Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

In the fevered atmosphere of 1860, Charleston was the worst possible place for the convention.27 Douglas delegates felt like aliens in a hostile land. Fire-eating orators held forth outdoors each evening. Inside the convention hall, northerners had a three-fifths majority because delegates were apportioned in the same way as electoral votes rather than by party strength. Douglas’s supporters were as determined to block a slave-code plank as southerners were to adopt one.

After two days of bitter parliamentary wrangling, Douglas men pushed through their platform by a vote of 165 to 138 (free states 154 to 30, slave states 11 to 108). Fifty delegates from the lower South thereupon walked out. Everything that followed was anticlimax. Douglas could not muster the two-thirds majority required for nomination. Nor could the convention agree on anyone else during fifty-seven acrimonious ballots. Exhausted and heartsick, the delegates adjourned to try again six weeks later in the more hospitable clime of Baltimore.

But anti-Douglas southerners wanted all or nothing. They walked out once more, followed by most delegates from the upper South and a handful of proslavery northerners—more than one-third of the total. The bolters quickly organized their own convention and nominated John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky (the current vice president) for president on a slave-code platform.

William H. Seward’s weakness in these lower-North states formed a growing cloud on the horizon of his anticipated nomination. To carry these states, a Republican had to attract support from many of the Fillmore votes of 1856. Seward’s long record of hostility to nativism would undercut this effort. More important, his higher-law and irrepressible-conflict speeches had given him a radical reputation that daunted old Whig conservatives.

But Chase shared Seward’s handicap of a radical reputation and did not command unanimous support from even his own state.

Cameron’s notoriety as a spoilsman who had been in turn a Democrat, a Know-Nothing, and had flirted with Whiggery, militated against his candidacy among delegates concerned that the party should appear to be as pure as Caesar’s wife. Bates seemed for a time Seward’s strongest challenger because Greeley and the influential Blair family backed him in the hope that he might carry even a few border states as well as the lower North. But the colorless sixty-seven-year-old Missourian had been a slaveholder, a Know-Nothing, and in 1856 he had supported Fillmore. He therefore alienated too many constituencies whose support was essential—especially German Protestants.

This left Lincoln. By the time the convention’s opening gavel came down on May 16, Lincoln had emerged from a position as the darkest of horses to that of Seward’s main rival. Party leaders gradually recognized that the Illinoisian had most of the strengths and few of the weaknesses of an ideal candidate. He was a former antislavery Whig in a party made up mostly of former antislavery Whigs. But despite his house-divided speech, he had a reputation as a moderate.

Already known popularly as Honest Abe, Lincoln had a reputation for integrity that compared favorably with the dubious image of Thurlow Weed’s New York machine. Of humble origins, Lincoln personified the free-labor ideology of equal opportunity and upward mobility. He had been born in a log cabin. In a stroke of political genius, one of Lincoln’s managers exhibited at the Illinois state convention a pair of weatherbeaten fence rails that Lincoln had supposedly split thirty years earlier. From

Finally, Lincoln was from a state and region crucial to Republican chances, particularly if Douglas as expected became the nominee of northern Democrats. Except for William Henry Harrison, who died after a month in office, no president had been elected from the Old Northwest.

Lincoln was not an unknown factor in national politics before 1860. His contest with Douglas had won wide attention; the publication of the debates early in 1860 enhanced his reputation. In 1859 Lincoln had given political speeches in a half-dozen midwestern states. In February 1860 he addressed a large audience in New York’s Cooper Institute and went on to New England where he gave eleven speeches. This first appearance of Lincoln in the Northeast was a triumph, enabling his supporters back in Illinois to crow that “no man has ever before risen so rapidly to political eminence in the United States.”34

Yet so obscure was Lincoln in certain circles before his nomination that some pundits had not included his name on their lists of seven or a dozen or even twenty-one potential candidates. Several newspapers spelled his first name Abram.

The Republican platform was one of the most effective documents of its kind in American history. While abating none of the antislavery convictions expressed in the 1856 platform, it softened the language slightly and denounced John Brown’s raid as “the gravest of crimes.” Gladly accepting the issues handed to Republicans by the opposition, the platform pledged support for a homestead act, rivers and harbors improvements, and federal aid for construction of a transcontinental railroad.

The election of 1860 was unique in the history of American politics. The campaign resolved itself into two separate contests: Lincoln vs. Douglas in the North; Breckinridge vs. Bell in the South. Republicans did not even have a ticket in ten southern states, where their speakers would have been greeted with a coat of tar and feathers—or worse—if they had dared to appear.

Though repudiated by the South and by the Buchanan administration, Douglas remained a formidable opponent. At the outset of the campaign he appeared to have a chance of winning eight northern and one or two border states with some 140 of the 303 electoral votes. To prevent this, Republicans mounted a campaign unprecedented in energy and oratory. Lincoln himself observed the customary silence of presidential candidates, but all other party leaders great and small took to the stump and delivered an estimated 50,000 speeches.

But in reality, Douglas Democrats were scarcely more a national party than the Republicans. Most southern Democrats painted Douglas nearly as black as Lincoln, and a traitor to boot. Douglas wound up with only 12 percent of the southern popular vote.

A Democratic float in a New York parade carried life-size effigies of Horace Greeley and a “good looking nigger wench, whom he caressed with all the affection of a true Republican.” A banner proclaimed that “free love and free niggers will certainly elect Old Abe.” The New York Herald, largest Democratic newspaper in the country, predicted that if Lincoln was elected “hundreds of thousands” of fugitive slaves would “emigrate to their friends—the Republicans—North, and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men. . . . African amalgamation with the fair daughters of the Anglo Saxon, Celtic, and Teutonic races will soon be their portion under the millennium of Republican rule.”

And in the lower North generally, Republicans played down the moral issue of slavery while emphasizing other matters of regional concern. In Pennsylvania and New Jersey they talked about the tariff; from Ohio to California the Republicans portrayed themselves as a homestead party, an internal improvements party, a Pacific railroad party. This left Democrats with less opportunity to exploit the race issue. “The Republicans, in their speeches, say nothing of the nigger question,” complained a Pennsylvania Democrat, “but all is made to turn on the Tariff.”

The Buchanan administration handed Republicans another issue: corruption. Americans had always viewed malfeasance and abuse of power as the gravest dangers to republican liberty. Not only was Buchanan, in Republican eyes, the pliant tool of the slave power but his administration also, in the words of historian Michael Holt, “was undoubtedly the most corrupt before the Civil War and one of the most corrupt in American history.”47 An exposure of frauds filled a large volume compiled by a House investigating committee. The committee’s report came off the presses in June 1860, just in time for an abridged edition to be distributed as a Republican campaign document. This report topped off a series of previous investigations that disclosed a sorry record of graft and bribery in government contracts, the civil service, and Congress itself. The War and Navy departments had awarded contracts without competitive bidding to firms that made contributions to the Democratic party. Postmasters in New York and Chicago under both Pierce and Buchanan had siphoned public funds into party coffers for years. Democrats had used some of this money in congressional contests in 1858.

The New York postmaster fled the country in 1860 when auditors found his accounts $155,000 short. The House committee also dug up evidence that the administration had bribed congressmen to vote for admission of Kansas under the Lecompton constitution. Government printing contracts, long a lucrative source of patronage, became a greater scandal than ever under Buchanan. Kickbacks from payments exceeding by several times the printing cost found their way into the party treasury. Secretary of War John Floyd presented the biggest target to graft hunters. He had sold government property for much less than its real value to a consortium headed by cronies. He had also signed padded bills presented to the War Department by a contractor in financial difficulties who then used these signed bills as collateral for bank loans and for negotiable bonds from an Interior Department Indian trust fund. Although partially revealed before the election, Floyd’s full complicity in this matter did not come out until December 1860, when Buchanan allowed him to resign without punishment.

A Virginian, Floyd pronounced himself a secessionist and returned home, where he was feted by like-minded compatriots who praised one of his final acts in office—an order (subsequently countermanded) to transfer 125 cannon from Pittsburgh to arsenals in Mississippi and Texas.

To be sure, Buchanan was not running for re-election, and most northern Democrats had already repudiated his administration. But some Douglas Democrats had also been caught with their hands in the till, and the whole party was tarnished by the image of corruption. The “plunder of the public treasury,” declared the Republican platform, “shows that an entire change of administration is imperatively demanded.”

The future would reveal that a good many Republican politicians were none too honest themselves. But in 1860 the party carried an unsullied banner of reform and freedom against the tired old corrupt proslavery Democrats.

This caused several abolitionists to denounce the Republicans as no better than Douglas Democrats. William Lloyd Garrison believed that “the Republican party means to do nothing, can do nothing, for the abolition of slavery in the slave states.” Wendell Phillips even went so far as to call Lincoln “the Slave Hound of Illinois” because he refused to advocate repeal of the fugitive slave law.

In vain, then, did a southern conservative point out that most of these atrocity stories “turned out, on examination, to be totally false, and all of them grossly exaggerated.”56 On the eve of the election a Mississippian observed that “the minds of the people are aroused to a pitch of excitement probably unparalleled in the history of our country.”

However irrational these fears, the response was real—vigilante lynch law that made the John Brown scare of the previous winter look like a Sunday School picnic. “It is better for us to hang ninety-nine innocent (suspicious) men than to let one guilty one pass,” wrote a Texan, “for the guilty one endangers the peace of society.”57 This mass hysteria caused even southern unionists to warn Yankees that a Republican victory meant disunion.

Republicans refused to take these warnings to heart. They had heard them before, a dozen times or more. In 1856 Democrats had used such threats to frighten northerners into voting Democratic. Republicans believed that the same thing was happening in 1860. It was “the old game of scaring and bullying the North into submission to Southern demands,” said the Republican mayor of Chicago. In a speech at St. Paul, Seward ridiculed this new southern effort “to terrify or alarm” the North. “Who’s afraid? (Laughter and cries of ‘no one.’) Nobody’s afraid; nobody can be bought.” Nor did Lincoln expect “any formidable effort to break up the Union.

Hindsight was to reveal that southerners meant what they said. Two sagacious historians have maintained that Republican failure to take these warnings seriously was a “cardinal error.”61 Yet it is hard to see what Republicans could have done to allay southern anxieties short of dissolving their party and proclaiming slavery a positive good.

A New Orleans editor regarded every northern vote cast for Lincoln as “a deliberate, cold-blooded insult and outrage” to southern honor. It was not so much what Republicans might do as what they stood for that angered southerners.

Lincoln rejected pleas from conservatives that he issue a statement to mollify the South. “What is it I could say which would quiet alarm?” he asked in October. “Is it that no interference by the government, with slaves or slavery within the states, is intended? I have said this so often already, that a repetition of it is but mockery, bearing an appearance of weakness.” Lincoln would have been willing to repeat

To southerners the election’s most ominous feature was the magnitude of Republican victory north of the 41st parallel. Lincoln won more than 60 percent of the vote in that region, losing scarcely two dozen counties. Three-quarters of the Republican congressmen and senators in the next Congress would represent this “Yankee” and antislavery portion of the free states.

The second Continental Congress had deliberated fourteen months before declaring American independence in 1776. To produce the United States Constitution and put the new government into operation required nearly two years. In contrast, the Confederate States of America organized itself, drafted a constitution, and set up shop in Montgomery, Alabama, within three months of Lincoln’s election. The South moved so swiftly because, in seeming paradox, secession proceeded on a state-by-state basis rather than by collective action.

And because the ground had long since been plowed and planted, the harvest of disunion came quickly after the thunderstorm of Lincoln’s election.

Not surprisingly, South Carolina acted first. “There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” wrote the correspondent of the London Times from Charleston.

Although none of these conventions exhibited the unity of South Carolina’s, their average vote in favor of secession was 80 percent. This figure was probably a fair reflection of white opinion in those six states. Except in Texas, the conventions did not submit their ordinances to the voters for ratification. This led to charges that a disunion conspiracy acted against the will of the people. But in fact the main reason for non-submission was a desire to avoid delay. The voters had just elected delegates who had made their positions clear in public statements;

The Constitution of 1787 had been ratified by state conventions, not by popular vote; withdrawal of that ratification by similar conventions satisfied a wish for legality and symmetry. In Texas the voters endorsed secession by a margin of three to one; there is little reason to believe that the result would have been different in any of the other six states.

Other southerners used similar metaphors to describe the phenomenon. “It is a complete landsturm. . . . People are wild. . . . You might as well attempt to control a tornado as to attempt to stop them.”6 Secession was an unequivocal act which relieved the unbearable tension that had been building for years. It was a catharsis for pent-up fears and hostilities. It was a joyful act that caused people literally to dance in the streets.

Not that the flag-waving, singing crowds in Charleston and Savannah and New Orleans wanted or expected war; on the contrary, they believed that “the Yankees were cowards and would not fight"—or said they did, to assure the timid that there was no danger.

Cooperationists were not so sure about this. “War I look for as almost certain,” wrote Alexander Stephens, who also warned that “revolutions are much easier started than controlled, and the men who begin them [often] . . . themselves become the victims.”8 But Stephens’s prescient warning was lost in the wind, and he joined the revolution himself when his state went out.

Though an emergency psychology certainly existed, the belief in a repressed unionist majority rests on a misunderstanding of southern unionism. As a Mississippi “unionist” explained after Lincoln’s election, he was no longer “a Union man in the sense in which the North is Union.” His unionism was conditional; the North had violated the condition by electing Lincoln. Cooperationists in Alabama who voted against secession cautioned outsiders not to “misconstrue” their action. “We scorn the Black Republicans,” they declared. “The State of Alabama cannot and will not submit to the Administration of Lincoln. . . . We intend to resist . . . but our resistance is based upon . . . unity of action, with the other slave states.”

What were these rights and liberties for which Confederates contended? The right to own slaves; the liberty to take this property into the territories; freedom from the coercive powers of a centralized government.

Because the Union after March 4, 1861, would no longer be controlled by southerners, the South could protect its liberty from the assaults of hostile power only by going out of the Union.

Submission to Black Republicans would mean “the loss of liberty, property, home, country—everything that makes life worth having,” proclaimed a South Carolinian. “I am engaged in the glorious cause of liberty and justice,” wrote a Confederate soldier, “fighting for the rights of man—fighting for all that we of the South hold dear.”17 What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in this crusade for the freedom of planters to own slaves? Some secessionists worried a great deal about this question.

So they undertook a campaign to convince nonslaveholders that they too had a stake in disunion. The stake was white supremacy. In this view, the Black Republican program of abolition was the first step toward racial equality and amalgamation.

Much secessionist rhetoric played variations on this theme. The election of Lincoln, declared an Alabama newspaper, “shows that the North [intends] to free the negroes and force amalgamation between them and the children of the poor men of the South.” “Do you love your mother, your wife, your sister, your daughter?” a Georgia secessionist asked non-slaveholders. If Georgia remained in a Union “ruled by Lincoln and his crew . . . in TEN years or less our CHILDREN will be the slaves of negroes.”

No! No! came an answering shout from Alabama. “Submit to have our wives and daughters choose between death and gratifying the hellish lust of the negro!! . . . Better ten thousand deaths than submission to Black Republicanism.”22

This Orwellian definition of liberty as slavery provoked ridicule north of the Potomac. For disunionists to compare themselves to the Revolutionary fathers “is a libel upon the whole character and conduct of the men of ‘76,” declared William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post.

The South was rebelling “not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. . . . Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.”

after he had become vice president of the Confederacy. “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

But in one respect the Confederacy departed from the classic pattern of the genre. Most counterrevolutions seek to restore the ancien régime. The counterrevolutionaries of 1861 made their move before the revolutionaries had done anything—indeed, several months before Lincoln even took office. In this regard, secession fit the model of “pre-emptive counterrevolution”

Though Mayer was writing about Europe in the twentieth century, his words also describe the immediate secessionists of 1860. They exaggerated the Republican threat and urged pre-emptive action to forestall the dangers they conjured up. The South could not afford to wait for an “overt act” by Lincoln against southern rights, they insisted.