described as the “Douglas-Popular Sovereignty-Supreme Court-ambiguous” report. When a young Maryland delegate moved to reconsider Butler’s report, a voice from the Alabama delegation mistakenly seconded the motion. Realizing his mistake, the Alabama delegate shouted, “Mr. President, I don’t second the motion of that man down yonder.” The Marylander took offense at the tone, and demanded to know the other delegate’s name. The man rose from his chair—all 220 pounds of him—and responded, “I intended no disrespect to the gentleman from Maryland—but my name is Tom Cooper of Alabama.” The first man smoothly saved face, announcing his own name and declaring that if Tom Cooper wished to call on him later, they would have a drink together.38
That was the last note of friendly accord at the convention. The delegates voted to consider the minority report plank by plank, beginning with a bare endorsement of the Cincinnati platform. The first plank passed, 165–138, with all but 12 of the majority votes coming from northern states. A last-minute move by Richardson to placate the South by dropping the resolution pledging the party to abide by future Supreme Court decisions failed miserably, with angry northerners voting against their own proposal when it became obvious that the southern delegates had no intention of voting at all. Halstead caught Yancey’s eye, and observed that the Alabaman was now smiling like a bridegroom. One by one, the chairmen of the southern delegations rose to declare their objections to the proceedings. Then they walked out, taking their delegates with them. In a mass exodus, the delegates from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas left the hall and retired to St. Andrew’s Hall, a few blocks away. Watching them go, the southern ladies in the gallery fluttered their fans, twirled their parasols, and favored them with approving waves.39
That night a carnival atmosphere prevailed in Charleston. Residents took to the streets in support of the southern walkout, and a crowd of several thousand congregated in front of the federal courthouse. Cries of “Yancey! Yancey!” filled the air. At 11:00 p.m., their champion appeared and delivered an impromptu speech denouncing the “Rump Convention” that remained at Institute Hall. He would, he said, help organize a “Constitutional Democratic Convention” the next day at Military Hall. “Perhaps even now the pen of the historian is nibbed to write the story of a new Revolution,” Yancey added. “Three cheers for the independent Southern Republic,” someone called out, as if on cue.40
The next day, the remaining delegates reconvened. Douglas supporters, although disheartened by the previous day’s events, still looked forward to securing for the Little Giant the prize that had escaped him so narrowly in 1852 and 1856. It soon became apparent that this was not to be. After Georgia spokesman Henry L. Benning read a statement withdrawing twenty-six members of his delegation from the convention, Cushing ruled that the eight Georgia delegates wishing to remain could not vote, since they did not truly represent their state. A series of arcane parliamentary wrangles ensued. The New York delegation, hoping to play kingmaker and possibly nominate one of its own members for president, led the effort to require that the nominee receive two-thirds of the total number of votes at the convention—303—not merely two-thirds of those remaining in the hall. With fewer than 250 voters still remaining in the hall (each delegate cast half a vote), Douglas would have to capture five-sixths of the total votes to win the nomination. It was impossible. Beginning at dusk, twelve separate ballots were recorded, with Douglas receiving between 1451/2 and 1501/2 votes. The rest were scattered among favorite-son candidates.41
The next day was more of the same. Following an appearance by the Boston Brass Band, which played several patriotic tunes from the gallery, the roll call resumed. Forty-five more ballots ensued, with Douglas never rising above 1521/2 votes, and no one else getting more than 651/2. Maryland delegate William S. Gittings spoke for everyone when he said that it was no use voting over and over again with no change. “If you’ll nominate Douglas, we can elect him, by God!” he insisted. Rumors swept the hall that Douglas would withdraw, but he issued a firm denial from Washington, saying that there was “not one word of truth in the report.” His supporters would not have withdrawn him, at any rate. “Douglas or nobody,” Illinois backer Charles Lanphier reported. “His friends will never yield.”42
While the national convention slowly ground to a halt, the southern bolters met at Military Hall and agreed to reconvene in Baltimore on the second Monday in June. When the New York delegation announced that it would withdraw its support of Douglas if he was not nominated by the sixtieth ballot, Richardson finally accepted the inevitable and threw his weight behind a similar motion to adjourn the convention and meet again in six weeks, also in Baltimore. Meanwhile, he recommended that the southern states make arrangements to fill the vacancies left by their bolting members. Cushing gaveled the convention to an end, and the delegates—angry, exhausted, disappointed, and broke—hastened to put Charleston behind them. By late afternoon on May 3, the only people left inside Institute Hall were the janitors sweeping up the melancholy remains of a political disaster, the crumpled posters and paper fans that had failed, literally and figuratively, to lower the temperature inside the hall.43
A few blocks away, in the middle of Charleston harbor, workers continued mortaring away on the ever-rising walls of Fort Sumter. But for the time being, at least, no one was watching.