Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

a pandemonium of jubilation. For a running mate, the Republicans cast a careful eye toward disheartened Northern Democrats and drafted a former Democrat from Maine, Hannibal Hamlin. “We are full of enthusiasm over Old Abe,” exulted Indiana Republican Schuyler Colfax. “We feel that the battle is half won already.”65

Southern Democrats were not nearly so jubilant. The Charleston newspapers began denouncing Lincoln as soon as he was nominated for the presidency in 1860, calling him a “horrid-looking wretch… sooty and scoundrelly in aspect; a cross between the nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper, and the nightman,” and the Richmond papers were not much more charitable: Lincoln was an “illiterate partisan” of the abolitionists, “possessed only of his inveterate hatred of slavery.” The American minister in England, George Dallas, had to fumble mentally to peg Lincoln, since he knew only that “Lincoln is as absolutely self-made as our democracy could desire. He began life as a day-labourer, and took to making fence-rails.”66

With the Democratic Party shivered into three splinters, there was little practical hope of defeating Lincoln and the Republicans, and after a glum and lackluster campaign by most of the candidates, Lincoln successfully captured the presidential election on November 6, 1860. Ironically, he had polled almost a million votes less than the combined popular votes of his three opponents, Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell—which meant that the Southern Democrats, by refusing to unite behind Douglas, had actually helped to bring about the very thing they had screamed against, the election of a Republican president. Even with less than a majority of popular votes, Lincoln still commanded the 180 electoral votes of the North. Those electoral votes would have given him the election even if the South had united both its popular and electoral votes entirely behind Douglas.67

At last the game of balances was tipping irrevocably over the edge of the table. One day after the election, interest rates on the New York money markets began to soar nervously toward 12 percent, and the New York lawyer George Templeton Strong groaned that “apprehension… has destroyed confidence in securities and property of every kind.” That same day, Judge Andrew McGrath closed the U.S. court in Charleston, South Carolina. The outgoing governor of South Carolina, William Henry Gist, who had held the state legislature in special session to watch the outcome of the election, now urged the calling of “a convention of the people of the State… to consider and determine for themselves the mode and measure of redress.” Gist was not reluctant about suggesting that “the only alternative left… is the secession of South Carolina from the Union.” On November 12, the legislature complied, passing a bill calling for the assembling of a state convention that would withdraw South Carolina from the Union.68

THE SUMTER CRISIS

It will be difficult for us to appreciate the degree of desperation produced in the South by Lincoln’s election unless we remember what the presidency meant on the local level in the 1860s. The creation of a professional civil service was still another thirty years in the future, and in the meantime, every federal appointive office—some 900 of them all told, from the cabinet down to the lowliest postmaster—was filled at presidential discretion and usually according to party or philosophical loyalties. Until 1860 fully half of these appointees were Southerners; in the case of the Supreme Court, nineteen out of thirty-four sitting justices appointed between Washington and Lincoln were slaveholders.69 Much as Lincoln might protest that he was no John Brown, his identity as a Republican was enough to convince most Southerners that he would appoint only Republicans to postmasterships (where they could ensure the free flow of abolitionist literature into every Southern hamlet), only Republicans as federal marshals (who would then turn a deliberately blind eye to fugitive slaves en route to Canada), only Republicans to army commands (and thus turn the federal army into an anti-slavery militia, and federal forts and arsenals in the South into abolitionist havens), and thus make the Republicans, and the anti-slavery attitude, attractive to the nonslaveholding whites of the South without whose cooperation the survival of slavery would be impossible. These Republican intruders would “circulate insurrectionary documents and disseminate insurrectionary sentiments among [the] hitherto contented servile population.” That was entirely aside from the possibility that Lincoln himself harbored hostile designs on the South. Georgia governor Joseph Brown prophesied, with remarkable foresight, that

if Mr. Lincoln places among us his Judges, District Attorneys, Marshals, Post Masters, Custom House officers, etc., etc., by the end of his administration, with the control of public patronage, he will have succeeded in dividing us to an extent that will destroy all our moral powers, and prepare us to tolerate the running of a Republican ticket, in most of the States of the South, in 1864. If this ticket only secured five or ten thousand votes in each of the Southern States, it would be as large as the abolition party was in the North a few years ago since. … This would soon give it control of our elections. We would then be powerless, and the abolitionists would press forward, with a steady step, to the accomplishment of their object. They would refuse to admit any other slave States to the Union. They would abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and at the Forts, Arsenals and Dock Yards, within the Southern States, which belong to the United States. They would then abolish the internal slave trade between the States, and prohibit a slave owner from carrying his slaves into Alabama or South Carolina, and there selling them. … Finally, when we were sufficiently humiliated, and sufficiently in their power, they would abolish slavery in the States. It will not be many years before enough of free States may be formed out of the present territories of the United States, and admitted into the Union, to give them sufficient strength to change the Constitution, and remove all Constitutional barriers which now deny to Congress this power.70

Lincoln, as the