Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

of an indirect and unfriendly nature… the constitutional right of any citizen of the United States to take his slave property into the common Territories.”58 They fully expected the next Democratic national convention in Charleston, South Carolina, to make these demands part of its national platform.

Douglas and the Northern Democrats were unwilling to acquiesce in a legislative program for the destruction of popular sovereignty in the territories, and certainly not for the purpose of pandering to Southern anxieties about John Brown and slavery. The stakes were made all the higher since Buchanan, bowing to Democratic tradition and weary of the burdens of the presidency, had announced his intention not to seek reelection. This left Douglas as the single most obvious candidate for the Democrats to run for the presidency in 1860. Douglas’s defense of popular sovereignty and his defiance of Lecompton in the teeth of Buchanan’s rage had made Douglas the champion of the Northern Democracy, and the only acceptable presidential candidate to the Northern half of the party. Moreover, Northern Democrats were convinced that only Douglas, and not the Southern fire-eaters, had the national stature to carry both Northern and Southern states in the presidential election of 1860. Consequently, they regarded Douglas as the only one capable of retaining Democratic control of the presidency and, with that, the entire apparatus of the federal bureaucracy.

The Northern Democracy’s unwillingness to follow the demands of the Southern ultras, and their determination to see Douglas nominated by the Charleston convention, together with Southern demands for renewal of the slave trade and slave protection in the territories, made the destruction of the Democratic Party inevitable. Douglas “held out to us here, when we advocated and supported the Kansas-Nebraska bill… that the Democratic party should be a unit on the question,” complained Louisiana senator Judah P. Benjamin, “but when he goes home, and is pressed in a local contest”—namely, the debates with Lincoln—“and he sees the glittering prize of a seat in this Chamber slipping from his grasp, he tells his people, as he says he has told them a hundred times before,” that “he has, in the Kansas-Nebraska act, obtained … a perfect right to make a free Territory of every Territory in the Union, notwithstanding the decision of the court.”59

When the Charleston convention assembled in April 1860, Southern radicals led by William Lowndes Yancey of Alabama stood for seven days agitating for a pro-slavery platform, and when it became clear that they would not get it from the Douglas men, all of the Deep South delegations except that of Georgia walked out of the convention. The Southern withdrawal made it statistically impossible for Douglas to obtain the necessary two-thirds vote for the nomination, and the shattered convention adjourned, to reconvene in Baltimore on June 18. But when the Democrats met again, the convention split once again, with still more Southern withdrawals, and Douglas, still short of the two-thirds majority of delegates, had to be nominated by the convention as part of a resolution. The same day, the Southern ultras nominated their own candidate, John Breckinridge of Kentucky, for president, thus making the party split a political reality.

Then, as if things were not already bad enough for the Democrats, a compromise movement, composed largely of old-time Southern Whigs and calling down a pox on both Douglas and Breckinridge, met in Baltimore and nominated yet another presidential candidate, the colorless Tennessean John Bell. The end result was that Douglas captured the Democratic nomination for the presidency, but both Southern support and the Democratic Party collapsed under him. “It is an utterly futile and hopeless task to re-organize, re-unite and harmonize the disintegrated Democratic party, unless this is to be done by a total abandonment of principle,” editorialized the Augusta Daily Chronicle and Sentinel. “No, sensible people might as well make up their minds to the fact that the Democratic party is dissolved forever, that new organizations must take its place.”60

The Republicans viewed the splintering of the Democrats with glee, for the collapse of Democratic unity between Douglas and Breckinridge, and the unwillingness of Bell’s supporters to vote for either as an acceptable Southern candidate, opened the way to a Republican victory in November. But precisely because victory was now within their grasp, the Republicans instantly began to hesitate about nominating their most ultra-anti-slavery standard-bearers, such as William H. Seward of New York. Seward was a longtime Whig who had once stiffened Zachary Taylor’s back against slave expansion, and who was regarded by Northern Democrats as a reckless radical. Nominating Seward might be perceived as too violent an anti-slavery gesture by the Republicans, costing them the votes of the moderates within the party; even more serious, his championship of the Whig economic agenda in the Senate and as governor of New York might drive Northern and Southern Democrats back into each other’s arms, depriving the Republicans of as much as a quarter of the votes they had won from Democrats in the 1856 presidential campaign.

The Republicans who assembled in Chicago in May 1860 for their national nominating convention would be looking for an anti-slavery man and a Whig economist who had managed to avoid making himself nationally notorious on either of those points, the kind of man Horace Greeley described in a letter to a friend: “I know the country is not Anti-Slavery. It will only swallow a little Anti-Slavery in a great deal of sweetening. An Anti-Slavery man per se cannot be elected; but a Tariff, River-and-Harbor, Pacific Railroad, Free Homestead man may succeed although he is Anti-Slavery.”61 Greeley thought this might mean the Missouri Whig Edward Bates, but the man who best fit Greeley’s description was already at hand in Illinois in the person of Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln’s run against Douglas for the Illinois senate seat in 1858 had won him national attention. Despite his defeat, Lincoln had nearly managed to stage the political upset of the century, and Republicans across the North remembered him. “Mr. Lincoln is a man of very great ability; few