Chapter 37
The Election Approaches

In a way, the question that California politicians had been debating was just a small version of the same issue politicians in the rest of the country were wrestling with.

Should California, where the interests of the northern and southern sections were much different, be one state or two? And should the whole country be one nation or two? How far did states’ rights go, anyway?

Trouble had been brewing between the North and South for a long time. There had been strong outcries against slavery for almost thirty years—going clear back to the preaching of Charles Finney in the 1830s as well as that of many others. The American Anti-Slavery Society was formed in 1833. William Lloyd Garrison had begun a radical antislavery newspaper called The Liberator two years before that stirred up sentiments on both sides all over the country. More societies were formed. Books were written. And dozens of preachers denounced slavery from the pulpit.

But none of that could do anything to put an end to slavery. The Congress in Washington, D.C., made the laws. And since Congress was controlled all that time by the Democratic party, which was mostly made up of men from the South, they continued to uphold the right of each individual state to have slavery if it wanted—which, of course, all the southern states did.

When the Republican party formed in the early 1850s, the Democrats and southerners weren’t too worried. But it grew so rapidly—with new states and territories all being more inclined toward northern interests, and with antislavery preaching continuing to grow—that by 1856 the Democrats realized they should be worried. Buchanan had been elected over John Fremont only by a hairsbreadth. If two of the northern states had gone for Fremont instead, he would have become president. The governor of Virginia, Edie had told us, had been thinking of secession even back then if Fremont had been elected.

Now, in 1860, southern leaders were worried!

In the North, there was strong and growing opposition to the hold of the South. But the southerners had no intention of giving up their power without a fight. There were growing threats throughout the year that a number of the states of the South would simply secede, or pull out of the Union. The South was financially strong, and if it had to, it would simply form its own new nation. But it would not give up slavery, nor give up its right to make its own decisions.

But the election of 1860 was not as simple as Democrats against Republicans, North against South, slavery against abolition. In fact, there were four candidates for president. Douglas, the Democrat, was not even a southerner at all. He was from Abraham Lincoln’s home state of Illinois, and was the U.S. senator from Illinois. He had defeated Lincoln for that position in 1858 after their famous series of debates.

Many southerners, in fact, didn’t like Douglas. He wasn’t strongly enough in favor of slavery to suit them. But most Democrats, by 1860, realized that Lincoln was absolutely sure to win if they nominated a proslavery southerner to run against him. So at the Democratic convention earlier in the year, a majority had nominated the northerner Douglas, figuring that a northern candidate was their only hope against Lincoln.

That only angered the Democrats from the deep South. Win or not, they wanted a candidate who stood for slavery! So they organized a convention of their own and nominated their Democratic candidate, Buchanan’s vice-president, John Breckinridge, from the slave state of Kentucky.

Now there were two Democrats running against Lincoln!

Back in the spring, a whole new party had been formed, called the Constitutional Union party. They hoped to find some middle ground between both the Democrats and the Republicans, and stood above all else simply for loyalty to the Union itself. They hoped to attract support from Union-loving conservatives in the South. The ticket for this new party was made up of two U.S. senators, one from the North, one from the South—John Bell of Tennessee for president and Edward Everett of Massachusetts for vice president.

So those were the four candidates: Lincoln for the Republicans, Douglas for the Democrats, Breckinridge for the southern Democrats, and Bell for the Constitutional Union party.

It was a hard-fought campaign. Douglas traveled up and down New England calling on people to preserve the Union and speaking against secession—sounding almost like Lincoln himself—trying to get the northern vote while retaining southern Democratic support. Even as pro-southern as he was, Breckinridge tried to convince the voters that he, too, was opposed to secession.

In California, as in the rest of the country, the Democrats had been in control, and there was a large pro-southern sentiment throughout the state. But the split of the Democratic party also split California and its leaders. Governor Downey declared his support for Douglas. Former governors Weller and Latham and Senator Gwin declared their support for Breckinridge. And Mr. Stanford and his business and railroad associates Huntington, Cole, Hopkins, and Charles and Edwin Crocker made up the most well-known of the Republican leadership within the state.

It was remarkable to me how much pro-southern, pro-slavery support there was in northern California. Except for the possibility that a lot of Californians had come from the South, I couldn’t understand it. I hadn’t understood it back in 1856, and I still didn’t understand it in 1860. If the Democratic party hadn’t been split in its loyalties, I don’t think Mr. Lincoln would have had a ghost of a chance in California.